Overseas (30 page)

“You should have just stayed, then.” The words snapped out before I could stop them, squatting brutally in the cell-phone ether.

He didn’t reply immediately. I heard his breath rustle against the mouthpiece once, twice. His voice, when he spoke, was nearly inaudible. “I hope you don’t really mean that.”

I thought for just an instant about the prospect of spending the night alone in his bed. “Not that I’d want you to,” I conceded, “but it’s a lot of driving for you.”

“That’s nothing, compared to the alternative.”

“Can’t I just come back into the city with you?”

“No. Look, can we finish this later? I’m desperate for the sight of you, and since you won’t let me drive…”

“I’m sorry. All right.” I paused. “Do you still want me to meet you at the inn for dinner?”

“I’d be devastated if you didn’t.” And he hung up.

17.

I drove into the parking lot of the Lyme Inn two hours later, and found to my surprise that it was empty. No green Maserati; no other cars at all, in fact.

I eased out of the Range Rover, feeling distinctly out of place in the black chiffon dress I’d picked out that afternoon from the Saks outlet. My hair flowed loose over my shoulders; another odd sensation, since I usually twisted it back on my head whenever I went out. A tiny silver barrette now held the waves back from my face.

I reached the front entrance and nudged the door open. A dark candlelit interior unwound around me, the fading daylight gathered about the windows. It had the feel of a rabbit warren, with doors and hallways and rooms branching off the entrance corridor and the lazy scent of wood smoke lingering in the air. A maitre d’ hovered by the desk. “Hello,” I said, pitching my voice low. “I’m joining Mr. Laurence. Has he arrived yet?”

“Good evening, Miss Wilson. Not yet, but if you’d like to follow me?”

I trailed behind him down the hall and to the left, peering around me and finding none of the other tables occupied. The maitre d’ led me leftward into a small paneled room, where a single table sat before a dancing hearth.

“If you’d like to be seated?” he prompted.

I dropped obediently into the chair he offered me, too embarrassed to say anything. “A glass of champagne?” he inquired.

“Apparently so, thanks,” I said, and he exited swiftly, returning almost before I could gather my thoughts, with a tray on which two glasses bubbled delicately.

Julian arrived about ten minutes later, coming up so silently I had only an instant’s warning before his warm hands clasped my shoulders, and his head bent down to press a kiss right where my clavicle merged into my throat.

“I expect you’re spitting mad at me,” he said.

I let out a small laugh. “No, not
spitting
mad. Not anymore.” I covered his hand with mine and turned to look up at him. “You’re all dressed up!” I accused, taking in his tuxedo, his crisp white shirt-points, his newly shaven face glowing in the firelight.

He smiled and shrugged. “I took a moment to clean up. I’m so sorry for being late, darling; I had a great many things to look after.” He lifted my hand and kissed it ardently. “My God, look at you! You’re ravishing! Not at all sporting of you, darling, when I’ve been aching for you all this endless beastly day.”

“Good effort, Ashford.”

His shoulders fell in a sigh. “Look, shall we talk first, then? Clear the air?”

I opened my mouth to make some polite dismissal, but realized it would be a mistake. “Yes, I guess we should.”

He reached over and took his chair and drew it next to mine. “Sweetheart,” he said, sitting down, “I was rather an ass this morning when you called me up from Newport. I’m sorry about that. I’d been sitting down with Geoff and Daniel, realizing the full magnitude of things, and I wasn’t in the best of moods.” He took my hands and stared at them. “You see, this is all rather new to me.”

“This?”

He looked up. “Having you in my life. To worry over, to protect.”

“Julian, I’m a grown woman, not your firstborn child.”

A rueful laugh. “You’re probably thinking I’m some sort of ghastly Victorian ogre, eager to repress you and all that.”

“No, of course not.” I ran my thumb along his. “But I think you
are
a man of your own world, Julian, and… and that’s wonderful, most of the
time. And you’re
not
domineering. I realize that. You aren’t trying to control me; you’re just worrying over me, and that’s a big difference. An
essential
difference.”

“Thank you,” he said eagerly, “thank you for understanding that.”

I held up my hand. “Hold on. But you’re also used to getting your way, and telling people what to do, and you can’t just
do
that with me. I won’t let you cross that line, from protective to controlling. And you can’t make decisions that affect me, like filing that complaint, without giving me a heads-up.”

“Fair enough. But isn’t that really what I was asking of you this morning?”

“Well, not
quite
. I mean, I was only driving to Newport.”

“Don’t be disingenuous. Visiting that bookstore was a great deal more.”

“Honestly, I never thought it constituted a risk. I would have asked you about it if I did. Look, if it means so much to you, I promise I’ll call you when I go out. Check in every so often, so you don’t have to worry.” I looked down at his hands, and without warning an erotic image spread across my brain: those same fingers caressing me intimately last night, agile and curious.

“Kate?”

“Um. Yes. I’ll call you next time. I promise.”

“I’d appreciate that. I won’t be away often, but when I must… darling, you’re so infinitely precious, I can’t help worrying. I…”

A waiter arrived, bearing tiny bowls of fragrant soup. Julian rose smoothly and adjusted his chair while the man set down the dishes.

When he left, Julian lifted his champagne glass and clinked mine. “Is it all right, then?”

I tilted the glass to my lips and studied him. “Julian, the last thing I want to do is waste time being mad at you. Let’s just recognize we come from different places and try to respect that, okay?”

He smiled. “I suppose I can manage that all right. I
have
been living in
your world for most of my adult life. I do know what’s expected of me as a modern man.”

I tasted the soup.
Crab
, reported my mouth to my brain, but the information ricocheted harmlessly away. “I don’t want you to change who you are, Julian. It’s just… I hope you understand who
I
am. I’m not…” I swirled the soup with my spoon, until a tiny eddy formed in the center. “I’m not like the girls you admired in your own time…”

“Oh, Lord. Are we talking about Flora Hamilton again?”

“Julian, you don’t need to diminish it for my benefit.” I cleared my throat, forcing my voice into an objective tone. “I realized, reading about your last leave…”

He put down his spoon and spoke fiercely. “That bloody book. Yes, let’s clear up
this
little matter straightaway. Since it’s causing you so much distress.”

“You don’t need to. She was your first love; I understand. She’s just a little intimidating, that’s all.” The soup eddy deepened, drawing tiny bits of crabmeat and chives into its vortex.

“Kate, listen to me. I was never in love with Flora. Not really. Our mothers were friends. We knew each other all through childhood, she and her brother and I. All quite close. It was perfectly apparent to both of us that the families hoped we’d marry one day, and we joked about it. But I should imagine I spent more time with Arthur than with her. We went to school together; he was a good friend.”

I glanced up. “Oh, come on. There’s more to it than that. I saw that picture of you at Henley. She had her hand on your arm, and you were eating her up.”

“I thought you said you didn’t care.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t
care
, just that you didn’t owe me any explanation.”

“Well, here it is, anyway. Flora was very pretty, very flirtatious. I may, at some point in my misguided youth, have rather fancied her. A crush, I believe, is the modern term. We corresponded while I was at university.
She was the sort of girl who liked to think herself quite special indeed, not at all like the other girls; she became involved in one cause and another, taking up suffragism one month and socialism the next. At one point she had grand plans to try for a place at one of the women’s colleges at Cambridge, but found the Greek and Latin preparation too much for her.”

“Greek? You had to know
Greek
? To go to
college
?”

He waved his hand impatiently. “In any case, she was violently patriotic in the first year of the war, waving her flag as I left for the front and joining the nurses’ auxiliary and so on, and then violently pacifistic ever after. We began to quarrel in our letters, and when I came home on my last leave, she insisted on meeting me, on having me to stay with her family at their house in Hampshire.” He took a drink of champagne and set the glass next to the pointed tip of his knife, turning the base just so. The bubbles rose upward in long fine threads, undulating hypnotically; he watched them for some time before he continued. “We were up the entire night talking, arguing, until I was half dead with exhaustion and general annoyance. I said something cross, I don’t remember what, and she flung herself at me, begging forgiveness and all that, and I found myself kissing her. I put a stop to it directly, of course, but she went on and on about her supposed love for me, and perhaps I should have been more emphatic, more unequivocal in rejecting her…” His voice drifted; he looked up and met my eyes. “I left the next morning, determined never to see her again, and was astonished to receive her letter after I was back in billets two days later. She had the most extraordinary ability to interpret events to her own liking. I wrote back firmly, telling her in as gentlemanly a fashion as I could that things were not quite as she remembered them. She didn’t reply for some time, and then…”

“That was about the time you went on your last patrol, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, “and it astounded me, later, to see what she’d manufactured for herself out of that thin raw material. Her war memoirs were a shocking fabrication; I hope you don’t plan on reading them. They brought her fame, of course, and I don’t suppose it does me any actual harm. And
she lost her brother, you know, less than a year after my own supposed death. Blown to pieces by a German shell, apparently. A terrible blow for her; they were quite close. So it would be churlish of me to hold grudges.”

“You never loved her?”

“Darling, by the time I left for the front, Flora Hamilton was beginning to represent all I most disliked about my world. And to compare the… the
fleeting
feelings I had for her with those I bear for you…”

“But you wrote the poem for her.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The poem.”

“Your everlasting fame comes from a… a love sonnet to another woman,” I said, hiding my expression behind the soup spoon.

He spoke slowly. “It’s generally supposed that I was referring to England. To the love of king and country as redemption for war’s evil.”

I quoted, into my soup. “Excuse me, but no man is that patriotic.”

“You’ve memorized it?”

“I told you, I wrote an essay on it in high school.” I looked up at him and smiled, a little ruefully. “I had to compare you to Wilfred Owen.”

“How did I come out, in your estimation?”

“I think I stumped for Owen,” I admitted. “I thought ‘Overseas’ sentimental, especially laid next to those froth-filled lungs of Owen’s. But you were writing during the first part of the war, before the Somme, and he wrote at the end. That was the point of the essay, you see…” My voice dwindled. “But I
liked
yours the most. I thought it was the most hopeful, the most redeeming, especially that bit at the end about defeating eternity. Poor Owen’s just miserable. There’s no compromise, nothing to soften the blow. Nothing to hope for.”

“Well,” Julian said meditatively, “the war itself was bleak and horrible. Either you saw a higher purpose in it, or you didn’t.”

“Did you?”

He considered. “I suppose so. Partly because I was doing my duty, not just to my country but to the men I commanded. And partly because I was a silly young ass, after all, just out of university, thinking myself jolly splendid in my uniform. It suited that rather barbaric streak to my nature. Going from the quite rigid civilization of my earlier life, its petty proprieties, its various hypocrisies, to going without washing for a week at a time. Up all night, running raids and repairing wire and that sort of thing.”

“Weren’t you scared? Horrified?”

“Well, yes. Of course. Shell fire particularly; most nerve-racking, that. Incessant bloody noise. And the beastly snipers taking potshots at all hours. But you see, I was one of those lucky chaps that could stand it, more or less.”

“I’m not sure I buy that. I don’t see how it couldn’t affect you.”

He ran one finger along the stem of his glass. “Look, I didn’t say it didn’t affect me. But I don’t brood about it. I don’t know why; perhaps because I never fought a major action, only damned little raids and patrols. Perhaps because I’d been stalking deer and shooting birds all my life; I hadn’t any illusions about what happens when one fires a gun and hits something. Or perhaps because it was all overshadowed by what came after. Really, Kate, what do you want me to say? That I’m wounded inside and I need you to heal me?” He said it lightly, teasingly, but I caught a faint note of warning in his voice.

I leaned forward, unimpressed. “So why did you write the poetry, if you didn’t need to get things off your chest?”

“Kate,
everybody
wrote poetry. My formal education, you understand, consisted largely of memorizing endless sections of verse, epic and otherwise. I could jolly well recite you every bloody word Milton ever wrote. Virgil, in Latin. The entirety of
Henry V
. ‘Once more unto the breach’ and all that. So it was more or less inevitable that my fellow officers and I, finding
ourselves in the middle of an historic European war, well-larded with long stretches of interminable boredom, were moved to cram our service notebooks with all sorts of derivative rubbish.” He paused to drain his champagne, an uncharacteristically gluttonous act, and fiddled the empty glass between his finger and thumb. “I suppose, in my case, I wrote to keep my intellect from surrendering completely to the sordidness around me.”