The Bannister Girls (46 page)

‘
Chérie
, it cannot last much longer, and we will be together for always. Would it help if you told the nuns that you're married to a Frenchman?'

She shook her head. ‘It wouldn't help at all! We had a married girl at the Abbey a while ago, and she was sent
straight back. They're so strict about it, and it's so stupid. As if a married woman can't tie a bandage as competently as an unmarried one!'

‘That's not the reason, is it –?'

‘No. They think the married ones will go to pieces thinking that every casualty brought in is going to be their husband! I thought they'd seen what I went through to know that it makes no difference when someone's in love. Married or not doesn't change the emotions one feels –'

She stopped, biting her lips and realising the truth in Mother Superior's words. Battle-fatigued. Was that true of her after all? She had been here so long. It was something one didn't recognise in oneself. She knew that only too well.

‘I have some news as well,' Jacques said.

‘They're not sending you to England too, are they?' She spoke with false hope, knowing it was very unlikely.

She knew well enough that squadrons flew every day, on recce raids and bombing raids. Day and night, until the pilots were punch-drunk with flying … and it would go on until the war ended, unless Jacques applied for training instructor duties, and Angel couldn't imagine that. Not until he could barely see to fly any more…

‘You've spoilt the surprise.'

She looked at him in astonishment, and he grinned.

‘No,
chérie
, it's not quite as you think. But the old plane they gave me is falling apart, and I'm to get a replacement one very soon. Now that the new command is officially called the Royal Air Force, things are changing slightly. I'm to take my old crate back to England, collect my new one and fly it back. If we can wangle it for the right time, you could be my passenger.'

Her heart nearly stopped. She had never stepped inside an aircraft before. The thought of it was both exciting and unnerving. She didn't know which was uppermost in her mind at that moment. But the idea had evidently caught Jacques' imagination. He seized both her hands, caressing
the palms with his fingertips.

‘Why not, Angel? You already share half of my life. Fly with me and share the rest of it,' he said urgently.

She sensed that this was somehow important to him. She felt the pressure of his fingers on hers, and knew that she would follow him to the ends of the earth if he asked her to.

‘Yes!' she said, ignoring the hammering of her heart. ‘But how can we possibly arrange it?'

‘Leave it to me,' he said with supreme confidence. ‘Just let me know the date you get your travel pass. You'll have some leave when you get to England, I take it?'

‘Just a few days before I report to the convalescent home in Essex. I'll be driving back and forth between there and the hospital ships at Dover.' She stopped, because he wasn't really listening to her last words.

‘I daresay I can manage a few days as well, before I return to Brighton Belle,' he said, falsely casual. ‘That is, if you're interested in spending them together –?'

Her answer was in the sudden blaze of happiness in her eyes, and the widening of her smile, and it was ridiculous, but it hadn't even occurred to Angel before. Until that moment, she had been too incensed at the blow fate was dealing her to think about anything else.

Clemence didn't waste time with a letter. There was a message for Angel to telephone Meadowcroft immediately. Her heart sank, knowing what to expect. Comte de Ville had sent a telegram of congratulations on the marriage, but Lady Bannister's reaction was predictably quite different.

‘How could you do this to us, Angel?' Mingled hurt and fury seemed to ooze out of Clemence. ‘Your father and I are terribly upset, and I'm very, very angry with you!'

Angel felt her throat begin to tighten. ‘I thought Daddy would understand –'

Clemence seethed at this. ‘Don't think you can wind your father around your little finger this time, Miss, the way you
always do! I know now why you wanted your birth certificate. Such lies and deceit! Is this all the gratitude I get? Heaven knows I've done my best to bring you up properly –'

Angel held the receiver away from her ear as Clemence's voice rose. Her heart beat sickeningly, knowing she deserved all this and more, and helpless to stop her mother's tirade.

‘What on earth will people think? It's scandalous to get married in this hole and corner fashion. I'm not sure if it's even legal, or if it's not possible to get it annulled –'

‘You can't do that, Mother,' Angel couldn't let this go on. Her voice shook. ‘Jacques and I are married. It's perfectly legal, and it would be an even bigger scandal to try to get it annulled, because of – uh – certain things that have happened between us –'

She was overcome with the most awful attack of nerves and embarrasment, feeling the hot colour flood her face. Clemence had always been such a stickler for etiquette and proper behaviour, and everything happening in its correct order, and her outrage threatened to swamp Angel. She had flaunted everything her mother stood for, and knew it, and the guilt didn't make this awkward conversation any easier. The small silence told her that Clemence understood exactly what she was saying.

‘Well, of course, that was to be expected,' she said freezingly, implying that a young woman who showed such disregard for finer feelings, and a hot-headed continental, would naturally give in to animal lust.

Angel tried again, her voice still trembling. She wanted to be strong, but it was the most difficult moment of her life.

‘I didn't want to hurt you, Mother, truly I didn't! But Jacques and I needed to know that we belonged, in case – well, in case anything happened. Surely I don't need to make it any clearer, do I?'

‘What does Jacques' father have to say?' Clemence ignored the plea.

‘He sent a telegram of congratulations. I'm sure he'll be
writing to you and Daddy. He understands –'

‘Well, I'm sure that I don't,' Clemence snapped. ‘But it seems to me that my feelings never counted for very much as far as you girls are concerned. Louise seems settled enough, though I'm displeased that she's selling her London house – something else that I wasn't told until afterwards! And Ellen's as much of a trial as ever, not knowing what she wants to do half the time, and I suspect that as soon as the war is over, she'll be waving banners again for the Women's Movement!'

Her attention was diverted for the moment from the shock of her youngest daughter's indiscretion, and Angel seized the moment to divert it still further.

‘Mother, I've got some news to cheer you up. I'm being posted to England sometime in May, to a convalescent home in Essex. I'll be able to see you more often, and there's every hope that the war won't last much longer.'

‘We heard that the new spot of trouble at the Somme was over,' Clemence said, slightly less fraught. ‘And it's a relief to know you'll be on English soil, even though the damage has been done, and it seems there's nothing we can do to reverse it.'

‘Nothing at all, Mummy!' she said solemnly.

The wild urge to laugh was tempered by her mother's brief reference to more bitter fighting at the Somme during March and April. There had been heavy losses again, the British outnumbered by an estimated three to one. The Germans had advanced twenty-five miles, enough to begin panic waves, and it had taken desperate defensive measures for the British Tommies to stand firm under Field Marshall Haig's command, despite many of their battalions being wiped out. By April 18th the battle was over, with enormous losses on both sides, the hospitals filled to overflowing, and nothing conclusive gained.

Yes, Angel thought wryly, you could refer to it all as a spot of trouble…

‘Your father wants to speak to you.' Angel heard the muffled voices at the other end of the line, and her hand gripped the cord more tightly. She needed Fred's approval. All that had happened before was as nothing to the longing to be still his best girl.

‘We wish you both all the happiness in the world, my darling girl,' Fred said. ‘Your mother's naturally disappointed not to be planning a society wedding, but we'll make up for all that when the war's over. We can still celebrate once we're all together again, and that's the most important thing. Take care of yourself, and come home safely.'

‘Thank-you, Daddy.' She was choked, aware of Clemence's annoyance in the background, but Fred was giving his daughter his full support, and for that, Angel was eternally grateful.

Ellen wrote an elated letter, telling her she was a clever old thing. Margot was slightly affronted at not having been told, but she and Baz wished her best luck. Louise and Dougal sent an elaborate card of congratulations, with a smudged scrawl that was supposedly young Christopher's fingerprint.

Following his telegram, Comte de Ville wrote at more length, welcoming Angel into the de Ville family, adding that there must be nuptial celebrations when they were all free citizens again, and that he hoped all her family would be the Comte's guests at the chateau when the time came. A remark that would surely lift Clemence's spirits…

Angel lay gritty-eyed in her bed, exhausted and yet unable to sleep, after a late evening ward duty, assessing the reactions of all those important in her life. Alone in her room at the Abbey, above the cloisters that now housed row after row of sick beds, it all seemed totally unreal.

The messages from her family and friends; the final acceptance from her mother that she and Jacques were married, and nothing was going to change it; the endless
day-to-day routine of hospital life; the waiting for her transfer to England…

And none of it was as important as the fact that she and Jacques were one. Joined in the sight of God and of man. And but for the piece of paper that made it legal, they might as well have been at opposite ends of the earth. Marriage was for the mutal comfort and benefit of each for the other … or words to that effect … and for each of them, those words were farcical.

Jacques was somewhere among the myriad stars in the night sky, flying with danger, and probably over enemy lines at that very moment. While she, despite being in the midst of a hospital buzzing with noise and activity, a bride of just a few weeks, had never felt more alone and lonely.

Angel finally left St Helene in the middle of May. Leaving the Abbey itself tugged at her heart more than she had expected. She had grown used to the nuns, to the harshness of their unwavering faith, and to their rules and demands.

She knew the Abbey well, felt the strength of history in its cloistered walls. Strangely, she could still sense the ghosts of the legions of wounded men who had been tended there. It was a sad parting in many ways. She would have clung tearfully to several of the nuns if it had been permitted.

Dignity prevented such a thing, and instead she had to be satisfied with solemn good-byes and a head held high as the ambulance lorry took her to the bus stop north of the town. She had asked to be set down there, saying that she intended to visit a friend before making her own way to the hospital ship bound for the south coast of England.

It was the most calm and beautiful day, sweet-scented with flowers of early summer. Perfect for flying, Angel told herself over and over to quell the way her stomach turned at the thought. No one at the Abbey knew that today she was to make the most exciting journey of her life … she had to keep repeating those words to herself too…

Jacques looked anxiously at the sky. His artist's eye briefly acknowledged its beauty. Azure blue and corn gold, the great orb of the sun dazzled the eyes … Common sense of the practised flyer took over. It was just the setting for the
German planes to hover, hidden between the British planes and the sun, waiting to pounce. A pilot would hear nothing but the throb of his own engines, the flap of canvas and the judder of metal, until out of nowhere came a sudden raucous whine of an alien engine, a flash of gleaming metal, a spitting of red fire from the weapon in the hands of a Jerry gunner…

Jacques unclenched his hands, unaware until that moment that they had been tight with tension. Was he mad to have suggested flying to England with Angel as his passenger? If danger threatened they would have no defence. They would be shot to pieces, the way his first plane had been shot down, burning, burning, screaming towards the ground in its death-throes, the earth leaping to meet them before they exploded in a wild eruption of flames.

Memories of that time surged into his mind with their usual nightmare proportions. He could still see Phil Brake's skin shrivelling in front of him, the flesh curling, the stink more abominable than hell. He could hear Phil's cries, mingling with his own, the sounds nothing short of demonic. Jacques' blasphemy had been savage and unrelenting then, denying a God who had put this hell on earth, and begging Phil to die quickly.

He had longed for death for himself, as he had crawled from the inferno of his plane with every inch of his skin on fire, abrasive with the shock of blisters bloating his body, his eyes raw and splinter-dry. And then the new, almost unbearable shock of finding himself at the edge of a lake, of plunging in and feeling the sweet icy water soothe him for an instant, before the new pain enveloped him.

Such pain was inhuman … he gave up the struggle, letting himself float face-down and waiting for death … ragged and drowning, he suddenly screamed as hands that were not his own began dragging him out of the water.

Hands that ripped the ravaged, tender flesh from his arms, and voices that shouted at him in his native language. Hold on, hold on … but couldn't they see that he hadn't wanted to
hold on? He'd wanted to let the freezing water suck him down, soothing him into oblivion…