The Couple in the Dream Suite by Marguerite Kaye Read Free Book Online Page B

on the Court Martial panel, who happened to have served under my father in Burma. I owe it to him, my being packed off so quickly. I should be grateful. And besides, it’s true.’
    ‘I doubt that very much. I suspect most of the men who served in the war are still carrying it around in their heads. Some of them working all hours or partying all hours or whatever it takes to forget…’
    ‘Like you.’
    ‘…and some of them too taken up with their own private hell to do anything but remember,’ Vera said, with a meaningful look. ‘What I’ve been through is nothing,
nothing
compared to you. To them. It makes me furious, it makes me absolutely livid sometimes, the injustice of it. All that suffering and all that bloodshed, and expecting all those perfectly ordinary men to do perfectly extraordinary things, and then when it’s done, expecting them to go back to their lives as if nothing had happened.’
    ‘Like you.’
    ‘Not like me. I don’t – as you’ve pointed out. As Dexter has pointed out too, if you must know. I don’t live any sort of life. But yes, all those other women, they do.’ Vera jumped to her feet, her fists clenched. ‘You have no need to feel ashamed, Justin. It’s an absolute outrage that you do. Your father – dammit, what is he thinking of!’
    ‘He’s an old-fashioned man.’
    ‘You can’t possibly mean to excuse him!’
    ‘I understand him.’ Justin winced. ‘I don’t see him though. We are quite estranged.’
    ‘Because you had a breakdown?’
    ‘Because my breakdown led me to see things differently. To see the world differently.’
    ‘I should hope so. The world is changed beyond recognition.’
    ‘Yes.’ Justin looked weary, and unutterably sad. ‘That’s rather the point, for my father. Changed beyond recognition and very much for the worse. He too would turn the clock back, but not for the reasons I would. He – we argue. He makes me so angry. All that he is, it’s what I was, and that’s what caused it. People like him. People like I was, once. Before.’
    ‘You didn’t cause it,’ Vera said, ‘though you had no option but to help clean up the mess. What you did, what you suffered – it’s a miracle you were not not in a straitjacket afterwards. Oh God, were you?’
    Justin smiled faintly. ‘No. I was at least spared that indignity.’
    Vera swore. ‘I can’t imagine.’
    ‘I think I’d rather you didn’t. As I said, I’m not proud of it.’
    ‘You should be.’
    ‘No Vera, you really don’t understand. I was completely deranged for a while. When I wasn’t in a stupor I was ranting and raving. I didn’t sleep unless I was drugged.’
    ‘Like I was. I do understand, a little. What happened? How did you get better?’
    ‘Talking. That’s what they do at Craiglockhart, they believe you should talk about it.’
    ‘That’s all?’
    ‘For me, but I was one of the lucky ones.’ Justin’s smile was twisted. ‘I was angry, just as you are, at the waste of it all. The injustice. I still am, but I have ways of coping with that now.’
    ‘How?’
    He shrugged. ‘Writing it down.’
    ‘Like a diary?’
    ‘Something like.’
    He was beginning to look deeply uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry,’ Vera said, ‘I sound as if I’m interrogating you.’
    ‘No, it’s simply…’
    ‘Enough,’ she said, nodding. ‘I meant it when I said you should be proud, you know, and not ashamed. I think to come out of the War unscathed you would have to be mad. It’s the sane ones who suffer.’
    ‘That’s certainly a different way of looking at it.’
    ‘By which you mean, yes, I can accept that for everyone else but me,’ Vera retorted. ‘Do you think I was weak for breaking down? Because I do. I’m ashamed. Still. Deeply ashamed, though if my father had been alive, I doubt he’d have rubbed my nose in it.’
    ‘It was different for you.’
    ‘Because I’m a female? Because I was a civilian?’ Vera demanded. ‘What about all the other men in