His desertion was complete, but not accepted.

Vivian sat down at her writing desk and began another letter. She wondered how many she had sent now. It must be around a hundred, yet she had only ever received one from him. The one that said, You know I couldn’t have done anything other. She’d thought about that sentence for hours; examined it for its true meaning, for nuance, for connotation, hints and explanations. Hours per word she must have spent pondering it. She believed that the sentence acknowledged their connection, even revered it. You know. Those words admitted that they had an unprecedented intimacy, but they also foreshadowed disaster and miscalculation. She did not want to admit to understanding if that meant she had to understand why he had gone. That she had, after all, forced him away. I couldn’t have done anything other. Those words suggested that he had weighed up the situation, considered the alternatives and rejected them. He would not stay on Aubrey’s land, with Aubrey’s wife and child, while Aubrey fought the war Howard loathed. How could she have predicted such moral niceties? Why couldn’t he have been content to enjoy her, feel grateful for their luck in finding one another when the whole world seemed lost? Why did he feel the need to sacrifice himself? She sighed. He was right, she did know why. Howard Henderson looked at the world in his own particular way, and he could no more change his principles than she could change the tides.

The silence screamed at her. It never shut up. Her head pounded constantly. She knew she was sending her letters to the right place; she had made enquiries with the authorities, and besides, on the one occasion when she had managed to get inside Enid’s cottage, she’d spotted an envelope addressed to him on the mantelpiece. It was propped behind the clock that ticked away the minutes, trying to fool them into believing time was linear. When would it all end?

She remembered the things he had told her when he never imagined he’d go out there again. Scraps of flesh, charred hands and feet, burnt heads rained out of the sky into her dreams. When she dug in the fields, she thought of the soldiers’ shovels pushing into the dead bodies of the men who had fought earlier battles. She remembered his words. They were tattooed into her consciousness. He’d talked of human flesh putrefying and stinking. He’d said it was no good, that it was never any good. Whatever they did. If they got through one scrape, inevitably they’d be caught in the next. He’d told her these horror stories at her own insistence. It was torture, knowing he was in that hell.

She also felt anguish knowing that Aubrey was in the thick of it too. Guilt sat a sack of coal on her heart, because she could only feel concern, perhaps pity, but not love. So after all, Howard had been right about that. The guilt would have destroyed them if he’d stayed.