We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [48]
He was silent for some time. She looked at him and in the light of the star shells saw a somberness in his face. When he had first come late in 1915 he had been very young, barely twenty. It was some time before he told her that he was actually running away from his hometown, even from America altogether, after an ugly incident in which he had lost his temper and beaten a man.
Now the world was different, and Wil himself looked so much older. He had not put on weight—no one did on army rations—but his leanness had turned to muscle, and there was a grave maturity in his face. He had not lost his midwestern accent, but he had picked up a great many very English expressions that he had begun using with humor. They were now so much a part of his nature, he no longer noticed them himself.
“I’ll miss you,” he said suddenly.
“For a little while,” she conceded, not certain what else to say.
“Home won’t be the same as when I left,” he went on. He bit his lip. “Some of that’s good. Maybe they’ll have other things to think about than what a fool I was.”
“You still worried about it?” she asked with surprise. “Come on, Wil! That was years ago. The whole world’s grown sadder and wiser since then.”
“You don’t know small-town people,” he retorted. “They can hold a grudge for generations.”
“Of course I know small-town people,” she said with a laugh. “How big do you think Selborne St. Giles is? Everybody’s related to everybody else, and has been for a thousand years! If you go into the shop in the morning they can probably tell you what you had for breakfast. They can certainly tell you who’s quarreling with whom, and what about.”
He smiled; it was a wide and unusually charming expression. “Perhaps I’ll stay in England. Do you think I can?”
“Certainly, and welcome. But don’t you want to go home?” She looked away from the road for a moment, then hit a deep rut and concentrated again. “Are you really that scared of it, Wil?”
“No!” He hesitated. “Well, maybe. I never got to go back and say anything, and now they’ve got real heroes, men who fought, even some who died. Not from our town, but not far away.”
“Every town has someone who died,” she answered.
“I guess you Brits have some for every street, eh? I’m sorry.” His voice dropped. “I’m just not sure where I belong anymore.”
“Nobody is.” She realized how intensely she meant that. In St. Giles she had been something of a social misfit herself before the war, not content to marry suitably and become absorbed in home affairs as everyone else was. Well, that world no longer existed anyway. But what sort of world was it now? Women, old men, and children, with a million young men gone and near enough two million more injured or maimed who would need care. The jobs women had held over the last four years would, for the most part, have to be given back to the returning men. She would have to earn money. She couldn’t possibly expect Joseph to keep her. Anyway, it would bore her to death not to do anything. Wil Sloan was certainly not the only one who had no idea what to expect.
“There’s something vaguely comfortable about the place you are used to,” she added aloud. “Even if it’s plunging around in the mud being shot at.”
“Only a Brit could say something like that.” He stared straight ahead, his eyes very bright in the momentary headlights of an ambulance coming the other way. “And I will miss you,” he repeated.
She could think of nothing that sounded right to say in return, or that would tell him the affection she felt for him. There were friendships to miss that nothing could replace. There would never be anything else like this again, thank God, but those who survived it would share dreams and nightmares that no one else could know.
Joseph was standing outside the Resuscitation tent when he heard a movement behind him and turned to see Lizzie in the entrance. Despite the anxiety in her face, he felt a quickening of pleasure. He drew in breath to ask if she was looking for him, and then realized that she was almost certainly seeking a doctor.