Blue Smoke (12 page)

Tamar caught Bonnie’s eye, and crooked a gloved finger at her.

Both girls came over, and sat down on either side of their grandmother.

‘What a very nice wedding,’ she said to them as diplomatically as she could. ‘Simple, but very pleasant.’

Bonnie and Leila looked at each other and grimaced. They had not met Evie until today, and had been a little surprised, to say the least, by the woman their beloved cousin had chosen.

‘Her wedding outfit is, well, it’s quite unusual,’ Bonnie said.

They all glanced over at Evie, who was holding Liam’s hand, chatting to her sister and laughing uproariously. Her pale pink suit was fitted at the waist with sleeves that puffed slightly at the shoulder, and her hat matched her white lace gloves. The ensemble itself was fairly harmless, apart from the fact that it was rather tight across her bottom, but Evie had brightened it up by adding an enormous red silk flower to the band of her hat, and was wearing high heels in the same startling shade. The whole effect was rather tropical, and not, in Tamar’s view, entirely suitable for a late winter wedding in Palmerston North. But that was certainly not something she was going to say out loud.

Instead, she said, ‘A lot of brides haven’t been wearing the full white costume lately.’

‘But still,’ Leila said, ‘red silk flowers?’

‘That is unnecessary and unkind, Leila,’ Tamar responded somewhat hypocritically. ‘Do remember that not everyone is as privileged as you two.’

Bonnie asked, ‘Does, er, does Liam love her?’

‘He certainly thinks he does,’ Tamar replied in a tone that suggested to both girls that they should not pursue the subject. Not with their grandmother, any way.

Later, after they had all enjoyed a hearty wedding breakfast of cold chicken and ham, peas and potatoes, fruit salad and trifle and a small, iced, single-tier wedding cake, Bonnie and Leila asked Liam himself.

He went pink, because it was a very personal question and these were his
girl
cousins, after all, but replied gamely, ‘Of course I do. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

The girls had their doubts, which they shared with a kind of fascinated dismay in their hotel room later that night. Evie seemed to be a very confident,
worldly
girl, and not at all the sort of wife they would have expected for their quiet, slightly naive cousin. He was twenty-four, granted, and not completely inexperienced when it came to the opposite sex — they knew because they’d heard Duncan teasing him about it some time ago — but still …

‘I hope he knows what he’s doing, that’s all I can say,’ said Bonnie as she hopped into one of the two single beds in their room.

‘Well, if he doesn’t, it’s too late now, isn’t it?’

England, September 1940

D
uncan was in so much pain he could easily have chewed off his lower lip. That was, he thought, if he still had one — he wasn’t sure. His skin itched appallingly under the bandages swathing his head and hands, and he very much needed a pee.

He turned his head slowly and said to his neighbour, ‘Pete? Get us a nurse, will you? I’m dying for a slash.’

The man lounging on the bed next to him, dressed in an odd assortment of casual clothing, obliged by ringing his bell repeatedly, holding the handle between his teeth and shaking his head vigorously. A minute later the sound of a nurse’s shoes came squeaking down the linoleum floor of the ward.

Peter Nash was a flight sergeant with Bomber Command who’d passed out at altitude through lack of oxygen without his gloves on, and had been severely frostbitten. Last week, as a final resort, his fingers had been amputated, although he still had his thumbs — which meant he would still, eventually, be able to grip things.

‘Pete, what can I do for you?’ said the nurse cheerfully, as if she were a shop girl behind a counter.

Her name was Claire Pearsall and she loved working at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, although she had to
admit that caring for her charges in Ward Three was sometimes emotionally very demanding. The ‘Boss’, though, Doctor Archibald McIndoe, was a truly gifted plastic surgeon and an outstanding and refreshingly informal man. His ability to give back to his patients their faces, their hands and limbs, and therefore their self-esteem, was extraordinary, and they and his staff alike revered him.

‘Duncan wants a wee,’ Pete said.

‘Then what’s wrong with ringing your own bell, Duncan?’ she chided gently.

She had a voice that was low and pleasant, but her laugh was boisterously loud, and she laughed often. Like her colleagues, she had been personally chosen by Doctor McIndoe for her looks and her cheerful nature, as well as her nursing skills. He had a policy of employing only nurses he considered capable of communicating with his patients, regardless of their deformities and scars, and of relating to them as the young, virile men they still were, in spite of their injuries. As for the girls being attractive, McIndoe believed it was good for his men to have pretty faces to look at, and that it helped them with their confidence.

Claire Pearsall was aware that most of her patients were at least half in love with her, and she and her colleagues, also objects of affection if not lust, used that knowledge shamelessly to get the men to do the things they disliked, such as exercising their shattered bodies, and to jolly them out of succumbing to bouts of black depression, an all too common occurrence.

But Duncan knew only Nurse Pearsall’s voice, and what a delightfully rich, seductive voice it was. His eyes had been bandaged since he’d arrived at East Grinstead, and the Boss had not yet decreed that it was time to remove the gauze, preferring to give the ruined skin and muscle the best chance of recovery. And although no one had said anything, Duncan also suspected that Doctor McIndoe was giving him an opportunity to come to terms with
the possibility that he might be permanently blind.

So over the month he had been in hospital, he’d become very familiar with his ward mates and the ward itself, although he had never seen either. He could put a name to every voice now, and knew in which part of the big room each man’s bed was located. He was not very clear, however, about the injuries of his fellow patients, because most of them did not speak in detail about what had happened to them. There were frequent references to being ‘fried’, and comments such as, ‘Stop your moaning, you’ve only been singed’ and ‘Buck up, you were bloody ugly before any way’, but no one ever seemed to refer to their injuries directly. Perhaps such a cavalier attitude helped them come to terms with the awful damage their bodies had suffered. But they all seemed to be very decent chaps, mostly from the RAF and injured during the Battle of Britain which, thank God, seemed to be easing off now.

He also knew intimately the daily routine that had become central to his existence. The ward was a very noisy place — except when someone was very badly off, and then everyone would tiptoe around until the man came right — and at times seemed nothing less than chaotic. Patients and nurses referred to each other by their Christian names — except for the Boss, who was always addressed to his face as ‘sir’. The radio played all day and there was a piano the chaps thumped away on regularly, people talked loudly and laughed uproariously and seemed to come and go whenever they felt like it, and ever since Duncan had arrived someone had been teaching themselves to type, clacking away for hours at a time. There was a keg of beer permanently on tap for the patients, and he knew that groups of the chaps — the mobile and the semi-mobile — would frequently go out to the Whitehall, a pub in town, sometimes just to let their hair down, and sometimes to meet up with nurses or the local girls. Already, two patients had become engaged to their nurses, even though one of McIndoe’s
rules — not always adhered to — was that the men were not to touch them.

There were all sorts of stories, related repeatedly and at length, about the time that a certain patient toured East Grinstead after a night at the Whitehall and diligently uprooted every single road sign, about wheelchair races down the main street, and about very under-the-weather patients being delivered back to the hospital by civic-minded civilians, then put to bed with tea and toast by tolerant nurses. Duncan heard a fair bit of the latter himself. The chaps steered clear of the booze only the night before they were due to go under the knife; that was an unwritten rule that was never ignored. They were extremely proud of the fact that a local clergyman had been heard to refer to them as the most ungodly people he had ever come across.

It was unorthodox, but it worked. The Boss condoned the rather undisciplined behaviour, and at times even joined the chaps in the pub or at the piano. It was rumoured he had asked the people of East Grinstead to support his patients, and it was clear that the town was more than happy to comply. In fact, members of the community often turned up at the hospital to visit the patients or take them out for the day, or home for a meal.

The place seemed to run very smoothly and efficiently and the medical side of things was very professional. In fact, Duncan doubted he could have tolerated lying on his back for all these weeks in a silent room filled with other patients weighed down by their own doom and misery.

After the ambulance crew had picked him up only yards away from the wreckage of his Spitfire, a couple of miles from Biggin Hill, and while the skin and tissue on his hands and face was already blowing up as if he were a human balloon, he’d been taken to the nearest hospital equipped for burns injuries. Then, when he’d stabilised enough to be moved, Doctor McIndoe had come
to collect him and bring him back to East Grinstead, fortunately before he’d been given the tannic acid treatment, which often caused more permanent scarring that the original burns.

The first few weeks in Ward Three had been a blur of agony and uncertainty, of morphine injections and not knowing whether he was awake or asleep, and of the Boss continually assessing the damage to his face, head and hands. It had been too early then to start any grafting procedures, but Duncan knew that within the next few days he was due to go ‘on the slab’ To prepare him for what would be the first in a series of skin grafts.

After the shock of his prang had ebbed, Duncan had been on the verge of sliding into a very frightening depression, but he simply had not been allowed to do it. The other chaps had joked and chatted with him about nothing in particular, just to stop him from withdrawing into himself, and the nurses had been tremendous too. Especially Claire Pearsall, in Duncan’s opinion. She had never been far from his side during those bleak weeks, and even now was only ever seconds away if he needed anything. Such as the urine bottle, which he required desperately.

‘I can’t find my bell,’ he said through the bandages covering his lips. ‘I must have knocked it off the table.’

‘I’ll look for it later,’ Claire replied. ‘I’ll get you a bottle, that’s more urgent.’

She squeaked away, and was back again almost immediately. Duncan felt his sheet being pulled back and hands undoing the cord on his pyjama pants. He spread his thighs a little as he felt the bottle being placed at the base of his groin, then heaved a great sigh of relief as Claire held his penis inside the neck of the bottle and he let go. He couldn’t direct himself because of the boxing glove-sized bandages on his hands. He had almost died of embarrassment the first few times this toileting had happened, but he was quite used to it now, and any way it was far better than
wetting the bed, which he’d also done. It was rather pleasant, really, having your penis handled by lovely, smooth hands attached to a gorgeous-sounding nurse.

‘Better?’ Claire asked. ‘Good. Don’t leave it so long next time, it’s bad for you. And by the way, the Boss says you’re going under the knife the day after tomorrow, but before that we’ll be taking the bandages off. Actually, we’ll be doing that this afternoon.’

There was a brief silence as the last few drops of urine emptied out of Duncan’s bladder, and he digested what she had just said.

‘Off my eyes?’

‘Yes.’

This was momentous. In only a matter of hours he would find out whether or not he could still see. He suddenly realised that he was absolutely terrified. Being scarred he could cope with — even not having the full use of his hands would be manageable — but to never again see the sky, or the sea, or the green and brown hills of Hawke’s Bay was unthinkable.

‘If it’s gone, my sight,’ he asked so quietly it was almost a whisper, ‘will the Boss be able to bring it back?’

Claire’s eyes filled at the hopeless naivety of the question. They both knew it was an absurd thing to ask, but Claire understood very well how desperate Duncan Murdoch must be feeling.

‘No, not if it’s the eyes themselves,’ she replied gently. ‘If it turns out that they haven’t been damaged too badly, and it’s only the tissue around your eye sockets and brows, he should be able to do something. He usually can, you know.’

‘The chaps keep saying how good he is.’

‘He’s a miracle worker, in my opinion. I keep forgetting — you haven’t seen any of his before and afters, have you?’

Duncan shook his head.

‘Well, you will soon, I’m sure.’

Claire thanked God he couldn’t see that she had her fingers
crossed; she had become very fond of Flight Lieutenant Duncan Murdoch from New Zealand.

Just before dinner late that afternoon, the Boss himself helped Duncan into a wheelchair and, to a hearty chorus of ‘Good luck, old boy’ from the other patients, wheeled him out of the ward and along the cream and green hall to a smaller room, known as the clinic, one of the few private places in the hospital. This was for Duncan’s convenience, not McIndoe’s. Once inside he closed the door, pulled the drapes against the deepening dusk outside, and set about laying out a tray of the instruments he would need to remove Duncan’s bandages.

Archibald McIndoe, a dapper man of medium height with horn-rimmed spectacles and a touch of grey at his temples, was a New Zealander, originally from Dunedin but now resident in Britain with a private plastic surgery practice in Harley Street, a very impressive medical reputation and more young men to practise on now than he’d ever imagined in his worst nightmares.

‘So, Duncan,’ he said conversationally as he inspected a pair of small scissors for sharpness. ‘How was the weather in Napier before you left?’

Duncan was slightly startled at the question. ‘Before I left to fly in England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it was four years ago now, sir.’

‘Yes, that’s right. How was the weather?’

‘Ah, it was quite nice I think, sir, if I remember rightly.’

It was a very strange question but it had served its purpose — Duncan was no longer focusing on what might or might not be under his bandages.

‘Been there myself a few times,’ McIndoe went on. ‘Lovely
beach. Well, before the earth quake, of course. Lose anything in it, did you?’

‘In the earth quake?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Well, not personally. I was at school at the time of course, and the assembly hall came off pretty badly. And our beautiful new Chrysler Imperial Roadster was flattened in Emerson Street.’

‘My God.’

‘Yes, it was a tragedy.’

Duncan heard the door open.

‘Claire’s going to be giving us a hand,’ McIndoe said. ‘Don’t mind, do you?’

A light hand rested on Duncan’s shoulder, and he knew she was there to lend moral support, just in case.

‘No, that’s fine,’ he replied. He was nervous again, and feeling rather sick, but trying not to show it.

‘Right then,’ McIndoe said, and Duncan felt the outer layer of bandages begin to come away.

The surgeon’s hands were gentle, but there seemed to be yards and yards of the stuff wrapped around his head.

Eventually, McIndoe stood back again.

‘We’re down to the last few layers and then the gauze. Are you ready?’

Duncan nodded. He wasn’t, but there was no point in delaying what was inevitable.

He felt the last two turns of bandage lifted off, followed by a single clicking noise. Then the gauze, peeled carefully away with what he assumed was the aid of a pair of tweezers. The air felt strange on his skin, which felt wet but tight at the same time, and there was an odd, not altogether pleasant smell coming from somewhere under his nose. He didn’t know whether he had his eyes shut or not.

No one said anything, but he felt Claire’s hand tighten on his shoulder.

He struggled to move the muscles of his face, feeling an appalling stiffness and a dull, ragged pain, then he blinked once, and then again.

He suddenly felt embarrassingly helpless, and swore in frustration, anger and despair.

‘Jesus
bloody
Christ.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but … oh
shit
, there’s nothing.’