Authors: Alison Stuart
* * * *
Paul stood by the window of his hotel room looking with unseeing eyes down into the quiet, rain sodden Brussels street. Knowing he would not sleep, he had tried to read but he couldn’t focus on the words. He had risen from the chair to fetch a glass of water. He looked down at the glass in his hand and wished it was whiskey.
* * * *
Passchandaele September 18, 1917.
Paul dreamed a cold, wet pillow was being held over his mouth and nose and the more he struggled, the tighter the grip became. With one last supreme effort, he fought the smothering pillow away and lay still, taking in deep breaths of air that smelled of cordite and death. His ears still rang with the percussion of the shell and the silence added to the eerie sense that he inhabited the world of the half dead, neither alive nor dead but not permitted to cross the River Styx.
The lowering, rain-soaked sky told him that it was late afternoon and that he had been unconscious for several hours. He tried to move and the limbo world he had returned to gave way to indescribable agony. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard himself cry out in pain. A bullet zinged into the ground just beside his right hand and the damp mud spattered across his flesh, bringing him fully to his senses.
Wounds or not, he had to move and move now. He took a deep breath and tried to assess how badly he had been hurt. His right hand and arm seemed to be uninjured but it hurt when he moved his head, and a tentative exploration with his right hand confirmed his helmet had gone and he had a gash over his left ear that bled profusely. His left shoulder had a piece of shrapnel protruding from the wound, rendering his left arm useless and his right leg–he had never experienced anything like the pain of what must be a broken femur.
With a supreme effort, he rolled on to his right shoulder. Charlie lay beside him on his back and he knew what had been smothering him. It had been Charlie’s weight on top of him. Charlie had taken the brunt of the shell burst. Charlie had saved him.
Paul seized a handful of his cousin’s tunic in his hand and used it as leverage to haul himself toward him. Hardly daring to breathe, he reached out and touched Charlie’s shoulder.
“Charlie!”
If Charlie responded, Paul could not hear him above the roaring in his ears. His head spinning, he raised himself up on his right elbow and saw with a sinking heart what he had not seen before. The torn tunic, Charlie’s abdomen, sodden with dark blood and worse. Even as he lowered his head, grief threatening to overwhelm him, Charlie groaned and his eyes flickered open. He turned his head slightly and seeing Paul, something like a smile touched the corners of his mouth as the blood bubbled from his lips.
Paul felt utter despair wash over him. The fact Charlie still lived made it worse. He couldn’t stay here and he couldn’t leave Charlie out here to die.
Paul raised his head looking for shelter in the desolate landscape. Another bullet whistled past his ear as he saw just a few yards away, a shell hole, a massive crater in the lunar landscape, an old hole already half filled with water.
Paul swallowed. Knotting his hand around Charlie’s collar and with the pain of his own wounds suddenly nothing against the basic instinct to live, he started to pull the dead weight of his cousin toward the shell hole. Charlie screamed but Paul had been a soldier long enough to know that whatever he did, however gentle he could be, it would make little difference to Charlie in the end.
The Germans now had a good sight of the two men and began the sport of trying to pick them off. Paul felt a bullet graze his already injured right leg but there was no time for pain.
He had reached the edge of the shell hole and with one last supreme effort, Paul sent them both tumbling into the water-filled crater.
* * * *
A soft knock on the door caused his hand to jerk, sloshing water from the glass on to the thick carpet at his feet. For a moment, he thought he had been mistaken but the sound came again, a soft rap on the door.
He glanced at his watch. It was long past midnight. He crossed to the door and opened it. Helen stood in the dimly lit corridor, still fully dressed, her arms wrapped around her slender frame. When she turned her face up to him, he could see she had been crying.
They stood for a moment without speaking, both understanding in each other the need for company but not for talk.
“Get your coat,” he whispered. “Let’s go for a walk.”
The rain had stopped, leaving the cobbled streets glistening under the streetlights. The residents of Brussels kept sober hours and the old medieval houses were shut up tight and dark. Their footsteps echoed in the narrow streets as they walked in silence.
When they reached the bank of the canal, they stopped and leaned on the railing above the water looking out over the dark, still water to the far bank.
“What will you do now?” Paul broke the silence between them.
Helen’s shoulders heaved as she sighed. “When I get back to England, I’ll fetch Alice and we will come over to the continent for a couple of months. Then I’m going home.”
“You won’t come back to Holdston?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You sound very sure.”
She tilted her head to look up at him. The light of the gas lamp, cast the planes of her face in strange shadows, her eyes lost in dark pools. He thought of that moment on the battlefield when she had taken him in her arms and held him. No one had ever done that before, except perhaps his mother and Sarah Pollard when he’d been a small boy.
He had not led a monastic life but the women he had bedded had been there for one purpose only. Only in those fleeting few days with Angela had he felt a real connection with another human on a plane that went beyond the physical. Until today. As he looked down into Helen’s face, he yearned for her touch again.
He put out his hand and touched her cheek and when she didn’t move, he lowered his head, his lips brushing hers in a brief exploratory touch. She took a deep shuddering breath and her body turned toward him. He slipped his arms around her, drawing her close and she responded, her own arms winding around his neck, drawing him down toward her.
The moment their lips touched, the embers that had been smoldering between them burst into flame. A hunger born of the long, lonely years flared. The canal, the cobblestones, the gas lamp above them and the memories of their grim day on the battlefields of Passchandaele faded into a world that just became Paul and Helen.
With shuddering breath, they broke apart and stood for a long time enfolded in each other’s arms. Paul closed his eyes. He wanted to hold her like this forever but he had nothing to offer her, nothing she would want. She would always look at him and think of Charlie and he could never replace his golden haired, laughing cousin. They were the flip sides of the same coin, for Charlie there would always be Paul–as dark and closed as his cousin had been fair and open.
He gently disengaged her arms.
“We must get back to the hotel,” he said.
“Paul...” she began but he laid a finger over her lips, shaking his head.
He saw her frown and despite himself, he reached out and brushed a lock of hair that had fallen across her eyes.
“Helen, tomorrow we will return to England and to our own lives. What happened tonight was just a moment. Take Alice on her adventure and return to Australia.”
The gaslight reflected unshed tears in her eyes. He knew she wanted him to say those three words that would bind her to him but to tell her that he loved her would be a mistake.
“And you?” she asked, the tremor in her voice evident.
He shook his head. “I will do what has to be done. That is my duty.”
She laid her hand on his chest. “Duty? What about the man in here? What do you want, Paul Morrow?” She pressed her hand hard against his breastbone.
He removed her hand and let it drop.
Turning, he walked away from her. Behind him, her quickened steps rang on the cobblestones as she hurried to catch him. Her fingers caught at his, sending sparks through him. He felt the cold metal of Charlie’s wedding ring and released her clasp, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his coat and he hunched his shoulders against a flurry of rain. As they crossed the Grand Place, the first of the flowers sellers wheeled their barrows on to the cobblestones but they didn’t slow their step. They parted at the door to his room without a word.
Chapter 20
Paul looked down at the battered tin trunk that sat in the middle of the faded and threadbare rug. For an object that had been his daily companion for so many years, it seemed alien and repulsive. He swept the dust from the top, revealing his name and regimental number stenciled in black letters.
He hadn’t seen this trunk since the day he had taken his men over the top and never returned. It contained nothing he had wanted or needed since the day he had been wounded. The only thing of value to him,
The Iliad
and his notebook, had been tucked into a pocket of his tunic and had survived the day, slightly bloodstained but relatively unscathed.
Taking a breath, he hefted the trunk on to the table and threw back the lid. For a moment, time stood still. The smell of the trenches still lingered in the trunk, as if captured in a time warp. Mud, mould, smoke, cordite, latrines and boiled cabbage wafted up at him and he took a step back.
An empty pistol holster sat on the top of a pile of neatly folded shirts and other clothing. He picked the object up and his breath constricted in his throat. On that last day, the pistol would have been on a cord around his neck. Officers only carried pistols. Rifles were considered ungentlemanly.
With a shudder, he removed the clothes, consigning them to a pile on the floor for the next bonfire.
At the bottom of the trunk, he found the leather writing case, the reason for his search, wrapped in a hand knitted gray wool jumper. He couldn’t recall who had sent the jumper. He couldn’t imagine any woman of his acquaintance producing such a thing, with the possible exception of Sarah Pollard who had sent him gloves and a woolen scarf which he found tucked in a corner of the trunk. The jumper probably came from a Red Cross parcel, knitted by an unknown hand for “one of the boys” at the Front.
He unwrapped the writing case and was surprised to find it in good condition. He traced his father’s initials stamped in the corner and reflected that this one object was the only possession of his father’s he possessed. It contained only a few small bundles of letters. A collection from Fi, tied up with a frayed string. He smiled at the girlish hand on the lavender colored envelopes and consigned them to the fire without further consideration.
Besides Fi, there had been few people to write to him in those long, difficult years. Evelyn had written duty letters every month. These he had never kept. There were a few from Sarah with the Holdston gossip. He glanced through them and added them to the fire. Hastily scrawled notes from school friends, also serving on the front and now long dead, followed into the flames. It left one solitary sealed envelope.
He picked up the mud-stained envelope and turned it over. It had one word scrawled on it, in Charlie’s impetuous hand.
Helen.
“Come at a bad time?”
Paul looked up, thrusting the letter back into the case.
“Tony. Always pleased to see you.” Paul looked at the trunk and ran a hand through his hair. “Just thought it was time to clean out the cobwebs.”
Tony gave him a quick knowing glance, and crossing to the table where the decanters stood, poured two whiskeys. The men sat in Paul’s battered armchairs.
“How’s Evelyn?” Tony asked.
Paul shrugged. “Busy with her plans to hold a memorial service for Charlie next week. Do you know where Helen is at the moment?”
They had parted as virtual strangers at the hotel in Brussels on the morning he had kissed her. Helen had been adamant that she had to return to Alice and he did not try to prevent her. Evelyn had been prostrate with grief and he had felt unable to leave until she was fit to travel. So he had let Helen go.
He assumed she had stayed in Cumbria since her return and he envied her the peace and healing tranquility of the Lake District.
“London,” Tony replied. “I inveigled her back down south with the promise of London treats for the sprite. Paul…”
The sudden, unfamiliar seriousness in his friend’s tone made Paul look up.
“Paul, I’m going to ask Helen to marry me.”
Paul looked down at his glass and when he didn’t answer, Tony continued. “Is that...? I mean...do you have any problems with that? Is there anything between you and Helen I should know about? You know I would never...”
Paul heard the yearning in Tony’s voice and understood that he needed to be given permission to do as he intended.
Paul made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Good God, no. She’s a terrific girl and she deserves to be happy. You have my blessing, for what it’s worth.” Even as he said the words, a knife twisted in his gut.
Relief flooded Tony’s face.
“What are you going to do about your mother?” Paul continued. “She seems to have formed an unfavorable view of Helen.”