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“Does she do it often?” he asked. There was tenderness in his voice, not criticism.
Her voice should not have been so sharp or defensive. “Yes, but you can’t blame her for it. The pain doesn’t go away just because time is passing and you’re getting older, and it seems as if all life is bright and pretty…and meaningless. You don’t—”
“Elena!” He cut her off firmly. “If she does it often, and you’ve forgiven her before, then she knows you’ll forgive her this time. You understand, and she knows that.”
Suddenly she saw his meaning. “Oh. Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Stop it!” he said quickly.
“What?”
“Stop being sorry. Those who are gone loved us. The last thing they would want is for us to spend our time grieving for them instead of living!”
She knew that was true, but it too easily sounded like an excuse.
“What was he like, your brother?” he went on.
Memory flooded back with overwhelming pain. “Mike was good at sharing things—he told the best jokes—and I think he got that from Grandfather. He would start off with, ‘Have I told you the one about…?’ and then go on into some long, crazy story. He could do all the accents, from wherever you could think of. He loved music. He played pretty well, classical and lighter stuff. He used to invent it as he went along. He was only a year older than Margot, but five years older than me. He was nineteen when he was killed.”
“That’s terrible…”
“You must have lost people, too. Everyone did.”
“My father, but not until quite a long time afterward. He was pretty badly wounded, but more than that, he was shell-shocked. He was never like himself again, and I can’t really remember much of how he was before that. There was an acute sorrow in his eyes, as if he felt guilty for having come home and left so many of his comrades behind.”
She reached out and put her hand over his, where it lay on his knee. He turned his palm upward and clasped hers. They sat together for several minutes as the countryside slipped past them, and the rattle of the train was oddly soothing.
“You don’t have any brothers?” she asked eventually, withdrawing her hand and sitting up a little straighter.
“Only sisters. Three of them, and they are all older than I am. They spoiled me totally, but they did teach me considerable respect for girls. They are all clever, and none of them would take any cheek from little boys.” He gave a rueful smile. “I know about older sisters.”
“Tell me about them…if you don’t mind?”
He did, for about an hour. The stories were funny and intimate, and, above all, kind. Elena felt as if she had known them by the time he finally stopped.
They went along to the dining car for dinner and found a table near the back.
“The Italians know how to make food such a pleasure,” Ian said, taking a piece of sweet melon on his fork and wrapping the wafer-thin Parma ham around it.
Elena agreed, but added, “So do the French. It is an art we would be so much happier if we learned.”
“Do you know French food well?” he asked.
“Yes, to eat. I couldn’t cook it to save myself. But my father was British ambassador in Paris for a while. It was wonderful, even though it was after the war and everything was pretty grim. Nothing like Germany, of course. Whatever your losses, there is all the difference on earth between winning and losing.”
He was silent for several moments, and she was afraid she had offended him in some way. She had no idea why it would bother him.
His voice was different when he spoke again, and she saw what looked like a profound sadness in his eyes.
“You say that as if it were observed personally, and not an overall political comment. Do you mean it?” he asked.
She frowned. “Yes, of course I do. If you win you have the confidence of victory to sustain you, whatever the cost—and the cost was terrible. We lost people we loved, and we’ll never know for certain what happened to some of them, or how, where they’re buried, or even if they are. Some are still alive, but so different from what they would have been had they never seen such horrors, never faced every physical fear and pain and loss, never seen half their friends killed. They can’t tell us, and they can’t ever let it go. It would seem like a betrayal of the dead.” She shook her head. Perhaps she was talking too much, but she wanted him to understand that she grasped something of the reality. “I don’t know, not with my heart and my skin and my bones, only with my imagination…”
He reached across the narrow table and touched her hand, very gently, and only for a moment. “And the losers?” he asked. “They have all of that, too…”
“Yes. But they also have guilt and confusion…”
“Do they accept they started it?” He looked surprised, and perhaps doubtful.
