she had given up on him. “No, Dad,” she said, her voice breaking, the tears coming. A nurse stood up, rushed to her. Alice didn’t stop her when she reached an arm across her shoulders. “Not if you wouldn’t be you,” she stuttered.
Tom didn’t say anything for a while, then slowly turned to the doctor and spoke very quietly. Elizabeth could almost see the fight diffusing from him, like mist clearing after a storm. She thought of Kate again, how much she wanted her there, how time was running out. “Then we should do what you think,” Tom told him, and with a quiet nod the doctor stood up to leave, stopping only briefly to reach for Alice’s hand. She and the doctor shared a brief exchange, but nobody else heard what was said. In that moment Tom turned his head into the wing of the chair, closing his eyes.
“Shall I get everybody a cup of tea?” the nurse proposed, her words soft and well intended. Elizabeth nodded, and the nurse left the room. Alice moved to the window, tears streaming down her face. Elizabeth reached for her hand, but Alice moved away at the last moment, knelt by the side of Tom’s chair.
“I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said, burying her face against his arm. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Elizabeth saw his eyes flicker open for just a moment. He glanced at his daughter as a tear broke free from his eye. And for a while after that nobody said anything else at all. Elizabeth turned to the window and gazed down into the garden, where a young couple watched as their baby played on the grass, smelling the scent of a bloom of winter roses while her parents sat on a bench nearby.
Then
The first part of the journey home was completed in silence, their travel the slow speed of a funeral procession. Unapproachable space had grown between them, as if James were stranded on a calving iceberg and she had no choice but to wait and watch as he drifted away into an arctic future of unknowns. His plans had been whipped out from underneath him, and the guilt smothered her. Without any intention of hurting him, she had ruined his future. But even then, amid the pain of her choices, she knew the only other option would have been to hurt Tom, and she could never, ever do that.
“I am truly sorry, James,” she said as they turned back onto the road that would lead them to Porthsennen and the conversation she needed to have with her father. “When I first met you, I really did think you were a lovely man.”
He nodded, but it was with a sense of tenacity. “It’s not your fault. I always knew you were young. The young are notoriously frivolous.”
Elizabeth wasn’t sure she fully understood his answer, but she had a feeling that she wasn’t entirely keen on the concept he was proposing. “You think that I feel this way because of my age?”
The tires skidded as he pulled the car over to the side of the road. It was just on the brow of the hill, overlooking the cove. The sea had picked up, whitecaps breaking across the shallows of Longships reef like a bottle of spilled milk.
He silenced the engine and turned to face her. “What could it be if not that?”
“Love,” said Elizabeth, without any of the doubt his certainty intended to raise.
The sigh that followed was deep and philosophical, conveying all the weariness of an age he was decades from reaching. Raindrops appeared on the windshield. “I want to tell you a story, Elizabeth. I too was in love once.” It was strange to hear him call her by her full name. Something had changed between them, both a relief and bizarre at the same time. “I was eighteen, halfway through national service, and ready to run away with a young girl I met near where I was stationed.” A little lost in the memory, he smiled to himself while his fingers played aimlessly at the wheel, stroking back and forth. “The thought of her was the only thing that got me through my time away in Malaya.” He paused, and in that moment, she realized just how much there was she didn’t know about him. Yet that silence granted her a brush with his history, the irrecoverable way that war could change a man. “Wilhelmina,” he said wistfully. “Her family wasn’t wealthy like mine, but I didn’t care.