He was as different as a man could be. With other men he was obviously decisive; the sort that a group looks to for leadership: does not even look, she sensed, just accepts without thought. He was twenty-five. Had a DSO which – so Sister Scotland said – was rare and hard to get in the Royal Navy. And had commanded a destroyer, though apparently briefly and because his senior officer had been killed.
She could love him; did love him, if she was honest, despite her vow; she had known it from the moment she had felt for him in her very womb when she heard those bombs coming and had flung herself on top of him for a reason she had since tried to analyse: was she trying to save him, or make sure that she too died if he did? Were you being brave or cowardly, Nurse Exton? Was that the same sort of question that sometimes made men embarrassed, as Ned was about talking of his DSO? That an action was often capable of having two motives so that one was never quite sure which was which? Yes, she loved him; no, she didn’t know whether she had covered him with her body to save him or die with him. But a bomb which killed him, she now realized, would have killed everyone else in the ward anyway, but at the time…
It was all crazy; up to that moment, until the sound of the bombs, they had done nothing more than have routine conversations in that ward, ‘Nurse Exton’ and ‘Lieutenant Yorke,’ or ‘Mr Yorke’ for a change. He had (although she did not know it at the time of the bombs) written her a note, a formal note in some ways, but one she had since read a dozen times.
Now, after this afternoon’s walk, she understood that note so much better: using a series of almost stilted phrases he was in fact trying to discover if she was engaged – the thought that she might be married, let alone widowed, had obviously not occurred to him. It was a wonder that one of the other nurses in a piece of cattiness had not called her ‘Mrs Exton’ or ‘Mrs Brown’.
Would he, she thought inconsequentially, ever know how lucky he had been not to lose the arm? He did not realize that the surgeons had not dared to amputate for fear of more septicaemia; that the torture of having the arm put in hot water every four hours was a fairly desperate attempt to control it, and it had not worked… He would never know, unless Sister Scotland (or perhaps Nurse Exton) told him, that what saved his arm was that the hospital managed to get a new and experimental drug still known only by the maker’s number, M & B 693, and which Ned had called ‘horse urine’ and disliked because it had to be injected in large quantities into his buttock and was painful, and had a brownish colour more reminiscent of a stable than a hospital ward.
It had made him so depressed – Sister Scotland had warned him that it would – and probably for that reason alone he had hated it so much that he had not realized it was the reason for the septicaemia clearing up and the swelling subsiding as the pus stopped forming. All he knew – and from the pain it caused it was understandable – was that the hot fomentations had stopped, the arm and hand had started healing, and now the whole arm and hand was a livid-looking mess with brown, dead skin which would peel off, and the hand would be normal again one day, crisscrossed with scars but usable.
Luckier, for all the pain and the grumbling, than Pilot Officer Reginald Brown, who had dived a Miles Magister plane into the ground ‘while on night operations’ three years ago. She had accepted the official explanation until she realized a Magister was a two-seater trainer, and not used for operations. Eventually she had discovered what had happened: Reginald and some of his fellow pilots, celebrating a birthday, had been drunk and decided to ‘buzz’ the aerodrome. They had taken off without permission in the only three available planes. The Magisters had fooled around until Reginald had flown into a row of trees, killing himself and so injuring his friend in the other seat that he too had died before dawn.
It had been just a drunken party; newly-qualified young pilots trying to behave like seasoned men. It was the time of the ‘phoney war’; the favourite song had been that nonsense about hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line. Before Dunkirk; before the Battle of Britain. War to them then had been a glamorous game: the first those young pilots had known of death had been Reginald’s crash. How many of them had since survived the Battle of Britain?
At the time everyone had been so sympathetic towards the young widow; they had not really understood why she had not gone to the funeral – there had been time – and the authorities were still writing to her about the pension. Everyone, she thought as she walked along the lane, had been so understanding, but none of them had understood.
So she had become a nurse. She had struggled through the training, often feeling so faint she finished a class bent over with her head between her knees, breathing deeply. She had studied Gray’s Anatomy and read the latest reports written as a result of experience in the fighting in France and the bombing – that shock could kill a person as surely as visible wounds. But nursing had sounded more glamorous than it was: a patient might be a hero, but he still needed bedpans and bottles, his temperature had to be taken and his bowel movements recorded. No man was a hero to his valet, they said, and likewise no patient could be a hero to his nurse. Ned was one of the most sensitive patients she had ever nursed: a septic arm was smelly, and it embarrassed him that the nurses had to put up with it – even while he was retching himself.
She looked at her watch. She was on duty in four hours’ time.
‘We must be getting back.’
‘Do you really sleep in the mornings, when you go off duty?’
‘I did this morning,’ she said, ‘even though we had a quiet night. It’s so peaceful down here. The birds singing, the wind in the trees…one gets the feeling of centuries passing with no change. There’s always such a senseless bustle in London; everybody seems to be hurrying but no one really gets anywhere.’
‘No bombing down here.’
‘You hear them going over, though, and it’s horrible to think they’re carrying bombs…’
She watched that distant look come back to his face. A glass screen seemed to slide over his eyes; he went a thousand miles away; a thousand years almost. For moments, minutes even, he became another man obviously reliving memories – of what? Not women, from what he had said; probably something to do with the sinking of the destroyer. He had said the Aztec was bombed. A British destroyer sinking amid bursting German bombs was so far from this Kentish lane – yet perhaps not; at the rate the Germans were sinking the merchant ships, they might yet invade successfully.
She could imagine the hand and arm inside that bandage; she could only guess at the memories inside that head… He was jealous of her memories (what a bitter irony) but deliberately shut her out of his.
‘Clare,’ he said suddenly, ‘you’re having a boring afternoon.’
‘I’m not, but I shall if you say things like that.’
‘But I’m so serious, so dreary. I’m not laughing or making jokes. I’m just rattling on about the war, instead of cheering you up.’
She took his hand again. ‘Yes, you are boring,’ she said lightly, ‘but because you won’t rattle on about the war. I’ve been trying to get you to tell me, but you fob me off as though I was an inquisitive old aunt.’
‘But why on earth do you want to hear about all that?’ He was genuinely surprised; that much was clear to her and she was not sure whether to be angry or exasperated. Instead she stopped walking, so that he had to turn to face her. She brushed her hair back with a hand.
‘Ned – tell me once again, am I just a convenient companion for winter walks while you convalesce, a romantic sort of junior Florence Nightingale who sneaks you a goodnight kiss, or…’
‘Or,’ he said quietly.
‘Very well, give me a chaste kiss now…’
He bent and kissed her, and she said: ‘You want to know about me; about what I did before I became a nurse, before I met you…’
‘Of course I do; is there anything odd about that?’
‘No, but what about you? Didn’t you exist until they brought you to the hospital?’
‘Of course I did!’
‘“Of course”! That’s twice you’ve said it. Can’t I be curious about your life before then? About what made you the man you are? Can’t I be jealous about the girls in your past? About the places you’ve been to, the jokes you share with other people, but not with me?’
‘But there’s nothing. It’s all been flat until now.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
He shrugged his shoulders and winced at the pain in his arm.
‘Well, you’ve been in love, you’ve married… You were happy, even though briefly. You have happy memories. My memories don’t involve happiness; they involve months of war.’
‘Oh Ned, you are so jealous of my late husband. He’s dead; he’s no rival to you! I’ve tried to avoid telling you about him because it doesn’t matter: you’re here and alive and…’
‘Yes, but I’d prefer to know.’
Suddenly she stood back from him, her face taut, her eyes narrowed as though she had just made a great decision; she looked incredibly beautiful and, he realized, suddenly distraught and incredibly vulnerable.
‘I’ll tell you then,’ she said. ‘I hated him. He married me because I have a private income and because he wanted to stop people talking. I found out on our honeymoon that he was homosexual. The pilot killed with him was his lover. He joined us in Rome for the honeymoon. Our married life lasted four days. I was too embarrassed to divorce him, so I was still legally “Mrs Brown” when he was killed. Now you’ll hate me because I disgust you: I was a homosexual’s alibi, but I didn’t understand.’
He took her in his arms as she began to sob.
‘Oh, it was so disgusting… I’m still – oh Ned, I’m a married woman but I don’t know – I mean, I’m still – oh…’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been incredibly stupid and clumsy.’
He held her for two or three minutes, until she stopped sobbing, and with both of them realizing there was nothing more that needed saying, they continued walking along the lane, hand in hand.
As the lane turned gently to the right, rising slightly to give a better view over the fields, Clare nodded towards a clump of half a dozen trees forming the corner of a meadow. ‘Those large lumps in the top branches – what are they?’
‘Magpies’ nests.’
‘So big?’
‘They’re made of mud and sticks and so thick that you can stand underneath with a shotgun and the pellets won’t penetrate.’
They stood for a few moments looking across the meadow and Clare said: ‘It looks as though there’s been a paperchase through here!’
‘Large pieces of paper – there’s a bundle of it over there, caught in the bushes.’
Before he could stop her she had run a few yards along the lane to a gate, scrambled over it and walked across to the nearest piece of paper. She stared at it and then went over to pull the bundle from the bushes. She came back and gave him one of the sheets. The paper was poor quality, greyish, the kind used for newspapers. There was a message printed on one side.
He read it, half unbelieving, half amused. ‘We’ve lost the Battle of the Atlantic!’ he said. ‘It says so here.’
‘I know, I’ve just read it. Who…’
‘German planes dropping leaflets. That bundle – the chap forgot to cut the string so the whole thing dropped. The rest must have fluttered down during the night. Better than bombs!’
She shivered. ‘These figures – millions of tons of shipping sunk by the U-boats. Are they true?’
‘Certainly not true, because pamphlets are only propaganda. But they’re sinking quite a few ships – at the moment we’re certainly not winning the Battle of the Atlantic.’
‘Will we?’
‘We have to,’ he said grimly, ‘otherwise we’ll starve.’
‘But here,’ she waved one of the pamphlets, ‘the Germans say they’re sinking more merchant ships than we’re building. Surely that means eventually…’
‘Exactly! Unless we stop the sinkings and increase our building.’
‘Can we?’
‘We can’t; not Britain alone. But now the Americans have come in – just wait until they get going.’
‘How long will that take?’
Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Nurse. Still, there’ll be a few more cuts in the meat and cheese ration before the extra ships are launched, you can be sure of that.’
‘But a week’s cheese ration is only the size of a matchbox now!’
Yorke looked her up and down without smiling. ‘It suits you. Two matchboxes and you’d be plump.’
‘No, seriously, Ned.’
‘Seriously, Nurse. No one’s starving.’
‘But we’re losing a lot of ships.’
‘Yes, and the Germans are losing a lot of bombers over Britain, and tanks in the Western desert. And U-boats in the Atlantic, too. Don’t forget that.’
‘What do we do with these pamphlets?’ she asked.
‘Take some back with us – the others will love to see ’em. You can offer the bundle to this boy coming along on a bicycle – he can probably get a penny each for them at school.’
‘Should we, Ned? Isn’t that what the Germans want – everyone to read them?’
Yorke laughed and waved the paper. ‘I hope everyone does: it’s such blatant propaganda, so strident… It’s written in such a shrill and hectoring way that even if it was true, no one would believe it.’
Clare was far from convinced. ‘Then why do the Germans drop them?’
‘Because they don’t understand the British for a start. Tell us we’re beaten and we start waking up and trying. But if the Germans were winning the Battle of the Atlantic, why bombard us with pamphlets? Why not save paper and wait for us to starve? If all this was true,’ he tapped the bundle she was holding, ‘we’d have to surrender by Easter or starve to death.’
Finally she smiled. ‘Stop looking at me like that. I’ve been putting on a little weight, but it’s all the potatoes.’
‘So you won’t be surrendering by Easter?’
‘Not to the Germans,’ she said, and waved the boy on a bicycle to a stop. She held out the bundle. ‘German pamphlets. The man in the bomber didn’t cut the string. There are plenty more in the fields over there. Are they any good to you?’
‘Cor!’ the boy exclaimed, snatching the bundle excitedly and inspecting it with the eye of an expert. ‘I just found a dozen or so sheets over in Nicholson’s fields, but I didn’t realize others drifted this far. Must have been the wind. ’Ere, lady, can I really ’ave this lot? I get a penny each at school and Mrs Rogers – she runs the Red Cross – is on at me to give ’er some to sell to buy bandages and things. She charges tuppence. Promised she wouldn’t undercut me. These ain’t damp, neither. Them I got last week was useless – it’d rained for hours before I found ’em. In Hatch Park they were, and I reckon some poacher got a good picking first.’
By now Clare was holding Ned’s hand again and smiling. ‘Very well, you can have the bundle, and there’s a trail of them across those fields. But make sure Mrs Rogers has as many as she can sell.’
‘Oh, yus, miss. It’s the bandages, you see; they’re very expensive.’ He caught sight of Yorke’s hand in the sling. ‘I bet you know that! You must have a bob’s worth on that hand. ’Ere, mister, are you one of the chaps from the new place they’ve just started in Willesborough?’
Ned nodded and the boy grinned. ‘I ’ear they’ve got a smashing lot of nurses there. My dad works for the electricity, and he had to go there yesterday to read the meters. Made my mum jealous, he did, the way he went on about them. Anyway thanks for these!’
With that he turned his cycle round and pedalled back the way he came, riding without hands and clutching the bundle to his chest, the trail of loose pamphlets forgotten.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Clare said. ‘A few more leaflet raids and we could make enough money to build a new hospital.’
‘And I’ll be the recruiting officer who chooses the “smashing nurses”!’
Sister Scotland wore what Clare usually referred to as her ‘official face’. Standing beside Yorke’s bed, she coughed and said: ‘Mr Yorke…’
‘Yes, Sister?’
‘About that arm of yours.’ When Yorke raised his eyebrows, startled by the ominous tone in her voice, she said: ‘It’s not really responding. The physiotherapist is very worried by the limited movement in the wrist.’
‘It should move more by now?’
‘Yes, at least, we had hoped so.’
‘And the fact it doesn’t means?’
‘It means either the muscle is more damaged than we thought, or you aren’t concentrating on your remedial therapy.’
‘There’s no much else to concentrate on,’ Yorke grumbled.
Sister Scotland stared at him. ‘I thought you were concentrating on long-distance walking. I’ve been expecting Nurse Exton to tell me the Admiralty had started patrols over the North Downs, collecting German pamphlets.’
‘Oh, you’ve heard about them?’
‘A small boy called at my office this morning – he came with his father, who works for the electricity company – asking if any of the patients had found any more pamphlets. It seems his first consignment came from you – he described you as “the gentleman with a bob’s worth of bandages on the left hand” – and he’s sold them all.’
Yorke looked out of the window, where a weak sun shone through fast-moving patches of cloud. ‘If we hear any German bombers tonight, perhaps you’ll let me go for a walk tomorrow, Sister?’
‘Of course, of course, Mr Yorke. You are walking so well there’s no need for a nurse to accompany you.’
‘No,’ Yorke agreed, smiling, ‘but you know how risky it would be for patients to wander round these lanes alone. Nurses, too – they might be hit by a bundle of propaganda leaflets.’
‘One has been already,’ Sister Scotland said dryly. ‘I’m very worried about her.’
‘The diagnosis was made yesterday,’ Yorke said quietly. ‘The prognosis – that’s the correct word for the future, isn’t it – is excellent.’
The Sister looked down at him, silent for a few moments, obviously considering what he had just said. ‘Yesterday, eh?’
‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘The specialist took his time,’ she commented gruffly. ‘A month, almost six weeks.’
‘He didn’t have all the papers in the case.’
Sister Scotland nodded and as she moved away said quietly, ‘Work on that arm; it’s touch and go, but now you have an extra incentive.’
As he watched her moving among the other men in the room, pausing beside each bed to chat, he thought of Clare. Somewhere in this old house, in one of the bedrooms, probably in one of these same iron-pipe beds, she would be sleeping, because she was still on night duty. It was tiring for her but gave them the most time together: she was allowed out for a couple of hours in the afternoon; she spent the whole night on the ward. She would be sitting at the small table over there, in the middle of the room, a tiny figure in a tiny halo of light thrown by the green-shaded lamp. She would be in profile. She would, during the night when she thought he was asleep, look round at him. And while she worked on the pile of papers and wrote reports, he would watch her without her realizing it. Childish, romantic, pointless – yes, all of these, and yet so important.
‘Mr Yorke…’ He looked up to find the physiotherapist waiting. She was a tall, bony woman in her early thirties, mousy-brown hair bobbed short and her face having the well-scrubbed, fresh look of a games mistress…’has Sister told you?’
‘About the extra exercises?’
‘Yes, two one-hour sessions. It’ll be tiring but it might make all the difference.’
All the difference, she did not add, between spending the rest of your life with a withered arm or an ordinary one which is badly scarred but useful.
She took the exercise instruments from the trolley and gave him first the little device for improving his grip; two pieces of wood shaped to fit his palm on one side and his fingers on the other, and separated by several small compression springs. For the next ten minutes he had to grip the exerciser and keep on squeezing.
‘The Spanish Inquisition was never like this,’ he grumbled.
‘It probably was, but I’m sure the victims didn’t complain as much. After all, this is for your own good.’
‘And that,’ Yorke said, grunting as he squeezed, ‘is exactly what the Inquisition said. They put their victims on the rack to save their souls.’
‘I’m not interested in your soul,’ the woman said with mock viciousness, ‘it’s your body I’m trying to save!’
He continued squeezing. It seemed to take an age to reach a hundred; finally at four hundred she said: ‘That’s ten minutes.’ She took the grips and began the series of exercises for his wrist.
‘The postman’s been,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘I have some letters for you. Three. You get them when you’ve finished your exercises.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t pry. There’s a long one in a manilla envelope. On His Majesty’s Service. From the Admiralty, I think. Two handwritten ones, a London postmark and a local one.’
‘Local?’
‘Willesborough. Here. The little sub-post office is only just up the road. Whoever wrote it could have saved the price of a stamp and delivered it by hand.’
For someone who didn’t ‘pry’, Yorke thought to himself, the physiotherapist was well informed about the letters. All the other patients were due to have exercises, so presumably they too would get their mail afterwards, like giving a horse a sugar lump after a difficult jump.
‘And your name’s in the newspaper,’ she said. ‘In the list of people who’ve been given medals.’
‘Oh, they’ve Gazetted it at last.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, ‘but don’t you want to see the paper and find out what you’ve got?’
‘I know already.’
She was clearly disappointed. ‘I’d have thought they’d keep it secret until they put it in the paper; a sort of surprise.’
There was no point in explaining that for security reasons the names of people getting awards were often not Gazetted until months after the awards were made: German intelligence officers could not then work out from the officers and men receiving awards the activities of individual ships. Sometimes, when it was known that a particular ship had been involved in a battle, the names were listed together; but when the Admiralty wanted to keep secret a particular loss, the names were scattered.
‘What did you get it for – the DSO?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Being a good boy. I made everyone eat up his porridge. The Admiralty are very keen on porridge. Gives your stomach a warm lining on a cold day.’
‘My boyfriend is serving in the Tropics.’
‘The porridge packet says that in the Tropics it’s for external use only.’
‘I’ll write and tell him. Might help keep his privates cool.’
Yorke laughed. ‘Yes, a sovereign remedy for avoiding hot privates.’
‘Don’t be vulgar, Mr Yorke,’ she said severely. ‘My boy-friend’s a sergeant; he worries about his men. They’re privates. It’s infantry, you see.’
The exercises changed and his arm ached; the whole forearm felt as if it had been pummelled with a mallet. ‘The bandages are chafing.’
‘They’re bound to, but the skin’s too soft to exercise without them; your hand would blister.’
If only Clare was the physiotherapist. No, that was not fair on either woman: Clare would not be tough enough, and this woman certainly knew her job. More important, she knew how to make her patients do the exercises without bullying them.
‘There!’ she said, putting the various exercise devices back on the trolley, ‘That’s it for this morning. I’ll be back this afternoon. And here are your letters. And the paper with your name in it. They seem to know all about you. Quite a story, eh? Didn’t know you came from these parts.’
He knew which letter he would open last, because he wanted to savour it, but which first? He tore open the Admiralty letter. Pale blueish-grey paper; the usual formal introductory sentence. Then the orders: as soon as he was discharged from the hospital as being fit for active service he was to report to the Admiralty, and in the meantime indicate when that was likely to be. There was a room number and a four-letter initial, ASIU. What department was that? It must be new; the usual ones were familiar enough – DNI for the Director (or Department) of Naval Intelligence, DOD for Operations Division, and so on. This must be some new and crackpot department which allowed the Second Sea Lord (who dealt with appointments) to find quiet jobs for deserving wrecks like Lieutenant Edward Yorke, DSO, RN – providing he had two arms that functioned. If his left arm seized up then he would be invalided with a pension and one of the large silver lapel badges called ‘The King’s Badge for Loyal Service’ (presumably intended to stop old ladies giving you white feathers) and turned out to graze in civilian clothes with the assurance that the King and his various helpers could now beat Hitler without Lieutenant Yorke’s one-armed assistance.
There was a great future for a one-armed man of twenty-five who had been trained only as a naval officer, especially one who had specialized in navigation, so that a dagger sign followed his name in the Navy List. The world was waiting with open arms for unemployed dagger navigators; they were needed to help old ladies drive their cars through the centre of London, making the best use of the petrol ration.
The letter from his mother was, as usual, a calm note which ignored the existence of Hitler, the Luftwaffe, rationing or bombing, and which was a measure of her personality since she was living in the town house in Palace Street, only a few hundred yards from Victoria Station. She described how she had been able to find some ‘artificial boarding’ to cover up a few broken windows – no mention that the glass was shattered by the blast of bombs – and the loose tiles had been replaced. She was more concerned lest she had said the wrong thing to newspaper reporters who had called to find out details about him. ‘The fact was,’ she wrote, ‘that they seemed to know a great deal more of the interesting part of your life than I did; I was able to tell them only that over the years the men in the family had tended to go to sea. There was an amusing moment when we found out that one of the reporters, who was a bit tipsy, thought I said “tended to go to seed”, but a colleague of his, a nice young man who had lost a leg in the Western Desert (trod on a landmine, I think he said), seemed to watch out for that sort of thing.’
Then, with her usual forthrightness, she commented on his reference to Clare. ‘I was interested to read about your beautiful young widow – you seem to prefer small women. But beware of widows in general. The advantage is that they have few illusions left about men; they have learned all the lessons and if they fall in love with you it is likely to be both genuine and without any illusions. The disadvantage is that if they loved their first husbands, then the new husband is competing with a ghost and will always lose. He might in fact be a much more satisfactory husband, but he will never be certain because he’ll never believe his wife’s assurances. If you love her,’ his mother wrote, ‘then trust her and dismiss from your mind that there was ever a predecessor. You wouldn’t be jealous of an earlier lover – in this modern age most young women have had one – and a brief marriage differs from a brief affair only in the legal aspect.’
Yorke folded the letter and put it on his locker with the manilla envelope from the Admiralty. Clare, whether as Miss Exton or Mrs Brown, was welcome at Palace Street. He wished his father had still been alive to meet her; but on the other hand the last few months of the war would have broken his heart: with Winston Churchill he had tried in the House of Commons to warn the nation against Hitler and persuade it to rearm; but like Churchill he had been howled down. Peace had been the fashion, the Labour Party was against rearmament and the Conservatives against taxation, and the majority of the people had been prepared to pay any price as long as it cost nothing. Well, the bill was now being presented – not just their sons’ lives but, in the bombed cities, their own as well.
The third letter…the writing small, educated, by a woman with a strong personality who had studied Greek. She had written it the second night after telling him about her husband.
‘I am sitting here at the desk in the middle of the ward looking at you sleeping. The lamp is so shielded that you are just a shadowy figure. The four other patients are snoring but you aren’t. You don’t snore. I don’t know if I do. I wonder if you are dreaming. Dreaming of your loved one is, I believe, a myth; I’m told (by a doctor specializing in psychology) that however much two people are in love, they usually dream of other people, and if the dreams are erotic, then they are almost never of the ones they love. Are you having an erotic dream at this moment? Who is the lucky girl? Who has flown into your sleeping thoughts and roused you in a way I cannot because I am Nurse Exton, on night duty in Ward BI? I hate her; I am jealous; I want to walk over and shake you until you wake up, so that she has to go away, because I know she exists only while you sleep and no matter what you might try to do to keep her, she will vanish the moment you wake.’
He continued reading the letter slowly, picturing her at the desk – which was now empty except for the lamp with the green shade which looked like one of the first electric lights ever made – and thinking of her watching him as he slept.
‘You were jealous of the memories you thought I had of my previous (unhappy) existence, but I wonder if you realise how many happy new memories I have already even though Lieutenant Yorke and Miss Exton have known each other such a short time? Just think of yesterday – the look of shock, amazement and then relief on your face when I told you how it had been: I knew then that although you might have a girl in every port, I am the important one. And then finding the German leaflets. How right you are, about the Germans not bothering to drop them if they were really winning. Anyway, I have put one of them among my few treasures, to look at again when I am an old lady.
‘Then, already surprised how well you knew the countryside here, I suddenly realized the coincidence of your name and the name of the big house we can see in the distance, so I cycled over there. Yes, the old gardener finally broke down under fierce interrogation by Nurse Exton, even though he felt loyalty to the family meant he should say nothing about anything to anyone.
‘So that was your home until the war began. How your mother must have hated giving it up “for the duration”. And you grew up there. I still can’t picture you as a small boy. Did you collect birds’ eggs and have a catapult? Did you get measles and have to stay in bed and eat jelly and blancmange? And, my darling Ned, all those paintings that are boarded up in various rooms (the gardener let me see the house) – are they portraits of your forebears or dreary landscapes, where the varnish has darkened so much that high noon over the Weald of Kent now looks like midnight in Limbo? Don’t tell me, and I liked the mystery as I walked through what I suppose was the dining room and saw those rectangles of bare wood, the size of picture frames. I realize they must protect paintings on the actual wall, or set into the plaster. Perhaps some long-dead Yorke commissioned Rubens to cover the walls with chubby pink and naked cherubs.
‘How I wish I could have shared those early years there with you. And yet had I done so they would not seem so intriguing now. The fun is speculating about the boy Ned; knowing might be disappointing! It is better to imagine rather than to see a small boy with measles sitting up in bed counting his birds’ eggs and repairing his catapult and then feeling sick because he’s eaten too much blancmange.’