‘That’s good,’ Amy said quietly. ‘At least if he listens to me and gives me a chance I shall know it’s not because I’m any port in a storm.’
‘No, there is that. Look, Gertie and I have been talking. Do you want us to come with you?’
‘And have Gertie drop the baby on his doorstep? Somehow I don’t think that would help matters much.’
‘I couldn’t leave her with the bairn so close.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to. I shall be perfectly all right, I promise.’ And then her voice softened. ‘But thank you, both of you, for all your support and concern.’ Her voice became brisk as she added, ‘Now I’m going to say goodnight so I can pack an overnight case and be away first thing. It’s a long drive but with your directions I’m sure I shan’t get lost.’
‘Ring me at work if you do and I’ll try to put you right. You’ve got my number, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I’ve got your work number, Bruce.’ She loved him dearly but she wished he wouldn’t worry so. ‘Now concentrate on Gertie and the baby. Tell her I’m praying for a little lassie this time.’ They already had two boys and Gertie had confided in her some weeks ago that she would love a girl.
‘I’ll do that. Bye, Amy.’
‘Bye, Bruce.’
Contrary to what she had said she remained sitting for a long time, her thoughts in the past. And it wasn’t only Nick she was thinking of. She had loved Charles at the beginning, albeit a romantic, girlish love, and she had loved him at the end but in a different way entirely. But what she felt for Nick was so far removed from any of this as to be incomparable. If he didn’t want her she would never marry anyone else, she knew that.
During the war she had known lots of women who had had more than one man, many more in some cases. Even here in Sunderland it was common knowledge that this woman and that had had ‘friends’ visiting them when their husbands were away fighting, and more than a few marriages hadn’t survived when the husband had come home. Because of the war, divorce wasn’t the scandal it once had been, even in the Church. Times were changing fast. And here was she at the age of thirty-four having only ever slept with one man, and the last time being well over a decade ago.
She stood up at last and wandered into the kitchen. She made herself a cup of tea which she drank staring out of the window into the darkening twilight.
She had thought her life had ended when she lost her baby and the chance ever to be a mother. It wasn’t really until Nick had come to see her in the hospital and whispered they could adopt that she had ever considered the idea. Since that time it had been with her always, even though it hadn’t been possible when Charles was alive. But if Nick still wanted her she would forgo adoption if he had changed his mind about it and consider herself well blessed nonetheless.
But she was jumping the gun here. She finished the tea and washed the cup and saucer before walking through to her bedroom. Enough thinking. It only wound her up until her thoughts spiralled and she found herself going round in circles. Tomorrow would determine the rest of her life sure enough, but however things turned out she wasn’t going to crumble. She wouldn’t let herself.
Surprisingly she slept well, but when she awoke it was with the very clear picture of a sweet little face in her mind. She had always been grateful that as time had gone on she had never forgotten the tiniest detail of that one brief glimpse of her son. She only had to close her eyes to see him and this she did often. But last night it had been different. Last night she had dreamed of him, and instead of the nurse whisking him away he had smiled and reached out to her and she had held him close to her breast. She had sat down in a big old rocking chair and cradled him in her arms, gently rocking him to sleep, and as she had looked down at the tiny sleeping face she had known - in the manner of dreams - that he was the first of her children and that there would be others. She’d woken up with her face wet with tears and it had taken some time to pull herself together, but strangely a sense of peace had descended that hadn’t been there the day before.
It stayed with her as she got ready to leave, put her overnight case in the car and locked the bungalow door. It stayed with her throughout the long journey which, in spite of her brave words to Bruce, she had been nervous about. She stopped at lunchtime, eating the sandwiches and drinking the flask of coffee she had brought with her before starting on her way again. She got lost once on the outskirts of Peterborough but she didn’t panic, merely stopped at the nearest garage and asked directions for East Sussex. After a slight detour she was soon back to following Bruce’s detailed instructions again.
The long summer twilight was beginning when she reached the perimeter of the South Downs. She drove another mile or two and then stopped the car next to a drystone wall, where she got out to stretch her legs. She had just passed Ratton village so she knew she was close to the spot where she had to turn off the road and onto an unmade lane. Several hundred yards on, Nick’s cottage was set all by itself in what Bruce had described as a field. She breathed in the warm air scented with sun-ripened grasses and wild flowers, staring over the wall at the fat cattle idly chewing the cud in the distance. The only sound was the low drone of fat bumble-bees in the flowers at the base of the wall; everything else was quiet and still.
She didn’t know what the dream the night before meant or whether it meant nothing at all and was simply a dream. But whatever, it had been wonderful to hold her baby and feel him in her arms, to be happy. Just to be his mam.
‘Thank You.’ She looked up into a sky which threatened a storm after the heat of the day, knowing she wasn’t saying thank you to Father Fraser’s God of fire and brimstone, nor yet Father Collins’s who was altogether more reasonable. In fact she didn’t think God was Catholic at all. He was . . . God. It was man who tried to put Him in the little boxes of creed and denomination.‘Thank You,’ she said again, wiped her eyes and got back into the car.
There was a man stripped to the waist scything the thigh-length grass in what was indeed a field. Amy had parked the car where Bruce had told her to, crossed over the lane and opened the big three-bar farm gate secured to the gatepost with string. After carefully making sure the gate was fastened again she began to walk along the narrow track which had been trampled in the meadow.
The man had his back towards her but even from a distance of some hundred yards or so she could tell it wasn’t Nick. This man was twice the breadth Nick had been when they last met; powerful muscles rippled under the nut-brown skin as he worked. And he must be an older man, much older, if the grey hair was anything to go by. Probably an odd-job man or gardener Nick employed, she thought as she wound her way up the slight incline towards the large sprawling cottage some distance away. Not that there looked as though much gardening had been done here for some time.
The man was whistling as he worked and intent on the task in front of him, the long curved blade of the scythe making short work of the gently waving grass. As she neared him she could hear the soft swish of the murderously sharp cutting tool, and thinking to warn him of her approach so he didn’t jump and thereby do himself harm, she called,‘Hello there. I wonder if you know whether Nick Johnson is at home.’
The big figure froze, half bent, and then slowly straightened, and even before he turned to face her she knew. She braced herself for what she might see, determined not to react, and then she was staring into the green eyes, those beautiful green eyes. For a moment they were all she saw, the knobbly scars and grafted flesh beneath the thick shock of what once had been raven-black hair barely registering. ‘Hello, Nick,’ she said quietly.
He didn’t answer her immediately; he stood quite still with the scythe now held loosely in his maimed hands as he watched her close the few yards between them. It was only when she was standing right in front of him and so close she could see there were no lashes to his eyelids that he said, ‘Amy.’ His voice was without expression.
He hadn’t forgiven her. He didn’t want her. The tight feeling in her chest made
it difficult to speak but to her surprise her voice sounded quite normal when she managed to say, ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you. I felt . . . Well, there are things to say.’
She had forgotten the painstakingly worded speech she had perfected over the last days, and faced with his continuing immobility she began to stammer. ‘I know . . . I know it has been a long time and I should . . . should have written first or phoned, Bruce told me that. He . . . he gave me your address but please don’t blame him, I made it difficult for him to refuse.’
‘Why have you come?’
She was trembling from head to foot. He seemed so indifferent. She had prepared herself for anger or bitterness or even the biting sarcasm Nick did so well. In the past his tongue had had the cutting edge of a whip when someone displeased him. But this lack of emotion was something else. Perhaps he was embarrassed. Maybe he had someone waiting for him in the cottage above the field.
She drew on all her strength and said, ‘Charles died a little while ago.’
He blinked but said nothing.
‘I . . . I was thinking about what you said the last time we saw each other, that I had never loved you.’ And then she knew she just had to say it or she would turn and run. ‘You were wrong, I just wanted you to know that, that’s all. Every day of the last eight years I have thought of you, every day. I love you, I’ve never stopped loving you and I never could. I did what I did because I had to, not because I wanted to. There is a difference. I don’t expect you to understand that but, if nothing else, believe that I loved you, that I still love you. That’s all I wanted to say. I . . . I felt you had the right to know.’ She lowered her head and stared at the cut grass, the rich smell wafting on the faint summer breeze. Her stomach was turning over and over.
She was just about to turn away when he said, ‘Did Bruce tell you about me? About the accident?’
She nodded, raising her head and looking at him. ‘At first he wouldn’t, but when . . .’ She stopped, her face burning, not knowing how to put it. She dropped her gaze again.
‘What?’
‘When I thought you had forbidden him to speak of you to me because you hated me, he told me.’ She stopped again. Nick had made a sound deep in his throat and she lifted her gaze and looked into his eyes. They were as green as emeralds, green and clear and possessed of a drawing power that made you forget the damaged face. No, no, not forget it, that wasn’t right, she told herself dazedly. The beautiful eyes gave the marred patchy skin something that was almost magnetic to the beholder. She could well understand how women still flocked to his door. He had something now he had never had when he was just handsome.
‘How could you think I hated you?’ he said huskily, his voice dropping so low she could scarcely hear him.
‘Because I deserve your hate,’ she whispered.
‘Never.’
He had still made no move towards her and now she closed her eyes, knowing in the next moment she would fling herself at him and disgrace herself if she didn’t shut him out from sight. The next move had to come from him and she still wasn’t sure how he felt.
‘And what do you think? Now you’ve seen me?’ When she opened her eyes and then her mouth to reply, he silenced her with an upraised hand. ‘I still take longer than a four-year-old child to dress myself and do up shoelaces. Could you stand to see me fumbling around or would it drive you mad with irritation or . . . pity?’
One little word, but it could separate them for all time. Charles had accepted and even been grateful for a love that had self-sacrifice linked to it. Nick would find it an abomination.
Her heart was racing. She had to make him see. And then the words were there. ‘You are an original, Nick Johnson. You always were,’ she said softly, a small smile playing about her mouth. ‘I started off by being annoyed at your arrogance and pig-headedness and falling in love with you didn’t change that.You can be selfish and insufferable and you never doubt that you’re right, even when it’s proved you’re wrong. Life with you will never be calm and harmonious, I know that. But you are also tender and gentle and noble and vulnerable and a hundred other things besides, which I’m not going to tell you because you’re already big-headed enough as it is. I can’t promise you won’t irritate me because when you’re being mulish about something you’re the most irritating man in the world. What I can promise is that the emotion of pity is a non-starter. It doesn’t apply where you are concerned.’
He turned his head away from her for a moment, looking up into a sky from which the first fat raindrops were beginning to fall.Then he pulled her roughly into his arms, kissing her hard and long, his mouth only lifting from hers to mutter, ‘Hold me tighter, tighter, Amy.’
And she held him tighter. She held him as though she would never let him go, hardly able to accept the miracle that had happened. She had dreamt of this, in her wildest dreams she had dreamt he would kiss her like this and she was glad the flames had spared the warm firm lips that had thrilled her in the past.
It was a long time before they slowly walked up the meadow to the cottage and the rain had all but stopped.They were both soaked to the skin but neither commented on it. Some weak rays of late evening sunshine were daring to poke through the clouds, and in the distance a faint rainbow stretched across the sky. A blackbird was singing in the hedgerow at the bottom of the field, the pure notes winging their way on the rain-washed air.
‘You’ll marry me soon and defy convention?’ he asked softly. ‘We’ve a lot of time to make up for, you and I.’
She thought of the raised eyebrows and gossip. The war might have changed things but not so much that a young widow marrying again within just a few weeks of her husband’s death wouldn’t attract some condemnation. And she didn’t care a fig. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow if you like.’
‘You shameless hussy.’ He pulled her into him, his voice suddenly deadly serious when he said, ‘I never stopped loving you, not even in the early days when I was so filled with anger and resentment that you had chosen him over me.’ As she went to speak he put his finger on her lips. ‘That was the way I saw it then,’ he said softly. ‘In stark black and white. It took this,’ he touched his face, ‘to start me thinking in shades of grey.’
‘Oh, Nick.’ She stared up at him, her blue eyes misty with love as she gently traced a path round Mr McIndoe’s handiwork. ‘Was it awful?’ she whispered brokenly.
Nick thought of the thirty-one operations he had endured on his hands and face, of the sheer unadulterated torture as McIndoe had stripped the thick scaly scar tissue off his distorted webbed hands from knuckles to wrist before he could even start the skin grafts that would give him back the use of his fingers. The pain had been so bad at times he had found it hard to believe that such things could be, and only the fact that he was in a hospital where there were men worse off than him had kept him going. Agony and self-pity, hatred and revenge had been constant bedfellows, the last two emotions directed against the Germans. It had been his determination that they weren’t going to win and leave him a burned cripple that had made him work towards getting fit enough to be passed for flying duties by the RAF Medical Board twenty months after the accident, despite being told by all and sundry it was highly unlikely. But he had done it. He had spent the last months of the war up in the air again. Ironic that it was easier to fly a plane than make a decent knot in his tie or do up his own shoelaces.
‘Pretty awful,’ he said now to Amy, kissing the tip of her nose. ‘I’ll tell you all about it one day.’
‘You promise?’
He nodded.‘But not now,’ he said quietly, his mouth falling on hers. For now it was enough that they had survived the war, that they were alive and together and a blackbird was singing on a lovely summer’s evening in a free England.What better start to the future could there be than that?
EPILOGUE
Nick was not greedy. He only kept Amy all to himself for a few months but then it was he who broached the matter he knew was so d
ear to her heart, and together they started the adoption process.
The four children between the ages of five and nine who came to live at the cottage from children’s homes were all war casualties. Two had been abandoned by single mothers when they were born, and the other two had been orphaned by Hitler’s bombs. They came to their new parents one at a time over a period of nearly two years, and all four had problems. The physical injuries were easier to deal with than the emotional hurt, but Amy was waiting to lavish the care, reassurance, tenderness and most of all the love each one so badly needed.With Nick’s help, a solid foundation was established in each child’s life and the nightmares and fears began to fade.
As the years went by and the four grew into healthy and confident adults, more children were added to the family in the cottage. Foster children this time. More sad and sometimes defiant little faces that spoke of things children should never be called upon to bear but whose healing was slow but sure in the love they received.
The Rainbow Years Page 37
