The Firebird

He had straightened to his full height, now. His eyes looked strangely bright, she thought, and red around their rims, and he said nothing, either, only gave a kind of nod and glanced away. She saw his eyelashes were wet, and that seemed strange to her as well, and yet it could not be from weeping because everybody knew a soldier never wept.

She managed not to weep herself, although she found it very hard.

The Abbess Butler let her watch him through the window while he left. He was on horseback, looking tall and strong and wonderful. He saw her at the window and he raised his hand as he went by, and at the far end of the street he slowed his horse and brought its head around enough that he could look the long way back at her. She saw his arm lift one more time – one final wave, one last salute, and then he turned the horse and they rode on.

The world beyond the window blurred.

She had a vague awareness of the Abbess Butler standing there behind her, of the soothing words, the sympathetic hand upon her shoulder, and the fact that she had not been left alone, and yet already she could feel the hole beginning in her heart.

And when the first tear fell, she knew she’d never be a soldier.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Rob wasn’t feeling up to conversation yet. He hadn’t said as much, but I could sense it when I looked at him, and so while he was finishing his dinner I sat back and watched the people passing by us on the pavement.

We had picked a restaurant fronting on the town’s impressive market square, ringed round with buildings reconstructed from the rubble left by the bombardment of the First World War, the darkly Gothic Cloth Hall with its high clock tower at the western end, its tall spire shadowed by the church spire rising close behind it, and the long tall line of ancient-looking buildings, with stepped gables and steep roofs that looked too perfectly medieval to be real. The courthouse at the eastern end of the long open square looked like a palace, built of golden stone, with carving round its windows and a curious round metal tower rising from the centre of its high roof.

It was busy in the square. Cars stood angle-parked all down the great expanse of it, while round the streets that ringed it other cars sped past or crawled along according to the temper of their drivers, and the pavements were alive with tourists.

And at our side of the square a little funfair had been set up, neon lights around its side stalls with their games of skill and luck, and a small dragon-headed roller coaster that lurched round its corners with a rush and rattle, making all the children that it carried shriek and hold their arms up bravely.

When we’d first been seated it had been a little quieter because it had been coming up on eight o’clock – the time, our waitress told us, of the ceremony held each evening here in Ypres to honour those who’d fallen in the First World War and had no graves. The ceremony took place at the Menin Gate, just visible beyond the square, an arch of pale stone built above the bridge that crossed the moat. The traffic would be stopped, our waitress said, and music played, and words recited, with each night a different honour guard of soldiers from one of the many countries that had lost men in that unforgotten war. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ she’d told us. ‘Many tourists come to see it. It is something to remember.’

We didn’t go ourselves. I heard the sounding of the last post, and the bugle’s call to reveille, but given the emotional intensity of what I’d just been witnessing, I didn’t really want to face more sadness, and I doubted Rob did, either.

It had taken something out of him this time, our going back. I hadn’t noticed it at Slains, or at the cottage, but this time when we had surfaced from our visions of the past there in that shadowed covered driveway, Rob had leant a moment longer up against the hard brick wall and closed his eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ I’d asked him.

‘Aye, I’m fine.’

He looked fine, now. We’d been here for an hour, and he’d polished off his steak and Flemish beer. I’d ordered fish, myself – small rolls of sole in the Normandy style in a mushroom sauce livened by bits of red apple, with piped mashed potatoes and salad, but most of it still sat untouched on my plate.

Rob had glanced at it once. When he did it again now I nudged the plate over the table towards him. ‘Go on, then.’

I watched him eat, looking for any sign he might be tired, but he looked the same as he always did.

We’d stayed partly outdoors, not going right into the restaurant but taking a table instead on the front covered patio, where the glass walls at each end blocked a lot of the breeze, and the raised wooden floor lightly bounced with the steps of the servers. Rob might have preferred somewhere softer to sit than the black metal mesh of these chairs, but the restaurant’s interior had looked too intimate, too softly lit, and I’d thought I would find it more comfortable here in fresh air and bustle. I’d thought that our meal would feel less like a date.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. For starters, the table – a small, square grey table dressed up with a grey linen cloth draped across it – was so small there wasn’t a way we could sit at it without our knees touching. Ever the gentleman, Rob had made room for me, shifting his feet a bit further apart, but that hadn’t helped. Now my knees were between his, and that only made me a lot more aware of him.

And for another thing, I hadn’t counted on just how seductive this mental connection would be, that we’d shared today following Anna. Breaking that connection had been difficult, like stepping from a warm room to the wintry world beyond. It had been harder because Rob’s mind had stayed open to me, fully open, as though …