The Nurse's War (22 page)

Daisy and Connie exchanged a speaking look. The tragedy had affected Lydia’s mind, that was plain to see.

‘Don’t look like that.’ She had caught their glance. ‘I know I sound mad, but I’m not. As a nurse I look after the living, I patch and mend and make better. Or I’m supposed to. But I didn’t, did I? I destroyed. I’m not worthy of the job any more, not after what I’ve done. So I’ll look after the dead and the dying instead.’

The girls waited for an explanation. ‘It’s simple,’ Lydia said. ‘I’ll train as ambulance crew. I understand they take on the most grisly of jobs.’

Daisy shuddered, remembering too vividly the sights she had seen only the other morning. Could Lydia really be intending to comb bomb sites for broken bodies and severed limbs?

‘You do know what it entails?’

‘I know. It’s ghastly, but that’s the point.’

‘And you think that somehow it will help you?’ Connie put in.

‘It will help me pay back what I’ve taken away. It may even help others. Families that have seen their loved ones destroyed. Like Willa’s family.’

Her decision, it seemed, was not for discussion. She turned abruptly and walked out of the room and they heard her thumping up the stairs, grief and determination marking her every step.

‘Well!’ Connie exclaimed.

‘I suppose she must do what feels right for her.’ Daisy envied the certainty. Lydia would go into action and gradually purge herself of this terrible stain, while she could only suffer a slow, gnawing remorse.

‘It seems a bit extreme. The injuries we’ve seen have been devastating enough. I don’t want to think how much worse an ambulance crew might have to face.’

Connie was still battling with the notion that anyone, even Lydia, would willingly embrace the horrors she was bound to encounter.

‘Everything is extreme at the moment.’ Daisy sounded exhausted. ‘And we haven’t had the funeral yet.’

Daisy went to bed that night, knowing she wouldn’t sleep. Lydia had chosen renunciation. The girl was giving up a job she loved, a job she did well, in the hope of finding redemption. A cleansing, a purging, after what had happened. If only she could do the same. If only she could unlive the last few days. Her mind kept coming back to Grayson. For all kinds of reasons, it had never been a good idea to get close to him. She’d always known she couldn’t give him her heart, not fully, and even if he’d accepted the little she could offer, what kind of future would they have had? They were from wholly different worlds and she would rather not imagine his mother’s reaction, tucked away in her comfortable flat in Pimlico, to a girl who was the wrong class, the wrong background, even the wrong skin colour.

Lydia’s words had reawakened the old uncertainties. Daisy had always felt as English as anyone around her, but what did she really know? Her mother had been English, that was certain, but her father? When she looked in the mirror, her dark hair and dark eyes, her almond skin, suggested a different story. None of that worried Grayson, she knew, but it would almost certainly worry his family. Her intense guilt over Willa reinforced an older, deeper feeling that Grayson and she were not meant for each other. Only bad things could come from a refusal to recognise it. And there was no longer a need for them to meet. Gerald must have collected his papers by now and be readying himself to leave. His departure to a new world meant the death of their marriage. So why not the death, too, of this difficult relationship with Grayson? As long as Mrs Oliver’s distraction worked, she would meet him tomorrow as arranged. Tuesday was the day before Willa’s funeral, and that seemed entirely fitting.

Every day, when he woke to the realisation of where he was, Gerald felt physically sick, as though someone had punched him squarely in the chest. Everything about living in these rooms, this house, this district, was depressing. Deeply depressing. The maze of mean little streets, the grey soot, the dirt. Even if he hadn’t been menaced by the fear of discovery, he would have had to get out of the place. He’d expected never to return here, had believed
he’d left his history far behind. The day he’d joined the Indian Army as a raw recruit, the angels had sung to him. His parents had come to the station to see him on his way to Sandhurst, he remembered. He’d forbidden them to come any further than the London terminus and with good reason. He might be eighteen and wet behind the ears, but he was able to envisage only too well the reaction of senior officers to a Cockney tailor and his Cockney wife. He’d blenched at the thought of any meeting. Paddington was the nearest his parents would ever get to Sandhurst. Unbeknown to them, he’d already changed his name and was planning a final escape.

He’d written, of course, from time to time, but gradually as the weight of his studies increased and he’d felt the effort to succeed grow ever more difficult, his letters had dwindled to nothing. He’d paid them just one visit, a day that was forever engraved on his memory, the week before the posting to his first regiment in India. They’d splashed out on high tea and invited the neighbours into the ‘best’ room, a cold, dank, unused parlour, to partake in their reflected glory. That was how he’d seen it then and he had winced with shame. Now it looked very different. Now, after his years of pretence, of deceit, of wickedness—yes, wickedness—he could see they were merely proud. The costly ham tea was a way of saying they thought he was wonderful. They’d always thought he was wonderful, scrimping year after year to send him to Hanbury, listening attentively to any small remark he might vouchsafe during
those wretched holidays spent in Spitalfields. He could never wait to get back to school, just as he couldn’t wait that day to return to Sandhurst, to his new-found family of brother officers. And then to India, the final break with his embarrassing origins and the dreary streets in which he’d come of age.

It was another irony, poetic justice perhaps, that he’d ended back on those very same streets. He had become Jack Minns again. Only this time without the parents who had worked to give him his new life, a life that had collapsed irrevocably. In his trouble, he’d returned to them. Yet one more irony. He’d trudged across Europe, desperate for food and shelter, lying and stealing his way from country to country, taking any job that offered, anything that would buy bread, cheese, a drink of some kind to drown the wretchedness. Then at last those white cliffs soaring before him and his heart lifting with them. At last, home. He was home and soon he would walk the familiar pavements. But it was a dream that turned to nightmare, as so much of his life had. Instead of the joyous homecoming, he’d faced a landscape laid to waste and two heaps of newly turned earth in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. Unmarked, unloved, pauper graves.

But this morning was different. The sun was shining and the wind had dropped. He peered through the streaked window on to the street below. It was the first real day of spring, and the first of his new life. He strode over to the mantelpiece and took down Daisy’s letter. He must have
done that a dozen times in the last few days, reading her note over and over again, just in case the words might have changed. He supposed it was because he couldn’t quite believe his impossible quest had become possible. But it had, and the words he read were always the same. Whenever he thought of the liberty they promised, it was difficult to suppress a shout of elation, difficult to stop himself from dancing on the spot.

And today was the day. Tuesday. By now Daisy would have done her stuff and the papers would be safely lodged at Rigby’s. For a moment he thought of his wife with fondness. He had to admit that she’d treated him decently. She’d been honest and loyal. And she was quite a looker. She always had been, of course, or else he would never have got himself tangled in the mess that was their marriage. He’d begun to think it a shame that she wasn’t coming with him. She was his wife after all. But Grayson Harte would make sure the papers he’d authorised were for one person alone. And even if there had been tickets and a passport, he doubted she would have agreed to travel. She was in training for a job she evidently enjoyed. And she didn’t enjoy him, that was clear. It piqued him to know it, but he no longer held sway. Better, then, that she stay in England for however long this interminable war lasted, though he doubted it would be for much longer. A matter of months in his estimation, before Hitler would be marching along Whitehall. Vaguely, he hoped Daisy would be all right when that day came, that she would survive
the occupation. But he couldn’t allow himself to worry too much about her; he had his own future to consider. He was about to become a citizen of a new country, a young and thrusting country, and it was better that he arrived there untrammelled by past attachments.

He laced his shoes and readied himself to creep downstairs. These days, that was the way he moved in and out of the building. The men below had been unusually quiet the last day or so, but he didn’t trust them or their plans, and he was always conscious of the need to remain as unnoticed as possible. As if on cue, he heard the first sound in days of a raised voice. Then another voice weighed in. He sighed. Couldn’t they have kept their quarrel until he’d visited Rigby’s and was back safely in his hideout? The journey to the shop wasn’t going to be so easy now that they’d woken from whatever torpor had kept them silent. Here and there he caught the odd word or phrase shouted or hissed with some violence. Hindi words.

One man, the one with the deeper voice, the one Gerald reckoned was Anglo-Indian and seemed to be in charge, was proposing something that the other was vehemently against. There were several
can’t do its
and
must do its.
Then
only chance. Duty
was another word. He couldn’t make much of the argument but whatever it was, it was stopping him from collecting his pass to safety. Hopefully, the men would quarrel themselves into silence. But the row went on, even escalating in noise as the minutes passed. They no longer seemed to care they might be overheard.
This was serious. Before they’d always hushed each other, aware that he was living only a thin ceiling above and could understand their language. But this time their argument was so fierce, they’d forgotten the possibility of an eavesdropper.

Perhaps he could slide past their front door while they were engaged in shouting at each other, and stay out until he saw at least one of them leave the house. There were plenty of places in Ellen Street he could conceal himself. And the men never left the house together. In fact, he didn’t think the darker-skinned man went out at all. With one of them absent, he could risk slinking back into the building. He creaked across the floorboards to the far end of the room. The attic formed an L shape, the foot of the letter L jutting out over what must be a storeroom beneath, but because of the angle it made, it was possible to see into the room below. Just a few feet—if he pushed his face close up to the small window and looked sideways.

He did just that and what he saw caused him to stagger backwards. The men were locked in combat, no longer shouting but uttering thick grunts mingled with the occasional rough curse. Their arms were around each other’s neck, trying to wrestle one another to the floor, their fingers poking at unprotected eyes. Then one of them lunged and his kick sent the other man sprawling across the floor. Gerald was back at the window, pressing his forehead hard against the glass. The fallen man had dragged himself from sight, the other man too. Presumably ready to follow
with another kick. But no, the man was on his feet again and backing into Gerald’s sight line and the other, the lighter-skinned man, had followed and had his arm raised. There was a flash of silver. The flash of a blade? Gerald felt nauseous. He had no wish to look longer and dragged himself to the nearest chair. It was a while before his heart stopped jumping.

A strange quiet reigned, as though the house was holding its breath. He could hear nothing, not even a curse. What was he to do? He made a rapid decision. He would go. If the men were still engaged in a life and death struggle, they would be far too busy to pay him attention. And he had to get to the shop. He had to get those papers. But he would still be cautious, opening his door very, very slowly and then taking one step at a time, hoping against hope that the stairs remained silent beneath his soft soles. He had reached the landing below and was about to take the first step towards the ground floor, when the door to his left was suddenly flung open. It was the door to the men’s room, which meant they must have finished their quarrel—at just the wrong moment.

They had. Gerald looked aghast when he realised what he was looking at. The man standing inches away was breathing heavily and his eyes were wild, but it was his shirt that transfixed. A white shirt, at least it had once been white, but now splattered an ominous red. And beyond the man, beyond the open door, Gerald’s scared eyes took in the body of the second man, lying prone, lying in a pool of
red, that was trickling a path through the floorboards. Time slowed almost to a stop and for Gerald it seemed as though the scene in front of him had been going on forever. In fact, it must have taken seconds before he jerked himself into full consciousness and took action. He fled precipitately, jumping the stairs two at a time, desperate to get to the front door. It was only seconds before the blood-spattered man moved too, pounding after him in a frantic bid to block his escape. With every fibre of his body, Gerald strained to reach the door. If he could get there, lift the latch, flee along the road, he would be in reach of green space, in reach of bushes and trees that could conceal him from … a murderer. The word drummed through his brain even as he pushed his legs to go faster. All thought of collecting the papers had vanished. All he could think of was survival. He reached up and grasped the door latch. The footsteps behind him grew loud in his ears. He pulled up the latch and twisted the doorknob. The door opened an inch, two inches. He could feel the fresh air of the spring day. He could feel the man’s breath on his neck.

C
HAPTER
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