Polly's Angel (48 page)

‘I'm never going to get married,' Polly said, shrinking down in her rug once more. ‘Nor I shan't have kids . . . and I do t'ink you might feel a bit sorrier for
me,
Tad, with everything I believed turned upside down.'

‘It's been a dreadful shock for you, so it has,' Tad agreed diplomatically – and truthfully, now he came to think of it – pressing the starter and putting the car in gear. ‘You'll come to terms with it, Poll, given time. And you must ring your mammy at work first thing tomorrow and let her know you're all right. Promise?'

‘Oh, all right,' Polly said. ‘And now I'm goin' to sleep so you mustn't talk to me any more, Tad Donoghue. I'm very grateful that you came for me, but I don't like you very much right now. You won't try to understand, and you say you're sorry for Grace when at least she really is who she thought she was. Goodnight.'

And with that she huddled herself right into the rug and turned away from him.

Tad could have done with the companionship of an occasional word or a look, but he drove on, realising that to Polly what had happened had been a major tragedy. She would come to her senses in the end, he knew that – his Polly had never been one to bear a grudge. And he acknowledged that finding your family were not your family, your parents not your parents, must have taken some swallowing, especially for the spoiled and adored Polly. He felt it a little unfair that he was being punished for it, for driving alone with Polly beside him and pretending to be asleep – now and then he saw her eyes glint as she glanced stealthily sideways at him – but he had enough imagination to guess pretty accurately at how she must be feeling and continued to drive in silence.

However, once they reached the island he pulled over again and turned towards her, giving her a gentle shake when she hastily closed her eyes and once more pretended slumber. ‘Polly, I think you'd best wake up now. Your wrennery will be locked up for the night, and it can't be more than four o'clock now so there won't be anyone stirring for a bit. I'm out without leave too . . . but I've worked out how to get round that. What about you, alanna?'

‘There's always someone up around six o'clock,' Polly said. She yawned. ‘Don't worry, I'll get in wit'out any fuss. Diane will have signed in for me, I expect.'

‘Right. Then I'll put the other rug round me and we can both snooze until around five.' He leaned over to the back seat and pulled the second rug across, then glanced sideways at Polly. ‘Shall we both snuggle up under the two rugs, alanna? Then we can share each other's warmth and have the warmth of both rugs instead of one each.'

‘I don't think we should,' Polly said, with an edge of frost in her voice. ‘What would people say?'

‘Not a lot,' Tad said, grinning. ‘I'm not suggesting we get into the back seat, alanna! 'Tis just for warmth, you know.'

‘Well, I suppose it might be all right,' Polly said, clearly not wanting to come down off her high horse but probably needing the warmth as much as he did, for Tad, by this time, was very cold indeed. His hands felt as though they might have frozen to the wheel and his feet were very little better. ‘After all, you're more like a brother to me than—' Her voice wobbled and Tad heaved the rug off her and took her in his arms.

‘All right, all right, darlin',' he said, his voice rough with love and compassion. ‘You've had a shocking time, so you have, and here's me been trying to make you see that it wasn't so bad when it's been cruel hard on you. Now give your Tad a nice cuddle and we'll go off to sleep like a couple of babes in the wood and it'll soon be morning. Indeed, the sky's trying to lighten in the east even now.'

‘Pull the rugs over us, then,' Polly said, snuggling against him. ‘Oh, Tad, isn't this nice and comfy? You are kind – I wish you really
were
my brother. You'd have telled me I was adopted if you'd known, wouldn't you?'

‘I don't know,' Tad said, innate honesty compelling him not to give the easy lie. ‘But it's not your brother I want to be, alanna. When this lot's over I want you to change your name again, only this time to Donoghue.'

He said it with a dry mouth and thumping heart, for though he had known he loved Polly and wanted to marry her ever since they had met as two adults, he still did not really know how Polly viewed him.

Polly stirred in his arms and laughed sleepily. ‘Silly! I'm going to marry Sunny Andersen, I'm sure I told you that ages and ages ago. I love you ever so much, Tad, just like I love me brothers . . . well, I mean just like I love the O'Brady boys. But it's a different sort of love, isn't it! Now let's try to go to sleep or we'll be wrecks.'

Polly slept quite quickly after that but Tad stayed awake, his heart sick and sore within him. She loved him like a brother! She was going to marry that Sunny Andersen – ridiculous name – because for him she had a ‘different' kind of love! He had been a fool not to have courted her more openly, letting her believe that it was just friendship which brought him into Holyhead whenever he had a few hours free, just friendship which made him give her lessons on his motorbike, teach her how to service it, take him so for granted that she could phone him up and ask him to get her out of trouble without a second thought. She knew Tad – good old Tad – would not let her down because he was like a brother to her!

It was a long while before he slept.

Next morning, Tad was closeted with his squadron commander for a long time, rather to the surprise of his friends, for they knew that Tad had got away with his unexpected absence and also with his ‘borrowing' of the car. When he came out, however, he was pale but composed, grinning cheerfully at his friends and telling them that he would surprise them all yet.

A couple of days after that, he rang Polly at her wrennery.

‘Hello, Poll. Did you ring your mammy and daddy?' he enquired, for all the world as though they had parted best of friends instead of with a chill between them. ‘You did? It's glad I am. Well, next time you speak to them, tell them I've been posted, will you? I'm off to foreign parts to train as a pilot, so you won't be troubled with me for a while.' And when she would have asked questions, he just said, still with unimpaired cheerfulness: ‘Take care of yourself, Poll, and no more hitchhiking. Bye, love. See you – oh, some time, I guess.'

He rang off. No point in hanging around where you were not wanted, he told himself grimly. Besides, the powers-that-be had offered to train him as a pilot. It would . . . take his mind off things.

Whistling, Tad set off for his hut to get his gear packed.

Chapter Fifteen

1944

Sunny came up from the warm depths of the ship on to the icy deck and instinctively ducked his head deeper into the thick scarf wound round his neck and the lower half of his face. By God, but it was freezing out here, though that was nothing new. In the Arctic waters at the top of the world, where they took their convoy of merchantmen to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel, it was always cold. Indeed, cold scarcely described it, Sunny thought morosely now. The air was so icy that it was dangerous to draw it sharply into one's lungs and even through the muffler he knew from experience that all too soon the damp of his expelled breath would form icicles on the soft white wool.

He glanced towards the rail and saw the white-tipped waves, though he had known the sea would be rough. When was it ever anything else, up here? He had been on the Russian convoys for two years – more – and had grown accustomed to the constant bucketing of the ship, the constant straining to see through the thick dark and the wicked, unrelenting cold which attacked every man as soon as he left the warmth of the mess deck below. But no one, Sunny thought now, could get used to the almost perpetual darkness up here. How did they bear it, the inhabitants of these arctic coasts, where they only saw daylight between eleven in the morning and two in the afternoon and that a pretty grey and overcast daylight at this time of the year? He and the rest of the crew, after their first few trips, had speculated on why in heaven's name did the Jerries want this God-forsaken land? Why should they fight to possess the great, sprawling mass of Russia, a land made up of empty, ice-ridden wastes and surly, ignorant peasantry? But it was all part of the war effort, to keep Russia alive and armed, so they continued to bring the convoys across some of the worst seas in the world, to suffer the perpetual dark and the endless cold, to say nothing of the dangers inherent in such seas.

However, staring out at the sea would scarcely bring them in to port any faster so Sunny made for the bridge, where the man waiting to be relieved grinned at him and then made his way as quickly as he dared across the iced-up deck and down the companionway, where he would seek his hammock and would get himself as warm as he could during his time off watch.

On the bridge, the officer of the watch acknowledged Sunny's arrival and he took his place beside him and raised the night glasses to his eyes scanning the convoy keenly for the first blue flash of a signal from another vessel. The ships showed no lights, but he could see the dim shapes of the merchantmen and could guess that the deeper darkness on the port bow was another corvette, circling their flock, as the
Snowdrop
was doing. He wondered where they were; they had rounded the North Cape a day or so earlier; going on past voyages they must be in the approaches to the harbour by now. He thought rather wistfully of his earlier days at sea, when he had sailed through warm, tropical waters and, when the ship docked at a foreign port, had taken pleasure in their surroundings, strolled around the streets, smiled at the people, admired shop windows.

Russia was different. Very different. There could be no talking to the locals because the Russian police saw to that. They were a constant presence, patrolling the dirty, wooden quaysides as though some great treasure was hidden there.

There was a slight scuffle on the bridge and moving closer to the rail he saw the ice-breaker looming up in the darkness. So the port was near! Out here, where the sea was so constantly rough, so constantly in motion, the ice did not form but as soon as the ships got into the shelter of the land – such shelter as it offered – then the sea began to freeze over. Russian ice-breakers were essential to force a way into harbour for the convoys and their escorts and now, on the port bow, Sunny saw, through his binoculars, the quick flicker of a blue light – a signal from the Russian ship. Sunny scribbled the message on his pad and read it out to the officer of the watch who told him to acknowledge it, so that the crew of that rusty, elderly vessel would know that this was the convoy for which they waited.

Very soon, Sunny was signalling the other ships to follow the icebreaker into harbour. The
Snowdrop
and her fellow guardians would not be the first into port; the merchantmen, which went right up to the quayside, were always first with the war ships following them in like sheepdogs shepherding their flock. Once the merchantmen were tied up, Sunny knew from experience that the Russian dockers would come swarming out of the collection of wooden huts which, it seemed, constituted a Russian port, and begin to unload the convoy. Meanwhile, the warships which had protected them on their long and arduous journey would not be allowed to tie up against the quays but would anchor in mid-pool. The intention, Sunny was sure, had been to see that no British sailors went ashore, since the police must have had their hands full just watching the dockers, both men and women, working on the ships. But since the ice formed hard enough to walk on with complete safety after no more than half an hour it was possible for anyone to walk ashore.

Someone came and stood close by Sunny's elbow at the rail. It was Freddy Sales, a fellow Liverpudlian. The two men had become good friends, particularly since Sunny's mother's death the previous year when she had been killed by a stray bullet during a daylight raid on the shipping in Portsmouth harbour and though Sunny had been at sea at the time he had been given compassionate leave when the ship had docked. He had made his way to his mother's cramped little house, only to find it already occupied, since because of the bomb damage housing was at a premium in the area. Since Sunny had never spent more than a few days in the house it had never seemed like home and though he visited her grave he had left Pompey with few regrets. He and his mother had drifted apart once he had joined the Navy, and though her morals had never worried him as a youngster, he had found it more difficult to accept her way of life once he was in the Navy himself. On the couple of occasions when he had taken himself off down to Hampshire she had been ‘entertaining' a friend and though she was not embarrassed to find her son on the doorstep, both Sunny and her new playmate were. He had heard nothing of his father since the start of the war, and reverted to Liverpool on his leaves, glad to return to the city where he had been born and bred. It had seemed very much easier to go back to the city where he still had many friends, including the O'Brady family, who were always warm and welcoming. They were happy to let him sleep in their spare room if he had nowhere else to go, though he usually managed to find a shipmate who was glad enough to have him to stay for the brief period of his leave. Besides, he was ruefully aware that it was far easier to make his way to Liverpool than it had been to Hampshire. At least it enabled him to get there and back in the time allotted to him.

And of course, there was the lure of seeing Polly, because she had been back in Liverpool now for eighteen months, and sometimes, when he was on leave, he managed to see a fair bit of her.

Although he acknowledged sadly to himself that his Polly had changed. She was a despatch rider now, and took her job very seriously. She whizzed all over the place on what seemed to him a very large motorbike, taking messages, instructions, secret papers quite often, she told him proudly. She was still a darling, of course, he told himself loyally now, but . . . well, different. Harder. Less – less interested in his war, being far too occupied with her own. And, he had to admit it even to himself, less interested in him. It was not as though she had another feller, not that he could discover anyway, and Polly was not the sort of girl to try to deceive anyone. No, she was honest and straightforward. It was almost – well, almost as though her interest in young men in general and himself in particular had flagged. Been beaten down by the war, perhaps, and all the various things which had happened to her. So, though he always tried to see her when he was on leave, he was uneasily aware that there was something missing; the old Polly, the light-hearted, carefree one, was gone, and that he did not really know the more serious young woman who had taken her place.