The civilian restrictions continued. In April the Government banned embroidery on women’s underwear and nightwear. Joe thought this was very funny. ‘How the heck are they gonna police this ordinance? I want to be the first guy to volunteer for duty as enforcement officer for that law.’ He nodded and grinned at Lucy. ‘I’ll just have to approach ladies on the sidewalk and say, “Pardon me, ma’am, but I’m obliged to inspect your underwear. It’s a government rule”.’
Lady Fitzwilliam drew her brows together as Lucy giggled.
The war news, however, was not good. Joe read the newspapers and commented to Kezzie, ‘We’re gonna have lots of customers very soon.’
In Russia Sebastopol had fallen, and in the Western Desert Rommel’s Afrika Korps struck. The Argyll and Sutherland troops, with armour and infantry from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, were now part of Lieutenant-General Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Egypt. At the end of May, in a great tank battle at Bir Hacheim, the Germans tried to turn the Allies’ southern flank. In the middle of June Tobruk fell and twenty-five thousand Allied soldiers were captured. At the end of the month the Allied Army had to abandon Mersa Marruh in Egypt. Six thousand more prisoners were taken by the Germans. Rommel with his twelve divisions was within seventy miles of Alexandria and the Nile.
Kezzie felt ill. There had been no word from Michael for weeks and weeks. She’d received his last letter at the beginning of March and it had been written around Christmas-time.
He had told her of the beauty of the desert countries, the exotic dress of the natives, the strange languages, and the stillness and deepness of the dark blue nights. The sky and earth so close to each other. The feeling of history, of ancient and honoured traditions. He now felt that the Western powers were imposing on these people, demanding that they change to a lifestyle which they neither wanted nor needed. ‘Theirs could be a future of exploitation,’ he wrote to her.
Kezzie realised that Michael was thinking deeply, as she had, about the ultimate purpose of the war. He, like her, was aware of the significant changes which were taking place, of how society was altering, had altered already. And despite its being a frightening prospect, it was important that this time they tried to set the world right as best they could.
The German panzer divisions rolled on. Backed up by devastating aerial bombardment they advanced more than three hundred miles. By late summer the Allied troops were left defending a narrow front along the Quattara depression. At a place called El Alamein the Eighth Army grimly held the line.
The more serious casualties were being flown home, the dead and the dying. The reputation of Joe’s surgical unit spread. Generally they only received grievously wounded men, and as the summer progressed they became busier and busier.
At the beginning of autumn they were working and operating all round the clock. Late one night Kezzie was taking a patient out of theatre. As she stopped in the ante-room to connect the transfusion unit, another soldier was brought in. The junior doctor checked him over quickly. He shook his head and handed the clipboard with the case notes back to the stretcher-bearer.
‘This one’s a goner,’ said the orderly to his friend, and began to turn the wheels around.
Kezzie pressed herself against the wall to make room for them to leave. As the trolley slid past her she glanced down at the wounded man. The bottle of blood she was holding slipped from her fingers and crashed to the floor.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Oh God. No.’
Kezzie was looking on the wax-pale face of Michael Donohoe.
CHAPTER 28
Life or death
‘WHAT’S UP?’ JOE Petrowski appeared at the door of his operating theatre.
‘I think this one’s too far gone to operate on, sir,’ said the junior doctor.
Kezzie uttered a low cry. From behind her clenched teeth came a suppressed scream. She clutched at herself, wrapping her arms around her own body tightly. She was breaking apart, all of her, physically and mentally, her heart and her life, her very spirit, was disintegrating, and she could not control it.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No.’
‘Nurse, pull yourself together,’ said the matron. ‘We’ve got other patients here who would profit from your help.’
‘No,’ Kezzie said again.
The world was spinning … the whole great globe … never-ending, into eternity, and she herself was dying. She knew this. Before her eyes Michael’s life force was ebbing away, and with it, so was hers.
If there ever had been any doubt at all that this man, who now lay so cold and still before her, was part of her own being, then it was gone. They were inextricably linked. From the first moment, when his eyes had met hers in the autumn harvest in Stonevale, there had been no other path for her to take but the one that joined with his. No other course for either of them. She had kept the memory of it all in her heart. The gulls crying above them as they lifted the crop together from the ochre earth. The music and the tales around the fire. The smell and the sound of both their languages and cultures bonding together. Connected by fate, separated by circumstance and war, was death now to part them for ever?
‘Kezzie!’
Her glazed eyes hardly registered what was happening. The name being called did not connect to her.
‘Kezzie!’ Captain Joe Petrowski cried again. ‘Is this guy a friend of yours?’
She inclined her head.
Joe nodded at his staff. ‘Bring him in.’
The stretcher attendants exchanged glances. ‘Sir, it’s not going to be worth the trouble.’
‘Her face says it is,’ the captain said curtly.
The junior doctor hesitated. ‘Sir …’
‘Wheel him in,’ Joe snapped. Then he leaned over and spoke to Kezzie. ‘I need an experienced assistant in there,’ he said. ‘So c’mon, clean up and help me.’
She stared at him.
‘You hear me?’ he shouted into her face. ‘Pick up or get out!’
He turned and strode through the open doors.
She followed him more slowly.
‘Get me plasma,’ he ordered.
‘I can’t,’ she whispered.
He changed his gloves in seconds. Then he looked at her before pulling his mask on. ‘I’m not carrying passengers,’ he said. ‘Don’t come in here if you can’t handle it. There are no free rides on this trip.’
Inside the theatre they were cutting off Michael’s uniform.
‘Gee, what a mess,’ said the junior doctor. ‘What a bloody mess. It’s all in his chest. One lung gone, definitely.’ He looked questioningly at the surgeon.
Joe Petrowski nodded. If he was worried he didn’t show it. ‘I guess we’re gonna have to work to hold him then,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’
It was the hardest thing Kezzie had ever done. Fingers slippery with sweat, every part of her cringing as she saw the torn flesh. She could barely watch as the rubber bag began to rise gently as they tried to reinflate Michael’s lung and get him breathing again. She knew she had to function, and fast, or Joe would throw her out.
‘I’m needed,’ she told herself. She held her hands rigid to prevent them shaking. ‘Joe needs me.’
And Michael needed her too. She was the most experienced assistant on duty. She had to stay, do what she was trained to do. Be detached, professional. She’d wanted to be a doctor for as long as she could remember. Now was the time to prove she was capable. She had to do it.
And suddenly she was keeping up with Joe’s instructions, watching his hands, listening to his voice. She took her lead from him. The way he moved and how he handled the equipment. His actions not slow, but deliberate and sure. Cool, competent and efficient, even at the most difficult parts. He removed the shrapnel and cut out the dead and damaged tissue.
Only at one point, when Michael’s heart stopped again, did he say in exasperation, ‘Aw c’mon, buddy. You’re gonna have to do a bit of this yourself.’
He grinned at Kezzie as the falterin
g pulse came back. It was the first time he had looked directly at her since he had begun to operate.
‘What’s his name?’ he asked her.
‘Michael.’
‘OK, Michael,’ he said. ‘I’d sure appreciate for you not to do that again.’ He glanced around. ‘We’ll close now,’ he told his team. He looked at Kezzie again. ‘Then it all depends on how much fighting spirit this guy’s got.’
‘How much fighting spirit have you got, Michael?’ Kezzie whispered as she watched him being transferred to the recovery room. She followed the trolley down the corridor, and stood by his bed. How much? she wondered.
She wouldn’t leave him. Not at all during the long days and longer nights which followed. She talked to him as she changed his drip. His hand was so cold when she reinserted the needle under the vein in his arm.
‘Michael,’ she said softly.
Lady Fitzwilliam understood Kezzie’s terror. She knew Kezzie’s fear was that Death stalked the corridors at night, and if she was not watchful then it would come for Michael. If she allowed herself to slip into sleep for one moment then it would steal him away, and when she awoke he would be gone.
So Lady Fitzwilliam didn’t tell her to come home and rest, or advise her to leave his side. She brought an easy chair into Michael’s room and tucked a blanket around Kezzie. She made tea and sat and drank it with her or stayed out in the corridor within call, through the dark watches of those first few nights. Joe checked him every hour. Kezzie knew that he’d left word to be called at any moment, day or night, if Michael’s condition changed.
And the friends she had made since arriving in England contacted the base hospital. The parents of the local children, the farm workers, and Lady Fitzwilliam’s colleagues on her various committees sent words of comfort. Flowers and gifts, and offers of help came from all over the country. Kezzie was overwhelmed by their kindness.
‘His colour is so poor,’ she complained to Lady Fitzwilliam on the third day. ‘His face has such a lifeless pallor.’
‘We must not expect too much,’ said Lady Fitzwilliam, ‘and it would be so terribly cruel to give you hope when there might be none. But … that skin tone does not always mean the worst. A rosy glow on someone’s face can be much more deceptive and sinister.’ She sighed deeply. ‘I lost three babies before I had William. Not one of them survived more than a year. That was their colour before they died. It was almost as though they were preparing to go. I often thought that it was some small kindness of the Almighty as they were about to be taken.’
As Kezzie looked at Michael, lying there so unmoving, she had an urge to pull all the tubes and tags aside and climb into bed with him. To lie down beside him and warm his body with her own.
Harvest-time was drawing to a close. The winter nights were closing in and the weather was chillier. About a week after his operation Kezzie noticed a very slight alteration in Michael’s condition. During the day his body seemed less inert as she tended him, as if he were on a slightly higher level of consciousness. Kezzie was worried. Joe was operating and would be unavailable for at least another hour. She gazed at Michael and called his name softly, but there was no response. His breathing was different, not so shallow, but not as regular either. Did that indicate an improvement? Was he getting better? Or was she in fact deceiving herself? She remembered what Lady Fitzwilliam had told her. This change in Michael could be the last kind act of the Creator, easing him into the afterlife.
At five o’clock she switched on the small lamp by his bed and went to close the curtains. The sun was setting over the frosted fields. A red-golden ball of fire turning the whole sky crimson, the rays shafting into the room, reflecting on the walls and ceiling. Kezzie pulled down the blind and as she turned from the window she heard a voice speaking.
‘Sure, I should have known that when I died and went to Heaven, the first angel’s face I’d see would look like Kezzie Munro.’
CHAPTER 29
Recovery
KEZZIE’S HEART TURNED over.
‘Oh, Michael,’ she said softly. She walked slowly from the window towards the bed and looked down at him. She smiled. ‘Michael,’ she said again.
His face was palest white with long shadows under his eyes, and his features were gaunt; the outline of cheekbones, nose and neck emphasising the hollows elsewhere. But his eyes were watching her. And it was those eyes, dark, dark blue with a slightly troubled expression, more than his voice, or his colour, or the change in his breathing, that gave Kezzie hope. He gazed at her, and she could see comprehension and life slowly returning in his look.
‘I’m alive,’ he said at last.
‘Yes.’ She could barely speak the word, her chin and face were trembling so much.
He tried to raise his hand on the coverlet of the bed but could not. He tried to lift his head a little but failed completely. He sank back down. ‘And I’m not imagining you?’ he asked.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and took one of his hands in both of her own. ‘I’m real enough, Michael Donohoe,’ said Kezzie.
‘I dreamt I was dead,’ he said at last.
‘You almost were,’ she said.
‘Am I all of a piece?’ he asked her.
‘There’s a bit of you inside which will never be the same, but the doctor says you’ll be able to sing and dance nearly as well as ever you did.’
This time he managed a faint grin. ‘Sure now, my prize-winning days are not over yet then,’ he murmured.
He drifted into sleep.
Kezzie went to the door, opened it and slipped quietly out to the corridor. She walked sedately in the direction of the matron’s office, but had gone no more than two hundred yards down the corridor before she began to skip with happiness.
Joe ordered her to take some days off, but she couldn’t stay away from the hospital. She sat beside Michael and held his hand, whether he was conscious or not. And slowly, slowly, his condition improved.
She told him of Canada and Clydebank. Of her return to Scotland and her friends in the café. She described the destruction of the Blitz, and he wept with her when she spoke of her grandfather.
He spoke of being in combat, the vibration in the air and on the earth when they were under bombardment. The great gulping fear, inside your head and the taste in your mouth. And more than that, the terror that you might let your comrades down, that when the moment came you would not manage to fight. And the ultimate horror of seeing his friends fall beside him. She tried to comfort him, to reason away the distress he felt because he was safe at home. He knew that Montgomery was preparing his own offensive and he wouldn’t be there, his Battalion would march forward without him.
At times the war in Africa and the Far East seemed far away and remote as Kezzie cycled home across this soft landscape, with the pretty farmhouses tucked in the folds of the hills. Then they would have a rush of wounded to the hospital, and hard reality would surface again. Kezzie was very aware of Lady Fitzwilliam’s own position. With William gone it could have been awkward for her to rejoice in Michael’s recovery, and very easy to resent someone else’s happiness. But she didn’t. She and Lucy were a solid unit behind Kezzie, helping and supporting her when she needed them the most. And as Kezzie watched the two of them together she realised that she had lost part of her sister to this woman. Lucy was the daughter Lady Fitzwilliam had never had.
They had news from Scotland. Peg and Ricardo were going to be married. They planned to have the wedding after Christmas and she and Lucy would be attendants. Peg was having trouble in obtaining any pretty clothes, and had been looking through the shops in Glasgow for lace and veil. Lady Fitzwilliam and Lucy searched the attics of the house for anything that might do.
‘Peg is tall, almost an inch more than me,’ said Kezzie, ‘with lovely long slim legs, and a neat waist. Her hair is the colour of fresh honey.’
‘My hair was blonde once upon a time,’ said Lady Fitzwilliam. ‘When the regiment was in India people there used to a
sk my husband’s permission to touch it.’
She looked out a beautiful sari folded away in tissue paper, a piece of Kashmiri cloth, and some chiffon scarves. In a decorated tin box they discovered a pair of cream buckram boots decorated with a bow which had tiny seed pearls sewn on. Joe turned up with a piece of parachute silk, but refused to divulge its source. Lady Fitzwilliam made all of their finds up into a parcel and sent Samuel off to the station to despatch them to Scotland. In her reply to thank them Peg said that she and Ricardo intended to emigrate to the United States as soon as they could.
‘It’s not that I don’t love Scotland,’ Peg wrote. ‘It’s just that Ricardo has told me so many wonderful things about America, and I have so many painful memories here.’
Kezzie knew how she felt. She too had a great longing to go back to Canada. She was sure she would do so one day.
Joe came in a few days later to give Michael a thorough checkover.
‘I’m sending you up to the big house tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Lady F. can take care of you. We need this bed for guys who are really sick.’
‘So I’m a lot better?’ said Michael. He was sitting propped up in bed. ‘How bad is this, only having one lung?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ said Joe pulling his stethoscope from his ears, ‘you ain’t gonna jitterbug no more.’
‘I didn’t – what was it you said? – “jitterbug” in the first place,’ said Michael.
‘Then you’re not going to miss it much, are you?’ said Joe.
Michael glanced at Kezzie. ‘Anything else … that I might miss?’ he asked casually, keeping his eyes on Joe all the time.
‘Well,’ said Joe. ‘You can’t smoke. You can’t drink.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You can go with women.’ He grinned and looked at Kezzie. ‘Have babies, if you want to.’
Kezzie blushed to the roots of her hair.
Michael leaned back on his pillows. ‘That’s OK then,’ he said.
He too was looking at Kezzie.
Kezzie at War Page 28
