Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [38]
“I don’t mean that!” She tried to keep the loneliness out of her voice, and the anger that he seemed to be willfully misunderstanding her. “That doesn’t tell him what it feels like! Anybody can read the facts out of a book. He wants to know it from you. I do! What is your day like? What do you care about? What does it taste like? What’s funny? What’s horrible?”
He smiled, his face wrinkling in the old laughter lines she remembered. “It tastes pretty much the same as at boarding school,” he replied wryly, passing it off as a joke, still keeping her from the pain. “Bit staler, and it smells like salt, engine oil, old rooms with windows that have never been opened.”
She swallowed. She was touching reality at last, even if obliquely. “And in battle?”
His face changed so subtly she could not have named the difference, something in the tautness of the skin across the planes of his cheek, the line of his lips. “It smells of smoke, cordite, burnt rubber, and the sweat of fear,” he answered. “I’m on leave, Hannah. I don’t want to spend it talking about war. I want to be at home. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me about the children.”
The door to his inner self was closed and locked. She knew from the set of his face and the way his eyes avoided hers that he would not allow her into that part of him where fear or pain were real, or any of his passionate and vulnerable self. They were alone together in the familiar room with the light fading outside, the last birds circling in the sky, everything exactly as it had always been. They could talk of their children, and nothing could be dearer or of more meaning, yet it would be only the often-used words, so predictable as to add nothing. The gulf between them was infinite. She could have said the same things to a stranger.
When Joseph came back in from the garden, Tom went to bed and a short while afterward she followed, weary but wide awake, ridiculously close to tears. But she must not weep, or when would she stop, and how could she explain it to anyone?
Joseph sat across the room from Archie and saw his tired, closed-in face. Archie was in command of a destroyer in the most desperate and crushing war England had known. There were no great victories like Nelson’s a century ago, just the slow erosion of sudden attack, and loss. It was his job never to show fear or doubt, regardless of what he felt, or the greater weight of what he knew. He protected his men from the demons of the mind as well as the violence of the seas. Hannah would not understand that any more than she could understand the blood-soaked trenches of Flanders. Why should she? Her own responsibilities were enough.
The next day was quiet. Archie took Henry for a walk in the early evening. Joseph could understand if the sheer silence of the countryside offered him a kind of healing that nothing else could, and perhaps he needed a time of solitude away from the questions and the unceasing hunger for his company. The dog was a happy and undemanding friendship.
Joseph knew that he could no longer put off writing to Isobel. He went into his father’s study to do it. He had never taken it as his own, and was grateful that Archie had not even placed anything of his there either.
He opened the door and went in. It was clean; there was no dust on the polished surfaces, but it had a forsaken feel which was surely more than just his knowledge that John Reavley would never come back to it again. The Bonnington seascape still hung where it always had, its gray-green water almost luminous, its lines small and delicate.
Joseph stood for only a moment before sitting down at the desk and pulling out paper and opening the inkwell. He could not even know if his advice was right or not, but he must have the courage to give it. Indecision was a choice as well. Better to be in error than to take the coward’s way of silence.
Dear Isobel,
Thank you for your letter. I was delighted to hear from you. I am recovering rather more slowly