The Man Who Heard Too Much by Bill Granger

Author:Bill Granger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

17

BRUGES

Rita Macklin had red hair and green eyes, and she had loved him for a long time. Perhaps she still loved him, but he wouldn’t think about that. She had decided something, the last time, the time they had almost come back together. They had made love, and when it was over, it was over. She didn’t even try to explain that to him. Dead. If not dead, then it would be killed. Put in a box and buried under the dirt of everyday life. Life goes on, life is compromise.… To save your life, leave your love and find another. They had parted one day and they never expected to see each other again.

The train rocketed along the track across the broad, rolling face of Belgium, where a thousand armies had marched in all the years of history, back and forth from France to Germany or France to the Netherlands, back and forth in ceaseless battle from the beginning of man in Europe. Not an acre of ground was without remembrance of bloodshed. Devereaux sat across from Rena Taurus and did not see her but saw his memory of another woman.

The train lurched from side to side. Kilometer posts flashed by, the ground near the train seemed to stream away from it like the wake of a ship. The train was grubby, close, damp. The heaters worked too well. Dirty windows were streaked with beads of rain.

Rena’s coat was open, her arms were folded beneath her breasts, she stared out the window as though she found the bleak, brown countryside utterly fascinating.

Rita Macklin had said to him the last time: “Run away tomorrow and I’ll run with you. If we have to run for the rest of our lives to get away from them. I don’t need my career. We can live on a beach in Tahiti. We can live outback down under. We can live in the Alaskan bush, I don’t care. Pioneer wife. I’ll make you children. I’ll wash your clothes and clean your house. I’ll make love to you all day and all night. I’ll bury myself in living with you. Just you and me. Just us in the world. Maybe we’ll have ten years or thirty, I can’t tell. Then we die. I hope we die together, but even with the sadness at the end, it would be worth it. Ten years, fifteen, twenty years. We’ll quarrel and get into long, stupid arguments, that’s all part of it. But we’ll sleep together every night in the same bed for however long it lasts, until we are dead.”

That was the choice. She stared at him with her brave green eyes and waited.

Of course he would do it.

Except it was a fantasy.

The train swayed back and forth through the drizzle that streamed across the windows. The conductor would come into the car from time to time and tramp up and down the aisles, checking tickets, examining each one as if he were a border guard. The forests along the way bent to the wind.

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