The Promise (30 page)

He looked hard at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes. ‘All right, Reilly, you’ve made your point. Give me the number and I will put a call through to them now. Now, go and get into dry clothes. Both of you may have tomorrow off, I appreciate you need some rest to get over this.’

Belle stepped forward, picked up a pencil from his desk and wrote the Forbes-Altons’ telephone number on his jotter. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, and turned away before he could see she was crying.

Outside, David put his arms round her. ‘That was brave,’ he said, holding her tightly against his shoulder. ‘For a moment I thought you would hit him if he didn’t give in.’

‘It was only me saying her parents were influential that persuaded him,’ she sobbed against his shoulder. ‘After all we see here daily you’d think you’d get hardened to it, wouldn’t you? I could just about deal with those two men with stomach wounds who were dead on arrival at the hospital today, death was better than life for them. But Miranda had everything to live for. She wanted love so badly and at last she’d found it. It is just so cruel she had to be taken like this.’

He held her for some little time to comfort her. ‘Come on, I’ll take you back to your hut,’ he said eventually.

‘I’m worried about Will,’ she said, allowing herself to be led away. ‘Miranda had arranged to meet him tomorrow night. What if Captain Taylor doesn’t get in touch with him?’

‘I think he will; after what you said he wouldn’t dare do otherwise. But what about you? Will you go home for her funeral?’

Belle just looked at him dumbly; she couldn’t see beyond the pain inside her.

David appeared to understand. He didn’t press her further, just led her to her hut, opened the door and nudged her in. ‘Ask one of the girls to make you a hot water bottle,’ he said. ‘And stay in bed tomorrow.’

The following day it had stopped raining and the sun came out. Belle remained in the hut alternately crying, thinking about all that she had loved about Miranda, and staring blankly at the ceiling. When the other girls came back in the early evening, their kindly questioning about whether she’d eaten and how she was feeling made her want to cry again. Using the excuse that she needed some fresh air, she went outside and sat on the step.

The big puddles of the day before were far smaller now, it was warm and everywhere looked cleaner and fresher. She felt curiously numb, and she thought that must be nature’s way of dealing with grief. She knew she should pack Miranda’s things, and write her parents a letter, but she couldn’t do that yet. She couldn’t even write to Jimmy or Mog.

So many memories of Miranda still kept flitting through her mind, but they were the happier ones now. She could see her in the shop trying on hats and pulling faces in the mirror, and recalled the laughter they shared when she was teaching Belle to drive her father’s car, and the comfort she’d given her when she lost her baby. She remembered her friend’s gift for mimicking people, and her sarcastic little asides about them that were always so acute and funny. Yet Miranda had never been deliberately unkind, she had been generous, affectionate, and loyal too. Belle had always imagined they would still be friends when they were old ladies. They knew all about each other, good and bad. Miranda was the one person Belle felt she could always be her true self with. She didn’t believe it was possible to find another friend like that.

‘Tell me to go away if you’d rather be alone.’

Belle started at Vera’s voice. She hadn’t heard her open the hut door.

Vera was a very bouncy, happy person, renowned for her jollity. Even the most dour drivers and stretcher bearers remarked that she was a tonic with her ready smiles and the way she was always ready to help anyone.

Her pretty, elfin, freckled face, red, curly hair and slender shape belied how strong she was. She joked that she’d built up muscle even as a child helping her father knead dough in his bakery.

‘No, stay,’ Belle said, remembering that it had been Vera who had kept her company all the time Miranda had been seeing Will. ‘I thought I wanted to be alone, but I don’t think I really do.’

‘You two were so close I don’t suppose you can imagine life without her,’ Vera said, sitting down beside her.

‘That just about sums it up,’ Belle said glumly. ‘Mostly I thought I was the one who held her up; I had the ideas, she followed me. But now without her I feel I’ll never have another idea or plan again. I was thinking earlier how odd it is that I think that; after all, if she’d run off with Will, or decided to go home, I’d have been fine without her.’

‘But you didn’t see this coming, and it’s final, that’s why it hurts so much,’ Vera said. ‘None of the rest of us got really close to her, but it’s still knocked all of us for six. Every single one of the drivers and stretcher bearers feel it too.’

‘I don’t know if I can stay here now,’ Belle said sadly. ‘I’d give anything to be at home with Mog and Garth, yet at the same time I know if I was to go home I’d feel just as empty there.’

‘Would it make you feel better to go and see Miranda’s mother?’

Belle shook her head. ‘She’s the last person I want to see. She’d put on a big display of grief, but I’d be thinking how false it is because she wasn’t very kind to Miranda.’

‘What about Will? He’ll need someone to talk to.’

‘Yes, that’s true. Poor man, they had made so many plans. Miranda didn’t even have time to tell me them all, but I don’t think I could talk to him, not yet.’

‘You can talk to me any time,’ Vera said, and put her hand on Belle’s arm.

They sat there together for some time in companionable silence. Every now and then a couple of nurses or orderlies would come past, and there were a number of civilians too, perhaps relatives of patients. Further down the path, there were some men well enough to leave the wards, some on crutches, an arm in a sling, or a bandage around their head. Birds were chirping nearby, but behind that they could hear the muffled boom of guns miles away at the front.

Belle broke the silence. ‘The guns must be very loud if we can hear them all this way away,’ she said. ‘It must be like hell there. Three years of war now and we’re still no closer to ending it. How many more men have to die before they are satisfied?’

Vera took Belle’s hand and squeezed it, a way of saying she shared Belle’s anger. ‘You know, I sometimes wonder what it was that made me come all this way. I can remember thinking it was my duty to help, but I had no real understanding of the destruction, the sheer brutality of war.’

‘Miranda and I saw it as an adventure,’ Belle confessed. ‘That seems so stupid now, after all, we’d worked in a hospital back home and knew the horror of it. But we thought we were being brave and noble.’ Her laugh was hollow.

Vera nodded in understanding. ‘I suppose I thought I was being noble and self-sacrificing too. But the real truth is that I was so bored working in the bakery. I’d listen to customers telling Mother about their problems, trivial things like a child who’d broken good china, or the dress material they’d sent for that hadn’t arrived, and I wanted to scream at the dullness of my life.

‘I used to daydream of living in a big city, going dancing, having enough money to buy anything I wanted. But I wasn’t qualified to do anything other than serve in a shop. When I heard they needed volunteers here, it seemed the answer to everything. I would see more of the world; I’d learn things I never could at home.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly done that,’ Belle said. ‘But didn’t you get some hospital experience before you came?’

‘Only a month in Auckland, but because I could drive they put me on collecting and taking old people home, so I didn’t learn anything much. That’s why I got put on driving an ambulance here. But my first day collecting the wounded from the train shocked me to the core.’

‘I should think it did,’ Belle agreed. She’d found it shocking too and she was already used to seeing gory sights.

‘I wanted to go home,’ Vera went on. ‘The tranquil life I had back there seemed like heaven when I was surrounded by blood and guts and young soldiers crying for their mothers. I’m so used to it now that I’ve started to worry that I’ll never fit in again back home.’

‘I sometimes feel like that too,’ Belle said. ‘It’s hard to write home because I know they can’t imagine what we do, or maybe it’s that I don’t want to put those pictures in their heads. So tell me about New Zealand. That would be a far more pleasant thing to describe to them. Is it very hot?’

‘It can be in the North Island where I come from,’ Vera replied. ‘It’s sub-tropical, you see. But down in the South Island it can be very cold and often very wet. It’s a beautiful country, with mountains covered in snow in winter, lakes and fast-flowing rivers. There’s lots of sheep, many more of them than people, there’s so much space, you can go miles without seeing a single house.

‘But I live in a little place called Russell. It’s in the Bay of Islands. The sea is turquoise, with little islands dotted about in it covered in trees, and it’s very quiet and beautiful. Yet once it was a very wicked place, which they called the Hell Hole of the Pacific because the whalers used to come there to get drunk and find women.’

Belle half smiled because that made her think of New Orleans, but she wasn’t going to tell Vera that. ‘It sounds lovely. Have you ever seen a whale?’

‘Lots of times. I used to go out fishing with my father and brothers and we often saw them, dolphins too, they are exciting to watch, so playful and beautiful. But I guess no one ever appreciates where they grew up, not until they go away from it.’

‘It sounds heavenly to me,’ Belle sighed. ‘Jimmy and I used to think we’d like to live by the sea when the war is over, but the longer I’m here, the less I think about the future. I can’t imagine doing ordinary things like washing clothes or baking a cake any more. Maybe you are right and we won’t fit in when we go home.’

Just then they saw Captain Taylor walking towards them. ‘He’s coming to speak to you,’ Vera said. ‘I’ll go in and leave you to it.’

‘Thank you for the chat, Vera,’ Belle said as the girl got up. ‘You’ve cheered me, I’m very grateful for that.’

‘Good evening, Reilly,’ the captain said as he drew closer. ‘I just came over to tell you that I’ve managed to contact Mr and Mrs Forbes-Alton. They are arranging for their daughter’s body to be taken home to them. It will be tomorrow morning.’

‘And did you manage to contact Sergeant Fergus?’

‘Not personally,’ he said. ‘I spoke to his CO this morning and he will have told him by now. It’s a bad business, we are all sadly accustomed to informing relatives of servicemen killed in action, and now and then we have to inform men here too of deaths in their family back home, but I never expected to have to relay the news of a death of one of our female volunteers.’

‘May I go home with Miranda?’ Belle asked. ‘I mean, on the same train and boat. She would have wanted me to.’

She saw by the way his face tightened that this wasn’t possible. ‘Or just so I get back in time for the funeral,’ she said. ‘I know it must be difficult with one driver gone, without a second one asking for leave.’

‘I’m sorry, Reilly. But Mrs Forbes-Alton has insisted that you are not to attend their daughter’s funeral,’ he said.

Belle was stunned. ‘But why? How could she say that? I was Miranda’s closest friend. She would want me there.’

The captain looked uneasy and made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘She was adamant, extremely forceful. I’m sure it was grief, it does make people say irrational things sometimes. She appears to blame you for her daughter’s death.’

‘Me!’ Belle was incredulous. ‘How could I be blamed for it?’

The captain shrugged. ‘She said you persuaded her to come here, that she hadn’t been the same girl since she met you. But as I said, people do say foolish things at such times.’

‘That woman is such a witch,’ Belle gasped. ‘Miranda was older than me, she had a mind of her own, I didn’t force her to come, she wanted to. How dare her mother say such a thing?’

‘I have to admit I was rather shocked at her outburst,’ he said. ‘I pointed out that her daughter had been happy here, that she was a valued member of our team and that I’d found you to be a steadying influence on her. But it was to no avail. I’m sorry, Reilly.’

‘Did you tell her that she was going to marry Sergeant Fergus?’

‘No, I didn’t, it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say under the circumstances.’

‘I’m a volunteer. If I want to go home on leave tomorrow, can you prevent me?’

He looked at her for a moment, as if weighing up the situation. ‘No, I can’t prevent you. But I would urge you to think it through. We need you here, and Mrs Forbes-Alton has connections in high places and is likely to use them if you go against her wishes. Please think it over calmly. I’m sure your friend would not have wanted you to jeopardize your future just to attend her funeral.’

Belle was just about to make an angry retort when an American staff car drove past. She saw a familiar face glance at her and the captain, then the driver stopped the car and reversed back towards them.

‘That’s Sergeant Fergus,’ Belle gasped. ‘I hope to God he’s been told already, I don’t want to have to break the news.’

Belle could see by Will’s face as he got out of the car that he had been told. He seemed to have shrunk a couple of inches and the glossy appearance he’d had the day they first met had vanished.

He saluted the captain, then looked at Belle with such pain in his eyes that a lump rose in her throat.

‘Will, this is Captain Taylor, who runs the ambulance unit,’ she said. ‘Captain Taylor, this is Will Fergus, Miranda’s fiancé.’

The captain offered his condolences and explained that Miranda’s body was being taken back to England in the morning. Then, perhaps realizing it was Belle that the man wished to speak to, he said that if Fergus had any further questions of him, he would be in his office.

‘Oh Will, I’m so very sorry,’ Belle said once the captain had gone. ‘How much did they tell you?’

‘The minimum,’ he said. ‘A train hit her ambulance. Was she killed instantly, Belle? I can’t bear to think of her suffering.’