‘No, no children.’ He forced a light note into his voice as he added, ‘I’ve got to wait a little longer to be an uncle.’ How had they got on to this anyway? In an effort to change the subject without appearing rude, he said now, ‘How on earth did you think you would manage with all that on the train, by the way?’ He inclined his head towards the back seat, stacked high with gaily wrapped parcels, without taking his eyes off the road.
‘I wouldn’t have attempted to bring all this if I had been travelling by myself,’ Sarah said quickly, ‘but when you offered me a lift . . .’
‘You must have been saving your rations all year for that lot.’ His smile was warmer now, what Sarah would term a real smile. ‘Perhaps I didn’t do you such a favour after all in offering you a ride?’
‘You certainly did,’ Sarah said indignantly, before adding, ‘I would have spent the same but some of it would have been monetary gifts, but they aren’t so nice, are they? There’s no . . . cosiness with them.’
It was a strange choice of words, but he remembered this about her. Even as a child she had expressed herself differently to anyone else, but although initially her phraseology might seem odd, when analysed, it was not. She had been a truly enchanting child. He was surprised by the sudden pull on his heartstrings, and to cover his emotion his voice was brisk when he said, ‘Quite right.’
Quite right? He could do better than that, couldn’t he? The poor girl hadn’t asked to travel with him, he had suggested it, after all, although he wasn’t quite sure why, if he thought about it. Maybe it had been the spur he had needed to answer Martin and Ruth’s repeated invitations to visit them again? He’d had a guilty conscience about them for months now. Or perhaps the fact that the hour or so in the little tearoom with Sarah, when they had chatted about old times and Sarah had brought him up-to-date with her life, had been like a ray of sunshine on a winter’s day. The simile faintly embarrassed him. He didn’t consider himself a poetical man, or even aesthetic.
And he
had
been trying to save her an arduous journey. The rational, logical side took over. The trains were bad enough at the best of times, but near Christmas, and with the bad weather, she could have been standing about on cold platforms for hour after miserable hour. Trains, railways, he hated them - they would ever be synonymous with the living hell of the Japanese camps. How many executions and atrocities had he witnessed in those years on the Burma railway? Hundreds, thousands . . .
It did no good to indulge in such reminiscences, and now he wetted his lips and swallowed before he said, ‘I’m glad Maggie isn’t still at Hatfield, although I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some surprise at Florrie’s benevolence. She didn’t strike me as a charitable sort.’
There was more than a touch of cynicism in his tone, and Sarah stiffened defensively before she told herself she really couldn’t blame him for thinking the worst. Perhaps in his place she would have thought the same. But he didn’t know, he didn’t understand, what Sarah’s nearly dying had done to Florrie.
‘Actually, that’s exactly what Florrie is.’ It was firm, and suggested further comments on the same lines would not be appreciated.
Rodney took the hint. ‘And Matron Cox?’ he asked quietly. ‘She’s still locked away where she can do no harm, I hope?’
‘As far as I’m aware.’ Oh, this was difficult. He wasn’t at all like she remembered, but then she had changed too.
‘She was quite mad, you know, dangerously so. It was a wonder she hadn’t cracked before.’
‘It was probably because she was able to do virtually what she wanted at Hatfield. It was only later, when I was a bit older, that I realized how many of the children were confined to the infirmary for weeks at a time after they had been sent to the Matron for punishment. Everyone, children and staff alike, was petrified of her.’
‘Except Maggie.’
‘And you,’ she returned quickly.
She smiled at him, and he glanced at her and smiled back, before saying, ‘You are determined to see me in a good light, aren’t you?’ But it was the first time for a long long while that he had felt good about himself. It was the feeling of helplessness that had eaten into him in the camp. There he’d been, a doctor, someone who was supposed to save lives, and all around him men - walking skeletons of men - had been dying like flies. He’d been beaten almost to the point of death one time in that first month in Burma, when he’d argued with the camp commander for more medicines, the meagre supplies of antiseptic and quinine useless against the disease and malnutrition which had been rife amongst the prisoners.
What was it that young army chaplain had said, when he had visited the ward shortly after they had arrived back in England? Oh yes, ‘unforgiveness is a tool of the devil’. There he’d stood, fresh out of college and never having seen a day’s action in his life, and he’d dared to say that to the remains of what had been men in that ward. Ill and weak as he’d been, he didn’t know how he had kept his hands off the pious young fool.
‘Matron Cox’s replacement was just the opposite, though. Hatfield changed considerably once she was in charge.’
‘Ah yes, the good Matron Blair.’ Again Sarah’s voice brought him out of the shadows and he nodded slowly before adding, ‘I remember her as the original broom that swept clean. She caused quite a stir with some of the old fogeys on Hatfield’s committee.’
What Sarah remembered, as she heard him speak the Matron’s name, was that she had been burningly jealous of the new Matron’s relationship with ‘her’ Dr Mallard. Matron Blair had been bright and attractive, and worse - in her childish eyes - very grown up. She could recall endless nights when she had lain awake staring into the darkness, Rebecca’s steady breathing in the next bed emphasizing she was the only person awake in the whole wide world, and her mind had played out the doctor and the matron’s wedding day. What a fiercely impassioned little thing she must have seemed.
She gave a mental shake of her head at the forlorn little ghost from the past, and changed the subject.
It was over two hours later, and in icy darkness, that Rodney’s car, looking somewhat incongruous in the maze of back-to-back dilapidated tenements in which Maggie and Florrie’s house was buried, drew up in a narrow street in the heart of Sunderland.
In spite of the numbing coldness of the winter night, there were several young children, most without coats, taking it in turns to swing from a rope which one of the more adventurous had tied to the jutting iron arm of a lamp post, and their shrill voices were loud in the clear frosty air.
‘Sarah! Hey, it’s Sarah.’ One of the older boys came running up to the car when he saw Sarah alighting after Rodney had opened the door for her, the other children following a moment later. ‘You come back to see old Maggie, Sarah?’ he asked cheerily, wiping his runny nose with the back of a grubby hand.
‘Less of the “old Maggie”, Tim McNeil.’ Her voice was severe, but Sarah couldn’t stop herself smiling as she looked down at the dirty little face. ‘It’s Mrs McLevy to you.’
‘Maggie don’t mind, she’s all right, is Maggie.’ The sharp eyes, far older than their years, dissected Rodney as he stood at Sarah’s side, before the boy said, ‘Who’s the toff then, Sarah? He your fancy man or somethin’?’ as the other children tittered and giggled behind him.
‘
Tim
.’ It was a distinct warning, and Sarah wasn’t smiling any longer.
‘You’re not gonna leave that motor round ’ere, are you, mister?’ Tim turned his attention to Rodney, who was trying hard not to laugh, quite unabashed at Sarah’s rebuke. ‘They’d ’ave the drips from your nose round these parts.’ And with that friendly warning he returned to the lamp post, the other children following hot on his heels.
Sarah smiled weakly at Rodney. ‘That was Tim McNeil.’
‘So I gathered.’ Rodney smiled back. ‘The lad will go far.’
‘You’ll come in for a minute and say hallo to Maggie? I know she’d love to see you again.’
Rodney hesitated for a moment, and then, as Sarah’s smile widened and she said, ‘I’ll set the formidable Tim to guard the car if you’re worried,’ he laughed out loud before saying, ‘That won’t be necessary, but I have no wish to impose.’
‘Oh, go on with you.’ The words, and the flapping of her hand, were very northern, and he found himself thinking, as he locked the car and turned to join her where she was waiting for him on the pavement, that it was at these times, when he caught a glimpse of the child she had been, that he liked her the most. The new Sarah was a little disconcerting at times, and the directness that had been so enchanting in the child was more than a trifle challenging in the adult woman. But that was probably exactly what he needed, he admitted to himself soberly as he stood behind Sarah while she knocked at the door, looking down at her shining blond head that was a halo of gold in the dimly lit street. To be jerked out of the comfortable rut he had settled into the last few months? He hadn’t realized it but he had let his work become his security, hiding behind it, letting life pass him by while he had licked his wounds in his little bubble of isolation. He didn’t like the analogy but it was true. And it wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.
He had no further time to reflect as the door opened and Maggie’s bulky shape stood silhouetted in the opening.
‘Thank goodness. Thank goodness you’re here, lass, I’ve been worried to death. I expected you hours ago.’ Maggie had enfolded Sarah into her arms as she’d spoken, and now, becoming aware for the first time of Rodney’s presence, she peered into the shadows as she said, ‘You got someone with you, lass?’
‘Hallo, Maggie.’
‘Saints alive! I don’t believe it.’
‘Well, I’m alive, but I’m no saint, Maggie.’
‘It’s Dr Mallard, as I live an’ breathe. Oh, lad, lad, come in, come in. You’re a sight for sore eyes.’
The warmth of her greeting touched him, and when Sarah was almost thrust into the hall, and Maggie reached out both hands to grasp his, he felt a lump in his throat and a pricking at the back of his eyes that caused him to say, and over-heartily, ‘It’s been a long time, Maggie. A long time.’
‘It has that, lad, an’ with a war between an’ all. You come through then?’
‘Yes, I came through, Maggie.’
He found himself drawn into a long narrow dark hall, and as he heard Sarah’s voice speaking to someone, Maggie said, ‘You know I live with Florrie now?’
‘So Sarah told me. I have to admit I was surprised at first.’
‘She’s been like an angel of mercy, lad, I tell you. No daughter could’ve bin better. Me legs aren’t too good, an’ me rheumatism gives me jip some days, but she never complains if I’m laid up in bed for a while, just gets on doin’ everythin’ an’ her with a manager’s job at the laundry too. She’s a good lass.’
He raised his eyebrows, nodding slightly, as he said, ‘That’s good. I’m pleased for you, Maggie.’
‘But?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Oh, come on, lad, this is Maggie you’re talkin’ to. There was an edge to your voice, an’ war or no war, I know you. Say what’s on your mind an’ be done with it. It’ll be better out than in.’
For the first time in months, years, he felt a bubble of something - which he recognized as the beginnings of the good old belly laughs he used to enjoy - welling up inside. She was a comic; without even recognizing the fact, she was a comic all right. Would that there were a few more Maggies in the world.
He checked the impulse to laugh - he didn’t want to offend her - and instead tried to make his voice suitably humble as he said, ‘I’m sorry, Maggie.’ She had let go of his hands as she’d spoken, and now he reached out and took hers, looking down into her fat face criss-crossed with wrinkles, as he said quietly, ‘I think I must be getting cynical in my old age.’
‘Folks can change, lad. Oh aye, I’ve seen it, but in Florrie’s case it weren’t so much a change as gettin’ into the skin of the person she was meant to be. She’d been in the workhouse from a bairn an’ she’d been treated rough, no doubt about it, an’ it had soured the lass. But I tell you’ - she paused, and now her face was straight - ‘she loves them lasses, Sarah an’ Rebecca, like her own.’
He nodded but said nothing more, and she stared at him for a moment longer, her gaze penetrating, before saying, her tone jocular now, ‘Come on in an’ have a hot bevy, lad, it’s enough to freeze you out there.’
He followed her down the hall and into the second of two rooms to see Sarah crouching in front of a blazing coal fire, her hands held out to its warmth, and Florence Shawe, her tall angular body even thinner than he remembered, looking straight at him.