‘It’s all right,’ she said softly. ‘It was a bad dream. Nothing but a dream.’ Lightly, confidently, she climbed onto the bed and put her arms around him. ‘You’re safe now.’
‘Louisa,’ he whispered. And all sense fell away. He clamped a hand around her back and pulled her to him, kissed her mouth, sinking deeper and deeper. He couldn’t stop now; not even if his life depended on it. He moved lower, down her throat, her collarbone, making her gasp. Trembling, he pulled off his nightclothes, stomach clenching with desire. Her nightgown was shed, and his mind reeled at the shock of her naked body pressed against him.
Her back arched as he held her. He slid his hands beneath her, lifted her closer to his mouth. She was smooth as alabaster. She tasted of sweetness and salt at the same time – he felt insane with desire Oh God. He felt he was coming apart. It was as if every solid thing holding him together had dissolved away. He hadn’t even known it was possible to feel like this.
‘Is it all right?’ she whispered.
Briefly, he surfaced from his delirium of desire. He could barely see her face. ‘Yes,’ he managed to whisper. ‘Yes.’ The blood throbbed blackly and thickly through his veins.
She was like a mussel, slippery and soft, all secret folds. Her breath came out in a choke, and his mind careened. He was drowning in longing. With the weight of his body he parted her legs, and heard her breath hitch.
‘I want you so much,’ he whispered, ‘but I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘You could never hurt me.’ She wound her arms around his back.
He tried to go slowly, be gentle, but the excitement was building inside him with a logic and volition all of its own. In his wildest dreams he could never have imagined it would be like this. There was a vast wall of sea, somewhere just out of sight, moving closer and closer towards him, obliterating his senses. Nothing could stop him now. He drove himself into her – not just physically, but somehow all of him, all his mind and soul. The immensity of it crashed through him, and he felt at once God-like yet prostrate with humility before her.
After a while, he turned onto his back and pulled her on top of him. They lay together, listening to the silence. His mind was vast and blank. He felt like a tiny speck of flotsam floating on an endless ocean.
‘I’m sorry if I hurt you,’ he said when he could talk again. They lay quietly, her heart beating over his.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘With all my heart and soul.’
The nightmare was gone – the dead Bavarian soldier, the horrific river, all his regrets and his shame. But there was no relief. There was only another delusion: Louisa. He had never felt so happy in his life – or so utterly desolate.
‘I love you too,’ he said.
He awoke to her voice.
‘Robert?’
‘Yes?’
It was much later: he could tell from the position of the moon in the sky. He always left the shutters open now.
‘This is real, Robert. You and me, here. You know it is. I’m not just an idea.’
‘I know,’ he said. Because it was true. But, he thought bleakly, that still didn’t change the fact that it wasn’t possible. And he lived in a world of facts and truths. Cold, annihilating facts: steel bullets that tore through flesh, deadly bombs that shattered the earth. A world where a man had to fight or be killed himself. There was no dodging the question. This wasn’t Neverland.
He looked out into the night. The stars seemed like tiny, drifting flames. And the two of them, he and Louisa, seemed to be adrift too – two more flickering points of light come unpinned from the place they should be. The night was heavy with promise. He could feel it tempting him: the possibility of staying with her here forever, enveloped in timelessness; an otherworldly realm, where phantoms and deities and lovers lived.
Earlier, he’d told her what had happened at High Wood: how he’d been buried alive in the filthy, defiled mud of the battlefield, and how it had turned him blind with horror. He’d told her about all the men he felt he’d failed; the men he’d tried to save but couldn’t; the Germans he’d killed in battle. He told her he felt his spirit was rotten through and that he’d never be able to find absolution.
‘I know I’m destined for hell,’ he said now. ‘But then hell can’t possibly be worse than where I’ve already been. Or perhaps this is hell now, being here with you, and not being with you. A hell woven through with heaven, a sort of twisted punishment. That’s what God is like. That’s what gives him pleasure. The war taught me that.’
‘If he’s punishing you, he’s punishing me too.’
Suddenly, he turned, roughly caught her wrists and pinned her arms either side of her head. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘What are you? Are you really just an innocent, as you say, or are you somehow complicit in all this?’
He could feel her fine-grained skin, her bones, as solid as his own. Her hair was spread across the pillow. Made dark by the night, it looked like blood seeping from her head. He knew that he could never have dreamt her up, but that just made it worse. He put his hands to her neck, pressed his thumbs either side of her windpipe, felt the flutter of her pulse.
‘You aren’t a very convincing devil,’ he said. ‘You’re not invincible at all, like I’ve always imagined the devil would be. I could kill you now and be done with you. It would be the easiest death I’ve ever brought about. There isn’t a thing you could do to stop me.’
‘No, there isn’t,’ she agreed softly. ‘You’re right. But I’m not a devil or a demon. I don’t know what I am, but I know I’m not that. I’m just another lost soul. Like you.’
He had no way of knowing. But it didn’t matter. He loved her too well, wanted her far too much.
‘Forgive me,’ he whispered, stroking her face. ‘I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it. I’m the devil here, not you.’
He kissed her, his passion rising again, running his hand down over her breast, her stomach, between her legs, feeling a shudder pass through her – which then passed straight through him too. He groaned, felt her fingers lock in his hair.
‘Stay with me,’ she whispered. ‘Stay with me forever.’
‘Yes,’ he said. And in that moment, he meant it with all his heart.
***
Louisa awoke. Robert, she thought. She reached for him. But the sheet, and the mattress beneath it, were wrong. She opened her eyes – and saw with an ache of misery that she was back on the ward in 2017 Coldbrook Hall. She groaned into the bedcovers. It felt as if part of her had been cut away. She turned over, closed her eyes again, retreated back to him, and the dark hours in his bed.