The Promise (31 page)

He sat on the hut steps next to her and Belle told him exactly how it came about and assured him it was instantaneous. ‘I ran to her, and she was already dead, Will. She didn’t stand a chance.’

‘She told me on Saturday night that her arm was aching from the stiff gears,’ he said. ‘If only she’d refused to drive it again.’

He told her then how they had discussed getting married, and although he would have liked it to be back in Philadelphia with all his family there, they had decided that if they got married in France it would be far easier to take her home with him when the war was over.

‘Another reason was that she wanted you there,’ he said. ‘She joked that she was going to make you wear something so ugly you wouldn’t outshine her.’

That brought tears to Belle’s eyes because she could imagine Miranda saying it.

‘I never thought for one moment when I left the States that I would find love here in France,’ he said. ‘Me and the other guys had the idea that the French girls would be queuing up for us, we talked about little else on the way out here. If anyone had told me I was going to fall for a classy English girl I would’ve laughed at them. I was so proud of her I felt I could burst with it. I’d written home and told my folks all about her. I had my whole future planned around her, all I was scared of was that I might die here. It never crossed my mind it would be her.’

Belle told him then what Captain Taylor had said, how she wasn’t welcome at Miranda’s funeral, and that made her cry. ‘At least you were spared that overbearing ogre of a woman as a mother-in-law,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t believe she would blame me.’

‘Hey, don’t take it to heart,’ he said, putting his arm around her, tears running down his face too. ‘Miranda said she didn’t care if she never saw her mother again. I thought at the time they’d just had a bit of a tiff, but I guess she was on the level about her. Don’t put yourself through going over there just to make a point.’

‘All I wanted was to be with Miranda on that final journey,’ Belle sobbed. ‘We meant so much to one another it seems awful that she’ll be going alone. How could anyone be so cruel and nasty?’

‘Beats me,’ he said sadly. ‘No wonder Miranda said she wasn’t even going to tell her folks about us until after we were married. But I tell you what, suppose I come tomorrow night with flowers and we go down to the level crossing and say our goodbyes to Miranda there?’

Belle sniffed back her tears. ‘That would be good,’ she said.

‘She loved you like a sister,’ Will said, hugging her to his shoulder. ‘She said that meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to her, well, up till meeting me. We’ve both got broken hearts now, I can’t see mine ever mending, but I know she’d want you to laugh again, to be happy with your old man. So you gotta do it for her.’

‘I’ll try,’ Belle said, deeply touched that he was soothing her when he was hurting so badly. ‘I suppose I ought to go in now. I know Captain Taylor kind of gave us permission to talk, but it will still be frowned on, me being out here with you.’

‘Can you meet me tomorrow? I’ll wait outside the fence where I used to meet Miranda.’

Belle nodded. ‘I’m glad you came, I was so worried about you. It was me who told Captain Taylor he had to inform you. If it had been left up to him even her parents would only have got a telegram.’

‘Thank you for saying I was her fiancé,’ Will said. ‘That made me feel like I had a real claim on her, y’know what I mean? And if you give me her folks’ address tomorrow, I’ll write them and make them see Miranda was very special.’

Belle gave him a watery smile. She thought he was one of the nicest men she’d ever met, all that Miranda had claimed.

‘And I’ll tell ’em what a gem you are,’ he added. ‘We’ll stay in touch, yeah? Maybe when we’re all done here I’ll come to England and meet your folks and your old man. He’s lucky he’s got you to come home to.’

After Will had gone, Belle went into the hut and with help from Vera packed up Miranda’s things. She found her friend’s copy of the photograph they’d had taken together before they left England. They were wearing dresses of a similar style, with loose frills down the bodice and a wide sash at the waist. Belle’s was green washed silk, and Miranda’s blue-and-cream-striped crêpe, and they both wore pretty little hats that Belle had made. The sepia colouring of the picture didn’t do the dresses or the hats justice, but their smiles were real, because they were excited about going to France. She thought she would give it to Will as she still had her own copy she would never want to part with.

When she found the dark red velvet dress she guessed that was what Miranda had worn on her last evening with Will, and she hugged it to her, breathing in her perfume that still lingered on it. It was tempting to keep it, but it looked as if it had cost a small fortune and Mrs Forbes-Alton might claim she had stolen it.

She kept a silver bracelet for herself as a keepsake, though, and the fluffy pink shawl that Miranda used to wrap around her shoulders when sitting up in bed. It still smelled of her lavender toilet water.

‘Why don’t you give her diary to Will too?’ Vera suggested when she found the small blue leather book in her locker. ‘I bet she’s written all sorts of things about him in it. And she wouldn’t want her mother reading it.’

Belle agreed. Then they folded up all the clothes and put them in the suitcase. A little later Belle carried it over to Captain Taylor’s office.

In bed later, she read the diary, and for the first time since the accident she found something to smile about. The writing was as irrational and flippant as Miranda had been. One day she wrote a whole page very neatly, on others she scrawled just one line. There was one entry which made Belle splutter with laughter. It was 19 January. ‘Sister Fogget might be an excellent nurse and a good example to a know-nothing idiot like me, but I’d like to tie her to the bedsteads she makes me scrub, and beat her with a wet towel.’

On the day they’d left England she’d written, ‘Poor Belle, struggling not to cry at leaving Mog. But I’ll convert her to being as uncaring as I am.’

A few days later the entry read: ‘Belle was made for this, she has a smile that would make a blind man see, and a lame man walk. She’s even turned me into a half decent person.’

Will was there too. The day she met him she’d written, ‘Met Will, a Yank, in Calais. I am fast. I took one look at him and knew he was the one I’d been waiting for. Kisses that made me weak with longing. I hope I had the same effect on him.’

Belle closed the diary then. She’d skimmed through it quickly and seen all the later entries were about Will, and she felt it should only be read by him. She hoped it would make him smile and see how meeting him had changed Miranda for the better. And above all it would comfort him to know that he was in her heart right up to the moment she died.

Chapter Seventeen

Sally walked past Belle as she was cleaning out her ambulance at the end of the day. ‘Captain Taylor asked me to inform you there’s someone waiting to see you in the drivers’ room,’ she said curtly.

Belle assumed it was Will. It was two weeks since the evening they went down to the level crossing and placed flowers for Miranda there. That evening had been particularly painful because the crushed ambulance had still been there, lying on its side by the track. The cab looked as if it had been opened with a giant tin opener to get Miranda’s body out, but although the heavy rain had washed away her blood, the horror of the moment when Belle saw the train crash into it came back to her anew. For Will it must have been simply devastating to see how Miranda met her end. He broke down, sobbing so hard that Belle wished she’d never agreed to show him where the accident happened.

‘I had so many plans for us,’ he said through his tears. ‘I was going to take her to the Waldorf in New York and have a picnic in Central Park. My folks would’ve loved her, and even if I could never keep her like her own folks did, we would’ve had a good life together.’

All Belle could do was hold him and tell him all the lovely things Miranda had said about him. That she’d been waiting all her life for love like his, and how she couldn’t wait to marry him.

They sat on an old tree trunk and cried together, then Belle gave him the diary and the photograph.

‘I haven’t read the entries since she met you,’ she told him. ‘That’s just for your eyes. But I hope it will give you some comfort to read the funny things she said, and help you understand more about her. Try and remember her as she was on your last night together, not how her life ended. She’ll be looking down on you and wanting you to be happy with someone else one day.’

The memory of that painful evening with Will was still imprinted on Belle’s mind, and she hoped he’d called today to tell her that he’d heard from Miranda’s parents because she didn’t feel she could cope with any further emotional scenes.

‘You’ll be in trouble if you get any more male visitors,’ Sally added waspishly. ‘But then, I suppose you’ve wormed your way round Captain Taylor.’

Sally often sniped at Belle. It reminded her uncomfortably of the cattiness of some of the girls in Martha’s sporting house in New Orleans. She didn’t know what Sally had to be jealous about; it wasn’t as if they were in competition here, and Sally was a far better driver and a really good mechanic too.

‘Well, no one could ever accuse you of worming your way round anyone,’ Belle retorted. ‘You’re more of a cobra, you spit venom to paralyse your victims.’

Sally flounced away without responding. Vera, who had heard the exchange, grinned at Belle and put one thumb up in approval.

Vera had been such a comfort to Belle. She had moved into Miranda’s old bed, perhaps understanding that it would be at night that Belle would miss her old friend the most. The other girls didn’t speak about Miranda at all, it was as if she’d never been there, but Vera got Belle to talk about her, and that had helped a great deal.

As Belle didn’t want Will seeing evidence of the nature of her job, she quickly ran back to the hut, took off her bloodstained overall, washed her face and hands and brushed her hair before going over to meet him.

The drivers’ hut door was open, and she walked in ready to greet Will with a smile, but when she saw who was waiting there she froze in shock.

It was Etienne.

Whenever she pictured him in her mind it was always as he’d looked in Paris at the Gare du Nord, with a trilby hat, a dark suit and striped waistcoat, his eyes like blue glass. But now he was dashing in the French grey-blue uniform, his boots polished to a mirror shine and sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. Yet his blue eyes were just the same and made her heart flip.

When she first got to France, she had scrutinized the French soldiers, half hoping to see him. She had always checked the names of any French wounded brought in too. But she certainly hadn’t expected him to turn up here to see her.

‘Etienne!’ she exclaimed. ‘What? How?’ She paused, so shocked she couldn’t get any sensible words out.

‘I ran into Will Fergus at the American base when I collected some supplies from there,’ he said. ‘He told me what happened to his girl. I felt I had to come and see how you were; I knew you must be taking it just as badly as he is.’

Belle felt a bit faint with the shock and had to sit down. ‘But how do you know I knew her?’ she asked.

Etienne frowned and sat down too. ‘Didn’t Miranda tell you that we met when she was staying at the Faisan Doré?’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Belle said. ‘But she got back late that night and it was the next morning she was killed.’ She paused, looking at him in puzzlement. ‘But how on earth did she connect you with me?’

Etienne shrugged. ‘I was in there with a couple of men from my company. Will spoke to us and I translated what he said to the other two. At one point we exchanged names. I can only suppose she recognized mine because of something you’d said to her, because she inquired if I was from Marseille. When I said I was, she asked if I knew someone called Belle. I was like you are now, stunned. She said you came here together.’

‘But she never told me this,’ Belle gasped.

‘That may have been because she thought it best not to,’ he said. ‘It struck me afterwards that you must have told her a great deal about me for her to remember my name. That touched me. Then to hear she’d been killed in such a terrible way! Will could hardly bring himself to tell me about it.’

‘Yes, it was terrible,’ Belle said. ‘I still can’t really believe it. We were such good friends and I thought we always would be. I’m lost without her.’

‘I thought that would be the case, that’s why I had to come,’ he said. ‘But I have to admit that finding you’d told her about me made me glad you hadn’t forgotten me entirely.’

The hut door was open, they were sitting opposite each other, and should anyone look in they would see nothing to suggest the French sergeant and she were anything other than casual acquaintances. Yet Belle suddenly felt very nervous.

‘Oh, we had one of those you-tell-me-your-story-and-I’ll-tell-you-mine conversations once,’ she said lightly, as if it was of no real importance. ‘She was the only person I ever told about New Orleans and Paris and your part in it. But Miranda was a romantic, and a great one for reading more into things than was really there.’

‘She must have meant a great deal to you if you felt able to confide in her about that time.’ He looked straight at Belle, one eyebrow raised questioningly. ‘How did you meet her?’

‘In my shop,’ she said. ‘She lived nearby, and yes, she did come to mean a great deal to me. Her death has knocked me sideways. It was just so awful, as it wouldn’t have happened if the crossing had been manned like it’s supposed to be.’

‘It’s hard losing good friends,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost so many since the war started I avoid getting friendly with anyone now.’

‘I’d never had a real friend before, not someone you can confide in and talk about anything. I don’t think she had either. We might have come from very different backgrounds but we had a great deal in common.’

‘So what happened to the shop?’