Читать книгу Come Away With Me - Sara MacDonald, Sara MacDonald - Страница 9

August 2005

Tom wakes with a start. His heart is thumping loudly in the silent house as if he’s had a nightmare. If he has, he can’t remember it. He turns on his back, sure there is something, some small niggling warning he should recapture from sleep, but he can’t conjure it up.

He gets out of bed and pulls on his bathrobe. He goes to the uncurtained window and looks out. It’s almost dawn and he watches the pink tinge grow behind the rooftops. He turns back to the bed and looks at Jenny sleeping. He feels such an overpowering sense of love and fear flood through him that he catches his breath.

He moves out of the room and across the landing, flinging the shadows away, swearing at these moods that always come on the last days of his leave. Rosie is curled like a dormouse in her cot, the same wiry hair as her mother, the same way of sleeping, a small clone. He smiles and tucks in her arms, carefully pulls up the covers over her plump little body. Rosie. Flesh of his flesh.

He shivers. The shadows in the room creep nearer, encroach from all sides. He can’t turn and face them because he doesn’t know from where the most danger comes.

He leaves the room, goes into the sitting room and sits in his battered leather armchair. He loves this house. This marvellous, lived-in Victorian house with its high ceilings and huge casement windows. He loves everything about his life except returning to this nasty little war he is unsure he still believes in. He has to cull these feelings; kill them with one blow before they take hold. He has younger, less experienced soldiers under him, nineteen-year-old boys who rely on him. It’s the life he’s chosen. He has no right to maverick thoughts, dread or self-pity.

Impatient with himself, he gets up to pour himself a brandy. He’ll sit and listen to the silent house move and breathe and creak around him. He’ll absorb into himself from the shadows of night the hub of Jenny’s busy days. The constant coming and going and chatter and giggles; the sound of the phone or doorbell; the noise of his daughter’s small footsteps on the polished floor; the touch of Jenny’s hand as she passes him clutching rolls of coloured material, turning back to smile at him, her face alive with love. All these things are the routine of her days when he’s away; her enclosed, safe, female world.

Marriage has made everything harder. There’s so much more to lose, risks become calculated, less instinctive. It’s hard not to grow softer, to lose your edge. He swallows the brandy quickly. Stop thinking.

He falls asleep in the armchair and dreams again. Dreams he’s getting off a plane in Northern Ireland, or Bosnia, or Iraq. It’s pouring with rain and his heart is heavy with the loss of something…

There’s something he should remember but it dances out of reach, just beyond memory. All he can feel is the icy night rain coming in on a wind that chills him to the bone.

He turns to look at the young soldiers following him off the plane. They shimmer in the heat blasts of the plane warming up behind them. They have a dreamlike quality as they float towards him and he realises with sudden clarity that time as he knows it does not exist. These soldiers, he himself, are shimmering in some timeless zone. They are the soldiers of yesterday and the soldiers of tomorrow. They are smiling, flirting with adventure, dancing with death. They do not understand it will never end, these brutal little wars against an unseen enemy. There they stride with their eager, innocent smiles and their new, squeaky boots and heavy packs, and he wants to shout them a warning. We’ll never win. It will just go on and on and on.

Yet, as he moves towards them he sees his own younger face among them, determined and alight with challenge. They move, laughing, through him as he stands facing them on the tarmac and he realises that they cannot see him for he is not there. He does not exist. His time has been and gone.

With relief he wakes. It is morning. He is in England. Sunlight shines across the polished floor. He laughs with relief. Where should he take Jenny and Rosie on this precious last full day of his leave?