Suddenly, there was a terrific pounding on the door. ‘Wonder who that is?’ Terry said.
‘Whoever it is, Lois will deal with it,’ Carmel said, and then just moments later there was the sound of thumping feet on the stairs and then a rather timid knock on the door.
With a questioning look at Carmel, Terry crossed to open it, holding the baby against his shoulder. ‘Jeff!’
‘Lois has just told me about the baby,’ Jeff said, twisting his hat nervously in his hands. ‘Can I…would it be all right…?’
‘Come in, Jeff,’ Carmel called from the bed where she had pulled herself into a sitting position and raised her arms in welcome as he came in. As he took hold of her hands she pulled him onto the bed and said, ‘You are a sight for sore eyes.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Yes, truly.’
‘I have been a fool,’ Jeff said miserably. ‘Stiff-necked, nearly as bad as my wife. I took umbrage when Terry said about the money. I know now how unreasonable I was being. Can you forgive me?’
‘Jeff, there is nothing to forgive,’ Carmel said, and her eyes shone with tears of thankfulness. ‘I am just glad you are part of our lives once more.’
‘I am glad you feel that way,’ Jeff said, ‘though I hardly deserve it. I have a tricycle for young Beth in the car, a big one with a bread basket on the back for Santa to deliver tomorrow. It’s old because it was Paul’s and then Matthew’s, but I had it done up and painted, and a new bell fitted, and it’s like new now.’
‘She will be thrilled,’ Carmel said. ‘But just as important as the things you give her is the time you spend with her. She has missed you sorely. In fact, in the new year I was going to seek you out.’
‘You might be a bit of a granddad to the new edition too, if you like,’ Terry said, lifting the child who had gone to sleep against his shoulder so that Jeff could see him. Jeff traced one finger gently around the baby’s face and said, ‘You are a lucky man, Terry.’
‘I know it,’ Terry said softly as he laid the sleeping baby in the cradle.
The war was over. Hitler shot himself in a bunker in Berlin on 30 April and his body was found by the Red Army who entered the city first on 2 May. Germany surrendered officially on 7 May and the following day was a national holiday.
Church bells pealed out the good news and street parties were hastily organised. No one mentioned bedtime and the children ran about in the streets till all hours, Beth along with the others. Carmel knew it was pointless trying to put her to bed as she would never be able to sleep.
Carmel couldn’t blame the people for their slight hysteria. The war had been long and arduous, and many had suffered tragedy and trauma. Yet she knew whatever the cost in human life, war couldn’t have been averted and, once undertaken, it had to be won, for the evil Nazi regime had to be stopped. She saw the relief on Lois’s face that Chris had survived it all and would soon be home again where he belonged.
Each morning, when Carmel woke, she would be filled with contentment and she enjoyed the first summer of peace. Each fine Sunday, they would all travel to Sutton Park, Lois and Colin too. Petrol rationing was too restrictive yet to make a car a viable proposition, but Carmel at any rate loved the little steam train that took them nearly to the entrance.
The first time they had done this, she remembered her first experience of the park when Paul took her there the day they had become engaged. She had almost expected a pang of nostalgia, but there was none, just a warm memory that made her smile.
‘What’s up?’ Terry asked with a quizzical look at her.
‘Nothing.’
‘Well then, why are you grinning like the Cheshire Cat?’
‘I’m not, and anyway,’ said Carmel archly, ‘it’s my business.’
‘Oh, yeah? What about the obey bit in the wedding ceremony?’
‘Doesn’t say that you own me body and soul,’ Carmel replied. ‘And my thoughts are my own, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.’
‘Why you!’ Suddenly Terry reached out and caught Carmel up in his arms.
Lois was smiling at the pair of them and Beth caught her eye and then cast her own upwards as if to say ‘they are at it again’, for she was well used to the way her mother and father went on.
‘Are you happy, Mrs Martin?’ Terry asked, as he held Carmel close.
‘Ecstatically so, Mr Martin,’ Carmel replied.
‘That is all the answer I need,’ Terry said. ‘And I will do all in my power to make sure that is always the case.’
Carmel knew he would, he had, and she thanked God nightly for giving her a second chance with this very special and wonderful man. She knew she had much to be thankful for and the only thing she had any concern about at all was that everyone would have Sam spoiled to death. Even Colin, little more than a baby himself, seemed to adore Sam, while Beth was his willing slave when she wasn’t at school for she had started at the Abbey Infants in January.
In fact, everyone ran round for Sam—Ruby, George, Jeff, even Lois—and as for Terry, there was sometimes no reasoning with him where Sam was concerned. Only
the other day Carmel had put her foot down about Terry buying Sam a train set for Christmas. Not that she thought he would be able to lay his hands on one. Precious few toys had reached the shops yet and this first Christmas of peacetime would be a lean one for many children, Carmel guessed.
It was Saturday, 13 October. Lois and Colin had gone away for a few days to stay with Chris’s parents. Terry and Beth, who had been in the garden, had come in for a warm drink. Carmel had Sam in the highchair, feeding him, when there was a knock at the door. Leaving Terry to finish with Sam, Carmel went to open it.
The man was slightly stooped, his hair was pure white and he had deep score lines scarring his face. Yet Carmel had the feeling that he wasn’t old and he was also familiar. Then the man spoke.
‘Do you not know me, Carmel?’
Carmel felt her mouth go dry, while her heart hammered against her ribs and the scene swam before her, for though the man’s voice was cracked and husky she would have known it anywhere.
‘Paul?’ she said, but hesitantly, and as if it were a question—as if she couldn’t believe it and didn’t want to believe it.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ Paul said. ‘And I know I’m no oil painting, but you should see the poor buggers who didn’t make it.’
Suddenly there flashed through his mind the doctor in the military hospital he had been taken to in the British sector of Berlin, who had said he wasn’t yet in any fit state to leave the hospital. ‘Come now, Mr Connolly, you are a medical man yourself and you know that we haven’t even had the results back of the tests we have run on you yet. My concern is about your lungs—;’
‘I’m sick of bloody tests,’ Paul had said angrily. ‘That’s all you sodding well do. As for being a medical man, that was in a past life. All I have done for the past five years is try to survive, and the only reason I did that was the thought of my wife waiting for me back home.’
‘Of course, we all understand that,’ the doctor had said in the soothing, patronising tones he might have used to a half-wit. ‘We will, of course, contact your wife as soon as you give us some more details.’
‘Don’t you understand anything?’ Paul had roared in
frustration. ‘Haven’t you listened to a word I have said, you moron? I will never be well until I hold my wife in my arms.’
Excuses were made for Paul’s outburst in the hospital, for they knew what he had gone through and they’d thought to treat his anger alongside trying to get him as well as he ever could be, considering how much he was damaged, which they would know more about when the results of the tests were in. The doctor certainly didn’t want him to return as he was. He was nowhere near ready and he seemed to think his wife was in some sort of time warp, that things hadn’t moved on for her too.
‘Write to her,’ the doctor persisted. ‘Prepare her a little?’
‘I don’t want to write. I need to see her. What is there to prepare about a woman welcoming her husband home?’
He had left the hospital without their knowledge and, using someone else’s clothes—for the ones he had been wearing when he was brought in were only fit for the incinerator and all they left him with was a hospital gown—he had taken five days to cross war-ravaged Europe. Always in his mind had been the picture of Carmel the day he had left her. He had thought that when she put her arms around him he would be at peace and healed by her love for him, but it had all gone wrong somehow.
Carmel was looking at him as if he was a ghost, and a very unwelcome ghost at that, and Paul knew that scenario being acted out at the door was the very thing the doctor had been worried about when he had advised
him to write and prepare his wife. But, for God’s sake, this was his home.
‘Am I to be asked in then?’ It was meant to come out in a fairly jocular way, but he had lost the art of doing that and, like most comments he made these days, it sounded aggressive.
‘Of…of course,’ Carmel said, opening the door wider.
And then, as Paul stepped into the hall, he saw the man behind Carmel. He had a baby in his arms and a little girl danced by his side as he said, ‘His lordship is finished. Is he to have anything else?’
‘Who is this man?’ Paul asked Carmel, his voice unnaturally and unnervingly calm.
Carmel swallowed deeply. ‘You must understand, Paul, we thought you were dead.’
Now it was the man’s turn to look alarmed and astonished. ‘Paul!’ he repeated.
Carmel, perilously close to tears, cried, ‘Oh, come in. None of this can or should be discussed on the doorstep.’
At first, it was little better in the breakfast room, for Carmel and Paul faced each other like two combatants. Terry took one look at them and disappeared into the kitchen, taking Sam with him. Beth gazed at each of them, feeling the tension but not understanding it.
Suddenly Carmel felt guilty. However she felt personally and whatever the outcome of this, it was a poor homecoming.
‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said, crossing the room. ‘I was taken totally by surprise. It was the last thing that I expected.’
She would have put her arms around him then, but he stepped out of her reach and said again, ‘Who is that man?’
‘Paul, please…’
Paul slammed the table with the flat of his hand and Beth jumped and looked with sudden fear at the man who was bellowing at her mother. ‘Tell me who he is, damn you.’
Carmel looked at the red face and eyes bulging with temper and the cruel twist of the mouth, and saw this man was not the gentle peace-loving Paul she knew.
Terry came in, still carrying Sam, and said to Paul, though his own heart was as heavy as lead, ‘There is no need for any of this.’ Then he turned to Carmel and said, ‘There is a tray of tea in the kitchen. If you bring it in, I will put Sam to bed. There is some talking to be done.’
Carmel nodded and then she said to Beth, ‘Do you want to go to Ruby’s for a bit?’
Beth shook her head. What she wanted was to roll her life back by just a few minutes to the happy time before this strange man came to the door, upsetting everyone and shouting. But now he had come, she was being shunted nowhere until she understood why and who he was.
Carmel brought in the tray and sat at the head of the table. When Terry came back into the room he sat opposite Paul as Carmel said gently, ‘This is going to be hard for you, Paul. God knows, it is going to be hard for all of us but Terry Martin is the man I married in 1943, after I thought you had been dead three years.’
Paul gave a sudden jerk in the chair. He wondered
why. He had known in his heart of hearts what she would say, but the actual words caused his innards to twist so painfully that he almost cried out against it. What he did instead was glare at Terry as he ground out, ‘Don’t matter what you both thought, I am not dead and as a woman can only have one husband, I suggest you sling your hook, mate.’
Before Terry had a chance to speak, Beth flew to Terry’s side and said heatedly, ‘Don’t you tell my daddy to go away. It’s you needs to go away.’
‘Hush, Beth,’ Carmel said.
Beth turned to her mother, her face full of distress, tears trickling down her cheeks as she cried, ‘Make him go away, Mommy. He is horrible and we don’t want him here.’
Carmel lifted Beth onto her knee and said to her, ‘He belongs here, Beth. Paul is your real daddy.’
Beth looked at the old man with the lined face and white hair beside her, and remembered the picture beside her bed. She loved that picture, and the Paul in it had been happy and smiling and young and wearing uniform—and as unlike the man beside her as it was possible to be. So she said, ‘No, he’s not.’
Paul had almost forgotten about the child. Because she hadn’t been born when he left, she had faded from his memory and when he had thought of home he had thought only of Carmel, but he remembered now that he had a daughter too. He tried to smile at her, but it came out like a grimace and Beth was repelled and snuggled further into her mother as Paul said, ‘Oh yes, I am your real father.’
‘Well, I don’t want you to be, so there.’
‘That will do, Beth!’ Carmel snapped out and then to Paul, she said, ‘All of us, Beth included, have a right to know where you have been for five and a half years and what has happened to turn you from a fit, vibrant young man into…’
‘A shambling old one,’ Paul finished for her.
He lifted the cup of tea and drained it as Carmel went on, ‘I mean, I got the telegram and all, and then Chris said he saw you killed and tipped into a ditch.’
‘And he would have been right if I hadn’t been found by a French farmer and, I was to find out later, one of the Resistance,’ Paul said. ‘At great risk to himself and his family, he took me in and tended me. He said for weeks I hovered between life and death. When I recovered, there were plans to get me back to England and I had already got my false papers when the Gestapo swooped.
‘If I would have spoken, given my name, rank and serial number, I still might not have survived,’ Paul went on and added. ‘The Gestapo record on taking prisoners is not good, but no one else would have survived either. Every man, woman, child and anyone else working on the farm would have been killed. But some mightn’t be killed straight away. The Gestapo would know that I had to have help to get false papers and that would mean there was an active Resistance cell in the area. People would be tortured until they told what they knew; even I might have had the thumb screws applied.’ Paul glanced at Carmel cuddling her daughter before he continued, ‘And they would get the information, for if the men won’t talk, they torture the children till the women speak, so I was told.’
Carmel instinctively held Beth tighter as she said, ‘So you kept quiet.’
‘Yes,’ Paul told her. ‘There was no choice. You know my French has always been good and it improved further in the three or four months I was at the farmhouse; was good enough, anyway, to fool the Germans. I was marched away with all the fit man of the area to one of the German labour camps and there was no way I could get word to you either then or later.
‘Anyway, to tell you I was alive and well would have been a lie. Barely alive would have been more like it. We were set to rebuild roads and bridges and essential buildings the Allies had destroyed in bombing and so we worked in blistering heat, freezing cold and in pounding rain, and we were given just enough food to keep us alive. If you took a rest at any time you were whipped, the second time you were shot and any too sick to leave their beds received the same treatment.’
Paul’s eyes were so full of pain as his story unfolded that Carmel’s heart constricted in pity. She reminded herself that once she had loved this man more than life itself, and she longed to reach out and touch him, to cover his agitated hands with her own, but she was constrained with Terry there, who she could see clearly was suffering too. She knew whatever happened after this, someone was going to be so terribly hurt and she knew that would have to be her beloved Terry. How then could she comfort Paul in front of the man who was going to lose everything all over again?
Inside, Terry felt as if he was dying. Although he was moved by Paul’s tale—and who wouldn’t have been?—he saw the life he had built up, the second chance he
had been given, crumbling away like so much dust before his eyes and he wanted to howl at the unfairness of life.
And so did Carmel, who felt as if she was being rent in two. ‘I am so sorry, Paul, for all you have had to endure,’ she said at last after the silence had stretched out uncomfortably between them.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he burst out almost savagely. ‘You looked out just for yourself there. We would be marching for days, sometimes in unrelenting heat on subsistence rations and a scant amount of water, and men would drop before you and you had to step over them and go on. The guards would pull them out of line and put a bullet through their heads and any who helped them, as they had in the beginning, were similarly dealt with. No one there could afford to have human emotions. We were treated like animals and in time behaved like them. I have seen men fight to the death over a slice of bread one has stolen from the other. Jesus Christ, it was hell on earth.’
‘It’s over now,’ Carmel said soothingly, and then as Paul began to cry great gulping sobs of sadness, she put Beth down and put her arms around him. Her own eyes met those of Terry and she recognised the despair and helplessness she saw there.
‘Is there no way around this?’ he asked desperately.
‘What do you suggest?’ Paul asked sarcastically, turning his ravaged and red-rimmed eyes on Terry. ‘That we share my wife—is that it? Maybe you should have her Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then my turn would be Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and Sunday could be turn and turn about. How would that suit?’
‘Oh God, you know that isn’t what I meant,’ Terry
cried brokenly. ‘Almighty Christ, I don’t know how to cope with this.’ He looked across at Carmel, her hands still on Paul’s shoulders and saw her pain and knew her heart was being ripped in two, as his was. And if he stayed talking from now till doomsday, the end result would be the same, would have to be the same, and he would further upset Carmel and little Beth.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and said, ‘There is no point prolonging this. I’ll start collecting my things together.’
Carmel just watched him leave the room. She couldn’t speak. What she wanted to do was hold him tight and beg him not to go and leave her with this stranger that she was almost afraid of, but she knew she could do or say none of those things and she sank onto the chair beside Paul and put her head in her hands. Beth stood sucking at the thumb she hadn’t needed the comfort of for some time, her dress gathered into a bunch by her restless hands because everything had gone way past her understanding.
Terry could barely see for the tears falling from his eyes as he emptied drawers and his side of the wardrobe into his suitcases. He ached with pain and loss, and wanted to cry out with the injustice of it, but there was nothing that he or Carmel could do to fight against this. In the end the pain would be less for everyone else if he was just to walk away, and as quickly as possible.
Beth didn’t see it that way at all and when he appeared in the doorway with his cases, she threw herself at him with a cry of anguish. ‘Daddy, don’t go!’ she begged tearfully. ‘Please don’t.’
‘Beth, I must,’ Terry said, and he put the cases on
the floor and put his arms around the distressed child.
Paul lifted his head and growled out, ‘Don’t call that man Daddy. I am your daddy.’
‘Paul, Beth didn’t know you were alive till today,’ Carmel chided gently. ‘She is bound to take time to adjust.’
‘She is being openly defiant,’ Paul said, and he pulled her out of Terry’s arms and nearer to him so suddenly neither could do a thing about it. Then he held on to her so she couldn’t pull away.
‘Paul…’ Carmel said nervously, but Paul wasn’t in the mood to listen to Carmel.
‘If you call that man Daddy again, or refer to him as daddy when he has left here, you will make me very angry,’ Paul said to Beth, and gave her a shake. ‘Do you want to make me angry?’
Beth was very frightened and yet she found herself saying, ‘I don’t care about making you angry, because I don’t like you and I wish you hadn’t come back.’