Her suitcase slipped from her hand, landed with a thud and tipped over into a puddle on the cobbles. She felt pinned, like a butterfly in a case, her arms stretching out to her sides as she tilted her head and cried, ‘Alex?’
He stepped out of the shadows and ground the cigarette under his heel.
‘Sylvie? Is it you?’
She ran, giggling with shock. ‘Of course it’s me. Of course it is.’
She expected his arms to open to her, but he stood rigid as she went to him, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘But is it you, Alex?’ she asked, half joking.
Opening her front door, she ushered him in and up the stairs. She hurried from window to window in her living room to make sure the blackout was down before she could switch on a lamp and see for herself.
‘Poo,’ she said. ‘Smells a bit musty. You’ll have to forgive this, I haven’t lived here for a year.’
He stood by her empty hearth, his cheekbones angled and tanned. His temples were flecked like a badger, a streak of grey swept back through the dark hair over his forehead. His eyes were still that same burning blue.
‘You’ve lost weight, my dear,’ she said.
Alex looked around. ‘Not been here for a year? So where’s the baby? Where is …? I don’t even know. Boy or girl? No one has told me. You haven’t told me. I don’t even know.’ He was bewildered.
‘Let me fix you a drink. See if my tenants have left anything by way of spirit or wine … Ah, yes.’ She opened the kitchen cupboard. ‘A syrupy bit of port. Do you fancy it? Oh Christ, that’s never the siren?’
Alex stood by the window and peered round the blackout as a muffled whining resounded outside. ‘It’s at least three miles away. I thinking they’re stonking the East End.’
‘No need to worry, then,’ said Sylvie. ‘Marvellous isn’t it? My first night back in town and I’m grounded.’
He turned to her, his eyes blazing. ‘Stop your nattering, Sylvie, and tell me. Where the hell is our child?’
‘Alex,’ she retorted, her hands on her hips, suddenly ferocious. ‘And where the hell have you been?’
Sylvie poured another round of port and lemon as they sat cross-legged under the kitchen table.
‘There’s the cellar,’ she told him. ‘But I’d rather not.’
‘Me neither. And we’re perfectly safe.’ He reached up and knocked the underside of the table. ‘Good solid English oak.’
‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t let you know,’ she said quietly. ‘Seems I have had these women’s problems for years, the doctor said. It was, as old wives would have it, a phantom pregnancy.’
Alex rubbed his fingertip obsessively on the rim of his glass. ‘So there was never …? Never a …? And you are quite well?
‘Never felt better,’ she smiled. ‘Although you don’t look so good. It’s a shock, isn’t it? All this time, you thought …’
He knocked back his drink and winced.
‘All this time …’
‘And that is quite a suntan you have, Alex. Are you going to tell me about it?’
His smile was crooked on his face. ‘I want to tell you how wonderful your fellow countrymen are. Absolute unfaltering heroes. I would not be sitting here under this excuse for an air raid shelter,’ he laughed wearily, ‘if it was not for le pêcheur, code name Esprit Fort.’
Sylvie sipped her port as a crump of bombs landed a mile away and smiled at Alex. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘The curtains didn’t move. That means its incendiary and a long way off. If the curtains suck inwards, and the windows rattle, then we’re in for some trouble.’
‘I was in trouble,’ he said, ‘almost as soon as I shuffled onto that damnable beach.’
It was a perfect night. Many months of planning to reach this stage. A deep, black night, he told her, with a huge starless sky. Everything was going according to plan. Samples of sand collected, the reach of the waves, the pull of the tides monitored and recorded. It took hours. A survey of the dunes was taken as he lay on his stomach and peered through binoculars in the dark of a Normandy night and dictated measurements to his corporal.
‘Remember, Sylvie, I have a degree in geology. And this is what it leads me to.’
The sentries, he said, dug into the sand, warned him that they’d heard a German patrol on the beach road.
‘“Back off”, I gave the order,’ Alex said. ‘“Day trip’s over.”’
As he turned to shuffle back to the encroaching waves, he felt a muscle pull hard in his thigh, a flash of pain that paralysed him, so intense he couldn’t breathe. His leg, stiffening, useless. He’d been lying so long in cold, wet sand that his muscles had clenched in protest, pretty much disabling him.
‘Sir,’ whispered his corporal. ‘Ready to go. Awaiting orders.’
‘Carry on,’ he said, his teeth gritted in agony. He ordered his men to leave, to struggle along the lines of rope through the waves to the waiting boat, out there in the rocking darkness. He thrust his bag of equipment at the corporal and watched his astonished, mute face recede into the night.
‘I kept my head down. The patrol passed by, oblivious, leaving me with some pretty foul jokes in German. I hadn’t reckoned on the cold, and I knew I had to move soon. Any rate, by then, the dawn was breaking. I managed to crawl up the beach and hid in a fold of the dunes.’
‘Which beach?’ asked Sylvie.
Where the Seine estuary feeds out, he told her, at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula.
‘I know it.’ She smiled at Alex, feeling a soup of emotion swell inside her. Her months of worry and resentment had faded, and her old desire, her old longing for Alex resumed.
He had to wait for nightfall again, and in the darkness turned his face north and hurried along the coast, ducking through hedgerows and skirting the fields. He followed the streams, kept close to wherever there was water, always the lowest point.
‘Your leg?’ she asked.
‘Right as rain.’ He slapped his thigh. ‘But I could not have my men waiting on that beach for it to get better. Even for five more minutes. I could not jeopardise them.’
And this, he told her, was how he met le pêcheur. Word had been radioed through via Special Operations, via intelligence, to the cell, and the man intercepted him, let him rest in a safe house, kept him away from Montfleur where there was a high concentration of Germans. ‘Bit of a headquarters there, I understand,’ said Alex.
‘The village,’ breathed Sylvie. ‘My village. How is the place? Oh, but I think I know who the fisherman is. Mother once mentioned that our maid Adele had a sweetheart, Jean Ricard, who fished out of Montfleur harbour. She told me that in her last ever letter. Before the first Christmas of the war.’ Her voice cracked. ‘How is she, did le pêcheur say?’
‘I have no idea. He barely spoke to me. That’s the rules. The least we know about each other the better. If indeed it’s the man you are thinking of.’
Sylvie breathed out long and hard, shuddered. ‘I can’t believe you were there, so close to my home. It seems absolutely incredible. And here you are.’ Her smile broke as tears watered her eyes. She sipped the last of her port and glanced at her empty glass.
Alex told her how the fisherman gave him food and water, and false papers. He was to become a French peasant and travel, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, south-west, heading for Brittany and the Vendée, down the lines, all the way to the Pyrenees.
‘I stayed in various farms in isolated hamlets, in bastides, in gîtes, sleeping next to cattle, in barn lofts, in bales of straw. The risks these people took were humbling. I was speechless with fatigue some days, with reverence on others. Way down in Gascony, with the mountains on the horizon, I remember the aged couple who insisted on giving up their bed for me. This peasant farmer and his wife, all bandy legs and deeply lined, tanned faces, were happy to die, they told me, as long as l’anglais made it across the border safely.’
‘And then into Spain?’
It was another long, arduous journey, h
e said, through mountain passes, and long, hot, dusty roads, but eminently safer. Olive groves became his bedrooms, and wine cellars, too, he smiled. The organisation was stupendously efficient. Finally, he said, Gibraltar, and the dubious delights of a debrief and a bunk on the ship of His Majesty’s Navy.
Alex stopped, exhausted. The all-clear had sounded, and yet Sylvie did not feel like moving out from under the table. Here, she felt safer than she had in a long long time, now that Alex was back.
He glanced at her hand. ‘I see we’re still engaged.’
‘We are,’ she said, brightly. ‘I told myself I’d wait for you.’
Alex shuffled out from under the table and stretched hard. ‘Let’s sit down in the armchairs,’ he said. ‘God, it must be the middle of the night.’
‘I was hoping,’ said Sylvie, following him into the living room, ‘you were going to say “let’s go to bed”.’
She saw that his face was tired and pale, but that his eyes were bright and guarded.
‘I think we’d better talk,’ he said.
‘Oh no, not that.’ Sylvie almost laughed. ‘Not that old chestnut.’
She gazed at him in the dim light of the lamp and waited.
‘It’s very delicate,’ he said, courteously.
‘You’re telling me!’ she snapped.
‘We got engaged because we thought you were expecting a baby.’
‘And now?’
‘Now,’ he sighed. ‘Now, everything is different. Except one thing.’
Sylvie waited again, her heart hammering. He said one word that broke her world apart: ‘Nell.’
She wanted to laugh it off, to try to pretend how much she didn’t care, but her cousin sat like a ghost in the room. Over there, in the corner. ‘All this time, through your great escape across France and Spain, you thought I had had our baby, and yet, you still thought of her.’
‘I thought of you both, constantly,’ he replied. He coughed to hide a sob in his voice. ‘But Nell—’
‘Oh, don’t give me that pathetic noise,’ Sylvie snapped. ‘So you came here, to check me out first. I bet you’re over the moon, aren’t you? No more need to look after Sylvie. Aren’t you the lucky one? Well, I have no idea where she is, if that’s what you’re wondering. She’s disappeared on us. Went a bit funny about a year ago. Around the time you left, actually. But then, I suppose that wasn’t surprising in the circumstances, when she heard my news. Stayed at her father’s for a good while, went home briefly to Lednor, so Auntie Moll tells me, then went into nursing. And don’t ask me where, because I have absolutely no idea.’
Sylvie stood up, ferociously rummaging in her handbag for her pack of cigarettes.
‘You know, Alex, when I saw you on the doorstep,’ her voice quivered too hard for her liking, ‘I thought it was a miracle. You were safe and my happiness had returned. And now, you just ruin it all again. You better work this one out for yourself.’ She turned from him, not wanting him to see her tears. ‘Shut the door on your way out.’
She stood with her back to him, breathing hard as she inhaled on the cigarette. She heard the rustle of his overcoat, his step on the stair. The front door below closed quietly. She stubbed out the cigarette and slumped back into the chair, her hand over her face, squeezing her eyes tight in an attempt to stop misery bubbling out of her. Her head snapped up when she heard the front door knocker rap gently. As she leapt up, she felt her agony fall away, as if shedding a skin. She hurried down the stairs, her happiness rising, simmering in her throat. Her love for him still blooming in her chest.
Alex stood on the doorstep, the street lightening with the dawn behind him, his hat low over his eyes.
‘Your suitcase,’ he said, handing it to her.
He turned and walked away.
Part Five
1944
Two years later
Nell
Rain drummed on the pitched roof of the nursing home, sending silvery rivulets snaking down the grime and dust on the roof light windows. She lay wakeful in bed and watched as streams of rainwater met one another on the glass, collided and divided. Outside the drainpipes were rushing, gutters spluttering under the deluge. The unseasonal storm – it was only the middle of May – was passing overhead, washing away the dirt, cleaning the air.
Her bedroom was in the converted attic, with a little dormer window facing north. She could look straight over the rooftops to the city, and what was left of it. Getting out of bed, she washed quickly in the bathroom along the corridor and, back in her room, dressed in her uniform. There was a rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning over the West End. Not the Luftwaffe this time, she thought. Just plain old weather. And, at any rate, these days they were all terrified of buzz bombs. She made her bed, then opened her dormer wide to let in the cooling early dawn air just as the bell clanged along the corridor. Six in the morning. Time to get up.
Someone tapped on her door and Violet, in her dressing gown, poked her head round.
‘Might have known you’d already be up and dressed, Diana,’ she said. ‘Can I please borrow some stockings? Mine could be used as a fishing net and I got the most frightful rocket from Sister yesterday for walking over to the hospital without my cloak on. Can’t risk it two days running. I’ll pay you back soon as I can.’
Nell handed her her last pair.
‘Thanks ever so, Di. See you at breakfast.’
Nell knew she had exactly twenty minutes before she had to be downstairs in the nurses’ dining room. This was the only period of the day when she truly had time for herself. As the nurses’ waking, chattering voices grew steadily louder along the corridor and in the rooms next to hers, she pulled out Alex’s letter. She curled up on her crisply made bed to read it, even though, two years after she’d first opened it, she knew each line by heart.
Nell wondered how any of the patients got any rest or proper sleep. The morning bedpan round, with its scrubbing and sluicing, produced deafening and offensive clatter, assaulting both senses of hearing and smell. And all had to be in order and shipshape for the consultant’s daily visit on the ward when he swooped through, white coat-tails flying, followed by Matron and Sister in terrified flutter. The work was exhausting but good, always good, Nell decided, for it helped her forget, gave her no time to think. At King’s College there were no babies or children, no little ones to remind her. Just men, badly injured, horrifically burnt young men, some who came in, still alive, with labels tied to their feet for identification.
While she worked she sometimes allowed herself to think of Alex. As she scrubbed bed legs to ensure against bed bugs, it was as if she was watching a film at the picture house, another girl playing her. Alex’s letter had been desperate in his contrition, but whatever his appeal, it became meaningless in the face of what actually happened. He loved her, he wrote. And she knew that. But he had thrown her away.
She dared herself to think of Sylvie and, moments later, stopped to stare at the red marks on her hand ingrained by the scrubbing brush.
Around midday, Sister asked her to feed the patient in bed five. Pushing aside the curtain, she saw a charred head against the white pillow. The familiar smell told her the soldier had been roasted.
‘I’ve come to give you some lunch, sir,’ she said.
The eyes were bloodshot and strangely alive amid the dead flesh; the split mouth grimaced in what she suspected was a smile. He let out a faint wolf whistle.
‘What a cracker.’ His voice was hoarse, trapped in his throat. ‘What an absolute cracker. I bet your sweetheart is head over heels. What’s your name?’
She helped him sit up, feeling ribs and shoulder blades beneath his pyjamas. He grunted, hissed with pain.
‘I’ll ask Sister about your drip,’ she told him. ‘It looks like it needs topping up.’
How hard it was to keep her nerve. The first year had been difficult, of course, but she’d hoped things would have been better by now. Last week, a consultant had asked for a patient’s X-rays.
Off she’d trotted to fetch them and handed them straight to him. Afterwards, Sister had called her to one side and in no uncertain terms told her that she should have given them to her, so that she could pass them to the doctor. And then Sister had wondered if Nurse Blanford should take a hearing test, as more often than not, when she was summoned, it was an irritatingly long while before she responded. It’s as if you don’t know your own name.
Nell sat on the chair at bed five, poised with the spoon of liquefied vegetables and gravy.
‘You haven’t told me your name,’ the patient said.
‘Nurse Blanford,’ she whispered, mindful of Sister’s strictness about being too friendly with the soldiers, for it only caused heartache in any of the so many inevitable outcomes.
‘Pleased to meet you, Blanford.’
If the soldier had still had both of his eyelids, she was sure he would have winked.
On her day off, she was free to leave the hospital and all of its nauseating odours and claustrophobic racket behind her. She would often watch the other nurses hurrying off, linking arms and giggling, their capes billowing, with a mixture of curiosity and envy. The thought of doing as she pleased, without the structure of routine and work, sucked Nell through a void of confusing dread. She would fight it by sitting in the cinema in Peckham, or walking around Brockwell Park. Some days, she even went as far as Greenwich Hill, where she could look over the bombed and ruined docks, all the while alone and with a mind to forget, or at least to fill her head with something other than John-James.
How she longed for her valley, her place under the willows by the river. How she longed for the September Garden, where bees bumbled over his scented cradle, wriggling over the clover. It was early June and the dog roses would be out along the lanes, festooning the hedgerows, and the air would be soft with birdsong.
That day, for a change, she caught the train from Denmark Hill to London Bridge. She walked, still in uniform, her cape fluttering behind her, across the bridge, the churning, dirty river below her. She plunged into the city, her flat, sensible nursing shoes negotiating the cobbled alleys in the grey shadow of mighty and inviolable St Paul’s. She circumnavigated the bomb sites of the ancient quarter, darting down alleys and passages, relishing the sense of being lost; that no one on this earth knew where she was.
The September Garden Page 23
