At the Break of Day (30 page)

‘I don’t know.’

The doctor hesitated, looked at her, then down at the desk. ‘I can help but you realise it must be discreet. It would be quick and painless. Not in a seedy room in some dirty street. But it will cost a hundred guineas.’

Rosie thought of the hop-yards, the sticky smell on her hands, the gypsies who brewed potions. The Welsh girl who had drunk some on a hot and heavy night and then screamed in pain all night but smiled for the rest of the picking because there would be no disgrace, not this time.

But Jack had been at the hop-yard, Jack had smiled and held her. Jack had thrust himself inside her on the cold damp moors and she had wanted him. Not like that, not in that way perhaps. But she had wanted him and she loved him, even if he no longer loved her. This child was part of him. She counted the breaths she was taking, they were in time with the clock on the mantelpiece.

‘No, thank you.’ Rosie stood up, handing him his consultation fee. The movement made her feel faint. She sat again. He came round the desk, put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Will the father marry you?’

‘I will be quite all right, thank you,’ Rosie said, rising, but slowly this time.

She went to the GP. The next week she collected iron tablets from the chemist in her lunch hour and nodded to Mrs Eaves.

‘The baby is due at the end of June,’ she said quietly.

Mrs Eaves told her she must sit with her feet up and rest as much as she could at work. She must carry nothing heavy, but a shorthand pad wasn’t heavy, neither were the articles she had to sift. Mrs Eaves also said she should go back to America but Rosie said she couldn’t. Frank and Nancy had enough to worry about and she couldn’t face their disappointment, the ending of all their hopes for her.

‘How would Jack find me, when he comes home?’ she said and wouldn’t allow herself to see the doubt in Mrs Eaves’s eyes or acknowledge the same doubt herself.

It was at night that the fear grew and cut the breath in her throat, when she was away from the lights of the office and the smiles of the other girls. It was when she was alone that she allowed herself to think of the child that was growing and she didn’t know if Norah would let her stay until Jack came back at Christmas. Because she had to believe that he would, just as she had to believe that he would write. Goddamn it, Jack, write. You must write. Because there was still an anger that swept her as well as fear and love and it helped to keep her strong.

In the first week of December Frank wrote with the details of the Chinese assault which had pushed the UN forces back, slaughtering them in the narrow valleys, even though they marched on only a handful of rice. How Mao’s men had marched on through the snow, capturing, fighting. How the British Forces had carried out rearguard duties. How brave they had been. Had she heard from Jack? Was he all right? They would not now be home for Christmas.

Rosie went round to Ollie who opened the door, his face setting when he saw her.

‘Is he all right?’ she asked because there was no place for anger or her own fear. There was only the thought of Jack and Korea.

Ollie looked at her. ‘I’ll let you know if he isn’t.’ He shut the door.

That night she fainted as she stood to take her plate to the sink. Her cheese was still on the plate. She hadn’t been able to eat. Harold carried her to the armchair by the fire, Grandpa’s chair, and Rosie cried, her head down in her hands, because Grandpa wasn’t here and neither was Jack. But Norah was, standing in front of her, her stockings rolled down round her ankles, her slippers trodden down at the back.

‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ Norah’s hands were on her hips.

Rosie wiped her face with the back of her hands and nodded.

‘Does that Jack know?’

Rosie shook her head.

‘Then you’d better write and tell him.’

‘I can’t.’

Norah slapped her face then hard, catching Rosie’s hair, jerking her head to one side.

‘You’re a bloody little slut. Why not? Isn’t it his? Is it that Joe’s?’

Rosie gripped the arms of the chair. She pushed herself back into it, away from Norah who was leaning forward, her face ugly. She would stay in Grandpa’s chair, then she would be safe. It would all go away. All of it. It would roll away to the time before all this.

‘Go on then, whose is it?’ Norah insisted.

‘It’s Jack’s, but I can’t tell him. He’s left me. He wants to make up his mind whether he loves me. He’d come back if I told him, but I’d never know whether he wanted to.’ Rosie reached out her hands. ‘Can’t you goddamn understand? I love him. I can’t do that to him.’

Rosie looked at Harold now. He was kind sometimes but now his face was filled with contempt.

‘So you’re alone. Lovely little Rosie hasn’t anyone to love her. Now you’ll know what it’s like.’ Norah was reaching down, pushing at Rosie, pulling at her, forcing her from the chair. ‘I was left with you and Grandpa. I was alone.’

Rosie clutched at her, she felt sick again. ‘But Grandpa loved you, and Grandma. You know they did. Grandma most of all. What the hell are you talking about?’ Norah was still pushing her out of the kitchen, towards the hall, and Rosie didn’t have the strength to stop her.

Norah shouted in her face now, pulling her back, jerking her to a stop. ‘But you had the best. You still have. You go to America, you bring back candy. Push it in my face. You little slut. Well, you’ve got more than you bargained for out of all this love, haven’t you? You’re an alley cat.’ She pushed her towards the foot of the stairs.

Rosie felt her legs growing weak, her head heavy. The blackness was gripping her again. Sweat drenched her body. She clung to the banister, sank on to the stairs.

‘Get out by the morning,’ Norah hissed, standing above her, watching.

‘I can stay as long as I need to,’ Rosie said, anger driving the sickness back, but only for a moment. She leaned her head down on her knees. ‘Grandpa said.’

‘And what do you think Grandpa would say to this bastard you’re bringing into the world? You don’t think he’d want it in his house, in his neighbourhood. Where it’d bring disgrace. Where his rose growers would know.’

Norah left her, went back into the kitchen, shut the door. There was no light left. Just darkness. And Rosie knew Norah was right. There were too many memories here. There was too much of the past which needed to be guarded for Grandpa. She must go. It was Christmas in three weeks and it was time for her to go. To find some privacy.

The hospital was clean and white and light. And so cool. Jack was eased on to the bed. The pain was all over him now, sweeping, cutting, and he groaned, turned his head, watched the naval nurse as she smiled. Looked at the bag on top of his locker which contained toilet necessities, playing cards, cigarettes and sweets. There was writing paper too.

He looked away. He wouldn’t need that. Not to write to Rosie. Not now, not ever. He wouldn’t write to Ollie either. Why tell him?

‘You’ll be going up to theatre soon. There’ll just be a small prick now.’ The nurse smiled at him again but his lips wouldn’t work to smile back.

It was two weeks before the pain left him and then only in snatches in which he watched the ward, heard the clatter of trolleys, the murmur of voices. But then it claimed him again so that he didn’t know which was morning, which was afternoon. He didn’t know which was night, which was day.

All he knew was that Korea seemed further away than a three-day boat trip. There were no flares, no bugles. There were no screams. There was no Tom. There was no American dying of burns. No American he had to shoot.

But there was the smell of disinfectant, the gentle hands of the nurses who soothed the boy across the way when he groaned, who soothed Jack when he woke screaming from dreams in which he shot the American, again and again, but the flames kept burning, the hand kept reaching out and the face which called to him was Ed’s. Yes, Korea was far away and England even further.

But now the times without pain were longer. He watched the clock move round and the nurses with charts, and smiles, and soft voices, and it was all so clean, so ordered. There were no decisions to be made, no questions to be asked except, ‘What day is it?’

‘It is December eleventh. Now rest.’

Each morning he was a little stronger and each day and night the dreams faded until at last he did not sleep in the day, or cry out at night.

That morning he ate breakfast, biting into crisp toast, and smiled at the boy opposite who smiled back. There had been no groans from him either.

He watched as the doctor did the rounds, first one bed, then the other. The sheets were starched and correctly turned, the pillowcases too. The Sister coughed, the doctor nodded and then they came to him and he felt the tension rise in him. He was better. He knew that. The doctor would know too. He would send him back, into the battle.

The doctor checked his bandage, talked to the Sister, laughed when Jack said he would be ready to do the town by the evening.

‘Maybe next month. Maybe,’ the doctor said.

Jack touched the bandage, feeling the tension relax, feeling his face smile. Thank God, he would be here for that long at least. He wouldn’t be returning to the snow, the cold, the fear. He could stay here where there was no life outside the ward, outside the cool drinks, and the kind nurses, and the ache of his arm.

The Staff Nurse smoothed his sheets as the doctor moved on. ‘A little bit longer then,’ she said.

‘You knew I was frightened?’

‘You all feel the same. Why not? I would.’

‘Each day,’ the boy across the ward shouted, ‘there are letters delivered. I bet my girl sends me one.’ Jack had written none. He would receive none and so he turned from the Sister who stopped at each bed but his. Everywhere there were letters, three for the boy across the ward. All his had SWALK written round the flap.

Now there was silence as they read them and further silence as the letters were replaced in the envelopes and visions of home came too close.

He had none of that. He had none of their pain. The ache that he felt deep inside wasn’t love. He had told himself that. It was anger. There was no love any more. He knew that. He remembered Tom. His wife must know by now.

He watched instead the Japanese flower girl who came to the ward with a trolley heaped with flowers and foliage. She wore bobby sox, and a skirt and blouse, and she almost looked American, but not quite. There was the golden skin, the lowered eyes, the small steps.

He wished that she wore a kimono like the girls he had seen on the way to the hospital. He didn’t want anything American in here.

She took flowers and leaves to the central table. Her hands were small and quick. She undid the copper pulley, and lowered the existing arrangement which hung above the ward’s central light. He hadn’t noticed it before.

She tipped the faded blooms into a basket, emptied the water into a bucket on the trolley, refilled the vase, arranged the flowers, slowly now, and the foliage, then raised the arrangement back up above the light. That night, a small blue spotlight illuminated the flowers and he dreamed of the hop-yards and heard the bees, smelt the hops. Then the scent of roses, the scent of the past, filled the air and he woke crying, but he told the Sister it was the pain.

With each day he grew stronger and the nurses began to decorate the wards as Christmas approached. He and Bill from the bed across the way held the ladders while the nurses climbed and pinned streamers and foliage and the other men whistled and cheered.

That night he dreamed of Rosie making streamers because it was 20 December and in the morning he was running a fever and his wound had become infected. He was too ill to notice Christmas, too ill to open the presents forwarded from Ollie; the tie from Maisie, the letter from Lee, the shirt with no card, which he knew was from Rosie.

‘I’m too ill,’ he shouted to the nurse and pushed them all from the bed, making her take them from the ward, but keeping Ollie’s card and the money he sent and looking up at the flowers which glowed throughout the night.

It wasn’t until the middle of February that he was able to move to the convalescent ward and now he knew, they all knew, that though the Communists were pushing them back in the centre, the Chinese supply lines were in doubt.

In the west of Korea US and British troops had recaptured the port of Inchon which had been taken when the Communists carried forward their attack. UN troops were also shelling Seoul which was yet again in the hands of the Communists. On the east coast the South Koreans, supported by naval bombardment, had driven up the coastal highway to the 38th parallel.

They all knew this, but they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t want to remember, nor did they want to go back.

The next week they had a private in who had been injured when the Allied forces took up positions in a twenty-five-mile arc to the south of Seoul. He told them that Communist resistance had stiffened. That the fourth battle for Seoul was about to begin. That he hoped it would be over before he was returned as fit for active service. He was a conscript. He was nineteen. Jack felt old at nearly twenty-one. He didn’t want to go back either, but neither did he want to go to England.

The flower girl came to this ward too while letters were delivered and so Jack heaved at the pulley for her with his right hand. His left was still bandaged, still in a sling which dragged at his neck. Each day he pulled it and smiled and they spoke of the coldness of the weather, the beauty of the flowers, and her voice was sometimes harsh as voices were in the Japanese tongue she told him. But her lips were shaped and gentle, her eyes demure and black. And he didn’t have to look at the men opening their mail.

They talked of the summer and the sun that would come and she told him of the giant fish fashioned from bamboo and covered with painted cloth which is launched each July by Toyahama fishermen in honour of the ocean gods. She told him how the Japanese people bore gifts of rice to the dead in the graveyards and he thought of Rosie taking roses to her grandpa, but he didn’t want to think of her. She was the past. She was where the pain was.