Free Another World by Pat Barker

drives to a row of terraced houses not far from the University library. Four-storey substantial Victorian houses, divided into elegant, expensive flats. Helen has the top floor of one of them. A beech tree, its leaves a virulent green in the light from the street lamp, reaches to her windows.
    Nick knocks, hears the television news switched off and then Helen appears, barefoot, in jeans and T-shirt, short dark hair spiked around her ears. ‘Nick,’ she says. ‘How are you?’
    ‘Not so bad.’
    ‘Come in.’
    This is what he needs, he realizes, following her through into the living room, though it’s probably not what he ought to need.
    ‘Coffee?’
    ‘Please.’
    ‘Or beer?’
    ‘Beer would be better.’
    The fridge door bangs shut. She comes back into the room hugging cans with a cold sweat on them to her chest, and hands one over. ‘Here you are.’
    Sweeping piles of books off the sofa on to the floor, she peels open her own can and applies her mouth to the white foam that bubbles out, laughing and flicking beer from her hands as she sits back. ‘So how are you really?’
    ‘All right.’
    She waits. Don’t pull that one, he thinks. I do the silences.
    ‘Geordie’s dying.’
    ‘Oh, Nick, I am sorry.’
    ‘You’re the only one.’ This comes out so much more bitter than he intended that he reins himself back. ‘Well, you know, I get a bit fed up with people saying, Perhaps it’s for the best, he’s had a good innings…’
    ‘You’ll miss him.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘So will I.’ She attempts a smile. ‘Won’t have anybody to flirt with now.’
    ‘Oh, you’ll find somebody, I expect.’
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘Cancer. They’ve done an exploratory operation. Secondaries all over the place.’
    ‘Is he having radiotherapy?’
    ‘There’s no point. It’d just mess him about, and it wouldn’t give him that much longer anyway.’
    ‘Can I see him?’
    ‘Give it a few days,’ Nick says awkwardly. ‘The thing is they’ve put the sides of the bed up and he’s so upset about that he can’t think about anything else.’ He hesitates, because telling anybody this, even Helen, seems like a betrayal. ‘He’s taken to wandering about in the middle of the night.’
    ‘But he’s not confused. Not when I saw him.’
    ‘No, but you can see why they think he is. He’s back there. Poor old Frieda gets mistaken for the German army. I mean, I don’t think it’s confusion because I think he’d be showing signs of it the rest of the time. It sounds like flashbacks, but why should he suddenly start doing that again?’
    ‘Fear of death? Pretty powerful trigger.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘How’s he going to manage?’
    ‘Frieda’ll look after him during the day – he’s all right then – I’ll do the nights.’
    ‘And what does Fran think about that?’
    ‘She doesn’t know yet.’
    ‘Sure you wouldn’t rather have a whisky?’
    He smiles. ‘I think I’ll take you up on that. But only a small one, I’m driving.’
    ‘You could walk from here.’
    ‘If I turned up sozzled I would be in trouble.’
    ‘Small one, I promise.’
    While she’s out of the room, Nick passes the time looking along her bookshelves and, for the second time that evening, identifies the red cover of Soldier, from the Wars Returning . This time he opens it and Geordie’s voice leaps off the page.
GEORDIE: Like Rip Van bloody Winkle, I suppose. You don’t hear that story much now, do you? We got told it at school. Friday afternoons, we used to have a story, last lesson before the bell, and that one sort of stuck in me mind. I remember walking home from school – four miles, it was, there and back twice a day – they’d think it was child abuse these days – and thinking all the time about this man going to sleep on the hillside, and waking up years later, and nobody knowing who he was. It haunted me. I used to think it was awful.
HELEN: What in particular?
GEORDIE: The loneliness.
    Helen’s focus in the