Barbed Wire and Roses

by Peter Yeldham

  While we talked his voice became calmer and more relaxed. He even smiled now and then. Time passed. The floor had begun to dry around us, but where we sat was still wet and uncomfortable. I suggested it was time to get up and a change of clothes might be a good idea, but before we could act on this the door to the shower block was abruptly pushed open and a piercing voice demanded to know precisely what we thought we were doing.

  ‘Matron!’

  I started to rise, forcing Stephen to his feet, for I was still clasping his hand. The matron kept gazing at this until our hands parted.

  ‘Would you care to explain, Nurse Rickson? Sitting on the floor, your work unfinished, holding hands with a patient! I can hardly wait to hear your explanation.’ Her quieter voice next was, if anything, more threatening. ‘My room, I think, in ten minutes. That might just give you time to change out of your wet undergarments.’

  ‘Yes, Matron. May I just say that Mr Conway was distressed —’

  ‘Mr Conway seems to have made a rapid recovery,’ Matron replied acidly. ‘He might also wish to change his clothes, and after that I’ll ask the medical superintendent to explain to him the rules about liaisons in the shower block with nurses. Ten minutes, Miss, to change your knickers and tell me what on earth possessed you.’

  The matron’s name was Isabel Hardy, and some of our nurses claimed that her family had descended from Flag-Captain Thomas Hardy — he of the famous ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ request from Horatio Nelson when the great British admiral lay dying.

  ‘Juvenile rubbish. A stupid myth,’ the matron had always declared when hearing of this ancestral elaboration, but the older nurses told me that the legend pleased her.

  Matron Hardy was a tall, rather angular woman in her late forties. She had a lustrous head of brown hair that was gathered into a bun, and wore a pince-nez to effect sternness when required. She was wearing it as she sat behind her desk severely regarding me with disfavour.

  ‘How old are you, child?’ was her first question.

  ‘Matron, I’m not a child,’ was my reply. I could see it irritated her intensely.

  ‘Then you’re a fool. A child sits in a puddle of water — but only a fool sits in it with a man.’

  I was twenty-six years old. I had reached that age having had brief crushes on boys in Leatherhead where I was brought up, including a close shave with a good-looking and cheeky stablehand who almost deflowered me in a haystack. There had been a few mild flirtations with patients at the hospital, but the truth is I had never known a real love affair. I fell in love with Stephen straightaway, virtually as we sat together on the wet floor of the shower block, and Matron finding us there, threatening disciplinary measures for such aberrant behaviour, only seemed to intensify my feelings.

  Did I feel sorry for him, and fall in love out of sympathy? No, it was instinctive and immediate: I just wanted to hold him and care for him, and felt angry at the harsh way life had treated him. The emotional scars were deep, but I believed kindness and care could soothe them, even if I could not heal his wounds entirely.

  And Stephen, because it had been so long since he had experienced warmth and affection from anyone, responded. It’s not vanity or blind love when I say that his condition soon began to improve and his memory started to return. I began to realise that amid the bedlam of the psychiatric ward he felt calm and under control whenever I was there, and because I cherished him, I tried to make sure I was as close to him as the job allowed. I managed to get myself transferred to his ward. Whenever I was off duty, we spent all our time together.

  Stephen talked; he had been silent for so long in his awful prison years that he talked with animation: he told me of his childhood, his school days, his year as a law student; he talked of everything except the trenches and the war. We walked along the paths and across the spacious lawns of Netley, our hands linked at first and fingers entwined, which was a lovely feeling, but even better was after that when we had our arms around each other.

  We didn’t care who saw us, but soon it became noticeable and then quite conspicuous, and before long the nurses had a subject for busy table talk at mealtimes. Even the patients began to spread gossip about us. So many rumours! I suppose there was nothing much else to enliven their daily routine. The staff dining room was by far the worst, and I was conscious of a lot of animated chatter that seemed to stop whenever I entered. I didn’t really care what anyone said. People declared they’d seen us kissing down by the pier. Other tittle-tattle insisted that far worse was going on in the gazebo.

  The matron sent for me again.

  This time she removed her pince-nez and told me to sit in one of the comfortable chairs by her window. She sat in the other. She looked far kinder without the spectacles, but concerned. She asked me for the truth, and I told her. I said that we did kiss down by the pier, but it was untrue about what was supposed to have happened in the gazebo.

  She believed me, but warned me it was a foolish relationship: Stephen was a disgraced soldier, psychologically damaged, although perhaps not his fault — he had, after all, spent four years at war, much of it in the front-line — but I was one of the nurses in her care, and she felt she should caution me against unwise and excessive emotion. A young woman in her twenties, especially one gently nurtured and still a virgin, had much to lose, she warned.

  ‘I take it you are still a virgin?’ she suddenly asked me.

  ‘Yes, Matron. Of course.’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it these days, child, but I believe you. And that’s why I wish you’d think very carefully, Georgina. I can’t instruct you in matters of the heart, but I am concerned. There seems to me no future in this.’

  I asked if I could recount Stephen’s story, and she nodded. I told her of the reason why he felt he could never go home to his own country and his family because of his wife’s plea, and finished by saying that I wished to look after him.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  I began to feel Matron had never known love, or she would not have asked that question. In the end I simply replied that I wanted to do this, because there was no one else who knew or cared about the extent of his deep suffering.

  ‘It’s a huge responsibility. I can’t imagine how you’ll manage it.’

  ‘My father’s dead now,’ I replied. ‘There’s only my mother and my elder sister living in our big house, and Stephen and I won’t take up much room. We could live quietly up on the attic floor. There’s a grand view of the river from there.’

  ‘You’ve thought a lot about it.’

  ‘Yes. When my time’s up and I can leave here, I want to take him with me. He’s served his sentence, so he’s entitled to be a free man, Matron.’

  ‘He’s a sick and disturbed one,’ she insisted.

  ‘Not if someone cares for him.’ I was equally insistent. ‘Like the way I’ll care for him. He can’t be kept in here against his will, can he?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, Georgina. But I think you’ll find that he agreed to come here.’

  ‘Because there was nowhere else for him to go. But when I leave here, he wants to go with me. He wants that, and so do I. Can you help us?’

  Dear Matron. She did help. We went back to live at the Lodge in the summer of 1930. Stephen was thirty-six years old. Matron Hardy used her influence to have me released from my contract of service a year before it was due to end, and arranged for Stephen to leave the hospital with me. On the money saved from my annual salary of forty pounds, we took the train to London. I bought him some much-needed new clothes, and we posed as husband and wife and shared a room at a small private hotel in Paddington.

  A cheap but sweet little hotel, where I gladly lost my virginity, and we happily experimented in the ways of love. One blissful week; I can still remember; every hour of it, they were days and nights of such joy. I never wanted it to end, but when the week was over we went to Epsom where I met father’s lawyers, Peacock & Marsh. There I learnt the inheritance from my father’s will tha
t had been held in trust for me would produce what seemed like an enormous income of five hundred pounds a year, and Henrietta and I would jointly inherit the Lodge if we survived our mother.

  Then I took Stephen home to meet my family. That’s when the trouble began, for our arrival was not well received at Leatherhead.

  There was an immediate antagonistic reception from my sister; Henrietta was strongly opposed to me bringing home a man with whom I intended to live openly — and a married one at that. She said it would cause gossip in the neighbourhood and create scandal for our family who’d had enough trouble, without inviting more from strangers. Mother agreed, although with some timidity. For several years her time had been spent in solitude in her room, suffering from poor health and mourning her lost sons and our father. She was like a fading shadow now, dominated by my sister.

  Things changed, but not for the better. After the first hostility came a different and far more awkward situation, when Henrietta began to realise she might actually have known Stephen from her war service at Netley — that he had been one of thousands who had passed through in her time there. He clearly remembered her, there were even references to her in his notebook, and she easily convinced herself that she remembered him. She became possessive in the strangest way. She was forever intruding on us, determinedly reminding him of past events to which I was not privy, like the hated sister they had called Attila the Hun, who was removed from Netley in disgrace, but now lived in luxury on the estate in Monmouthshire she had inherited on the death of her father, the earl. It seemed none of her male cousins survived the war, hence it all came to her, or so my sister informed Stephen.

  Daily, Henrietta started raising other subjects that excluded me. They talked of Wilfred Owen and his poetry — Stephen’s friend Wilfred — who had gone back to the trenches, and there won a military cross for bravery. Stephen didn’t know what had happened to him; he was shattered to learn from her that Wilfred had been killed in the very last week of the war. Such a tragic loss, Henry sympathised; such a fine, talented young man.

  The intrusions became relentless. She had no end of news and nostalgia relating back to those days. The Scottish quack, she told him, was now a leading physician in Edinburgh, and it was expected he’d receive a knighthood in the next birthday honours. Henrietta even whispered to him about the patient next door to Stephen in Bed 10, who had once confessed to her that when he masturbated he always liked to pretend he was in her bed making love to her which, while crude and rather disgusting, she supposed was some kind of release. She said she was aware a lot of the poor chaps in wartime had felt like that about her. Poor things, she knew they all lusted after her; knew from their emotional responses they all imagined she wanted to climb into their beds and spend the nights making love to them. And one night she nearly did get into bed with one of them. But that, she said, was to remain a secret strictly between her and Stephen. Which meant, of course, he was not to tell me, but naturally he did.

  These almost daily excursions into nostalgia started to upset me. I knew Stephen was trying his best to forget the war, while Henry with her endless reminiscences kept prodding at his memory almost every day. I got angry, I admit it. It wasn’t jealousy. I knew she had no real affection or desire for Stephen — nor for any of the male sex. It was a way of reliving the war years, which to her were so full of excitement, whereas the decade since had been dull and dutiful, looking after our ageing parents, deprived of the company of nursing friends, and missing the reflected glory of being one of the glamorous Roses. I might even have sympathised — sometimes I did try to make allowances — but this process of constant retrospection meant she was repeatedly unsettling Stephen and excluding me. It led to a monumental row.

  One evening when Henrietta was again monopolising the dinner table, reminding Stephen of various doctors and patients who were there in his time, talking of the many chaps who had been so fond of her, I completely lost my temper. I couldn’t help it; I asked if any of Henry’s so-called ‘chaps’ ever guessed how expert she was at pretence, and did none of them realise they hadn’t the slightest hope of getting her into any bed, because she was a lesbian?

  Mother looked rather puzzled by the word; the maid, who was serving soup at the time, dropped the tureen which smashed and spilled its contents all over the Persian rug. The maid fled. Henrietta shouted that it was a lie; I replied that it most certainly wasn’t: she’d been a lesbian ever since falling in love with Miss Scott, the English mistress at our boarding school, and everyone knew she was a lez and always would be.

  Then I tried to make amends, but too late by far. I said it had never bothered me, I’d known about it for ages, but why did Henry have to bore us rigid with these stupid and fanciful tales about ‘her chaps’? She burst into tears, called me an oversexed bitch on heat and swept out in a rage. Mother tottered off to her room, asking aloud what the world was coming to, and my sister and I didn’t speak again for years.

  After Mother died two years later the ill feeling continued. It even grew worse with our mutual inheritance of the Lodge. I tried to call a truce, but Henrietta would have none of it. She sent for a surveyor who carefully measured the main floor space, and the house was divided into two exact sections. I attempted to tell her it was insane, but that was almost impossible because she pretended to never hear anything I said. So the Lodge became two dwellings, and the connecting door between us was always kept locked.

  Perhaps the bizarre living arrangements were for the best. Stephen and I lived in our half of the house in utter harmony. These were the best, the very sweetest years. We loved each other so deeply that we felt no need for any outside company. I did the shopping in the village; I went alone and seldom stayed long. Even an hour was time I begrudged being away from him. As for him, he hardly ever left the grounds. His life was happy and peaceful at last. He spent his days keeping our section of the garden trim, growing vegetables, reading books and listening to the radio, particularly the daily news with great concern as Hitler became the German chancellor and the world again went to war.

  Henry, after a series of sexual misadventures, took in a female lover who drove a field ambulance — but to our neighbourhood she was a boarder, and her billet at the Lodge was my sister’s contribution to the war effort.

  Whenever there was an urgent need to communicate with us, Henry asked the ambulance driver to convey her message to Stephen, who in turn conveyed it to me, and in this way contact was maintained without the stress of proximity. Nobody beyond us four principals and the servants knew of the strange existence inside the walls of the palatial old building. The Lodge had always been such a grand estate, so private from the rest of town, that there was no speculation about the way we lived. It was a traditional case of the Ricksons and the rest of the town, which was how it had always been.

  When the Second World War ended in 1945, the ambulance driver departed for a more lively existence in London, and a few years later Henrietta became very ill. It was only then that we were reconciled. I nursed her; Stephen brought her offerings of flowers and fruit from our garden, and in 1956, just when it seemed the nursing and our reconciliation had brought a reprieve, Henry at the age of sixty-two had a massive heart attack and died.

  After that, there was just the two us. We had another eight precious years together, then it was Stephen’s coffin I followed to the graveyard beside the church. He was sixty-nine, and with all that he had endured it was remarkable he’d lived so long. I was the single mourner there, for we had never tried to acquire local friends, and when it was over I went home and wept with an anguish I had never experienced before. The deaths of my brothers when I was a young impressionable schoolgirl, my parents later, then my sister… none had aroused this kind of grief.

  Afterwards, months afterwards, I drew comfort from the words Stephen spoke before he died. He said that I’d restored his life. That I’d given him love when he thought he would never experience it again, and he hoped I’d been as happy in our
years together as he had. It had been nearly thirty-five years since we met on the wet floor… Almost half his life. Often afterwards, I began to think about Jane who had asked him not to come home, as well as the son he never knew, and one day, after a visit to Australia House in London, where I was given an address for Richard Conway, I wrapped Stephen’s diary and sent it to him with a rather cautious note.

  I kept his own notebook and this, my precious memories of our life together. Dear Stephen, I miss you so much. If I restored your life, you utterly transformed and enriched mine.

  PART FOUR

  Patrick

  TWENTY SEVEN

  The first trace of sunrise touched the treetops of the Megalong Valley, and lit the sandstone cliffs that enclosed it like ramparts. The scattered towns of the Blue Mountains began to appear, and soon afterwards the plane started its long descent towards Kingsford Smith Airport. The cabin crew were busily collecting breakfast trays and folding away pillows and blankets. A cheerful announcement from the cabin said landing would be in about twenty minutes, and the weather forecast was for a warm and sunny day.

  Patrick looked out his window at the pattern of streets and houses below as they reached the western suburbs. The panorama of tiled roofs extended as far as he could see, a drab mosaic only enlivened by splashes of blue from backyard swimming pools. Soon early peak-hour traffic would start to clog the arterial roads, and the day below them would begin.

  He and Claire had spent most of his last night in London fully engrossed in Georgina’s memoir. Plans for a farewell dinner at their Italian restaurant were cancelled; they paused only for a quick ham sandwich and coffee, as he marvelled at the treasure salvaged by her impulsive visit to Mrs West. Later Patrick re-read it slowly aloud while Claire typed a back-up copy that would be sent to his email address as a safety measure.