A Song in the Night (13 page)

The following day, Rosie finished work at half past two and went straight through to the hospital. She hadn’t visited the day before. According to Ciaran, Beth had been a bit ropey after her endoscopy, so she’d decided to give it a miss. She arrived bang on three o’clock and Beth’s face lit up as she walked in.

“How’s it going then?” Rosie gave her a quick hug. Touchy-feely wasn’t her thing as a rule, but Beth’s being ill in bed made it somehow easier.

Beth screwed up her face. “I’m cheesed off of being stuck in here. I’m beginning to show signs of cabin fever, I reckon.”

Rosie grinned. “Hang on a minute.” She turned round and spotted one of the nurses just finishing her observations round. “Could I possibly abduct this patient for half an hour? I won’t take her any further than the restaurant, I promise.”

The nurse agreed, and after getting Beth fixed up with a wheelchair, the two set off.

“Sweet freedom …” Beth exhaled with relief as they wended their way down the corridor. “Why didn’t we think of this before?”

“You weren’t in any fit state, Mrs M.”

They went up a couple of floors in the lift and found the restaurant. Rosie rummaged for her purse. “You having anything?”

“No, I’m not bothered, Ros. You just get what you want.”

They sat over by the window and Beth looked out longingly. The restaurant was on the fifth floor of the hospital and commanded an expansive view of the surrounding area.

“I’ve only been in here six days and it feels like six weeks.” She sighed heavily. “I can’t tell you how good it feels to get off the ward.”

Rosie eyed her satirically. “You must be a desperate woman. You’ve come out in your purple bunny PJ’s. Let’s hope you’re not being stalked by anybody from the music press. Get that headline –
The Angelic Beth Maconochie, Jammin’ in her Jimjams … .
”
They both laughed. “So how was it yesterday? Did they find anything out?”

Beth shrugged. “When I had the barium meal on Monday, they said there was something they needed to look further into. Didn’t say what. I’m thinking it’s an ulcer or something like that. Anyway, they took a biopsy yesterday when they put the camera down, and now we have to wait for the results. I’m stuck here until they find out what’s what.”

“Poor you.” Rosie smiled. She couldn’t help noticing how frail Beth suddenly looked. Still, at least her colour was much better. And she was sitting up talking instead of lying down groaning. There must have been some improvement. “You’d better hurry up and get yourself home. That brother o’ mine’s acting like he’s one sandwich short of a picnic.”

Outside, an ambulance was heading up the main road towards the hospital, its sirens blaring. It sped into the entrance to the grounds and disappeared from view. Beth became thoughtful. “D’you ever wonder who’s in there, Ros?”

Rosie wasn’t sure she understood the question. “
Huh?
In where?”

“In an ambulance – y’know, when they go speeding past with their sirens going. Don’t you ever ask yourself who could be in there …
why
they’re in there?”

Rosie frowned. “No. I can’t say it’s a thing that occupies my mind if I’m honest.”

Beth was quiet for a few moments. Her eyes had a strange, troubled expression. “For all we know, Ros, someone could have been gasping their last breath in there. Fighting for their last few seconds. And here we are, just sitting in a restaurant having a coffee, watching life go by – while some poor beggar’s being sucked out of this old world forever. It seems almost indecent.” Her voice trailed away.

Rosie sat back in her chair, a faintly amused expression on her face. “Have they
put
you on something, Beth?”

Beth caught the irony in her tone and coloured slightly. “Sorry, Ros. I sound a right misery, don’t I? I’ve been thinking about a lot of bizarre things while I’ve been stuck in here.”

Rosie felt a flash of guilt. After all, Beth
was
the one who was ill. She was entitled to a little morbid reflection if she wanted. “Perhaps it wasn’t anything quite so drastic,” she said, her voice softening. “Maybe they’d just eaten a dodgy pizza at Mama Bellini’s.”

Beth smiled gently. “Yeah, I guess so. By the way, while we’re on the subject of drastic dramas, I wanted to ask you a favour.”

Rosie grimaced. “So long as it doesn’t involve me feeding you grapes or changing your bedpan.”

Beth gave a slight laugh and shook her head. “No, nothing like that, Ros.” She hesitated. “You know the diary I told you about, the one I found in that old case?”

Rosie thought for a moment. “Yeah, go on.”

“Well, the other day I asked Ciaran to bring it up to the hospital for me. I wanted to carry on reading it. There’s been a bit of a problem though.” Beth’s face creased into a frown. “Tuesday, I got the diary out to have a look at it, and Velna – one of the women across from me on the ward – started asking me what it was. I made the mistake of telling her it was an old diary I’d picked up from a second-hand bookshop. ‘Oh,’ says she. ‘What period?’ ‘First World War,’ says I, like an idiot. Her eyes lit up, Ros. I’m telling you, her eyes lit up like I’d just told her I’d got the Venus de Milo stuffed under my bed. Turns out her son’s a military historian. Really keen apparently. Got a house full of stuff – books, paintings, weapons, the lot. She asked me if I’d be interested in selling it. ‘Let him have a look at it,’ she says. ‘He’ll give you a good price if he thinks it’s worth it.’”

“That’s great!” Rosie broke in. “Maybe you’ll be able to afford to get away for a few days convalescence when you get out of here. Get that brother o’ mine out of my hair.”

“No, Ros, it’s not great at all,” Beth burst out in exasperation. “I don’t
want
to sell it. I haven’t even read it yet. Besides, you don’t
sell
something like that. It’s not as if you can go down to Tesco and get another. Things like that are one-offs; they don’t come along very often.” She leaned back in her wheelchair. “Anyway, this morning Velna informed me that her son would be coming to see her at eleven. Apparently he’d managed to get permission for a morning visit because he’s working afternoons all this week, and he’s about the only visitor she gets. At five to eleven I just got under my covers and pretended to be asleep. I was stuck like that for nearly an hour. It wasn’t funny.”

Rosie smiled wryly. “You little sneak!”

Beth’s expression was a mixture of guilt and frustration. “I know, I feel bad about it, Ros. But I’m just rubbish at saying no to people. Besides, the diary’s old and fragile. I don’t like the thought of everybody’s sweaty hands all over it. It needs handling with care.”

“Right. So where do I come in?” Rosie eyed her friend with amused curiosity.

Beth breathed out slowly before announcing her plan. “Well. For starters you can take the diary home. That way, if Velna brings the subject up, I can quite truthfully say that I haven’t got it with me any more.”

Rosie nodded. “I think I can just about manage that. But why don’t you just give it to Ciaran when he comes later?”

Beth countered with a reluctant half-smile. “Well, Ros, that’s where the favour comes in …”

Rosie raised her eyebrows enquiringly.

“Rosie, you know how brilliant you are at typing?”

Rosie nodded dismissively. “Yeah, yeah, fastest fingers in the West. Flattery will get you nowhere, Mrs M. Where’s all this leading?”

“Well, Velna’s interest got me thinking,” Beth continued. “It would be really good to get the thing typed up. Bang it into the computer, store it on a memory stick – y’know, so that we’ve got a permanent version. I mean, who knows? One day I might feel like handing it over to a museum or something. Somewhere it’ll be looked after properly. Frankly, I’m amazed it’s lasted as well as it has.”

“So you want me to do the honours then? Type it up?” Rosie frowned, unsure as to whether she should greet the prospect with excitement or dread.

“
Would
you, Ros?” Beth’s face was suddenly a picture of childlike supplication. “I was thinking you could print the entries off as you went along. That way we’d have a hard copy. Perhaps we could set it all out in a little folder. Then other people could read it without me having to hand over the diary itself. I mean, it’s the kind of thing you want to show folk – my brothers for a start, they’d be well impressed. But I’m a bit scared of lending it out. It could get damaged being passed around to all and sundry … .” Her voice tailed off then as though she was starting to lose confidence in the persuasiveness of her request. Looking down, she began to trace invisible patterns on the table in front of her. After a moment or two, she lifted her head and gave a hopeful grin. “At least you could run a copy off for me so I can keep reading it while I’m in here. What d’you say, Rosie?”

Rosie shrugged resignedly. “How can I refuse? I couldn’t live with myself if Velna ransacked your locker in the middle of the night.”
Besides, it’s not like I’ve loads of other stuff to do. My phone hasn’t exactly been going mad these last few days.
She suddenly found herself thinking of Gavin, and as she did, her stomach turned over. She hadn’t heard a thing from him since Friday when she’d called from the hospital. What was the deal with him? Had she unwittingly committed the ultimate crime in his eyes – cancelling a date with Mr
‘How Dare You? I’m The Most Fanciable Guy This Side Of Pluto’
? Well, she certainly wasn’t going to ring
him
. If his ego couldn’t make allowances for people being rushed to hospital and spoiling his neat, little designer plans, he’d just have to take his beautiful self elsewhere.

She suddenly realised Beth was looking at her, grinning. “Thanks, Ros, you’re a star! I’ll give it to you when we go back down to the ward. I’ll slip it in with some washing, then Velna won’t suspect a thing.”

“That should do it the power of good,” Rosie remarked dourly. “Surviving the trenches, only to be suffocated by a mound of dirty knickers. Shouldn’t think there’ll be many folk queuing up to get their mitts on it once this news gets out.”

Beth punched her playfully. “Don’t be daft. I’ll wrap it in something first. But we need to use a bit of subtlety, don’t we?”

Rosie smiled.
You missed your way, Beth. You could have been a dab hand at organising prison breaks.

____________

It was just after five when Rosie got home. She made herself a coffee and flicked through the mail. Nothing for her. Obviously Gavin hadn’t mastered the art of letter writing either. She looked down at the carrier Beth had given her. It wasn’t really a bag of dirty washing at all; just a couple of token nightshirts, not a pair of smalls in sight. A couple of neatly folded nightshirts, wrapped around something concealed in a Waterstone’s bag. Beth was an expert at subterfuge. Rosie sank back into a chair and positioned the bag on her knee.
Well, here goes. My mission, should I choose to accept it …

She reached inside and pulled the diary out. The first sight of it made her shudder. Something about its appearance unsettled her. Its battered leather cover was blotched in various places with dark, suspicious stains that made her think of ancient blood, and it seemed to give off a stale, musty smell which she found slightly disturbing. For a few moments she stared at it. Why on earth had she let herself be roped into this? She took a long, slow mouthful of coffee and sat back in her chair.

She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she’d never been able to stomach stuff like this. She remembered the grotesque, old gas mask Lydia Martin had once brought into class. That thing had given her nightmares for weeks. Another incident, even further back in her memory, started to surface in her mind. The time she and Ciaran had been parcelled off to their great-aunt’s, shortly after their parents had separated. That house had been like a museum. No – a mausoleum. Aunt Mariah had suffered from a strange, pathological sentimentality which had led her to cram her home with bizarre and ancient keepsakes, plundered from the houses of deceased relatives and kept as memorials to them. Rosie had hated that place. Its ghastly memory stood like a tombstone amongst all her childhood recollections. The two weeks they’d spent there had been hideous. She wondered if the experience still haunted Ciaran; it wasn’t a thing that could be easily erased from the mind. She looked down at the old diary again. This wasn’t going to be easy. Beth’s wonderful treasure left her cold. Still, she’d given her word.

After a bite to eat, she settled down at her computer and propped the diary open. What was it Beth had said? Something about getting up to entry number six –
August 22nd 1916
– whatever that all meant. Rosie looked down at the dedication on the inside of the front cover. At first glance, she was surprised at the size of the writing. It was tiny. She’d no doubt be wearing jam jar glasses by the time she finished typing this thing up. Still, the dedication was cute. Just the sort of stuff she’d expect from Gavin. Not.

She began to type. Owing to the smallness of the letters and the difficulty of deciphering some of the words, it took her over an hour to get through the first five entries and bring Beth up to speed. By the time she arrived at the sixth entry, her eyes felt tired and she decided to have a break. As she lay on her bed and looked up at the ceiling, she found her mind drifting back to long forgotten history lessons. And to Mr Lowry, a long forgotten history teacher.

It was all coming back to her. He’d had a passion for the First World War; two of his great-uncles had fought in it. The flower of a generation cut down, he was fond of saying. Lions led by donkeys, wasn’t it? She remembered he used to recall a story told to him by his grandmother, of the parade of proud, young lads in her town who’d so eagerly joined up to fight. Only a dozen of them had returned, and two of them so horribly mutilated, their families had hidden them away.
“Just think,”
he used to say,
“young lads, not much older than you lot, going off on their big adventure. Coming home, mere stumps of men – if indeed they came home at all.”
Old Mr Lowry; he’d certainly had a way with words. He’d have loved to have got his hands on a diary like this. Rosie found herself trying to picture Sam. Blue eyes, she imagined; yes, definitely blue eyes. And light hair. A similar height to herself – not too tall, not too small. Expressive too, at least on paper. Certainly in touch with his feelings. When was the last time she’d come across a guy so emotionally clued up? Gavin hadn’t even got off the starting block. She imagined the parade of proud, young lads in Mr Lowry’s tale and mentally inserted Sam in the line-up. Had
he
survived, she wondered? Had he come home? For Emily’s sake, she hoped he had.