Call Nurse Jenny (36 page)

That had been a mistake. She shouldn’t have said that. On reflection it seemed she was condemning her own son. That was when she had nearly broken down. To combat her weakness, she had gone into the other room to stand over Matilda, the other two following at a distance.

Looking down on the child, averting her eyes from knickers, bras, stockings and men’s pants that draped every chairback, she’d been revolted by the musty odour that rose up to meet her from the cot itself, an offensive effluvium of urine, long-unbathed skin and unwashed bedclothes. She’d half expected disorder but not this abomination. The cot, like the bed, must have been crawled in and out of for weeks without any change of linen, and looking at Crawley with his fresh-looking skin and his attention to dress, it was unbelievable he would put up with such squalor as met her eyes. There had been another smell too in that room. A faint reek that she could not at first place. Susan and her abominable lover had been crawling all over each other night after night, filling the room with the reek of their coition. One word had escaped her as she lifted the child, who must have witnessed this copulation time after time, out of her cot: ‘Slut!’ And again, enlarging on the word: ‘You disgusting slut!’

In a smouldering fury she had commanded Matilda to be washed and dressed, a process that had involved a great deal of perseverance to control the miniature tempest at the unaccustomed washing. Susan had told her this was how Mattie always was and that it was easier not to bother and upset her, a likely excuse for laziness. Finally, Lilian had borne the child home with her, as Susan had asked.

It still escaped her how the child’s mother had stood by and watched her being taken away without one word of protest. The last she had seen of Susan, as she bore Matilda down the stairs and out of the house, was her standing there leaning slightly against Crawley, his arm protectively about her, a declaration if ever there was one of her intention never to go back to her husband when he finally came home. Lilian was still certain of that.

She now cuddled her granddaughter to her. After a proper bath, her hair now brushed to a dark sheen, the little body still convulsed with the occasional sob from screaming at such mishandling. One would think she’d never seen water in her life, which must almost be true, sad to say, and Lilian again felt hatred build up against the mother.

‘You should have seen those rooms,’ she said to Leonard. ‘She was never like that when she lived here. I took her always for a clean girl, clean-living. You could have knocked me over with a feather. And her cries when Matthew left, I’d never have believed she could turn so far the other way.’

‘Well, she’s here now,’ he soothed, his arms opening for Matilda to come to him, which she did readily, to lie against her grandfather, thumb in mouth, dark eyes slewed round towards the grandma who had so handled her. ‘She’ll be with us until Susan wants her back.’

To which Lilian huffed, ‘We’ll see about that.’ And smiling at the child, added, ‘One day, you’ll thank Grandma. When Daddy comes home.’

As the year drew to its close, that he would come home she was more than certain. And soon. Of that too she had no doubts, the news being what it was, all good. This year of 1944 marked a turning point if ever there was one; despite buzz-bombs, despite frightening V2s that had come after – in June alone Rome was captured and the landings in Normandy took place, but much more heartening, for her at least, was the defeat of the Japanese invasion of India. For her it was a light at the end of the tunnel. A few more months and they’d be defeated entirely and Matthew would come marching home. In the face of that thought, all other victories had paled, even when Paris was liberated in August, then Brussels. And then on the twentieth of October had come the most wonderful news of all, of the Americans’ re-landing in the Philippines. Not long now before she saw her son again. Then another heartache would begin when he learned that the wife he loved so much had been and still was unfaithful. At least they had his child here. A beautiful two-and-a-half-year-old to be introduced to him, to call him Daddy, compensation for the loss he did not yet know of. Lilian’s heart almost broke for him at what faced him on his return.

Meanwhile it was a new half-forgotten world she and Leonard had entered, taking Matilda into their home. They’d scarcely remembered what it was like to bring up an energetic young child. Louise had been quiet, doing all that was asked of her, never resorting to tantrums, when hurt, running to her parents for it to be kissed better in the stubborn knowledge that all would be well. She could be quite self-willed when the fancy took her, but Lilian had always managed her.

Even Matthew, who had been the harder of the two to bring up, a rebel always wanting to kick over the traces, going into a corner to nurse his hurts, brazening out hurt pride with abrasive flamboyance – even with him she had managed. Until, that is, he’d gone against her advice to go for a commission, instead joining up as a mere private. She still felt he had done it just to spite her, though why, she had never been sure, she with only his well-being at heart. And look where his action had got him.

But all the good and bad in her two children had become a distant memory as they’d grown away from her. Louise was now an independent young woman, hardly ever coming home when on leave and, so her letters said, going out with a young Canadian by the name of Ken Turnbull from Winnipeg. They planned to go steady and, reading between the lines, she was hoping to go back with him to Canada after the war. With Matthew a prisoner far away, Lilian prayed daily, if God were willing, that he would come home, but she knew he would probably be a changed man.

Yes, her memories of bringing up a child had dimmed considerably. Matilda, however, altered all that. Invading her grandparents’ stagnant lives, she hounded them, small as she was. Being a demanding child, rather like her mother, but charming with it, she made her grandmother’s head spin and sometimes ache with her liveliness. With no idea how to stay neat and clean, her clothing coupons never went far enough, and to keep her prettily dressed, Lilian dragged out her old sewing machine, cutting down her own dresses, unravelling old cardigans and often sacrificing her and Leonard’s own coupons. But there were rewards, seeing a child they’d brought home looking and smelling like some workhouse waif transformed into the pretty little thing she was. And so like Matthew that it hurt.

It had pained them at first hearing Matilda’s plaintive cries of ‘Mummy, Mummy’. She said little else, for she was terribly behind with her talking, not yet chattering as a child that age should. It passed, as she was too young to sustain a memory, but Lilian took care not to take her to see her mother and awaken the child’s renewed distress. Susan seemed not to mind.

There was never a word from her unless Lilian made it her business to seek her out.

‘Aren’t you interested in how your daughter is getting along?’

Susan, displaying sullenness at her insistence in coming, had merely shrugged. ‘I know where she is if I want her.’

Come Christmas, heavy with her bastard, off-handed and rude to her mother-in-law, Susan had apparently made up her mind that she had been right about Matthew. Now certain she was a widow, she treated Lilian as an interfering old busybody who no longer had any jurisdiction over her actions. Lilian, keeping to her rigid faith, fostered hatred of the weak-willed girl for it.

The International Red Cross, with so much on their plate, were still working hard tracing prisoners of war, and had said that they’d made contact in certain quarters and the name Matthew Ward had been on a list which the Japanese had reluctantly released just prior to Christmas. It could have been any Matthew Ward, the name was not an uncommon one, but Lilian saw it as too much of a coincidence for it not to be her son. His wife had no such weight of faith, continuing to prefer her life with the abominable Geoffrey Crawley. Her and Matthew’s child was slowly becoming Lilian’s whole life, a straw to cling to, someone to take the place of her son in the unlikely event of his never coming home. But that thought she put from her.

Sister Ross moved briskly across a quadrangle of the Shaftesbury military hospital.

Hard to believe the war was over at last. Having only just returned to England, she’d missed the VE celebrations here, and could only hear about it from her mother and from the nurses here.

From her mother she had gleaned all sorts of news, amazingly detailed for one supposed to be reserved, unless of course Jenny’s absence had brought her out at last. She heard how Matthew’s wife was living with the husband of her erstwhile landlady. Jenny wasn’t a bit surprised by that, only sad. Sad for Matthew who would learn of it when eventually he came home, soon, because the war in the Far East couldn’t last much longer for all the tenacity of the Japanese in refusing to surrender to superior forces, their allies in Germany allies no longer. He would discover that while he had been sweating it out in Japanese hands, his wife had been enjoying the comfort of another man’s arms.

Jenny learned too that his parents had charge of his child, were bringing her up admirably; that his wife had had a baby by her lover, a boy; that she had nothing now to do with Matthew’s parents, considering herself wholly a widow. The war had passed her by.

As she walked on, Jenny thought back over her own war, over all that had happened to her after landing in Normandy. Having crossed the Channel in a full gale that seemed at the time to have been waiting just for them, making the whole unit, herself included, seasick, they’d moved forward with the advancing Allies, tending the wounded as they were brought in. Some were injured so grievously it had taken all her resolve not to show revulsion or pity before the sights that greeted her lest she undermine the brave face the wounded had put on. She marvelled at the resolve of most of them not to be done down by their ghastly, disfiguring wounds before their comrades.

She had seen foreign towns and cities, Bayeux, Caen completely in ruins from Allied bombardment, Rouen which had been let off relatively lightly as the troops went through. The gunfire always ahead of them, their trucks had rumbled along in the wake of the advance, bucking and pitching over the shell craters they’d left. And always the grey-faced wounded, the air filled with their moans, the hospital tents packed with hardly room enough for stretcher-bearers, medics, and nurses to go about their business, usually all under a continuous relentless barrage.

She had learned swear words she had never before known existed. She’d also learned a smattering of German as, success following success, German prisoners began being brought in, wounded prisoners in as much need of attention as Allied wounded. The QAs tended them all.

She’d seen Paris and had been entranced by its beauty, and finally, with the guns falling silent, she had been posted to a town called Rotenburg, not far from Bremen, to a small hospital to help nurse the pitiful victims of Sandbostel, a concentration camp in the north of the country. After all she had seen of the wounded and dying, that place had provided the sights she most wanted to erase from a heart still apt to sink with sickening regularity at the slightest recollection.

Finally home, leave, and transfer here, caring for servicemen who had contracted tuberculosis, mostly ex-prisoners of war, victims of conditions they’d been compelled to live under. She had seen a little of the world. In time she’d return to civilian nursing. But she would never forget.

Shovelling sawdust into sacks wasn’t pleasant at most times. Now, as with most things in Japanese hands, the extractors had long ago fallen apart and no longer sucked away the fine dust. Despite strips of sacking tied over nose and mouth, it got into the lungs to be hawked up later in thick yellow phlegm.

The officers complained regularly. The gaol commandant, Major Tanaka, listened sympathetically and did nothing, just as he did nothing about the diabolical bullying by his men, especially one known as Valentino from his handsome narrow face and the dramatic way he swivelled his eyes.

Having felt the weight of his bullying, Matthew trudged back through the gates of Rangoon gaol at sunset in a black mood. Loading sacks on to a barge, one had slipped, spilling sawdust everywhere. Valentino had pounced, wielding his bamboo stick like a samurai warrior, ending up by booting him headlong into the water, strutting off to leave his victim to be fished out by his workmates.

Showering briefly under the Heath Robinson contraption built by the POWs which the Japs allowed to be turned on for just half an hour each evening, subsequently causing long disappointed queues, Matthew worked to take his mind off his treatment, thinking instead of Susan. She no longer floated in his mind as during the days of the railway. He’d come through it, just, though he still suffered malaria from time to time. Almost callously, he had fought to put behind him thoughts of comrades who had died on the way. He had survived. He was determined to continue to survive, and to this end, he put behind him too today’s thrashing, and thought only of Susan, of going home to take up their lives together, when all this would become a thing of the past.

In the midst of thinking that as he soaped himself with the tiniest sliver he’d been handed by an officer – told not to overdo it as others had to use it too – the name Jenny flashed into his mind and for a second he saw her quite clearly through the thin curtain of dripping water: her flaming hair, her wide smile, her well-formed features.

Strange though, he thought a lot of Jenny Ross; she came into his mind at the oddest of moments, like now. Mostly it was to recall that ardent kiss she’d given him in the street, right out in the open, all that time ago. Typical of her to do a thing like that. Never seemed to get it right.

Matthew lifted his face up to the drips falling from the makeshift shower head, a perforated canvas bag being spasmodically filled by a pipe from a tank someone in turn kept refilling as long as the water would last.

Her kiss had been a fleeting thing, leaving him to smile reflectively at the lingering sensation it had brought, one that had stirred him enough to make him want to write to her, perhaps further the relationship she had begun. But then his unit had been transferred to Birmingham and he’d met Susan. From then on
she
had taken up all his thoughts.