Convoy (6 page)

He stopped and swung her round holding her shoulder with one hand, and before he could stop himself said bitterly: ‘He was the first man you loved enough to marry. You have all those memories. Your honeymoon, the private jokes, tunes, places – St Peter’s in Rome. Paris? Florence? I have nothing to be jealous about? I’m jealous of all those memories.’

She clung to him now, tiny yet tense; he thought she was tense with anger and instead of silencing him it made him go on and on like a stuck record. ‘The man who first shows you the view from the Spanish Steps, who is with you when you first smell Gauloise cigarettes as the cross-Channel ferry berths, who explores the Louvre with you and shows you the treasures in the Piazza Navona, and comments how muddy are the Arno and Tiber, and how the uniforms of the Swiss Guards seem tawdry: yes, I’m jealous, I’m sick with jealousy.’

He managed to stop himself adding that their memories, the memories and shared experiences of Ned Yorke and Clare Exton were, so far, of bedpans and bottles, the bared teeth of pain, the stink of his own suppurating flesh, the clinking of the lid of that white enamel dish which held the scalding water. Those things, and one brief moment as a bomb hissed down towards them.

She looked up at him, white-faced and stricken, and reaching for his face and holding it between her hands whispered: ‘Answer me truly, because we’ve known each other only – how long, a month? Have you really fallen in love with me, Lieutenant Yorke, or am I just an available nurse, a pretty young woman for a wounded sailor to dally with until he goes back to sea?’

He tried to clasp her with the arm in the sling as well as the right arm. ‘What do you think?’ His voice came out harsh, not at all the way he wanted it to sound, but his vocal cords were suddenly constricted, tightened by unknown muscles.

She looked away. ‘Until now I thought – well, you’ll soon be back at sea. But when you talk so bitterly of Rome and Paris, I’m not so sure; I’m suddenly confused. Ned, I swore I’d never fall in love in wartime. I’m not afraid of
being
alone; I’m afraid of being
left
alone for ever. You’ll never understand that it’s the men who get killed who are the lucky ones: the women who are left die thousands of times, at every anniversary, every time particular tunes are played, jokes made… Have you ever thought of
that
, Ned? The bereaved keep on dying; the dead die only once.’

‘I know, but it
was
like that, wasn’t it?’ he demanded bitterly. ‘You went to all those places on your honeymoon? Or before, probably. And now, as you say, you die again every time you remember. How can I compete with that?’

‘What about you?’ she asked angrily. ‘How many girls have you taken there? How do you know what it’s like? Why should you be jealous of him, and me not be jealous of her – or them? They’re still alive – I may even meet them and never know they shared anything with you.’

‘There’s never been a “her” in that sense; I’ve been to all those places, but never with anyone I loved.’

‘Never a girlfriend?’ she challenged.

‘Oh yes, plenty; enough to make me…’

‘Make you what?’

He tried to laugh it off, realizing he had talked himself into a comer. ‘Make me appreciate a girl with a crooked seam who tried to save me when she thought a bomb was landing close.’

‘Oh that,’ she said offhandedly. ‘A nurse’s duty is to her patients. You were the nearest.’

The shock of the remark made him let her go. ‘Do you mean that?’

She looked up and smiled impishly. ‘Why be upset? You
were
the nearest.’

‘Suppose I hadn’t been?’

‘We’ll never know!’

‘But…’

‘Ned,’ she said, arranging his sling and avoiding looking at him, ‘why question everything? You were the nearest. I did my duty as a nurse – or I did what I wanted to do as a woman. Why analyse everything? Now,’ she said, turning him round and tugging his arm to make him walk, ‘tell me how you hurt your hand. And the medal.’

‘I don’t know what happened with the hand.’

‘Oh,’ she said impatiently, ‘don’t sulk, and don’t suddenly get modest and understated: it’s so boring! I’m curious, nosy like all women. I want to know about you – if only to gossip to the other nurses!’

‘I’m not being modest or understated,’ he protested. ‘I was in a destroyer and we were attacked by bombers. We were hit several times. One bomb burst on the bridge, on the other side from where I was standing.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘The destroyer sank. Or so they told me. I was knocked out.’

‘Oh, Ned, come on! It’s you, and I want to know all about it. Do I have to squeeze it out of you?’

He stopped and swung her towards him. ‘Yes!’

She put her arms round him. ‘I can’t squeeze too hard because of the sling.’

‘That’s just about right,’ he said, and he could feel her breasts hard through the tweed material.

‘I’m waiting,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be squeezing the story out of you, remember?’

‘I came to sitting in a Carley float with four other chaps.’

‘A Carley float?’

‘A sort of small raft made of very light wood, like a square quoit, with a net across the open part.’

‘Who were the others?’

‘One of the bridge lookouts. A Polish naval officer. A wardroom steward. And a Polish seaman.’

‘Why Polish? Were you serving in a Polish ship?’

He shook his head. ‘No, we had some on board and some Polish refugees, that was all. Other survivors were also paddling round in Carley floats.’

‘How long were you in the float?’

‘A day or two. We managed to keep together, and another ship picked us up.’

‘And the medal?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘They usually give one to the senior surviving officer.’

‘But surely you weren’t commanding the destroyer, were you? You’re much too young.’

‘I didn’t command her to begin with.’

‘Oh – but you did at the end. You survived.’

He nodded. A quarter of them had survived; the rest had been killed by the bombs bursting on the
Aztec
, been killed in the water when the bombers had flown back and forth, methodically machine-gunning the survivors, or died of exposure. The Teds had been trying to make sure the Polish civilians died – and ironically every one of them had survived; only their rescuers died.

His arm, particularly the hand, had obviously been slashed by the explosion on the bridge; he had lost a lot of blood in the Carley float, and fuel and lubricating oil had soaked into the wound. And three days later they had been picked up by a submarine, more dead than alive; three days without food had been unimportant; three days without water had been worse. But three days with oil soaking into the wound had been painful and, as it began to swell, grotesque, too.

‘A penny?’ she said.

‘That’s an old trick.’

‘You should be flattered, Lieutenant Yorke. Miss Exton wants to know your thoughts: she might get jealous, too.’

‘If she knew my thoughts at this moment she might also get embarrassed.’

‘I doubt it,’ Clare said. ‘You can’t shock an old widow woman who’s spending the war nursing rough sailors.’

He was as different as a man could be. With other men he was obviously decisive; the sort that a group looks to for leadership: does not even look, she sensed, just accepts without thought. He was twenty-five. Had a DSO which – so Sister Scotland said – was rare and hard to get in the Royal Navy. And had commanded a destroyer, though apparently briefly and because his senior officer had been killed.

She could love him; did love him, if she was honest, despite her vow; she had known it from the moment she had felt for him in her very womb when she heard those bombs coming and had flung herself on top of him for a reason she had since tried to analyse: was she trying to save him, or make sure that she too died if he did? Were you being brave or cowardly, Nurse Exton? Was that the same sort of question that sometimes made men embarrassed, as Ned was about talking of his DSO? That an action was often capable of having two motives so that one was never quite sure which was which? Yes, she loved him; no, she didn’t know whether she had covered him with her body to save him or die with him. But a bomb which killed him, she now realized, would have killed everyone else in the ward anyway, but at the time…

It was all crazy; up to that moment, until the sound of the bombs, they had done nothing more than have routine conversations in that ward, ‘Nurse Exton’ and ‘Lieutenant Yorke,’ or ‘Mr Yorke’ for a change. He had (although she did not know it at the time of the bombs) written her a note, a formal note in some ways, but one she had since read a dozen times.

Now, after this afternoon’s walk, she understood that note so much better: using a series of almost stilted phrases he was in fact trying to discover if she was engaged – the thought that she might be married, let alone widowed, had obviously not occurred to him. It was a wonder that one of the other nurses in a piece of cattiness had not called her ‘Mrs Exton’ or ‘Mrs Brown’.

Would he, she thought inconsequentially, ever know how lucky he had been not to lose the arm? He did not realize that the surgeons had not dared to amputate for fear of more septicaemia; that the torture of having the arm put in hot water every four hours was a fairly desperate attempt to control it, and it had not worked… He would never know, unless Sister Scotland (or perhaps Nurse Exton) told him, that what saved his arm was that the hospital managed to get a new and experimental drug still known only by the maker’s number, M & B 693, and which Ned had called ‘horse urine’ and disliked because it had to be injected in large quantities into his buttock and was painful, and had a brownish colour more reminiscent of a stable than a hospital ward.

It had made him so depressed – Sister Scotland had warned him that it would – and probably for that reason alone he had hated it so much that he had not realized it was the reason for the septicaemia clearing up and the swelling subsiding as the pus stopped forming. All he knew – and from the pain it caused it was understandable – was that the hot fomentations had stopped, the arm and hand had started healing, and now the whole arm and hand was a livid-looking mess with brown, dead skin which would peel off, and the hand would be normal again one day, crisscrossed with scars but usable.

Luckier, for all the pain and the grumbling, than Pilot Officer Reginald Brown, who had dived a Miles Magister plane into the ground ‘while on night operations’ three years ago. She had accepted the official explanation until she realized a Magister was a two-seater trainer, and not used for operations. Eventually she had discovered what had happened: Reginald and some of his fellow pilots, celebrating a birthday, had been drunk and decided to ‘buzz’ the aerodrome. They had taken off without permission in the only three available planes. The Magisters had fooled around until Reginald had flown into a row of trees, killing himself and so injuring his friend in the other seat that he too had died before dawn.

It had been just a drunken party; newly-qualified young pilots trying to behave like seasoned men. It was the time of the ‘phoney war’; the favourite song had been that nonsense about hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line. Before Dunkirk; before the Battle of Britain. War to them then had been a glamorous game: the first those young pilots had known of death had been Reginald’s crash. How many of them had since survived the Battle of Britain?

At the time everyone had been so sympathetic towards the young widow; they had not really understood why she had not gone to the funeral – there had been time – and the authorities were still writing to her about the pension. Everyone, she thought as she walked along the lane, had been so understanding, but none of them had understood.

So she had become a nurse. She had struggled through the training, often feeling so faint she finished a class bent over with her head between her knees, breathing deeply. She had studied Gray’s
Anatomy
and read the latest reports written as a result of experience in the fighting in France and the bombing – that shock could kill a person as surely as visible wounds. But nursing had sounded more glamorous than it was: a patient might be a hero, but he still needed bedpans and bottles, his temperature had to be taken and his bowel movements recorded. No man was a hero to his valet, they said, and likewise no patient could be a hero to his nurse. Ned was one of the most sensitive patients she had ever nursed: a septic arm was smelly, and it embarrassed him that the nurses had to put up with it – even while he was retching himself.

She looked at her watch. She was on duty in four hours’ time.

‘We must be getting back.’

‘Do you really sleep in the mornings, when you go off duty?’

‘I did this morning,’ she said, ‘even though we had a quiet night. It’s so peaceful down here. The birds singing, the wind in the trees…one gets the feeling of centuries passing with no change. There’s always such a senseless bustle in London; everybody seems to be hurrying but no one really gets anywhere.’

‘No bombing down here.’

‘You hear them going over, though, and it’s horrible to think they’re carrying bombs…’

She watched that distant look come back to his face. A glass screen seemed to slide over his eyes; he went a thousand miles away; a thousand years almost. For moments, minutes even, he became another man obviously reliving memories – of what? Not women, from what he had said; probably something to do with the sinking of the destroyer. He had said the
Aztec
was bombed. A British destroyer sinking amid bursting German bombs was so far from this Kentish lane – yet perhaps not; at the rate the Germans were sinking the merchant ships, they might yet invade successfully.

She could imagine the hand and arm inside that bandage; she could only guess at the memories inside that head… He was jealous of her memories (what a bitter irony) but deliberately shut her out of his.

‘Clare,’ he said suddenly, ‘you’re having a boring afternoon.’

‘I’m not, but I shall if you say things like that.’