Across the Mersey (34 page)

Staff had been right: Seb was worse. So much worse, in fact, that Mr Leonard had ordered that he was to be moved into one of the private side wards. The same one in which the young sailor had died.

Remembering that now, Grace felt her heart contract as she looked down at him. His morphine had been increased to give him some relief from his pain, and although he was asleep, his body twitched violently on the bed with the onset of the withdrawal symptoms that came when the drug needed readministering.

He was talking in his drugged sleep, but not in English, Grace recognised, and not only in one language either, but the only word she could understand was the name he kept on saying.

‘Marie.’

Whoever this Marie was, she was obviously on his mind, Grace acknowledged as she straightened his bed.

Sister came in, her uniform rustling with starch.
It was almost unheard of for her to do something as mundane as take a patient’s temperature but that was exactly what she did now, informing Grace, ‘I want you to check this patient’s temperature every half an hour, Nurse, and report any changes to me.’

She then folded back the bedclothes and looked briefly at Seb’s shoulder. Grace knew that she was looking for any telltale signs that he was suffering from blood poisoning from his wound. She had just looked herself, her heart thudding with relief when she had not seen the red line that would have meant the infection had entered his bloodstream.

‘In addition you are to prepare and apply a fresh kaolin poultice to his wound every hour starting from now.’

Grace nodded. She knew that the kaolin clay, which had to be heated in a container placed in a pan of boiling water and then smeared on a sterile bandage before being placed as hot as possible against the infected wound, should draw any infected matter to the surface of the wound.

Mr Leonard had prescribed regular doses of M and B 693 for his patient, sulphanilamide being the only drug that had any effect against septicaemia.

Of course, Grace still had her normal ward duties to perform as well as the extra work Sister had given her, but she still made sure that she followed Sister’s instructions to the letter, even foregoing her morning break rather than hurry the application of the kaolin poultices.

The edges of his wound, which had had to be reopened to remove the second piece of shrapnel, were very badly swollen and inflamed.

Mr Leonard did his round escorted by Sister and Staff, and stopped for a long time in the small side ward, but of course Grace, as a lowly first-year nurse, wasn’t able to hang around in the hope of learning how Seb was.

Instead she had to do a locker round, and then go for her lunch, where she was dismayed to have to listen to Lillian going on about how wonderful her doctor boyfriend thought she was.

Poor Luke was better off without her, even though he himself couldn’t recognise that as yet, Grace thought as she ignored both Lillian and her own sisterly desire to remind her of how much she had hurt her brother.

It was late in the afternoon before Grace was finally and almost disbelievingly able to look at the thermometer and see that Seb’s temperature was finally dropping. She was so worried that she might be wrong that she took it again, ignoring Seb’s irritated protests.

Her hand shook slightly as she wrote down the new temperature and then went to inform Sister.

They had given their first show at one of the munitions factories in Liverpool, and Francine was suffering from the normal tiredness that always hit her after a first public appearance in a new show as she opened the gate to the small front garden
to Jean and Sam’s house, and then stopped when she saw that the back gate was open.

Only the family used the back gate so she assumed that someone must already be in, and headed automatically for the back door instead, coming to a halt as she rounded the corner of the house and saw a small shabbily dressed boy curled up asleep on the back step.

She recognised him instantly and her heart turned over.

Going to him, she kneeled down beside him and put her arm around him, saying gently, ‘Jack?’

He was awake immediately, fear tensing his body. His face was grubby and he had obviously been crying.

‘It’s all right,’ Francine reassured him. ‘You’re Jack, aren’t you? I’m your … I’m your Auntie Francine …’

He still looked apprehensive.

‘Have you been here long?’ Francine asked him. ‘Only I expect you’re feeling a bit hungry, aren’t you? I know I am. Why don’t we go inside and have something to eat whilst we wait for your Auntie Jean to come home.’

The sound of Jean’s name had an immediate and relaxing effect on him, and although he didn’t say anything he stood up readily enough whilst Francine unlocked the back door, keeping one arm around him whilst she did so. He was so thin, it tore at her heart. She could feel his bones through his shabby blazer and shirt – too thin, surely, for a boy his age.

* * *

Half an hour later, she’d made him a ham sandwich, which he’d eaten as though he was starving.

He’d run away, he’d admitted after she had patiently coaxed him into telling her what had happened. He’d run away because the couple he was living with had told him that the Government had stopped sending them money to pay for his keep and that his parents didn’t want him any more.

The couple, who ran a smallholding of some sort, from what Francine could gather, had had three boys living with them, and all of them had been expected to work on the smallholding after school and at the weekends, but two of them had been taken home by their mother, and Jack had been forced to do their work as well as his own. He’d been kept short of food and threatened with beatings if he complained to anyone. The final straw had been when he had accidentally broken a plate and the woman had locked him in the cellar all night as punishment and then sent him off to school without any breakfast.

Instead of going back to the smallholding after school he had decided to run away and come home. He had walked to the local station and managed to get on to a train to Liverpool without anyone seeing him.

His quiet, ‘I thought I’d come and see Auntie Jean instead of going home, and ask her to speak to Mum,’ had torn at Francine’s heart and she had only just managed to hold back her tears.

Now bathed and fed and wrapped in a towel
– she couldn’t let him put his own filthy and shabby clothes back on again – and his story told, he was leaning against her so exhausted that he was falling asleep.

Very carefully Francine lifted her arm and put it round him, pulling him close to her. It seemed like a small but very special miracle that he was here, this thin ungainly boy who was all arms and legs but whose body curved as sweetly and rightly into her hold as he had done the day he had been born. Her arms tightened around him.

She was still holding him half an hour later when Jean and Sam came home.

Jean’s face lost its colour when she saw him.

‘Oh, Francine, what have you done?’

Francine shook her head and said quietly, ‘It isn’t what you think,’ as Jack woke up and looked uncertainly at Jean.

‘Well, Vi will have to be told.’

‘But not yet, Jean,’ Francine pleaded. ‘At least let him have a decent night’s sleep.’

Sam had carried Jack upstairs and laid him on Francine’s bed when he had fallen asleep again halfway through retelling his story to Jean.

‘Fran’s right, love,’ he said. ‘Let the poor lad at least have his sleep.’

‘But Vi will be so worried.’

‘Mebbe, if she knows what’s happened, but my guess is that this couple that had the lad and were supposed to be looking after him won’t be in any rush to report him missing. Not after the way
they’ve been treating him. They probably think he’s around somewhere and that he’ll have to come back to them. It will probably be the morning before they let anyone in authority know that he’s gone, and even then I doubt anyone will be in a rush to let your Vi know. It was a real bit of luck for the lad, him getting on a train for Liverpool. He could have ended up anywhere.’

‘He was so desperate to get away from those dreadful people that he probably would have risked doing that,’ said Francine.

‘Well, I suppose you’re right, Sam, but if I were our Vi and it was my son—’

‘But that’s the whole point, isn’t it, Jean?’ Francine pointed out emotionally. ‘If he had been your son, this wouldn’t have happened.’ Francine’s voice broke. She got up and ran into the hall and up the stairs.

‘Oh, Sam, I feel so awful. Fran’s right. If we’d had him—’

‘I’m not having you blaming yourself for any of this, Jean. Like I’ve said before, you were in no fit state to do anything for anyone when Jack was born. If anyone’s to blame then it’s the so-and-so who went and got your Fran into the trouble in the first place, and then your Vi for not doing right by Jack when she and Edwin took him on. I’m not saying that I don’t feel it’s a damn shame that the poor little tyke’s bin treated the way he was, and I’m not saying neither that I don’t feel like going and finding the chap who’s bin treating him so badly and letting him know what I think of
men like him, because I do. But we both know that it’s ruddy Edwin who should be doing that. Not that he will. Let Francine have her bit of time with Jack, love. It’s little enough, and even if your Vi does know that Jack’s gone missing, which I doubt, it won’t do her any harm to worry about him for once.’

Jean looked at her husband. ‘Well, if that’s what you think, Sam …’

‘It is,’ he told her firmly.

‘Hello, there.’

Seb’s voice might sound weak but there was no mistaking the fact that he was a lot better than he had been twenty-four hours ago, Grace acknowledged, hoping that her smile wasn’t quite as wobbly as it felt and that it looked properly professional.

‘Nurse Reid told me that it is thanks to your kaolin poulticing that I’m not going to lose my arm.’

Grace knew that she was blushing now.

‘It’s Staff Nurse Reid,’ Grace reproved him firmly, ‘and I dare say she said no such thing.’

She was doing a locker round and Sister encouraged her nurses to chat to the patients whilst doing this chore because she believed that giving the men a chance to talk about themselves could sometimes highlight problems they weren’t willing to mention during a formal consultant’s round.

‘I admit I never really thought I’d be here and that you’d be nursing me when I made you promise to do your training.’

‘I owe you such a lot over what you did for me,’ said Grace.

‘It all seems such a long time ago now, and in another life.’

‘Yes,’ Grace agreed. For no reason at all she was remembering how she had felt when he had kissed her and she suppressed another blush.

‘Sister said I was rambling away in French. I just hope I didn’t say anything too ripe that I shouldn’t have said in a woman’s presence.’

Grace shook her head. ‘The only word I could make out properly was “Marie”. You kept saying it over and over again, and I thought that maybe she was a girl you’d fallen in love with.’ She had said far too much but it was too late now to wish that she hadn’t.

‘She’s a French girl. We were billeted in the village where she lived, and … and working together. I wasn’t in love with her, but I felt guilty about leaving her behind, knowing what she and her family were likely to be facing, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way. She’s a patriot, you see, and France means everything to her.’

It surprised Sebastion to discover how easy it was to talk openly and honestly to Grace about Marie and his feelings.

‘I think I can understand that. I know I’d hate to think of this country having to surrender to Hitler.’

‘We’ve got to win this war otherwise there is no hope for any of us,’ said Sebastion.

‘Everyone’s afraid that Hitler will invade us like he has done those other countries.’

‘Everyone? Does that include you, Grace?’ Sebastion asked her.

‘Yes,’ she told him honestly, ‘but I try not to think about it and to get on with my work. My family have been so lucky. My brother, Luke, came back from Dunkirk uninjured, and so apparently did Charlie. Luke’s been posted to Home Duties now at Seacombe barracks.’

‘Churchill will want to concentrate all his manpower at home to defend the country if Hitler does invade,’ said Seb, thinking privately about the role he would be playing in that defence as soon as he was fit enough to leave hospital. His gift for languages made him an important part of the team being assembled at Derby House, the Headquarters for Joint Strategic Planning, involving both the navy and the RAF coast defence units, as well liaising with Fighter Command Group 12. His job as a special operator and a member of the ‘Y’ Section would be to spend his days incarcerated in a silent set room, listening for designated enemy coded messages, mainly in German.

It would be someone else, sitting in a similar room in a different part of the country, who would listen in for Marie’s coded messages. Perhaps it was just as well that it would not be him, Seb admitted, but he knew too that she had made a lasting impression on him and that he could never forget her even if, as he had truthfully told Grace, he was not in love with her.

Being at war acted like a pressure cooker on the emotions when people worked closely together,
forcing them into something they might otherwise not have been.

There had been nights when his own desire to give in to temptation and take the physical pleasure Marie had suggested they should share had come perilously close to overwhelming him. The only thing that had stopped him had been knowing that if he did he would have been breaking the rules he had been warned explicitly against breaking. A soldier away from home might with moral impunity visit a brothel, but he should not and must not become sexually involved with another member of a close-knit team. Marie’s attitude towards sex had been very different from his own, and he suspected that he would not have been her first lover, and certainly not her last. It was, though, France that held her heart, no matter what she chose to do with her body. Grace was very different, softer and warmer, a gentler, sweeter-natured girl, and far more dangerously easy to fall in love with.