Chapter 43: Through Eden Took Their Solitary Way

POPERINGHE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

April 1918

With no other means to hand, Freddie and Jones walked to Poperinghe, stealing through shadows, hurrying through the two miles or so that separated Pop from Couthove, almost impossibly taxing on Freddie’s drained limbs. The city was in warlike chaos, and the noise shredded his nerves.

With Faland, it felt like nothing else in the world could touch him. But now the world was all around him, raw and bright and painful, its dangers immediate, its ugliness obvious. They kept their heads down as they passed the outskirts of town, dodging frantic traffic in bad light until they got to the town square, which was packed and heaving with men. He wasn’t sure how, in the bewildering midst of the crowd, his eye found Laura. But he found her. She was standing beside Winter, supporting him, his arm over her shoulders.

Winter’s eyes were narrow with pain, his face set. There was blood on Laura’s skirt, and the remains of tear-tracks on her face. How were they—

Then Freddie’s senses cleared a little, and he heard the music beneath the crowd’s noise, realized that it moved not to the demands of modern war, but to another power entirely. Faland was there. He was playing his violin.

Jones broke away, went to Laura and said, “What in hell, Iven? Are you all right? Where is Shaw? What the hell are you doing with…” He gave the half-conscious Winter a very unfriendly look.

Freddie had followed Jones, trying to ignore the music lurking in the crowd’s rising noise. Winter raised his head a little. Their eyes met. Winter said, “Iven—why did you—?” A billow of flame, pouring like wings from the town hall, cut him off, and there was the music again, insistent, underlying the noise of the crowd.

There were shouts of fear, of anger, the sound of car horns, as though Faland were dragging sheer madness up from where it lurked beneath the surface of their minds. Or perhaps they were just reacting to the fire. Freddie couldn’t tell what was real anymore. He felt quite insane.

What now?

He raised his eyes and caught Faland’s gaze. As though he’d always been there, eyes heavy-lidded while he waited for Freddie to notice. He wasn’t playing his violin anymore, but that didn’t matter. The essence of it had been taken up by the crowd.

Faland wasn’t alone. The beautiful woman was with him, and Freddie understood the expression on her face, the terrible decision. Magic and oblivion on one side, and a whole broken future in their new world on the other.

Jones said, “Mrs. Shaw—what are you doing?”

Freddie knew what she was doing. He felt a surge of jealousy. He’d chosen the new world, chosen Winter, chosen Laura, chosen the wasteland of his life, with whatever green shoots he could coax out of the parched terrain of his soul. He saw that the woman had made the other choice, to go into the dark with the stranger, and allow herself oblivion.

For a second, he regretted. For a second, he almost called to Faland, his whole heart twisting suddenly with longing. Faland watched him, waiting. But Winter’s arm was tight around him, and Laura was leaning on him from the other side, and they were all anchoring each other in the madness, and he couldn’t have broken that connection, not for anything.

Mrs. Shaw’s delicate face was twisted up with longing, and her eyes were on Laura. She hesitated.

“Pim,” whispered Laura, barely audible over the madness. “I need you too.” Their eyes, amber and blue, were locked together.

She just shook her head a little. Freddie saw that she had bloody hands. She looked up at Faland and said, “Well?” He could see the shine of her tears in the billowing light. Freddie wanted to cry too, but his mind and his memory were in too much chaos.

“We have to get out of here,” said Jones.

“That way,” said Winter.

Laura said nothing, and neither did Freddie. But they both turned when the other two prompted them, and the echoes of Faland’s music chased them out of Poperinghe. The crowd heaved with the emotion of it, and at the very edge of hearing, Freddie thought he heard Faland’s voice.

“Farewell, Iven,” said Faland, and laughed. “Try not to think of me too much.”

---

· · ·They walked. Winter, leaning on Freddie’s shoulder, alone of them all seemed to have some idea where they were going, which lanes and roads would conceal them. Perhaps that was how he’d survived, all those months. When he stayed. Looking for Freddie.

Freddie didn’t know how to feel.

They walked until it felt that they’d always been walking.

Jones spent the whole time insulting them, chivvying them, ordering them to keep going. And Winter set his jaw and kept going, as he had on the battlefield, his courage as bright as it had been there.

So they went.

Finally—and Freddie could not have said exactly when it happened, except that day was breaking and he was utterly spent—they stopped walking and found themselves on the outskirts of an ordinary town, with the mutter of war quieter than the send and suck of the sea. Freddie didn’t know how far they’d gone. He could not muster enough of himself to care. He felt like he’d wakened from a dream, and half-wished he hadn’t.

Laura’s face was still streaked with tears; she was gray in the morning light and her skirt was bloody. Winter’s face was expressionless, but he and Freddie had held each other up, that last distance, each instinctively seeking the other’s strength. “We must find a rooming—house—run by Belgians,” Laura said. “A modest rooming house. And pay them well. So they won’t ask questions. Or talk.”

“I’ll go,” said Jones. He looked as though he’d no idea what had happened. But he was the only one of the four neither bloodied nor wraithlike. His glance lingered briefly on Laura. Then he went.

It hardly took half an hour, which was good because they were all, to varying degrees, on their last legs. It wasn’t even that difficult. No one, in those bad days, would turn down hard currency, no matter how strange the appearance of a doctor and a nurse, and two hollow-eyed men that kept to the shadows. They took two rooms, and locked the doors, and then it was quiet, and Freddie didn’t know what to do. He and Laura took one of the rooms, Jones and Winter the other. Freddie didn’t say anything. The darkness was prosaic now, the world’s horrors gray, unleavened with Faland’s malice, his painful empathy. Freddie stood there, feeling hollow.

---

· · ·The mattress was suspect and the plumbing shrieked. Freddie hadn’t said a word. But Laura was too tired and too grieved to worry about that; he was there, alive, dragged back to her against the odds. She’d saved him, she reminded herself. She’d come there to save him, and she’d saved him. Even if she could not save Pim.

It hurt to think of Pim.

She took off her stained dress and put it to soak. Stood there in her combination and stockings, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. Freddie was still standing there, looking around at the homely room as though he could not quite believe it was real. When she went to him, he was passive; let her help him peel off his clothes, washed his face when she put the cloth in his hands. “Is this real?” he asked her once, low.

“Just rest,” she told him.

And finally, he went to bed, and fell into a restless sleep. His white-threaded hair stuck to his cheeks. Laura sat awake, watching, as though she could make it all right for him if she just never looked away.

She could not, of course. Freddie woke screaming, at some point, in the darkness. No effort on her part, no pleading, no comfort, no touch, no words, would quiet him.

Preoccupied, she didn’t see Winter come into the room, didn’t hear his halting footsteps until he was standing beside the bed. He’d been with Jones next door; Jones had cleaned and dressed his wound. She would have thought he’d be dead to the world now. But he was there, standing by Freddie’s bed, his expression guarded.

Freddie raised his head, looked at Winter as he had not looked at Laura. He said, “It’s dark.”

Winter said to Laura, although his eyes never left Freddie, “Sometimes, waking, I’m back in the pillbox with no way out. There’s no light. There’s no air. I would have died, if I’d been alone. I’d have gone mad, if I’d been alone.” Pause. “I think for him it’s the same.”

Like sharing the same death, the same birth. Laura understood. She also felt an unholy jet of rage. How dare he? This German, this enemy. He’d have killed Freddie out in No Man’s Land but for a strange quirk of fate. How dare he stand there, looking at her with steady eyes, as though he knew her brother, the last family she had, better than she ever could?

Her brother who’d all but forgotten her. Her brother whom she loved. Who was all she had left in the world. Whose eyes were open wide, stark and afraid. He’d given up oblivion to try to come back to her. She’d saved him from that.

But she could not save him from this.

Perhaps they’d never find their way back to each other. But they had a chance to try. Because he was alive.

She owed Winter that.

She stepped away silently, until her back was to the connecting door. She paused in the doorway. “He is all I have,” she said to Winter. It was half apology and half warning.

“I know,” said Winter. And, strangely, she thought he did. It was that understanding, and that alone, that gave her the strength to turn her back on her brother, to go through the door and leave them alone.

---

· · ·Jones was on his feet, by a refreshed fire. Well, of course he was awake, he’d heard Freddie screaming. And did Jones ever sleep, anyway? Even at Couthove, he’d always been doing something. He was in his shirt and trousers now, his sleeves rolled halfway up. He looked from her to the doorway, and said, “Come and sit by the fire.”

She had forgotten that she had a blanket wrapped over her stockings and combination and little else, until she felt the fire’s heat on her bare shoulders, and realized how cold she was.

She sat on the shabby armchair, and Jones leaned on the mantel. Finally, he said, “I’d dose your brother, if I’d anything to give. I gave what I had to Winter.”

Laura shook her head. “It’s not that. There are demons that we can’t fight. Not even you.” She tried to smile. “A dose won’t help him, I think. If anyone can help him, it’s Winter.”

Jones said, “She’s gone then, is she? Shaw?”

Laura flinched. Jones waited. “She wanted to go with Faland,” said Laura. “She didn’t want her life anymore—she’d lost her husband, her boy. I couldn’t—I couldn’t hold her. I could hold Freddie. But not her.”

Jones’s pragmatic voice was tonic. “You can’t save everyone, Iven.”

Laura bowed her head. He stood there looking down at her, and she wished he’d go away, wished he’d say something, wished he…“Laura,” he said, and at the new note in his voice, she looked up. “May I hold your hands?”

His eyes were black in the firelight. He waited. Without a word, she put out one hand to him.

He knelt, in silence, on the rug beside her, and took her right hand in both of his. His fingers were as clean as ever, cool and dry and precise, as he tested the scar tissue, the range of motion in the joints, massaging where they were swollen. He took up her other hand, tracing the deadened lines of scar tissue, pressing so she could feel the sensation, diffuse, beneath. She could not have stood sweetness, or sentiment. But he had a surgeon’s touch, gentle and a little ruthless, and trust eased some of the knots in her soul. There was utter silence from the room next door.

Laura said, “They need each other.” More than he needs me, she was too proud to say. I got him back and I lost him…

“That’s how they survived, I think,” Jones said. He was still looking down at her hands. “Needing each other. You can’t change it, and you shouldn’t try. But you got him back.”

She was silent, but after a long pause, she let her head fall onto his shoulder. His hand came around her head to hold her there, tangling his fingers in the short, tawny curls. It all felt too big, too strange for emotion. Pim and Freddie, Winter and Jones. She didn’t know how to feel.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she said, against his shoulder, feeling his fingers in her hair. “I didn’t—I didn’t expect—”

“Understandable,” said Jones. His voice had roughened a little, but his hands were precise as ever, in her hair, between her scapulae. “You will go home, of course. Take them both home, and sort it out there, out of earshot of the damned Front. You have time now. A whole future in front of you. No more war for you, Laura.”

Laura didn’t lift her head. Very softly, she admitted, “I don’t know how to get them home.”

Jones said, “Winter will need identification. So will Wilfred. And three berths on a ship. I’ll help you get it.” His hands fell away as she lurched back from his shoulder.

“Stephen—” she began, his name still strange in her mouth, and saw color rise in his face. But he interrupted, pragmatic as ever, before she could say anything else. “Don’t be proud about this. How else are you going to get home? Are you going to stay here until someone wonders what on earth the three of you are doing?”

She said, struggling for sense, “And you? Are you going back to Couthove?”

He might have hesitated. “Yes. I have patients. Obligations.”

She said, “I don’t want to be an obligation.”

“You’re not.”

“I don’t—I don’t want it between us. I already owe—”

“Christ, Laura,” he said. “You don’t owe me anything because I won’t let you. I want—” He didn’t finish that thought. Laura didn’t know if she was glad or sorry. “Well, there’s time enough for that later.”

Somehow the harshness of him touched her own rough edges and smoothed them. Low, she said, “Then come and find me. After it’s all over. And tell me what I owe you.”

“Nothing,” he said, and he was close enough for her to feel the brush of his hair, against her ear and throat. The vibration of his voice. “I already told you.”

“Come and find me anyway,” said Laura.

---

· · ·Out of the depths of his nightmare, Freddie heard a voice, and it was saying “Wilfred,” oddly careful. His head cleared a little. The door had closed behind Laura and there was only Winter. Freddie didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to say it.

Winter looked strangely foreign, with his stiff fairness, his single arm, standing by the bed; utterly out of place. Winter said, “I—fall asleep and I dream it’s the pillbox, and there’s no way out.” There was half a question in his voice.

“So do I,” said Freddie.

Winter said, “But we got out.”

Freddie wasn’t sure he had. The hotel had held it all in abeyance, but it had mended nothing. And he’d opened every single door in the place to get out, and now all his worst memories swam round and round his mind.

Winter sat down, very gingerly, on the bed beside him, not touching. Freddie felt the heat of his feverish body. There was no music here, no oblivion. There was the familiar sound of Winter breathing.

“Winter, I—”

Winter said, “It’s all right, Iven.”

“I was a coward.”

“You were a man. I’d have gone with him, if our positions were reversed.”

“I’m a ruin,” Freddie said. “I let him have—my mind, myself. And I got back—only the worst things, I can hardly remember anything else.” Except for you, he didn’t say. I remember you.

“You came back, though,” said Winter. His spine was more rigid than ever.

“You stayed,” said Freddie.

“I swore,” said Winter, “that you weren’t going to die. I knew it was the last thing I was ever going to do. I don’t break my promises.”

“I promised the same thing,” said Freddie.

“And we are alive,” said Winter.

“Are we?” said Freddie, with bitterness. “I might as well be dead.”

Winter said with sudden ferocity, “Do you dare say that, Iven? Do you think I stayed because I believed that? Do you think your sister came back searching for you because she believed that?”

Freddie was silent, but his silence was resentful. He wasn’t looking at Winter anymore, and so he started in surprise, when Winter caught his chin in his hand. His eyes flew up and found Winter’s. “He filled your ear with poison, didn’t he?” said Winter. “Faland.”

“He said the world had ended and that I am a coward,” said Freddie. “And he wasn’t wrong.”

He could see the muscles tense along Winter’s jaw, but Winter said nothing, for a moment. “No, perhaps he was not wrong,” said Winter at last. “But that doesn’t mean he told you everything.”

“What else is there?” said Freddie.

Winter had let go of Freddie’s face, and Freddie found himself wishing that he hadn’t. Winter was real in a way Faland had never been.

Slowly, as though thinking it out for himself, Winter said, “That there’s no such thing as a coward, or a brave man—not out there. There’s no man’s will stronger than the war. He might as well have called you an angel as call you a coward, the—distinction—is just as valuable. That is to say, not at all. And of course the world ended. But it went on too.”

Winter had turned a little as he spoke, drawing one knee up so they were facing each other. Each watching the other, a little wary, measuring. He did still have a soul, Freddie thought, in some wonder. For what else could it be, the thing inside him, linked to Winter, like interlaced hands? It was not a kindly bond. They’d lied and suffered—even killed—for each other. With Faland, whatever you did, there were no consequences, not really, except for the single, great consequence: the utter loss of self. But that hadn’t seemed to matter. The war already made him forget he was a person.

But he was a person and there were consequences now. Reach a hand to Winter, and Winter might draw away.

Reach a hand to Winter, and he might be angry.

Reach a hand to Winter, and he might reach back, in equal, drowning desperation, and Freddie didn’t know which frightened him most.

“Winter, what happened? After—at Brandhoek. After I left. What happened?”

“I was ill,” said Winter. “Very ill; I ought to have died. It was your idea that saved me, to give your sister’s friend a reason to value my life. I didn’t die.” He didn’t look at the place where his arm had been.

“But—you could have—you could have gone. Once you were well. Gone to be a prisoner, safe. You nearly died because you didn’t go.”

Winter said, “I knew you’d gone with Faland, Iven. Do you think I didn’t understand? I saw him, when they were taking me away. I tried to warn you. I wouldn’t let him have you. So I searched. I hid. I stole. I felt like a madman for trying, or a ghost myself. Or one of the wild men that poor boy thought we were. I was on the edge of despair that night in Poperinghe.”

Freddie reached out then—his fingers brushed down Winter’s face, jaw to throat, and he felt Winter go still, the blue eyes finding his.

But Freddie had yanked back; the touch sparked a sense-memory, remorselessly strong. He was suddenly there, back in that shell hole, his hands on a different throat, also warm, thrashing against his, tension running through the cords of the neck, wet. There was rain and there was water and there was drowning, his own desperation, and he didn’t want to be alive, he didn’t want to remember.

“I can’t,” he said. His voice cracked, right at the end. “Winter, I can’t.” He couldn’t articulate what he couldn’t do—not love, so much as live. He’d said he would try but it was no good, he couldn’t.

“Iven—”

“I can’t,” said Freddie.

“You don’t have to do anything,” said Winter. “Just be here. Stay, Iven.”

But Winter was a man, and he did not lie, like Faland, beyond the bounds of the world, beyond what the world called right and wrong. There would be a morning. And perhaps another morning, and another.

But the world ended,Freddie thought, in strange wonder. Mother always said the world would end, and it did. As a child, he had imagined that it would be glorious. As a soldier, he’d thought it meant something gray and hopeless.

But now, with the first feeling of hope he’d felt since—since he couldn’t even remember—he thought, Everything’s different now. What does it matter if I reach for him, here in the dark and…He didn’t let the thought finish forming; he reached for Winter’s arm, and said, hearing his voice rough and abrupt, “Are you cold?”

He felt Winter go perfectly still. The arm under Freddie’s hand went steely and rigid. He saw the blue eyes black in the dark, the blunt-featured face, the sandy hair.

Time stopped. The question hung there, and the room was utterly silent.

Carefully, so carefully, Winter’s own hand came up, and closed on Freddie’s, where it curled round his arm. “Yes,” he said.

Slowly, awkward with his wound, he slid under the wool blankets, lying on his good side. Freddie could hardly see him, but it was better that way. He’d always—perhaps always would—know Winter better in the dark. Winter didn’t move, when Freddie touched him, but his heart beat hard under Freddie’s hand.

“Why did you stay?” said Freddie. His voice was just a stirring—even less—in the dark.

“I promised,” said Winter.

“Is that the only reason?”

Winter made a harsh sound. “Can you ask? Iven, we were dead together, we were born together. I cannot live without you.” He didn’t sound happy about it. In fact, he sounded much the way Freddie felt, as though he’d been changed against his will, and was marking out the new boundaries of himself.

Freddie’s hand trembled now, where it lay marking the swift tread of Winter’s heart. “I remembered you,” said Freddie. “I was losing everything else—but I remembered you. I’d wake up listening for you—”

Winter moved forward, sharply, and kissed him, his body warm, his grip almost bruising. It was shocking. It was inevitable. It was home. It was the first time Freddie had felt alive in his own skin since the night he went up Passchendaele Ridge.

He kissed Winter back, his own hands rough on Winter’s face, gentle on his wounded side. Winter drew away, but only to a finger’s breadth, close enough for Freddie to see his pupils blown wide, his face afraid. Neither of them, Freddie thought, was who he’d been. But if they’d never changed, they wouldn’t be here, together, in the dark.

“Stay,” said Freddie, and twined his fingers with Winter’s, bit his lower lip. Felt him breathe.

“Yes,” said Winter.