Convoy (7 page)

‘But I’m so serious, so dreary. I’m not laughing or making jokes. I’m just rattling on about the war, instead of cheering you up.’

She took his hand again. ‘Yes, you are boring,’ she said lightly, ‘but because you won’t rattle on about the war. I’ve been trying to get you to tell me, but you fob me off as though I was an inquisitive old aunt.’

‘But why on earth do you want to hear about all that?’ He was genuinely surprised; that much was clear to her and she was not sure whether to be angry or exasperated. Instead she stopped walking, so that he had to turn to face her. She brushed her hair back with a hand.

‘Ned – tell me once again, am I just a convenient companion for winter walks while you convalesce, a romantic sort of junior Florence Nightingale who sneaks you a goodnight kiss, or…’

‘Or,’ he said quietly.

‘Very well, give me a chaste kiss now…’

He bent and kissed her, and she said: ‘You want to know about me; about what I did before I became a nurse, before I met you…’

‘Of course I do; is there anything odd about that?’

‘No, but what about you? Didn’t you exist until they brought you to the hospital?’

‘Of course I did!’

‘“Of course”! That’s twice you’ve said it. Can’t I be curious about your life before then? About what made you the man you are? Can’t I be jealous about the girls in your past? About the places you’ve been to, the jokes you share with other people, but not with me?’

‘But there’s nothing. It’s all been flat until now.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He shrugged his shoulders and winced at the pain in his arm.

‘Well, you’ve been in love, you’ve married… You were happy, even though briefly. You have happy memories. My memories don’t involve happiness; they involve months of war.’

‘Oh Ned, you are so jealous of my late husband. He’s dead; he’s no rival to you! I’ve tried to avoid telling you about him because it doesn’t matter: you’re here and alive and…’

‘Yes, but I’d prefer to know.’

Suddenly she stood back from him, her face taut, her eyes narrowed as though she had just made a great decision; she looked incredibly beautiful and, he realized, suddenly distraught and incredibly vulnerable.

‘I’ll tell you then,’ she said. ‘I hated him. He married me because I have a private income and because he wanted to stop people talking. I found out on our honeymoon that he was homosexual. The pilot killed with him was his lover. He joined us in Rome for the honeymoon. Our married life lasted four days. I was too embarrassed to divorce him, so I was still legally “Mrs Brown” when he was killed. Now you’ll hate me because I disgust you: I was a homosexual’s alibi, but I didn’t understand.’

He took her in his arms as she began to sob.

‘Oh, it was so disgusting… I’m still – oh Ned, I’m a married woman but I don’t know – I mean, I’m still – oh…’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been incredibly stupid and clumsy.’

He held her for two or three minutes, until she stopped sobbing, and with both of them realizing there was nothing more that needed saying, they continued walking along the lane, hand in hand.

As the lane turned gently to the right, rising slightly to give a better view over the fields, Clare nodded towards a clump of half a dozen trees forming the corner of a meadow. ‘Those large lumps in the top branches – what are they?’

‘Magpies’ nests.’

‘So big?’

‘They’re made of mud and sticks and so thick that you can stand underneath with a shotgun and the pellets won’t penetrate.’

They stood for a few moments looking across the meadow and Clare said: ‘It looks as though there’s been a paperchase through here!’

‘Large pieces of paper – there’s a bundle of it over there, caught in the bushes.’

Before he could stop her she had run a few yards along the lane to a gate, scrambled over it and walked across to the nearest piece of paper. She stared at it and then went over to pull the bundle from the bushes. She came back and gave him one of the sheets. The paper was poor quality, greyish, the kind used for newspapers. There was a message printed on one side.

He read it, half unbelieving, half amused. ‘We’ve lost the Battle of the Atlantic!’ he said. ‘It says so here.’

‘I know, I’ve just read it. Who…’

‘German planes dropping leaflets. That bundle – the chap forgot to cut the string so the whole thing dropped. The rest must have fluttered down during the night. Better than bombs!’

She shivered. ‘These figures – millions of tons of shipping sunk by the U-boats. Are they true?’

‘Certainly not true, because pamphlets are only propaganda. But they’re sinking quite a few ships – at the moment we’re certainly not
winning
the Battle of the Atlantic.’

‘Will we?’

‘We have to,’ he said grimly, ‘otherwise we’ll starve.’

‘But here,’ she waved one of the pamphlets, ‘the Germans say they’re sinking more merchant ships than we’re building. Surely that means eventually…’

‘Exactly! Unless we stop the sinkings and increase our building.’

‘Can we?’

‘We can’t; not Britain alone. But now the Americans have come in – just wait until they get going.’

‘How long will that take?’

Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Nurse. Still, there’ll be a few more cuts in the meat and cheese ration before the extra ships are launched, you can be sure of that.’

‘But a week’s cheese ration is only the size of a matchbox now!’

Yorke looked her up and down without smiling. ‘It suits you. Two matchboxes and you’d be plump.’

‘No, seriously, Ned.’

‘Seriously, Nurse. No one’s starving.’

‘But we’re losing a lot of ships.’

‘Yes, and the Germans are losing a lot of bombers over Britain, and tanks in the Western desert. And U-boats in the Atlantic, too. Don’t forget that.’

‘What do we do with these pamphlets?’ she asked.

‘Take some back with us – the others will love to see ’em. You can offer the bundle to this boy coming along on a bicycle – he can probably get a penny each for them at school.’

‘Should we, Ned? Isn’t that what the Germans want – everyone to read them?’

Yorke laughed and waved the paper. ‘I hope everyone does: it’s such blatant propaganda, so strident… It’s written in such a shrill and hectoring way that even if it was true, no one would believe it.’

Clare was far from convinced. ‘Then why do the Germans drop them?’

‘Because they don’t understand the British for a start. Tell us we’re beaten and we start waking up and trying. But if the Germans
were
winning the Battle of the Atlantic, why bombard us with pamphlets? Why not save paper and wait for us to starve? If all this was true,’ he tapped the bundle she was holding, ‘we’d have to surrender by Easter or starve to death.’

Finally she smiled. ‘Stop looking at me like that. I’ve been putting on a little weight, but it’s all the potatoes.’

‘So you won’t be surrendering by Easter?’

‘Not to the Germans,’ she said, and waved the boy on a bicycle to a stop. She held out the bundle. ‘German pamphlets. The man in the bomber didn’t cut the string. There are plenty more in the fields over there. Are they any good to you?’

‘Cor!’ the boy exclaimed, snatching the bundle excitedly and inspecting it with the eye of an expert. ‘I just found a dozen or so sheets over in Nicholson’s fields, but I didn’t realize others drifted this far. Must have been the wind. ’Ere, lady, can I really ’ave this lot? I get a penny each at school and Mrs Rogers – she runs the Red Cross – is on at me to give ’er some to sell to buy bandages and things. She charges tuppence. Promised she wouldn’t undercut me. These ain’t damp, neither. Them I got last week was useless – it’d rained for hours before I found ’em. In Hatch Park they were, and I reckon some poacher got a good picking first.’

By now Clare was holding Ned’s hand again and smiling. ‘Very well, you can have the bundle, and there’s a trail of them across those fields. But make sure Mrs Rogers has as many as she can sell.’

‘Oh, yus, miss. It’s the bandages, you see; they’re very expensive.’ He caught sight of Yorke’s hand in the sling. ‘I bet you know that! You must have a bob’s worth on that hand. ’Ere, mister, are you one of the chaps from the new place they’ve just started in Willesborough?’

Ned nodded and the boy grinned. ‘I ’ear they’ve got a smashing lot of nurses there. My dad works for the electricity, and he had to go there yesterday to read the meters. Made my mum jealous, he did, the way he went on about them. Anyway thanks for these!’

With that he turned his cycle round and pedalled back the way he came, riding without hands and clutching the bundle to his chest, the trail of loose pamphlets forgotten.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Clare said. ‘A few more leaflet raids and we could make enough money to build a new hospital.’

‘And I’ll be the recruiting officer who chooses the “smashing nurses”!’

Sister Scotland wore what Clare usually referred to as her ‘official face’. Standing beside Yorke’s bed, she coughed and said: ‘Mr Yorke…’

‘Yes, Sister?’

‘About that arm of yours.’ When Yorke raised his eyebrows, startled by the ominous tone in her voice, she said: ‘It’s not really responding. The physiotherapist is very worried by the limited movement in the wrist.’

‘It should move more by now?’

‘Yes, at least, we had hoped so.’

‘And the fact it doesn’t means?’

‘It means either the muscle is more damaged than we thought, or you aren’t concentrating on your remedial therapy.’

‘There’s no much else to concentrate on,’ Yorke grumbled.

Sister Scotland stared at him. ‘I thought you were concentrating on long-distance walking. I’ve been expecting Nurse Exton to tell me the Admiralty had started patrols over the North Downs, collecting German pamphlets.’

‘Oh, you’ve heard about them?’

‘A small boy called at my office this morning – he came with his father, who works for the electricity company – asking if any of the patients had found any more pamphlets. It seems his first consignment came from you – he described you as “the gentleman with a bob’s worth of bandages on the left hand” – and he’s sold them all.’

Yorke looked out of the window, where a weak sun shone through fast-moving patches of cloud. ‘If we hear any German bombers tonight, perhaps you’ll let me go for a walk tomorrow, Sister?’

‘Of course, of course, Mr Yorke. You are walking so well there’s no need for a nurse to accompany you.’

‘No,’ Yorke agreed, smiling, ‘but you know how risky it would be for patients to wander round these lanes alone. Nurses, too – they might be hit by a bundle of propaganda leaflets.’

‘One has been already,’ Sister Scotland said dryly. ‘I’m very worried about her.’

‘The diagnosis was made yesterday,’ Yorke said quietly. ‘The prognosis – that’s the correct word for the future, isn’t it – is excellent.’

The Sister looked down at him, silent for a few moments, obviously considering what he had just said. ‘Yesterday, eh?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘The specialist took his time,’ she commented gruffly. ‘A month, almost six weeks.’

‘He didn’t have all the papers in the case.’

Sister Scotland nodded and as she moved away said quietly, ‘Work on that arm; it’s touch and go, but now you have an extra incentive.’

As he watched her moving among the other men in the room, pausing beside each bed to chat, he thought of Clare. Somewhere in this old house, in one of the bedrooms, probably in one of these same iron-pipe beds, she would be sleeping, because she was still on night duty. It was tiring for her but gave them the most time together: she was allowed out for a couple of hours in the afternoon; she spent the whole night on the ward. She would be sitting at the small table over there, in the middle of the room, a tiny figure in a tiny halo of light thrown by the green-shaded lamp. She would be in profile. She would, during the night when she thought he was asleep, look round at him. And while she worked on the pile of papers and wrote reports, he would watch her without her realizing it. Childish, romantic, pointless – yes, all of these, and yet so important.

‘Mr Yorke…’ He looked up to find the physiotherapist waiting. She was a tall, bony woman in her early thirties, mousy-brown hair bobbed short and her face having the well-scrubbed, fresh look of a games mistress…’has Sister told you?’

‘About the extra exercises?’

‘Yes, two one-hour sessions. It’ll be tiring but it might make all the difference.’

All the difference, she did not add, between spending the rest of your life with a withered arm or an ordinary one which is badly scarred but useful.

She took the exercise instruments from the trolley and gave him first the little device for improving his grip; two pieces of wood shaped to fit his palm on one side and his fingers on the other, and separated by several small compression springs. For the next ten minutes he had to grip the exerciser and keep on squeezing.

‘The Spanish Inquisition was never like this,’ he grumbled.

‘It probably was, but I’m sure the victims didn’t complain as much. After all, this is for your own good.’

‘And that,’ Yorke said, grunting as he squeezed, ‘is exactly what the Inquisition said. They put their victims on the rack to save their souls.’

‘I’m not interested in your soul,’ the woman said with mock viciousness, ‘it’s your body I’m trying to save!’

He continued squeezing. It seemed to take an age to reach a hundred; finally at four hundred she said: ‘That’s ten minutes.’ She took the grips and began the series of exercises for his wrist.

‘The postman’s been,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘I have some letters for you. Three. You get them when you’ve finished your exercises.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t pry. There’s a long one in a manilla envelope. On His Majesty’s Service. From the Admiralty, I think. Two handwritten ones, a London postmark and a local one.’

‘Local?’

‘Willesborough. Here. The little sub-post office is only just up the road. Whoever wrote it could have saved the price of a stamp and delivered it by hand.’