Curiously, it was Verschoyle who was the first to arrive. He appeared at the end of the ward and came slowly towards Kelly, moving cautiously to the bed, his scarred face concerned.
‘Hello, Kelly,’ he said quietly. ‘You all right?’
‘Better than most,’ Kelly said shortly. ‘William Latimer’s dead.’
Verschoyle sat down. ‘Yes, I heard so.’
‘His wife came a few minutes after he went. She walked in expecting to find him alive.’ Kelly paused. ‘Boyle’s wife came, too. I met her first in Russia, you know. She was French. We fished her out of Odessa with her family. Christ–’ Kelly fought to keep the tears back ‘–what a bloody waste! What happened?’
‘They don’t know yet. Charley been?’
‘Not yet. What’s happened to her?’
‘I think there’s been some balls-up somewhere. They told me you were at Burn but I knew you were going to Bourne. Perhaps they told her Burn, too.
‘Poor William,’ Kelly said. ‘All that Shakespeare. What’s going to happen now, James?’
Verschoyle shrugged. ‘Well, it’s obvious you won’t be going to Trincomalee,’ he said. ‘It’ll be six months before you’re right again and by that time the war could be over. We’ve already heard that the Germans are making pacific noises. They’ve all fallen out with each other and they’re all trying to grab themselves a bit of security by posing as someone who wanted peace all the time and wasn’t allowed to because Hitler was on his neck. I don’t think it’ll help ’em much because there seems to be a move afoot to bring the whole bloody lot to trial in front of the German people so they can see their guilt.’
‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’ Kelly moved his hand. ‘If we’d lost, they’d have brought Winston to trial, and, God knows, he didn’t start the war.’
‘You sound low. Fed up about the task force?’
Kelly considered. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’ll mean I’ll have a bit of time with Charley, which’ll make a change, because in the whole of my life I’m damned if we’ve spent more than a few consecutive days together. Retirement would be nice.’
Verschoyle smiled. ‘Who said anything about retirement? This business has caused a bit of switching about, of course, but they reckon you’ll be back on the ball in a couple of months, and, knowing you, I reckon they’re right. And, since by the time you’re out the Germans’ll have thrown their hand in, they’re suggesting you for that job Ramsay turned down.’
Kelly stared at the bed cover. ‘Do they really mean it?’ he said.
‘Yes. And you’ll want a deputy, and that’s a job I wouldn’t mind.’
Kelly paused, thinking of Boyle and Latimer. ‘It’s nice to know there’ll still be someone around I know,’ he said slowly. He managed a smile. ‘It’s a long time since we half killed each other fighting.’
Verschoyle smiled back. ‘It was a good scrap,’ he said. ‘You’d never have won if you hadn’t cheated.’
Charley didn’t arrive until the evening.
The nurse was making a brave effort to cheer him up and he didn’t want to be cheered up. He felt as low as he’d ever felt and blasted off at her as she punched his pillows.
‘Look, sir,’ she said finally, ‘you may be very important in your ship, but here you’re just a patient. And it’s time to take your sleeping pills.’
‘I don’t want to go to sleep,’ Kelly snapped. ‘My missis hasn’t been yet.’
‘You’ll be no fun for your wife if you’re in pain, will you? You’ve got third-degree burns on your hands, a broken collar bone and a gash as long as my arm in your thigh.’
He took the pills unwillingly and she went away with such an angry expression he made up his mind to apologise and be particularly nice to her next time.
He lay in bed, glowering at the cage over his leg, waiting for the pills to take effect. Poor Latimer, he thought. It had been a long association and it still seemed bloody sad that all that knowledge had been wasted.
Mentally he was calling the roll of the men he’d known. So few of them had been granted his own luck. A few would reappear eventually from prisoner of war camps, a few would recover their health to be useful again, and life would go on. But he wondered how much anybody really knew of what it had cost. They’d spent the last six years seeing their friends whittled away by attrition and even when it was all over, whenever they heard of another one dying it would be like another wound because a war never ended and the grief was never gone while ever there were survivors.
A movement at the end of the ward caught his attention and he turned his head, somehow half-expecting to see Latimer or Boyle. But Boyle had never appeared and Latimer’s bed had gone, wheeled away in a hurry after he’d died.
It was the nurse and she was frowning and looked ready to do battle. He forestalled her by smiling and apologising to the best of his endeavour. She looked startled.
‘There’s somebody to see you,’ she said.
‘My wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, wheel her in!’
‘I don’t know that you deserve it.’
‘I’ll go down on my knees if it’ll help.’
She smoothed his pillow and smiled. ‘Just be quiet and calm down. After all, bed’s not a bad place to be.’
‘It’d be better with you in it.’
She laughed and turned away and when he saw Charley coming slowly down the ward his heart did a flop into his stomach because, somehow, she looked just as she had when she’d visited him in Rosyth after Jutland. She was wearing blue as she had then and, in the same way as then, it made her hair seem darker. She had a paper bag in her hand.
‘Grapes again?’ Kelly asked.
‘Yes.’ She sat beside the bed, her eyes on his face. ‘I don’t think you’re the type for flowers.’
She gave a small hiccuping sob and bent to kiss him. ‘Oh, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I thought at first you were dead.’
‘Well, I’m not. Not by a long way. What kept you?’
‘They sent me to Burn.’
‘Typical bloody staff work! Those buggers get enlarged backsides shining the seats of their chairs! You’d think they’d have managed to get a thing like this right!’
She managed a smile. ‘It doesn’t matter. They apologised. They said there were so many hurt, they had to rope in anybody they could, to do the telephoning.’ She paused. ‘Kelly, I’m so sorry about William and Seamus Boyle.’
He grunted. He’d managed to shove them to the back of his mind to be thought about later when he felt he could bear it.
‘What do they say about you?’
‘Broken collar bone, a gash on my thigh and burns. I did the collarbone diving out of the plane. I must have done the leg inside. The burns aren’t much.’ He frowned because a lump persisted in coming to his throat every time he thought about it and he had to force himself to be brusque and hearty to keep it back. He held up his bandaged hands. ‘This is a damn silly thing to have happen to me, Charley. I can’t make grabs at you.’
She gave him a small sad smile. ‘You’ll not be going to the Pacific now.’
‘No.’ He managed to smile back at her. ‘Verschoyle says they’re going to fix me up with a job at the Admiralty. I shall be home a lot. I hope you can stand it.’
She said nothing, her eyes huge and suddenly swimming with tears.
‘It’s the sort of job that’ll get on my nerves,’ he went on. ‘All those bloody silly office wallahs. I expect I shall be a bastard. Somebody else’ll get the task force job and then the war’ll end, so I reckon this is the end of seagoing for me. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and resign.’
‘Are you sorry, Kelly?’
He thought about it and found he wasn’t. He’d often felt that the old story about the pull of the sea was overdone. He’d probably move to the coast where he could smell the brine in the wind, but he found it didn’t worry him really. His mind had dwelt on it a lot in the last few hours. Britain was no longer the super power she had been and in a flash of insight he suspected that the Empire wouldn’t survive the fact.
He’d probably had the best of the Navy. He’d known it in its greatest days, when it had kept the peace around the world. It had had a prestige then that it perhaps hadn’t deserved, but in future it might well be smaller and somehow he couldn’t see himself serving in a truncated version run by penny-pinching politicians.
He looked up to find Charley’s eyes on him, gentle, compassionate, understanding – and loving.
‘Petty Officer Rumbelo says he’s making a corner of the garden where you’ll be able to sit in the sun until you’re all right again,’ she said.
‘Good old Albert. I’m glad he wasn’t with us. He’d never have got out. He’d have been too fat.’ He grinned at her. ‘I expect I shall fall asleep on you soon,’ he went on. ‘They gave me something to send me off. They did last time, if you remember.’ He paused. ‘Christ, that’s a long time ago, Charley! Thirty years, damn’ near. Do you mind?’
‘Mind what? The thirty years?’
He looked up quickly, suddenly afraid he’d said the wrong thing, but she was still smiling.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Going to sleep on you again.’
The sleeping pill was beginning to effect him at last. His vision was growing blurred and Charley’s face seemed to be the only clear thing in the room.
‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And certainly the most wonderful thing that ever happened in my life. I don’t deserve it – I never did, I suppose – but I’m glad it did happen.’ His eyes blurred again and the pale face in front of him wavered. ‘And, now, if you don’t mind,’ he ended, ‘I think I shall just have to close my eyes.’
She bent over and kissed his cheek. ‘Go to sleep, Kelly,’ she whispered.
He gave her another grin. ‘Yes, Mum,’ he said, and the last thing he remembered was her smiling at him.