Sunday 13th November
I went to church in the camp this evening and when I got to the gate Tom was waiting for me. I couldn’t resist a glance behind me in case someone from the convent was watching. Sister M-P always seems to be around and sometimes I think she’s spying on me. Perhaps Reverend Mother has told her to watch me. I don’t know, anyway she wasn’t there to see me go or to see who met me. Anyhow, I’d got permission from Sister Eloise to go. She thinks I’m next best thing to a heathen, so she’s quite keen for me to attend service at the camp, even if it is a Protestant one. I like working for Sister Eloise. She stands no nonsense, but she’s kind and generous in her outlook, and though she is often brisk with us she never is with the patients and always has them at heart. She’s taught me a lot even though my French is still so bad.
Tom and I walked to the tent Mr Kingston has turned into his church. It is lovely inside, with a little altar draped in a white cloth and candles in brass sticks. I think they are his own and they go with him wherever he goes. He isn’t always at the camp, he told me he sometimes goes up to the front and has even held services in a dugout. We all sit on benches and chairs he has taken from all over the camp.
After the service very few leave, we all sit around and talk. Tom and I sit together. There is so much to know about him. He hasn’t had an easy life, brought up in an orphanage. He tells me about life in London, and I tell him about Charlton Ambrose. He’s heard a bit about it from Harry, of course. I haven’t told him about Dad, don’t suppose I ever will, except he’s so easy to talk to. Sometimes it feels like I’ve known him all my life. So, maybe, one day.
I don’t think Mr Kingston has talked to Reverend Mother, or I am sure I’d be sent straight back to the camp after the service. It is wonderful to be outside the convent for a few hours each week, especially as Sarah and I haven’t been to the village for some time. There are days when the walls seem to close around me, hemming me in. Now I have Sundays to look forward to.
13
On Sunday evening Molly walked through the gate towards the convalescent camp. It was already an accepted thing that she should go to the evening service there whenever her duties permitted it, and unless there was a panic on, Sister Eloise made no problem in giving her the time.
Tom was waiting for her the other side of the convent wall, and together they walked through the camp to the tent Robert Kingston had converted into his church. At first they walked in silence, an unaccustomed awkwardness between them. Both knew that something between them had changed after the moment in the garden and their exchange in the cold air of the cemetery, but neither could put into words exactly what.
Their friendship, one brought about through the chance of war, had grown with their mutual concern for Harry. It might have developed quite differently or not at all, Molly had thought as she lay in bed, her mind whirling in the darkness, if Reverend Mother hadn’t issued her prohibition. She might never have thought of Tom Carter as anything more than an injured young man who needed a little comfort after the death of his friend, but because the nun had forbidden them to meet, Molly had come to realise how much she wanted the friendship to grow, to develop… into what? Tom was shy. He would never have suggested that they defy Reverend Mother. It was not up to her, Molly knew, to take the initiative, but she was glad she had when she suggested they meet at church. After all, she told herself, it is the way we’d be allowed to meet at home.
As she came through the gate and Tom had turned and seen her, his face had broken into his rare and vivid smile, lighting his dark eyes, their usual weariness dropping away and Molly found herself matching his smile with one of her own. They greeted each other but did not touch. There was no shaking hands or taking of arms, their smiles were enough, and they turned and walked side by side to the church.
“How’s your arm?” Molly said at last to break the silence. “You look better, more colour in your face.”
“Much better, thank you, Nurse,” Tom replied with a grin, and the ice was broken.
So it began. Each Sunday they met at the gate and strolled over to the church, and after the service when, encouraged by the padre, several of the men stayed to chat, Tom and Molly stayed as well, sitting together, talking. Robert Kingston watched their friendship growing but made no comment. Life for young men such as Tom was likely to be short, and the padre thought that there was no harm in the young couple getting to know each other, chaperoned as they were by himself and a group of others. It was all perfectly proper. If he had known of Reverend Mother’s feelings on the subject he might have thought otherwise, but he did not.
When later they returned to the convent, they walked together as far as the gate in the wall, and then Molly went through and straight up to her room, Tom waiting a few moments before following her and going up to the restoration ward; both were uncomfortable with this small deceit, but neither wanted to draw attention to the their meeting at church.
Molly found herself living for Sunday evenings. She worked long, hard hours in the ward, her experience and competence growing daily, but she found that Tom was in the back of her mind all the time, and often slipped to the forefront if she were working on a routine job that did not require her full attention. She stored up small incidents, little things that might make him laugh, like Sister Marie-Paul seeing a mouse, leaping onto a chair and dropping the bed pan she was carrying, and the time when a bird flew in through the door and the nuns chased it flapping round the ward, to raucous encouragement from the men. Molly loved to hear him laugh, to see the worried look drop from his face as she told him these things in their precious time together on a Sunday evening, and the knowledge that he was thinking of her too, warmed her as she dealt with the chilly bleakness of suppurating wounds, amputations and death.
At the end of each day she went, exhausted upstairs, but before she fell into her bed, she sat down with her journal and recorded both her thoughts and the happenings of the day. Their tiny room with its stone walls was always cold, but Molly would take the blanket off the bed and drape it round her shoulders as she wrote. Even if she made only a one-sentence entry, she tried to write something every day, but more often than not she wrote several pages before she went to bed. It was a form of release to pour out her heart in her diary, for though she could talk to Sarah about their nursing cares, she could not mention Tom. For a start, Sarah would not approve of their meetings on a Sunday in direct defiance of Reverend Mother—Sarah greatly revered Reverend Mother—but apart from that, Molly’s awakening feelings were too private, too precious to share with anyone else.
Sarah always came up later than Molly, as she never went to bed these days without a visit to the chapel first.
“How can you pray for half an hour?” Molly asked one evening when she came to their room even later than usual.
Sarah considered her question seriously. “It’s not prayer, exactly,” she said, “I do pray, of course, but mostly I just sit there and think over the events of the day and try to come to terms with some of the things that have happened. It’s very peaceful in there, and when I come out I feel that I’ve handed my problems over to God and He knows what to do about them.”
Molly still had grave reservations about God. He seemed to her to be entirely irrelevant to what was happening in the war-torn world about them, but she could see that her time in the chapel was important to Sarah, and so she said no more.
It was two Sundays later that they paused outside the gate. Tom had tucked Molly’s arm through his as they walked the short distance in the dark from the camp to the convent, and Molly could feel the warmth of his body against her own in the chill of the evening. Just before they reached the gate Tom stopped and pulling Molly aside from the path turned her towards him. Her face was a pale oval in the darkness, turned up to him half-expectantly, and he slipped his good arm round her, drawing her against him. He looked down into her face and though he could not see her expression in the dark, she made no move to pull away. As his arm tig
htened round her, her pale face under its Sunday hat tilted towards him and he felt her arms slide up and round his neck. He lowered his head and very gently kissed first her forehead and then her lips. For a moment her lips were cool and dry against his own, then to his delight they parted and she returned his kiss. After a moment they drew apart, a little breathless.
“Molly?” Tom whispered, wonder in his voice.
“I’m here, Tom,” she answered softly.
“You didn’t mind?”
“No, I wanted you to.” Molly stifled a laugh and added, “I shouldn’t say that, should I?”
“Why not if it’s true? Is it true, Molly?”
For answer Molly pulled his head down, and this time she kissed him first.
They stood together, their world contained in their embrace. Even as they stood there, each held close to the other, Molly thought, I’ve held him in my arms before, but it felt nothing like this.
“I’ve never walked out with anyone, Molly,” Tom told her, “you’re my first girl… if you’ll be my girl?”
She smiled up at him in the darkness and whispered, “Oh yes, please, Tom.”
She believed what he said. She knew he was shy, not the sort to have been consorting with girls like some of the other lads. She had never walked out with anyone either. This was the first man she had ever allowed near her except her father, and with him it wasn’t a question of allowing him. She wondered again, if she could ever tell Tom about that, but doubted that she could. For the moment that didn’t matter; for now it was enough to feel his arms around her, to feel protected and safe. Safe within the circle of his arms she felt she would never need to feel afraid of her father, or anyone, again, and she gave herself over to the new and wonderful sensations that were sweeping through her body as he kissed her hard and long.
This time when they drew apart he said, “I love you, Molly Day.”
Molly didn’t answer, simply laid her head on his chest, nestling against him like a child, not wanting the moment to end. The wonderful moment was short-lived; from the other side of the wall there was noise, raised voices, and the spell was broken. Reluctantly Tom released her and Molly said urgently, “We must go back. Something’s happening.”
She hurried to the gate and saw at once that more wounded were arriving. Men were being led round from the front of the building and brought into the wards at the back.
“Looks like I’m needed,” she said briefly over her shoulder and without a backward glance headed directly to ward one, where Sister Eloise handed her an apron to cover her church clothes and a clean cap to replace her hat and the work began.
Molly was up most of the night helping with the influx of men. “How will we fit all these in?” she asked Sister Marie-Paul as they tried to sort the waiting men out.
“Those go up to restoration,” Sister Marie-Paul nodded over Molly’s shoulder. Molly glanced round and saw six of their patients, almost all of those who were able to move, collecting their few possessions and leaving the ward. Two novices were hard at work stripping and making up the beds with fresh sheets.
Used to be my job, Molly thought, but she knew that Sister Eloise needed her for the nursing side of things now, and she turned back to look at their next patient. As she helped strip and wash the man Pierre had lifted up on to the examination table, peeling away the filthy bandage that covered a jagged wound in his shoulder, her thoughts were concentrated on the job in hand and it was only later when she and Sarah were once more creeping into their beds for a few hours’ sleep, that she thought what the consequences of clearing the ward might be for Tom. They would need space for the men who had moved into restoration. Almost certainly Tom would have been sent to the convalescent camp. She felt suddenly cold. Once he was in the camp it would not be long before he was sent back to his regiment. Everyone knew of the huge losses suffered during the fighting at Loos in September, and though the onset of winter had halted any major confrontation with the Germans and there was a dreadful stalemate in the trenches, it was also common knowledge that the British army was desperate to bring its number up to strength. Private Thomas Carter of the 1st Belshires would be sent back to the lines the moment he was considered fit for duty.
The time he spent in the restoration ward had worked wonders. Tom’s gaunt face had filled out a little, his skin no longer stretched, a pale shade of parchment over his cheek bones, but had regained its normal, healthy colour. His arm had regained much of its movement and the film of constant pain no longer covered his eyes. He would probably spend only a comparatively short time in the camp.
Molly knew it had to come. They had talked of it, but only as a distant prospect. Now, she felt, it was about to become a reality.
This very evening, Molly thought, Tom had told her he loved her. She had not responded, not in words at least. She had not reassured him with a declaration of her own. Why not, she wondered? She had never been in love before, had no experience with men at all, but as the prospect of losing Tom back to the trenches stared her in the face she finally accepted what she had known for some time, that she loved him and couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. How she wished now that she had told him so. He had been braver than she, telling her of his love without being sure she returned it. She lay in bed in an agony of despair. She wouldn’t be able to see him again until Sunday, but suppose they had moved him on before then? Suppose they decided that he was fit to go and she never saw him again? He might be killed and she would never know.
I must see him, she thought. I’ll go over to the camp. We’ve done it before.
So they had, but always she and Sarah together and not recently. She would not be permitted to go on her own, and what reason could she give for wanting to? If she asked permission it was unlikely to be granted as Mother would know that Tom was now in the camp, and if she risked going without asking she might find she was banned from going on a Sunday. Since she had begun her meetings with Tom, she’d had the feeling she was being watched by the nuns. Was it her imagination, or was Sister Marie-Paul whispering about her to Sister Eloise, or worse still Reverend Mother? Result of an uneasy conscience, Molly told herself firmly. After all, she had no evidence that they were keeping watch on her, but what little time off duty she had enjoyed before had been cut to a minimum. Necessity, Sister Eloise called it when she regretted on several occasions, that Molly and Sarah would not be able to have their free time to go to the village. How could she get a message to him? Molly drifted off to sleep at last and when she awoke the answer seemed obvious. Perfectly simple. She would write to him and post the letter to the camp. Soldiers received mail all the time; it was important for morale and the service was good. Yet even as this solution came to her she had to reject it. First, because mail for the troops had to be sent to a special address and she didn’t know what it was, and, second, there was no way for her to get the letter posted. Molly had not been in the habit of writing letters, but Sarah posted hers when they went down to the village. As they hadn’t been able to go recently Molly knew Sarah’s letters had been entrusted to one of the lay workers who came in every day, but Molly knew she couldn’t entrust her with a letter addressed to a soldier, it might go straight back to Reverend Mother. She’d have to wait until Sunday, six whole days of not knowing.
Pale with dark smudges under her eyes from lack of sleep, Molly prepared for another day. The creeping grey dawn was cold, as she and Sarah dressed quickly, neither wanting to linger over their chilly ablutions.
“Do you think they sent everyone from restoration over to the camp last night?” Molly, who was brushing her hair, tried to make her question sound casual.
Sarah looked at her quizzically. “Most of them I should think, why?”
“I was just wondering,” Molly sounded unconvincing even to her own ears. She watched Sarah in the mirror, whilst steadily brushing her hair. “We sent six up to restoration from our ward, and other wards must have had to do the same.”
“We sent three,”
Sarah said. “I suppose they’d have to send some across anyway.” She looked across at Molly and said, “Anyone in particular?”
“Anyone in particular what?”
“Molly, you’ve been miles away the past couple of weeks. I haven’t been able to get near you, and,” she added with a sudden smile, “so much church on a Sunday evening? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Molly’s answer came a little too quickly. Sarah noticed the colour creeping into her friend’s face, but she didn’t push her. She was sure that Molly had somehow got herself involved with one of the patients, one who must have already moved on from her ward, so she simply said, “I’ll try and find out how many were sent across… but a name would help.”
There was a pause, and then Molly said softly “Tom Carter, Harry Cook’s friend.”
“Can’t you ask yourself?” suggested Sarah. “Sister Marie-Paul knows most things.” It was from Sister Marie-Paul that Sarah had already had a hint about Molly and a patient.
“She is your friend,” Sister Marie-Paul’s little eyes had lit up with the whiff of scandal. “I thought you should know. To be interested in a patient is not comme il faut.” Unknowingly, she echoed the words of Reverend Mother, and Sister Bernadette. Nothing between patient and nurse was comme il faut Sarah thought wryly, yet surely something warmer than a brisk and clinical relationship which the nuns seemed to advocate must help with the healing. All she had said was, “You clearly know more than I do, Sister.”
A little disappointed, Sister Marie-Paul had gone on her way. Remembering this incident, Sarah said now, “No, on second thoughts, better not. I think you should watch what you say to Sister Marie-Paul. She’s, well, I’m not sure I trust her.”
The Lost Soldier Page 20
