“Did I ask her to go out wandering at night, arguing with bad men? Leave me to my pleasures, Iven, the world’s so dour now.”
“What does she want?”
Faland said, “What does anyone want? Her heart’s desire. Enough. I’m going. Come back with me or go to blazes, boy, which is it?”
“Damn you,” said Freddie. “What about my sister?”
“You saw her, she’s perfectly well,” said Faland.
He didn’t move. “You lied. You came for that woman. You didn’t come to show me Laura at all.”
“Laurawas ill,” said Faland, with precision. “Influenza, andpneumonia. She survived, evidently. She is now working in that—” He pointed at the chateâu. “A private field hospital. Happy as a rabbit in clover. Anything else you want to know?”
“How did you know all that?”
“I am an inveterate gossip,” said Faland.
“Leave my sister alone.”
Faland snorted. “If she leaves me alone; she’s the righteous, meddling kind, you know.”
Freddie strained his dimming faculties. “And that woman? What do you want with her?”
With exaggerated patience, Faland said, “I think your question should be what do I want with you?”
“I know what you want with me,” said Freddie.
They shared a long look.It is not far from love,Freddie thought somewhere in the embers of a mind that had been a poet’s.The tie of hunter and prey.“I want to see Laura again.”
“I said you’d see her, and you did. You could have gone in.”
He couldn’t have. Faland, that bastard, knew it.
Faland said, “Stay or go, Iven?”
He was already walking away, over the dewy spring grass, whistling a little to himself, as though trying out a melody. Without a word, head bent, Freddie followed.
· · ·
More time passed. No one came to the hotel anymore, as though Faland had suddenly got tired of playing at hospitality. Freddie drifted through corridors that he did not always recognize; lived in a world that was nine parts dream. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. But still he clung to the scraps of himself. Laura was out there. She’d survived, she’d come back. He didn’t have the strength to go to her. But he couldn’t bear to leave her either. Not when she hadn’t left him. Perhaps he’d see her again, he thought vaguely. Even from afar. So he wavered, a stranger to himself. Hour after hour.
Faland spent every moment on a piece he could not seem to master, love and madness twined in a nauseating swirl. Freddie kepttelling over memories that felt like they’d happened to someone else, trying to reweave the fabric of his soul as quick as Faland tore it apart. And at the end of each day’s story, when Freddie was slumped, crying, feeling like he’d clawed pieces off himself with his fingernails, he’d ask, “How is she?”
“The same,” Faland would say.
And finally Faland answered instead, “She’s left the hospital. Your sister.”
“Why?” said Freddie. But he knew why. Deep in the remains of his soul, he knew, whatever his mind tried to tell him. His heart beat faster—was it in fear or delight?She’s looking for me.
Don’t find me, Laura. I don’t want you to find me.He hated himself for being glad that she was looking.
“Do you wish to see her?” said Faland.
He tried to fight his way through lethargy, like clawing away cobweb. Why would Faland ask? “Yes.”
Faland touched Freddie’s face with a wounding gentleness. “All right,” he said. “I shall take you to her. But first I want you to tell me what you see, all those times you’ve fled from nothing, when you look behind you in my hotel.”
He saw the shell hole, the soldier’s face as he drowned. Winter. The shell hole was one of his hoarded memories of Winter. Of course Faland wanted that.
