Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [108]
He was staring at her. “For God’s sake, Hannah! Can’t we just have a pleasant evening? I have to go tomorrow.”
“I need to know!” she said with rising desperation. She knew she was angering him, risking pushing him further away. They might even part with a quarrel! That would be unbearable. It could be for the last time. That thought beat in her mind, almost choking the words, her throat was so tight. “When you’re gone it’s as if you disappear!” she said hoarsely. “I know a part of you so well it’s as if we’d always been together, but there’s a whole world, terribly important, that I’m shut out of as if I couldn’t understand and don’t belong. But at the moment it’s the biggest part of you. It’s what you spend your life doing. It’s what makes you who you are, what you believe, what makes you real. I need to know it, Archie!”
“I can’t tell you,” he said with patience that obviously cost him a tremendous effort, almost more than he possessed. “It’s ugly, Hannah. It would give you nightmares and your imagination would torture you. You can’t help! Just . . .”
“I’m not trying to help you!” Her voice was rising in spite of her effort to keep it under control. “Can’t you see that I’m trying to help myself! And if I have to, help Tom. What if something happens to you, and Tom asks me what you were like? What am I going to say? I don’t know? He never told me? Do you think that will satisfy him, when his father’s gone and he can’t ask? Do you think it will satisfy me? We need to know, Archie. Maybe it will hurt, but that’s better than a lifetime of hating myself because I didn’t have the courage to face it.”
“Tell you what?” he said wearily, sitting on the floor and crossing his legs as if he had given up. “What it feels like to live in a few square feet that’s never still, even when the sea’s calm? Do you want me to tell you how cold it is? The wind off the North Atlantic whips the skin from your flesh. How tired you get when you’ve only had a couple of hours’ sleep, and day and night blend into each other till you can’t think, can’t feel, can’t eat, and you feel sick? You know what it’s like to be exhausted. You’ve experienced it yourself with sick children, up every half hour, or more.”
“It’s not the same,” she said, wondering if it was.
“At sea you stare out at the ocean till you’re blind,” he went on, almost as if ignoring her. “You know every wave could hide a torpedo. One moment you are standing on the deck, pitching and sliding, and the next you’re deafened by the noise of tearing metal, and you know you could be pounded, broken, and suffocated by icy waters, dragged down into the darkness and never come up again. You imagine your lungs bursting, and pain obliterating everything else.”
She sat frozen, her muscles locked and aching.
He went on, his voice was softer, cut across with grief. “Shall I tell you about fire at sea? Or what it’s like to see a gun turret hit, and bodies of men you know cut to pieces, blood everywhere, human arms and legs lying on the deck? Or would it be enough if I just stick to the long days and nights of monotony while you wait, and wonder, cold, tired, eating sea rations, trying to work out how you’ll deal with the attack when it comes, how you’ll keep the men together, keep heart in them—be worthy of their trust in you that somehow you can get them out of it? And how you’ll live with it if you fail?”
She blinked. “It’s horrible,” she whispered. “I don’t even know how to imagine it. But if that’s your life, then shutting me out of it would be even worse . . . maybe not straightaway, not now, but in time it would. It hurts to be shut out. A different kind of hurt, but a real one.”
“You don’t need it, Hannah!” He stood up easily, moving with grace in spite of his inner tiredness. The leave had not been long enough. But he had told her only about life at sea, and little enough of that. He had not