The thing is, the film made me think – not just about Castle Combe – or about how I could make it look like I was not crying at the end – but about Hal and the whole reason he’s here. He’s looking for someone’s story – for them, all this time after they lived.
Would anyone bother doing that for me?
Unlikely. I mean, I left school in a mess, and nobody from there came looking for me – not days after, not weeks after…not now. So why would anyone care a hundred years later?
I’ll just be gone.
No one would miss you anyway.
Shut up, Flora. Nobody asked you.
What would Albie think, knowing someone cared enough to turn their own life upside down searching for him?
To turn mine upside down – because that’s what Hal’s done.
And the thing is…I think that maybe that’s been a good thing.
On the driveway, the glow from the windows at the front of the hotel is golden on the gravel and the light from a rising moon tints the gardens silvery grey. We have walked into a painting. We are the painting, two figures stopped on the edge of it all, standing almost toe-to-toe.
And neither of us moves.
“I should get back.”
Even though I say it, I still don’t move.
He doesn’t either.
“How are you getting home?”
“The usual – across the deer park.”
“In this?” He points at the sky.
“How else am I supposed to get there?”
“But it’s dark…?”
“It’s fine. I know where I’m going. And some of us are used to no street lamps.”
In the light spilling from the windows, the gleam of the moon and the fading dusk, I can see him biting his lip.
“Let me walk you? I mean…can I?”
My heart pinballs off the inside of my chest.
“You don’t need to. I don’t need you to.”
“No, I know.” Another pause. “I want to.”
“You want to walk me home?”
“Yes. If that’s okay?”
Walking me home, holding open doors…sometimes I wonder whether Hal has escaped from 1913 himself. Nobody I’ve ever met before acts like he does.
“Pa always told me manners cost nothing,” he says, as though he can hear everything I’m thinking.
Can he?
Maybe he can.
What if you said it out loud? What’s he going to think of you then? What would he say if you told him everything that goes on in your head?
“Are you sure?”
Please say you’re sure. Please.
“It’s no problem. And anyway…I’m not ready to go back inside yet.”
“You’ll have to walk back in the dark, though, and you won’t know where you’re going.”
“I’ll manage.” His voice is as soft as the sky.
“Okay then.”
And the night seems to stretch out and on, just for us. The moon lights a path across the gardens and over the lake, all the way to the park – and when our hands meet, I don’t know if it’s because I reached for him or he reached for me, and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to overthink it – it just is.
He just is.
The gardens are quiet; the guests who went to the screening have all headed back indoors and everyone else has gone home. We have the night all to ourselves – the white flicks of rabbits’ tails as they scatter, the reflection of the moon caught cleanly in the lake, the stars slipping out from behind the sky…it’s ours.
What is the point of sights like these if there is no one with whom to share them?
I step onto the little wooden bridge across the lake. This is what Albie meant, isn’t it? Not the seeing, exactly, but the knowing there is someone else seeing the same thing.
The not being alone.
Our footsteps on the bridge vibrate down through the water, rippling out and shaking the moon on the surface – creasing it and folding it until it’s nothing more than jumping white lines…before slowly, slowly it finds its way back to its real shape.
I know that feeling. It’s the way my mind feels sometimes, the way it felt back then. Only I didn’t realize it at the time, so I had no idea what was coming when those first ripples hit.
I must have been staring at the lake for a little too long, because suddenly Hal says, “Are you okay?”
“Me? Oh, yeah. I was just…” Just what? Contemplating the complications of my own brain and how it’s constantly, constantly out to get me? Thinking about how, even though it feels like there are three of me in here sometimes, all wanting different things and there’s not enough room for all the feelings and thoughts in my head, it’s lonely. Because how can I ever be anything but the crazy girl if people don’t know who I am – and how can I be who I am without them seeing all of me? “I was just thinking about Albie. And his letter.”
“Me too.”
“You were?”
“Yeah.” His grip on my hand tightens. “I was thinking about him and about what it must have been like. The war,” he adds. “Whether it was like the film. And trying to figure out how someone goes from here…” He stares out at the lake. “To there. How they can be in both places and still be them.”
“Maybe they can’t. Maybe places change people?”
“What, like this one?” He laughs, but not at me. His eyes are full of stars and moonlight, and all on me, and when he speaks I can feel every word.
“Why not?” Before I know it, he’s spinning me up to him, into him – and suddenly we’re face to face in the middle of the bridge, our bodies pressed together. Slowly, I reach up and brush his hair away from his face. It’s soft under my fingers and the air suddenly smells of him. “You’re telling me you don’t feel different here?”
“Maybe that isn’t because of the place.” He whispers it into my ear, his voice so quiet and his face so close that he must be able to hear my pulse dancing just like I can feel his. He must know that every breath I take is that little bit faster now…He must.
His thumb grazes the skin of my cheek gently, carefully, as if he’s touching something rare and delicate and doesn’t want to damage it, and suddenly everything is sparks and fire as I tilt my face up to meet his…My lips brush his and my veins are full of lightning that crackles under my skin as I lean into him because this, this is what I want and I’m sure of it now. His hand moves around me, behind my waist, pulling me nearer still; my hand reaches for the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his hair as his lips press against mine – and everything is quiet and everything is loud and everything is thick velvet darkness and blinding bright light and there is nothing in between – and this time, I am not afraid of either. I welcome them both.
Whether it’s him or me who breaks the kiss first, I don’t know. I can’t tell any more. All I know is that, dizzy and breathless, the feel of his lips on mine stays there even when there’s space between us, even as I can see his eyes looking deep into mine, paler than ever in the near-dark.
“Umm.”
“Umm.”
And then we both laugh at the exact same time – I see the laugh building behind his eyes, and he must see it in me too, and he tilts his forehead to rest against mine. He smells like lemons and the night, like starshine and moonlight and sunset, and his hands holding mine feel like they were always meant to be there.