Matthew turned away, unwilling to face me while he dredged up his memories.
“There was one fellow,” he began, “the one I dreamed of tonight. He’d been blinded by gas, and his body was oozing with burns. I’d studied biology for one year—I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do! I pulled off the field wrappings, and layers of skin came along with it. He screamed and screamed. I wasn’t treating him; I was torturing him. The sounds he made—I can still hear them. And to know it was all my fault . . .”
“Oh, Matthew.”
“I’d had a few close calls before, when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, but that was the last straw. I covered his mouth and began raving like a madman, shouting at him to shut up. Tonight, in my dream, I was trying to make him stop.”
Matthew took a deep breath that sounded like a shudder.
“The nurses had to pull me off him. The next thing I knew, I was invalided out. Couldn’t talk above a whisper, my throat was so sore.”
“Invalided?”
“Shipped home for what Mum called a ‘rest cure.’ Not that there was anything restful about it. I was visited every night by the bloody corpses of men I’d let die. Do you know what it looks like when your stomach’s been ripped open?”
I didn’t want to know, but I kept still as Matthew described horror after sickening horror, and the world I knew shattered. The poised, self-assured man I had married was nothing more than a thin, brittle shell. Here beside me, shaky, was the real Matthew. The one who’d always been just beyond my grasp.
I was scared and furious and brokenhearted, all at once. My first thought was that I had been duped into marrying a man who might be insane. Then my mind flashed to images that couldn’t be memories but had the clarity of truth. Ma’s body slamming against the kitchen table. The glint of silver as she drove the knife into my father’s stomach, over and over, until her hands were stained crimson. The slickness of the blood beneath my knees and palms, the shrieks and guttural groans. Maybe Matthew wasn’t the only one who was broken.
Slowly, carefully, I inched across the bed until our shoulders touched. My toes sought out his feet under the sheet.
“The war’s long over,” I said. “You have to put it behind you.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” The sharpness of his voice hit me like a slap. “Mum consulted the best doctors in the world! Not one of their treatments worked. I lied when I told you I’d been in Europe on business. I went back to France. It’s a booming business, escorting tourists around the battlefields. I tried to make my peace with what happened, but the nightmares kept coming.”
Dashing Matthew Lemont, strolling the deck of the Franconia, dazzling me with his confident smile. He’d been a figment of my imagination all along.
“Then I met you,” he said. “I began looking forward to the future, for the first time in years, and the dreams went away. I thought I was cured.”
“Is that why you married me?” A whisper.
Matthew didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself. “It was rotten not to tell you all this before. I didn’t know how.”
My illusions about Matthew were shattered on that dismal Sunday night. But he could never know. As the shock wore off, I was overcome by a maternal affection for the suffering man beside me. I made a promise, I told myself. For better or for worse. If it was in my power to take away his pain, I would.
I clutched his hand and squeezed. “It’s all right.”
Matthew tried very hard to smile. His arms and chest shook with suppressed sobs, enough to make the mattress quiver. My liar’s instinct told me he hadn’t revealed the whole truth, that he was deliberating whether to confide the rest.
“There’s something else,” I said. As if I already knew.
Matthew released a breath with a drawn-out shudder. “Sometimes I see Aunt Cecily,” he whispered. “Bleeding.”
He sounded like a terrified child confessing a mortal sin that would damn him to hell.
“Mum mustn’t know. She thinks I’m doing so much better.”
“I won’t say a thing. I promise.”
My assurances seemed to soothe Matthew, though his eyes were still agitated, his muscles tense. I had to do something—anything—to distract him from his guilt-ridden thoughts. I slipped my nightdress up over my shoulders and head. It was the first time Matthew had seen me naked, in the light. I took hold of his hand and placed the palm flat across my bare chest.
“Do you feel it?” I asked. “My heart?”
Eyes fixed on mine, he nodded. How beautiful he was. How fragile.
“They’re gone,” I whispered. “Cecily and those poor boys. But I’m alive. I’m here.”
Matthew’s other hand reached out and caressed the curve of my breast.
“I’m here.”
Matthew wrapped his arms around me, pressing his face into my neck. His stubble grated against my skin as he kissed me roughly. Desperately. His hands clutched at my waist and back, and I twisted and arched to accommodate him, responding in kind as his movements became more frantic. His teeth cut against my lips; his fingers dug into my hair as I squeezed his thighs and backside. For once, I didn’t worry what Matthew was thinking or whether I was doing the right thing. I simply matched him push for push, moan for moan. Physical sensation silenced our troubled minds, and our bodies pounded together in a matching rhythm that left me gasping. My arms ached from the effort of holding him so tight.
At last, Matthew collapsed on top of me, sweaty and spent. I whispered that I loved him, and he whispered it back. I saw how tired he was, yet how unwilling to surrender to sleep, and I told him it would be all right. That I wasn’t afraid.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he mumbled. “When work settles down, I’ll take you on a proper honeymoon. Anywhere you want.”
If Matthew was soothed by planning an imaginary vacation, I’d play along. “I’ve always wanted to see palm trees,” I said. “What about Florida?”
“We can do better than that. Money’s no object.” Fatigue was making him slur his words. “Let’s go far away. To the other side of the world.”
“Africa.” I don’t know what made me say it. Heaven knows I’d never pictured myself as a safari type of girl, and the last thing Lakecrest needed was more stuffed animal heads.
“Africa,” Matthew breathed. He entwined his fingers with mine and pressed his lips against my knuckles. Then, holding my hand like a talisman against his chest, he drifted into sleep. I lay beside him, disconcertingly awake, and stared at the thick pillars of our bed, the lumpy horsehair sofa, the heavy velvet drapes. We were surrounded by an old man’s vision of grandeur. Was it any wonder Matthew felt tormented by the past?
I had a sudden, striking vision of Matthew and me lying in a field, staring up at the vast African sky. Sharing sights and smells and tastes that would be immortalized in shared memories. I held on to the thought like a beacon in the dark. Beside me, Matthew snored gently. At peace.