The Hidden Years (6 page)

He never spoke about his injuries. Never complained, as
some of the men did, about fictitious limbs that were still there.
Outwardly, he seemed to have adjusted well to his amputations, quietly
allowing the nurses to get him into a chair, so that Lizzie, or one of
the other aides, could wheel him into the gardens.

Lizzie liked him, although she knew that most of the other
girls found him poor company, complaining that he never laughed or
joked like the other men and that he was a real misery.

Lizzie didn't mind his silences—she knew that he
particularly liked to be wheeled round the gardens. He had told her
once that they reminded him of the gardens of his grandparents' home.

Cottingdean, it was called, and when he talked about it
Lizzie could tell that it was a place he loved and that, in some way,
the memory of it brought him both joy and pain. Sometimes when he
mentioned it she would see the bright sheen of tears in his eyes and
would wonder why, if he loved it so much, he stayed here, but she was
too sensitive to question him, too aware of the deep, raw pain he kept
hidden from the others.

She liked him and discovered, as the months went by, that
she looked forward to seeing him, to winning from him his fugitive,
reluctant smile.

Like her, he enjoyed reading, and when he discovered that
she had read, and now reread, everything the vicar's wife had donated
to her he offered to lend her some of his own books. She refused,
worrying about the wisdom of leaving them in the dormitory. The other
girls would not deliberately damage them, but they were not always as
careful with other people's property as they might have been.

Gradually, a tentative friendship developed between them
and often, on her days off, she would spend time with Edward, taking
him out in the garden if the weather was fine, sometimes reading aloud
to him when it wasn't, knowing how much the mere effort of holding a
book sometimes tired him.

She made no mention of Edward in her letters home to her
aunt. Aunt Vi would not have approved. Edward came from a very
different world from her own and Aunt Vi did not approve of any
mingling of the classes. It always led to trouble, she had warned
Lizzie.

It made her blood run cold now to remember that, on this
particular Thursday, she had almost decided against spending her
precious time off with Edward. She had woken up in an odd, restless,
uncomfortable mood, her mind and body filled with vague, unfamiliar
yearnings, but then she had reminded herself that Edward would be
looking forward to going out. The rhododendrons were in full flower in
the park, and he had been looking forward to seeing them for days. The
sun was out, the sky a clear, soft blue… No, it wouldn't be
fair to let him down.

And so, suppressing her rebellious yearnings, she had
washed in the cold, shabby bathroom which all the girls shared,
allowing herself the luxury of washing her hair, and wondering at the
same time if she dared to have it cut. She was the only girl in the
hostel who wore her hair in such an old-fashioned style, braided into a
neat coronet, which Aunt Vi insisted upon. She wondered idly for a
moment what she would look like with one of the shoulder-length bobs
worn with such suggestive insouciance by some of the other girls, and
then sighed as she studied her make-up-free reflection in the spotted
mirror.

The other girls wore powder and lipstick, and cheap
perfume given to them by their American boyfriends. They curled their
hair and darkened their eyelashes with shoe blacking and, if they were
lucky enough to own a pair of the coveted nylons, they deliberately
wore their skirts short enough to show off their legs.

As she dressed in the serviceable cotton underwear which
Aunt Vi's strict teachings ensured that she spent her precious
allowance of soap scrupulously washing until her hands were almost raw
and bleeding, to ensure that it stayed white, she admitted that
lipstick and fashionably bobbed hair were not for her.

She knew the other girls laughed at her behind her back,
mimicking her accent and making fun of her clothes.

Aunt Vi had practised a lifetime of frugality and, as
Lizzie had grown out of the clothes she had originally arrived with
from London, the older woman had altered garments from the trunks full
of clothes she had been given by her employers over the years to fit
her great-niece, and, in doing so, had also turned the exercise into
lessons in dressmaking and fine plain sewing.

That the skirt she was wearing now had once belonged to
Lady Jeveson would have impressed the other girls in the hostel as
little as it impressed her, although for different reasons, Lizzie
acknowledged. The other girls would have screamed with laughter and
derision at the thought of wearing something which had first been worn
by a girl who was now a grandmother.

That quality of cloth never wore out, Aunt Vi declared
firmly, and indeed it did not, Lizzie reflected wryly, fingering the
heavy, pleated tweed.

It was a pity that Lady Jeveson had not favoured the soft
pastel colours more suited to her own fair colouring, rather than the
dull, horsy tweeds of which she had apparently been so fond. The blouse
she was wearing might be silk, but it was a dull beige colour which did
nothing for her skin, just like the brown cashmere cardigan she wore
over it.

She had seen the other girls, on their days off, going out
in bright, summery dresses, with thin floating skirts and the kind of
necklines which would have shocked Aunt Vi, and, while she knew that
she could never have worn anything so daring, this morning Lizzie found
herself wishing that her blouse might have been a similar shade of
lavender-grey to her eyes, and that her skirt might have been made out
of a fine, soft wool, and not this heavy, itchy stuff, which was a
physical weight on her slender hips.

There were no nylons for her. She had to make do either
with bare legs, which the rough wool made itch dreadfully, or the
thick, hand-knitted stockings her aunt had sent her for Christmas.

She wasn't sure what had made her opt for bare legs, what
particular vanity had decreed that this morning she would not be
sensible and wear the hated stockings, knowing that they made her
slender ankles look positively thick, even if they were warm and
practical.

The hostel was just across the village from the hospital,
and Lizzie cycled there on an ancient bicycle. When they were on duty,
the girls ate at the hospital; not the same food as the patients, but
meals which the others often angrily derided as 'not fit for pigs'.

Certainly, the meals were stodgy and unappetising, and not
a patch on Aunt Vi's dishes. Her aunt might almost be bordering on the
parsimonious, she might make every penny do the work of two, but she
was a good cook, and Lizzie missed her appetising meals, the fresh
vegetables and fruit in season which she always managed to obtain by
some country means of barter.

This morning, since she wasn't on duty, there would be no
breakfast for her at the hostel, and, since the girls were not allowed
to cook food in the hostel, that meant either whatever she could buy
and eat on the way to the hospital, or an expensive and not very
appetising snack in the village's one and only cafe.

Trying not to let herself think about her aunt's porridge,
thick and creamy with the top of Farmer Hobson's milk, Lizzie told
herself stoically that she didn't really want any breakfast.

All the girls were always hungry; their workload was
heavy, and no matter how unappetising they found their food it was
always eaten.

All of them were a little on the thin side, Lizzie in
particular as she was more fine-boned than the rest, with tiny,
delicate wrists and ankles that sometimes looked so frail that they
might snap.

As she cycled towards the village, she could feel the sun
beating down on to the back of her head and smell the fresh warm scent
of late spring, mingling with the tantalising suggestion of the summer
still to come.

As she rode, wisps of blonde hair escaped from her coronet
and curled in feathery tendrils round her face. At first, the other
girls had refused to believe her hair was naturally fair, accusing her
of dyeing it.

She chose not to ride through the village but to circle
round it, using a narrow side-road which meandered towards the rear
entrance to the hospital.

Before the war, the hospital had been a grand house, and
the lane she was using had originally been that used by the tenants and
the tradespeople.

She was cycling happily down the centre of it when she
heard the car, the sound so unexpected that at first she made no
attempt to move off the crown of the road. The village saw its fair
share of wartime traffic; the squire's wife still drove her car on Red
Cross business and Lizzie was used to the imperious sound of car horns
demanding the right of way, especially when they were driven by
excitable young men in uniform.

She was not, though, used to them being driven down this
narrow little lane which led only to the hospital, which was why, lost
in her own daydreams, she did not initially react to the sound of this
one until it was almost too late.

The realisation that someone was driving up behind her,
that the car was one of those expensive, open-topped sporty models
driven by a young man with wind-blown thick black hair, bronzed skin,
and the dashing uniform of an airforce pilot, hit her in a series of
small shocks as she glanced over her shoulder and saw the shiny dark
green bonnet of the car, realised that there wasn't room for both of
them on the narrow little road, tried desperately to turn to one side,
and lost her balance at the same time. The young man stopped his car
with a cacophony of squealing tyres, protesting engine and angrily
bellowed complaints about her sanity.

Lying on the dusty road, her knees stinging with pain and
her eyes with tears, Lizzie wished devoutly that a large hole would
appear beneath her into which she could conveniently disappear.

Her face scarlet with mortification and embarrassment, she
struggled to her feet, at the same time as she heard the car door slam.

'I say, are you OK? That was a nasty tumble you
took… I thought you'd heard me…'

'I did…but I didn't realise… Well,
no one ever drives down this road…'

She was on her feet now, her face still red, a tiny voice
inside her deriding her for her vanity in not wearing the woollen
stockings which would have protected her now smarting skin from the
road, all too conscious of the appearance she must present to this
unbelievably handsome young man who was now standing next to her,
towering over her, looking at her in a way which made her loathe and
castigate Lady Jeveson for ever being stupid enough to choose such
unflattering clothes.

Two bright spots of colour burned on her cheekbones as she
realised what was happening to her. For the first time in her life she
was experiencing the dizzying, dangerous sensation of falling
helplessly in love with a stranger—that sensation, that
awareness… that feeling which she had heard so often
described by the others.

The unexpectedness of it distracted her momentarily, her
mouth half parting at the wonder of it, so that Kit Danvers found his
attention caught by her, despite the awfulness of her clothes and the
hairstyle that made her look like photographs he had seen of his
grandmother.

If one really studied her it was possible to see that she
was quite a looker, he recognised with the ease of a master long used
to seeking out his quarry in the most unexpected of places.

Finding pearls hidden in dull oysters was Kit Danvers's
speciality—the other men in the mess envied him for it,
admiringly, if sometimes resentfully, recognising that when it came to
women Kit Danvers had something, some unrecognised quality that the
female sex found it impossible to resist.

Lizzie knew none of this. She only knew that as she looked
into the laughing blue eyes looking back into hers, as she studied the
handsome tanned face with its firm male bone-structure and its warm
smile, something inside her melted and uncurled, something completely
new to her and yet as old as Eve.

'You've got a smudge on your nose… There, it's
gone.'

She held her breath as he leaned towards her and
carelessly rubbed his thumb against her skin. A thousand pin-pricks of
sensation were born where his touch had been, an odd yearning
constricting her breathing, her body suddenly tense and yet languorous
at the same time.

'Look, you can't ride that thing now… Why don't
I give you a lift to wherever you're going…?'

'The hospital—I'm going to the hospital,' Lizzie
told him breathlessly, scarcely conscious of what she was saying,
unable to take her wondering gaze off his handsome, smiling face. 'I
work there.'

'You do? Now, there's a coincidence. I'm on my way there
too. They told me in the place where I'm staying that this road would
get me there quietly and discreetly. Not supposed to be running this
job really, you know,' he told her, patting the bonnet of his car. 'And
she's a thirsty lady. But when you're in the forefront of a war you're
entitled to a few perks. Luckily the Yanks aren't as parsimonious with
their petrol as our people, and I know this Yank…' He broke
off and smiled winsomely at her. 'Boring you to death, I expect. A
pretty girl like you doesn't want…'

A pretty girl… Lizzie gazed adoringly at him.
He thought her pretty… her heart raced and sang, and then
she remembered all Aunt Vi's stern teachings and turned her head away
from the dangerous potency of that warm smile, saying shakily, as she
tried to pick up her cycle, 'I really must go… I'm sorry I
didn't hear you coming…'

'Going to be late for work, are you? What do you do up
there… nurse?'