As Time Goes By (30 page)

‘Bad show about your brother, Grey. Chin up, though. That’s the spirit, eh?’ the major told Sam as she held open the car door for him.

It had been raining all night and now this morning the ground around where Johnny’s section were digging out a newly discovered unexploded bomb was filled with deep puddles and sticky with mud. A stiff wind was blowing the rain into her face like needles but it wasn’t their cold sting that
made Sam flinch so much as the tearing ache caused by the sound of Johnny’s voice.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she answered the major, the etiquette of war taking priority over her personal feelings as she responded to his brusque words of intended comfort.

She didn’t want to look at Johnny but she just couldn’t help herself. She longed desperately for the comfort of his support and his closeness but he had his back to her. Deliberately, so she suspected. He was certainly making it clear that it was over between them. Perhaps he was even pleased. At least now he wouldn’t have to pretend that he loved her when he didn’t. And as for his reasons for taking up with her, so explicitly described by Lynsey, well, a good-looking man like Johnny wouldn’t find it difficult to get himself a girl willing to share his bed.

It was just as well it was raining so hard, Sam decided. No one would notice that she was crying.

The telephone rang just as Sally was sitting down to eat her tea, but she got up automatically and hurried into the hallway to answer it.

‘It’s the hospital here, Mrs Walker,’ she heard a crisp female voice telling her. ‘The doctor has asked us to telephone you and let you know that he’s been called out with the emergency team.’

‘Oh, yes. Thank you for letting me know.’

‘I can’t tell you when he’ll be back. Terrible accident, there’s been,’ the woman on the other end of the line told her. ‘A double-decker bus
coming from Lime Street full of passengers got hit by one of them American lorries and overturned.’

Sally sucked in a shocked breath.

‘Bodies all over the place, so I’ve heard. Worse than if there’d bin a bomb gone off, so one of the ambulance drivers has said. Shouldn’t wonder if the emergency team will be there all night.’

Sally shuddered as she replaced the receiver. Those poor people. What a dreadful thing to happen.

Her cup of tea had gone cold but she didn’t feel in the mood to make herself another.

‘Where’s my doctor?’ Tommy demanded crossly, playing with his food instead of eating it.

‘He’s gone to see someone who’s very sick,’ Sally told him. ‘Hurry up and eat your tea and then I’ll read you a story.’

‘Don’t want you to read it. Want my doctor.’ Tommy banged his spoon down onto his plate, sending mashed potato flying onto the table, and the floor, which Sally had washed that afternoon.

‘Tommy, that’s very naughty, wasting good food like that,’ Sally scolded him but her heart wasn’t really in it. ‘I know,’ she told him. ‘Why don’t you finish your tea and then we’ll sit down and write a letter to Father Christmas?’

He was too young yet to really understand about Christmas, which was just as well since the only toys to be had were second-hand and cost far more than she could afford, but his face had brightened up and he was giving her his normal sunny smile.
She
didn’t feel like smiling, though, and not just
because of the bad news about the bus. There was no point in her feeling sorry for herself because of her feelings for the doctor; she would just have to remember that saying of her mother’s: ‘What can’t be cured must be endured.’ After all, she wasn’t some silly young girl who still thought that her life wouldn’t be worth living if she couldn’t have the boy she wanted, was she?

The sound of a key turning in the front door brought Sally out of the kitchen chair where she had been dozing in front of the fire.

It was gone midnight, and the last time she had opened the front door it had been raining cats and dogs, and a wind coming in off the sea that threatened to strip your skin from your bones.

She had switched off the light in the kitchen but the hall light was on, and that and the glow from the fire was enough to show her the weariness etched into the doctor’s face.

He obviously hadn’t seen her in the dimness of the kitchen and so she was at liberty to watch him, greedily absorbing every tiny detail to store away in her heart. He looked so tired and pulled down, his shoulders slumped, rainwater puddling from his coat onto the linoleum floor. She saw him turn towards the stairs, a look of such desolation on his face that her heart turned over with a mixture of pain for what she saw and guilt because she was seeing it without him knowing that she could.

Stepping back into the shadows, she scraped the
chair’s feet noisily on the floor and then called out as though she had only just realised he was there, ‘Is that you, Doctor?’

‘Sally!’

The blaze of delight she could see in his eyes as she switched on the kitchen light tore at her heart but she affected not to notice it, busying herself by going into the hall and tutting over the mess on her clean lino.

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise …’

‘It looks like you’ve brought half the Mersey in with you. You’d better give me that coat, and your shoes, although goodness knows how I’m going to get these shoes dry. I’ll have to try to find some paper to stuff in them and then put them in front of the fire overnight.’

‘You shouldn’t have waited up for me.’

‘I dare say I wouldn’t have done if I’d known how late it would be but seeing as I’d made you a dinner anyway I thought I might as well keep it hot for you.’

‘They telephoned you from the hospital, didn’t they, to let you know? I would have telephoned you myself but there was such a rush.’

‘Yes, they did.’ She let the crossness drop from her voice as she said quietly, ‘It sounded a really bad business, from what I was told.’

‘Yes. Yes, it was. The bus was full … men coming home on leave, some of them with their wives and children who’d gone to the station to meet them and welcome them back.’ He lifted his hand and rubbed it over his eyes. ‘We did what
we could, but … the bus had slid along the road on its side, you see, from the impact of the crash.’

‘It had been hit by an American Army lorry, so the hospital said,’ Sally encouraged him, sensing that he needed to talk.

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right. The lorry was loaded with some heavy-duty equipment. No one knows yet just what happened. The driver, poor boy, was in a terrible state. He was only young – seventeen, he said, although he looked younger. Some of them lie about their age when they join us. His voice had barely broken. He’d gone through the windscreen.

‘Still, at least the lorry driver is alive,’ he continued, ‘unlike some of the bus passengers. There was one family … the prettiest little girl. She looked just as though she’d gone to sleep. There wasn’t a mark on her face, but her poor little body …’

His voice broke and automatically Sally went to him, only just managing to stop herself from doing what she had promised herself she would never do, and touching him. She was almost tempted to put her hands behind her back to make sure that she couldn’t do so.

‘I’ll get your dinner out for you then, shall I, Doctor?’ she asked, taking refuge in formality.

‘Yes … thank you.’

He had turned to follow her towards the kitchen table so Sally stopped and turned round.

‘I’ve laid the table for you in the dining room.’

She had lowered her gaze and was keeping it
fixed on the wall to one side of him but she knew anyway exactly the look that would be in his eyes, and how her sharpness would make them darken with anger.

‘I’ll eat in the kitchen, if you don’t mind. It will be warmer than the dining room.’

This was the first time he had challenged her determination to keep him at a distance.

‘Very well.’

He went to wash his hands in the downstairs cloakroom as she dished up the rabbit stew she had made earlier in the day. Molly’s dad had brought the rabbit round, along with some veg from his allotment. As soon as she had put the plate in front of him Sally went to put the kettle on.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea and then I’ll be up off to bed. The washing-up can wait until morning.’

‘Sally, don’t go. Please stay and have a cup of tea with me. I’m not really in the mood for my own company tonight.’

She’d be a fool to stay, she knew that.

‘Very well, Doctor.’

She could hear him exhale as though he had been holding his breath.

‘You’re always rushing around so much – come and sit down for a minute.’

‘I’ve got the tea to make.’

‘Then when you’ve made it. I feel so envious sometimes when I hear you and the boys laughing and talking over your meals, whilst I’m eating alone in the dining room.’

‘Harry isn’t exactly talking yet.’

‘That’s only because Tommy does his talking for him. Harry can understand what’s being said well enough. They’re two bright little chaps, Sally.’

It must be so hard for him always having to live with knowing that his own sons were gone. She knew she would not have wanted to be in his shoes. Losing a husband or a wife was one thing but to lose a young child, no more than a baby really …

She poured them each a cup of tea.

‘Sit down, Sally, please,’ Dr Ross repeated.

She shouldn’t be doing this. It would lead to no good, she warned herself as she did as he had asked.

‘I thought after losing my boys the sight of death could never touch me like that again, but tonight, seeing those children … as if they didn’t have enough to bear with the war, without having their lives taken in a bus accident.’ He put down his knife and fork. ‘I’m sorry, Sally, but I’m just not hungry.’

The cuff of his shirt had turned bright red with blood.
His
blood, Sally realised.

‘You’re bleeding,’ she told him.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Let me see.’ She was up and out of her chair and at his side before she had time to think about what she was doing.

‘I cut my arm on a piece of glass, that’s all.’

Ignoring him, Sally unfastened his cuff and rolled back his sleeve, just as she might have done for
Tommy. Or Ronnie? She pushed that thought away. The cut was on the inside of his arm below his elbow, sharp and, she suspected, quite deep, the flesh gaping to ooze blood.

‘It needs cleaning up and a bandage putting on it. Stay there. I’ll go and get a bowl of water.’

She went over to the kettle, pouring what was left in it into a bowl and adding a bit of salt. Salt cleaned wounds; Doris had taught her that. And then she took a clean cloth from the cupboard and carried the bowl and the cloth over to the table, putting the bowl down and then dipping the cloth into it, working firmly and determinedly to clean the skin round the cut in exactly the same brisk fashion she would have done if he had been one of her sons. One of her sons – not her husband! A boy, not a man!

The only sound in the room was the occasional hiss of rain coming down the chimney onto the fire, and their own breathing, his slow and regular and her own equally steady. Each measured breath she took was an effort but if she gave in to what she was feeling her breathing would give her away.

‘There,’ she told him when she was satisfied that the cut was clean.

She was still holding the bowl and when he stood up and took it from her, she let him, not realising until it was too late what he intended to do.

‘Thank you.’ He bent his head and brushed his lips against hers.

‘No!’

‘Sally!’

She was in his arms and he was kissing her as she had dreamed and longed for him to do, a man’s kiss filled with passion and need, his man’s arms holding her tight, his man’s body pressed hard against her own. It had been so long since she had known this, and that was why she wanted him so desperately – because he was a man and not because he was him – but even as she told herself her lies her heart refused to accept them, and tears spilled from her eyes because of her own guilt and despair.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t cry. Sally, I’m sorry … I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I promised myself that I wouldn’t do anything that would make you run away from me …’

It was wrong that she should allow him to bear all the guilt and blame. She pulled away from him but before she could speak he told her, ‘Having you living here with me is part heaven and part hell. I feel like a man dying in the desert from the lack of water I can see but I can’t touch or taste. Sometimes the torment of that … I love you, Sally. I’ve tried not to, God knows. Every morning I wake up telling myself that I mustn’t love you, but then I see you and I know that I can’t help myself. I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you. You were walking past the house …’

‘… and you were horrible to the boys.’

‘Was I? I didn’t mean to be. It was just that what you made me feel was such a shock. I swore
after the way my wife lied to me and deceived me that I was better off being alone.’

His words jerked Sally out of her own pain and guilt. ‘What do you mean, she lied to you and deceived you?’ This wasn’t how she had expected to hear him speak about the woman she had believed he considered so superior to herself, and had loved so very much.

He said quietly, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. We’re always told that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. And after all, she wasn’t responsible for the fact that I was fool enough to believe her lies, or that I let my physical desire blind me to reality. But since I did say it, well, the truth about our marriage is an ugly one that does neither of us any favours. I rushed into it, driven by a mixture of lust and guilt because of that lust, and her fulfilment of it, never stopping to think or question why she might want to marry me. She never failed to let me know that in marrying me she had married beneath herself.’

‘But your marriage brought you your sons,’ Sally reminded him.

‘My marriage brought me an expensive house that was too big for us, filled with a domestic staff that looked down on me almost as much as the wife who despised me. Like our marriage, the house was a barren cold place, controlled by my wife’s never-ending reminders of how short I fell below her standards. I wanted a wife and a home that were warm and loving, the kind of home I had known with my adoptive parents. They were
good friends to me, counselling me to think carefully about marrying her but, arrogant young fool that I was, I believed my wife when she told me she thought their concern sprang from a resentment that my marriage would take me away from them and into a new social strata. She was the daughter of an eminent titled physician, you see, a spoiled pampered adored daughter born after several sons. Sir Charles worshipped her and thought nothing too good for her. I own that I was surprised when she assured me that he would look favourably on me as a prospective son-inlaw, but then of course I didn’t know the truth.’