by Marie Joseph
When Nigel kissed her, brushing her mouth with his moustache, she smiled and said thank you very much.
‘Don’t mention it, darling.’ Nigel slid a hand underneath the table and squeezed her knee. ‘You have gorgeous eyes,’ he whispered. ‘Real come-to-bed eyes. I like you a lot.’
‘I quite like you too,’ Sally assured him sincerely and solemnly, ‘but my heart belongs to this gentleman here.’
‘Hard cheese,’ Nigel said, and they leaned on each other, laughing till the tears ran down their cheeks.
When at last they decided to call it a day and went outside, Sally looked up at the ink-black sky, seeing a whirl of stars that didn’t exist. For a while they stood together, the four of them, swearing they must meet again some day, saying goodbye all over again.
‘We’ll meet again,’ Nigel sang in a throaty tenor. ‘Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.’
Finally Christine kissed everyone, the men full on the lips and Sally on both cheeks. ‘I’ll drive,’ she told Nigel. ‘You’re pissed.’
‘Sorry it’s only a two-seater.’ Nigel shook hands with Lee, then he turned back and took Sally by the shoulders, peering down into her face.
‘Can you see what I’m saying, love?’ he asked gravely.
Sally nodded. ‘I can hear you, Nigel.’
The floppy moustache seemed to quiver with emotion. ‘It was the only … the only decent way, love.’ He jerked his head to where Christine and Lee stood by the little red car. ‘As parents we’d be non-bloody-starters, whereas …’ His eyes were dazed by drink, confusion and a sudden sense of his own inadequacy. ‘You’re a little corker,’ he mumbled. ‘And Hiawatha there, he’s a lucky bloke.’
A bewildered expression came over his pleasant face. ‘Turn me in the right direction, love,’ he demanded. ‘Maybe I am a weeny bit pissed after all.’
As the car roared away down the winding country road, Sally and Lee set off towards the bus stop, arms entwined. Bounded on one side by dry-stone walls and fringed by tall trees on the other, the road was a black ribbon, with only the newly painted white line down the middle shining dimly through the total darkness.
Suddenly, the drink inside him urging Lee to show off, his natural high spirits elevated to a careless height of optimism, Lee broke away from Sally to tread the white line, arms outstretched.
‘Who says I’ve had too much to drink?’ he shouted. ‘Watch me, honey! Watch out! The Hun is coming at you out of the sun! Pull out, Skip! Whacko! Press the bloody knob, man!’
Swaying first one way then the other, he teetered along the white line, his greatcoat flying open and his cap over one eye, a child again, showing off to an indulgent parent.
‘Lee!’ Sally saw the oncoming car, a speeding black box, its headlamps heavily obscured according to war-time regulations, the beam almost totally masked.
The driver, a doctor on his way to an urgent case, had no chance at all. In his dark uniform Lee was invisible.
‘Who?’ the doctor was to ask over again in the weeks to come. ‘Who would expect to meet a man doing a balancing act in the middle of a country lane in the black-out? But, dear God, I’ll never forget that bump till my dying day.’
Sally was vaguely aware of being led gently away from the still figure lying there. She was even more vaguely aware of being taken into the little front room of a cottage, her hands closed round a mug of hot, sweet tea. She sat in a low winged chair imprisoned not in grief but in a tearing bitterness that precluded any attempt to comfort.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
The woman bending over her had appled cheeks and hair pulled back from her face with a childish slide. ‘He wouldn’t feel anything, love. The doctor said it was instant.’ She twisted her hands together and glanced quickly at her husband hovering behind her. ‘Try again to remember your telephone number, love, or your address. I know thinking isn’t easy just now, but try.’
Sally looked at her, totally without comprehension. ‘That wasn’t how he wanted to die.’ Her little flat voice broke. ‘Not mown down by a car. Not on the ground.’ She lifted pain-dazed eyes. ‘All he wanted was to fly.’
‘Cry, love,’ the woman said. ‘Have a good cry.’
‘Up in the clouds,’ Sally said firmly. ‘With flak coming at him. He thought he was immortal, but I knew different.’ Her face rejected the sympathy coming at her from the kindly, decent, elderly man and woman standing helplessly by. Locked in a strait-jacket of anger, her grief was bloody-minded, her expression as hard and flinty as the dry-stone wall fronting the tiny cottage.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she whispered pitifully.
Eleven
THERE WAS NO way Sally could or would assuage her shock and grief in a healing flow of tears. Like a child she raged at the obscenity of Lee’s sudden death. He had died, her beautiful American, in a way she could not accept. Fuddled with beer and gin, he had thrown his bright young life away, and her rejection of any attempt at sympathy was harsh and immediate.
Shutting herself away in her room she refused to eat, spending long hours staring at the wall, irritated to the point of hysteria when Josie or Stanley crept up the stairs offering crumbs of comfort and pleading with her to come downstairs.
‘There’s a box come for you, love.’ Josie knelt down by the bed, forcing Sally to look at her. ‘Do you want me to open it?’
‘If you like.’
‘Shall I bring it up here?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, do what you like with it!’
Josie backed away from the harshness in her daughter’s voice. When she stood up she was trembling.
‘Look, love. I know how you feel.’
‘Do you?’ Sally’s tone dripped sarcasm.
Josie stood her ground. ‘You can ask me that, our Sally? After John?’
Sally glared at her mother, her hands balled into fists. For a moment Josie thought she was going to be attacked, then her chin went up. ‘Awful things happen in a war, you know that, but we have to go on, love. Life has to go on.’
The look that Sally gave her mother could easily have been construed as hatred. There were two safety pins fastened to the bib of Josie’s flowered apron; she smelled of talcum powder and cod-liver oil. And in that moment Sally could hardly bear to look at her.
‘John was killed in the war!’ she shouted violently. ‘In this bloody senseless war’! At least God had the decency to have him killed like a man. Fighting, as they say, that we might live. Lee was killed walking in the middle of a country road, balancing on a white line down the middle like a naughty schoolboy.’
‘He was a bit like a naughty schoolboy,’ Josie said unwisely.
‘You never liked him.’
‘Now, love, that’s not fair. I liked him a lot. He was good for you.’
‘How good for me?’
‘He made you laugh.’
‘And I never laughed before?’
Josie gave a deep sigh. How could she tell this angry child – because in spite of her nineteen years that was all Sally was – that one of the things deafness had done for Sally was to shut her away from laughter? True, she was bright and bonny, but until Lee there had always been a wary sadness about her. A haunting stillness that the American had managed to break through.
‘I’m going down for the box,’ she said firmly. ‘And if you don’t want to see what’s in it, then I’ll open it, because it might be flowers, and if it is then they’ll want putting in water.’
But when Josie laid the box on the bed beside an indifferent Sally, then lifted the lid and peeled away the top layer of tissue paper, her heart did a downward flip.
There, in folds of slippery oyster satin, was a wedding dress of such exquisite simplicity and beauty that Josie, familiar with discreetly expensive model clothes, could not fail to recognize it as a superb example of the finest workmanship.
As she lifted it out the skirt fell into folds intersected by lace godet
s. The neckline was heart-shaped, and the sleeves long and tight, finishing at the cuffs with a row of tiny satin-covered buttons. Lying at the bottom of the box was a note scribbled in a large twirl-embellished handwriting:
‘Wear this on the day you and Lee marry, Sally. It should only need a few inches chopping off the bottom. Oodles of love, Christine.’
Silently cursing herself for her terrible gaffe in bringing the box upstairs, Josie handed the note over.
As she read it Sally’s pent-up anger and grief dissolved at last in a noisy storm. Held fast in her mother’s arms, the tears flowed as if from the depths of a bottomless well. Unable to hear herself, her wails were those of a desolate child, and when the baby from his cot in the next room joined in, it seemed to Josie as if the whole house rang with the sound of weeping.
When Easter came the weather turned so suddenly warm that the cherry blossom came out in the trees planted at regular intervals down Sally’s road. One Saturday afternoon she saw a young man walking along with a tennis racket swinging from his hand, and stared at him as if he had dropped in from another planet.
That spring was a gloomy period for the Western Allies. The Americans were in the process of digging in, and the King gave the besieged island of Malta the George Cross.
Stanley gloomed over his wireless, and Josie brooded over her little grandson, stopping his crying by sticking a dummy coated with condensed milk into his mouth, and occasionally drying his wet nappies by the fire without rinsing them out so that the house smelled of baby and became more untidy than ever. To test his bottle she sucked the teat. When the dummy fell to the floor she wiped it on her pinny and stuck it back in his mouth. He slept propped on a pillow, was fed when he was hungry and put to bed when it suited Josie.
And as the weeks went by he grew and thrived in a way that would have confounded the writers of baby manuals.
Sally went to work, sat at the long bench smoothing the rough ridge away from the rounded curve of the heels until the palm of her right hand grew a hardened callus from holding the heavy file. She was much thinner now, and to avoid having to roll up her hair each morning she cut it short with a pair of nail scissors so that it curled round her head, giving her an almost boyish charm. At the weekends she took long cycle rides alone, riding far out into the countryside, pedalling furiously up steep hills, freewheeling like the wind down them, arriving back home in the late dusk too tired to eat.
And as long fine weekend followed long fine weekend, it was this lonely pedalling along one country lane after another that helped Sally to begin to come to terms with her grief.
By the middle of April the daffodils were out, fringing lawns and clustering beneath spreading trees. One Sunday Sally came into the house carrying an armful of them, and seeing her rosy face above the blooms Josie closed her eyes briefly to thank the God she didn’t believe in for giving her daughter back to her.
As Josie went through into the kitchen to fetch a vase, Stanley turned round from the wireless, his face set in lines of disgust.
‘We’ll have to teach those Germans a lesson they won’t forget. They’ve been bombing our historic cities now, would you believe it? Canterbury, York and Bath. Not one of them of any military importance whatsover. Unmitigated swines!’
‘It was cold out today. Lovely and fresh, but a cold wind.’ Unwinding the scarf from round her neck, Sally spoke dreamily.
‘And Norwich,’ Stanley told her. ‘The uncouth bastards.’
‘There were some ducks on a lake. A mother, father and two babies.’ Sally went from the room, trailing the scarf and carrying her short jacket over her arm.
‘Did you hear that?’ Stanley appealed to his wife as she came back into the room with the daffodils in a blue jug. ‘She was reckoning on she couldn’t hear me, but she heard me all right. She’s pretending the war doesn’t exist, going off on that bicycle every weekend and stopping out all day. She only uses this house for eating and sleeping now.’
‘Not much for eating.’ Josie frowned. ‘I’m sure all that fresh air can’t be good for her. Did you notice how chapped her cheeks are?’ Bending down to the sideboard cupboard she took out a folded newspaper. ‘I’ve a good mind to show her this when she comes downstairs. It was in the evening paper the week after Lee got killed, so I put it away.’
Stanley shrugged his shoulders. ‘Show it to her if you like, lass. I can’t see it making any difference.’
‘She always had a soft spot for him, though.’ Josie opened the paper and spread it wide on the table. ‘And once he hears that she isn’t going to marry the American …’
‘For God’s sake, woman!’ Stanley looked up from the book he was reading. ‘You’re not expecting her to jump from the frying pan into the fire?’ He sucked furiously at his pipe. ‘Even if what you’re hoping for happened, that lad is flying over Germany night after night. We bombed Lübeck and Rostock last week and I bet he had a hand in that. Do you want her heart broken all over again?’
‘She’s coming down.’ Josie turned as Sally came into the room. ‘See here, love. I meant to show this to you the other day, but I forgot. Look. There’s his photograph.’ She moved her finger over the column, reading aloud:
‘Flight Lieutenant David Turner, awarded the DFC for conspicuous bravery. In spite of terrible damage to his plane, the Flight Lieutenant was mainly responsible for getting it and his crew safely back to base.’
‘It’s obviously a studio portrait,’ Sally said, giving the picture a swift glance. ‘He looks as if both him and his uniform have been pressed with a hot iron.’ She touched the paper lightly with an outstretched finger. ‘Not a hair of his moustache out of place, and look at his cap! David never did squash his cap like the others. He looks too handsome to be real, doesn’t he?’
‘Where is he stationed now, love?’ Josie ignored her husband’s warning glance. ‘Do you know?’
‘Somewhere in Yorkshire, I think,’ Sally said in her new quiet way. She moved over to the fireplace, and bending down took her knitting from behind a cushion on the settee. ‘If I don’t get on with this matinée jacket the baby will have grown too big for it before it’s finished.’
Josie went to sit beside her. Her blue eyes were surprisingly tender.
‘Why don’t you write to David, love? Just to congratulate him. You know. He struck me as looking very lonely last time he called.’
‘You could hardly bear to speak to him last time he called.’ Some of the bitterness crept back into Sally’s flat voice. ‘Why don’t you write to him?’
‘What, me?’ Josie laughed out loud. ‘Me write to David Turner? What would I have to tell him? How much the baby weighs, and the colour of his motions? I can see David finding that fascinating. No, you’re his friend, not me.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Sally said, then lowering her head began to count stitches, moving her finger swiftly along the knitting needle. ‘Damn it, there’s one too many. No wonder the pattern came out wrong.’
Sister Irene Margerison found the letter in the pocket of the airman’s flying jacket, placed it in the bedside locker along with his other belongings, and promptly forgot all about it.
A tall girl with piercing black eyes and no claims to beauty, she had done her training at a West London hospital before the war. Then when the entire hospital had been evacuated to a country mental hospital near Basingstoke, she had applied for and got a transfer to a hospital in Yorkshire, wanting to be near her mother who was slowly dying of a chest complaint that had turned her days into a constant fight for breath, and her nights into a tortuous agony.
Now, at the beginning of that summer in 1942, her mother had been dead for eighteen months, but Sister Margerison stayed on, bringing solace to her patients and daily terror to the nurses who had the misfortune to come within her jurisdiction.
When the men from the nearby airbase began to be admitted as patients, Sister Margerison came into her own. And that May morning the officer with the clipped moustache, swathed in
bandages over most of his face and his neck, presented her with a challenge she took up gladly.
Flight Lieutenant David Turner was going to live. He might think otherwise, but the sister knew different. The surgeons had done their bit, removing the shrapnel from his gullet and treating the minor burns to his face and head, but now it was nursing care which would count.
Checking the saline drip and taking his pulse for the twentieth time, Sister Margerison motioned to the nurse sitting at the other side of the bed, the lift of a finger indicating that a non-stop vigil was to be kept until the patient showed signs of regaining consciousness. Then she tiptoed away down the ward, her back as straight as if her starched uniform was keeping it so.
When David opened his eyes briefly the first thing he saw was a pair of eyes regarding him steadily. Above them was a white cap perched on a fringe of bright red hair. David closed his eyes again.
He could equate the cap with a nurse, and along with the nurse, by inference, he could slowly grasp the fact that he was in hospital. His eyes were all right; he accepted this gratefully, but the upper part of his face felt stiff, and he felt as if his neck was being forced up, out of his body. Wiggling his toes, he accepted too that he still had feet, then the effort of trying to assess his injuries overwhelmed him with exhaustion so that he drifted off into unconsciousness again.
There was a tube going up his nose and down his parched throat. When he squinted at it, it seemed to be filled with a nauseous dark green liquid that smelled abominably. The smell pervaded all his senses, so that he lay half awake and half asleep drowning in the stinking horror of it.
At intervals – he never knew the exact frequency – Sister Margerison would drag the tube out and replace it. Taking it out was hell, but swallowing a fresh one was worse.
‘Swallow!’ she ordered. ‘Come on, now. You can do it if you try. Gulp! That’s right. Now again! It’s nearly down. We can’t have you being sick at the moment. A few more days of this and you’ll be able to be rid of it and maybe swallow a little soup.’ She patted his shoulder. ‘Then we can take you off the drip. If you cooperate.’
