As Time Goes By

by Annie Groves

  What he was saying was so tempting, and when he wrapped his arms around her she allowed herself to imagine that his suggestion was possible, but whilst he could protect her from Daisy’s gossip, and they could run away from it, he couldn’t protect her from her own conscience, and she certainly could not run away from that.

  ‘It isn’t just Daisy and what folk would say,’ she admitted.

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It’s Ronnie.’ She felt his arms tighten round her. ‘He’s not even cold in his grave yet, and it would not be right me and you … I’d feel like I was behaving like one of them women what goes wi’ other men behind their husband’s backs.’

  ‘You said you loved me.’

  ‘I know … and … and I do … but that doesn’t make it right. I may not be able to stop meself from loving you but I can stop meself from … from being with you and being disrespectful to Ronnie.’

  ‘Sally …’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  But she knew that sooner rather than later they would have to talk about the future, Sally admitted later in the day when Alex had gone out to do his house calls.

  She had just put both boys down for their afternoon nap when Doris arrived at the back door.

  ‘You’re looking a bit pale and peaky,’ she announced as she sat down at the kitchen table and Sally poured her a cup of tea. ‘What’s to do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘From the look of you it seems to me like it’s the kind of nothing that means an awful lot of “something”. I’m not daft, Sally. Summat’s bothering you. For all the attention you’ve bin paying to wot I’ve bin saying these last ten minutes I could have bin talking Chinese. It’s you and the doctor, isn’t it? Summat’s happened.’

  ‘No! Yes,’ Sally admitted miserably, knowing that her red face was giving her away.

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I could see which way the wind was blowing with him, and that he was getting sweet on you. And summat tells me that you’re every bit as struck on him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally admitted wretchedly. ‘I should never have come here, putting temptation in front of both of us, but I didn’t realise then … I never meant anything to happen, Doris, I promise I didn’t, no matter what anyone else might have to say. I didn’t have a thought in me head of anything happening between me and Alex when I moved in here.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t, and neither did the doctor, I’ll be bound, but things have a way of happening when there’s strong feelings involved and there’s a war on,’ Doris assured her comfortingly.

  Sally wasn’t ready to be comforted, though. ‘It’s all very well for you to say that, Doris, but there’s others that won’t see it that way,’ she retorted miserably.

  ‘Come on, let’s get that kettle on and have a fresh cup of tea, and then we’ll have a talk about it,’ Doris suggested.

  Obediently Sally filled the kettle, and then burst out unhappily, ‘I feel that ashamed, Doris. I’ve let my Ronnie down good and proper, and him dead no more than a few weeks.’

  Instead of agreeing with her, Doris shook her head. ‘Here, let me make that tea; you go and sit down,’ she insisted.

  ‘And it isn’t any good me telling meself that I didn’t want it to happen or trying to lay the blame on Alex,’ cos I did, and it wasn’t his fault,’ Sally admitted.

  ‘Well, you don’t need to go telling me that anyone with any sense in them can see that you and the doctor aren’t the sort to go getting involved in summat like this if you didn’t have feelings for one another.’

  ‘I don’t have any right to have feelings for him, not with my Ronnie—’

  ‘Sally, listen to me. There’s no call for you to go making yourself miserable like this. I know it’s only bin a few weeks since you heard about Ronnie, but it’s bin over two years since he was last home.’

  ‘That shouldn’t make any difference. He was fighting for his country, and for me and our kiddies, and now he’s dead, and I’m …’

  ‘Things are different in wartime, Sally, and if you want my advice then I reckon you and the doctor ought to be able to have what happiness you can together. Anyone can see how much he thinks of you and them two lads. Boys need a father.’

  ‘You brought your Frank up wi’out one, and that’s what I’m going to do as well. I don’t want my lads growing up hearing things said about their mother by other kiddies, like how she was off wi’ someone else with their dad just dead. I couldn’t live wi’ meself if I did that to them, Doris. I’ve got me standards, you know. Me and Ronnie, we promised each other that we’d do the best we could for our kiddies, and I want Tommy and Harry to grow up knowing what a good dad he would have bin to them.’

  ‘Well, there’s nowt to stop you telling them that, and giving them a good stepfather as well, is there? You’d be daft to turn your back on a good man like the doctor, Sally, especially wi’ the way you feel about him.’

  ‘I’ve got to think about what I owe my Ronnie.’

  ‘What about what you owe yourself and the doctor? It’s right that you should mourn Ronnie – I’m not saying it isn’t – but you can’t live wi’ the dead, Sally, and your Ronnie would be the first to tell you that. If little Tommy hadn’t taken to the doctor the way he has it might be different, but have you thought about what it’s going to do to him if you was to tell him that he could have the doctor for his dad, but for you being daft? You’re too young to spend the rest of your life mourning a dead man, lass.’

  ‘It’s all very well you saying that, Doris, but if you were in my shoes …’

  ‘Well, as to that, I have bin, haven’t I? Frank’s dad was killed before Frank was even born.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but you’ve never remarried … or … owt … and Frank thinks the world of you, and no wonder.’

  Doris looked at her and then said quietly, ‘I’m going to tell you summat now, Sally, as I’ve never told anyone. Never thought I would do either, but seein’ as you haven’t got your own mother here to do a bit of straight talking to you then I reckon I’ll have to do it meself. I can’t let you go doing summat daft on account of worrying about what the likes of Daisy Cartwright might have to say.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you aren’t the first woman to find yourself in this kind of situation, not by a long chalk you aren’t,’ Doris told her meaningfully.

  Sally stared at her. ‘You’re never trying to tell that you … that there …?’

  ‘Just listen to me, Sally, and don’t say a word until I’ve finished. Me and Frank’s dad grew up living on the next street to one another. Already walking out, we was, me and Frank’s dad, Bert, when war was declared. I was doing me nurse’s training and Bert had a good job, but of course what did he do but decide he had to join up? They was all doing it, of course, all the young lads, just like they have done this time. Well, of course, the first thing Bert said after he’d told me that he’d joined up was that he wanted us to get married, and I was just as daft, and said that I wasn’t having him going off to fight without us getting wed – just in case. A proper fight we had on our hands wi’ both his parents and mine telling us that we was too young. Bert was only twenty and me not even nineteen, but in the end they gave in and me and Bert got wed on his bit of leave after he’d done his training.

  ‘There was plenty of lasses done the same, just like this time. I kept on with me nursing even though normally I’d have had to give it up on account of me being married, but Matron had an idea of what was to come and the Government had given orders that as many nurses as could be were to be trained up. I even lived at home with me mam and dad and me three brothers after I was married.

  ‘Of course, we thought it’d all be over in a matter of weeks, and when it wasn’t and the wounded started coming back from the Front, telling such tales …’ Doris shook her head. ‘Those were bad times, I can tell you. When my Bert walked in to me mam’s kitchen late one night out o
f the blue, I thought for a minute he must have deserted, but it turned out he’d bin given home leave. We’d just had the bad news at home that our Fred, me eldest brother, had been killed, and Bert said he was going to rent a little house for us so that we could be on our own. That was how my Frank came about. Not that I knew until I was being sick half the day three weeks after Bert had gone back to the Front. That was in 1917. By the time Frank was born in 1918 both me other two brothers had been killed and then came the news that Bert wouldn’t be coming back neither.

  ‘A couple of weeks – that’s all the time we’d spent together as a married couple.’

  ‘Me and Ronnie didn’t have much more than a few months, not with him being in the army even before the war,’ Sally told her.

  Doris gave her a sympathetic look before continuing, ‘When the vicar asked if I’d take in this schoolteacher – Peter Marston, his name was – as a lodger, I thought nothing of it, only that it would be a bit more money coming in. The vicar told me about how he’d got this wound that still needed attention – dressing and the like – and that he thought I’d be able to do that for him, with me being a nurse. Quiet type, he was, not like my Bert, who’d been a bit of a one for a singsong and a drink, but I didn’t mind him being quiet. It suited me, with Frank being only a few months old. Peter kept himself to himself at first, staying up in his bedroom and reading his books. They’d had to amputate the lower part of his left leg, and that was what had to be dressed clean every day. Never made a murmur, he didn’t, even though I knew it must be hurting him when I had to take off the bandaging. Loved Frank, he did, and took to reading to him. He could get him off to sleep faster than I could.

  ‘He’d been lodging with me for about three months when he said that he was going to leave. Wouldn’t look at me at all, he wouldn’t, when he told me. I can see him now … lovely hair he had, and the bluest eyes. Said as how he couldn’t stay, not feeling how he did about me. Of course I felt the same about him. Three months we’d been living under the same roof. I knew him better than I’d ever known Bert, and I knew how I felt about him as well, but like you’ve just said now, Sally, him and me both thought that it wasn’t right that we should feel the way we did, with Bert having been killed. There was a lot of chaps that came back from that war feeling bad about being alive on account of all them that didn’t come back, and Peter, well, he was the kind that thought a lot about things.

  ‘He went and had a talk with the vicar. What he said to him I never knew, but the next thing was that the vicar had found him somewhere else to lodge.

  ‘We’d agreed that he’d move himself out whilst I was working at the hospital, but then, well, there I was in the middle of having me dinner with the other nurses when suddenly I just stood up and said that I was going home.

  ‘Ran all the way from Mill Road, I did – I was only a slim little thing in those days. When I got home I knew straight off that he’d gone. I could sense it even before I unlocked the back door. I sat down in me kitchen and cried me eyes out like me heart was broken, which of course it was. And then I heard this knock on the back door and when I went to open it, he was there. He’d got on the bus, he told me, but he’d only gone one stop, and had to get off and come back.

  ‘Three weeks, we had together, and they were the most wonderful and precious weeks of my life, Sally. Of course the vicar came round and gave us both what for, but by then I’d got me courage up and I wasn’t having it. Me and Peter had as much right to be happy as anyone else, I reckoned, and I didn’t think my Bert would have begrudged me that happiness even if his mam had been telling everyone that I was no better than I should be for taking up with someone else.

  ‘All sorts of plans, we made; he had such dreams. He went over to Yorkshire for an interview with a school so that we could have a fresh start …’ Doris shook her head, plainly battling with her emotions.

  ‘I never saw him again. He came down with the Spanish flu, and what with him being weak from the amputation and everything … well, instead of coming back to me he let them send for a doctor over there, and he said he wasn’t fit to travel, and then the next thing I knew the vicar was telling me that he’d died.’

  ‘Oh, Doris …’

  ‘Aye, it was a bad time for me … Without Frank to look after I don’t think I could have gone on. I miss Peter still, Sally, I really do. But what I’m trying to say to you, lass, is that through all the years I’ve had without him, at least I’ve had the comfort of those weeks we had together in the way that nature intended a man and a woman to be together. I know there are those that would say what we did was wrong – we hadn’t had any church vows, after all – but if you were to ask me I’d say it would have been more wrong not to do what we did.’

  Sally couldn’t find the words to express what she was feeling, and not just because of her astonishment that Doris, whom everyone thought of as so rigidly strait-laced, should have done such a thing.

  ‘See, Sally, what I’m trying to tell you is that some things are more important than what the rest of the world thinks we should do. You say that you feel ashamed of yourself because you’ve fallen in love with the doctor when you’ve only just been widowed, but how would you feel if you were ever to be in my shoes? What I think is that at times like this, with a war on an’ all, Sally, folk like you and the doctor what have a chance to be happy, should take that happiness, because you never know what’s waiting round the corner. Sometimes there’s precious little happiness to be had in life, and it seems to me that it’s like being wasteful and throwing away something that shouldn’t be wasted, when you don’t take that happiness when it’s offered to you. It’s like God’s giving you both the chance of a bit of happiness – yes, and your little lads as well, – and you’re throwing it back in His face, and that’s never right, is it?’ Cos what I reckon is that some things are meant to be, Sally, and that’s that. Of course,’ she added more briskly, ‘if you don’t love the doctor, then that’s different … But if you do … well, you have a little think about what I’ve said.’

  The room was silent now, the only sound that of their breathing and the quiet tick of the clock. Wordlessly they looked at one another, two women separated by a generation but reaching across that separation to share the same knowledge.

  ‘I love him so much, Doris,’ Sally said at last. ‘It scares me half to death feeling like this.’

  ‘I know, lass,’ Doris told her gently.

  ‘Oh, Doris.’

  Tears welled up in Sally’s eyes and the next minute she was in Doris’s arms, the older woman hugging her comfortingly.

  Shaking her head, Sally released herself. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done wi’out you in me life, Doris, I really don’t.’

  They exchanged looks that were slightly embarrassed but wholly understanding, two strong women, who were both more used to keeping their own counsel than sharing their deepest feelings.

  ‘I’d better be on me way now,’ Doris announced determinedly, signalling both a return to their normal familiar relationship, and a sign that the time for confidences was over, ‘otherwise Molly will be worrying.’

  Taking her hint, Sally made no reference to what Doris had told her. She walked with her to the back door, and opened it for her.

  But then, as Doris stepped through it, Sally reached out and touched her arm, telling her emotionally, ‘I wish I could have met him – your Peter.’

  ‘Aye, Sally, I wish that, an’ all.’ Sally could see the sadness in Doris’s eyes. ‘He was a lovely man.’

  ‘Grey? You in there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam called back, shivering as the trickle of water from the shower suddenly turned icy.

  ‘Well, get a move on. Captain wants to see you – pronto.’

  Sally grimaced as she tried to rub some warmth into her cold flesh. Her towel was still damp from the morning, but she had got so muddy and wet driving the major from one bomb side to another that she had had no option but to have a shower. Her towel was b
eginning to smell slightly rank from overuse, but Sam knew there was no point in trying to get it laundered until the end of the week. Rules were rules, and one clean towel per week was all they were allowed.

  Her clothes felt stiff with cold and slightly damp as she dressed as hurriedly as she could. Her shoes were wet inside – again – and she had no spare dry socks for the morning. But these small discomforts were nothing compared with the real reason for her current misery. How was it possible for a person to be so happy one minute and then to have that happiness torn from them the next? What did the captain want her for? If it was to tell her that she was being transferred somewhere else would she feel as glad as she ought to feel, or would she instead want to plead with her superior officer to be left where she was, in order to be close to Johnny?

  ‘Private Grey reporting as requested,’ Sam told the new warrant officer, as she saluted smartly outside the captain’s office.

  ‘Stand easy, Private,’ the warrant officer instructed her, knocking on the captain’s door to announce her.

  ‘Good news, Private Grey,’ the captain informed Sam without preamble when she had been shown into her office. ‘Your father telephoned earlier to say that your brother is safe and well.’

  ‘Russell is safe! I mean, yes, ma’am,’ Sam managed to correct herself.

  ‘Apparently your brother’s Lancaster was damaged on the way back from a mission but he was able land it on a small airfield close to the coast, where he and the crew repaired the damage. They had to wait for the fog to clear before they could take off again, and of course they couldn’t use radio communication in case they alerted the enemy to their presence.’

  ‘He’s always had the luck of the dev— I beg your pardon, ma’am.’