The House by Princes Park (3 page)

He had come into the hospital three weeks ago with a badly gashed leg and a dose of double pneumonia. Tomorrow, he was being sent to convalesce in a hospital in Calais. As soon as he was fit, he would return to an American Army unit to fight again. As a reminder of his imminent departure, there was a clanking sound as the ambulance train was shunted into place on the railway sidings behind them, ready for morning.

By comparison, he knew little about her, just that her name was Olivia Jones and she was the same age as himself. She had been born and bred in Wales and had never left its borders until she’d come to France two years
ago as a nurse. He also knew, because he could see, that she wasn’t even faintly pretty, almost insipid with her pale face and pale blue eyes.

‘What will you do when the war is over?’ Tom asked casually.

‘Finish my training. I hadn’t taken my final exams when I left Cardiff.’

‘Would it be possible to finish training in the States?’

She caught her breath. ‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because it’s where I’ll be.’ His voice was very low, intense. ‘It’s where my job is. And it’s where I’d like
you
to be. Will you marry me, Olivia?’

‘But we hardly know each other,’ she gasped, though it was silly to sound so surprised when it was a question she’d hoped and prayed he’d ask.

He gestured impatiently. ‘My darling girl, there’s a war on, a hideous war, the worst the world has ever known. There isn’t time for people to get to know each other as they would in normal times. I fell in love the first time I set eyes on you.’ Pressing her hand to his lips, he said huskily, ‘You are the loveliest woman I’ve ever known.’

He must be in love if he thought that! It was time she answered, said something positive, told him how she felt. He was kissing her now, her neck, her cheeks. He took her face in both hands and kissed her lips.

She was a timid person, withdrawn, and this was the first time she had been properly kissed. She pressed herself against him and felt her body come alive. ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

He held her so tightly she could hardly breathe. ‘The minute this damn war is over we’ll get married,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’ll write you every day and let you know where I’m posted so you can write me. Have you a photograph I can have?’

‘I’ve one taken with the other nurses a few months ago,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I’ll let you have it before you go.’

‘I’ll let you have something of mine.’ He held out his hand. A circle of gold glinted dully on the third finger – she had noticed the ring before, and had thought he was married until she realised it was on his right hand. ‘It’s my grandpop’s wedding ring,’ he explained as he removed it, dark eyes shining. ‘He gave us all something before he died. I got his ring. It’ll be too big, but might fit your middle finger. Or you can wear it around your neck on a chain.’

The ring was too big for any of her fingers. She put it in the breast pocket of her long white apron. As soon as she could, she’d buy a chain.

‘I feel as if we’re already married.’ Her voice was thick in her throat. It was almost too much to bear. She wanted Tom to kiss her again, do the things that, until now, she’d thought wrong. She slid her arms around his neck and began to pull him along the side of the hospital building. He put his hands on her waist and they moved as if they were doing some strange sort of dance. In the distance, the troops began to sing, a desolate, haunting sound.

Tom said, ‘Where are we going, honey?’

‘Round here.’

They reached the corner of the building. About a hundred feet away, a tangle of railway lines shone silver in the light of the moon. Beyond the lines stood a small, single-storey building without a door.

‘This used to be a station,’ she said. ‘That building was the waiting room.’

‘And is that where we’re going?’ There was incredulity in his voice.

By now, she felt utterly shameless. Every vestige of the respectability and conformity that she’d been fed over her entire life had fled. In just an instant, the world had turned 180 degrees. ‘If you want,’ she said.

‘If I want! Gee, I can’t think of anything I want more. But you, Olivia, is it what you want?’

Her answer was a laugh. She grabbed his hand, and they began to step over the silver lines. The stars continued to shine in their hundreds and thousands, the troops continued to sing, but Olivia and Tom were aware of none of these things as they entered the small, unused building into an intoxicating world of their own.

The war would be over in a few months’ time, so everybody said: the experts, the newspapers, the pundits, the tired, hopeful men on the ground. But people had been saying the same thing for the last four years, ever since the fighting had begun.

It was something they wanted to believe, Olivia Jones included. But now she had her own pressing reason for wanting the fighting to end, to be over before Tom returned to battle.

Next morning, she saw him off, slipping him the promised photograph when no one was looking – she would get into serious trouble if Matron discovered the magical thing that had happened the night before. A few nurses in their shoulder-length voile caps, dark-blue gowns, and full-length aprons, came out of the hospital to wave goodbye to the men they had tenderly nursed back to health. Tears were shed on both sides as the train puffed away in the brilliant sunshine towards Calais.

Olivia hadn’t thought it possible to feel both unbearably sad and blissfully happy at the same time; sad that Tom had gone, happy thinking about their future together. She fingered the ring in her pocket as she watched the train disappear round a bend. She’d examined it the night before. Inside was engraved, the words worn away until they were barely legible:
RUBY TO EAMON
1857.

‘If – no,
when
me and Tom have children, we’ll call them Ruby and Eamon,’ she decided, rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

The vacated beds weren’t empty long. Later that
morning, a horse-drawn ambulance arrived full of casualties who’d already been cursorily seen to in a dressing station on the front line. The rest of the day was spent re-bandaging wounds, comforting those for whom there seemed no hope because their injuries were too severe. Some were taken to the operating theatre to have limbs removed, returning, dopey from the anaesthetic, waking later, shattered and terrified.

As she walked from bed to bed, smiling at the stricken men, fetching water, making them as comfortable as possible, Olivia cursed the politicians who were responsible for the slaughter, who’d allowed it to continue for so long. A generation of young men had been sacrificed for no real reason, and a generation of women had lost husbands, fathers, sons.

The injured men would never have guessed the little nurse with the sweet smile – Olivia wasn’t quite as plain as she thought – was so preoccupied with thoughts of the previous night, a night when she’d taken a lover, become a woman, and had promised to become a wife.

‘Mrs Thomas O’Hagan!’

She practised saying the words underneath her breath.

‘What was that, darlin’?’ a little Cockney with a broken arm enquired.

‘Sorry, I was talking to myself.’

He grinned. ‘Well, that way you won’t get no arguments.’

She grinned back, tucked the sheet tightly around his waist, and told him to rest.

It was after tea by the time the men had been seen to and those able to eat had been given a meal – the inevitable bully beef accompanied by mashed potatoes. While they ate, a dozen weary nurses collected in a windowless recess outside the ward which they regarded as their staffroom, for a hot drink, the first since morning.

The conversation turned, as it often did, to rumours that
the fighting would soon end. After all, someone said, the Battle of Amiens had just been won, mainly by Australian and Canadian troops, and there’d been only 7000 casualties on their side.

‘Only seven thousand!’ someone else remarked sarcastically.

‘There’s been ten times that number before now.’

Olivia hardly listened. She held her hand against her breast and, through the pocket of her apron, could feel Tom’s ring pressing against her palm. For the hundredth time that day, she went over the events of the previous night.

‘What’s the matter, Olivia?’ said a voice. ‘You look as if you might cry.’

‘Nothing.’
She couldn’t see him any more
. His face, so clear all day, had suddenly become a blur. The hairs on her neck prickled and she felt convinced something was dreadfully wrong.

It wasn’t until the following day, after a sleepless night, that she learnt that Thomas O’Hagan was dead. The ambulance train had been passing over a bridge that had been heavily mined by saboteurs operating behind Allied lines. Not everyone had died when the bridge exploded and the train and those on board had plunged into the river below.

But Tom had and, for Olivia, it was the end of everything.

She sighed and wriggled uncomfortably on the bed. She was perspiring freely and the clothes felt damp. The contractions were only minutes apart, painful, but bearable.

Suddenly, she felt her stomach heave and she no longer had control of her body. There were a series of violent spasms, followed by a cloud of pain, so savage that she
nearly fainted. Then the heaving stopped and she felt empty.

‘It’s a girl,’ Madge cried triumphantly.

‘A girl!’

‘A lovely girl, very dark. I’m cutting the cord. Do you want to look at her, Olivia?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Olivia whispered. She half closed her eyes and saw a creamy-skinned baby being picked up by its feet. Madge gave the plump bottom a sharp slap, and the baby responded with an angry howl. ‘She looks fat.’

‘No, she’s just right. She’s a fine, healthy baby. I’ll clean you up, then take her downstairs, make a bottle of tepid water and give her a cuddle. She deserves it after all that effort. Is there a name you want to call her?’

‘I never gave a thought to names.’ She half saw Madge wrap the baby in a sheet and put her in a basket, then she lay back and allowed herself to be washed and patted gently dry. The bedclothes and her nightdress were changed, her hair quickly combed.

‘I’ll make us both a cup of tea in a minute,’ Madge muttered. ‘I need one as much as you.’ She picked up the basket and made her way carefully downstairs, leaving an exhausted Olivia warmly tucked in bed with only a feeling of soreness as a reminder of her ordeal.

She lay, watching the sharp line between light and shade creep across the wardrobe with its dusty suitcases on top as the sun gradually disappeared from sight. The singing had stopped. The children had gone indoors. The world seemed to have paused for breath and Olivia paused with it.

She had just had a baby!

Tom’s
baby. His daughter.

And now she felt oddly incomplete. She had to see Tom’s daughter so as always to remember what she looked like. Otherwise, she would wonder until her dying day.

It hurt, getting out of bed, going downstairs, not making a sound in her bare feet. The basket was on the
floor in front of the living-room fire. Olivia saw a tiny foot appear and kick away the sheet. Another foot appeared, followed by a little flower-like hand. The baby was making faint chirruping noises, like a bird. Madge was humming to herself in the kitchen as she prepared the bottle.

Olivia crept into the room and knelt beside the basket. The baby was naked and, oh, she was so pretty! Dark curly hair, dark creamy skin, rosebud mouth, a perfect nose, not squashed like some babies. Her limbs were smooth and round, unwrinkled. The baby regarded her calmly with big blue eyes, though she’d been told that babies couldn’t focus for weeks.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Olivia whispered. She put her finger inside the diminutive hand and it was gripped with surprising strength. As the flesh of the mother touched that of the child, Olivia shivered, and the parts of her that she had thought had died with Tom, became magically alive. She knew then she would never bring herself to give up her daughter. Never!

She slipped the nightdress off her shoulder, reached down and picked up her baby, cradling her in her arms. ‘Are you thirsty, darling? Would you like a drink?’ She put the child to her breast and she began to suck noisily. Olivia smiled and began to sway from side to side.

‘Olivia! Oh, no, dearie. No!’ A shocked Madge had come into the room with the bottle. She sank into a chair. ‘That’s torn it,’ she groaned.

‘Oh, Madge!’ Olivia cried, eyes shining. ‘I remember now what Tom looked like, just like his daughter. And Madge. I’m going to call her Ruby. It was Tom’s grandmother’s name. Ruby O’Hagan.’ She stroked the soft cheek with her thumb. ‘Don’t you think that’s lovely?’

‘Lovely,’ Madge agreed, sighing.

She was slightly unhinged. The emotions that had been supressed for months bubbled to the surface. She couldn’t stop smiling as she nursed her baby hour after hour, cooing, stroking and kissing, marvelling at her fingers, her toes. Entranced, she watched the blue eyes gradually close as Ruby fell asleep.

Eventually, Madge told her sharply to put the child down. ‘You’re wearing her out. She needs rest. And so do you. You’re much too excited.’