‘Oh, it’s terrible – those poor men. What must it have been like for them, knowing they were so far from home with no hope of rescue?’ Margaret Mackay sighed, smoothing her newspaper out on her lap as I took ointment, a dressing and bandages from my nurse’s bag.
Laying my things out on the little table beside her chair, I glanced at the headline of the article she was reading:
NIGHT ATTACK ON ALLIED SHIPPING CONVOY.
I couldn’t read the rest from where I was standing, but immediately, I remembered the body Bill and I had found washed up on the rocks in the bay two days ago, and that piece of metal from a ship with bullet holes in it. I wasn’t sure what had happened after Bill and I parted, as I’d taken Eirik straight back to the croft, but when the sailor was buried up at the church yesterday morning there had been a crowd of people there to pay their respects. I had gone along too, and spotted Bill, looking pale and tired, at the edge of the churchyard. Our gazes met briefly, and he nodded at me, but by the time the service was over he had gone. Had the sailor been one of the men who’d drowned in that attack?
Margaret had her bad leg propped up on a little footstool. I carefully unwrapped the bandage already wound around her calf, noting with some relief that at last the angry-looking wound was beginning to heal. I felt satisfaction, too – the satisfaction I’d felt as a young girl, knowing I’d been useful to my father; that I’d felt when I was training and my teacher smiled at me and said, You’ve done well today, Hedda; the satisfaction I’d felt upon walking into Oslo hospital on my first day as a qualified nurse, proud of my neat uniform and the hard work I’d put in to get here, sure that this was the start of a long career helping others.
That day I’d seen Magnus Tonning for the first time; I’d giggled about him with my friends, and we’d all agreed that he was a good-looking man. Little had I known, then, what would happen next: being singled out for praise; the requests to work late with him; then him asking me to accompany him to a conference in Bergen, where he kissed me for the first time. I’d been so young; so naive. I’d known he was married, and had been shocked at his actions at first, but when he’d told me that his marriage was an unhappy one – that both he and his wife had agreed, discreetly, to see other people – I’d believed him. Or rather, I’d convinced myself that I did, and that that made it OK. He had such a forceful personality that I didn’t feel able to refuse him; I was scared he might make things difficult for me at the hospital if I did.
‘How is it looking?’ Margaret asked.
I smiled at her. ‘Much better.’
‘Oh, thank goodness for that.’
As I put ointment on the wound and re-dressed it, Margaret went back to her newspaper, frowning and occasionally shaking her head and making small, sad tutting sounds. She often read while I was treating her. When I’d finished tying the new bandage, I sat back on my heels for a moment and looked around the room. It was as neat and sparse as always, the table under the window still cluttered with half-built radio sets, but one thing had changed: it was warmer now. The first thing I did when I got here for my daily visit was build up the fire until it roared. Margaret had protested at first, saying that Charles would be worried about wasting fuel, but when I’d relayed this to Doctor Gaudie he’d bellowed, ‘Let him worry! If he’s going to be that bloody stingy, I’ll bring the woman some peats from my own supply.’
Although his outburst had taken me by surprise, he’d been as good as his word, telling me to keep an eye on the pile stacked up in the little wooden store beside the Mackays’ outhouse and to let me know when Margaret needed more. I had still been worried that Charles might take offence, but a few days ago, when I’d gone to collect Eirik from school, he thanked me stiffly for taking such good care of his mother. ‘I’m afraid I had no idea about her leg, or that she was letting the house get so cold,’ he’d said. ‘What with the school and my Home Guard duties, I am out for most of the day, and she tells me she’s fine, of course.’
After that first visit to Margaret I’d been annoyed with Charles, thinking that he had been neglecting her, but it seemed I had got him wrong. ‘Don’t worry about it, please,’ I had reassured him. ‘She won’t be allowed to get in such a state again.’
Charles had sighed. ‘She’s stubborn, that’s the trouble. Still thinks she’s a young woman and I’m a child!’
‘I suppose none of us like to think we’re getting older,’ I said.
He sighed again. ‘No, I suppose not.’
Truth be told, I still felt terribly sorry for the man. It couldn’t be easy for him, having to care for his mother on top of all his other duties, especially when his own health was poor. Sometimes, when I was visiting Margaret on a Saturday or a Sunday and he did not have Home Guard duties, he would be there and we’d talk a little. He would ask me about Norway, saying that as a younger man, he’d wanted to go to Scandinavia; he’d once dreamed of being a painter or a writer and had planned to write a book about his travels. But then the Great War had come along, and that dream had been lost forever.
It was odd, because in some ways, I felt I knew more about Charles than I did about Bill. Certainly, if a stranger had asked me to tell them both men’s life stories, it was details about Charles I could have furnished them with. But I felt much more at ease with Bill, and not just because we were close in age. With him, I could be carefree; I loved the stories he told me of his life back in Canada about his parents and friends there, and of his exploits when he was training to be in the RAF. The way he described the things that he’d done were so lively and vivid I could almost imagine I’d been there too. Charles, friendly though he was, always seemed to be always holding something of himself back, deliberately keeping me – and everyone else – at a distance.
But who could blame him? I knew all too well what horrors war could bring; the corners it forced you into and the terrible things it could drive you to do. Even now, the face of the German officer still lingered in my nightmares, and Eirik still suffered with bad dreams, too. What must it have been like for Charles in the trenches, surrounded on all sides by destruction and death? How could you ever leave something like that behind you?
I got up, putting my things back in my bag. Margaret folded up her newspaper and gave me a bright smile. ‘Do you have time for a cup of tea before you go?’ she said.
I smiled. It was our usual ritual, and when I looked at my watch I saw I had almost half an hour before I needed to see my next patient, a child who was recovering from pneumonia and lived only a few streets away. ‘I will make it,’ I said – also part of our ritual.
When I returned to the parlour with the tea things on a tray, Margaret said, ‘I hear there’s going to be a concert up at the camp.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping to go. Will Charles bring you?’
‘Oh, I hope so. It’s years since I’ve been to a concert!’ Margaret said. ‘I can’t manage the dances these days – not with my heart trouble, or my leg – but it would be grand to sit and listen. Will your young man be there?’
I frowned at her. ‘My… young man?’
‘Yes!’ Her lined face wrinkled in another broad smile. ‘That soldier. Bertha Sutherland came to bring me a parcel the other day and she told me that she saw you both at the dance at Talafirth Hall last week.’
Oh. She meant Bill. For some reason, I felt my face growing hot. ‘He’s not my young man, Mrs Mackay – I’m married, remember? My husband is back in Norway. And Bill is engaged.’
‘Oh, silly me, of course.’ Margaret flapped her hands, looking embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, what a dreadful gossip you must think me. I promise you Bertha and I were only making chit chat.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I reassured her, although my stomach was tying itself in knots. Did other people think there was more between me and Bill than just friendship? Was I giving everyone the wrong impression? What would Anders say?
I caught myself again. Anders was not here. He was over a thousand miles away. How would he ever know? As always, the thought was a mere reflex, ingrained after years of enduring his temper and paranoia, and of having him inhabit my every waking moment, whether he was physically there with me or not.
Anyway, I was doing nothing wrong by being friends with Bill. Yes, I had danced with him that night. I’d danced with a lot of people, including fifteen-year-old Niall Sutherland, Bertha’s son, and ninety-year-old Alan Robertson who was, as he liked to tell anyone who would listen, still as lively as he was in his days as a herring fisherman. Everyone danced together at these things. That was the whole point.
As if a man like him would be interested in an ugly thing like you anyway, I heard Anders jeer at me, and jumped; it was as if he’d spoken right in my ear.
I drank my tea. ‘I must go, Mrs Mackay,’ I said, forcing cheer into my voice and hoping she hadn’t noticed anything.
She looked at me with mild surprise. ‘Already, dearie? Oh, well, if you must. Will you leave the teapot? I think I’ll have another cup.’
By the time my rounds were over, it was time to collect Eirik from school. I did not do this every day now as he often walked back to the cottage with his friends, but he did not seem to mind when I was there waiting for him. As we walked home, Eirik chattered to me – mostly in English now; his language skills were improving all the time – but I wasn’t really paying attention. My mind was drifting as I wondered what it would be like to be married to someone like Bill – someone who was kind, who smiled at me and said, oh, never mind about that, instead of looking at me with loathing in his eyes because the bread hadn’t risen enough or there was a missed cobweb in the corner.
Suddenly the new, rebellious voice inside my head spoke up. What if you didn’t return to Norway? What if you stayed here, on Fiskersay, or went to the mainland. After all, Anders has no idea where you are. You could even change your name – how would he find you then?
My heart began to beat faster, even as I recognised it for the fantasy it was. I couldn’t just leave Anders. I was his wife.
But the thought had ignited something that did not want to be extinguished. Since coming here, I could feel all the knots inside me – knots that were wound tight after years of tiptoeing around Anders, second-guessing everything I did – slowly but surely loosening. I rarely jumped now when someone came into a room I was in, or felt panic close around my throat like a hand as I dressed in the morning, wondering if what I had chosen to wear would be deemed acceptable. And Eirik had lost that permanently wary look he’d worn long before having to live under German occupation and constant bombardment from the Soviets.
What if, when the war ended, I didn’t go back?
What if I took a different path instead?
But how?