A Nightingale Christmas Wish (33 page)

‘Where are we going?’ Frannie asked.

‘You’ll see. It’s not far.’

Finally he stopped the car on the edge of a murky-looking lake. Not far from them, further along the waterside, was a dilapidated-looking farmhouse, its whitewashed walls peeling. It was flanked by similarly neglected outbuildings, all built around a filthy yard. It looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for years.

John got out of the car and came round to open the door for Frannie. She stepped out, her shoes sinking immediately into the spongy marsh ground. She pulled her hat down over her ears, shivering in the chilly wind that swirled across the flat land. It was as if the heat of the summer had never visited this grim part of the world.

‘Where are we?’ She tried to stay calm, but her heart was pattering against her ribs. ‘It looks like the middle of nowhere.’

‘It is, more or less.’

He looked down at her, eyes shaded under the peak of his cap. ‘First of all, I wanted to apologise.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘I should never have walked away from you like that. I knew as soon as I did it that I’d made a mistake. I thought I could stay away from you. But then I realised you meant too much to me.’

‘Why did you do it then?’ Frannie fought to keep the hurt out of her voice.

He stared across the lake towards the house. ‘I haven’t been completely honest with you,’ he said.

Fear crept up her spine. ‘In what way?’

He turned to her. ‘You have to understand, I didn’t think I would ever see you again,’ he said, his eyes pleading for understanding. ‘And then when we met in the hospital – I just didn’t know what to do. I knew I should tell you the truth, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose you. And I knew if you ever found out—’

‘John? John, what are you talking about? You’re scaring me.’

A loud click behind her made her swing round. In the distance, she saw a man standing in the doorway to the house, a shotgun raised to his shoulder, pointed straight at them.

Frannie let out a cry of panic but John was perfectly calm as he turned slowly to face the gunman.

‘For God’s sake, put the gun down, you fool,’ he called out wearily, his voice echoing across the marsh. ‘I’ve brought someone to see you.’

‘John? Is that you?’ As the man slowly lowered the gun, Frannie saw his face for the first time. But even though it was clear to her, she still didn’t believe it.

‘Matthew?’ she whispered.

‘FRANNIE?’

It was a vision, she thought, as she watched the figure striding out of the mist towards her, gun crooked over his arm. Birds wheeled overhead, their screams breaking the silence. She was imagining it, just as she’d imagined him in her dreams in the weeks and months after the telegram came.

But then he was there, standing in front of her, as real as he was when she’d kissed him goodbye at the railway station.

Matthew scowled at her, then at John. ‘You promised,’ he muttered. ‘No one would ever know, you said.’

‘Yes, I promised. And that promise has cost me dear over the years, believe me.’ John’s face was grim. ‘But I’m not going to lie for you any more, Matthew. Frannie needs to know the truth.’

She was hardly listening. Her eyes were fixed on the man she’d loved and lost all those years ago. He was still handsome but had lost weight, his clothes hanging off his bony frame. His dark hair was too long, and his chin shadowed with stubble.

All kinds of emotions rushed through her – anger, hope, bewilderment, disbelief. She felt the ground sinking under her feet, and all at once John’s strong hand was at her elbow, holding her up.

‘I – I don’t understand,’ she stammered.

‘He can explain everything.’ She caught the hard look John gave Matthew, and read the tension between them. Matthew’s face was petulant, just as it always had been when he was forced into doing something he had no inclination for.

Finally, he seemed to relent. ‘You’d better come in, then,’ Matthew grunted. He turned and started towards the house. Frannie went to follow, but John stood still.

She glanced towards him. ‘You’re not coming?’

‘This is between you two.’ He glanced at the house. ‘I’ll be out here waiting if you need me.’

Frannie gave him one last look then walked slowly towards the house, moving on legs that seemed suddenly unable to support her. This was all so horribly unreal, as if she was floating through a dream. John seemed like the only solid, dependable thing around her, and she fought the desperate urge to cling to him.

Inside, the cottage smelled of damp and neglect. Barely any light permeated the grubby net curtains, filling the room with gloomy shadows. From what Frannie could make out there was one room downstairs, sparsely furnished with a single threadbare armchair beside the range, a kitchen table and two wooden chairs. Over in the corner stood a narrow dresser and an old stone sink.

A mangy-looking mongrel lay in front of the range. He lifted his head to look at Frannie and then let it droop, as if the effort were too much for him.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Matthew said. ‘Sorry about the mess, I wasn’t expecting visitors,’ he added pointedly.

Frannie sat down at the table. In front of her lay a dirty plate with the congealed remains of a meal, and next to it an empty cigarette packet and an overflowing ashtray.

Matthew went to the range and picked up the kettle. ‘Tea?’ he offered, then smiled knowingly. ‘Although I reckon we could both do with something stronger, don’t you?’

He crossed to the dresser and took out a whisky bottle and two glasses. ‘I suppose this has all been a bit of a shock?’ he threw over his shoulder.

‘Yes. Yes, it has.’ Shock was putting it mildly. Frannie watched Matthew as he filled their glasses, terrified that if she took her eyes off him even for a moment he would vanish into thin air.

Her dazed mind still couldn’t take in the idea that he was alive. For the past twenty years she’d thought about him often, wondering what he might have been like had he lived. But never, ever had she imagined anything like this.

‘And I don’t suppose John’s told you anything?’ She shook her head. ‘He always was a man of few words, wasn’t he? I don’t know why he had to open his mouth now,’ grumbled Matthew, putting a glass down in front of her. ‘He swore to me he wouldn’t tell anyone. This has put me in a very awkward position.’

He plonked himself down in the chair opposite hers, full of bad grace. Frannie watched him take a gulp of his drink.

‘I thought you were dead,’ she whispered through numb lips.

‘That was the general idea.’

‘But why? Why couldn’t you let us know you were alive?’

‘I couldn’t very well be found after all this time, could I? People might have started asking some very awkward questions.’

‘But I don’t understand – why did you disappear? Were you injured?’

‘Not exactly. Not in my body, anyway. But up here . . .’ He tapped his temple. ‘Not that that meant anything to them,’ he muttered bitterly. ‘I was out of my mind with fear, but as long as I could point a rifle, that’s all those bastards cared about.’

‘So what happened?’ Then, suddenly, it dawned on her. ‘You ran away,’ she said.

He glared at her over the rim of his glass. ‘Do stop giving me that disapproving schoolteacher look, Frannie,’ he snapped. ‘I hated it when we were kids and I still hate it now. Let’s just say I did what I had to do to survive.’

‘You deserted,’ she repeated faintly.

‘So what if I did? You don’t know what it was like out there. Living in filthy trenches, up to our knees in mud, running alive with fleas and rats. Not being able to sleep at night for fear and cold.’ He drained his drink and poured himself another, his hand shaking. ‘They all died, you know. Tom, Stephen, the Sowerby boys. One by one, they were all killed. I even saw it happen to little Frank Sowerby. He got caught up on barbed wire. The Germans shot him to pieces as he hung there.’

‘Don’t.’ Frannie winced. She remembered Frank Sowerby sitting in the back pew of the church, shooting peas at the back of the curate’s head.

‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but that’s what it was like. I knew it was only going to be a matter of time before I ended up the same way, so I escaped. Who wouldn’t, given the chance?’ said Matthew defiantly.

Frannie thought of all the young men she’d nursed at the field hospital, men who hadn’t run away. ‘You would have been shot if you were caught.’

‘Yes, but I wasn’t, was I?’ He smiled, looking pleased with himself. ‘I got friendly with some sappers in our platoon, who told me there was a network of disused trenches and tunnels leading right back beyond our supply lines. They reckoned if someone knew the right route, they could get all the way to Calais without being spotted. Or at least, far enough that they could make a decent attempt at escape. I’m surprised no one else did it,’ he shrugged.

Frannie picked up her whisky to take a sip, then examined the grimy glass and put it down again.

‘And so you ran away,’ she murmured. In a way, she couldn’t blame him. As a dedicated pacifist, she didn’t believe in sending innocent young men to fight. And Matthew painted such a bleak picture, she could imagine anyone being driven to desperation.

Anyone but Matthew. She tried to picture the supremely confident young man she’d known, the one who’d proudly boasted he was going to come home a hero, abandoning his friends and crawling on his belly through the mud to escape.

He must have read her thoughts. ‘I don’t really give a damn whether you approve or not,’ he said, slamming down his glass. ‘I’m telling you, I did what I had to do. I should never have been there in the first place. I realised that as soon as I got there. I was too bright for them, too clever,’ he said, his dark eyes glittering with defiance. ‘I wasn’t cannon fodder like our friend John.’ Frannie flinched at the cruelty in Matthew’s tone, but he went on talking. ‘John took to it like a duck to water. He was so dogged, so determined to do his bit. They made him a corporal straight away, did he tell you that? And didn’t he feel proud, strutting around with those pips on his shoulder, lording it over the rest of us?’ Matthew’s mouth thinned in contempt. ‘I suppose he was so used to buckling down and following orders in the orphanage, it was second nature to him to kowtow,’ he sneered.

Frannie saw the jealousy in his face. She could only imagine what it must have been like for someone like Matthew, always the leader, suddenly to find himself taking orders from a workhouse boy.

‘But you were better than that?’

Matthew was so full of himself he didn’t notice her sarcasm. ‘Of course. Why should I take orders from someone who was barely fit to clean my boots in civilian life?’ He lifted his stubbled chin. ‘I should have been an officer,’ he said, a whining note in his voice. ‘Then perhaps I wouldn’t have had to do what I did.’

‘Did John know what you were planning?’

Matthew gave a snort of laughter. ‘Of course he did. I offered him the chance to come with me. I thought we could escape together, but he was too busy playing the hero to do that.’ Angry colour rose in his face. ‘He didn’t want me to go either. He even threatened to shoot me if I went. But I told him he might as well. I was going to be dead either way, so it didn’t matter to me who fired the bullet. In the end he let me go.’ His mouth curled, as if he despised John for it.

Frannie stared at him. ‘You could have told us you were alive,’ she said.

‘How could I? I would have had to give myself up.’

‘But your mother – it would have meant so much to her to know you were safe.’ Poor Alice Sinclair had never recovered after that telegram. She had always been a strong woman, a capable farmer’s wife. But after Matthew’s loss she seemed simply to fade away. ‘You know she died of a broken heart, don’t you?’

Matthew looked away, and for the first time she saw a shadow of guilt cross his face. ‘You can’t blame me for that,’ he muttered.

‘And what about me? I waited for you.’

‘I didn’t ask you to. I thought you’d take the hint when I stopped writing to you.’

She stared at him, shocked. ‘But we were engaged!’

‘Oh, that. I gave you a cheap ring the day before I left for France. Lots of the lads were doing it. I thought it would be fun. To be honest, I thought you might give me something to remember you by in return. Show me what I’d be missing, and all that?’ He sent her a meaningful look. ‘But of course, being the disapproving schoolmaster’s daughter you were, you wouldn’t hear of it.’

Frannie cast her mind back to their last night together, when Matthew had given her the ring. She’d chosen to preserve it as a perfect, magical moment, and to push away the memory of the unseemly tussle that had followed, but now it all came back to her, the way he’d clawed at her blouse and tried to put his hand up her skirt. If he hadn’t have been so rough and insistent she might have given in to him.

‘We were young,’ he said. ‘I truly thought you’d forget about me and find someone else as soon as you found out I wasn’t coming home.’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I loved you.’

‘You don’t mean to tell me you’ve been pining for me all these years?’ He sent her a look full of amazement and pity. ‘Oh, Frannie! Oh dear, you poor girl.’

She hadn’t meant to do it, but all the pent-up tension got the better of her. And when she saw the smirking expression on his face, before she knew what she was doing, she’d hurled the contents of her glass across the table and into his face.

‘You’re right, I was foolish to wait for you,’ she hissed. ‘But then, I wasn’t waiting for
you
, was I? I was waiting for a hero, not a whining little coward who blames everyone else but himself for his misfortune.’

Matthew sat back, wiping himself dry. ‘I think you’d better go, don’t you?’ he said coldly.

‘Oh, believe me. I don’t want to stay here a minute longer.’ She got to her feet. ‘You know, I used to dream about a moment like this,’ she said. ‘I used to think about what it would be like to find you again. But it was never like this.’ She sent him a look of contempt. ‘Now I wish you’d stayed a memory rather than find out what kind of a man you’ve become.’