‘Oh?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Whose would that be, then?’ Bron was repressive.
‘Whose do you think? My very own. Two weeks on Saturday.’
‘Oh?’ Bron said again provocatively, and Sally hid a smile. ‘Quick, isn’t it?’
‘All the style nowadays, didn’t you know? Kiss the girls goodbye and back to the Front—’
‘He’s a soldier then?’ For all her efforts Bron could not keep her curiosity in check, nor could she quite conceal the gleam of envy in her eyes.
Kate preened. ‘A sergeant no less. In the Gloucesters. A lovely hunk of a man. A tram driver in civvy life. Ding, ding!’ She pulled an imaginary bell cord, grinning.
‘Congratulations,’ Sally said.
‘It’s him you should congratulate,’ Kate said pertly. ‘He’s marryin’ a girl that’s done well enough for herself I don’t mind tellin’ you – supervisor I am now, down Silvertown.’
‘Ammunition?’
‘That’s right.’ Kate shrugged, ‘Bullets for the boys. An’ long may it last, I say—’
‘You’re enjoying your war?’ Sally could not quite keep the caustic edge from her voice.
Kate was ready for it; had perhaps, Sally thought later, actually provoked it. ‘I should say. Anything wrong with that?’
Sally shook her head.
‘Not as if I’m the only one,’ Kate said and winked, very deliberately, at Bron. ‘Eh, Bron? There’s folk not a million mile from ’ere might say the same if they were honest as me.’
‘That’ll do,’ Bron said sharply.
Sally glanced at her in surprise.
Kate, expression blandly innocent, smiled. ‘I’m all for it meself. Nothin’ wrong with enjoyin’ yourself; it’s po-faced hypocrisy that I can’t stand. Well – better go – the bride-to-be’s got a few more calls to make. The Bethany church, ten o’clock, two weeks on Saturday. Got that?’
Bron nodded, avoiding Sally’s eyes, and with no goodbye turned back to the sink.
As Kate, with a last spiteful smile at Bron’s sharply turned back, shut the door behind her, silence fell.
‘What was she talking about?’ Sally asked, her curiosity aroused as much by Bron’s obvious and transparent discomfiture as by Kate’s words.
‘Oh, nothing much.’ An iron saucepan clattered loudly in the sink. ‘You know Kate. She’s got a tongue that spreads poison the way a knife spreads butter, mind.’
Sally shook her head. ‘Didn’t sound too poisonous to me. But then I don’t know what she was talking about—’ She eyed Bron’s back and waited.
Bron resisted temptation for a creditable moment longer, then turned, wiping her hands on her apron. Her good-natured face was solemn. ‘They did cause some gossip, it can’t be denied. But it was true I know that Doctor Ben asked him to cheer her up—’
‘What are you talking about, Bron?’
‘Why—’ Bron hesitated for a second longer, ‘Why Miss Charlotte and Mister Peter – when he was home, see? They – they saw a lot of each other – though natural it was, of course it was – it’s just there was talk, see?’
‘Talk?’ The single, questioning word was flat.
‘Well – you know what people are.’ Bron was still wiping her hands absentmindedly on her apron. ‘Nasty minds they’ve got, most of them.’
Sally forced her voice to lightness. ‘You’re not saying that there’s anything in this – talk?’
Bron’s expression was becoming more and more worried. ‘Why no – of course not – but—’
The silence was infinitesimal. ‘But?’
‘Well – it’s the letters – one almost every day she gets from him, and one a day like a religion she writes back.’ Bron’s voice had dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. In her relief at finding someone, at last, to speak to of her worries the words tumbled over each other, ‘I don’t like to say it, truly I don’t, Sal – but you can’t help wondering, can you? I mean – she doesn’t write to Doctor Ben like that – once a week it is, if he’s lucky. And his letters – why they’re read at the breakfast table for all to see. But—’ she had joined Sally at the table, pulled out a chair and sat down, her work-roughened hands folded before her, her honest face earnest, ‘but not Mister Peter’s – oh, no – they’re read upstairs in that – that boo-dwar as she will call it! – and then packed away in ribbon, under all them nighties of hers, with his picture—’ She stopped at the look on Sally’s face, ‘Well, I couldn’t help it, see?’ she said, indignant and defensive at once, ‘I was tidying the room and – well – I just happened to find them – an’ it isn’t right, is it? I mean – his own brother—’
Sally was sucking her lower lip, her schooled face inscrutable. ‘You really believe that Miss Charlotte – Doctor Ben’s wife – is having – or had—’ she hesitated, ‘an affair – with Mister Peter?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ In her defensiveness Bron resorted to near temper. ‘I’m only saying there’s bin talk, and she does keep his letters and his picture in her drawer, and – you know what an airy-fairy creature she is – who’s to know what goes on in that mind of hers?’
Sally, eyes distant, nodded.
‘That bloody Kate,’ Bron muttered. ‘If she’d kept a still tongue I’d never have said.’
‘Kate doesn’t know about the letters?’
‘Diawch! Of course not!’ Bron looked hurt and scandalized at once, ‘What do you take me for, Sally Smith?’
‘I’m sorry.’
Bron stood up. ‘Mountains out of molehills. There’s probably nothing in it.’ She cast a sudden anxious glance at Sally, ‘You’ll say nothing?’
Sally forced a reassuring smile. ‘Of course not, Bron. Not a word. As you say – there’s probably nothing in—’
‘Right—’ Bron smiled, relieved, ‘Now, a cup of tea for you?’
* * *
Three days later Sally left to go back to France. She found it harder, this time, to leave Philippa, who at nearly four years old and so much like her father in looks and temperament seemed suddenly much the most precious thing in the world. The weather had turned miserable; cold and wet, the sea a sullen grey that merged with the chill horizon. As they neared the French coast the distant echoes of war grew louder; she had forgotten, almost, that sound of incessant bombardment. The train journey to Amiens was drearily slow, the compartment, which she shared with a group of politely curious young officers, as cold as an ice-box.
She did not immediately contact Ben. She had known from the start that she could not repeat Bron’s gossip; but for the moment, fresh as it was in her mind, she was not sure she could trust herself. Much as she longed to see him, it seemed better, for the moment, to stay away.
It was two days after her return, with rain and mist and already freezing temperatures making life in the trenches all but unbearable, that he came to her. She was astonished to see him; by mutual consent he had kept away from her billet except for the most innocent of contact.
One look at his face told her the news was bad.
‘What is it? Ben – what’s happened?’
He slumped into a chair wearily, lowered his head to his hands. ‘It’s Peter,’ he said baldly. ‘A sodding sniper got him. They don’t think he’ll live.’
Chapter Eighteen
I
Peter Patten’s war was over. He first suspected it when he saw the look in his sergeant’s eyes in those first strange and deadly clear moments after the bullet had smashed into his back; knew it with clarity in some small, still part of his soul as later he lay in a daze of pain and morphia in the comparative quiet of the Casualty Clearing Station. What he did not know until very much later was how very close to death he had come.
Once or twice, after they told him, gently and with a firmness that left no room for hope, that he could never expect to walk again, he wished they had not saved him.
The months that followed were harrowing – months spent in hospitals first
in France, then in London, whilst his comrades in France fought on through one of the bitterest winters in living memory. Men shivered and cursed and froze in the trenches, died of exposure and of influenza, fought across ground where the corpses of their friends – and of their enemies – sprawled, preserved in the gaunt rictus of death, trapped in the frozen mud. The cold was searing; it was a winter of ice and snow and brutally low temperatures. It was as if the elements themselves had turned against the men who struggled to break the ghastly stalemate that held Europe in its death grip. As Peter hovered between life and death the Battle of the Somme ended at last, hostilities stopped as much by the sheer impossibility of fighting through the appalling weather conditions as by the achievement of any clear objective by either side. In the middle of that terrible December, on the day that the monk Rasputin was murdered in Russia the fighting at Verdun, too, eased at last, both armies simply too exhausted and too weakened by casualties to continue.
Peter lay through those first months, apparently docile, a favourite with nurses and patients alike, his slight, bright good looks honed to beauty by the privations of illness, his courage and his easy good manners a fragile shell to protect himself and others from the bitterness growing within. He had been ready for death – though, in truth, he knew he had never truly believed in it – but this? A lifetime of paralysis, of dependency? He had never even contemplated such a thing and in the quiet moments of the long, pain-filled nights he railed at the flawed fate that had allowed it to happen. Death would have been infinitely preferable. Because it was his nature to smile, he smiled, and was commended for his valour; yet in his heart and in his soul the canker grew. He hated his useless legs with an inflexible hatred that would have astounded those who tended him each day, who saw only the gilded smiles, the warm, bright eyes, heard only the gallant banter: ‘And how are we today, Major?’ – ‘Tres beans, Sister, thanks. Nearly got up to practise my golf swing in the night but thought I might disturb the others—’
He was not well enough to face the journey back to England until half-way through January. Ben came to see him the day before he was due to leave. Both Ben and Hannah had visited him as often as they could; but not even for them had he been able to lower his obstinate, flippant guard. Perhaps especially not for them.
‘Back to Blighty, then?’ Ben said, settling his huge frame gingerly on the flimsy chair the smiling nurse had provided.
‘Looks like it. Hospital in London, I gather – don’t know which one.’
‘Barts,’ Ben said, ‘I just asked. You’ll be well looked after there.’
Peter nodded.
‘And you’ll be within striking distance of home, too. Pa and Charlotte and Ralph will be able to come to see you—’
Peter’s smile was brilliant. ‘That’ll be jolly, won’t it?’ Charlotte. Lovely, childlike, vulnerable Charlotte, whom he had held and comforted as she had cried in terror. Charlotte who – he knew – had loved him; had loved the Peter Patten he had been before a sniper’s bullet had split his spine – Charlotte, who so much needed to be protected and cared for. What good would a cripple be to Charlotte? He looked at the brother to whom she belonged and smiled until his face ached. ‘Let’s hope the weather’s a bit better in London.’
‘I gather not. Worst winter since the eighteen eighties, or so they’re saying.’ Ben dug into his pocket and brought out a couple of packets of cigarettes. ‘Here – present for you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Hannah sends her love.’
He nodded.
Ben held out a hand. ‘Good luck, old lad. Take care of yourself.’ In his rugged face was a sorrow that it was beyond words to express. Ben it had been who had finally had to convince him that there was no hope.
‘Yes, I will.’ For one moment the gleaming smile died and a bleak glint showed in the blue eyes. ‘Or at least, I dare say, the rest of the world will.’
They shook hands in a suddenly unnerved silence, both perilously aware of the other’s emotion. Then with a quick lift of the hand Ben was gone.
Peter watched him stride away on the long, strong legs that carried him with such unthinking sureness and speed. He sat for a long time, very still, his face remote.
Then he closed his eyes and with an enormous effort of will relaxed upon his pillows.
Charlotte.
* * *
He did not want to see her; assured himself that in his present state she would not want to see him. Illness, he knew, frightened and disturbed her – a cripple surely must be abhorrent, whether she could bring herself to admit it or no, and he trusted that she would leave it as long as possible before facing him.
She came the day after he arrived in London; his first visitor. And with a shock he realized, in the moment she sat beside him and took his hand, in the moment she did not respond to his quick, practised, lying smile, that she knew. She was pale and thinner than he remembered, her fair beauty more delicate; and as she looked at him in that first, long moment of silence he saw, with a stab of something close to fear, that she understood with the perception of love precisely how he felt; she was not to be fooled the way others had been fooled.
He could not bear it.
He had nursed his hatred, nursed his hurt until the hiding of it had beome essential to him – a game to play deadly seriously – the only thing to make it worth while opening his eyes each morning. He could not bear what he saw in her eyes.
The silence was a long one. She leaned to him and her lips brushed his cheek very softly. When she sat back her eyes were brilliant with tears she would not allow to fall, but her voice when she spoke was controlled. ‘Peter, darling. You’re home at last. I’ve been out of my mind with worry.’
The habitual, brilliant smile flickered with brittle ease, totally at odds with the look in his eyes. Her hand was still in his, childishly small, very soft; his own skin too had lost its masculine, trench-toughened roughness over the past months of inactivity, and the soft, rhythmic stroking of her fingers upon his was silk upon silk. He tried gently to disentangle his hand from hers. Her fingers tightened very slightly, and she would not let him go. She had amazed herself in coming. She had thought – had been afraid – that the beauty of him, the bright courage, the warmth of which she had dreamed for so long, might not have withstood an ordeal the horror of which she could only imagine. She had been terrified that her own weaknesses would betray her. But as she had entered the ward and seen, unobserved, the spare, fair face, the lift of the handsome head, she had realized with a shock of emotion and – yes, delight – that had all but stopped her heart that she had never seen anything as beautiful as this helpless, damaged man. She had loved him before; like him she had been more than aware of the possibility that the bullet that had crippled him might well have destroyed too the fragile web that had spun between them. But it had not. Here, at last, was her prince. Handsome, a hero – and defenceless. She had never in her life experienced anything like the wave of love that had overwhelmed her as she had taken his thin, fragile hand. No warrior now; no strong arm to threaten, defend, take what was his. Like a great, calm sea the love and the strength rose in her; she had seen with clarity the depths of his fear, the cutting blade of his bitterness – she and only she could help him; she knew it with a certainty that would not be denied. With enormous tenderness she lifted the tense hand she still held and laid it against her cheek.
Almost, he flinched from her, turning his head a little on the pillow, unwilling to look at her, unmanned by her nearness.
‘Peter.’
He shook his head.
‘Look at me.’
At first he would not. She let the moment stretch, waiting. At last, reluctantly, he turned his head.
‘I know there’s no hope of recovery – you won’t walk again. But’, she held his eyes steadily, willing him to listen, to understand, ‘that doesn’t mean that you’ll never be happy again. Believe me. You have to believe me. Your life isn’t over. It isn’t. It’s simply a
new life beginning. And it will be a good life. I promise you.’
‘Charlotte,’ his voice was low, ‘look at me! Look at me! What good am I?’
At the far end of the ward a bustling nurse pushing a trolley was briskly dismissing visitors. ‘Doctor’s on his way, off we go, please.’
‘I won’t listen to such nonsense. You hear me?’ As the nurse advanced officiously, Charlotte released his hand and stood up. ‘It’s no good. I simply won’t listen. You’ll have to believe me in the end, because I won’t let you do anything else—’
‘Doctor’s on his way, madam—’
‘Yes, I’m going.’ She leaned across and kissed Peter lightly on the forehead. Her perfumed hair brushed his brow. He clenched his hands upon the starched bedspread. She smiled and graceful as a bird in dove grey and white she left him, the eyes of the other men in the ward following her appreciatively. Peter watched her go, and for the first time since the bullet that had destroyed his hope of life had struck he felt the shaming burn of tears behind his eyes, the ache of them in his throat.
Make her stay away from me – sweet Christ! make her stay away! – I can’t stand it –
‘Morning, Major – Doctor’s on his way – feeling better, are we?’
‘Right as rain, Sister.’ The blithe and graceless smile gleamed, ‘What time are you off tonight? Fancy a night at the Savoy?’
* * *
She came almost every day, sometimes alone, sometimes escorted by the limping Ralph or by the frail, indomitable figure of his father, Doctor Will. No one questioned the propriety of her visits – what more natural than that a fond sister-in-law should visit a gravely wounded man? Sometimes she brought messages from Hannah or from Ben. They discussed the news of the war, which still showed no sign of a conclusive ending one way or another, and in March they discussed the events in Russia that seemed slowly but very surely to be leading to revolution and Russia’s withdrawal from the war effort. They discussed the possibility of American intervention. In April they discussed Toby’s leaving, a subaltern in the Buffs, and the rift that quite obviously had opened between the boy and Sally. In short they discussed everything but themselves. Since that first visit Charlotte had kept the tone of their conversations determinedly light, almost impersonal, though her smile and the light in her eyes each time she saw him, the brief, tantalizing kisses, the soft curl of her fingers about his were like another, wordless dialogue that danced about their prosaic conversation like music. Little by little he came to look forward to her visits as slowly, very slowly, he began, almost without realizing it, to accept her vision of himself and to realize that her love, far from being diminished, had developed from a childlike infatuation to an emotion much deeper and stronger. Of the future he did not – could not – think. It was enough that each day she came, always dressed and groomed with infinite care, her eyes always finding him with unerring accuracy wherever in the room he might be. As for Charlotte – she watched him grow stronger and less afraid each day, and laid the plans that one day would make him, and her, happy. Seeing sometimes that shadow in his eyes she knew the battle was not yet won; he had by no means come to terms with his terrible disability, with his dependency on other people – but when in early May 1917 his doctor announced him far enough along the road to recovery to be sent to a convalescent home in Surrey, she did not worry as she once would have done at the thought of his brooding alone, away from her, in strange surroundings.
Tomorrow, Jerusalem Page 49
