‘Oh. Right,’ Cherie said, immediately seeing the force of the argument. ‘I didn’t realise the house was badly damaged, though I knew the thatch had gone, of course. I looked back when the ambulance drove us away and I could see it burning.’
Marianne moaned again and the nurse, who had been standing by the door, stepped forward.
‘I think you ought to leave Mother for a while, dears,’ she said in a low voice. ‘She’s on morphine, so she really doesn’t know you’re here. Just you go out and get some air and make your arrangements and come back at, say, seven this evening.’
‘Right,’ Tess said, immensely relieved to be leaving the room and the figure on the bed. ‘Come on, Cherie, there really isn’t anything we can do here. And Mrs Sugden’s waiting in the entrance hall; she’ll take us up to Uncle Phil’s if we ask her to, I’m sure she will.’
Mrs Sugden got to her feet when she saw them approaching. She looked very anxious.
‘My dears, how is she? What’s happening?’
Tess gave her a watered-down account of Marianne’s condition and Mrs Sugden took them out to the car and drove straight to their uncle’s house on Unthank Road. Auntie May was home and greatly distressed to hear their news and agreed at once that the girls must move in and have the small back bedroom between them.
‘Mrs Sugden, I’m ashamed to ask any more of you, but could you take us back now, to fetch our night-things?’ Tess asked, but Auntie May said that it wasn’t necessary.
‘Heaven knows what sort of a state your stuff is in, from what you’ve said,’ she pointed out. ‘I’ll kit them out for the next few days, Mrs Sugden, and we’ll keep you informed, of course. Something may well happen to – to make their presence in the city no longer necessary.’
‘She thinks Maman will die,’ Cherie said, as she and Tess were washing for dinner in their aunt’s bathroom. ‘But she’s wrong, isn’t she, Tess? Maman won’t die, she’s going to get married!’
‘Lord, does Maurice know?’ Tess said, begging the question. She could not imagine that marriage would be an option for Marianne for a long, long while, if ever. ‘I’d better get in touch with him. Do you have a telephone number or an address?’
Cherie did not. ‘It’s in the brown book, at the Old House,’ she said. ‘Maman knows it by heart, so she’ll be able to tell us in a day or two, but not quite yet I don’t suppose. Perhaps we could bus over to Barton tomorrow, and make a note of it?’
Tess said they might do that, but Uncle Phil, when he got home, knew the number and contacted Maurice for them.
‘He’s very upset. He’s coming over to the hospital at seven, to visit her,’ he said, returning from the hallway, where he had made his telephone call. He looked straight at Tess. ‘I wonder, my dear, if that’s wise?’
‘I don’t think it is,’ Tess said immediately. ‘She’s on morphine so she won’t know he’s there and the sight of her is – is very distressing. But Cherie and I are going to visit at seven o’clock, the nurse asked us to, so we can tell him it’s early days.’
‘I’ll walk down with you, and walk you home,’ Uncle Phil said at once. ‘If the staff allow, I’ll have a word with her doctor, ask him what the prognosis is.’
‘I’d be very grateful,’ Tess said earnestly. ‘I’m afraid Cherie and I will just be told to wait and see. They won’t fob you off like that, I’m sure.’
‘So am I,’ her uncle said grimly. ‘And now let me see you two girls eat a hearty dinner, because you’re going to need all your strength over the next few days.’
For ten days Marianne’s life hung in the balance, though Cherie, Tess was sure, never realised it for one moment. For Cherie, her Maman was going to get better; it was simply a matter of being patient.
And for those ten days, Tess and Cherie slept in Uncle Phil’s spare room and spent every moment they could at the hospital. They told Maurice that it was too soon to visit, that Marianne wouldn’t know him, that he would only distress himself, and he stayed away, but on the eleventh day, when Marianne had sat up and drunk weak tea through a straw, he visited with the girls.
Tess had been dreading his reaction, what he might say or do, but she had underestimated him. He cooed to Marianne, talking to her exclusively in French, kissing her hands, telling her that soon, very soon, she would be his own adorable little girl again, and then they would marry and live happily ever after and this – pooh, this – would be but a terrible episode which he would spend the rest of his life ensuring that she forgot.
‘Does he mean it?’ Tess asked Cherie as they walked homewards that night. ‘Will he really wait?’
‘Why not? She’s going to be beautiful again,’ Cherie said in her most sensible voice. ‘She’s going to have lovely new teeth, and her hair will grow, most of it, and she’ll have nice new skin in the places where the burns are worst.’
‘Ye-es, but it’ll take months,’ Tess pointed out cautiously. She had never told Cherie that her beloved maman would probably never look the same again, and she was desperately worried over what Marianne herself would feel when she saw herself in the mirror. To date, the staff had carefully kept all reflective objects out of her reach and since she was still bedbound and unable, as yet, to leave the life-giving machines which were attached to her by various tubes, she had no idea of the extent of her injuries. Well, the staff said she didn’t know and Tess had to believe them, though sometimes she wondered. She had seen tears running down Marianne’s scarred and puckered cheeks more than once, and she didn’t think they had been caused just by the physical pain she was suffering.
‘Now that Maman is sitting up and talking and taking nourishment, I suppose I ought to start school,’ Cherie said, on the eleventh day. ‘I can still go in and see her before classes each morning and after each evening. Sister says.’
Cherie got on very well with Sister Prentiss, who was hard on her nurses but kindness itself to her patients and their young relatives. Indeed, she spent hours talking to Marianne and Cherie when she wasn’t on duty, telling her patient that she was going to recover completely and assuring her patient’s child that although recovery might take a long time, it was going to be worth the wait.
‘Modern medicine can perform miracles these days,’ she said cheerfully, and brought a book of photographs to show how skin grafting was progressing. ‘You wait, you’ll be a lovely thing again!’
‘Will her hair grow back?’ Tess asked Sister Prentiss, who said that it might well do so, but that wigs, today, were so natural that real experts had been fooled.
‘I know you think she looks pretty awful now,’ she said privately to Tess at one point. ‘But she’s a strong and determined woman who has an overriding urge to marry. That will bring her recovery on faster than you might imagine. Mind over matter, my dear; mind over matter!’
‘I’m glad,’ Tess said sincerely. ‘We haven’t always seen eye to eye, but we’re fond of one another now. And Maurice – he’s not the drongo I thought him.’
Sister Prentiss cocked her head on one side. ‘Drongo? That’s an Australian expression.’
‘Yes,’ Tess admitted. ‘I’m going to marry an Australian bomber pilot. He’s been posted missing right now, they had to ditch over occupied France, so I’m waiting to hear whether he’s a POW or – or whether he’s making his way home. His friends saw parachutes, you see,’ she ended.
‘I see. Well, I shall pray for him,’ Sister Prentiss said matter of factly. ‘As I pray for your mother, my dear.’
‘Thank you,’ Tess said. ‘I pray for them both, too.’
The weeks passed and spring turned into summer. There was no word from the Air Force concerning Mal’s whereabouts and Marianne’s progress seemed painfully slow. Tess, living at Willow Tree Farm and going into Norwich whenever she could to see Marianne and Cherie, thought that, awful though it was, the explosion at the Old House had at least stopped her fretting all the time over Mal. Seeing how calm and optimistic Cherie and Maurice were, she would have been ashamed to have been less so herself. So she talked cheerfully of getting married when Mal got home, and applauded Maurice’s plans to take Marianne away somewhere to convalesce just as soon as she was well enough.
And she went out with Ashley.
‘I know Mal’s coming back,’ she said to Sue and Molly as they worked in the fields, planting, hoeing, harvesting. ‘But Ash says why should that stop me living a normal life in the meantime, and I believe he’s right. He knows I’m – I’m spoken for, he’s just being friendly.’
‘That’s right,’ Sue said, and winked at Molly. Tess, intercepting the wink, sighed but said nothing. She could not spend all her time hospital visiting and working, it was safer, she felt, to go out with Ashley, who knew the status quo, rather than with some other young man who might have his hopes raised, only to be blighted at Mal’s return. But when she said as much to the girls they obviously didn’t understand.
‘Do you think it’s unfair of me then, to see Ash?’ she asked bluntly, a few days later, when the girls were reading their letters over breakfast. ‘Only I get very low-spirited, sometimes. No home any more – Mr Thrower says he’ll do what he can, but building materials just aren’t available – no parents or family. And Ash does understand, really he does.’
‘Sure, love. You go out with anyone you want to,’ Molly said. ‘Ashley’s a decent bloke, he won’t try to take advantage of your loneliness.’
‘He’ll get a smack in the kisser if he tries,’ Tess said briefly. She had been hoeing cabbages, now she straightened, a hand to the small of her back. ‘Gosh, thank God for the end of the row! Is it time to break for grub yet?’
Sixteen
IT WAS A
beautiful blue and gold summer’s day in August, and Tess was helping Ashley to strip the plum trees at the bottom of the orchard so that Mrs Knox might bottle some of the fruit and make jam with the rest. It was a busman’s holiday in a way, since the girls at Willow Tree Farm had spent every spare moment for three weeks picking plums, but Tess didn’t mind. Mrs Knox had pointed out the flocks of blackbirds and starlings attacking the plums; it would help a great deal in the coming winter if the fruit were picked before the birds and wasps ruined the crop. What was more, because she no longer had a home to go to when she was on leave Tess had been glad of the Knoxes’ invitation to visit them whenever she was at a loose end. And at least, Tess thought ruefully now, picking plums gives Ashley and me something useful to do whilst we quarrel.
Not that Ashley was much interested in being useful, she quite realised that. He was on leave, having finished his third tour, and would be instructing for the next few months and felt he was doing well by his country. Three tours with only one bad landing (a tyre had burst) and one ditching in the North Sea (near enough to the shore to be picked up speedily), wasn’t bad, he had told Tess complacently earlier in the day. He had added that she should realise he was a warrior from the war returning, so why didn’t she do the decent thing and cast herself on his bosom and gratify all his desires?
‘Because I’m spoken for,’ Tess had said . . . and that, of course, was why they were quarrelling, though since she was barely allowed to open her mouth it was less a quarrel, she supposed, than a lecture. But perched high in the branches, handing down her basket whenever it was full of plums so that Ashley could arrange them in the tray, at least she was at liberty to pretend his more offensive remarks hadn’t been said.
Because the truth was that Ashley, who had come to Barton on that dreadful morning and been such a comfort, simply refused to believe that Tess could be in love with a man she scarcely knew. The words,
a man who, for all you’ve heard of him since his ditching, might well be dead,
could never be spoken between them.
‘You only met him once or twice,’ he had protested at the time, as he drove Tess back to Willow Tree Farm to start work once more. ‘I know you must still be in shock but Tess, my love, this isn’t Marianne, nor your father, nor anyone you know really well. It’s always sad when someone goes for a burton, but to make yourself ill . . .’
‘We were going to be married,’ Tess had said in the new, thin little voice which had seemed all she was able to produce at that time. ‘We saw each other on and off for a couple of weeks, that was all, but it was enough. I – I
knew,
you see, and so did Mal. We belonged together. Why, the reason Marianne was in the spare room that day was because she was sorting out the food so that there would be some left for our wedding reception, when Mal came home. Didn’t you know that was why . . .’
‘Yes, all right,’ Ashley said hastily as Tess’s explanation stumbled to a halt. ‘But what you felt couldn’t have been more than a – a passing fancy, sweetie! Damn it all, you and I have known each other for years, but I’ve never managed to persuade you to spend a day away with me, let alone . . . Christ, sweetie, you can’t call that thick Aussie exactly charming, or a sweet-talker . . .’
‘I didn’t have to be charmed, or sweet-talked,’ Tess had said dully. ‘I don’t understand it myself, Ash. But it’s the way things are.’
‘Were,’ Ashley corrected, then, at her involuntary wince, added in a lower tone, ‘I’m sorry, darling Tess, I shouldn’t have said that. But – but you get under my skin and I can’t understand why you don’t feel the way I feel and . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tess had said patiently. Soon she would be back at work and Ashley would be flying his fighter once more. There was absolutely no point in trying to convince him. ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Ash.’
But right now her basket was full, which meant a scramble down and an eye-to-eye confrontation with Ashley. As she climbed lower the birds clustering in the next tree rose uneasily, then settled again. ‘I’ve not finished this one yet, my feathered friends,’ Tess informed them, descending on to the lowest limb of the tree and handing her basket down to Ashley. ‘You won’t starve – but you won’t get the whole crop, either!’
‘Stop talking to the bloody birds and ignoring me,’ Ashley said plaintively. ‘Tess, you know I love you, don’t you?’
‘I know you think you do,’ Tess said. ‘Please, Ash, don’t let’s . . .’
‘It’s all right, I’m not making any demands, I’m just telling you,’ Ashley said. ‘I’d do anything for you, Tess, anything at all. So if there is something I could do . . .’