As Time Goes By (36 page)

Reluctantly Sam took the glass she was holding out to her, grimacing as she drank its bitter contents.

Johnny was alive and safe. They were both safe … She closed her eyes and then opened them again, reluctant to go back to sleep in case she
was dragged back into the nightmare from which she had just escaped. But the sleeping draught she had been given was too strong for her, and by the time the nurse came back down the ward Sam was fast asleep.

Weeping silently, Sally pressed the softness of Alex’s shirt to her cheek. She had picked it up, meaning to wash it for him before she left, but she just hadn’t been able to bring herself to part with it. It smelled of his skin and just holding it felt a little bit like holding him.

It was gone three o’clock in the morning and she still hadn’t done what she had come upstairs to do. The suitcase she had dragged from under her bed was lying open on the floor, the boys’ clothes folded neatly, ready to go into it, the drawers to her own cupboard open.

What was wrong with her? She should have had everything packed by now and be downstairs making up some sandwiches for their journey. She looked down at the case, her face contorting with grief. She just couldn’t do this. She couldn’t leave Alex.

But she must. She had to.

‘Sally?’

She whirled round. Alex was standing at the door.

‘What’s this?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing?’

Overwhelmed by her own despair she hadn’t even heard her bedroom door opening, never mind his footsteps on the stairs or his key in the front
door. And now all she seemed able to do was stand there clutching his shirt, caught between guilt and anguish, as he stood looking from her guilty face to the open suitcase.

‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’ he repeated.

When she didn’t answer, able only to shake her head in mute misery, he strode across to her, taking hold of her arm, tension darkening his eyes.

The smell of the hospital on his clothes jerked her out of her own despair, reminding her of where he had been and why.

‘Luke, how is he?’ she asked him urgently.

She saw his mouth compress as he looked away from her, drawing in a deep breath and then exhaling tiredly, and her heart went cold.

‘He’s gone.’

Sally could hear the heaviness of defeat in his voice. ‘No,’ she protested, her own position as a mother shrinking from the thought of any child losing its life. ‘No, Alex. He can’t be.’ Inside her head she had an image of the vigorous, healthy child Luke had been. ‘He can’t be,’ she repeated, but she knew from Alex’s expression and his silence that he was.

Luke was
dead
. She started to shake, her fingers curling into the shirt she was still holding. She tried to put herself in Daisy’s shoes, but it was too painful and she shrank back from the horror of such a reality.

‘We tried our best, but it was no use.’

He looked down at the suitcase. ‘You’re leaving
me.’ He said the words flatly, as though her going was something he had expected. Expected but not wanted – Sally could see that from the pain in his eyes. ‘You were going to walk out on me without a word and leave me to come back and find you gone! Why, Sally, why? I thought you and I … You said you loved me.’

She could hear the torment in his voice. It tore at her heart and she knew she couldn’t let him think she didn’t care.

‘I do love you. But I’ve got to go. I can’t stay, Alex.’

‘I’m not letting you go!’

‘You must.’

He looked at her and shook his head. He looked so tired, so beaten down, that she ached to hold him and comfort him.

‘I don’t understand, Sally. You say you love me and yet at the same time you say you want to leave me … It doesn’t make sense.’

Not to him, perhaps, but it made perfect sense to her.

Why had he had to come back like this, catching her when she was at her most vulnerable, making this so much harder for both of them? If she had just left without any explanation he could have hated her for going and that hatred would have set him free to find someone else.

‘I want to know what’s going on, Sally.’

‘I can’t tell you. Please don’t try to make me. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. I have to go, Alex. I have to – for your sake.’

Sally felt as though she was being torn in two, her fear for him driving her in one direction whilst her longing for him was pulling her in another.

‘You’re not making sense,’ Alex repeated. ‘And I’m not letting you go, Sally, not until I have the truth.’ His voice and his manner had changed now, becoming stronger and determined.

‘You can’t stop me.’

‘No? You’re still in my employ and if I were to report you to the authorities for leaving…’

Sally stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’d do that?’

‘Yes. Unless you tell me the truth.’

He meant it, Sally knew. She had no choice. She would have to tell him. Maybe only then would he understand that she had to leave and he had to let her go.

She looked up at him and took a deep unsteady breath. ‘All right,’ she told him, ‘I will tell you.’

Slowly, haltingly, even stopping at times to shake her head when Alex, plainly moved by what she was saying, took a step towards her, she told him the full story.

‘You planned to leave me because of that?’ Alex burst out at one point when she had been describing how the debt collector had threatened her with blackmail.

‘What else could I do? He said there’d be letters sent, and gossip spread, saying that you weren’t a good doctor, and she, the Boss, she could do it … I know she could.’ Sally gave a fierce shudder. ‘You don’t know her, Alex. She’s wicked through and through. And if they found out about you and me
it would only make things worse. I couldn’t let that happen, not even though I knew it would break my heart to leave you. I couldn’t shame you and bring you down on account of you loving me, I just couldn’t.’

‘Oh, Sally, Sally! I can’t bear to think of you suffering all of this … Listen to me. Nothing’s going to happen to me.’

‘You don’t know what they’re like and what they can do …’

‘Oh, yes, I do. In fact, I know a very great deal now about this woman, her sons, their threats and their wickedness, and even if I didn’t, do you really think for one minute I’d let anything or anyone part us?’

‘What do you mean, you know a very great deal about them?’

Very gently Alex took hold of her and then drew her towards the side of the bed, where he sat down and pulled her down to sit beside him. Then turning so that they were facing one another he explained, ‘Daisy Cartwright broke down at the hospital. She told us about this same woman, the Boss, and how she and her sons had been blackmailing some of the men working on the docks to force them to supply her with large amounts of tinned goods, pressuring them for more and more so that in desperation Daisy’s husband has been giving them tins that are condemned. Daisy didn’t realise this and opened one of them for Luke’s tea. When he started to be sick her husband, guessing what had happened, panicked and told her that they’d have
to keep quiet about it otherwise he’d lose his job. That’s why she didn’t come round straight away. Of course, once she saw how much worse Luke was getting she ignored her husband, but by then it was too late. I … I knew that as soon as I saw him, but one always hopes for a miracle, especially where a child is concerned.’

Sally could see how much the little boy’s death had affected him. ‘Oh Alex …’ Instinctively she leaned towards him, wanting to give him comfort and receive it herself.

He moved towards her and then checked. ‘What’s this?’ he demanded, looking at the shirt she was still clutching.

‘Your shirt from yesterday,’ Sally confessed. ‘I was going to wash it for you before I left and then when I picked it up, well, it smelled of you and I … I knew I had to take it with me so that I’d have a bit of you with me.’

‘Oh, my love, my love. How could you ever think that anything could matter more to me than you? Do you really think I’d ever let a bit of gossip, no matter how malicious or damaging, come between us?’

‘Alex, you’re a doctor – you’ve got your good reputation to think of, and your patients need you.’

‘And I need you.’ He removed the shirt from her grasp and wrapped her in his arms.

Sally didn’t even try to resist, instead leaning her head on his shoulder and giving in to her own need to have this wonderful precious closeness to him. But her conscience still forced her to tell him,
‘You know what the Boss can do to people, Alex. She’ll try to blackmail me like she did poor Daisy’s husband.’

‘Shush,’ Alex stopped her lovingly, as he held her close. ‘She won’t be doing anything to hurt anyone any more, Sally, I can promise you that.’

‘What … what do you mean?’ She moved slightly in Alex’s arms and immediately they tightened lovingly around her.

‘Daisy Cartwright and her husband agreed to tell the police what’s been going on. In fact, the police were there at the hospital with them when they left, and I have it on good authority that the Boss and the rest of her gang will be behind bars in a very short space of time indeed.’

Silent tears of relief slid slowly down Sally’s face whilst her body shook in Alex’s hold with the force of her emotions.

‘My dearest love, I can’t bear to think of what you’ve suffered, but it’s all over now.’

‘Yes,’ she began to say, but her assent was lost within the sweetness of Alex’s kiss.

‘I think I must have a very special guardian angel looking after me, Sally,’ Alex whispered huskily against her lips. ‘I nearly didn’t come home tonight but after we’d lost little Luke all I could think of was how much I needed your tenderness.’

‘Maybe it’s not one guardian angle but a pair of them,’ Sally suggested softly, knowing he knew what she meant when he looked at her and said huskily, ‘My two lost boys? I’d certainly like to think they were looking down on me with love.

You mean so much to me, Sally. Everything, in fact. Promise me that from now on there won’t be any more secrets between us?’

‘I promise.’

The half-packed suitcase lay ignored on the bedroom floor as Alex lifted her onto the bed and then joined her there, the only sounds now breaking the night’s silence not those of despair but the soft music of whispered words of love and shared kisses.

‘Wake up, sleepy head.’

The soft words, whispered teasingly close to her ear in a familiar and beloved voice, had Sam opening her eyes and then turning her head on her hospital pillow in disbelief.

‘Johnny!’ she exclaimed with delight as she looked from his dear face to the wheelchair that he was sitting in, and in which he had, she was sure against hospital rules, managed to get himself into her small private room. ‘Oh, Johnny!’ she whispered, her eyes filling with tears.

‘Well, that’s a fine welcome for a chap who’s managed to get himself a bit of transport out of a sister who’s tighter that a duck’s a—’

‘Johnny!’ Sam protested, giggling.

‘That’s more like my girl,’ he told her approvingly. ‘And you are my girl, Sam,’ he added, his voice deepening with tenderness. ‘Always and for ever. The only girl I could ever want, and just you make sure you understand that, and that you’re mine. Savvy?’ he told her, mock sternly.

‘Savvy!’ Sam agreed, giving a small blissful sigh of happiness when he reached out to put his arm around her so that he could kiss her.

It was a very thorough kiss and a very long one, and Sam, nestling against him, knew that she had never been happier nor more thankful to be alive.

‘That was a bloody brave thing you did for me, Sam,’ Johnny told her. ‘And a bloody daft one, an’ all, risking your own life like that.’

‘Mine wouldn’t have been worth anything to me without you in it,’ Sam told him shakily.

‘There you go, being daft again – how the devil is Mr Churchill going to win this ruddy war without you to help him?’ Johnny teased her.

‘He needs your help more than he needs mine,’ Sam countered stoutly.

‘Aye, well, as to that,’ Johnny was holding her hand and now he held it tighter, ‘I thought I was a goner down there, Sam, I can tell you. I knew that eventually the lads would find me, but I reckoned it wouldn’t be before the morning, not with that bomb not being on the urgent list and me only having decided to take a look at it on me way home when I came off duty. And by that time I would have been drowned.’

Sam made a small sound of anguish and shook her head.

‘It’s the truth,’ Johnny insisted.

‘What about your leg? I know you’ve broken it.’

‘Yes, but it’s a clean break, luckily, and the doctor says that it should heal easily enough. Course, he’s
told me that seein’ as they’re short of beds here he’s going to need to send me home, and that on account of me not being able to get around much under me own steam, I’m going to need someone around to look after me. Do you know anyone who’d be willing to take on that job, Sam?’

His words might be whimsical and light but Sam was only half listening to them. She was looking into his eyes, and what she could see there made her heart somersault as though it was in the hands of a juggler.

‘I … I think I might do.’

‘Mm.’ Johnny was leaning closer to her. He was going to kiss her again. ‘She wouldn’t be a long-legged blonde with the most loving heart there ever was, and a smile that could soften iron, could she, this girl you know?’ Cos if she is …’

His free hand was cupping the back of her head now, his breath warm against her skin.

‘’Cos if she is?’ Sam prompted him weakly.

‘’Cos if she is then I reckon that her and me are just about perfect for one another.’

‘Oh, Johnny.’

‘And what’s going on in here, may I ask?’

They sprang apart at the wrathful sound of Sister’s voice.

‘When you told me that you wished to thank Private Grey for her part in your rescue, Sergeant Everton, this was not what I expected to find!’

To Sam’s amusement, instead of looking chagrined, Johnny merely winked at the stern-looking woman standing in the doorway and said,
‘Didn’t want any other chap to beat me to it and propose to her before I could.’

‘You’ve asked Private Grey to marry you?’

Johnny’s smile broadened. ‘Not yet, but if you give me another five minutes or so, I intend to.’

After Sister had gone with a disapproving rustle of her starched uniform and a firm, ‘Five minutes and not a second more then,’ Sam whispered lovingly to Johnny, ‘It won’t take me five seconds to say “yes”, never mind five minutes.’

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but think of how much I’m going to enjoy kissing you, to celebrate, for the other four minutes and fifty-five seconds.’

‘It’s really kind of you and Russ to come and collect me and Johnny, Hazel,’ Sam thanked her friend and her brother, as she checked that she had removed everything from her hospital bedside locker.

She and Johnny were both being discharged today and then the four of them were going to travel down south together to spend Christmas with Sam and Russell’s parents.

‘Johnny said he’d wait for us on his ward. He wanted to say goodbye to some of the other men.’

Sam’s face clouded slightly. Although she and Johnny had been kept in hospital for only a few days, it had been long enough for Johnny to strike up friendships with some of the other soldiers on the ward, many of whom had very serious injuries indeed.

She and Johnny were so very lucky. Sam gave
a small shiver as the three of them left her small room and headed for Johnny’s ward.

The first person Sam saw when Russell opened the ward doors for them was Johnny. The second was the pretty young woman who was standing talking to him, laughing up at him. There was something about her that was vaguely familiar but Sam couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was at first, and then she realised that she was the young woman she had seen singing at the Grafton the night Johnny had asked her to dance. A friend from his past, someone who knew all those things about him that she did not.

‘What’s up?’ Russell demanded when he saw the way she was hanging back.

‘Nothing,’ she told him, but she knew that there was. Johnny hadn’t seen her yet. It was obvious that he was relaxed and at ease with the woman, and that she was someone he knew well. She had even put her hand on his arm as she said something to him, as though to emphasise some point she had been making. Their intimacy underlined for Sam with painful sharpness the fact that a large part of his life – all of his past, in fact – was forbidden territory to her, and that hurt, even though he had explained his feelings to her.

Johnny looked up and saw her, a tender loving smile immediately curving his mouth. He was on crutches now and Sam saw him saying something to the woman, before starting to make his way towards her.

She felt Russell giving her a little push, and then
she was hurrying towards Johnny, meeting him before he had managed more than a few yards.

‘Come and meet Sally,’ Johnny told her. ‘She was singing at the Grafton that night …’

‘Yes. Yes. I recognised her,’ Sam stopped him. ‘You have a lovely voice,’ she told Sally.

‘Thank you.’

They exchanged slightly hesitant smiles.

‘I must go,’ Sally said. ‘I’ve left the boys with my … with Alex, and since he really came in to see one of his patients, I’d better go and get them.’

‘Sal just popped in to see how I was doing. I think she’s been hanging on so that she can warn you about me.’

Johnny sounded as though he was joking but Sam could see the anxiety in his eyes and it brought her love for him surging through her, pushing aside her self-consciousness.

‘No one could tell me anything about you that would change the way I feel about you,’ she told him lovingly.

‘See, Sal, I told you how it was.’ Johnny was smiling happily now. ‘Sam’s the girl for me, and I’m damned lucky to have her. She’s the best girl in the world.’

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Russell joined in playfully. ‘My Hazel’s the best girl in the world.’

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you there.’

Sally turned round to smile at Alex as he came into the ward with her sons, just in time to join in the conversation.

‘Sally takes that title, in my opinion.’

Suddenly they were all laughing and joking together, the ice broken by each man’s determination to speak up for ‘his’ girl, the girls themselves laughing and sharing that look that said how each of them felt about the man she loved and about being loved by him.

‘No more going out playing in the mud for you,’ Russell informed Sam in a lordly older brother way. ‘You’ve still got some behind your ear.’

‘What? No, I haven’t. You beast, Russ,’ Sam objected, joining in everyone’s laughter when she realised he was teasing her.

‘How long am I going to have to wait before I get you to myself?’ Johnny managed to whisper in that same ear as they all left the ward. ‘It’s been for ever since you last kissed me.’

‘Fibber. I kissed you at six o’clock this morning, when I brought you your breakfast and pretended to be a nurse,’ Sam reminded him.

‘Oh, that was you, was it?’

‘Sam, Johnny, we’re never going to get that train if you two stop walking to kiss each other every few yards,’ Hazel scolded them as she turned round to see why they had fallen behind.