‘No,’ George said, and heard the strangeness in his voice. ‘No, I did not.’
They were married in a matter of days, with only a friend of hers as a witness, who seemed to look at him with a mixture of humour, contempt and pity. But it wasn’t terrible, he reasoned. True, they did not know one another well. He could not be absolutely certain that they would like one another better if they knew one another more. But he did admire her. And there was the – for want of a better word – sexual bond between them. There were marriages agreed on less. Besides, he might be killed at the front. In which case it could not matter greatly anyway.
In the two weeks before he was posted home for good she lost the child. He returned to find a woman who bore no resemblance to the one he had married. She was desperate with grief, transformed by it. He saw suddenly someone who was not all poise and seduction, someone who needed love.
He was extremely sorry for her, and for himself – though he had not even been sure before that he welcomed the news of the child, the responsibility that would be his when he returned home. As a man of medicine he was able to understand the critical changes that had taken place, how they had caused her to lose the child and why it was that she would most likely never conceive again. What all of his learning could not teach him was how he might help her. He tried taking her out to dinner, to the theatre, to a holiday beside the sea. He tried merely sitting with her, talking to her. But none of it seemed to have any effect. She was unreachable; catatonic with her loss. Something in her had been broken, but it was beyond his reach – beyond the understanding of his science. He saw as never before how little they knew one another; that really, despite the intimacy they had shared and the vows they had made, they were complete strangers. He became almost obsessed by the idea that if he only knew her better, he might have held the key to her recovery. And then there was his suspicion that what she really needed was love; and this was the one thing he was fairly certain he could not give her.
Then her parents visited, and insisted that she came to live with them for a time; he did not object. There had been ‘problems’ before, he understood from them; episodes of hysteria in her youth. They had not wanted to worry him before now. He did not object, either, when they suggested that she might be better looked after in one of the kinder institutions available for women like her, who had apparently gone beyond the reach of their family.
When he learned a week later of an opportunity back in the Near East, a hospital in the newly occupied Ottoman city, he approximately convinced himself that it was his duty to go.
So he volunteered, yes: but could anyone say that his presence here has not been valuable, even essential?
No one questioned his motives for return, that was the thing. No one knew of it, here – save for a discreet few.
So here he has been seen as a good man, even a heroic man. Never a coward, or a scoundrel. Only he has known the truth.
Nur
Nur looks down the Bosphorus toward the Black Sea, from which an early autumn mist is approaching, thick as smoke.
He has turned to her; she can see the pale shape of his face at the edge of her vision. She thinks there might be something pleading in his expression.
Finally, with some effort, she turns, rising to an awareness of the sound of his voice like a swimmer surfacing from underwater.
‘It does not matter,’ she says. There is a coldness in her head, it has entered her words. She knows what it is: it is an anaesthetic, against the pain. She is grateful for it. It allows her to speak in a tone of someone discussing some regrettable – but slight – faux pas. ‘There has been nothing to be ashamed of.’
She will not think of the warmth of a palm against her cheek. Of the contract of it, the promise in flesh.
‘Nur,’ he says, ‘I have to explain.’
George
‘I do not love her.’
‘You married her.’
‘Yes. But—’
‘You made a promise to her.’
‘Yes—’
‘Then you must go back.’
He realises what this is, with a new, terrifying clarity. This is the moment upon which a whole life turns. He will return to it, time and again, over the years. It will be with him until the end of his days. He must get it right. He has a vision of himself as a drowning man with his hands tied, unable to save himself.
‘’I mistook it – with Grace, for something else … something more. I did not have this to compare it with.’
She says nothing.
‘There is something, isn’t there? Tell me that you know there is something.’ And by something, of course, he means: everything.
What would he say to her if he could throw off the strictures and conditioning of a lifetime?
He would say so much. He would say just this: love.
She does not agree, or refute it. Now there is only a kind of pity in her expression: for him, for herself.
‘This has not been real,’ she says. ‘None of this. It is that which has made it seem possible,
