Dogs scampered backwards and forwards along the ragged line of people. Hens, cats, birds, a pet rabbit were carried in cages. By the time they reached the bend in the road that offered the last view of the town, the French army were approaching in the opposite direction. ‘Don’t look back,’ Papa cautioned them. ‘Don’t look back.’
One of the cart wheels was coming loose. She could hear the irregular
thump, thump, thump
of it as it turned on the road. And then another thumping noise, though it was more like a crack, which made the earth rise up in a huge cloud. She thought at first the wheel had come off. Then she thought she must be the wheel because she was spinning, rolling along on the road. She felt something wet and sticky on her face. And then...
* * *
Sylvie jerked awake, heart thudding, skin clammy with sweat. She could still hear the crump of the artillery shell assaulting her ears. Dazed, shaking, her fingers clutched tight around the sheet, she realised the noise was someone knocking loudly on the door of her apartment. Surely it was too early
?
She glanced at the clock on her bedside table. Eleven. Late morning! At least it was Sunday, and she did not have to work. As she pushed back the tangled sheets and quilt, her unread book fell to the floor. The lamp was still on. She switched it off, clutching her head, which was also thumping.
‘Attendez. Je viens,’
she said, wincing at the sound of her own voice, staggering to the door simply to quiet the noise.
He was freshly shaven, though he looked as if he had slept even less than she. In the daylight the traces of his youthful good looks were much more evident. He could not have been more than twenty-seven or eight. Last night she’d thought him a few years over thirty. ‘Robbie?’
‘I woke you up, sorry.’
Sylvie looked down at her flannel nightgown that had once been red and had faded to pale pink. It had once been long, too, but she had been fifteen when Maman had made it for her, more than ten years ago. She had not been able to fasten the buttons properly for years, but she could not bring herself to stop wearing it. Blushing, she clutched at the neckline. It didn’t matter that he had seen everything underneath. That had been last night. In the dark. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, much more brusquely than she intended.
She realised that he’d been trying to smile when it faded. ‘I’ve obviously come at a bad time,’ he said, backing away from the door.
‘No.’ She tried a smile of her own and held the door open. ‘It is just—I was sleeping. It’s Sunday. I was not expecting—
Entrez
.’
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Robbie said again, standing awkwardly just inside the door.
‘I am glad you did,’ Sylvie said, shivering, thinking that at least he’d spared her the next part of her dream. The part with the blood and the screaming. ‘I could do with some coffee, but as you can see, I’ve not lit the fire yet. Not that I’m actually permitted to brew coffee because it is not technically a kitchen, but still, what the landlord does not know, you know?’
She turned around from gazing helplessly at the empty hearth to find him studying her. She remembered thinking last night that he saw too much, and she’d been right. ‘Bad dreams?’ Robbie asked.
Sylvie shrugged. ‘Nothing coffee won’t cure.’
He did not press her, for which she was grateful, until she realised the reason why. ‘You, too?’ she said, touching her fingers lightly to the dark shadows under his eyes.
‘Coffee sounds good,’ Robbie replied, making it clear he wanted to talk about it as little as she. He took off his cap and pressed his fingertips against the shorn side of his head, tracing the long red welt that was just visible on his scalp.
Despite the chill in the unheated room, there was a fine sheen of sweat at his temples. Sylvie caught his hand in hers, forcing him to stop worrying at his scar. ‘You will make it worse.’
‘It’s actually much better. I go back tonight.’
Her stomach plummeted. ‘Back?’ she asked stupidly.
‘To the front line,’ he confirmed. ‘That’s why I came. I needed to explain. About last night.’
‘Can you explain it?’ Sylvie wrapped her arms around herself. ‘
En vrai
, I don’t think I can. I barely recognised myself, I was so—so out of control.’
‘That’s exactly how I feel. To be honest, I came here not knowing what I was going to say. I just knew that I had to, since I won’t get another chance.’
Because he was going back to the front. Because he would never see her again. Because the chances were he would be killed.
‘We need coffee,’ Sylvie said firmly. ‘Sit. I will light the fire.’
She did so quickly, leaving the wood to catch and fetching an ancient woollen jacket that was warm and all enveloping. No one could possibly find her alluring in this attire. She set a pot of water to boil over the flame, conscious the whole time of Robbie sitting, silently watching her. He was going tonight. To the front. She would never see him again because...
Don’t think about that.
The water boiled. She made the coffee in Maman’s copper pot, the spout crooked from where she had landed heavily on her back after the explosion.
Don’t think about that.
‘I don’t have any milk,’ she said, handing Robbie a cup. Not the brown earthenware ones. They had been smashed into tiny pieces. He was going back to the front where he might also be...
Don’t think about that.
She pulled one of the hard, rickety seats from the table and sat down, taking a sip of coffee, then another. ‘Better,’ she said determinedly.
Robbie looked down at his own cup, seemingly surprised by its presence, and took one small sip before placing it on the floor by his feet. ‘I needed you to know,’ he said, ‘last night. I don’t— I have never— Not like that.’
Sylvie set her cup back carefully back in its saucer. ‘You came back here to tell me you regret it.’
‘No, I don’t regret it. I should. I behaved like an animal, but I don’t regret it.’
‘I behaved like a harlot, but I don’t regret it, either.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Robbie jumped to his feet, narrowly missing his coffee cup. ‘If anyone acted badly, it was me. Since coming here to France, not once in eighteen months have I behaved like that nor had any desire to. And yet afterwards I wanted more, even while I was still— I wanted you again. I tell you, I’ve never felt like that in my life.’
She should not feel relief at this declaration, but that was exactly what she did feel. ‘Perhaps it was precisely because it had been so long,’ Sylvie said, one of the many reasons she’d come up with herself to explain her wild abandon.
‘Perhaps.’ Robbie picked up his coffee cup and put it down on the hearth. ‘But more likely because I’ve had everything civilised torn out of me.’
The naked suffering in his face took her aback. ‘No, Robbie.’ Sylvie got quickly to her feet, catching his hands between hers. ‘You are not an animal. Or if you are, then I am just the same. Last night, I have never been so—so uninhibited,’ she said, forgetting her embarrassment in the urge to assuage his guilt. And her own, perhaps. ‘You were just a man a long way from home, looking to forget, find some comfort. It was the same for me.’
‘Was it?’
He looked at her searchingly. The shadows made hollows under his eyes. She didn’t think she had ever seen anyone look so utterly weary. He ran his fingers through her tangled hair. ‘I thought that side of me was dead, until last night,’ he said.
His touch made her shiver with awareness. ‘I thought I would never— Not ever again,’ Sylvie said, mesmerised by the blue-grey of his eyes, by the scent of him, by the breadth of him, which made her forget, as she had last night, that he was a soldier, made her think only that he was a man, a very attractive, extremely desirable man. ‘I thought it would be enough. Perhaps it was too much,’ she said.
‘Not enough,’ he repeated, his fingers feathering over the exposed nape of her neck. ‘It could never be too much.’
He kissed her. It was the same as last night, though the edge of desperation was even sharper. She clung to him, forgetting everything save for the rampant need that bound them together, kissing him just as hungrily back. They stumbled towards the bedroom, discarding clothing. His tunic. Her woollen jacket. His boots and puttees. Kisses, punctuated by incoherent words, accompanied them as they shed clothes and staggered into the room.
But when he laid her naked on the bed, he slowed, tracing the lines of her body with his hands, then his mouth, tasting her, murmuring her name, and the knife-like need in her melted into a desire that caused her breath to catch in her throat. He kissed her breasts and her belly, the crook of her arm and the curve of her waist. She was liquid with longing as he kissed her knees, her ankles and then her thighs.
He licked into the crease at the top of her legs, and she moaned. Then he pushed her legs apart, kneeling between them, and slid his fingers inside her, and the melting need twisted into tension once more. Sylvie cried out as her climax took her, sudden and unstoppable, writhing under him, begging incoherently for more, panting wildly as he kissed his way back up her body to reclaim her mouth, as he slid inside her with one slow thrust.
She wrapped her ankles around him, digging her heels into the tense muscles of his buttocks. He thrust into her, slowly and rhythmically, riding the waves of her climax to push deeper, tension and passion etched on his face until he could hold on no longer and cried out, a guttural sound wrenched from deep inside, clutching her to him as if she might save him from some fatal fall.
* * *
Robbie rolled onto his side, thanking whatever instinct it was that had reminded him at the last minute to use protection. His body was damp with sweat. This time there could be no blaming the night or the wine or the longing not to be alone among the teeming throngs of Paris. What on earth had he been thinking?
Not thinking. Again! Cursing under his breath, he got out of bed and made for the bathroom, grabbing his underwear and trousers. Unable to face the contraption that supplied hot water, he used cold, hoping that it would shock him into sanity. Emerging a few moments later, clean but none the wiser, he found Sylvie sitting up in bed clutching the sheet around her like a suit of armour. Her eyes were dark brown in the daylight, almost the same colour as coffee, her lashes as black as her hair. Were it not for the fact that she was looking at him with something akin to horror, he would have been very tempted to join her again.
‘I didn’t come here this morning expecting this to happen,’ he said.
His words sounded a great deal more defensive than he had meant them to. Sylvie pulled the sheet higher. ‘I hope you do not mean that I—that it was my fault.’
‘Of course I don’t.’ Robbie’s hand went automatically to his scar. It was throbbing. Seeing her pointedly watching his hand, he let it fall. ‘It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t mine. Or it was both of us. I don’t have a clue what it was. I don’t understand it.’
‘You said that earlier.’
‘And I think we’ve just proved me correct.’ He felt his temper begin to rise, not in anger but frustration. The clock on her bedside table informed him it was two o’clock in the afternoon. How the hell had that happened? ‘Look, I’m sorry.’
Her eyes flashed. ‘I knew it!’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Then just what do you mean?’ Sylvie jumped out of bed, grabbing her nightgown and the strangely shaped woollen thing, scrambling into both. ‘I wish you had not come back.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
She glared at him, her breasts heaving. ‘Why did you?’
‘I told you, I wanted to explain, because I won’t see you again.’
‘Then why does it matter? Since you are so determined that you will die,’ she said in response to his blank look, ‘why does it matter that you explain—even if you could?’
A bloody good question.
‘I don’t know, I just know it does.’ Robbie picked up his tunic and yanked it on. ‘Look, maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t have—not last night, not today. I was perfectly fine until you came along, and now I don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels. I haven’t ever wanted anyone so much as you, and I don’t want to, do you understand? I don’t want to! I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to want. Not you. Not anything.’
‘That at least is one thing we can agree on,’ Sylvie said shakily. She picked up his boots and threw them at him. Her face was pale, the bright slashes of temper on her cheeks a stark contrast. ‘You think it’s easy for me, wanting you, when you stand for everything I loathe.’
He had been so caught up in his own turmoil, he had not quite realised how upset she was. ‘You’re shaking.’
She shook herself free. ‘Don’t touch me.’
She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, gulping in deep breaths of air. ‘I hate this and all that it represents,’ she hissed, pointing at his uniform. ‘Not just yours—the French, the Germans, the British, all of them. None of them care about anything but their own squabbles, and if you are unlucky enough to get in the way—well, what does it matter in the grand scheme of things, as long as victory is won.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you care?’
‘You’re from the north, aren’t you?’ Robbie said, though saying the words made him feel ominously sick.
‘Picardy.’
Picardy, which had been rent in two and decimated by both sides in a gruesome game of tug of war from almost the first day of the onset. God knew which of the many villages and towns she’d been forced to leave, and by which army. ‘I’m sorry,’ Robbie said hopelessly.
‘Please don’t be! You don’t want to feel anything, remember? Well, nor do I.’
She was crying now, though she didn’t seem to notice. It was not so much the tone of her voice but the way she looked at him, as if he was the enemy, that made Robbie sick to his stomach. He was not angry with her but at them. The faceless hierarchy who had duped him, and thousands like him, into believing when he signed up that he was doing the honourable thing for king and country.
‘These,’ Robbie said, holding out his sleeve with its two captain’s bands, ‘simply mean I’m more likely to get killed than someone without them. Look, I don’t know what happened to you, but believe me, I am sorry you’ve had to suffer. I’m sorry that anyone has to suffer, and that sometimes I am responsible for that suffering. That’s just the way it is now, and I can’t let myself think about that too much because if I do then I—I won’t be able to function.’