Page 7 of The Last Kiss

The only spark he saw in the girl was when the subject of the vote arose. Mrs Allen sniffed and pronounced, “Well,Icertainly shan’t be voting. I’m quite content for Mr Allen to representmyinterests.”

At that, her daughter’s expression darkened with irritation, but still she held her tongue; it looked rather more like tactical retreat than surrender.

“I think,” Ash ventured, “it’s a shame the v-vote is s-still so restricted. Surely a w-w-woman of one and twenty is as sensible as a m-man of that age?” He smiled encouragingly at Olive. “M-more so, some might say.”

Not quite meeting his eye, and in a voice rather too loud, she said, “Given the advantage of the same education, Mr. Ashleigh, I believe there would be no difference in intellect whatsoever between the sexes.”

Ash smiled because he’d talked of such things with West. It had been easy to imagine a world where the barriers of sex, class and race were torn down when he was living and dying shoulder-to-shoulder with men from all walks of life and from all corners of the Empire.

Death did not discriminate.

For all its horrors, the war had opened his eyes to many things. And to West, most of all. Harry West was the sort of man Ash would never have come to know in the ordinary way of things, the sort of man who might have served in the stables at Highcliffe House. Before the war, West had been an ostler at an inn in Bethnal Green, living in a small back-to-back house with his parents and, more recently, his widowed sister and her two girls. But in West, Ash had found his soul’s partner. A kind, thoughtful man with a passion for justice (and horses), blessed with an easy, honest affection that Ash had never found among his own set. Certainly not within his family.

There was more to it than that, of course. Ash’s peculiar affection for his own sex meant that what he felt for West went deeper than ordinary friendship, for his part at least. Whether West felt the same, Ash didn’t know and had dared not ask. Sometimes he’d thought… But there were too many eyes at the front and he’d refused to risk exposing West to the danger of court martial. Besides, their friendship was too important to endanger simply to satisfy Ash’s romantic curiosity.

And yet he’d never been closer to another man in his life, would never be again. He felt with absolute certainty that their profound bond, forged in the hellish crucible of war, was inimitable. Never to be repeated and never to be forgotten.

Christ, but he missed Harry West more than he missed his damned leg.

His mother clucked her tongue against her teeth and changed the subject. “Ashleigh was always quite the horseman, you know. I think you like to ride, Olive?”

“Not really, Lady Dalton. I prefer to motor…”

Ash didn’t hear the rest of Olive’s reply. He shifted in his seat and gazed out across the tidy lawn to the stream, and beyond that to the fringes of the New Forest in spring leaf. He tried not to see shattered trees, like dead men’s fingers clawing up from the ruin of the world. He tried not to dwell on all that, he tried to make an effort. To look forward.

If only there was something worth seeing on the broad, bleak horizon.

CHAPTERFOUR

Nine months later — January 17th, 1919, London, England

Harry West reached England two months after the armistice, demobbed at the dispersal station in Crystal Palace, and made his way home through a city stricken by the influenza.

His own parents had perished last summer, before the war ended, but fate had spared Kitty and the girls and for that he was thankful. They greeted him with a flurry of emotion when he opened the door to number six Bethnal Road. Kitty wrapped her thin arms around him in a hard embrace while Dot and little May danced around them, half-shy and half-excited to see their Uncle Harry. There wasn’t much food, but they made the most of what they had and, as he told his sister, he’d eat anything that wasn’t a tin of Maconochie.

That night he made up a bed for himself next to the kitchen stove, lay there staring at the ceiling and didn’t sleep. It wasn’t the homecoming he’d dreamed of night after night at the front. He didn’t feel elated, he didn’t feel relieved. He didn’t even feel like he was home.

Perhaps it was because Mum and Dad were gone. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t the same man who’d left four years ago. But mostly it was because — He rolled over and sat up, digging into his holdall for the captain’s letters. It was too dark to read, but he didn’t need to see them to know what they said. He’d read them so often that holding them was enough.

Unfolding the first letter, pressed flat from where he kept it between the leaves ofThe Hound of the Baskervilles, he ran his fingers over the paper. There were several letters in all, held safe in Captain Dalton’s book. Two from Calais, two from a hospital in Southampton, and the rest from the captain’s home. Well, his parents’ home: Highcliffe House, Hinton, Hampshire. The last one had arrived shortly before Harry left the rest camp in Dieppe and if there were more they hadn’t reached him. Probably wouldn’t, now that he’d been demobbed.

He knew he should write to the captain and tell him he was back in England, give him his address, but something made him hesitate. It wasn’t like they could be friends, not in this old unchanged world where he’d have to doff his cap to Mr Ashleigh Arthur Dalton. And yet the thought of letting their friendship end hurt like the devil. He wanted to see the captain at least once more, to see him hale and healthy, so his last memory of the man wasn’t tourniqueting the bloody remains of his leg or holding him up out of the drowning mud and watching his eyes roll back in his ashen face. He’d like to remember those soft brown eyes better, he’d like to see them smiling and warm. He’d like to see the captain happy.

He’d like to kiss him.

His heart clenched at the forbidden thought, cramping around the empty longing he’d once felt for home. Only this yearning was for something he’d never had and could never have; he was wishing for impossible things.

Harry spent the next two months looking for work, silently resenting his sister for having a job when there was nothing for a man who’d given four sodding years in service to his country. But there were too many men back from the war and nobody was hiring, especially not with the influenza holding the city in its fist.

Harry felt himself increasingly distant from the world. He spent hours walking the banks of the leaden Thames, staring at laughing girls and handsome boys as if through glass. He could see them, hear them, but couldn’t reach out to touch them. The war — He couldn’t talk about the war, not even to Kitty. Not to anyone who hadn’t been there. Sometimes he met the eyes of a man on the underground, saw a kind of recognition, a haunted look, and they’d share a nod. Strangers together in a strange land, navigating a world they just didn’t fit anymore.

A cold winter bled into a damp spring. The London fogs continued as soupy as ever, made uncanny by the masks people had taken to wearing — some to keep out the influenza, others to hide horrific souvenirs from the fighting. Poor bastards. Better to have lost your legs, Harry reckoned, than your half your bloody face.

As he contemplated one sorry blighter scurrying through the fog, tin nose and fake moustache ill-concealed by the wide brim of his hat, Harry thought, with guilty gratitude, that he was glad the captain’s pretty face hadn’t been torn up — not that smooth skin, not those expressive lips that curved into a shy smile, not those eyes of softest brown beneath his fall of dark hair. Perhaps the man he was watching could read his mind, because he glanced over through the fog as if knowing he was being observed. No doubt he was used to it. Harry nodded, touched the brim of his cap in an awkward salute, and the man looked away, disappearing into the mist.

Harry shivered. These masked shadows in the fog made him feel like he was living in a weird purgatory of lost souls. He felt lost too, a wraith in the mist, not quite himself. Not quite home. Not quite anywhere.

Not without the captain at his side.

---