Authors: Maggie Ford
‘I just feel I’m being buried here, Jenny, bit by bit.’
The words seemed to come from deep inside his soul and Jenny fancied she felt every iota of his pain as if it were her own. She counted the days to each visit, coming to see him whenever she could get time off from her work.
There had been a wild idea when he’d gone off to the sanatorium to give up her present post and follow him, but in time he would leave there and come home for good. It was always a fool’s game following others around the country. They always moved on, leaving behind a void much as before. Not only that, here she was a visitor, a friend, a confidante. As a nurse she would have become an overseer, an official figure, not to be trusted. Things were better as they stood.
She sat now beside him on the veranda that caught the slanting, fast-diminishing warmth of an October sun. He was in a wickerwork easy chair, a cardigan about his shoulders, she on a hard chair that made her back seem unacceptably rigid. She would rather have been allowed to recline a little, to look more at ease. This way he had to look up at her which didn’t help an easy relationship. Though mostly he stared at the tiled floor as he emptied out his heart to her.
‘If I could only go to see her.’ He seldom mentioned Susan by name. By this time they all knew who
her
referred to. ‘I know I could sort things out. But no one agrees, they keep telling me it’ll put my health in jeopardy, but that’s an excuse. They don’t want me to try getting her back. They hate her so I must hate her too.’ He let his voice trail off and they sat on in silence for a while, then suddenly he looked up at Jenny, his eyes brightened by new hope.
‘But you could go.’
‘Me?’ She was startled, lost for words. How could she go to his wife, trying to convey to her what was in someone else’s heart? It was impossible.
He was looking at her from under his brow, his eyes slewing sideways towards her. She hurried on. ‘It wouldn’t be right for me to pay her a visit on your behalf. What could I say to her?’
‘No one has ever bothered to talk to her,’ he said bitterly. ‘Except to condemn her.’
She waited. He had dropped his gaze and she could see his face working very slightly, could almost see the thoughts going through his head, the pain, the longing, the hope and the hopelessness that seethed there. And memories too, memories that would never die. All he’d suffered these past years would be with him always. But none of it, looking at him now with grief and emptiness showing on every part of his face, had scarred him as Susan had.
Jenny could foster only contempt for the girl which instinctively she knew she must smother for his sake. If she did consent to being his errand boy, she would have to be sweet and understanding to gain Susan’s confidence. It smacked of an unsavoury business because subterfuge did not come easily to her. But wasn’t she resorting to subterfuge at this very moment, visiting him in the guise of a friend, when her whole being cried out to touch his hand in love, to kiss his lips and be kissed in return, the way he had kissed her before he’d gone away and it had all gone cold for her when he had met Susan?
‘Please, Matthew, don’t ask me to do that,’ she pleaded. But for his sake, for the sake of the love she had for him, if he pressed the point …
As well she had been looking at him or she’d have missed the hand half-raised in a small poignant gesture of defeat, of humiliated pride, an effort not to recognise that he must rely on her to do his work for him. He needed help yet felt belittled by that need. Innocently she
was
belittling him. He would not ask her again, that she knew. She knew too that their friendship was being placed in jeopardy, that he would never trust her again. She needed his trust as much as he needed hers. It was a kind of love in its way.
‘I’ll have to see,’ she added lamely; not a promise nor a denial, neither one thing or the other, a way of avoiding the total commitment she knew she was in danger of being held to. To escape it, she got up to gather up her coat and handbag, preparing to murmur some sort of farewell, when, only halfway out of her seat, she was taken by surprise as his hand closed about her wrist.
‘You will see her, Jenny? You promise.’
‘I haven’t …’ The commitment was already being made for her. Blackmail, trading on the affection she had for him, the thought shot through her head. He knew, he must know, how she felt about him, and was using it. That was unkind, cruel. For a second Jenny was aghast at the anger that swept through her. But the eyes staring up into hers were filled with pleading, not craftiness, were sunken with desolation, dark with pain, and though that in itself was a form of blackmail, how could she refuse him?
Yet still she hesitated. He was asking too much of her love. And she had expected him
not
to ask again, so was now taken off guard. ‘What on earth could I say to her, Matthew?’
‘Just that I … I want her to come back to me.’
‘I can’t tell her things like that. If you wrote a letter, I could take it to her.’
‘I’ve written letters.’
‘This time I’d be there to hand it to her, while she reads it, tell her how you are, how you feel.’
Oh God! She had walked right into it. Hope had begun to glow in his eyes. Hope was filling him as a deep hole is filled with lifegiving soil to nurture the tree with which it is about to be planted. And it was glorious to see him come suddenly alive. How could she destroy that?
‘All right, Matthew. Write to her. I’ll wait.’
She sat down again, put her hat and handbag aside and watched him fish a small writing case from his locker, feverishly open it and pull out the fountain pen resting inside to write his private letter to his wife.
All the while Jenny’s heart was pounding against her chest wall, partly at the prospect looming before her, partly at feeling herself being used as a sacrificial lamb, partly with the same emotion he himself suffered – love that tore at the very being but which the sufferer knew to be quite futile no matter what they did.
The feeling of being made a sacrificial lamb still lingering, she reluctantly prepared herself to visit Susan.
She made three calls that week, during break times from the London Chest Hospital, none of them successful. She received no reply to her knock and had no way to tell whether they were out or merely pretending to be. Each time it had rained, not heavily but with miserable persistence that carried all the odours of the East End with it, and after her three separate attempts, standing on the doorstep wet and fed up and growing more and more annoyed, she gave up. There was only so much one could do. Besides, it was all pointless anyway. Susan would never go back to the man she had rejected. Obviously happy with her lover, what did she want with a sick man? Which Matthew still was.
In a way it was a relief not seeing Susan, loathing the girl as she did for the way she’d behaved. But more than that, a tiny spark kept leaping into her mind that the longer Susan stayed away from Matthew, the more chance there was of his coming to terms with it. Would he one day see the futility of chasing after her and turn to someone else – herself perhaps? His friend all these years, always there for him, he was fast becoming dependent on her. Could that one day lead to love?
The thought made her laugh. Little hope of that. But a week from now she’d have to confront him with her admission of failure, see his face. She found herself putting it off and on that Saturday decided to postpone seeing him until another of her days off. Instead she’d try to see Susan one last time, have something she could tell him. But that morning it rained again …
It was his mother who forced her hand that very morning. It came as a shock to open the door and find his mother standing there, an umbrella above her head. Mrs Ward demeaning herself to come across in the rain to a lesser neighbour’s door revealed the extent to which some of her high-necked values had taken a nose-dive since the war.
She looked almost supplicant, the weight of her son’s plight making her a wholly different woman from the one who’d once lorded it over others. Her principles, however, had not slipped to the extent of agreeing to Mrs Ross’s invitation to come inside.
‘It’s Jenny I wish to speak to,’ she said, her voice as sharp as it ever was, and turning to Jenny she asked directly, ‘When do you next hope to be visiting Matthew?’
‘I was thinking of perhaps going this afternoon,’ Jenny lied, trying hard not to sound reluctant.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Mrs Ward compressed her lips in a manner natural to her. ‘We’ll be seeing him too today, as soon as Mr Ward gets the car out. You can come with us. Save your train fare. Could you be ready in, say, half an hour?’
Still some of the old Mrs Ward there. Assuming everyone would fall in with her plans came as naturally to her as breathing. Jenny chewed on her lip. She and Mumsy had planned on a quiet afternoon together, but it could probably be put aside. They’d have all evening. And part of her did want to see Matthew very much, despite her trepidation at what she had to tell him.
‘Yes, I could be.’ His parents being there might soften his reaction.
Mrs Ward inclined her head in a small gesture of acknowledgement. ‘He often asks after you, Jenny,’ she said, but broke off abruptly as though that information had embarrassed her in some way.
This woman would never let her high standards slip entirely no matter what the circumstances, but Jenny had detected more than once, as she did now, a ring of suppressed hope in Mrs Ward’s voice that she might one day see her as part of the family. A daughter-in-law perhaps? Vain hope, that, but she smiled as Mrs Ward added a little too briskly, ‘Well, we’ll pick you up in half an hour then,’ before turning and going down the steps and back along the road to her own house.
Matthew was in the day room, it being too wet to go outside. October, nearly at its end, already heralded a bad winter, and the room buzzed with families and patients. Jenny prayed he wouldn’t ask her what she had achieved.
She sat by while his parents put their offerings of fruit and a bar of Fry’s chocolate from their sweet ration before him, asked him how he was and began on all the trivialities of their lives since last seeing him. He murmured his thanks for the gifts, after a while turning aside from what they were telling him, his attention wandering while he muttered occasional comments in whatever seemed the appropriate place.
Several times Jenny saw his eyes come to rest on her, saw the query in their depths. She smiled weakly, knowing he would wait for a moment when they were alone. As if he had planned it, his father went out on to the veranda to smoke his pipe; his mother joined her husband, leaving Jenny to hold the fort. It was a moment she had been dreading.
The second they were out of hearing, his question came direct. ‘What did she say?’
‘Your wife?’ She stalled, trying to remember how she’d rehearsed this moment. He said nothing, but the look in his dark eyes said, ‘Who else?’
Jenny steeled herself, ‘I went there several times, Matthew, but there was never any answer to my knock.’
He sat silent for a moment, then said, ‘You didn’t speak to her.’
‘I tried. Oh, Matthew, I did try so hard.’
‘I expect you did.’ His tone was soft but full of condemnation. ‘It was unfair of me to ask that of you.’
‘No, it was right.’
He shook his head, throwing off the failure. ‘I’ve let myself down. The only one to go and see her is me. Can’t ask things like that of you. My fault, expecting too much.’
‘No, Matthew. I understand how you feel.’
He looked directly at her. ‘Do you?’ The look made her squirm, a look one would give one’s executioner, defiant yet resigned.
‘I want to.’ That she’d let him down she felt keenly. ‘I want to help.’
‘You’re putting yourself in a high place, aren’t you, Jenny, thinking you can do anything for me? I could tell you all of what’s inside me. I could tell you for a hundred years, you still wouldn’t know.’
‘I feel so useless.’
‘Then how the bloody hell do you think I feel?’ His voice had risen, bringing all heads turning in his direction. ‘You all think you know how people like me feel. Trotting out your damned platitudes. “It’s all behind you now – forget it – we’ll make it better – tell you some jokes – snap you out of it. It doesn’t matter that you wake up in a cold sweat, crying out for the friends who died while you stayed alive, feeling bloody guilty for surviving, feeling that you’d trodden on them to stay alive while they died. Why d’you keep crying for the girl whose picture you kept inside your head through all those years, who you thought was waiting for you to come back home, to find it was only a dream? You must get over it.” Well I can’t get over it. And all your bloody understanding, Jenny, isn’t going to help me get over it.’
He stopped as suddenly as he’d begun. Now he stood up, staring around him at the faces turned to him in stunned silence. His parents had come back in to gaze at him in alarm. For a moment he regarded them, then with all those in the day room watching him open-mouthed in the manner of people who feel unable to pinpoint any reason for odd behaviour, he strode from the room.
No one, not even his parents, moved, but Jenny was already on her way, hurrying after him. Thus when she caught him up they were alone. Just one other person could be seen in the corridor, a porter at the far end going about his business.
Taking Matthew by the arm she swung him round to face her and pulled him to her, gathered him in her arms. He came without protest, his head turned so that his cheek rested on her shoulder, allowing his face to bury itself in the hollow of her neck.
Cradling him, she could feel his body being shaken by quiet sobs. She heard herself crooning soft, half-formed words as a mother might do to a hurt child. ‘No, no, dear, no. It’s all right. It’s all right.’ Silly words to a grown man but they afforded the comfort of understanding and shared feelings.
But he was right. How could she share what went on in his mind? Who had any idea what it had really been like for men like him, only from what papers and newsreels showed? She had seen a Nazi concentration camp after its liberation and had been horrified. But by the time accounts of the experiences of the freed emaciated British lads had reached the papers, too much coverage had been devoted to those newsreels of Nazi atrocities for much more to be given to the horrors of Japanese prison camps. The inmates had been too far away. Also they’d been British and American and Australian, men who surely hadn’t succumbed to such barbaric treatment as had those Jews of the concentration camps, their skeletal corpses piled high in ditches for the public to see on cinema screens and the front pages of newspapers. No one saw the thousands of crosses lying deep in the jungle, too deep for photographers to penetrate with their cameras. Why bother? They had the groups of smiling if skeletal freed prisoners to snap. Brits, Yanks, Aussies, Kiwis, with bottles of beer in their hands given them by their rescuers, all doing thumbs-up for the cameraman as they held each other up on matchstick legs, bony arms around each other’s necks. They were all right. They weren’t lying in obvious piles of dead. They were coming back, all of them looking cheerful and victorious as though they’d won a war, and no one saw the horror that lay behind those smiles, the dead comrades who’d forever haunt their dreams. Jenny’s arms tightened about Matthew, imagining the pain for some like him whose wife or sweetheart hadn’t waited for them.