Chapter Forty
Forty
‘What will matter most,’ I asked Hugo during the quietest part of the night, ‘when this war is over and accounted for?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Will it be the good we’ve done or the bad? How we’ve loved or how we’ve hated?’
‘They are not columns in a ledger, Tilda. One will not cancel the effect of the other. When the war is over we must live with it all.’
‘Why must we?’
‘To do otherwise is to deny something of who we are.’
‘But what if I want to deny who I am? What if I can’t live with it all?’
‘Eventually you will forget yourself and become one of the wraiths.’
‘The wraiths?’
‘You’ve seen them. This place is full of them. Men who’ve done or seen or felt terrible things. They are not dead but they are ghosts. They have emptied themselves to forget.’
‘I have tried to forget.’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t want to remember everything.’
‘I know.’
‘But I want to remember us.’
He took my hand and held the inside of my wrist against his lips and nose. I could feel his breath against my skin, warm on the exhale, cool on the inhale. Warm then cool, then warm.
‘You have a scent I wish not to forget,’ he said.
‘What do I smell like?’
He stroked my wrist with a finger and shook his head. ‘I can’t describe it as anything else I know. It is you, and it is me. I can only smell it when I warm your skin with my breath.’
‘So how will you remember it?’
‘I will have to imagine this place.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think you will want to do that.’
‘I will have to do that,’ he said. ‘I have known you nowhere else.’