The Merciless Ladies Read Online Free Page A

and Bertie saw active service. Leo and I were training at Kinmel Park when the Armistice was signed. Bertie survived his six months in France, Paul nearly twelve at sea.
    One of Paul’s biographers, A. H. Jennings, has supposed that he had some influence to get into the Navy, for, by the time he was called up it was the Army’s desperate shortage of manpower that overrode all other considerations. That he could have had any influence at all is of course nonsense; nor did we at Turstall even have a branch of the naval cadets. Paul never would tell me how it had happened. I believe he refused any other form of service and was prepared to go to prison as a conscientious objector if he didn’t get his way. In some matters he had a mulish determination, and this must in the end have impressed the authorities. He had a tough time in the Navy, on a minesweeper, but about this too he had very little to say after. I only learned from another source that he had been blown up once and spent some hours on a raft in the North Sea.
    But the Armistice came, and presently we were all ‘demobbed’, and the world began to lick its wounds, to bury its dead, to try to return to sanity after four years of manic-depressive psychosis. And we picked up our lives again, or tried to, from where they had left off. But nothing was the same again.

Chapter Two
    So the world fit for heroes to live in was born, and the Jazz Age, and the day of the Shimmy, the One-Step and the Charleston. The age of the League of Nations, and Reparations and Disarmament. The age of Unemployment, and Votes for Women, and the Flapper, and the White Russians, the Locarno Pact, the Dawes Agreement. The age of disillusion and the dole.
    Yet for four young men, and for many others like them, it was the beginning of a new life, life unshadowed by prospects of early death or mutilation, a life of opportunity and limitless years ahead.
    Bertie, the first demobbed, showing no particular desire or aptitude for any of the expected things, was offered a job in an insurance firm in Reading and gratefully took it. The prospects were unexciting but, in a world where so many could find nothing, it was work . Leo still rather sulkily wanted to be something in the musical scene, but his mother said he had ideas bigger than his head: he could never become a front-rank pianist; as for composition, he had some talent, he might do some good for himself if he worked hard but it would take time. Meanwhile he stayed at home, desultorily answering advertisements for clerks and bookkeepers.
    At nineteen I got a job as a cub reporter on the Sheffield Daily Telegraph ; and Paul, the last to return to civilian life, finally took up his scholarship at M. Becker’s Grasse School of Art in Chelsea.
    Thereafter I lost touch with him for another year, and it was not until a chance assignment took me to London that I was able to look him up. I found him in a lodging house in the Bayswater Road, in which, conventionally, he had a top room with a dormer window and a fan-light. In the room was an easel, a single bed and two tables, everything possible cluttered with sketch-pads, palettes, tubes of paint leaking basic colours, rags, sheets of glass and half-finished boards and canvases. The intervening years had changed him, and there is a self-portrait in the Walker Art Gallery that shows very much how he looked then.
    In some ways Turstall had been bad for him. The war, and his return to a new, young society in London had helped to soften the combative inhibitions. The resentfulness had gone, but he was still very purposive, very self-contained, And much less uncouth. He was surrounded by portraits, one or two of which I tried to admire, but he was genuinely dismissive of them, contemptuous of his own work, not because in his view it was bad but because it ought to have been better.
    In a pub round the corner we talked for an hour. He was hoping to get to France for a while: there was some