by Marie Joseph
He was so much inside himself, so detached from his surroundings that when Sally stopped by his bed and touched his arm he gawped at her in open-mouthed amazement, the book dropping from his good hand and sliding to the floor.
Frantically Sally latched on to her self-control. It was David all right, but nothing the sister had told her in the corridor outside the ward had prepared her for this.
‘Hello, David,’ she said quietly.
The face, once so handsome her mother had referred to it as better looking than Clark Gable’s, turned to her, the fringe of singed hair a bright orange above the scarlet shiny stretched skin of the forehead. Only the eyes were the same, and as they looked at each other she saw a tear gather in the corners and begin to slide slowly down David’s cheeks. For a long time they stayed like that, without moving, then Sally saw his right hand close convulsively over a pencil as he drew a notebook towards him.
‘No need for that. Not with me.’ Sally leaned forward and gently took the pencil from his hand. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’ She sat down on the bed, facing him, unbuttoned her coat and, with a gesture as familiar to him as his own breathing, ran her fingers through her curly fringe, lifting it away from her forehead.
‘How?’ The eyes were dark and questioning on her face. ‘How, in God’s name?’
‘In Sister Margerison’s name.’ Sally smiled. ‘She wrote me a letter, telling me that maybe I ought to know where you were as I’d been kind enough to write congratulating you when you …’
‘Got my DFC.’ David tightened his lips in a shy smile. ‘Wait till I see her, the crazy woman.’
‘But you’re glad I came?’
David’s right hand came out and covered her own. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ his lips said, and Sally blinked sudden tears from her own eyes. She glanced through the high windows to where a pale sun shone through the grey clouds.
‘It’s stopped raining, David.’ She glanced at his blue trousers beneath his woollen dressing-gown. ‘Sister told me you were a walking patient. Do you think we could go out on the terrace? It’s quite warm.’
‘For the time of the year,’ David mouthed promptly, and they smiled at each other and went on smiling.
As they walked down the long corridor together, the copper-haired nurse burst into Sister Margerison’s room without knocking.
‘They were talking!’ she said. ‘Mr Turner and the girl visiting – I saw them. Talking! He wasn’t writing a word down and yet they were –’
‘Conversing,’ the sister agreed. ‘My guess is that Mr Turner’s friend is totally deaf. I could tell by her voice, even without realizing she was lip-reading me. So I am not in the least surprised, Nurse.’
The round eyes beneath the unruly red hair took on a sentimental glow. ‘Well! Would you believe it? It’s like the films. Like a Joan Crawford film where she comes in and the hero gets out of his wheelchair and walks towards her, except of course that it’s Mr Turner’s voice and not his legs.’ She clasped both her work-roughened hands together. ‘Oh, Sister, it was like witnessing a miracle!’
‘They do happen sometimes, Nurse.’
Sister’s curt nod was one of dismissal, but her eyes as they followed her nurse’s bustling little figure out of the room were kind.
‘Let it work right,’ she whispered to herself. ‘For that poor laddie’s sake, let it work right.’
Outside the air was warm with the promise of the spring sunshine yet to come. The sky was now a pure pearly white, and raindrops shimmered on the newly green grass. They walked together, David and Sally, along the paved terrace, stopping by a low brick wall, sheltered from the weather by the overhanging sloping roof of the east hospital wing. Before them stretched the lawns, ending in a fringe of trees, bordered by shrubs dropping pink and white blossoms to the dark brown earth beneath their branches.
There were no bluebells yet, but Sally imagined she could already sense their sweet bruised scent. Suddenly she turned to face David, looking up into his face above the high white bandage encircling his throat.
‘Lee is dead,’ she told him. ‘I couldn’t have come to see you at the time, but I’m better now. He was run down by a car in the black-out on a country road. It was his own fault really. That was what made it so hard to bear.’
She reached for David’s hand and held it for a moment against her face. ‘Don’t look so stricken. Please. I was so filled with anger when it happened I couldn’t see straight. In spite of it being a stupid accident, it was still because of the war. If it hadn’t been for the war Lee would never have left his father’s farm in Texas. And if it hadn’t happened like it did, he would probably have been killed when he started flying on operations. What are the chances of coming out alive for you and your sort, David? One in three? Or is it less than that?’ Her voice rose harshly. ‘This awful war! How many must lose their lives before someone decides enough is enough? Will it go on for years, till there’s nobody left to fly their stupid planes?’
Her unexpected bitterness shocked David so that he hardly recognized the hardness of the flower-like face staring up at him.
‘I’m so very, very sorry,’ his lips said. ‘I wish there was something I could say.’
‘You must sit down now.’
Abruptly the shadows left her expression as Sally guided him towards a bench set against the hospital wall. ‘Is it my imagination, David, or can you smell the bluebells? They’ll be out soon, down in that little wood.’
‘You’ve got so thin.’ Facing each other, he touched the curve of her cheek gently with a finger. ‘Being thin shows your dimples up more. Before, they were hidden.’
‘Fat-chops,’ she said. ‘That was what my father used to call me.’
‘He’s okay?’
‘Lives from one news bulletin to another,’ Sally said, then she told him about John’s baby and her mother’s obsession with it. ‘I think I might find a room to rent somewhere near the factory. I think it’s time I left home.’ She stared away from him for a moment. ‘Since Lee died I don’t feel I belong at home somehow.’
‘Why?’
‘Not the person I am now.’ She moved round on the bench again. ‘And you, David? Where do you go from here? Your war is over, thank God. They can’t hurt you any more.’ She looked down at the flagstones, obviously searching for the right words, then saying them with difficulty: ‘You won’t always be like this, David. The sister told me you stand more than a good chance of getting your voice back, and your arm is getting stronger every day.’
Her flat little voice with the emphasis on the wrong vowels tailed away as she saw the hopeless despair on his face. The scars of his terrible injuries were deep inside him, she knew that, and yet he was trying to smile at her, sitting there in the pale May sunshine, pretending that he was going to be okay. For a moment Sally closed her eyes, seeing him again striding down the road towards the tennis club, his racket under his arm, a tall, lanky boy in white flannels with a cravat tucked into the open neck of his white Fred Perry shirt.
‘David?’ she whispered suddenly. ‘May I come and see you again? May I come and see you wherever you are?’ She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve always been your friend, so may I go on being just that? Maybe your best friend?’
‘Because you pity me?’
He opened his dark eyes wide as she rounded on him.
‘Pity you? You talk to me about pity, David Turner?’ Sally’s face flushed. ‘Shall I tell you what I think about pity? I hate pity! I spit on pity! To pity someone you respect is to insult them!’ Her voice cracked, out of control. ‘All my life I’ve had to put up with pity, and I can tell you now you’ll be getting none of it from me!’
‘And you respect me?’
‘I … oh, David, at this moment I respect you and like you, and I’ve got to say this now or never … at this moment I love you, and it has nothing at all to do with feeling sorry for you. So now you know.’
He sat there, unmoving, a quiet inarticulate young man who sho
uld have been at the peak of his manhood. His head, tilted upwards by the bandage, had a touching nobility about it. He sat there for a long time, then in a sudden rush of emotion put his good arm about her and pulled her to face him.
‘Sally? I should have told you this a long time ago, but like a fool I kept silent. One day I’ll tell you about the bravest girl I’ve ever known who told me in a Belgian hayloft what a fool I’d been not to speak out.’
He laid his lips against her cheek then drew away from her.
‘I’ve always loved you, Sally. Since I saw you in that awful school cap, flattened like a bean-bag, I’ve always wanted and loved you.’ His mouth trembled. ‘When I’m better – not until I know I’m going to be better – would you … could you consider marrying me? In a long time, when you’ve got over … and I’ve come to terms with the way things are going to be … Could you, Sally?’ He shivered, and at once she stood up, helping him to his feet.
‘I’m not much cop,’ he mouthed, looking down at her as the shyness she remembered so well clouded his eyes. ‘Not at the moment, but I’ve come through before and I’ll come through again.’ He touched the bandage round his throat. ‘Once this is off I’ll look quite presentable, and they say my face will improve.’ He grinned, stared down and shuffled his feet. ‘At least old ladies won’t faint when they see me in the street.’
‘And you’ll get your voice back.’ Sally nodded with conviction. ‘But in the meantime it makes, as my mother would say, not an ’aporth of difference.’
‘Think about it, Sally. Write and tell me if you can’t bear the thought. But I couldn’t let you go without asking. I put up a black once, and I wasn’t going to risk losing you again.’
There was a soothing silence inside her. In a strange way Sally knew that David asking her to marry him was merely an echo of what should have been said a long time ago.
‘David,’ she whispered. ‘You have made me feel … it means a lot to me that you should want me. I was very silly that time when I ran away and left you outside our house. I was young and silly and treated you badly. I should have known, but the war hadn’t touched me then, not really.’ She took his arm. ‘But a lot has happened since then. Lee helped me to grow up. He made me into the person I am now.’
‘And the person you are now will think about marrying me?’
Standing on tiptoe Sally reached up and kissed him, letting her lips rest sweetly on his own, feeling him tremble before she drew away.
‘Oh, God, I love you so much,’ his mouth said.
‘I’ll come again. Next week,’ she whispered. ‘But I know now what my answer will be.’
She gave him her answer as they walked together back down the terrace and when they parted they kissed again. Her heart was full as she watched him go from her, tall and straight and with a little of his terrible suffering already eradicated from his young-old face.
*
Sally was walking from the tram down the long street to the factory the next morning when the line of trucks came towards her.
The Americans had been three weeks at sea; they were exhausted and unshaven, and their first glimpse of England did nothing to raise their flagging spirits.
‘Even the sky looks smaller,’ one of them grumbled, as his truck bumped along the winding street. ‘And get that cop there. He’s ninety if he’s a day.’
Then he caught sight of Sally, hurrying along the pavement, her bright face glowing from the early morning wind, her dark hair curling over her red bobble cap.
‘Hi, honey!’ The American whistled and grinned, then shrugged his shoulders as she walked straight by without even turning her head.
‘Oh, boy, that’s sure one icy lady!’ he yelled out. ‘Do you figure they all come gift-wrapped like that? D’you reckon her momma’s told her not to talk to Yanks?’
They all looked like Lee, Sally told herself as she walked along. All alive with the sheer joy of just being. Far from home, with photographs of their families in their packs, all eager to join in a war that was none of their doing.
Some day they would take part in the invasion of the Continent; her father said so. There would be a massive all-out effort and Hitler would be shown once and for all that his dreams of conquering this little island had been doomed to failure from the beginning.
But Lee’s war was over. His war had ended before it had begun. Stopping suddenly and turning round, Sally saw the last of the trucks trundling away over the brow of the hill. Standing there with her scarf blowing out behind her and the wind stinging her eyes to tears, she remembered the habit Lee had of throwing his head back when he laughed, as if he were coming apart at the seams. His gaiety, his jaunty way of walking with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. The drawl in his voice that she could sense without hearing, and the kindness of him, the simple acceptance of her love, his exuberance, his wanting to be, to do, and the way he would fling out his arms as if he would embrace the whole world.
Finally the trucks were gone from sight. The convoy disappeared. Sally turned and hurried on her way.
The American had been hers for such a short time, but she would remember him for ever. David would understand. Maybe some day when they were married David would tell her about the Belgian girl who was the bravest girl he had ever known, and she would want him to remember her too.
The war had left deep shadows on both their lives, but together they would face whatever the future held in store.
‘Oh, David,’ she whispered, then began to run, the wooden soles of her utility shoes tapping the pavement with a clattering noise she did not hear.
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Epub ISBN 9781448107902
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First published 1982 by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
©Marie Joseph 1982
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