Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [62]
The wind smelled of salt in her face and the slap of the water was swift, rhythmic. They were moving quickly. Surely the moonlight would catch the white line of the chalk cliffs of Dover soon?
What if Mrs. Prentice was like the general? She could picture his face very clearly, every expression, as if she had known him for years, whereas actually it was only a couple of months. Would Mrs. Prentice have the same gravity, and the sudden smile, and eyes that looked into your thoughts, and so seldom betrayed their own, but when they did it was as overwhelming as touch?
She heard the soldiers laughing, and then footsteps as one of them came closer. She turned, happy to be distracted.
“You a nurse, miss?” he asked.
“No, I’m an ambulance driver.” Driving the general was not really her job, and they did not need to know about it. Anyway, she would rather not hear their opinion of him, even in their tone of voice on this dark, windy deck where faces were only pale blurs against the summer night.
There was a moment’s appreciative silence, then they praised her, teased her and roared with laughter, exuberant with the joy of going home, to see family again, wondering what would have changed, saying anything to break the tension.
The boat landed around dawn and she went straight to the railway station for the London train. It was crowded, noisy, slow, like all troop trains, but by nine o’clock she was in London, broad sunshine already warming the pavements.
It was busier and shabbier than she had remembered. There were more cars and fewer horses. She refused to think of the dead horses around Ypres, limbs shattered, carcasses sometimes split wide open, but in spite of her will to blank it out, she remembered Cullingford’s eyes when he saw them. In his cavalry days his life had depended on a good horse, and the trust never died.
She bought a newspaper and looked at it quickly, mostly just the headlines, and a few of the lead articles. The war news was first, of course. Most of it concerned the Western Front or the Dardanelles, but there was a little about East Africa.
The facts were there, at least some of them, but it was the words that fascinated her, the talk of courage, honor, and sacrifice, soldiers fighting for the right. And of course implicit all through was the conviction of ultimate victory. Casualties were given—they had to be—but it was nothing like the reality she knew. No one wrote of terror and dirt and pain. It was as if they had gone smiling into the night, clean and dignified.
It was probably necessary. Too much truth and one would scream oneself into paralysis and be no use to anyone. The only way to go on was to think whatever you had to, believe whatever you could, and take it five minutes at a time, then the next, and the next, help what you could reach.
She did not go immediately to the Prentice house. First she needed to find a hotel and take a bath, a luxury she had not enjoyed for a long time. She filled the tub as high as she dared, then climbed in and sank up to her chin in the steaming water. She let her mind become totally empty, thinking of nothing at all but the smooth, rippling heat over her skin. She put in soap bubbles and let them seep through her fingers and fall in dollops on her body, stretching her legs up, then down again. It was a big tub, an expensive bathroom, and she drowned her senses in every exquisite moment of it.
When the water was cooling she stepped out, wrapped herself in the big towel, and lay on the bed. She intended to dry off, then put on clean underwear and go to