a little worse each year.) She screamed and dashed off down the platform, and somewhere in the tangle of khaki arms and khaki legs a man lifted her up high, yes, this spindly blond girl of nine years, and spun her around in a crushing embrace. Elfriede stood absolutely still, a paralysis of joy. In her head, she heard some woman say, It’s a special kind of love, you know, between a father and daughter. Wilfred, still holding this daughter in his arms, whispered some question in Margaret’s ear, and Margaret pointed back up the platform toward Elfriede, and Elfriede, looking upon her husband’s face for the first time since the end of spring, felt the sun rise at last in her sky. That’s what leave is like.
And yet. And yet. Even in November, something wasn’t quite right. That marvelous candlepower of Wilfred’s charisma had somehow dimmed, she thought, as she drove the Wolseley and Margaret kept up a thrilled chatter from the back seat, to which Wilfred replied with occasional and mechanical Yes darlings and Oh jolly goods. Later, when Margaret was asleep, he made love to Elfriede without a single word, rolled away and fell unconscious, woke sometime in the night to smoke beside the window, returned to bed, repeat. Elfriede counted thirteen stubs in the ashtray the next morning. And for the next five days, he did nothing but eat and sleep and copulate. Well, not entirely. In Margaret’s company, he tried his best to summon up the old sunshine and sometimes succeeded, but these efforts depleted him, and Elfriede had only his silence. His long, quiet walks around the grounds. His distant gaze at breakfast and dinner that reached across the room and through the walls to someplace far from Elfriede’s imagination. His wordless, relentless, tobacco-scented fucking in the middle of the night, sometimes the middle of the day, filling Elfriede’s womb with the stuff of life while she clung to his neck, his shoulders, his buttocks, straining for the same elusive object. She waited until the end of February to tell him she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure if the news would delight or upset him. He replied by telegram.
DEAR BELOVED ANGEL STOP RECEIVED YOUR LETTER AN HOUR AGO STOP HAVE NOT STOPPED WEEPING STOP FORGIVE THIS BEAST YOU CALL HUSBAND STOP TAKE EVERY POSSIBLE CARE FOR YOUR DEAR SELF STOP CAN BEAR ANYTHING EXCEPT LOSS OF YOU STOP NAME HIM FOR MY FATHER STOP ALL LOVE FROM ONE WHO HAS ALWAYS ADORED AND NEVER DESERVED YOU=
=WILFRED
In short, more affection than she had received from him in . . . well, since the previous leave, probably.
But now she wonders, as she leans against the pillar in the folly and listens to the robin. Affection, really? Or remorse?
Across the damp air, a man’s voice calls out. Elfriede’s eyelids fly open. Her heart leaps: Johann! (Thus the maternal mind, swinging back and forth between child and mate.) Then she remembers that Johann’s in Poland, probably, and this voice must belong to her husband. To this Wilfred so unlike the old Wilfred, this husband who only eats and sleeps and copulates. Yes, there it goes again, a bit louder, thick with longing and exasperation.
Elfriede!
He’s coming closer. Naturally, if he’s taken the trouble to find her at all, he’ll check the folly first. And maybe Elfriede already knew that. Maybe she came to this place for a reason: to be found. To be found here, in the scene of their old lovemaking, where every square inch of bench and floor and wall and step has been consecrated by one act or another, in one position or another. It’s like an album of their marriage, the carnal aspect of it anyway, in which the photographs are memories. Elfriede’s come here to be found by her husband. There must be a reason.
Maybe it’s Lucy MacLeod? Mrs. MacLeod, you know, whose husband—a lieutenant under Wilfred’s command—was killed last winter, blown apart by a shell in the middle of a muddy February day, somewhere near Albert. As you might expect, there wasn’t much left of Lieutenant MacLeod’s body to bury. Just the identification tags and some disarticulated bones and burned flesh. (Lucy doesn’t know these details, of course; Wilfred confided them to Elfriede in one of his more candid letters.) Elfriede’s visited Mrs. MacLeod frequently over the past several months, providing comfort as duty requires the commanding officer’s wife. Duty, and maybe a little fear too, because doesn’t Elfriede know all too well