At half a dozen junctures in my life I have longed, with particular passion, for the gift of reading the future. In fact, I suspect I see less of what lies ahead than most people. Tea leaves, spilled salt, black cats, magpies, mirrors, molten lead—none of them speak to me. I have never had the glimpses others claim, often smiling sheepishly: good news about money; oh, my, a tall dark stranger; a journey soon. So I like to think that if I had glimpsed what was coming between Samuel and me, I would never have allowed my admiration for him to turn to love.
The autumn after D-Day, Samuel was asked to take a Maxillo Facial unit to Europe. We spent his last night in Glasgow at the Trattoria and throughout the meal he enthused about his new position. During World War I there had been almost no way to treat men with facial injuries; as a result, many had died of shock or been left
severely disfigured. Now these small mobile outfits, nicknamed Max Factors, would treat casualties within hours and prepare them for the reconstructive surgery to come. No more tannic acid, Samuel boasted; he had hopes of constructing a portable saline bath. Trying to set aside my own hopes, I asked questions and listened. He was going to Europe to join the great final push, and it seemed useless to expect a declaration.
At the gates of the hostel he pulled me to him. “Don’t forget me, Eva,” he whispered.
Next day he was gone, and a few weeks later letters began to arrive in his crabbed writing. He wrote about his patients and, although he signed himself Love, he did nothing to nudge our relationship out of the vague romantic terrain where we had spent the last year. When one of the residents invited me to the cinema, I made excuses and, sitting in my room sewing on buttons, wondered why.
As Samuel’s unit followed the Allied forces deeper into Europe, his correspondence grew increasingly erratic; there would be no letters for a month, then two or three in a week. Meanwhile, the newspapers carried the first accounts of the Nazi concentration camps. I read them with pained attention. I still haven’t had any Jewish patients, Samuel wrote, but I hear terrible rumours.
Now that the war was ending, there was no longer the same sense of urgency in the infirmary, and the unit, under dour Dr. McFarland, was a very different place. Several of our friends had switched to private nursing, and Daphne was toying with the idea. One afternoon when we were out trying to buy soap, she persuaded me to accompany her to an agency.
The woman behind the desk looked up as we came in. At the sight of our uniforms a smile split her face. “Girls like you,” she
gushed, “are worth your weight in gold.” Then, seeing Daphne’s sceptical gaze, added, “Almost.”
She flicked through the cards on her desk. “You can take your pick. Mr. Sinclair, he has a hernia. Mr. Morpeth wants a companion for his wife—nerves, he says. We also have some permanent positions. We had an inquiry the other day from a public school for a matron.”
The name of the school rang in my ears, a low sweet note; it was in the valley where Barbara had grown up. “Could I have the details of that?” I asked.
“Certainly. A very nice position for someone ladylike.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Daphne smirking. As soon as we were out in the street, she burst into speech. “What a frightful woman! And all those hypochondriacs. Imagine being with someone’s hernia day after day. That’s not my idea of nursing.” She fulminated all the way to the tearoom.
Shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday, when I hadn’t heard from Samuel for almost a month, a crumpled letter arrived. I opened it on the tram to the library.
Conditions are dreadful here. Women beg on every street corner. The children are tiny and bowlegged with rickets. The only thing that makes it tolerable is knowing that the war is coming to an end. If it weren’t for the politicians, we’d have peace already.
Now I can ask you the question that I’ve been wanting to ever since you rushed to defend me from the woman on the bus. I love you, Eva. Will you marry me? We could go to Canada and start a new life together.
The vehicle lurched; so did my heart. Sometimes Samuel’s handwriting was hard to read, but he had written the word marry with especial clarity. For a couple of stops I was filled with happiness. Then, just as swiftly, happiness ebbed and the companions loomed. Until Samuel knew about them, he could not really ask me to marry him. Their existence was like his being a Jew: a fact so central that without it nothing else about me could be fully understood.
Two days later I was still struggling with my reply when I returned from night duty to find Samuel waiting at the door of the hostel. “What are you doing here?” I exclaimed. Before he could answer, I was in his arms.
He had three days’ leave which, minus travel time, gave him twelve hours in Glasgow. As we walked down the street he kept tight hold of my hand, and I was too excited to care who saw us. At Tommy’s Café he ordered fried bread, black pudding, and beans.
“And you’ll be wanting tea,” said the waitress.
“Enough tea to float the Armada.” He smiled at me. “You don’t know how often I’ve dreamed of breakfasts like this. All we get in the morning is a kind of rusk—the sort of thing they give to pigs and babies.”
I laughed, but I did not feel like laughing. Sitting opposite him, I could see that his face was much thinner. His jaw was dark with stubble and his hair straggled dully. More than any single feature, though, I sensed some deeper change; this man would never waltz a sister round the ward.
Over breakfast he described his journey. How calm the Channel was and how everyone on deck sang “The White Cliffs of Dover.” I waited for him to talk about the Max Factor unit and their slow advance into Europe, fill in the gaps in his letters, but when I asked
about his patients, the state of the towns he’d passed through, his face grew sombre. “Later, Eva,” he said, “when we have more time. I’ve seen things I thought were impossible.” For a moment he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again we talked instead about the unit here and his old patients.
We lingered at our table until even the friendly waitress showed signs of impatience. Then we walked to Queen’s Park, a few streets away. Before the war the park had been famous for Lily’s beloved botanical gardens; now it was filled with rows of vegetables. We sat on a bench near a herbaceous border where the carrot fronds waved young and green. I slipped my arms free of my cape. Beside me Samuel leaned back against the creaking wood.
“Did you get my letter?” he said.
“Yes.” With every breath I felt myself approaching the crucial moment, as years before I had run towards the high jump. Soon I would launch myself into the air, and there would be nothing to do but trust that I would clear the bar.
“I owe you an apology,” said Samuel. “I know I must have seemed closemouthed during this last year. I couldn’t think about my own life until I was sure the war was settled and that I had done whatever I could.” He flexed his hands, the same gesture I had seen him make at the White Hart, and I thought of all the stitches he’d sewn, the eyelids and noses and jaws he’d made. “Will you marry me, Eva?”
And now he was looking at me, lips parted, eyes glowing, the old Samuel. “You don’t mind,” I said, “that I’m not a Jew?”
“Of course not. That would be as bad as you minding that I am.” He reached for my hand. “I did wonder if you might convert so that our children would be Jewish, but we can talk about that.”
Two elderly men strolled by. The taller of them nodded, and I
saw how Samuel and I must look to passersby, both in our uniforms, young, in love. “Samuel, do you remember Neal Cunningham? That boy on the unit who kept everyone awake?”
As I spoke, the air rippled. The woman sat very upright at the end of the bench, her handbag in her lap. During my many meetings with Samuel, she and the girl had never once appeared; it had seemed as if, finally, they knew when they were unwanted. Suddenly I remembered what had happened with Catherine Grant, and my vow of secrecy. But this was different. If Samuel was going to be my husband, I had no choice. I tried to convey this to her in a quick sidelong glance.
Samuel let go of my hand. “Neal Cunningham. What was wrong with him?”
“His face was coated in tannic acid; he died before you could operate. He had nightmares about giving the men in his troop the wrong orders.”
“Eva, what does this have to with anything? Were you in love with him?”
“No, no, I only talked to him once.” I had meant Neal’s story as a prologue to my own. Now dismay at the misunderstanding made me heedless. “I’m trying to tell you that I see people.”
Beside me I felt the woman startle, but I was too busy watching Samuel to care. Just as certain words in his letters had resisted all my attempts to decipher them, so now his expression eluded me.
“What do you mean?” he said at last. “People?”
“Well.” I fixed my gaze on his boots; they were creased and muddy. “I see—” How dark the mud was. “They’re like people, but no one else can see them.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“All my life, since I was five or six.” Not daring to raise my eyes, I counted the crisscrossings of his laces as I described the companions. Samuel asked what did they do, this woman, this girl, and I explained how they had saved me from the gypsies, dug me out during the air raid. “So,” I concluded lamely, “I thought you ought to know.”
I had hoped his questions were a sign of belief. Now I realised he had simply been pursuing a diagnosis. “Eva,” he said, “many children have imaginary playmates. You were a lonely child and you grew up with two adults who were always talking about a dead woman. No wonder you got confused. But you’re an adult. You don’t need pretend companions. You have me.”
I had been up all night, and the weight of exhaustion fell upon me. An unpleasant metallic taste, like that of the pennies from the bottom of Lily’s handbag, flooded my mouth. To my left lay the woman’s fury; to my right Samuel’s scepticism. All I wanted was to retrieve my words and rest my head on his shoulder.
He was still watching me. “Do you have control over them? Can you summon them at will?”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Because if you can, then you can send them away.” He spoke quickly, firmly, as if he had solved a difficult problem.
“Samuel, please. Let’s forget about them. We’ve only got today, and there’s so much I want to ask you.”
He ignored me. Something else had occurred to him. “Do they ever appear when you and I are together?”
“Occasionally,” I said, in a low voice.
“So we might be married, we might be in bed, and you’d be chatting away to your so-called companions.” He stared up and down the empty path. “Are they here now?”
I gasped. The woman had seized my arm as she had the night of the air raid. Tighter and tighter she squeezed until I whispered, “No.”
Among the carrot fronds two sparrows squabbled. Overhead a plane droned, perhaps returning from France or Belgium.
“Samuel,” I went on, “it’s not important. How much longer will you be in Europe?”
Without bothering to answer, he stood up and began to pace back and forth in front of the bench. The woman watched for a couple of turns. Then she too rose and stepped into his path. She stood waiting while Samuel walked towards her. He took one step and another, shortening the distance with greedy strides.
I clutched the bench. When only a few feet separated them, I whispered, “Please don’t.”
The woman gave me a triumphant smile. As Samuel took the final step, she vanished.
He noticed nothing. “You’re telling me,” he said, “that you regularly talk to ghosts and that it isn’t important? If you were a patient, I’d send you to a psychologist or a neurologist.”
“You don’t have to be mad to see a ghost,” I said. I told him about Father Wishart and the ghost of Sir William.
“Wishart is a Catholic priest. Listen, Eva, I don’t think you’re mad. I think you’ve indulged a common childhood fantasy to a dangerous degree. But I’m convinced it’s within your control. You just have to decide you don’t want to see them again, and you won’t.”
He stopped to bend over me. I had known all along that Samuel was committed to the tangible, to what he could touch and heal, but his ready sympathy, his ability to imagine his most damaged patients
as whole, had made me hope he could understand my situation. Now, gazing into his cold brown eyes, I saw that I was wrong. Perhaps when we first met he might have, but not since he had been in Europe. “Can we walk?” I said.
As we strolled around the park, I asked about the Max Factor: Had he been able to implement the saline baths, was it hard to keep dressings and instruments sterile? But Samuel kept returning to the companions. He was not satisfied with my tacit denial. He wanted me to swear that I understood the error of my ways, that I would give them up. Over and over I repeated that this was beyond my power. When that made him angry, I pleaded fatigue, said I had exaggerated, that they were irrelevant.
As the day wore on my despair grew. My confession had rendered every remark suspect: nothing I could say would convince him of my affection. Only in the dark cinema did we escape the spiral of argument. At Glasgow Central, while we waited for his train, Samuel told me he would not write. “I’ve offered you my life,” he said. “It’s up to you, whether you want me.”
That morning he had embraced me as if I were all that he needed to be whole. Now, on the station platform, he raised his arms, not to draw me close but to keep me at a distance; a stranger might have taken us for casual acquaintances.
Samuel’s train left at eight, and I was on duty at nine. The night was an endless series of small difficulties. The staff nurse had a headache, a sergeant complained that his Tobruk plaster pinched. By the time I returned to the hostel, I was too tired even for breakfast.
Hours later I woke with a feeling akin to anger, not with the woman—she was just doing what she’d always done, trying to keep
me to herself—but with Samuel. If he loved me, he should try to understand. He should be grateful to the companions for saving my life. While I slept two chairs had overturned. Beneath one of them I found the piece of paper from the agency with the address of the school: Mr. Frank Thornton, Headmaster, Victoria College, Glenaird.