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“I’ve lost an arm, not my wits. I don’t want wrapping away from reality as if I were a case of nervous collapse or hysteria. Pretending Cawnpore never happened isn’t going to take the nightmares out of my sleep, and I don’t want to forget my friends as if they never lived or died. It would be a betrayal. They don’t deserve that. God knows, they don’t!” Suddenly the anger and the overwhelming pain drenched his voice and was raw in the room, silencing even Athol.
Only Hester had seen war as he had. Monk knew even he was excluded, for all the poverty and death and daily intolerable misery he had seen in the city slums not more than a mile from where they stood. But he felt grateful for it, not angry, not put aside.
He looked at Hester, not smiling at her with his lips, but willing her to understand that he knew what she was doing, and that she was right, and that he admired her intensely for it. Gabriel Sheldon must need desperately to speak openly to someone. One can wrap the truth in palatable euphemisms for only so long, then it chokes in the throat and the lies suffocate. One ends in hating those who force the deceit by their expectancy, their fear, their cowardice, their sheer lack of understanding of the reality of pain and loss.
“Perhaps we should go downstairs?” Monk said aloud. “I am sure the matters about which I consulted Miss Latterly can wait a while longer.”
“Oh …” Athol had apparently forgotten who he was. “Good … good. Yes, perhaps we should. Talk about something else, what? Would you like a glass of whiskey, Mr.? …”
“Monk. Thank you.” He turned and followed Athol across the landing and towards the stairs. He wanted to stay and talk to Hester, but he knew it was impossible now.
However, she surprised him. He had barely closed the withdrawing room door, and Perdita asked the butler to bring the decanter, when Hester came in as well.
“Is he all right?” Perdita said immediately, her voice rapid, the decanter forgotten.
“Yes,” Hester assured her with a softness around her mouth which was almost a smile. “Don’t worry for him. These memories are bound to intrude at times. They would with all of us.”
Athol frowned and took half a step forward, but Perdita seemed unaware of him; her attention was entirely upon Hester.
“It isn’t in me,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen anything really terrible. I feel a thousand miles away from him, as if there were an ocean between us and I don’t know how to cross it. I don’t even understand. I don’t have nightmares.”
“Don’t you?” Hester looked doubtful. “Didn’t you feel shattered, terrified, broken inside—”
“Miss Latterly!” Athol said sharply.
“No!” Monk put his hand on Athol’s arm, his fingers gripping hard enough to silence him.
“… when you saw Gabriel for the first time after he came home?” Hester finished.
“Well …” The memory was so clear in Perdita’s face, her mouth pulled as if the pain were physical inside her. She struggled for words and did not know which to choose. “Well … I …” Her eyes filled with tears. “Yes … I felt … just like that.”
“Haven’t you forgotten sometimes, and woken up as if it were all just the same as before, then remembered?” Hester asked. “And had to live it all over again?”
“Yes!” Suddenly Perdita knew; she grasped the reality of it as if it could save her from drowning. “Yes, I have.”
“Then you know what nightmares are like,” Hester assured her. “It is that same shock of seeing and feeling all over again, just as sharp as the first time, only it happens again and again.”
“Poor Gabriel. Do you think if I read”—she looked at Hester with desperate earnestness, stumbling towards knowledge—“if I read the history of India, as you said, that I shall be able to listen to him and be of some use?”
“I really don’t think—” Athol began.
Perdita swung around on him. “Oh, be quiet!” she said sharply. “I don’t want to hear about all their tortures and deaths. I’d much rather imagine the world is all as safe as we are here and nothing really unspeakable ever happens. But it isn’t true, and in my heart I know that. If I try to stay a child forever, I shall lose Gabriel.”
“Nonsense, my dear—”
“Don’t tell me it’s nonsense!” She stood still with her hands straight by her sides, her fists clenched. “He has to be able to speak properly to survive. If it isn’t to me, it will be to Hester. It certainly won’t be to you! You don’t know anything more about India than I do! Not about the reality of it, the heat and dust and disease, the flies and the cruelty, the death. You don’t know what happened to him. Neither do I … but I’m going to find out!”
“You are overtired,” Athol said, nodding with assurance. “It is hardly surprising. You have had a most distressing time. Any woman would—”
“Stop it!” she said loudly, her voice cracking she was so close to tears. “Stop talking at me as if I were feeble! I am! I know I am! Hester has been out to the Crimea and nursed dying men, faced bullets and swords, seen atrocities we haven’t even read about in our nice ironed newspapers the butler brings us on a tray. And what have I done? Sat at home painting silly pictures and stitching samplers and mending the linen. Well, I refuse to stay useless! I’m—I’m terrified!”
Athol was appalled. He had no idea what to say or do
. He stared at her, then at Hester with a mixture of anger and appeal. He loathed her for precipitating this crisis, and yet he needed her to cope with it, which he resented profoundly.
Monk was waiting for Hester to show her impatience with Perdita. She was quite right; she was useless and had been hiding from reality like a child.
“Being terrified doesn’t matter,” Hester said confidently, walking forward to stand beside Perdita. “So are most of us. It isn’t what you feel, it’s what you do that counts. Gabriel won’t mind you being frightened, then he’ll know you understand at least something of it. Nobody understands it all.”
