Overseas (32 page)

“Now that’s what I like about you old-fashioned types,” I said, reaching one hand to gather my tumbled hair on my back. “Perfect gentlemen.”

“Except for giving you nightmares, apparently.” He wore his uniform, neat and immaculate despite its overall shabbiness from the endless winter hours spent in muddy trenches; his peaked officer’s cap hung courteously from one hand. I hadn’t grown used to that yet: to the sight of Captain Ashford, soldier, trench dweller. “Are you all right, then?” he asked, more seriously, setting his cap on the bed and then snatching it up again.

“Oh, yes.” The air seemed frigid, now that he’d pulled away. I tugged the wool blanket back up to my shoulders, letting my hair fall away in loose waves around my head. “Just a little cold.”

He nodded to the small wrought-iron grate. “Your fire’s out. No kindling, of course, dash it. I’ll send up the char on my way out; she ought to be in by now.”

“Thank you. I’m… well, I’m not very good with fires.”

“Quite exceptionally useless. Central heating in every home, I expect?”

“Pretty much. How… how long do your meetings run?”

“All day, I’m afraid,” he replied.

I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and rose from the bed. He turned away, toward the fireplace. “And then?” I asked, flipping the switch on the electric lamp. It flickered indecisively, and then held.

“And then I thought perhaps, if it isn’t inconvenient…”

“Inconvenient?”

He turned to face me, his face reddened in the glow from the lamp. “Perhaps I might see a little more of you.”

“Captain Ashford,” I whispered, “I’d like that very much.”

“I’ve so much more I’d like to ask you,” he said hastily.

I reached out to touch his hand. “I’d love to tell you.”

“It was so good of you, last night, to sit up with me so late…”

“But I didn’t convince you, did I?”

“Of course not.” He smiled. “But I had rather an idea, after I left. Shells, you see, are all a matter of chance, of timing. I shall simply change the scheduled start of the raid to 0215. That should satisfy Fate this time.”

“But then something else might find you.”

“Something else might always find me.” His hand worked its way around mine: those familiar fingers, coarse and callused now, strong and beloved.

“How do you stand it? How do you bear it? How did any of you bear it?”

“Well, one doesn’t mind so much for oneself.”

“But others, Julian. The ones who care about you.” I squeezed his fingers, felt them curl in response. “Please don’t go. I know it only hurts you to hear that, because you can’t refuse your duty. I understand, I really do. But I can’t help myself. I have to try. I can’t just hope that a… a
timing
adjustment will keep you safe. I can’t take a single chance you’ll be out there that night. It’s too important.”

“Why,” he asked wonderingly, “does it mean so much to you?”

I reached out to touch the corner of his mouth. “Who can look at you, Julian, who can
know
you, and not understand the answer to that question?”

His lips just parted, exhaling against my skin. His fingers tightened around mine; I sensed the other hand rise and fall back.

“You’ll be late for your meetings,” I told him. “But find me when you get back. I have one more arrow left in my quiver for you.”

His head bent down; he kissed my hand. “I’m at your mercy,” he told me, and donned his cap and left the room.

18.

“Tell me something,” I said, late one afternoon at the end of August, when we lay entwined and peaceful on the grass outside, listening to the cicadas shimmer the humid summer air.

“Hmm,” he allowed, playing with a curl of my hair. “What is it?”

“Why do I always wake up alone?”

He hesitated, so briefly I might have imagined it. “Because, lazy child, you’ve a fondness for lying in, whilst
I
am obliged to work for a living.”

“Well,” I said, picking up his hand and threading my fingers through his, “
that
was a lame answer. Dig deeper, Ashford.”

“You’re too jolly persistent, you modern girls. Can’t a chap have a little peace?”

“Not in this century.”

He sighed and squeezed my hand. “Stand to.”

“Is that an army thing?”

“Most offensives, at least in the early part of the war,” he said dispassionately, as though he were a history professor delivering a lecture, “were launched at dawn, for various reasons. So each morning, when we were in the frontline trenches, we were required to stand to, to make ourselves ready for the enemy’s possible approach. Fix bayonets and all that. Rather a tense moment, if you understand me.”

“And you did this every morning?”

“Every morning, as the sun rose over the German trenches,” he said. “Waiting and waiting, peering into the mist with our periscopes, not making a sound. Nothing ever happened, of course, or hardly ever. But it’s the sort of thing that sticks with a chap. Even after all these years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It’s a small price to pay.”

“To pay for what?”

“For being here. For you.”

I turned in his arms until I faced his side. He was staring up at the pale hazy sky, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration. I propped up my head and ran my finger along the side of his cheek and down to the corner of his mouth, enjoying the sight of him, of his strong well-built face and his eyes reflecting the blue above. “Listen to you,” I said. “Compartmentalizing.”

“On the couch again, am I?”

“Mmm. This busy brain of yours. Everything locked away neatly in its own little box. The childhood box.” I pressed my finger against the side of his forehead. “The alpha hedgie box.” I moved my finger. “The Kate box.”

“A cracking big box, that.”

“It’s my favorite.” I drew a circle around the spot and bent down to impress it with a kiss. “And the war box, of course.” My finger moved again. “Long months of stress and trauma, all packed away under the vigilant watch of that amazing self-control of yours.”

“And you think it will all explode into the open one day?” He sounded amused.

“I don’t know. I guess not. Your way of dealing with it seems to be working. Throwing your energy into other things. Southfield did that for you, I think. Gave you something to obsess over, all those years.”

“And now I have you.”

“You’re
obsessed
with me?”

“I take that to mean you’re not obsessed with
me
?” An injured air.

I laughed. “
Obsessed
sounds unhealthy. This”—I kissed him—“is very healthy. Except I think you just artfully changed the subject on me.”

“We compartmentalizing types are famous for that.”

“I just worry I’m wrong, that it affects you more than I realize, and you’re just being all British about it. So if you could just sometimes let the
Kate box know what the war box is thinking”—I moved my finger from one to the other—“or even
feeling
, God forbid, it might help.”

“See here. I must take exception to that. The Kate box is absolutely crammed with feelings; spilling out the sides, in fact. I’m good about
that
, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are. It’s a lovely box. A loving, tender box; I’m proud to belong there.”

“I’ve put into it,” he said softly, “all the best in me.”

I bent my forehead into his chest. “Which is plenty,” I said. “But the war box, on the other hand…”

“Look, must you be off coveting the contents of other boxes? They’re not nearly so nice as yours. Nor a fraction as important to me.”

“Stubborn. I’ll have it all out of you eventually, you know.”

“Mmm. I’m sure you shall.” He lifted my chin up and kissed me. “You’ve an entire lifetime for the job.”

I felt the soft nibble of his lips, and the prickle of ripe grass beneath me, and the warm sun soaking my flesh, and I gave up. “So I’ll never have the pleasure of waking in your arms?” I asked wistfully, running my finger along his upper lip.

“If only you’d wake up sooner, my love. But you’re always dead asleep.”

“That’s because I’ve been up half the night, answering your insatiable demands. With you trying to make up for twelve years of celibacy in one short summer. I don’t know how you manage, actually.”

A tiny smile lifted my fingertip. “Sleep appears a complete waste of time, at the moment,” he said, and gathered me up for a proper kissing.

I couldn’t resist him; I never could. We’d been living in the cottage all summer, and still all he had to do was look at me with that particular expression in his eyes—or any expression at all, really—and my insides melted like wax under flame. He knew it, too. He knew exactly his effect on me, and, being a quick learner, had already grown adept at using it to distract me from certain topics of conversation.

Not that I minded. I was deliriously, rapturously in love. The summer
was passing by in a haze of wonder: days spent swimming and sunbathing at the beaches, sailing Julian’s nimble cutter on Long Island Sound, prowling the shops and sights of the nearby towns. We might go running or sculling on the river first thing, before the air grew too hot, and then Julian would disappear into the library for a couple of hours to conference with his lawyers or his traders; after that, the time was ours. We’d find somewhere to go, something to do. Mini golf, once, at which Captain the so-called Honorable Julian Ashford had played a shockingly dirty game: distracting my swing, knocking my ball with his own like it was a croquet match, and then making the critical mistake of trying to kiss his way out of trouble afterward.

Of course, there were other days: the days he left at dawn to drive into Manhattan, once or perhaps twice a week. I kept myself determinedly occupied then. I went to work in the garden, I read book after book, I sent cheerfully reassuring e-mails to my puzzled friends and family
(Just taking the summer off! It’s amazing! Country air! Beach!)
and posted smiling photos on my long-dormant Facebook page. I baked my own bread, traded my own modest portfolio, ran errands. Each month, when I mailed off the rent check to my roommate, I marveled at the barefoot fullness of my life: at how, without accomplishing anything newsworthy, without going farther afield than Newport, I felt more charged with connection to the surrounding world than I ever had in those cyclonic years on Wall Street.

And yet no matter what I did, however much I managed to amuse and occupy and even enjoy myself, I missed Julian. It was like having some essential organ in my body absent itself without warning. We e-mailed, of course, and he always called me at least once or twice, between meetings, but it did little to fill the gap. I tried not to count the minutes until eight o’clock—the earliest possible hour I could expect him—or to hang around the front door, waiting for the sound of his car in the driveway. But I knew when he arrived, all the same. I could feel him, his sunshine entering the house, and all the dull ache of missing him was cured, all our dissected parts safely reassembled. “There you are, beloved,” he’d smile, reaching for
me, and I’d step into his embrace to be hoisted in the air, or kissed breathless, or waltzed about the room.

And the evenings! Sometimes we went out to dinner or the movies, but mostly we stayed in. Julian might play the piano, Chopin or Beethoven or Mozart, which I loved, but also ragtime and old music hall songs with raunchy lyrics, made all the more hilarious because Julian—as he’d warned me—had no singing voice at all. Some nights he downloaded old recordings into his iPod and showed me how to waltz, to polka, to do the turkey trot and the bunny hop and the grizzly bear until we collapsed, laughing, on the living room floor. Other nights I made him instruct me in the fundamentals of fencing, boxing, cricket, rugby; then I’d enlighten him on various aspects of American football, with a particular emphasis on the history and hagiography of the Green Bay Packers. Or else I sang for him, or he settled me on the sofa and recited bits from Shakespeare or Homer or Wordsworth, or some ridiculous doggerel he’d picked up in a pub somewhere, his expressive voice shifting effortlessly from high art to low, never missing a word. I could have listened to it all night.

I never did, of course. As the summer wandered on, we craved each other with an immediacy that grew rather than lessened, nakedly carnal, as if through the tactility of physical union we could somehow seize control of this capricious mystery that had brought us together. I often wondered whether Julian felt it even more than I did. He was always touching me, holding me, drawing me into himself: eager, compulsive gestures that seemed to bring him relief rather than joy. There were times he possessed me with a peculiar gentle ferocity I didn’t fully understand: when the vile traffic on the interstate had kept him away until after sunset, perhaps, or when I hadn’t been quite within earshot when he came home, and he’d had to go looking for me. An edge of panic would lever his voice, and his arms would greet me with an instant of crushing strength, before softening to cradle me. He would kiss me, vibrating, scintillating with need, and I’d melt myself into him, letting him know it was all right, that I understood; he’d carry me upstairs and make love to me with the most exquisite care
imaginable, and the more delicate his touch the more desperately I knew he wanted me.
Let go,
I’d urged him, in the early days, marveling at his restraint.
I won’t break
. Later, as I began to have an inkling of what was going through his mind, I whispered instead that I was okay, that I was safe, that I wasn’t going anywhere, I’d be here for him always, always.

He’d lie atop me for the longest time afterward, a precious crushing burden, not saying anything, his head dropped down next to mine, his hands buried in my hair, his eyelids pressed shut: looking asleep, though I knew he wasn’t. “Happy or sad?” I’d asked him once, running my finger languidly up and down his spine, and he’d murmured, “
Happy
, you silly thing.” Because of course he knew that was what I wanted to hear.

But whatever the mood, we had always had the night afterward, the luxury of falling asleep together, skin on skin: an uncanny sensation of merging, of blending into each other, seamless and indivisible against an arbitrary universe. And if sometimes I stirred in the dark hours to find his arms wound around me in a suffocating hold, I learned it was a simple matter to turn and kiss him awake until the shadows fled, and he was my own teasing laughing Julian again, whispering naughty Latin in my ear until I fell back asleep.