Broken Rainbows (38 page)

‘I was going to suggest that as we're both going, perhaps we could skip the party and have a quiet dinner?' When she hesitated, he murmured, ‘Not even Mrs Llewellyn-Jones's spies reach as far as London.'

‘There's nothing I'd like better than a quiet dinner with you, Colonel Ford.'

‘Good, because I've already booked the table. I just hope it holds good in all this bedlam of victory euphoria.'

‘Lucy's beautiful and charming, isn't she?' David asked as he and Bethan sat across from one another in a crowded restaurant.

‘Charming,' Bethan echoed, thinking of Jane and wishing her new sister-in-law was anything but.

‘Your brother's a lucky man. First Jane, now Lucy.'

‘He would have been luckier if he'd held on to Jane.'

‘People and times change. I think both he and Jane will be happier the way they are now, than if they'd stayed together.'

‘How can you say that?'

‘Because I had a letter from Tomas D'Este yesterday. He seems pretty confident that he'll be able to get Jane to marry him before too long.' He tasted the wine the waiter poured into his glass, and nodded approval. ‘So, we've talked about everyone except us.' He looked into her eyes. ‘How is your husband?'

‘I had a card two days ago to say he was well and free.'

‘He's not home?'

‘No. Although other POWs who were in the same area returned to Pontypridd in April. They told me that the camp he was in had been liberated two weeks before theirs.' She toyed nervously with her wine glass. ‘You told me before you left that it wasn't the right time and place for us. Perhaps it could be now?'

‘I'd like nothing better than to make you fall in love with me, but it would have to be for the right reasons. Tell me truthfully, would you even be here having dinner with me if your husband had come home?'

‘Probably not.'

‘He's a doctor,' he said slowly, ‘and there's a desperate shortage of medical personnel in Germany right now.'

‘There's doctors with the invasion force, and in Europe.'

‘Not enough. Finish your meal, Bethan. There's something I have to show you.'

Andrew sat back in the corner seat of the carriage and looked across at the passenger sitting opposite him. He searched for familiar lines in the face of the man he had known so well before the war, but the hunched skeletal figure, with close-cropped silver hair, looked nothing like the well-built, strong, dependable man, with the distinctive mop of thick, white blond hair, who had swept Alma off her feet and set up a successful business in Pontypridd at the height of the depression. He wondered if everyone else would have the same trouble in identifying Charlie.

‘I wish you'd let me book us into a hotel in London for the night. It was crazy to come up on the milk train.' He stopped talking when he realised that Charlie wasn't listening. Most of the time the Russian scarcely seemed to notice what was happening around him, and Andrew wondered if mentally he was still in the hellish, nightmare world of the death camps he had been incarcerated in for so long.

He leaned back against the seat and looked out of the window. He could see nothing except his own and Charlie's reflections in the glass, but when he had tried to pull the blinds earlier, Charlie had stopped him. He knew why. The camp Charlie had been in had been very different to his, but when darkness had fallen both of them had been locked into wooden huts, the doors and shutters firmly secured from the outside.

He had thought nothing could be worse than the Oflag he had been confined in for five years, but then he'd been ignorant of the horrors of the concentration and forced labour camps. And according to one Russian doctor he had worked alongside, the camps in the east were even worse and more numerous than those in the areas that had been liberated by the British and Americans.

It was difficult to imagine anything worse than Belsen and Nordhausen. And both had been ‘cleaned up', for want of a better word, before he'd arrived, but even now he couldn't get their foul stench out of his nostrils.

When the British army had reached the gates of his camp, he had been ecstatic. Every officer had packed his meagre belongings and was ready and waiting with one thought in mind. HOME. Then the CO had sent for him and the two orderlies he'd trained and asked if they would consider working in a camp they'd discovered a few miles to the south-east that was short of medical personnel. He'd asked if it was an order. The CO had admitted he couldn't order them to do anything, but their services were badly needed until more permanent arrangements could be made.

He'd refused, protesting that he had a wife and two children he hadn't seen in over five years waiting for him. The CO hadn't argued, simply pulled a few photographs from an envelope he was carrying. They had been given transport, and a few hours later he had been driven into Belsen.

He could even remember the date. 19 April. His birthday. Nothing had prepared him or the orderlies for the sight that met their eyes. They had been told the bare facts: ten thousand unburied corpses, evidence of cannibalism, atrocities, disease, systematic starvation, deliberate neglect – but those were concepts that could be put into words. A British doctor had come up to them and handed them pens. Red pens. He'd looked at him in bewilderment.

‘Put a cross on the foreheads of those you think have a chance of surviving.'

Time became irrelevant, he scarcely slept or ate. The stench hung heavy in the air, a foul odour he thought he'd never get used to, but somehow he did. The death rate dropped to three hundred a day. Men and women at the end of their strength who no longer had the will to carry on breathing. And in all that time he had scribbled only one postcard to Bethan.

Am well and free. Be home as soon as I can, but am needed here at present. All my love, as ever, Andrew

When ninety-eight fresh, keen medical students arrived from London he was asked if he'd move on to another camp. One where slave labourers had been held. That time he didn't argue. And there, in a corner of a typhus hut, a heap of rags had moved and he'd heard someone call his name.

He hadn't recognised Charlie. Not until the Russian had whispered his Welsh nickname, and even then he'd found it difficult to believe that the scarcely human wreck in front of him was his old friend. After making sure that the hut and everyone in it had been thoroughly deloused, he spent every minute he could with him. It had taken hours to get him to swallow the thin gruel the prisoners hated, but was the only food the emaciated could digest. Then had come the difficult part: convincing the authorities that Charlie wasn't Russian but a British soldier who'd been working behind enemy lines.

It had taken two weeks to get the confirmation they'd needed and new identity papers for Charlie. There had been more important messages on the wires, and more important concerns than the fate of one Russian-born British officer. But nothing was more important to Andrew. Distanced from Bethan by more than miles, terrified she'd no longer love him when he finally got home; in some, crazy, superstitious way he wanted to believe that if he saved Charlie and returned him alive to Alma, then it would be enough to safeguard his own marriage.

Crazy stupid superstition. And, at first Charlie had refused even to talk about Alma, insisting that he had told her to build a new life and marry again if anything happened to him. Andrew had stolen minutes to sit by Charlie's bed – not minutes that belonged to other inmates, but precious minutes that he should have spent resting – talking, coaxing, reading every extract from Bethan's letters that related to Alma. But Charlie had been impervious to every mention of his wife, until by chance Andrew had read out an account of Ronnie and Diana's wedding. From that moment there had been a spark in Charlie's eyes. He had ransacked his bag and combed through all the photographs Bethan had sent until he found one of Alma with her son. That night while Charlie slept, he had pinned it to the wall above his bed.

The following day Charlie had left his bunk for the first time since liberation. Andrew had believed himself impervious to emotion after five years of imprisonment and almost a month working in the camps with the survivors, but that was before he had seen Charlie sway on his feet, his skin stretched like yellow parchment over his skeletal frame, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets, using what little strength remained to him to put one foot in front of the other.

‘We'll be in Cardiff soon.' Charlie's voice, hoarse, cracked, intruded into his thoughts.

Andrew checked his watch. ‘We'll be home in less than an hour. Alma will be up, working in the kitchen of the shop, although I doubt she still has the playpen in the corner. Your son, like mine, will be too big for it now. He's three and a half and Eddie four and a half, I've almost forgotten what boys of that age are like.'

Charlie pulled out the photograph Andrew had given him and studied it in the poor light. Andrew knew he didn't need to look, he could trace every line of the boy's face from memory. Those small blurred black and white figures had accelerated the Russian's recovery more than any food or medicine.

Andrew left the seat and lifted down the two kitbags. They had both been issued with new bags but there was little in either. Charlie had only the shaving kit, soap, toothbrush and paste and uniform Andrew had scavenged for him. There had been an American in Nordhausen who had earned the nickname of ‘the scrounger'. Andrew had told him his own and Charlie's stories. God knows where the man had got them from, but he had turned up with French perfume and silk lingerie for Bethan and Alma, and toys for the children, and although he had made Andrew pay handsomely for his presents, he had refused to take a penny from Charlie, although Charlie's back pay was already in hand, unlike Andrew's. His request had been turned down on the grounds that the Germans had paid him for his services as a doctor while he'd been imprisoned. The fact that neither he, nor any of the other medical personnel captured at Dunkirk had received a penny piece in five years, didn't affect the official ruling. And eventually, too happy in his new-found freedom to argue any more, he had let the matter drop.

As the lights on the platform drew closer, Charlie tried to lift his kitbag. Andrew took it from him and tossed both on to the platform as soon as the doors opened. When he turned back he saw that Charlie had managed to step down by himself. A workman tipped his hat to them, stopping and staring as they walked towards him.

‘And there I was thinking I looked good,' Charlie complained in his guttural accent.

‘Compared to a couple of weeks ago you look brilliant, but you should still be in a hospital bed.'

Charlie sank down weakly on to a bench. Andrew patted his pockets searching for the glucose tablets he'd packed.

‘Here, suck a couple, they'll make you feel better.'

‘Do you think I've done the right thing in coming home?'

‘No. You should have stayed in the hospital at least another month.'

‘I don't mean that. Look at me, Andrew, I can't even walk. Alma will have her hands full. A baby, the shops …'

‘That she needs help with.'

‘What help will I be able to give? I can't even carry myself.'

‘You'll soon be able to carry an ox if you give yourself time to recover. You need food and rest, and as you won't listen to me, perhaps you'll listen to her. Come on.' Andrew picked up both kitbags. ‘Let's see if there's a lift that will take us down, and up again to the Pontypridd platform.'

Dawn had broken when their train drew into Pontypridd. Andrew watched the familiar redbrick buildings draw into view and thought about how often he had dreamed of this moment.

‘Dr John?' Dai Station held out his hand to take their travel warrants. ‘Everyone's been wondering when you'd be coming home. Angelo Ronconi and Glan Richards turned up weeks ago, but then I suppose things are different for officers.'

‘Not that different, Dai.' He saw Dai staring at Charlie, but there was no spark of recognition in his eyes.

‘Would your friend like to go down in the lift?' Dai continued to gawk at his companion, wondering how anyone so thin could stand upright.

‘I'll use the stairs,' Charlie answered in a surprisingly firm voice.

‘Charlie …'

Andrew heard Dai gasp as he took Charlie's arm and helped him down the steps. The porter followed with their kitbags. He glanced around Station Yard. The taxi rank was empty, but he recognised the car parked in the corner.

‘Want me to telephone for a taxi for you, Dr John?' Dai Station offered, running behind them.

‘If you would, please.' Andrew led Charlie towards the seats in the tiled booking hall.

‘Mrs John is away. She went to London the day before yesterday. But then you must know that her brother has married again.'

‘Something happened to his first wife?' Andrew asked anxiously.

‘Went off with a Yank. Like half the women in the town.'

Andrew's heart sank as he looked at Charlie, who seemed mercifully impervious to the man's babbling. ‘Just get the taxi as quickly as possible.'

They sat side by side and waited. It wouldn't have taken Charlie more than five minutes to walk from the station to his shop in the old days, but neither of them suggested walking now. It seemed an eternity before the taxi with a huge gas balloon on the roof arrived. The porter stacked their bags in the luggage hold next to the driver while Andrew helped Charlie into the back. He saw him stagger and clutch the door handle as he climbed in. It was pointless to ask if he was all right. It was patently obvious he wasn't.

As they left Station Yard he saw a bus driver and conductor walk into Ronconi's café. A milk cart rattled down the Graig hill and under the railway bridge. They turned the corner past the New Theatre and there was a poster with Errol Flynn's name emblazoned across the top. This was his home town and he felt like a stranger. They carried on past the turn to Mill Street and the entrance to Market Square.