Green for Danger (17 page)

“I suppose they couldn't sleep either,” said Esther. “Heaven knows how any of us are going to get through our duty to-day.”

“Thank goodness I'm off this afternoon,” said Woods.

They met Major Moon puffing around the park in a vest and running shorts. “You look like a heavenly little steam-roller!” said Woody, laughing at him.

“Got to keep the boiler down,” said Major Moon, patting it.

“You don't happen to have a couple of bob for a florin, do you, Major Moon? We've run out of gas, and Frederica won't be able to get her breakfast.”

“As if he would in a vest and pants!” protested Esther, laughing. “Don't worry, Major Moon, Frederica can easily get her breakfast in the Mess for once. Oh, gosh, we are late! Come on, Woody.…”

Freddi looked tired and nervy and was rather cross. “You're awfully late, Esther, and I'm simply worn out.”

“I'm so sorry, pet; and another awful thing is that I forgot about my turn for a shilling in the gas, and we've run out, so you'll have to have your breakfast in the Mess. We've done your h.w.b.”

“Oh, well, all right, don't worry; I can manage. I'll get in two or three hours' sleep before I skip up to town.”

“I'd forgotten you were going to-day; that's why Barney's up so bright and early.”

“He's got to go down to Heronsford and get the car; they're doing something or other to it in the garage and he doesn't think they'll ever have it ready. He's calling for me at half-past eleven.”

“Would you like me to come over and wake you up at eleven?”

“It'll be all right. I've got the alarm.”

“Well, no alarm would wake
me
after only two or three hours' sleep on top of night duty; not to count a slight matter of investigation into murder during the night. By the way, will the detective let you go?”

“We won't ask him,” said Freddi coolly.

“My dear, he'd be simply livid.”

“I couldn't care less,” said Frederica. She added: “Don't remind Woody that I'm going. She always thinks I'm going to fade away if I don't have my quota of rest, and she'll get hold of Barney and tell him not to take me. I'm as tough as old boots,” said Freddi, wriggling her tiny frame into her hideous outdoor coat; “but Woody likes to think of us both as shrinking violets. It does something cosy to her mother urge.” She tripped off out of the ward and across the garden to the V.A.D. Mess.

Gervase Eden was not a man who liked early rising; but he was up and dressed and walking up and down the drive by the main gates, when she went across, after her breakfast, to the cottage. She stopped short in her tracks at the sight of him, but after a moment's hesitation, went steadily forward. He came quickly up to her, putting out his hands in a familiar gesture, but hurriedly drawing them back. “Freddi—I wanted to talk to you for a minute.”

“Well, I don't want to talk to you,” she said, stonily.

He looked at her, astonished, and said rather sharply: “That hasn't always been the case.”

“It's like you to remind me of it, Gervase,” said Frederica.

He was obviously puzzled and hurt, but he went on doggedly: “Well, all right, if you feel that way, Freddi, it makes it easier to say what I was going to, or perhaps I needn't say it at all.”

“Well, don't then. I don't want to hear it,” said Freddi who would, nevertheless, have liked, from sheer curiosity, to know what it was.

His dark eyebrows met together in a frown, half-humorous, half-hurt. “Have it your own way, my dear,” he said, and stood aside for her to pass through the gate.

She remained uncertainly on the other side. “Well, come on,” he said, surprised. “Aren't you going to your quarters?”

“Yes, I am: when you've gone back to the Mess,” said Freddi, remaining where she was.

“My dear, good child—you don't think I'm going to attempt a seduction scene here in the middle of the main high road, at eight o'clock in the morning, do you? Or what on earth's wrong with you?” His face cleared suddenly, and he burst out laughing. “Oh, my lovely Freddi! You couldn't possibly be afraid that I was going to leap upon you with a hypodermic full of morphia, filched from the theatre last night …?”

“Of course not,” said Freddi, tossing her head; but she came forward, nevertheless, and, keeping well away from him, passed on towards the cottage. He stood looking after her, still laughing, and the sound of his laughter followed her into the house. “Damn him!” she said, slamming the door after her; and she took off her stiff white cap and flung it on to Woody's bed, and chucked her coat after it, and, unpinning her apron as she went, made her way wearily upstairs.

The window would not open. She struggled with it, standing in her pyjamas on the bed, and finally gave it up. “After all, I shall only be here two or three hours and I can't get up much of a fug in that time.” She crawled under the blankets, and the moment her golden head touched the pillow, was sound asleep.

Woods returned to the cottage an hour later. Without hesitation, she went to the kitchen mantelpiece and took a shilling from under the clock there; put it in the meter, and made herself a cup of tea. She sat at the table drinking it, staring ahead of her, with an expression of pain and weariness, a sort of desperate resolution on her face; and, after a quarter of an hour, cleared away the things and, moving very quietly, left the house and walked across the park without a backward glance. The heavy, musty smell of escaping coal gas crept after her down the stairs and was barricaded in by the closing front door. Frederica tossed and muttered in her little bed, and fell back again on her pillow and lay motionless.

4

The patients had been washed and tidied by the time that Esther came on to the ward; they lay dozing in their beds, trying to sleep away a few more minutes of their interminable day. She whisked up and down among them, taking temperatures, counting pulses, measuring out doses, examining dressings. The up-patients in their blue linen suits, were tidying beds or making toast on the gas-cooker in the little kitchen outside. Chalk and Cheese were in a fever of activity at the other end of the ward. The fractured tib. and fib. announced that his behind was aching abominably, and that he would very much like it rubbed.

The oldest patient in every ward is known as ‘Pop'; anybody tall is invariably addressed as ‘Lofty,' anybody short as ‘Tich' and anybody bald as ‘Curly'; for the rest the patients are called by their surnames, or in case of sergeants, by their rank; but there is no accounting for the vagaries of the British soldier, and the fractured tib. and fib. was known, for no apparent reason, as William. He had lived down the stigma of his pansy voice, and was popular in the ward; there was a certain amount of competition among the V.A.D.s. to attend to him, for, though every strata of society has been absorbed into the ranks of the Army, the vast majority of soldiers are still drawn from the so-called middle and lower-middle classes; and, as a sophisticated, well-to-do and extremely personable young man, he was vastly interesting to Chalk and Cheese. Esther effectively concealed, even from herself, that she shared in this rivalry but she could not prevent a small sensation of pleasure at observing her colleagues so very busily occupied elsewhere. She advanced with a bottle of methylated spirit in her hand, and, lifting him on one arm, slid away the air cushion, and began to rub his thighs and back.

“That's
quite
comfortable now,” said William with complete truth, seeing that it had never been otherwise.

“You haven't got a trace of bed-sores,” she said, unsuspiciously, lowering him again and tucking in his bedclothes.

“Thank you so much,” he said; and as she stood by the bed, he took one of her hands in his. “Look at your poor little fingers!”

They were beautiful hands, small and narrow, with tapering fingers and the perfect filbert nail; but rough work and hard water had chafed and stained them, and, with all her care, the nails were broken and blunt. “I'm ashamed of them,” she said, putting them behind her back.

“You should be proud. They got that way in a very good cause.”

“Well, I suppose so, but—look!” She spread them out in front of her, frowning down on the callouses on her palm. “A hideous great scar where I burnt my finger last week, and a bruise on my wrist, and a horrible black stain round my thumb nail … I used to keep them looking so lovely and now they're just a disgrace; my poor little hands!”

“Could you take them very quickly somewhere else?” said William abruptly.

She stared at him in astonishment. “Why on earth?”

“I'm seized with an irresistible desire to kiss them,” said the fractured tib. and fib., “and I'm afraid you might not be pleased.…”

She would not have been pleased, and she picked up her bottle of meths. and walked hurriedly away: but a small, bright ember began to glow very warmly in the depths of her desolate heart. She left Chalk and Cheese, however, to attend to the rest of William's needs.

At a quarter to eleven she made an excuse to the Sister, and, hanging her outdoor coat over her shoulders, ran across the grounds to the cottages, where Freddi would be in bed upstairs. At the door she paused and sniffed, in the sitting-room she paused and sniffed again, and a moment later she was running up the narrow stairs. Frederica lay on the little truckle bed; her short heavily curling hair was spread over the pillow in a network of deep gold; her face was scarlet, her arms flung up over her head, the fingers tightly clenched. There was a strong, choking, sickly smell of gas.

5

Panic. The hospital hummed and buzzed and seethed with rumour. Linley's been murdered. Frederica Linley's dead. Somebody left the gas on in the Woodites' quarters, and Freddi was found nearly dead. Esther Sanson saved Frederica's life. Freddi Linley saved Esther Sanson's life. Esther's dead. Freddi's dead. Sister Bates is dead. We're all going to be murdered in our beds.

Cockrill sent for Miss Woods. “I want you to come down to the cottage with me. Miss Linley's too ill and Esther Sanson is sleeping off the shock. Can you get away from your operating theatre for half an hour?”

“I dare say it'll manage to stagger along,” said Woody, who was, in fact, off duty.

They walked together across the rough grass, under the tall, bare trees, and along the drive to the gate; a strapping, deep-bosomed woman, and a little brown old man in a droopy mackintosh and a perfectly enormous hat. “I must have picked up my sergeant's by mistake,” said Cockie irritably, pushing it up from over his eyes for the fifth time. “I'm always doing it.” He was perfectly indifferent to anything but the discomfort involved by this accident. Woods gave a fleeting smile at the thought of the sergeant's probable feelings, but such distractions could not last for long, and she said, vainly trying to steady her voice: “This is all really rather awful, Inspector, isn't it?”

“Getting the wind up, are you?” said Cockrill.

Woody considered. “Well, yes; I think I am.”

“You women are all arrant cowards,” said Cockie contemptuously.

Woods looked about her at the bomb-scarred landscape and the blast-pitted buildings where she and a hundred other women were voluntarily spending the days of their service to their country; at the fields, pitted with craters, at the gaunt white limbs of trees broken down by a bomb the night before; at the ruins of the Navy, Army, Air Force Institute where a girl called Groves, whom she had hardly known, had been killed by falling masonry; at the patches of dry grass all round her, blackened and scorched by innumerable incendiary bombs; at the jagged fragments of bomb-casing littering the ground at her feet. For a moment she felt the earth shudder and rock beneath her, for a moment the guns thundered in her ears, and the drone of the bombers was torn by the shriek of a falling bomb … Six months of it. Six months of it, day and night, almost incessantly—and in all that time she had not known the meaning of fear; had not seen in the faces about her, the faces of middle-aged women or young girls, a shadow of panic or failure or endurance-at-an-end. One felt it, of
course;
some people had a queasy sensation when the sirens wailed; some peoples tummies turned over at the sound of a falling bomb; most of them would go through life with a humiliating tendency to fling themselves flat on their faces at any loud noise; but that was all. They were all much too busy and tired to be afraid. She smiled outright this time, and said with a lift of her strong black eyebrow: “Oh yes, we're terrible cowards, there's no doubt of that.”

Cockie had followed her glance, but he remained unimpressed. “You can take the blitz in your stride; but a couple of unexplained deaths, and you all get the jitters.”

“‘Unexplained' is the operative word,” said Woody coolly. “Personally, I'm much more petrified of the blitz on the nights that it
does
n't come; once it's there, it's there, but I don't like the uneasy waiting for it to begin, and I don't like waiting to be murdered—or to have my friends murdered.”

“What makes you think they may be?” said Cockrill.

“Two successful murders, one attempted one, and somebody running around with two grains of morphia in their pocket,” said Woody succinctly. As they passed through the gate and turned right towards the row of cottages, she added: “Here's our slum—the one this end, nearest the gate. Pardon the squalor, but this is the best that a grateful nation can do for its Florrie Nightingales in the year 1940.”

“It looks all right,” said Cockie ungraciously. “What are you grumbling about?”

“I'm not grumbling. I haven't got a word to say against it. But I thought you might be a bit surprised and I was being the complete hostess.”

“It depends what you're used to, I suppose,” said Cockie, standing in the narrow doorway, politely averting his eyes from a line of solid-looking underwear hanging across the little kitchen.