As Time Goes By

by Annie Groves

  ‘Well, I thought he did, but he says in his letter that he’s got leave over Christmas and he wants us to get together.’

  ‘He won’t expect you to agree if it isn’t what you want to do yourself.’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem,’ Hazel said ruefully. ‘It is what I want, but … well, the truth is that I’m scared, Sam.’

  ‘Of Russell?’ Sam felt slightly put out and rather protective of her brother. ‘Hazel, that’s the last thing Russ would want.’

  ‘It isn’t Russell who scares me, Sam, it’s way he makes me feel.’ Hazel dipped her head and said in a low voice, ‘I think I’m falling for him, Sam.’

  Sam swallowed uncomfortably. She felt scared sometimes too by the way Sergeant Everton made her feel, but she wasn’t falling for him!

  Determinedly Sam wrenched her thoughts away from the sergeant and told Hazel, ‘You’ll have to remind Russ that you want to take things slowly.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hazel agreed. ‘The thing is, though, that there is a part of me that doesn’t want to take things slowly at all, or be sensible one little bit, and I know that I’ve got to refuse to give in to it. For Russell’s sake as much as my own.’

  ‘Have you got that pump fixed yet?’

  ‘No, Sarge.’

  Sam listened idly to the conversation between the men who were standing beside the shored-up shaft several yards away from her, enviously admiring the motorcycle belonging to one of the team. She was keeping away from the shaft deliberately, knowing the effect standing too close to it was likely to have on her. Her fear of being trapped underground was one she doubted she would ever be able to overcome.

  She and the major had arrived at the bomb site over half an hour ago, and the major hadn’t been too pleased to learn that far from having excavated around the bomb enough for the captain to defuse it, the shaft was now flooded, and the pump that should have been emptying it wasn’t working.

  ‘Why the devil haven’t you got another pump working on this, Sergeant Everton?’ The major’s voice was sharp with irritation and impatience.

  Sam knew perfectly well why the major was in such a vile mood. The news had been on his desk this morning of a defusing operation that had gone fatally wrong, killing not just the officer in charge but seven of that section’s men as well.

  The officer had been twenty-two and newly attached to the section. Sam had met him, a good-looking young man with a cheery insouciance.

  As she had driven the major out of the barracks one of their trucks was being driven in, the wooden coffins clearly visible in the back of it. Sam had been working for the major long enough now to have heard the word-of-mouth stories about six-foot broad-shouldered men ending up in coffins so light a child could have carried them, whilst shorter thinner men were in coffins that took four men to lift.

  ‘Fill ’em with sand, you see, when they can’t find all the body parts,’ the corporal had told her matter-of-factly. ‘Nail ’em down as well so that the families don’t get to see what’s inside …’

  ‘That’s dreadful!’ Sam had exclaimed.

  The corporal had shrugged. ‘What else can they do? There ain’t much left of a person when they get it wrong when they’re standing right next to a thousand pounds of German bomb. Working here in Liverpool, I was, during the May blitz, along with the sarge. Things we saw then. There was this one house, a woman and two kiddies in it – leastways that’s what the neighbours told us. Couldn’t find nothing, we couldn’t, excepting one of the kiddies’ feet … Only time I’ve ever seen anything get to the sergeant.’

  ‘Three Section had an A1 to deal with last night, sir, and they were a pump short,’ Sam could hear the sergeant answering the major now in an expressionless voice that Sam decoded as meaning that the pump had been blown up along with the men.

  When the major didn’t say anything, the sergeant turned his attention back to the excavation calling down, ‘Come up then, Tweedey, and I’ll go down and have a look at it.’

  Under different circumstances she would have been itching for a go on the motorcycle, Sam admitted. Funny how much her priorities had changed just lately, especially since she had been driving the major. That change, she knew, had its roots in the hostility that existed between her and Sergeant Everton. No one had ever made her feel like this before, and when she was around him she felt on edge and wary, and yet at the same time something about his presence made everything seem sharper and more intense, more challenging and yes, more exciting. So much so that she knew that whilst a part of her hoped she wouldn’t see him, another part of her hoped that she would.

  Sam had no idea what to make of these extraordinary and contradictory feelings, and they weren’t something she felt she could discuss with anyone else, especially in view of the proprietary stance Lynsey had taken about him. She didn’t even want to have to think about her feelings, never mind acknowledge them or talk about them, she admitted. There were, though, times like right now when she had no choice, when her heart thudded and ached, and the woman she was now, emerging from the chrysalis of the girl she had been, grew impatient with that girl.

  Stuart Tweedey, his face streaked with mud, had hauled himself out of the shaft, allowing the sergeant to take his place. Sam couldn’t help giving a small shudder as she watched him lower himself into its depths. The major was signalling that he was ready to leave but Sam didn’t really want to go – not yet; not until she had seen the sergeant’s seal-black head as he pulled himself out of the diggings.

  What kind of silliness was this? She started to walk towards the Bentley, refusing to admit how relieved she felt when she heard the now familiar sound of the pump starting up, telling her that the sergeant had succeeded in his task.

  She opened the door of the car for the major, who was just on the point of getting in when Stuart Tweedey called out anxiously, ‘It’s the sergeant. He’s bin hurt and he’s bleeding real bad.’

  Immediately the major turned back, striding over to the diggings, calling back over his shoulder, ‘Grey, bring that first-aid pack out of the car boot, will you, as fast as you like.’

  When Sam reached the huddle of men, the sergeant was slumped against a barrel, his face paper white, whilst blood soaked through the sleeve of his shirt.

  Her heart was pounding as heavily and unsteadily as though his injury somehow affected her personally.

  ‘It’s nothing much, just a bit of a scratch,’ he was saying irritably, ‘not a ruddy artery.’

  Maybe not, but he was in evident pain. Sam realised that the waiting men were expecting her to deal with the injury. She had had first-aid training and normally would almost have enjoyed a chance to show off her prowess, but on this occasion she couldn’t help wishing that there was someone else who could attend to the injury.

  But there wasn’t and the major was looking at her as though he wondered what was holding her back.

  She took a deep breath and stepped up to the sergeant, and then stopped. She was too close to him. She could smell the scent of his skin and his hair, see the faint sheen of pain-driven perspiration above his upper lip, see the dark shadowing along his jaw where he shaved.

  What was this? She didn’t know, but she did know that it was dangerous. Stop it … stop it, she warned herself.

  Bending down, she opened the first-aid pack and removed a pair of scissors.

  ‘You’ll have to hold out your arm,’ she told the sergeant without looking at him. ‘I’ll need to cut open the sleeve of your shirt.’

  He’d made his arm rigid as he extended it, but Sam knew from her training that that wasn’t enough and that she had to support the limb whilst she cut the fabric.

  Reluctantly she moved closer to him, sliding her hand beneath his wrist. Her pulse rate was all over the place, skipping beats and then suddenly thudding. She started to cut open his shirt sleeve, laying bare the flesh beneath. His flesh had a slightly olive tone to it and still carried the fading warmth of a summer suntan. She could see beneath his skin th
e outline of the muscles he had made rigid, corded and strong. Something alien was happening inside her own body, some kind of weakening softness that made her tremble so much that the scissors slipped against his arm, raising a tiny pinpoint of blood. Automatically Sam looked up at him, her breath locking in her throat when she saw that he was looking back at her, trapping her in the web of his concentrated metallic gaze. She felt magnetised by it, unable to drag herself free, unable to calm that thudding race of her heartbeat and almost unable to breathe. And then thankfully he turned his head towards the other men, demanding tersely, ‘Anyone got a cigarette?’

  Sam waited until he had the lit Woodbine in his hand and she had seen the rise and fall of his chest as he took a deep drag from it before continuing.

  She had almost reached the site of the injury when he threw the cigarette down unfinished, grinding it out beneath his heel as told her so quietly that no one else could hear, ‘Disappointed that you didn’t get the chance to spear them scissors through my heart, are you?’

  ‘No.’ Her denial was immediate and vehement, her hand jerking against his flesh as she pulled back the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a deep gash. Just looking at it made her feel slightly sick and dizzy. She was aware that his heartbeat too had picked up and that he was forcing his own breathing to appear even and unchanged.

  The ragged edges of the wound gaped, the blood flow slower now, and Sam’s heart thudded with a new anxiety.

  ‘It’s quite a deep cut, sir,’ she told the major, ‘and I’d rather not bandage it until it’s been properly cleaned.’

  The major frowned as he took a close look at the sergeant’s arm. ‘You’re right. Get in the car, sergeant,’ he instructed. ‘We’ll take you back to the barracks so that a medic can take a look at you.’

  Sam was appalled. The last thing she’d expected when she had told the major that the sergeant needed to have the wound cleaned was that she would end up driving him back to the barracks. The last thing she wanted was the intimacy of having him in the car. She gave a small shiver. She felt as though her nerve endings had had their protective covering ripped off, leaving her raw and far too vulnerable.

  ‘Look, sir …’ she could hear the sergeant beginning and she knew that he was going to refuse to go with them, but the major wouldn’t let him finish.

  ‘That’s an order sergeant,’ he told him firmly.

  Five minutes later, with the sergeant sitting in the front of the Bentley next to her, Sam was driving away from the bomb site.

  The major always sat in the back, using the car as an extension to his office. It was his habit to read his reports there, punctuating this with occasional grunts denoting either approval or disgust, and this was what he was doing now, his head bent over the papers he was holding, so that Sam felt almost as though she was alone in the car with the sergeant. She could feel the silence stretching between them as though it was a piece of rope slowly being tightened, and it was with great relief that she turned into Deysbrook Road and could see the entrance to the barracks ahead of her.

  She had just slowed down to turn in when the major looked up from the papers he had been studying and announced, ‘I’ve got a meeting at West Derby House at thirteen hundred hours, Grey. Going there with Lieutenant-Colonel Hartley in his staff car, so you may as well take your break now.’ He paused and then added, ‘In fact, you can escort the sergeant here to the first-aid station, to make sure he gets there. And that’s another order, Sergeant.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch.’

  They were on their own, sitting in the Bentley that Sam had just brought to a halt, having dropped the major off outside the officers’ mess, and now the sergeant’s angry words confirmed what Sam had already guessed.

  For the first time in her life she adopted the nonconfrontational tactics she had seen her mother use to good effect during moment of domestic tension, and responded calmly, ‘You’re welcome. I owed you a favour for recommending me to the major.’

  The sergeant, it seemed, was not as easily appeased as her father and her brother.

  ‘This is a favour?’ he demanded angrily. ‘I’ve left ten men back there, with a thousand-pound bomb, a dodgy pump, and a captain who’s still wet behind the ears.’

  ‘I can see that you take your responsibilities to others very seriously,’ Sam allowed, her normal outspokenness reviving as she added trenchantly, ‘Shame that you don’t take your responsibilities to yourself just as seriously. Do you want to walk over to the first-aid post, or …?’

  ‘Or what? You’ll carry me?’

  What on earth was her face burning for? And why for that split second had she had a mental image of his bare arm and her own awareness of the maleness of it and of him?

  ‘You’ve lost a fair amount of blood,’ she reminded him, pushing the image away, ‘even if you are trying to pretend that you haven’t. I could drive you there.’

  ‘No, thanks, and what do you mean, my responsibilities to myself? Trust a woman to make a fuss over nothing. It’s not as though I’ve cut an artery, after all.’

  ‘No,’ Sam agreed, ‘if you’d done that you’d be dead by now. Still, at least that would have been a quick death, unlike the one you’ll have if that cut gets infected and turns gangrenous.’ Her stomach heaved and then clenched with horror whilst she fought not to let her voice wobble.

  ‘And you’d know a lot about that, would you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I would,’ she told him truthfully. ‘A friend of my brother’s died from septicaemia. He cut his leg on a rusty scythe in his grandfather’s garden. It was only a small cut, nothing much at all, but then his leg started to swell up. They tried to save him. They amputated his leg but it was too late and he died.’ Sam spoke as briskly as she could, not wanting to remember the horror she had felt when the boys had talked about how Terry had died.

  ‘I’ll drive you over,’ she told him.

  He turned his head and looked at her, turned a smoky dark grey-eyed gaze on her that for some reason cause her heart to flip over. She half expected him to refuse to let her, and held her breath in anticipation of an argument.

  ‘If you must,’ he told her, giving in with a small shrug.

  The medical unit was on the far side of the barracks, set apart from the other buildings. Sam parked the Bentley outside it and switched off the engine.

  ‘Not coming in with me?’ The laconic question caught Sam off guard.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d want to make sure I see the doc, seeing as you seem to be taking personal responsibility for me avoiding death by gangrene,’ he told her.

  ‘It isn’t something to joke about,’ Sam insisted. Perhaps she should go with him just in case the major asked her to report back to him on the sergeant’s condition.

  ‘You looked as sick as a cat earlier at the site. What was up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she denied.

  ‘Liar. I’ve bin watching you: you don’t like getting too close to the diggings. Why?’

  ‘It isn’t any of your business.’

  ‘Everything that goes on around those bombs is my business, and if you were to go and do summat daft, like falling into one of them—’

  ‘No!’ Her sharp cry of panic had betrayed her, tipping her into the trap he had set for her, Sam realised as she saw the look in his eyes. ‘Yes, all right,’ she admitted angrily. ‘I am scared silly that I might fall in. Go on, laugh if you want to.’

  ‘I’m not laughing. What happened? And don’t tell me nothing. Something must have done.’

  He was using his free hand to remove his cigarettes from his pocket. He took two and lit them both, passing one over to her. Sam was too astonished to refuse it. She inhaled and then blew out the smoke, feeling it calm her nerves. He wasn’t going to let the matter drop until he had got the truth out of her, so she might as well tell him, she acknowledged.

  ‘I got trapped in a tunnel my brother and his pals had dug when I was a kid. It’s stupid of me,
I know, but now I can’t …’ Her voice was shaking again. She took another deep drag on the cigarette. ‘I still have nightmares about it.’

  ‘We all have those.’

  Sam looked at him uncertainly. She couldn’t imagine him being vulnerable in any way, never mind admitting it.

  ‘Dunkirk,’ he told her as though he had read her mind. ‘The first boat I was in got hit and turned turtle. I thought I was going to drown.’

  They looked at one another, and it was Sam who had to look away first. She opened the driver’s door and got out of the car, leaving the sergeant to do the same, then she locked it. Sam was determined not to look at him again, but somehow or other she found that she was.

  He threw down his cigarette and crushed it out with his foot, straightening up to lounge against the side of the car.

  Putting out her own cigarette Sam went towards him. As she reached him, to her shock he swayed and lurched forward. Immediately she went to support him.

  He must have lost more blood than he’d admitted to, Sam decided worriedly when he sagged against her as they walked the short distance from the car to the Medical Unit.

  ‘Here, let me help you.’ She put her hand under his elbow on his uninjured arm. ‘Mind the step.’

  ‘What’s all this then?’ the nurse of duty asked briskly.

  ‘Major Thomas asked me to bring Sergeant Everton over. He cut his arm whilst he was working on a pump,’ Sam explained.

  ‘Hmm, let’s have a look.’

  Sam saw the sergeant’s mouth tighten slightly as the nurse briskly removed the bandage from his arm.

  ‘Not very pretty, is it, but you’ll live. I’ll clean it up for you so that the doctor can get a proper look at it. This way.’

  There was no real reason for her to stay and wait for him, but nevertheless Sam felt honour-bound to do so. It had shocked her when he had leaned on her. Somehow he just wasn’t the sort of man she had expected to see give in to any kind of weakness, especially not in front of her.