· · ·
With the light beside him, Freddie slept, and the next time he woke, it was to music, and he was alone. Someone in the hotel was playing a violin. Precisely, achingly, flawlessly, the music trickled through the room: a melody he almost recognized. He saw fresh clothes folded at the foot of the bed. At first he thought they were a uniform, then he realized that they were just pieces of one. Canadian trousers, a British jacket. Castoffs. Like himself. He put them on. Ventured to the door, stiff in every limb. Peered out. The hallway was soft with carpet. The music rose. Freddie followed it down a flight of stairs. Found a door and opened it.
The music struck him in the face, like walking into rain.
He was back in the foyer, but it wasn’t empty. Men in proper uniforms packed the room, sitting at tables, drinking, talking, laughing. Sometimes crying. Their lips were stained, the floor was sticky. Their noise made the chandeliers quiver. Was it advertisements, Freddie wondered, that brought them all? He didn’t know if it was night or day. The room revealed nothing of the outside world.
Freddie clung to the shadows. The sheer, tenacious life filling the room frightened him, as though if he got too near he’d be swept back into its bloody gyre. But no one beckoned, no one was looking at him. They were all watching Faland. He was the one playing a violin.
Freddie was surprised somehow, that the musician was him. Faland seemed so remote. Detached. But there was nothing detached about his music. It reached a clawed hand right inside Freddie’s forgotten heart, alive with things he was too wounded to feel anymore. Regret, tenderness. It was beautiful, and it hurt so much.
He stood there frozen, and that was when he caught sight of the mirror over the bar.
Winter and Laura were eating supper. The war had neverhappened. Freddie and Winter had met in the ordinary way. There was no white in Laura’s hair, there were no lines on Winter’s face.
He didn’t hear the music ending. He didn’t hear anything at all until Faland’s voice in his ear shattered the illusion, left him reeling once more. “Well, you are among the living after all,” said Faland. He was carrying his violin in a case.
“Who are you?” Freddie said. He realized his face was wet. “I don’t understand.”
“I am a notable hotelier,” said Faland. “And fortunately you don’t have to understand. Would you like some wine?”
“God, yes,” said Freddie.
· · ·
He drank until he was no longer afraid. He drank until longing became only a pleasant ache. Faland drank too, color on his cheekbones, the paler eye brilliant. It was a compelling face. You wanted to look at it, and know its secrets. You wanted to look through it to where the music lived. The room around them was sunk in murmured talk, heady with warmth and wine.
“Will you tell me a story now, Iven?” said Faland. He’d taken a seat beside Freddie, lounging in the half-light.
Freddie hesitated. A story meant remembering. He wanted to stay adrift in the unmoored present. But Faland’s silence was expectant.I have fees,he’d said. Well, it was little enough, for the hours of glorious oblivion. Freddie found himself groping through his wine-hazed memory, thought of things he could tell—good and terrible—and finally he blurted, “Laura stole an ice cream for me once.”
“Misdeeds run in the family, I fear,” said Faland. He propped his chin on his fist and waited.
Freddie hadn’t thought of it in years. But he found himself slipping into the memory as though it were playing out in front of him. Faland leaned forward.
“Laura— God, she spoiled me. I’m nearly three years younger,you know, and I was a fat little brat of a red-haired thing. Awful freckles. And she had me by the hand once and we were walking past the shop, and I told her I wanted an ice cream. She didn’t have any money, of course, and neither did I. But you know it never occurred to me, even then, that she couldn’t get me one. So she looks at me. Looks at the shop. And then she marches in like a queen, holding me by the hand. She was—twelve? Twelve, I think. And she orders ice creams for both of us. With chocolate sauce. And then she gets to the till. Of course she’s not got a penny. And she reaches into her pocket. Nothing’s there. Her eyes fill up with tears. I started to cry myself, seeing her get started. She turns to the shopkeeper and says, ‘Sir, my dollar fell out of my pocket.’ She’s weeping like a Madonna the whole time, and she turns to me and says, ‘Freddie, go home, for I must make amends. Please, sir, spare my brother at least—’ She was heartbreaking, I can tell you. And the long and short is we got those ice creams and got off scot-free. I used to think she was terribly clever; now I think the shopkeeper was just impressed with her barefaced cheek and crocodile tears.”
Freddie raised his eyes and saw Laura’s adult face in the mirror, without a single mark of strain on it. As though the woman there had grown from the girl in his memory, with no Armageddon come between. He didn’t know how long he stared and when he looked away, Faland had disappeared.
Freddie didn’t remember how or when he got to bed. But he must have managed somehow, for he woke up back in that luxurious bedroom, dry-mouthed, with a headache. He had no notion of the hour, or even the day. He dimly remembered telling Faland a story. But he had absolutely no memory of what the story had been about.
CHÂTEAU COUTHOVE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
March 1918
Laura woke in the darkestpart of the night and knew that something was wrong, even though she was high in an attic, out of earshot of the ward. Before she was properly awake, she was out of bed and hurrying into her clothes, laid ready on the trunk. In less than a minute, she was slipping softly down the stairs, straining for the sound of aeroplanes, of explosions. Nothing. But she heard the commotion clearly as she got closer to the ballroom, saw the play of electric lanterns as the night staff belatedly heard and came across. She was with them as they entered the ballroom, their lights sweeping the stained parquet. The staff looked disoriented, even sheepish. They’d been taking their ease in the warm sterilization room while things went to hell in the main ward. Laura had to bite back orders and reprimands both.
The room was in chaos. Mila—Christ, why had no one been with him?—was screaming.
“Where are you?” howled the dying man, with a volume and clarity he absolutely shouldn’t have had, not with his ruined face. “Please, please, please, youpromised…”
He was the loudest. But the whole room howled. Patients’ voices fell on her ears as she made for the screaming man.
“God, did youhear?”
“It’s a sign, it is, we’ve lost.”
“He’ll come for us all.”
