Walter frowned. ‘Well no, perhaps not. And yes, I have been here, there and everywhere, lately in a gun turret painting the men rehearsing the loading and reloading of those huge guns, and all that. Theirs is a tough regime,’ he added, as if the medical officer would not know that.
The MO looked so unimpressed that Walter knew at once that as far as this medical johnny was concerned, painters were probably always on the wrong side of masculinity, and he couldn’t care less if this one decided to strap himself to a mast in the North Sea to paint the work the men carried out on the convoys.
What he cared about was disease, and that cough sounded all too graveyard to him.
‘I’m going to examine your chest, and if I find it wanting, you will be put on a back burner until it’s cleared, you understand? Can’t have you taking disease on board,’ he jerked his head towards the port, ‘giving God knows what to God knows who.’
Walter wished that he could relish the other man’s despite, but he couldn’t. He knew that proper people, service people who were not artistic, despised types like himself as being unnecessary bits of fluff, as well they should.
The medical officer would be thinking, who needs people like this Beresford chap on the convoys? Who needs him under their feet? Haven’t they trouble enough without having to take him along?
And yet in years to come, if people like Walter got it right, perhaps succeeding generations would stand back and say, ‘So that was what it was like,’ and be moved to pity at the sacrifice of it all, just as they stood in front of Sargent’s vast painting of a line of blindfolded men gassed in the trenches of the Great War, hands on each other’s shoulders, making their stilted, trembling, darkened way to who knew what. Through such work people realised the reality of the hell of war. So perhaps Walter, too, would, in the end, be proved to have had some sort of purpose, whatever the medical officer thought.
Walter started to strip, and as he did so he thought of Caro. She had left London on a thirty-six-hour pass. He wondered why. He was more concerned about that than about the outcome of this footling examination, which he felt sure would come to nothing.
Nurse Collingwood gave Caro and Robyn’s uniforms a puzzled look.
‘I don’t recognise the uniform. You’re from?’
‘We’re from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry,’ Robyn said in a crisp tone.
‘First Aid Nursing Yeomanry? Ah, good, so you’ll know how to deliver babies, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ Robyn replied, without batting an eyelid.
As Robyn gave the nurse the most accommodating smile, Caro’s mouth dropped open, and with good reason. Until that moment the only thing either of them had ever delivered were officers to their destinations.
‘Of course, nothing to it, we always say. What has to come down, has to come out, doesn’t it?’ Robyn went on blithely. ‘Lots of hot water and tea, or, in time of war, just lots of hot water, and keep the tea for the nursing staff.’
Nurse Collingwood laughed.
‘Very good, Officer. I always think lots of chin-up talk helps too. First babies can take a great deal of time to make their entrance, so if you don’t mind, since we are looking like being short-staffed by times about forty, stay with your friend and let me know only when things get really interesting.’
Robyn nodded and, giving Caro a brisk ‘follow me’ look, she walked into the side ward, past a host of other pregnant women, to where Betty was now lying.
‘Right, Betty,’ she said in cheerful tones. ‘We’re going to stay with you until things get interesting.’
Betty gave a little gasp. ‘Very well,’ she said, and she put out a hand to Robyn, who despite wanting to drive off behind the now departing charabanc, took it.
Caro looked at the ceiling. She was not good with blood, so please God there was not going to be too much of it.
‘You must have been coughing blood. You must have noticed?’
‘Only a little, nothing to speak of.’
The medical officer sighed so heavily his nostrils flared.
‘Can’t let you join a ship in this condition. You’d infect the whole crew. No, it’s curtains for your plans now, I’m afraid.’
He snapped his appointments book shut, as if he wanted to put an end to the whole boring business of giving Walter a medical.
Walter did up his jacket and sat down firmly in the chair opposite the MO.
‘So what happens next?’
‘You’ll have to go to a sanatorium somewhere. There’s one in Scotland, one in Haslemere, and one in Sussex beside the sea. Well, actually on the sea.’
‘I’ll take the seaside.’
‘If they’ll have you.’
‘Yes, of course, if they’ll have me. Is it crammed to the brim with TB patients?’
‘I don’t know. It’s only just opened. There’s less of your particular disease than in the last war, when it was rife in the trenches. I can telephone for you, if you like?’
The medical officer reached for the telephone on his desk, and as he did so Walter realised that he was in a great hurry to get rid of Walter, which was good, because Walter was in a great hurry to be shot of him.
‘Bertie? Johnny here, Johnny Kirby, we were at St Nits together, remember … ?’
Walter stared in fascination as the medical officer changed from cold, despising medic to warm chummy old school friend.
‘Got an artist chappy here with something just up your street, Bertie. You’re not full yet, are you? Empty beds everywhere? Well, that does make a change to hear.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Tell you what, I’ll send him along. He can be your first victim, ha, ha.’
After a small burst of chummy public school laughter, and not much more than ten minutes later, Walter was handed a scrap of paper with the address of St Christopher’s Sanatorium, Brewham on Sea.
When he reached his car he stared in some despondency at his neatly rolled-up luggage. It had been carefully sorted down to the last pencil and oilskin, all ready for joining a North Sea-bound convoy, not a sanatorium. He started to cough, holding on to the side of his car. Oh, for God’s sake, or someone’s sake, what a thing to contract. A poncy operatic disease that most people were convinced came from being dirty.
‘Will I get better?’ he had finally asked, before being turfed out of the medical officer’s room.
‘I dare say,’ was all that came his way. ‘Most people do nowadays. Treatments are more sophisticated, you know. A great deal more. Hot baths and cold air, and all sorts of fascinations.’
‘Oh, well, that is something to which to look forward, then.’
* * *
Caro would have dearly liked to have lit another cigarette, and smoked it down to the stub, only that wasn’t allowed in the hospital, so she thought about Walter instead. She imagined that he would be on his convoy, being thrown about the North Sea somewhere, perhaps feeling sick, which faced with the awful reality of Betty’s hours and hours of painful labour was how she was now feeling.
She switched her mind to the last time she and Walter had seen each other. No tearful goodbyes, just love, and more love, and then he had left her sleeping, a note on her pillow that said ‘I love you’ and a drawing of her asleep underneath it. It was a scrap of paper she now carried everywhere with her in her top pocket.
‘What’s she saying?’ Caro asked Robyn when she came back to reality.
Robyn was leaning over Betty, who had just been administered a nice dose of gas and air by Nurse Collingwood.
‘I don’t know, how should I know? I just want the baby to arrive.’
‘It’s hours off yet, Sister says,’ the nurse told them, before shooting out of the door again.
Robyn beckoned to Caro, who approached Betty with understandable caution.
‘It’s Miss Katherine, I know it is … Miss Katherine, Miss Katherine …’
Caro shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows in Robyn’s direction. It was hardly surprising that poor Betty was talking
rubbish after what she’d been through.
‘It’s the gas and air, it must have made her delirious. People talk rot when they go under; I know, our dentist told me. Although actually, sometimes they talk more than rot, they talk truths that they don’t want anyone to know so their dentist can blackmail them!’
‘Shut up, Caro. Shut up and listen! This is all about your sister.’
Caro looked and felt crestfallen. Katherine, blasted Katherine, everywhere she went her sister seemed to be shadowing her now.
When Katherine was very young, she and David had played at death, at facing firing squads, at falling on their swords, along with the rest of the children on their estates. They had stalked each other, they had trapped each other, and now she herself was both stalked and trapped. She thought of how her mother had used to say, ‘War games, darling, not always war games, surely?’ And of how she used to reply, ‘It comes with playing with boys, Mamma. Boys love war.’
Her mother … Faced with what she was going through Katherine tried to imagine her mother, tried to think of what her mother would think of her. Please God, eventually she would know that her Katherine was not a traitor, but had died for her, for all of them, for Chevrons, for sunny days to come to them all again. That was what she and David had died for, and please, please, dear God, send her death quite soon, oh, soon, please soon!
Edwina was listening to Colonel Atkins, who had visited after what he called ‘a polite interval’.
In true British fashion he did not mention the fact that it was his cottage in which Edwina was now staying, but Edwina, knowing that it was, had made a great effort to make it look as comfortable as possible – flowers, nice clean glasses for the gin and tonic, small snacks that she had fashioned out of pastry and a piece of cheese.
The colonel seemed pleased, looking round the cottage sitting room as if he hadn’t seen it before, as if everything was quite new.
‘This is nice,’ he said in admiring tones.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Edwina said, all innocence. ‘I really love it here, do you know that, Colonel, dotey?’
Edwina handed him a drink.
‘Now what’s to do?’
‘You’re worried.’ It was a statement.
‘Not worried, just want to prepare myself for the future. Don’t want to let anyone down. Now I’m rested I want to start tightening up again, preparing for the task ahead, you know? No good letting down too much, or I’ll become useless to you. You know how it is, agents who are let off the hook too long never want to go back.’
The colonel looked surprised.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I read it in a cracker!’
She was to return to London, this side of soonish, perhaps in a few days. To return to social duties, disseminating false information.
‘Yes, yes, of course, but this time it will be a bit different, won’t it?’
The colonel nodded, and then went to close the cottage door, which, given the warmth of the day, had been left open. He shut out the beach, the sea, the sounds of the waves, and sat down.
‘Here’s how it will be,’ he stated in his charmingly mellifluous voice.
It seemed that Edwina was to memorise two dates. One of them was the wrong date, and one of them was the right date. Only a handful of people knew those dates, and none of them, not one of them, knew which might be the right date.
‘Oh God, Colonel, dotey,’ Edwina started to laugh, ‘this is a nightmare, truly it is. You’ll have to get someone else.’
‘For the reason of?’ The colonel frowned.
‘For the very good reason, Colonel, dotey, that I, Edwina O’Brien, am completely innumerate. You have only to tell me something with a number in it for me to completely forget it the next second. You’ll have to get someone else.’
The colonel considered this for a moment.
‘It will not be possible,’ he said eventually. ‘Just not possible because there is no one else we can trust in this matter, no one else who is in your position either. You are ideal. That is why we chose you.’
Edwina raised her eyes to heaven. ‘Oh dear, oh dumpling, Colonel, dotey, then we may well be in the claggy!’
‘I will find a way around this,’ the colonel said after a short pause. ‘I think, indeed, I know how we can overcome this problem. We will leave as small a space in time as is possible. Then we will whisk you up to London, you will give a party, disseminate the wrong information, and then make good your escape down here.’
‘Will I need to do that?’
‘No.’ The Colonel lit a cigarette, looking thoughtful. ‘But you might, just might want to enjoy another few days by the sea, that is all I am saying.’
Every night after that Edwina, while not exactly pacing the floor, did find difficulty in sleeping, wondering, always wondering what it was that was going to be expected of her, and wondering, always wondering if she would be capable of shouldering the responsibility. Supposing she failed? Supposing she let the side down? The consequences of her innumeracy might be unimaginable. These were thoughts that she found so difficult to keep away on her own in the evening when, after listening to the news on the wireless, she climbed the old oak stairs to bed.
It was all right during the day, when there were distractions but in the dead of night the worries started.
A couple of days after Colonel Atkins’s visit, Edwina’s attention was caught by a man on the promenade painting. She knotted a scarf under her chin. It flapped furiously in the wind, making a noise that reminded her of sailing on the lake at home. She stared out to sea, wondering what the man was painting, and saw that it was a vast new arrival, something so strange that not just the painter, but everyone on the seafront was staring at what seemed like a harbour – either that or a sea of concrete – arriving.
‘What on earth is that monstrosity, when it is at home?’
Walter turned at the sound of the lilting Irish tones and, seeing a beautiful young girl standing a few yards away from him, he beckoned her over.
‘Don’t I know you?’ he asked above the sound of the waves, and the excited voices that were gathering around them.
‘No – no, not at all. I am at present anonymous to all but my closest friends.’
Walter narrowed his eyes. ‘Of course I know you! You’re a friend of Caro Garland. We met at the flat—’ He turned away discreetly, coughing briefly. ‘I thought as soon as I heard your voice that it rang a bell.’ He looked down at her, after putting away his handkerchief. ‘You’re looking very well and beautiful, if you don’t mind me saying, Miss O’Brien.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind you saying at all. It’s just that I wonder that you feel you have to say anything, so. I mean, there is a war on, and really, talk of beauty and such like matters is on the back burner until after it is over, surely?’
‘Oh, I love the Irish. They can talk better nonsense than anyone else, and yet it is always nonsense grounded in a strange kind of reality.’
‘And the Irish love you, just so long as you’re not English.’
Walter started to laugh, and then coughed again, once more turning away, this time embarrassed.
‘It’s the sea air, it’s too healthy!’ he joked.
‘Whenever yous laughs, yous coughs,’ Edwina told him, but she was careful not to glance back up the road behind them, where she had seen an increasing number of nurses wheeling patients from the sanatorium. It would have taken an idiot not to recognise that Walter had an unnaturally high colour, and the almost ethereal look that always seemed to accompany tuberculosis, even in its earliest stages.
‘You’ll be painting the new arrival then, Mr Beresford?’ she asked to distract him, nodding towards the sea.
‘I am going to do a watercolour of it straight away. Somehow it seems to underline the strangeness of it all.’
They both stared ahead of them at the strange islands of concrete.
‘I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it looks formidably m
ysterious and important,’ Walter said.
Edwina frowned. She knew the colonel would be calling her back to London soon, and she had a feeling that what was in front of them was part of the reason, but how, or what her part would be she had no idea.
Part of Operation Overlord, the plan codenamed Operation Neptune involved seven battleships, two monitors, twenty-three cruisers, three gunboats, 105 destroyers and over one thousand smaller vessels.
The navy’s orders were quite simple.
First of all it was to minesweep the English Channel, making corridors of safety for the combined British and American invading force. Next it was to keep up offshore bombardment, while escorting and landing troops and keeping German destroyers, E-boats and U-boats away from the said landings and supplies.
Next it was to escort two million tons of concrete and steel – two floating harbours – that would put the necessity of capturing a major French port to open up the supply chain on the back burner until such time that it would prove necessary. The Mulberry harbours, as they were known, were made up of sunken blocks, and prefabricated piers and jetties.
But before troops could be sent or the harbours constructed, they needed to fool the enemy with proposed dates: put the German command on a first alert, let them relax when they found out it was wrong, then put them on another wrong alert, while all the time waiting, waiting, for that most elusive of moments in the English Channel – a fine day.
By the time Betty’s baby finally decided to make his entrance into this world, an overworked sister and an exhausted midwife had arrived beside his mother to complete his entrance into life. To Caro’s great relief, but Robyn’s hurt pride, the Fanys were asked to leave before he took his first bow.
‘What a shame to miss the last act,’ Robyn said, as they staggered out of the cottage hospital and flung themselves into the Bentley, having waited and waited to see the baby, who was finally presented to them as a small red head wrapped in a blue towel.
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 32
