Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [54]
She smiled back, and told him a half truth. “I was wondering what we would be doing if we were not here.” She knew the answer for herself. She would be living the same rather purposeless life she had before the war. She would take part in all the usual village events, feeling unnatural and inadequate at it, watching time slip by having done nothing that made more than superficial difference. She could be wondering if she would settle for marrying someone she was merely fond of, someone who would be predictable, kind to her, who would behave with honor, whom she would probably even like, but never love with all the passion she could feel. Would he be someone she could live with, but not someone she could not bear to live without?
Cullingford fished in his pocket and put a penny on the dashboard.
“I would probably be driving,” she said aloud, not meeting his eyes. “But not really going anywhere, just around the village, trying to do what my mother would have done. Do I have to find a penny for you to tell me what you would be doing, if there were no war?”
“You have a penny,” he pointed out.
“Somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
“I paid you. That one is yours.”
“Oh! Well, it’s yours again, then. What would you be doing?” She wanted intensely to know.
“It’s nearly May. I would be walking down to the woods to see the bluebells,” he said without hesitation. “I would follow the path between the wild pear trees right into the middle of the flowers, where it all but disappears and you can hardly see where to put your feet without treading on them. It would be full of the sunlight and silence. I would stand there and let it sink into me until I was part of it.”
She was seized with an overwhelming hunger to do all the same things, to do them with him, not to say anything, simply to be there.
“It sounds like a lot more use than anything I would do,” she said quietly.
“If you would try to pick up the pieces of the things that your mother used to do for others, is that not useful?” he asked. There was a startling gentleness in his voice. “Isn’t that what we do, when we miss someone almost beyond bearing?”
She looked away from him; his eyes were too tender, too probing. “I hadn’t thought of it.” She choked on the words. “I suppose it is. I miss my father more. He would have gone walking, only he would have taken Henry, our dog.” She blinked rapidly. Her throat was so tight she could hardly speak. “I miss dogs—I miss dogs I could have as friends. You can’t do that here, they’re all messengers, or something. And I can’t bear caring about them, because I know how many of them get killed.”
Ahead of them the traffic was moving again, and she eased the car into gear and started forward. “It’s bad enough to lose people. I can’t cope with it when it’s animals. Don’t tell me that’s stupid, and wrong. I know it is.”
“I don’t know how wrong it is to love anything, or not to love it,” he replied, looking away from her and toward the traffic ahead. “I haven’t learned how to prevent it.” His voice shook a little. “With me it’s the horses.”
A dozen answers streamed through her head, and none of them were what she wanted to say. There had been a depth of emotion in him that was far more powerful than the simple meaning of the words. She put all her attention to driving, forcing everything else out of her consciousness, because she could not cope with it.
It was after they had returned to Poperinge, late in the evening, and extremely tired, that he spoke to her again. They were eating at their usual estaminet, Le Nid du Rat, in English the Rat’s Nest, a small, comfortable place with half a dozen tables. They had stew, consisting mostly of vegetables, and good bread. Today she was acutely aware of how much better it was than anything Joseph would have. She had seen something in his face that troubled her, a kind of blind, painful purpose deeper than simply the duty to tell Cullingford of Prentice’s death. He had suggested that he had been killed by someone who knew him, a British soldier, not a German one.