The September Garden (24 page)

Sylvie stood up, ferociously rummaging in her handbag for her pack of cigarettes.

‘You know, Alex, when I saw you on the doorstep,’ her voice quivered too hard for her liking, ‘I thought it was a miracle. You were safe and my happiness had returned. And now, you just ruin it all again. You better work this one out for yourself.’ She turned from him, not wanting him to see her tears. ‘Shut the door on your way out.’

She stood with her back to him, breathing hard as she inhaled on the cigarette. She heard the rustle of his overcoat, his step on the stair. The front door below closed quietly. She stubbed out the cigarette and slumped back into the chair, her hand over her face, squeezing her eyes tight in an attempt to stop misery bubbling out of her. Her head snapped up when she heard the front door knocker rap gently. As she leapt up, she felt her agony fall away, as if shedding a skin. She hurried down the stairs, her happiness rising, simmering in her throat. Her love for him still blooming in her chest.

Alex stood on the doorstep, the street lightening with the dawn behind him, his hat low over his eyes.

‘Your suitcase,’ he said, handing it to her.

He turned and walked away.

Rain drummed on the pitched roof of the nursing home, sending silvery rivulets snaking down the grime and dust on the roof light windows. She lay wakeful in bed and watched as streams of rainwater met one another on the glass, collided and divided. Outside the drainpipes were rushing, gutters spluttering under the deluge. The unseasonal storm – it was only the middle of May – was passing overhead, washing away the dirt, cleaning the air.

Her bedroom was in the converted attic, with a little dormer window facing north. She could look straight over the rooftops to the city, and what was left of it. Getting out of bed, she washed quickly in the bathroom along the corridor and, back in her room, dressed in her uniform. There was a rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning over the West End.
Not the Luftwaffe this time,
she thought.
Just plain old weather
. And, at any rate, these days they were all terrified of buzz bombs. She made her bed, then
opened her dormer wide to let in the cooling early dawn air just as the bell clanged along the corridor. Six in the morning. Time to get up.

Someone tapped on her door and Violet, in her dressing gown, poked her head round.

‘Might have known you’d already be up and dressed, Diana,’ she said. ‘Can I please borrow some stockings? Mine could be used as a fishing net and I got the most frightful rocket from Sister yesterday for walking over to the hospital without my cloak on. Can’t risk it two days running. I’ll pay you back soon as I can.’

Nell handed her her last pair.

‘Thanks ever so, Di. See you at breakfast.’

Nell knew she had exactly twenty minutes before she had to be downstairs in the nurses’ dining room. This was the only period of the day when she truly had time for herself. As the nurses’ waking, chattering voices grew steadily louder along the corridor and in the rooms next to hers, she pulled out Alex’s letter. She curled up on her crisply made bed to read it, even though, two years after she’d first opened it, she knew each line by heart.

Nell wondered how any of the patients got any rest or proper sleep. The morning bedpan round, with its scrubbing and sluicing, produced deafening and offensive clatter, assaulting both senses of hearing and smell. And all had to be in order and shipshape for the consultant’s daily visit on the ward when he swooped through, white coat-tails flying, followed by Matron and Sister in terrified flutter. The work was exhausting but good, always good, Nell decided, for it helped her forget, gave her no time to think. At King’s
College there were no babies or children, no little ones to remind her. Just men, badly injured, horrifically burnt young men, some who came in, still alive, with labels tied to their feet for identification.

While she worked she sometimes allowed herself to think of Alex. As she scrubbed bed legs to ensure against bed bugs, it was as if she was watching a film at the picture house, another girl playing her. Alex’s letter had been desperate in his contrition, but whatever his appeal, it became meaningless in the face of what actually happened. He loved her, he wrote. And she knew that. But he had thrown her away.

She dared herself to think of Sylvie and, moments later, stopped to stare at the red marks on her hand ingrained by the scrubbing brush.

Around midday, Sister asked her to feed the patient in bed five. Pushing aside the curtain, she saw a charred head against the white pillow. The familiar smell told her the soldier had been roasted.

‘I’ve come to give you some lunch, sir,’ she said.

The eyes were bloodshot and strangely alive amid the dead flesh; the split mouth grimaced in what she suspected was a smile. He let out a faint wolf whistle.

‘What a cracker.’ His voice was hoarse, trapped in his throat. ‘What an absolute cracker. I bet your sweetheart is head over heels. What’s your name?’

She helped him sit up, feeling ribs and shoulder blades beneath his pyjamas. He grunted, hissed with pain.

‘I’ll ask Sister about your drip,’ she told him. ‘It looks like it needs topping up.’

How hard it was to keep her nerve. The first year had
been difficult, of course, but she’d hoped things would have been better by now. Last week, a consultant had asked for a patient’s X-rays. Off she’d trotted to fetch them and handed them straight to him. Afterwards, Sister had called her to one side and in no uncertain terms told her that she should have given them to her, so that she could pass them to the doctor. And then Sister had wondered if Nurse Blanford should take a hearing test, as more often than not, when she was summoned, it was an irritatingly long while before she responded.
It’s as if you don’t know your own name.

Nell sat on the chair at bed five, poised with the spoon of liquefied vegetables and gravy.

‘You haven’t told me your name,’ the patient said.

‘Nurse Blanford,’ she whispered, mindful of Sister’s strictness about being too friendly with the soldiers, for it only caused heartache in any of the so many inevitable outcomes.

‘Pleased to meet you, Blanford.’

If the soldier had still had both of his eyelids, she was sure he would have winked.

On her day off, she was free to leave the hospital and all of its nauseating odours and claustrophobic racket behind her. She would often watch the other nurses hurrying off, linking arms and giggling, their capes billowing, with a mixture of curiosity and envy. The thought of doing as she pleased, without the structure of routine and work, sucked Nell through a void of confusing dread. She would fight it by sitting in the cinema in Peckham, or walking around Brockwell Park. Some days, she even went as far as Greenwich Hill, where she could look over the bombed
and ruined docks, all the while alone and with a mind to forget, or at least to fill her head with something other than John-James.

How she longed for her valley, her place under the willows by the river. How she longed for the September Garden, where bees bumbled over his scented cradle, wriggling over the clover. It was early June and the dog roses would be out along the lanes, festooning the hedgerows, and the air would be soft with birdsong.

That day, for a change, she caught the train from Denmark Hill to London Bridge. She walked, still in uniform, her cape fluttering behind her, across the bridge, the churning, dirty river below her. She plunged into the city, her flat, sensible nursing shoes negotiating the cobbled alleys in the grey shadow of mighty and inviolable St Paul’s. She circumnavigated the bomb sites of the ancient quarter, darting down alleys and passages, relishing the sense of being lost; that no one on this earth knew where she was.

She reached Charterhouse Square and, sitting on a bench under a plane tree, she watched the lawyers and city men in pinstripes and bowlers, faces behind newspapers, come and go around the quiet medieval enclave, and contemplated how they simply carried on ashen-faced amid the chaos and ruin, just like she did. And yet, she supposed, those city workers got back on the Underground each evening and went home to their families, their lives, cherishing them for who knew what tomorrow might bring.

Nell knew she could never go home again. Her lies, her forsaking of the truth, would follow her there and break the spell that she had cast around her. Impervious the spell was, and solid. It should stay here with her in London,
where it protected her. Inside it, she floated in a senseless dreamworld where her parents were strangers, to each other and to her; and they did not know her any more.

A man said
good afternoon
and sat down on her bench. She shifted her bottom along, mildly irritated, wishing she’d brought a book, always a good way to prevent conversation. There were plenty of other spare benches around the square, why didn’t he go elsewhere? She sensed him looking at her, askance, and she turned her face away, concentrating on a squirrel bouncing around the roots of a tree. Sunlight found its way through the branches, dappling the path. How clear blue the sky was, she thought, tilting her head. Such a lovely day.

‘My, my, you’re a difficult girl to track down.’

Turning in surprise, Nell saw a familiar profile, a long Gallic nose.

He doffed his hat, his grin wide.

‘Surely you remember me, Mademoiselle Nell,’ he said. ‘Henri. Sylvie’s friend. Well, I say
l’ami
, but we are so much more than that. I am forever asking her to marry me. She still refuses, you know. She runs off to Berkshire, and she comes back, and still she does not want me. She’s a stubborn one, that cousin of yours. Very stubborn indeed.’

Nell glanced around her, embarrassed and on edge, wanting to take flight.

‘Track down
?’ she said, with a shake. ‘Who is trying to track me down?’

‘There are many people looking for you,’ he said. ‘And I see you have disguised yourself rather successfully as a nurse.’

‘I
am
a nurse. In training.’

‘Where?’

Nell opened her mouth to tell him, and then snapped it shut. She saw the mischievous glint in his eye.

‘Not even my mother knows where I work,’ she said. ‘So why should I tell you? I’ve only met you once before.’

‘Ah, I see. So you have. And so you have run away from home?’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Run away from
something
, then?’

‘Perhaps you are right.’ She stood up and gathered her handbag with a little huffy show. ‘Good day to you, sir.’

‘Not so hasty, mademoiselle. What would you say if I buy you a drink, and I tell you news of Mr Hammond?’

Nell’s legs turned to straw. A great whoosh of pain blew out her middle. She sat back down, hard, on the bench.

‘I’m not surprised Sylvie refuses to marry you,’ she muttered, staring at Henri through eyes cloudy with tears. Her mouth was as dry as chalk. ‘Why would she want to marry you, when she is married to Mr Hammond? Because who would not want to be married to him? And she has a baby. She is so very lucky.’ A sob broke from her chest. ‘I’m sure they are very happy together – why should you break them up?’

Henri’s calm voice slipped below the storm raging in her head. ‘She is not married to him or anyone. Do you think me an utter, pathetic fool to chase her if she was? Come and have a drink with me.’ He took her hand and held it as if that would stop it shaking. He linked her arm through his and pressed it tight to his side as she leant onto him. ‘Brandy is good for shock. I know a little place. A nice old tavern just round the corner in Smithfield.’

She sat in the ill-lit pub, resplendent with stained glass and oil lamps, and pictures of hunts and shoots, sipping at the drink Henri gave her. It tasted like blistering fire. He sat by her, earnestly peering at her face while he told her that her cousin had never been pregnant, it had been a false alarm, and that she had not married Alex. But, he said, she had been engaged to him for nearly a year.

‘There, you see.’ Nell’s words stumbled and rose to a pitiful pitch. ‘She means a great deal to him, for them to be engaged for all that time.’

‘Mr Hammond did not come back from France for nearly a year. Put it this way: Sylvie stubbornly wore her ring for the whole time. We can deduce from that, that she was
sweet
on Mr Hammond. He was delayed in France. Something went wrong on the beach. He was left behind and became a guest of our Resistance; he escaped down the lines to Spain.’

The bones in Nell’s hands stiffened, her fingertips went cold. She murmured something about chance and danger and terror, shaking her head to try to understand what Henri was telling her. To think that had been happening to Alex, and she’d had no idea.

‘He is safe?’ she asked at last, her bravery finding its way through the clot of fear in her throat.

‘He is now.’

She sat back against the pub chair and tried the brandy again, breathing hard with relief. She remained silent for a while, trying to find a way through her thoughts, force it all to make sense: Alex and Sylvie did not get married; did not have a baby.

She glanced at Henri and saw his compassion and patience.

‘He wrote to me before he went to France,’ she told him, ‘but I did not get the letter for a year. I went to live at my father’s house, you see, and my mother never forwarded it.’

‘What did he write?’

‘His regret, his deep love for me. His sorrow. But his duty to Sylvie. His duty to “the cause”. He said all of that. I read it every day.’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘But in the meantime, I sent him a telegram from my father’s house. Sent it BFPO. This was before … before I went into nursing. I don’t even know if he ever received it.’

Henri waited. Eventually he asked her, what did the telegram say?

‘It was four words.
Never contact me again.’

She choked, then, as a helpless sob filled her throat.

‘Why did you hide yourself away?’ Henri asked her. ‘You’ve worried a lot of people. Your mother and father, Sylvie tells me.’

Nell looked at him, and saw a gentleman in a pristine suit, the cut of which was divine. His haircut suggested the military, and yet she knew he was in intelligence; Sylvie had hinted that he was very well connected, very brainy. He knew far more secrets than anyone should do in this war.

‘You probably know already?’ she asked. ‘Why I had to hide.’

‘You were in love with Alex Hammond. And Sylvie got there first.’

‘She didn’t,’ Nell retorted. ‘I got there first.’

Henri grinned, and then his face fell. His high cheekbones reddened. He looked mildly embarrassed at her confession.

‘How did you manage to evade everyone?’ he asked. ‘They knew you’d gone into nursing. We’ve established
that. But you’ve managed it for nearly two years.’

‘I knew that my mother wouldn’t talk to my father. And my father wouldn’t talk to my mother.’ Nell considered how her father and Diana would assume John-James was being cared for at Lednor by Mrs B and her mother. And yet her mother did not know he’d ever been born. Her deception was cruel and it terrified her. One more reason never to go back. ‘I wrote at Christmas and at birthdays. I told them I was perfectly happy.’