We've Come to Take You Home (10 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

T
HEY STEPPED OUT OF
the lift. Outside, on the street, there had been laughter and sunlight. But here, on the very top floor of the hospital, in this windowless dungeon of a corridor, if someone had told her that the world had come to an end, that she and her mother were the only two people left alive, she would have believed them.

‘Mrs Foster. Sam.'

A man, as tall as he was broad, with skin as black as the uniform he was wearing was white, was walking down the corridor towards them.

‘My name is Mac. How are you doing?'

A fluorescent light cracked and fizzed overhead.

‘The consultant's office is at the bottom of the corridor, Mrs Foster, second door on the right. They're waiting for you.'

He put his hand on Sam's shoulder.

‘What do you say to the two of us going in to see your father?'

Yesterday afternoon, when her father was transferred from the accident and emergency department to the intensive care unit, she and her mother must have come up in this same lift. But she could remember almost nothing about the ward itself and nothing at all about how they had got up there.

‘If you would prefer we could go to the family room and wait for your mother there. We have one right next-door to the ward. Have a coffee or some tea? It's your call.'

It had to be faced.

‘I'd like to see Dad.'

‘Follow me, Sam.'

They went through the first set of double doors, then a second.

‘You OK?'

‘Yes, I'm fine.'

Her memory of the ward, the people in it, what they had been doing, was all wrong. What she'd been expecting, and dreading, was gloomy darkness with doctors and nurses walking from bed to bed talking in hushed whispers. But this space was brightly lit, like a supermarket, and filled with people, some in uniform, but many not, clustered around a central desk, talking on phones and tapping at computers.

‘When a patient is very sick or heavily sedated we have to use a ventilator to assist them with their breathing…'

She followed Mac down a central corridor lined on either side with cubicles. To her left, lying on a bed, hooked up to a bank of machines, head bandaged and with an oxygen mask over their face, was a person. Man or woman, young or old, it was impossible to tell. A nurse, lifted her head, nodded and smiled, and then turned back to the syringe she was filling.

‘We use monitors, each bed has its own set, to keep an eye on heart rate and rhythm, blood pressure, blood oxygen level, respiratory rate and temperature. And then there are the pumps, or syringe drivers, which help administer fluids and drugs. There are probably more than a hundred machines in here. Each has an alarm. And they all sound different. There's one now…'

Loud and angry, and impossible to ignore.

‘There's nothing to worry about. It's usually just telling us that something needs checking…'

They turned right into the last cubicle. And there was her father.

‘Here, Sam, why don't you sit down.'

And what had seemed, just a second ago, perfectly possible was now the most difficult thing in the world. He sat down beside her.

‘You know, many of the patients who come in here do get better. Some who were so sick their families thought they would never return home. But they did. We had one lady who was in a coma for six months. When she woke up she didn't know she'd been in a road accident. She thought she'd been waiting to board a flight to America to see her family for Christmas…'

An airport, that's where her father would go, inside his head, if he was in a coma. Only he'd never been that good at waiting.

‘There's always hope. However, small and far away that hope may seem. And it's that hope which will help your father and which will help you and your mother help us to help him. Hope. And love. And those two things are almost as important, perhaps even more important, than any of the drugs, or nursing and medical skills that anyone, here on the ward, can provide.'

If only she could believe him.

‘Would you like to take your father's hand? That way he'll know that you're here, sitting beside him…'

The antiseptic, straight-lined, fluorescent whiteness of the hospital ward was replaced by a low-ceilinged, oak-beamed room with sagging cob walls and a beaten mud floor. The only light came from a single candle fluttering on a low table beside a bed, which was made out of wood rather than metal. The person lying on the bed, on a coarse woollen blanket, thrown over a lumpy, grey mattress, shiny with grease, was not her father but a child. It was a boy, his eyes were closed, and he was naked. Lying beside him was a very small, white coffin.

‘What are you frightened of?'

A woman stepped forward out of the darkness. The dress she was wearing was so thick with dirt it was impossible to tell whether it was brown, blue, black or grey. Hair hung in limp, tangled strands round and over a face that was so thin, so pinched, it looked as though it was collapsing in on itself.

‘Send him on his way…'

The woman stepped towards the bed. She lifted the boy, so pale, so still, so small, he could have been a doll.

‘You loved him when he was alive…'

She kissed the boy's forehead and then turned towards Sam.

‘Now love him when he's dead…'

Sam didn't know where she was. She didn't recognise the woman. Nor did she recognise the child. But what she did know was that he was dead and this woman was expecting her to lean forward, take him in her arms, to embrace him, even love him. Her mind fought, tried to pull away, break itself free, as her head bowed down.

She was warm rather than cold. And the smell of dirt had been replaced by the smell of chemical cleanliness. She was back in the hospital.

‘I can't.'

‘Why? Are you frightened?'

The white hand, punctured with tubes, lying on top of the sheet, was the same hand, the same blood and bones and skin that had saved her life. It had pulled her out of the river, when she'd fallen into the water just above the weir and was about to drown.

‘No. I don't know. Perhaps…'

But she couldn't touch it. It was impossible.

‘Sam, we've had many people like you, who've said, or thought, felt, the same thing. It's no big deal. But, you know, whatever you think, your father will know that you're holding his hand. He will sense it and it will help him get better…'

All she wanted was to get up out of this chair and out of this place, stuck between the world of the living and the world of the dead, a place with no hope and no future, as quickly as possible.

‘But what if he doesn't get better? What if he dies?'

It was out. She'd said it. She'd almost screamed it.

Mac took her hand. He held it tight.

‘Follow me.'

TWENTY-FIVE

June 1917

T
HE FIRST COURSE HAD
been served and cleared, there had been no complaints, and now the Major, his wife and their son were eating their beef-steak and kidney pudding. Or even cat-steak and kidney pudding. Jess took her mother's letter out of her apron pocket. There was a tinkle of a handbell from the dining room. Let them wait. Twenty seconds wouldn't kill them.

She'd washed all the glass, got the Prince of Wales' soup on – turnips, scooped out into balls, and then boiled in stock – and made the pastry for the bakewell tart when the Major's wife came down to the kitchen to insist that Jess iron the napkins for a second time.

And then the silver cutlery, which had already been cleaned and polished, had to be cleaned and polished again. Then the roses were too short, the lilacs too tall and the delphiniums too blue. And the knives weren't lined up straight, the wine glasses were all wrong and the damask tablecloth wasn't white enough. She'd had to clear the table, search out another tablecloth, and then lay everything out, all the silver, the glass, the candles, the flowers, all over again. And so it went on all through the morning, the afternoon and into the early evening.

Just when she thought that everything that could be done had been done, the Major's wife spotted a grease stain on the dining room carpet. What stain? Because thirty minutes later, and three trips up and down to the kitchen, the carpet looked exactly the same.

And, now, upstairs in the dining room, sitting at the perfectly laid table, with the candles flickering and the silver glinting, the son was telling his mother about her thief of a servant. But it didn't matter. Tomorrow she would be gone. The Major's wife's hands wouldn't be quite so lily-white after she'd stripped the sheets, turned the mattresses, cleaned the grates, brushed down the carpets and scrubbed the saucepans.

Jess tore open the envelope, read the letter and then folded it once, twice, three times, before tucking it back up her sleeve.

She slid, eyes fixed firmly on the floor, through the doorway into the dining room.

‘How can I expect my men to do their duty, to go out there and die, when the country they're supposed to be dying for doesn't give a damn. They come to me, men twice my age, with wives and children, a family to keep, to ask for help, to see if I can do anything and there is nothing I can do…'

The Major put down his glass.

‘Tom, please…'

He picked up the decanter of wine.

‘There has always been and will always be the rich and the poor, the fortunate and the less fortunate.'

He filled his glass.

‘That's how it is.'

She darted in and out clearing dirty dishes and cutlery.

‘And, to “do your duty”, for something, a way of life you believe in, that you hold dear to your heart, is an honour…'

She leant forward to take the son's plate. ‘Honour?'

His hand slammed down. She jumped back. A tear splashed down onto the table.

‘There's nothing honourable in being herded over the top like animals being sent to the slaughter, to be ordered to walk directly into the fire of a German machine gun, and to be left screaming in agony, ripped to pieces, hanging on the barbed
wire, begging for someone, for your best mate, to put a bullet in your–'

‘Tom, that's enough.'

The son closed his hand into a fist.

‘While the folks back home, your masters and betters, are sitting comfortably, smugly dining on their Prince of Wales' soup and their beef-steak and kidney pudding followed by bakewell tart with custard, your children are dependent on the kindness of a passing stranger for a husk of bread. That's not “society”. At least not a society, a way of life, a set of so-called civilised rules that I or my men either believe in or are prepared to die for…'

The son picked up his plate. His hands were trembling.

‘Thank you, Jess.'

She took it.

‘Ah, Jess.'

Was this her dismissal? Until a few minutes ago, until she'd read the letter, it had been something to look forward to. Now it was something to dread.

‘Yes, ma'am.'

She bobbed a curtsy.

‘Your letter, from your mother, how is she? Well I hope?'

Please don't let the Major's wife see that she was crying.

‘Yes, ma'am, very well.'

Jess bobbed a curtsey.

‘I've set the fire in the parlour, ma'am …'

She ran from the room, wiping the tears from her eyes, her mind following her body, up the stairs, to the first floor of the house. She pulled down blinds, closed curtains, turned back bedclothes. She then went up the stairs to the second floor and along the corridor, pulling down blinds and closing curtains in the nursery and the two empty bedrooms until she reached the youngest son's room.

A notebook was lying open on top of the bed, and, on a
page of that notebook, there was a pencil sketch of a girl. She was so alive, so real, Jess half expected her to walk off the page and out into the room. She looked up and caught a reflection of herself in the mirror over the fireplace. The girl in the notebook stared back.

TWENTY-SIX

S
HE WAS STANDING THERE
, on the bridge, looking down at the river below. And then she jumped. The water closed in over her head and she was sinking down, down and down. Strands of weed entwined themselves around her arms and legs. She clawed at it, fighting to free herself, but the weed's vice-like grip only tightened, pulling her down, down and further down into the black depths below. She gasped and gulped. Water, not air, filled her lungs.

‘Wake up, Jess, wake up.'

It had been a dream, a nightmare, nothing more. She was in the cottage, with her mother and father and her baby brother, and it was a hot summer's morning. She could already feel the heat of the sun on her skin. They were going to walk, the four of them, along the path that led through the meadows down to the river for a picnic.

‘Wake up, Jess'

She jerked upright. She wasn't with her mother and father by the river. She was in the basement of the Major's house and, standing opposite her, on the other side of the table, was the Major's son.

‘I'm sorry…'

She pushed her aching body up out of the chair.

‘Would you like some coffee, sir?'

‘No. Thank you.'

He was here to dismiss her.

‘Your parents…'

‘They've gone to bed.'

The gaslights on the wall flickered, rising and falling, twice in quick succession.

‘What's that?'

‘It's a warning, sir, to expect an air raid.'

The range was piled high with dirty dishes. It would take her half the night to scrub, wash, dry and put them away. And then she would have to get the range stoked up and the copper filled ready for the morning. But it was a job that had to be done if she was going to try and get the Major and his wife to agree to keep her on.

‘Where do we go? Is there a shelter?'

‘Your father refuses to take notice of them, the raids, sir.'

‘But, Jess, you don't have–'

‘And he insists that everyone else in the house does the same.'

Whatever the son of the house had to say, why didn't he just say it, get it over with and then go upstairs to his bed and leave her alone to get on with her work.

‘But what about you?'

She was more tired than frightened. At least if a bomb came she would get some rest – even if it was the sort of rest you never woke up from.

‘If it's going to hit you, then it will hit you. And there's nothing you can do about it. It's nature's way, that's what my father always said…'

‘Your father? Where is he now?'

A game was being played; he was the cat and she was the mouse, and she had no choice other than to go along with it.

‘He's dead, died in France, nearly three months ago now, sir,'

‘I'm sorry, Jess, that was thoughtless of me. My father mentioned it, in a letter, when he told me that your mother had written asking if you could come here…'

A plane hummed overhead.

‘Sir, about the bread and what I said, I'll make it up. I'll work extra hours…'

She had to convince him.

‘I'll do anything, anything at all to keep my place here. Sir, I'll do extra–'

‘My name's Tom. And there's nothing to make up. You did the right thing giving that boy the bread. You just never gave me a chance to say it. Jess, look at me…'

She kept her eyes to the floor.

‘Look at me, please, that's an order.'

She raised her head.

‘Please, sit.'

It was another order but the way it was said made it something else. They sat, together but apart, on opposite sides of the table.

‘Jess, upstairs, you were crying. You were trying to hide it from my mother but I could see. Please tell me what has upset you so much.'

She wanted to talk but could she trust him?

‘Our local vicar wrote to me…'

She pulled the letter out of her sleeve.

‘He got this address from the letter your parents sent to my mother offering me the job here. He found it in the cottage…'

She put it down on the table between them.

‘My mother's dead. She killed herself…'

A woman in a neighbouring village, back at home, lost not only her husband but also her two sons out in France. She hanged herself from the roof beam inside her cottage. Jess overheard her mother whispering to her father that it was an offence before God and that the woman would go to hell. And now she had done the same thing herself.

‘Do you know how it happened?'

His voice was very quiet, very controlled. It was also kind.

‘Her body was found in the river.'

Whether her mother had just waded in, her pockets filled with stones, or had thrown herself off the bridge, she didn't know. But she guessed it must have been at or near to the bridge where the river flowed over the weir before turning, deep and fast, out towards the sea. But what she couldn't guess was how her mother must have felt. That terrible choice that she'd had to make, in those seconds, before she threw herself off the bridge.

‘People who kill themselves go to hell. That's where my mother is. In hell–'

‘No, Jess, she's not in hell. It's the people left behind, who stood there watching, listening to the cries for help, without doing anything, they are the ones who go to hell, a hell of their own making, filled with fear and guilt, not the people who are–'

‘I did what I could. I didn't have any money. If I had I would have sent it…'

Was it a sudden decision, made in a moment of desperation? Or had her mother known all along, from the moment she wrote the letter to the Major and his wife, and then sent Jess away into service, exactly what she was going to do.

‘She knew that. You know that. You must never feel guilty. She was a good wife, a good mother, to you and your brother, and to me, much more so than my own mother, when I was a very young boy, growing up in this house. A kind, brave, generous woman, who deserves peace, not punishment.'

Peace could be the signing of treaties and the silencing of guns or the certainty that when you went to bed at night you would still be alive to wake up the next morning.

‘When are you going back?'

But peace wasn't only about the end of war – it was having a roof over your head and food on your plate and knowing that the people you love would always return.

‘To France? Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next week, I really don't know. When the telephone call comes, that's it, I have to go.'

‘What you said, about the guns, the wire, the bullet in the head. My father, did he die like that?'

‘Don't think about how he died, Jess. Just remember how he lived. Think about the good times, the two of you, you and your father, had together.'

Something stirred inside her. Was it hope? And, if it was hope, hope for what?