Page 1 of Past Lives
London 1940
The train'swhistle blares again, louder. Margaret pictures the world as a bell. Their parting feels like a note that will echo forever, a pain that empties her chest. Breathing hurts. Hugh's hands, steady and gentle, hold her face. His thumb wipes a tear under her eye, careful and soft. She already misses his touch.
"Six months," he repeats, as if repetition can write the future into fact. "With any luck, the whole thing will be over by then, and you, my love, will be sick of the sight of me loafing about the flat."
His optimism protects him. It always has. He fixed her bicycle tire in Russell Square with the same bold confidence. After returning the bike with a bow, he asked, "Will you have tea with me? Or a cigarette behind the library, which is frankly much less of a commitment." She said yes. Not just because he was handsome—though he is, with eyes she still wants to understand. There was something honest and a little wild in his look, a hint of sadness even when he laughed. It spoke to the empty places in her, places that know six months could feel like forever.
Now that same laugh, rough and tired, breaks the tension between them. "Think of it: all of London will cheer me home,and I'll trip up the steps like a drunken fool, and you'll kiss me out of pity, and then it will be over. All this queueing and crying."
She shakes her head, lips pressed tight, refusing to accept his promise. "Swear to me."
"I do." He says it quickly, almost lightly, but his hands do not leave her face, and she sees the tremor in his jaw, the flutter of a pulse that betrays him. "I bloody well do, Meg."
The porters move forward with purpose. Lanterns cast golden light in the fog that wraps around their ankles. A woman nearby drops her suitcase and leans against the wall, crying loudly. The sound is raw and painful. Margaret sways, holding onto Hugh's uniform tightly. Her nails dig into the fabric, as if holding him could stop him from leaving. She tries to remember every detail of his face. The shape of his brow. There was a small scar above his cheekbone. The way his mouth always tilts left, as if hiding a private joke.
The engine shudders through the train cars. Time seems to slow as Margaret clings to Hugh. Her vision blurs, but she tries to stay strong while Hugh gives her one last, intense kiss. His lips are chapped and taste of tobacco, iron, and rain—flavors she will miss. She puts all her fear, longing, and hope into that kiss, wishing that love could bring him back.
He whispers, "I love you," and she catches the words between clenched teeth, holding them there like a communion wafer that might dissolve if she breathes too deeply.
"I love you more," she replies, almost angry with the truth of it, the way it burns in her chest like a coal that will never cool.
Hugh grins, all bright teeth and stubborn tenderness. "Impossible. See you soon, Mrs. Carlisle." The promise hangs between them, fragile as spun sugar.
He steps away. Their fingers slip together for an instant, the touch holding everything they've shared and all they might lose. Then he is gone, shouldering his kitbag, walking through thecrowd without hesitation. He never looks back. Margaret lets her knees buckle and lowers herself to the platform's edge, drained of strength and hope.
The train jerks forward with a long mechanical groan, then begins its slow, unstoppable departure. She sees him through the glass for a fleeting instant. His cap is low and his eyes searching, as if he could pierce the fog with will alone and carry her image with him into whatever waits beyond. The world seems to close in around her, as if even the city cannot bear to watch the space between them grow so wide.
The crowd slowly leaves, defeated. There are no bands or confetti, just the smell of oil and steam and the quiet cries of those left behind. Margaret stays long after the platform is empty. The pain in her chest feels so strong that she thinks it might stop her heart. Her hands are cold, her feet numb, and her heart falters. She reaches out for his hand, but only finds empty air and memories.
She leaves only when the fog grows thick and the lamps on Euston Road flicker, each one a light he will never follow home. Back at their flat on Bedford Crescent, Margaret crosses through the empty rooms, reaching out to touch the walls where his shadow once was. She keeps their routines: boiling the kettle, turning on the radio, and sitting with her crossword where he used to help. These habits feel strange now, as if they belong to someone else. When she spills her tea, she quickly mops it up with shaking hands, realizing how real his absence truly feels, as if it expands to fill the space around her.
On the second night, she dreams of fire. The city is burning, glass shatters in the street, and Hugh runs toward her through the smoke but never reaches her. She wakes tangled in sheets that still smell like him, sweat cold on her skin, and feels sure that something has gone wrong. She can almost taste the future: bitter and sharp, full of waiting.
She has never been superstitious. Her mother would say, "Don't be so morbid, darling, it's only nerves." But Margaret sees how the old city absorbs loss, pressing the vanished into its mortar and soil until every cobblestone feels like a headstone beneath her feet. Each streetlamp casts shadows full of names that will never again be spoken at the table. She finds herself whispering Hugh's name to them, as if to keep it alive in the air. She walks the blocks between Euston and Russell Square with a hunger that gnaws at her ribs, lungs aching for just one breath that might carry his scent—that mix of tobacco and wool and skin she would know anywhere, that her body still searches for in sleep.
His absence feels almost real, like a ghost that follows her and presses close when she tries to sleep. She begins writing to him every day, more than she needs to. Sometimes, she fills pages with her thoughts: The bakery is out of rye, and I think of you. I miss the sound of your fork on the pan. My fingers still curl at night, looking for yours. Do you think it's warmer where you are? Sometimes she ends the letters with only a blank space, hoping he will understand.
"Don't listen to the news," Hugh had said, the evening before he left, his fingers tracing the curve of her ear as if memorizing its shape. "They're making it up half the time just to fill the hours."
But the news in London never stops, always bringing more bad stories. Margaret, worn down by longing, listens anyway. She sits on their rug and listens to the BBC, searching every report for the fear that Hugh might be gone.
He writes to her, as promised, in a cramped hand that grows more spare each week. His first envelopes arrive smelling of cigarette smoke, filled with jokes and sketches of the men he shares a barracks with, and descriptions of bad food that make her long for the meals they once shared. "You see, my own? Noteven the Army can dull my wit," he writes, and she traces these words with her fingertip until the ink smudges. But soon the jokes fade. The paper grows thinner, too, and his words become harder to read, full of things left unsaid.
There comes a day in late October when his letter does not arrive. She waits at the post box, lurking as the red van squeaks up the street, her heart suspended between beats, but the man only shrugs. "Might be a week, love. Trains are all off-schedule these days." But Margaret knows. The city itself seems to know: the air hangs heavier, the autumn fog presses against her windows with an almost physical insistence, as if trying to comfort her. The phone rings, and she drops a cup, and the sound of its shattering seems to echo forever in the silent flat, each piece a fragment of her splintering hope.
Days pass. Two weeks go by. Still nothing. She stops writing, unable to send words into the silence where his voice should be. She moves through the rooms, lost, reaching for someone who isn't there. She stops eating. Even small routines, like watering the plant Hugh bought or winding the old clock, become impossible.
The first letter after the silence is from a stranger. Sergeant Robert Dunne writes in a careful, apologetic hand: "I am writing to inform you that your husband, Lieutenant Hugh Carlisle, is missing." Not gone, not dead, but missing. Margaret reads the words again and again, holding the paper to her chest, searching for meaning in every space. Missing means not here, not there, not anywhere—the hardest way to tell a wife she must wait forever, her arms empty but still reaching.
Winter set in, and the city’s power flickered on and off with the blackout. Margaret started sleeping in Hugh’s old army jumper, the wool stretched and rough, but it still carried the scent of his neck, salted and human and alive. She replayed their final weeks together in detail: the way he insisted on walking herhome every night, even if it meant an extra half-hour in the sleet, and the way he pressed his palm to the base of her skull and whispered crude jokes just to make her laugh.
Some nights, she could almost believe he was there. She half-heard him turning the tap, half-felt the press of his footfall on the landing. She spoke to him, aloud, in the empty rooms—a madness, maybe, but the only thing that made sense. “I’m still here,” she would say, quietly, as if confessing it to the ether. “You promised to come back to me.”
But there was no reply, only the ticking of the clock and the shifting of radiators as the pipes cooled to bone.
Time passed unevenly. The air raids got worse, and the city looked strange and wounded, with orange glows on the horizon and searchlights in the night. Margaret walked the streets at dusk, not using the shelters, as if she didn't care what happened. The thought wasn't comforting, but it was honest. And she needed honesty.
Then, in March, exactly one year after Euston, a letter arrives, almost as if her longing brought it.
