A Rose In Flanders Fields (21 page)

I knew how Lizzy needed to hear my old, cheerful tones, even in my writings, and so bent to my last paragraph with a determined smile pasted onto my face, in the hope it would translate to the paper.

Gertie, Kitty and I were very busy last night, the town came under some pretty nasty attention, but we muddled through. I think Gertie needs a rest, but like all of us she must press on, and if bits are going to drop off, better they drop off her than us!

Take care, darling.

Yr ever loving

Evie

I picked up Will’s last letter and pushed it into the pocket of my greatcoat with the others I kept with me. I had told Lizzy of the distance I could sense in his words, but it was his hand that had written them and so it wouldn’t have mattered had it merely been a list of things he needed from home, or an invoice from his days as a butcher’s apprentice. It was
his
hand.

A week later he wrote again; he was granted local town leave for a day, and would be able to meet me at the station. I left Gertie with Kitty, assuring her once more of her ability to drive at night, and borrowed a car from Oliver’s company under the pretext of fetching supplies. Lieutenant-Colonel Drewe had stepped in and cut through the red tape, bless him, he was so helpful. It seemed predestined to be a perfect trip.

I wouldn’t have been half so pleased had I known what my absence that night was going to lead to.

Chapter Twelve

The station was as crowded as always but I saw him right away; straight-backed and square-shouldered despite the weight of the equipment he carried. Our embrace was uncomfortable; bulky and unsatisfactorily clunky, too many layers between us, and our gas masks clashed I knew his hands were on my back, but I couldn’t feel themthrough my greatcoat and my sweater.

I felt him holding back as he kissed me, as if we were acting a part on a stage and mustn’t give in to real emotion; my racing heart was doing the work for both of us. I wondered if he could feel it in my lips and my fingers as I could, but the kiss ended too soon, leaving me with a hollow ache in my chest and a faint feeling of embarrassment, as if it was all one-sided after all.

We walked to the little park beside the railway, and found an empty bench by the cold, grey pond. I couldn’t think what to say, whether to ask him outright how he was coping, or whether to simply blather on as I did in my letters, filling the silence with nonsense that neither of us really cared about. In the end I just took his hand and we sat quietly, ungloved against the bitter wind, but at least we were touching. I became transfixed by the sight of impossibly thin ice at the pond’s edges, rising and falling gently under the insistent fingers of the wind that rippled the water, until a tiny piece on the very edge broke away, and the whole, lacy-delicate sheet crumbled in front of my eyes. One or two pieces bobbed away to become ensnared by the long, ice-tipped grass, but the rest, insignificant and lost now, simply floated away from each other until the water swallowed them up.

Strangely saddened, my thoughts were trying not to make foolish connections and I jumped as Will cleared his throat. ‘Have you heard from Lizzy?’

‘Yes!’ I told him everything she had said in her letter, so relieved to have something to say that I found myself elaborating, just for the sake of seeing the tension slowly leaving his taut frame, and the lines in his face soften. ‘She’s happy, and well,’ I finished, ‘but she’s so frightened for Uncle Jack.’

‘Jack’s a good man,’ Will said. ‘He knows how she’ll worry. How you both will,’ he added, squeezing my hand. ‘He’ll be more careful than ever.’ I almost blurted out the news that Archie was actually Jack’s real nephew, but just stopped myself in time: Archie Buchanan wasn’t a subject I wanted to bring up, not in such a rare and fragile companionship as this.

‘I’m hoping to visit Lizzy soon,’ I said instead. ‘The Red Cross in Kent have raised enough in donations for two new ambulances, and Skittles and I will both go, so she can visit home for a day or two and then drive one of them back. She’s coming along ever so well.’

‘She seems sweet, from what you’ve said.’

I nodded, and the conversation died again. It was awful, and so unlike us. ‘When do you have to be back?’ I asked.

‘Next train, to get back before my watch.’ He looked up at the leaden sky, as if the gathering dark spoke in his favour. ‘I’m sorry it was such a short visit, for all that driving you had to do, but I can’t afford to raise the slightest suspicion and people are watching closely, even though I was exonerated.’ He was babbling now, in his eagerness to be gone.

‘Will…’

He looked back down at me, seeming a stranger in the grey afternoon light. I had known he would become a handsome man one day, and I’d been right, but I’d also believed he’d be someone I knew inside and out, and would be as familiar to me, always, as my own face. We were both enmeshed in this filthy conflict, both struggling daily against dirt, disease, fear and loneliness, but while I took comfort in the knowledge that I was at least doing some good, he had been watching more of his friends lose their lives, their limbs, and their minds, to no discernible gain. Pointless death every day, young men snatched away in the shriek of a shell or the crack of a sniper’s rifle, and Will’s hesitant return to emotional health was being eroded with every one.

‘You weren’t ready,’ I said, unable to find the words I really wanted to say: that I understood what he was doing, that I would give him all the time he needed, that I had utter faith in the strength of what we had built between us. ‘Tell them.’

He turned away. ‘I made a mess of things in ’16, and risked everything. This time I’m going to stick it out, and if I don’t come back…well, I’ll only be one of thousands more, most of them ten times more worthy.’

I could have slapped him for his indifference, if only to shock him back into life. With an effort I controlled my voice. ‘And what about my feelings? Don’t you care about me at all?’

Will leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the ground between his feet, as if it held the answer to what should have been the simplest question of all. Then he raised his head and studied me with unreadable eyes, before looking back at the rippling grey water.

‘I don’t think you should write to me any more.’

I stared at him, too stunned to speak. He wouldn’t look at me again, but I saw his hands clenched where they hung between his knees, chapped, raw and bleeding where the skin had split. There was tension too, in his shoulders, in the rigidity of his jaw and in the flicker of a muscle in his cheek, but he didn’t say anything else. After a moment he stood up and began walking away, and it was only then that I was able to move. I ran after him and grabbed his arm. ‘Wait!’

For a second I thought he was going to shake me off and keep walking, but instead he turned, seized my face in his hands and kissed me. Hard and desperately, and too quickly. He groaned as he pulled away. ‘Go back, Evie. Go and do what you were born to do, and try not to think of me any more.’

‘No!’

‘Please…you don’t understand how I am now. You’ll hate me if you get to know me again. I couldn’t bear that.’

‘How could I ever hate you?’

‘I’m not the man you married,’ he said, as he had before. ‘You deserve someone better.’

‘Archie Buchanan.’ I’d tried to inject the name with denial, even disgust, but Will only smiled gently.

‘I’ve seen the way he looks at you,’ he said, ‘he’d be lucky, and proud, to have you at his side.’

‘But I want to be at yours!’ Why couldn’t he see that? If it hadn’t been for that kiss, and the urgency in it, I might have thought he was making an excuse, that he no longer loved me.

He touched my face with heart-breaking gentleness, and began to walk backwards, away from me, his eyes locked onto mine. ‘I have to go. Take care of yourself, and give Lizzy my love when you see her. Try not to think too badly of me?’

‘I could never think badly of you.’ I realised it sounded as though I was giving in, but by the time I had found the words to deny it he had gone through the gate onto the platform. I couldn’t bear to watch him get on the train, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave yet, not while there was a chance he may turn and come back to me. So I stood by the gate, my fingers twisting together with growing anger and frustration; he thought he was being noble, did he, keeping me at arm’s length? This man who loved me, as he’d said, “beyond reason”? Well I wasn’t going to let him, and he would just have to –

‘Mrs Davies, isn’t it?’

I turned to see a soldier, his arm around one of the local women. He looked familiar, and then I remembered him: the tall soldier who’d been taking requests at the hostel almost two years ago, although, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember his name. The one thing I’d noticed about him then, as now, was his height; he must have stood six feet seven in his socks.

I forced a smile. ‘How nice to see you again.’ I nodded to the Frenchwoman, who looked a little irritated that her companion’s attention had been pulled away, but nodded back politely enough.

The man looked past me, puzzled. ‘Where’s Will?’

‘He had to get this train back,’ I said, my voice surprisingly steady. Presumably this man should also be making his way back, but he didn’t appear to be in any hurry.

‘Don’t know why then,’ he said, and winked at the woman, ‘we’re granted overnight this time.’

His words cut deep but I was determined not to show it. ‘Oh, he had something to attend to,’ I said. The soldier – Barry something, it came to me suddenly while my mind was occupied – let go of the woman and drew me to one side. He towered over me, but dipped his head to speak quietly into my ear.

‘Mrs Davies, I’m sorry to hear about everything.’

‘Sorry? Whatever for?’

‘Well, that you’re parting company,’ Barry said. ‘It’s a real shame.’

‘I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘We’re not parting. He’s gone through a lot, you know that, but I’m not giving up on him.’

Barry straightened up and patted my arm. ‘I hope that’s true,’ he said, ‘but no one would blame you. It must be very hard for you, what with him being the way he is now.’

‘The way he is?’

‘Different. You know. Always angry.’

That hurt too. ‘He’s not always angry. Sometimes he can be just like he was. Before.’ Again, that stupid little word that meant everything and nothing at once.

Barry raised an eyebrow, and chose to ignore what he clearly didn’t believe. ‘He doesn’t make things any more, you know. When he joined up he was always makin’ things. Out of paper, or whatever he could find. Doesn’t do it any more, that’s all. Seems a shame.’

‘He’ll do it again,’ I said, thinking with a pang of my paper rose. ‘You just need to give him time. It’s…difficult.’

‘It’s difficult for us too, that anger thing.’ Barry said, ‘makes him hard to get on with. And when a man doesn’t get on with the others in his unit he needs a good friend at his side.’

I swallowed hard, fear squirmed at the implication. ‘And are you still that good friend?’

Barry nodded. ‘All of us are, that remember him like he was, Missus. Trouble is we lost a hell of a lot in July last year, so a lot of the others are new. They never knew him then. He’d have done anything for anyone. Still would in a way, I suppose; whenever the order comes through he’s up and over, before you can blink. Takes a terrible sort of courage, that.’

‘What are you saying?’

Barry sighed. ‘It’s like he has nothing to lose. And to be honest I think that’s exactly how he looks at it. Rightly or wrongly,’ he hurried on, seeing my face. ‘I heard they were looking for volunteer runners. Be just like your Will to step up, the way he is now.’

‘Regimental or trench?’ I knew the answer, but still I prayed he would say “regimental” –it would be easier to bear knowing Will was relatively safe and carrying messages between HQs. But a trench runner faced instant, invisible death every second he was exposed.

Barry’s face gave me the answer I dreaded, and I gripped his arm. ‘You have to talk to him!’

‘I’ve tried,’ Barry said. His lady friend was tugging at his other arm now and I could see he was uncomfortable talking to me. ‘I’ll talk to him again, Mrs Davies, of course I will, but, well, he’s…’

‘Different now.’

‘Yeah,’ Barry said, and his expression turned sad. ‘Look after yourself, Mrs Davies. And keep up the sterling work eh? The lads need people like you.’

I drove back to the cottage in the borrowed car, numbed and silent, not singing as I usually did, not even cursing as the night sky lit up with vivid flashes. In the yard, I dragged the handbrake on with unaccustomed savagery, climbed out and slammed the door. With one eye on the horizon, I hurried inside and made sure oxygen masks were ready, and likewise the few beds we had set up in the cellar. We might not be able to do much, but we could be prepared and help a few, at least, and checking it all gave me something to concentrate on, for which I was grateful; Barry’s words were echoing in my memory, and I tried not to think about Will’s cool determination to get himself blown up, or shot, in the belief I would be better off a widow than married to someone I could no longer love.

Kitty was still out, no doubt doing a grand job, and once the cellar was made ready I was able to climb into bed, fully clothed against the cold, and try to put out of my mind what I could do nothing about; I would need to be alert for duty tomorrow, and could ill afford the luxury of lying awake feeling angry and sorry for myself.

Sometime around three in the morning, after the big guns had fallen silent, I had drifted into a shallow, unsettled sleep when I heard Kitty come in. I kept very still, hoping she’d think she hadn’t woken me, but she tip-toed in, and I breathed softly in relief. Then, as I began to float away again I realised I was hearing another sound: a soft hiccupping and the occasional sniff.

I sat up. ‘Kitty, darling, whatever’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Go back to sleep.’

‘Are you hurt?’ I pushed off my bedclothes and hurried to sit beside her.