For King and Country (20 page)

You kept me up all night, an’ all, and put the fear of God in me for the other kids, Sally thought, and didn’t return the smile.

He must have read her mind. ‘I incurred Matron’s displeasure too.’

‘Not surprising, since Matron had to help with the nursing.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I think the old trout rather enjoyed getting stuck in. She likes the occasional drama.’

Disrespectful young so-and-so! Sally gave him a disapproving look, but said nothing.

He persisted. ‘Of course, she told the chief, and it’s put me in bad odour with him as well. But I could hardly see my own cousin in extremis, and refuse to treat him, could
I?’

‘No, you couldn’t. But it would have been a bad job if he’d passed it on to any of the others.’

‘He didn’t. Between us, we made sure of it. You wouldn’t have refused to help him, would you?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘I believe he’s got rather a soft spot for you.’

‘I’m fond of him, as well.’

‘Not the only member of that family you were fond of, I believe, or who was fond of you,’ he probed.

Oh, and judging by that expression on your face, you’ll soon be talking about primitive impulses, she thought. Well, she’d nip that in the bud, and quick about it. ‘I’m
sorry, Doctor, but this is where we part company,’ she said, stopping at the chapel door with a little shrug and a close-lipped smile. We’re not all like Dunkley, she thought, or that
silly lass who got her marching orders. We’re not all intent on turning ourselves into concubines for doctors. ‘I’m just popping in here to say a little prayer for Kit.’

‘Oh well, say one for me while you’re about it.’

‘I will. I’ll pray you mend your ways.’

He gave an incredulous laugh. ‘The impudence!’

But she was already gone, leaving the chapel door to swing shut behind her and his
Evening Chronicle.

M
axfield was sitting alone in the pew nearest the door, and turned to face her. ‘What’s in that?’ he demanded, as soon as the
door had closed. ‘Another candidate for martyrdom?’

‘What?’

He tilted his head towards the
Evening Chronicle
‘What’s in the paper?’ he repeated. ‘Some Lady Bountiful looking for a poor soldier to exercise her charity on?
As long as he’s an officer, of course.’

Sally pulled herself up to her full, dignified five foot three inches. ‘I don’t know what’s in the paper, Lieutenant Maxfield, except the hospital bulletins,’ she
said.

‘Good. Because I don’t want anything to do with any bloody society woman who wants a pitiful cripple to parade round so that she can show her friends how patriotic she is, doing her
bit for the country. I’m a
man
, and I want a woman who wants a man, not some bloody self-appointed saint who wants a good work.’

Pitiful, he said! Why, what could be more pitiful than this exhibition? What could ring more hollow than shouting about his manhood, when he’d – how had Major Knox put it? Left his
comrades in the lurch. She could hardly keep the contempt out of her voice. ‘I doubt you’ll ever get one, then.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean I doubt any woman would go to all that trouble.’

‘I doubt it, an’ all, for somebody with a face like this.’ His hand went up to the dressing on his face and she regretted her words when, despite the broad shoulders and the
thick moustache, his lip trembled. She remembered with a shock that he was six months younger than her, and barely twenty.

Now subdued, she said: ‘I didn’t mean that, and neither did the lady who wrote the letter. I mean somebody as rude.’

He grimaced. ‘My mother would, though, she’d go to some trouble. Have you posted my letter?’

‘No, I hadn’t a stamp, and I haven’t had time to go and get one,’ she said.

‘No? Well then, there’s no danger of you putting yourself out for any smashed-up soldier, is there?’

She suddenly felt it beneath her dignity to explain to this peevish child why she hadn’t had time to get a stamp. He wouldn’t have wanted to listen, anyway. ‘Not much. I think
I’ll go now, Will.’

‘You’re a hard-hearted little . . .’

She wouldn’t listen to any more of it, but as soon as she turned to go, Will’s voice changed.

‘I’ve got some stamps, Sally,’ he urged her. ‘Meet me outside, where the pillar box is, in ten minutes, and we’ll post it.’

‘I can’t. We have to be in bed, and it’s lights out at half-past ten.’

‘They treat you like kids, and you let them. I wouldn’t put up with it. It’s as bad as the bloody army. You can’t make the simplest decision, because they don’t
believe in that. Don’t show any sign you’ve got any brains; the officers don’t like to see them. Just say, “Yes, sir, no sir, three bags full sir! Permission to scratch my
arse, sir?” All right, just bring the bloody letter here then, and I’ll post it myself.’

She was about to refuse when the chapel door opened, and Dr Campbell walked in. ‘I say, I got halfway down the corridor before I realized I hadn’t got my paper. I didn’t mean
you to keep . . .’

Sally held the paper out for him and he took it, his eyes resting for a second on her flushed cheeks, and then on Maxfield, who turned away.

‘Am I interrupting something?’

‘No, Doctor,’ Sally said. ‘I only came in for a minute, and now I’m going.’

She hadn’t even put pen to paper yet but she’d do it this minute, and have done with it all before she closed her eyes that night. She found some notepaper and
picked up her pen.

Nothing more needed saying, did it? She read it over, and decided not, and then she remembered what Elinor had said when she’d come with a pail and a pair of tongs to collect that
disease-contaminated uniform. ‘Sally, man, I don’t know what for you want to be taking chances with things like diphtheria,’ she’d said. ‘There’s a couple of
jobs going in the laundry. Why don’t you come and work with us? You’ll get a right laugh with some of the lasses.’

But laundry work would be a poor swap for nursing, Sally had told her. No matter how exhausting or even dangerous it might be, nursing was the only job for her and she wanted no other. Elinor
had gone away holding the pail at arm’s length, shaking her head.

Mrs Burdett, though, she might well want any job in the Infirmary once she knew her son was alive and a patient there. Sally picked her pen up again and scrawled ‘P.S., Can you let it drop
that there’s a couple of jobs going at the laundry here, so that Mrs Burdett gets to know? It might give her the chance to see him, if she can get a one.’

Yes, if Mrs Burdett got a job in the laundry, it would be dark by the time she finished work. Then Will could meet his mother on the Leazes, and nobody would be any the wiser.

She addressed the envelope to Ginny, and then folded her letter and tucked it inside. The one Will had written to his mother wouldn’t go in, so she folded his envelope tight round its
contents along the top, and down the side, to make it fit inside hers. Her envelope was stuffed so full she could only just manage to seal the contents inside, and when she looked at it she thought
she’d never seen such a suspicious-looking package in all her life. It seemed to want to call attention to itself. A host of hideous possibilities sprang into Sally’s mind. What if she
fell downstairs on her way to the post, and the envelope burst open? Somebody might read it, and then she’d end up in the hands of the police. What if she lost it, or the postmistress saw
something sinister about it, and reported it?

Silly, silly lass. She knew how silly she was being, but she couldn’t dispel the fear. She’d get rid of that letter as soon as she could, and then try to stop thinking about it.

There was a fog coming down, and she could barely make out the figure standing in the shadows by the pillar box.

‘You came. I didn’t expect it, but I’m glad,’ he said as she approached. They stood together in the darkness, their voices muffled by the mist, their faces turned away
from the few passers-by.

‘An’ I hope you’re in a better temper, an’ all. Have you brought your stamp?’ Sally whispered. ‘I couldn’t get a one.’

‘Aye.’ He took the letter from her, stuck the stamp firmly in the corner and dropped the letter in the box. ‘Look,’ he said, turning towards her, ‘I’m sorry
for some of the things I’ve said, but I’m stuck here like a rat in a trap because of these bloody wounds not healing right and I’m wound up to top doh all the time. If I could be
off, get lost in some fairground or something I’d be all right, but there’s no chance of that now, with a face like this. And I wouldn’t dare anyway, for fear of my arm going
wrong. Who’d dare risk losing his arm? So I’m stuck, helpless, and it’s driving me up the wall. I’m like a cat on hot bricks all the time, thinking somebody’ll come
looking for a dead officer before long and find a fraud, or somebody sharper than you might recognize me, or you might let something slip. Then I’ll be for a bloody firing squad.’

‘Somebody sharper than me. Well, thanks very much, I don’t think,’ Sally said as they turned, and began to walk back in the direction of the nurses’ home.

‘Well, you weren’t very sharp about tumbling to me, were you, thank God? Or about seeing anything wrong with Raynor.’

‘He had the chance to tell the doctors what was wrong, and he said he was all right.’

‘Of course he said he was all right. People say they’re all right if they’re dying, because they know that’s what you expect them to say, and you don’t want them to
say anything else. And half the time you haven’t got time for them to say anything else, so it would be bloody pointless anyway. So they say what you want them to say; they say:
“I’m all right,” but inside they’re screaming, “Look at me! Can’t you see I’m in agony? Can’t you see I’m dying? Can’t you see it’s
torture, wondering whether this thing’s healing, wondering what the hell I’m going to do if I have to have it amputated, wondering how any lass is ever going to want to look at me
again, with a face like mine! Make me right again, for pity’s sake!
Cure
me!”’

‘Well, then,’ said Sally, ‘we can’t be expected to read minds, can we?’

‘You can’t be expected to have any imagination either, by the look of it. And now you’re in a huff.’

‘Hm,’ said Sally, and after a pause added, ‘we’ve got too much to do to have any time to spare for mind-reading, and we’re not supposed to fraternize with the
soldiers, either. Anyway, to get back to getting caught – I thought you said there was no chance, because they take you for an Australian?’

‘There’s less chance, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have nightmares about it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t give me away, would you, Sally?’

‘I haven’t so far, have I?’

‘How do I know? The way you look at me sometimes, I wonder if you might.’

‘Well, I haven’t, and anyway, you might just as easily give yourself away, shouting things like “muddy” in the middle of the night.’

‘Muddy? Why would I say that?’

‘How do I know? But the night nurse said you did, but then she let it pass because she had better things to do than bother about it, just like I once heard you say ‘Oh God,’and
I let it pass.’

‘I won’t dare to go to sleep now.’

‘People don’t seem to take all that much notice. Like you said, they haven’t got the time, and Dr Campbell thinks it hardly matters that you don’t talk, because
you’ve got enough to keep you in the hospital anyway.’ Impulsively, she reached out to squeeze his hand. ‘Whatever happens, Will, it won’t be me that gives you away. And
I’ll have to stop calling you Will,’ she added, letting go.

He sighed, and shook his head. ‘Aye. You remember when Jones died and you were crying? I thought, Sally man, you might just as well cry for me, an’ all. To all intents and purposes,
Will Burdett’s as dead as David Jones.’

Remembering David Jones’ lifeless corpse, Sally said: ‘I don’t see how you make that out, though.’

‘Don’t you? Why, what is a man’s life, when you come to reckon up? Whatever it is, mine’s gone. I’ll never be able to be Will Burdett again. I’ll never dare
go back to live in Annsdale, or anywhere near. I envied you every time you were going back home on your days off, because there’s nothing I’d like better, but I’ll never be able
to. Name gone, home gone, brothers gone, friends gone. Even my face gone. It’s terrible. It’s terrible to want your life back, and know you never can have it. I sometimes think that of
the two of us, that Welsh lad was the lucky one.’

‘That’s a wicked thing to say.’

He stared at her, his face like stone. ‘The man who fired the shell that destroyed my face took my life from me as surely as if he’d killed me. He made me dread anybody looking at
me, dread having to go out, dread looking in the mirror. I doubt if any woman will ever want to look at me again, either. You won’t. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you didn’t
recognize me. And then the dressing came off and I saw what was in store for me on your face, before you ran away to be sick.’

‘Only because yours was the first wound I’d ever had to help dress,’ she protested. ‘A lot of nurses are like that at the start, but they soon get over it; they have to.
Armstrong says she fainted so often the sister on her ward had to teach her to sit down and put her head between her knees whenever she felt like that, and she did for a while, but she got over it,
and she can tackle anything now. Anyhow, I wouldn’t have thought you’d care one way or the other what I think about your face. I wrote to you three times after you came to Darlington,
and you never answered.’

‘I got the first one, and after that I went to the training camp.’

‘You never answered it, and I sent you two more.’

‘I know that.’

She watched him in silence for a moment, near enough to see the movement of his jaw as he gently ground his teeth. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘after the third letter I thought
I’d demeaned myself enough, writing to somebody who never wrote back, but I suppose it’s because of that white feather. You thought it was from me, and you still think it.’