Stanton tried to say something but she went on.
‘No, no, I didn’t mind. That was our agreement and you stuck to it and I had a lovely breakfast on our balcony before walking out with my head held high. So don’t worry, Mr Stanton, I haven’t come here expecting you to fall in love with me in exchange for playing nursemaid. To be honest I was happy just to be out of Ireland. It isn’t much fun at all at the moment, or Britain in general for that matter. I mean, it’s not like here, we’re not arresting whole classes of people, but there are still plenty of troops on the streets.’
Stanton had wanted to continue talking about her. To tell her that she was wrong and that he had been thinking about her every day since Vienna. But this news took him back completely.
‘Troops? On the streets? In Britain?’
‘Goodness, of course you don’t know, do you? We’ve been so busy talking about Germany I’d forgotten to say what’s been going on at home. It’s all happened in the last few days. Ever since Mr Churchill was killed.’
For a moment Stanton actually choked on his soup.
‘Churchill?’ he spluttered. ‘Killed? In 1914?’
‘Of course in 1914, what other year would it be? It was the most terrible thing. He was addressing a public meeting about Home Rule. His usual line, saying that it was treason for the Tories to threaten to support the army in resisting the law by force. Which, of course, it damn well would be. And then somebody shot him dead.’
‘Somebody?’
‘An Ulsterman, a Unionist. The man didn’t try to hide. He was proud of it. Said it was Mr Churchill who was the traitor for trying to break up the United Kingdom and that he was a patriot defending the King’s realm. You can imagine that the country’s in uproar and not all on Mr Churchill’s side either. I can tell you a lot of people are calling the murderer a hero. Meanwhile Ireland’s gone berserk. Bombs. Riots. Armed Republicans openly on the streets in Dublin.’
Stanton felt cold. He actually felt tears welling up in his eyes.
‘Hugh? Are you all right? You’re shaking. I mean, I know it’s dreadful news but there are plenty of people calling for calm too …’
Stanton lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling.
‘Bernie, you don’t understand. Churchill was essential. He saved us—’
‘Saved us? From what? He’d got the fleet up to speed certainly, but fat lot of good that’ll do anyone since everyone’s far too busy tearing apart their own country to fight anybody else’s. Look, I liked him myself, he was brave over Ireland and by no means the worst man in government on Suffrage, but he was just a Cabinet minister. What do you mean, he saved us?’
‘It’s nothing,’ Stanton replied, pulling himself together. ‘I just think he might have been destined for even greater things, that’s all. Who knows, it may be that great things won’t be required.’
‘I’m afraid I think they will be. Everyone in the whole country is at each other’s throats. Carson’s men have taken control in Belfast with their hundred thousand rifles and the army’s refusing to go in and sort them out. This isn’t the men, mind, it’s the generals! I think the way the military is acting here in Germany is giving them ideas. Some regiments have actually issued statements saying they won’t enforce Irish Home Rule whatever the law says. It seems to be only the King’s personal intervention that’s stopped them marching on Westminster. So you can imagine that nobody’s bothering much about women’s votes at present. Quite frankly, it’s beginning to look like there might not even be a parliament for women to vote for. So you see I was really quite happy to give it all up for a bit and come here and play Florence Nightingale. There’s more to life than politics, eh? I mean, one does have to have a life, after all. Well, I do … but perhaps you don’t want one. Or do you?’
‘Yes, Bernie,’ he said, now taking her hand in both of his. ‘I do want to have a life. I want it very much.’
The following day Stanton settled his bill, thanked the doctors, who were still shaking their heads in wonder, and left the hospital. With Bernadette’s help, he made his way down the massive steps of the hospital and into a taxi.
On entering his apartment he had expected to find empty bottles and rotten bread and cheese on the table where he had left his supper on the night of the Kaiser’s death. Instead the place had been cleaned; fresh food had been put on the shelf and fresh flowers on the table. The bed had been made with clean sheets and the window opened to air.
‘Surprise!’ Bernadette said. ‘Slightly against my principles to clean up after a man but since you still have a bullet hole in your stomach I thought I’d make an exception.’
Glancing across the room Stanton noticed bags in the corner that weren’t his. Bags he’d last seen in a hotel room in Vienna.
Those bags must have been empty because all of Bernadette’s clothes were on hangers in the cupboard.
‘Bit presumptuous?’ she asked.
‘No, not at all,’ he assured her.
‘Well, you’re obviously going to need a nurse for a bit while that wound heals properly so I thought it might as well be me. But, honestly, I can pack up and go again just as easily if you—’
He turned to her, took her in his arms and kissed her.
‘Come to bed,’ he breathed through the kisses that she was returning.
‘What about your stomach? The wound?’ she gasped.
‘I’ll risk it.’
‘For heaven’s sake, don’t burst your stitches. You just lie flat on your back and let me make all the effort.’
37
FOR THE FOLLOWING week Stanton remained in the little apartment speedily regaining his strength. Bernadette shopped for him and cooked for him and cared for him and every night they made love.
And it was love. Stanton knew that. He was in love with another woman. Something he’d never imagined was possible.
Bernadette sensed his guilt.
‘You feel like you’ve betrayed your wife, don’t you?’ she said in the small hours of one morning, sitting up in bed smoking her post-coital cigarette.
‘I’m sorry,’ he replied. ‘Is it so obvious?’
‘Only when you go quiet like this.’ The window was open as the summer had remained glorious and moonlight flooded the room, falling on her pale skin so that she seemed almost luminous. ‘You are allowed to have sex, you know. I mean, I don’t think that’s wrong. She’s been gone quite a long time.’
‘It’s not the sex,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think Cassie would mind me having sex with another woman. Particularly such a nice person as you.’
‘Well, then, what would she mind?’
‘I’m wondering if she’d mind me falling in love with you?’
Bernadette drew deeply on her cigarette. He watched her breasts rise as her chest expanded.
‘Oh right, I see,’ she said. ‘Are you falling in love with me, then?’
‘Actually I think I already have done.’
‘Well, that’s a very good thing,’ she replied, ‘because I’m in love with you too.’ She reached out and put her arms around him. ‘And I don’t think Cassie would mind that either because she loved you and you loved her, and if there’s a heaven then she knows that she’s dead and you’re alive and must live your span, and that nothing that happens to you now in any way diminishes what you once had with her and will always have had with her.’
Stanton knew that he was at the second major emotional junction of his life.
The first had been meeting and marrying Cassie. Some people speak of finding love as ‘completing’ them. He’d seen films where the phrase ‘You complete me’ was offered as some great statement of romance. He’d never seen love that way, as some kind of minor adjunct to his own personality. The love he’d felt for Cassie hadn’t completed him, it had created him. Before that, as far as he was concerned, there hadn’t been much to complete. He could scarcely remember himself or his life prior to Cassie. He knew that his mum had died when he was a teenager. That he’d been to schools and found some sort of family in the cadets and joined the army, which had become his life. But you can’t just be a soldier, you have to be a person too, a rounded human being who feels they have a place in the world, and Stanton had only begun to feel like such a person when he met Cassie. Her love for him had brought him into being.