Sister Margaret Kernan took one of the mugs of Bovril from the tray in the hands of an orderly. As she left the ward she hoped she would not meet Matron in one of the corridors. Matron would be sure to ask what she was doing, carrying a mug of Bovril around. She was lucky. Matron was in her sanctum, dressing down a slightly erring nurse with kind severity.
It was bright outside. June was almost on them. The red cross on the bodice of her uniform blazed. She looked around the terrace and out over the lawns and shrubberies. Some walking patients were out and about, some just dreaming. One was sitting on a white bench, a sketchbook on the table in front of him. She went down the steps of grey, glinting granite and over a broad sweep of lawn. He heard the crisp rustle of her starched uniform, glanced up, smiled at her and then gazed suspiciously at the mug.
‘What’s that, for God’s sake? Not more unsolicited medicine?’
‘It’s your Bovril, as you know very well—’
‘That’s a winter warmer.’
‘It’s an all-year-round tonic,’ she said, ‘and what’s this talk about unsolicited medicine?’
‘Something between me and Nurse Paterson. Was it you who put her on to me?’
‘Drink your Bovril,’ she said, putting the mug on the table. She had a soft voice but a clear one, her enunciation disciplined so that patients had little reason to ask her to repeat herself. Her ancestors came from both sides of the border and had probably fought and murdered each other in the distant past. She had moved from Hereford to Derbyshire in 1915, when they had converted Hattersleigh Hall into a military hospital. Here her Celtic warm-heartedness was kept under professional control by her English coolness. ‘I heard about Nurse Paterson.’
‘Trapped me,’ said James. ‘She had the spoon halfway down my throat before I wondered what the devil she was up to.’
‘She’s new here,’ said Sister Kernan, ‘she thought you were Captain Davis. You were sitting on his bed, I believe.’
‘Waiting for him to come back from the bathroom. Could have been serious.’
‘You didn’t actually swallow any, I’m told. But even if you had it would have done you no harm.’
‘I’m advised by Captain Davis that it does extraordinary things to him.’
‘Oh, fuss, fuss,’ she said but she wanted to smile.
‘Sit down, won’t you?’ said James, rising to give her the courtesy of half the bench. ‘I know you’re frantically busy as usual, but sit for a moment or two.’
‘I can’t, I really am busy.’ She had snatched a minute to bring him his Bovril and breathe in some fresh air. ‘And you’re due in therapy at eleven. Try not to be absent-minded about it. Nurse Upton says you’re never on time.’
‘Tell her if she’ll keep hoping I’ll keep trying.’
She smiled. Captain Fraser was nearly as good as new. He had been gaunt on arrival. The sun was getting at him now, giving him a healthy tan.
‘I must go,’ she said, and went. He looked after her, her cap and uniform a dazzle in the sunshine. There were women and women. There was one who was unique. It did little good to look for someone out of the same mould. Sister Kernan was no one but herself, as she was entitled to be.
She spared herself a little more time in the afternoon. She talked first to some of the patients whose beds had been wheeled out on to the terrace, then went down the steps and crossed the grass to the white bench near an old apple tree. Year after year it produced a generous crop of fruit for the hospital, but last year the apples had been specked. A diagnosis had resulted in a lavish dressing of potash. The forming fruit this year looked as if the harvest might be abundant and healthy.
James got to his feet as she came up. He looked lanky in his hospital blues.
‘Sit down,’ she said, ‘I can’t stop.’
‘Try and change your mind,’ said James.
‘Well, for a little while,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said James and they sat down on the bench together. It meant a brief but pleasant few moments for both. They were friends. She was twenty-seven, her dark auburn hair tucked up, cap neatly perched, her features smooth and clear, grey eyes placid but perceptive. She had, after eight years of nursing, a capacity for absorbing the stresses of life in a military hospital. She was a woman of attractive, receptive wisdom, who could bring order to systems and reassurance to patients without either fuss or fret. Those who sensed the warm bosom that beat under the starched front confided in her, and she in her experience knew when to supply sound, practical advice that came straight from the head. When they wanted to be serious the wounded men talked to her. It was the young nurses they flirted with. Since the hospital was for officers there was an unavoidable amount of this kind of inconsequential skirmishing, despite the discipline enforceable on both sides. She did not mind that no one made inconsequential advances in her direction. It saved her having to discourage them. And at twenty-seven she had settled for the fact that she was on the shelf, in common with many women. The longer the war went on the more crowded that shelf became.
‘Well?’ said James.
‘Well?’ she countered.
‘You needn’t talk. It’s not compulsory. Just put your feet up.’
‘There’s no hurry for a while.’
‘James, I simply—’
‘The place won’t fall down without you.’
‘If someone should want me—’
‘They can come and get you.’
‘A hospital isn’t run like a shop.’
‘I’m glad of that, otherwise we’d simply be weighed and wrapped,’ said James. ‘But it won’t hurt you to let it run without you for five minutes. Sit back, close your eyes and I’ll watch out for Matron.’ His smile was affectionate, and she felt the little weakness of any woman having a man trying gently to spoil her.
‘You’re very considerate,’ she said. She knew he felt grateful to her, to the hospital. Most of them did, most of those whom skilful medication and conscientious nursing brought out of pain and into convalescence. He had known pain from a badly neglected and badly burned arm. He expressed his gratitude in his own way, slightly teasing. Other patients were like that. But Captain Fraser to her was not quite like the others. He was a man of pre-war attitudes, fashioned by customs and trends already considered dated. To her such men were always recognizable, not necessarily by their age. They had their own way with women, for they had been brought up to regard woman as a civilizing influence and that the least of her dues were courtesies. Captain Fraser almost always stood up for her, as if he moved in a world that was still gracious. He was one of the men who had been men before the war. The young men, the boys made adult by the war, were already a different breed. Flippant, reckless, casual. So were the girls who had suddenly found themselves doing men’s jobs at eighteen and nineteen. They lived as if life was eating them up. It was to be expected. Captain Fraser belonged to the war now. It had to be fought, it had to be finished. But he also belonged to the generation which had been so buoyant, so hopeful, the generation which had seen a turn in the tide of social justice and a change in the intransigence of diehard government.
The boys, the young soldiers, were incredibly courageous, but so tragic as casualties, so bewildered. The men were as resilient as Job. When evening came and the hospital was at its quietest one could almost read their thoughts. She read them as reflections on how to get the war out of the way so that they could, perhaps, go and find the women they might have married but hadn’t, or resume life with those they had. Captain Fraser rested very quietly sometimes, on his back, his eyes on the ceiling and as far away as a man could be. She never intruded, never asked him what it was that so possessed his mind.
No wife came to visit him. He was unmarried. His parents came from time to time, his mother came often by herself. She had grown up in the era that was gracious for the privileged, and looked it. She was tall, fair and still fine-looking. She had no airs, however, and it was some time before anyone realized she was not Mrs Fraser but Lady Fraser.
They came and went, the visitors. So did the wounded men. Some returned to the front, others went home to stay home because they were crippled or blind. A military hospital was a lodgement for the cruel consequences of war, a place for the pursuit of healing, for patching up, for the acceptance on the part of some patients for compromise and for the application of skill and compassion on the part of the staff. One remembered the patients, or some of them, for a short while after they had gone, but one’s mind was almost wholly occupied by the needs of fresh admissions. New nurses had been known to periodically weep during their first weeks of duty, but after that one’s emotions gradually became armoured by professionalism.
Captain Fraser was luckier than some. His arm, burnt from wrist to shoulder, had been in a critical state when he arrived from France. It had required such delicate treatment, such careful nursing. It still hung a little stiffly, but the seared flesh and scorched sinews had responded bravely after months of medical care. They were pleased with him and with themselves. With luck they would have him back in France and flying again in a month or so. The sinews were becoming flexible again. Prolonged physical therapy was his lot twice a day. He could now bend his elbow a little and stretch the furrowed limb and healing muscle. The scars were savage but even they would look less fierce in time, and he could always keep his shirt sleeve buttoned. There were other patients in far worse straits. All the same he was a favourite with the nurses, even if with his dark bandit-like looks he was no Owen Nares. The nurses had their favourites. It could not be helped. Professional impartiality could not always withstand the undermining effects of one’s more whimsical reactions. The way a man endured pain or the loss of a leg or an eye counted for much, but it was often the indefinable which softened the professional front.
They had kept Captain Fraser in bed for quite a time, the arm a painful mess and torture at the slightest knock or touch. He was not conspicuously heroic, he swore about it as much as any man, and whenever the massive dressing was changed he rarely failed to advise the nurse he’d just as soon have her put his arm back in the oven.
‘How are we today. Captain Fraser?’ Sister Kernan asked him once.
He stared at her as if she was touched in the head.
‘I don’t know how you are,’ he said, ‘but I feel frankly overdone.’
Other men made quips, jokes. It was part of the attitude, the atmosphere. No one could say, and she herself could not, why that remark of Captain Fraser’s brought a more personalized touch to her professionalism.
They had become friends. There were traps available from Hobbs’s Stables in the village, which could be hired by patients physically able and genuinely capable of handling the ponies, and Captain Fraser had taken her for rides into the dales on evenings when she was off duty. The outings could not be kept secret and she knew the nurses talked about her. Was Sister Kernan being courted? She was not. The excursions were companionable and pleasantly conversational. Captain Fraser did not flirt with her or make any advances at all. Nurses were understandable targets for men temporarily removed from normal life, and many of the officers were naturally amorous. They considered a crisp uniform added a touch of piquancy to a young woman’s vulnerability. But Sister Kernan and Captain Fraser simply enjoyed each other’s company, or so it seemed.
She wanted to relax now, to sit back on the bench with him, to be able to watch the comings and goings without feeling she was in neglect of her duties. He had this effect on her, inducing in her a wish that she had more time to spare.
‘That’s better,’ said James, ‘and it’s not hurting, is it?’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Letting a little time slip by.’
‘You do so much of it,’ she said, ‘you sit out here and I watch you and you do nothing except let whole days slip by.’
‘Not quite nothing. There are always pictures to look at.’
‘Pictures?’ she said.
‘Moving pictures,’ said James. ‘I’ve discovered nurses never stand still, sisters never take time to stop and look, and doctors always hurry.’
‘It’s like pictures of ants scurrying about, is it?’
‘No. It’s mainly pictures of young women with a very special appeal to the bedridden.’
‘Oh, very fanciful. Not all of you are bedridden and not all of us are young,’ she said.
‘I’m drawing a general picture. You all look young. Only in Matron is there undisguisable maturity. Am I getting old?’
‘I think you’ve a few years yet,’ she said. ‘Nurses, you know, are not really romantic creatures. We do have tender ideas about suffering humanity when we first enter the service, but we become very practical out of sheer necessity.’
‘You may consider yourself the most practical person here,’ said James, ‘but most of the men in D Ward would fight lions and tigers for you.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Margaret. She sat up. She laughed. She sat back again. ‘Well, I’m glad I know.’
‘Oh, I’ll bring on the lions to prove it if you like.’
‘Please don’t. War wounds are bad enough. Lion bites would be too much. By the way, you didn’t say if you were included.’
‘Among those fighting off the lions?’
‘And the tigers.’
‘My dear Maggie—’
‘Sister Kernan when I’m on duty, please.’
‘Naturally. In my case—’
‘Concerning the lions and so on?’
‘And the stand I’d make for you. I like to think I’d earn a mention in the newspapers.’
‘Oh, lions eat man, you mean?’ said Margaret.
‘I rather thought in terms of man eats lions.’
She gave that some serious thought, then said, ‘You’d be sick. But I’m very touched at being so well thought of.’
‘You’re sweet,’ said James, ‘despite your will of iron.’
She coloured a little and hoped it was not too obvious. She looked away, at the apple tree, and said, ‘A will of iron stiffens my weaknesses. It’s going to be a good year for apples, Captain Fraser.’
‘I’m not on duty myself,’ said James.
‘I am, and I must go,’ she said.
‘I know. But tell me first, would you care to trot around with me for an hour or two this evening? I’ve booked one of Hobbs’s traps.’
She was pleased but kept herself studiously reserved as she said, ‘I’m not off duty until seven.’
‘Seven till nine are the best hours on a summer evening,’ said James. ‘Would you like to come? I always enjoy it more with you.’
Smiling, she said, ‘Shall I need my will of iron?’
‘Why, did I try to kiss you last time?’
‘No, you’re always very well behaved with me. What you attempt with the nurses I don’t know.’ She got to her feet. James rose too. ‘Your afternoon therapy, I think, Captain Fraser.’
Officially his rank was now Pilot Officer. In April the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Force had been merged to become the Royal Air Force, with its own ranks. But at the hospital they still called him Captain. In April too Richthofen, the Red Baron, had at last been shot down, dying in his crashed plane. When Margaret gave the news to James he did not look elated. He looked disbelieving. ‘Richthofen?’ he said.
‘Yes. Here, it’s in the paper.’
He read the news item. The British had buried the German flying ace with full military honours. Richthofen deserved that, thought James, but he also deserved to survive. He was the greatest of them. They would be mourning him in Germany. And in Austria too.
He walked now with Sister Kernan across the lawn and up the wide stone steps to the huge paved terrace of Hattersleigh Hall. Here were the beds which had been wheeled out into the open air and tucked into the shade. As Margaret and James crossed the terrace one patient ventured a question.
‘I say, Sister, who are you out with tonight?’
‘Me,’ said James. As they entered the Hall he said to her, ‘I’ll wait at the gates for you at seven.’
‘Give me a little more time,’ she said, ‘say quarter past.’
‘Done,’ said James, ‘quarter past.’
They walked along a wide oak-panelled corridor. The converted mansion was nineteenth century. During the winter the draughts dallied, frolicked and blew, but in the summer a welcome coolness invaded the place.
‘Shall I take those things back to the ward for you?’ asked Margaret.
‘What a good sort you are,’ said James, handing her his sketchbook and case of drawing implements.
‘A kind of best chum?’ she suggested.
‘Well, that’s a safe status, with a protective ring to it, isn’t it?’
‘I need to protect myself?’ she smiled.
‘Try to bear in mind,’ said James, ‘that there are a lot of us and only a few of you.’
He continued on to the therapy room while she turned into the corridor leading to D Ward. She took his things to his locker. For the first time he had used words which might mean he had a light-hearted flirtation in mind or something a little more serious. Or nothing at all. She hoped the evening would be as fine as the day had been, that it wouldn’t rain.
She rather suspected she was ready to fall in love and it made her feel strangely unsure of herself.
It was a very fine evening indeed, as clear and as still as nature could devise. James was at the gates with the pony and trap at ten past seven. He sat in relaxed patience, waiting for her. The years were going. He was almost thirty-one. He looked his age, his dark features leaner, his frame fined down by the ravaging exigencies of war. But remembering that even Richthofen had fallen he knew himself lucky. For two and a half years he had served with the Royal Engineers in France. Then his request for a transfer to the Flying Corps was approved. He had his wings up four months later and was brought down after five months of combat flying. The German gunners pulled him out of his blazing plane and he spent a little while being courteously received by a Colonel Huebner, and the smallness of the world closed in on him when he found that the colonel knew his friend Major Moeller, back on active service and a colonel himself.
Colonel Huebner sent him under escort to the nearest casualty station. There they did their best for his arm and arranged for him to be ambulanced with some of their own wounded to a clearing centre, from where he would land up in a base hospital to receive more skilled treatment. But he elected, because of opportunity, to take a different course. He sat waiting, a blanket over his shoulders, his arm giving him the devil, Sophie at the back of his wandering thoughts as she so often was. There were comings and goings, the orderlies busy as the November afternoon turned quickly into dark, damp evening. They stopped looking at him and he felt himself becoming as unobtrusive as the anonymous wounded waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He got up and walked about. No one said watch that man, he’s a prisoner. He moved out of the place in an idle, casual way. He took from a hook a German cap and greatcoat belonging to one of the orderlies and a few minutes later walked off wearing them. In the darkness no one challenged him, but he heard some German ambulances converging on the casualty station from the north. He knew he could not get back to the British lines without negotiating the massed German trench system, so he headed in the direction of the oncoming ambulances. They lurchingly passed him. He kept on and not long after found a churned-up road leading west. He took it.
A French family found him the next morning, sitting on the edge of a muddy ditch behind their house on the edge of a village. He had walked through the night and was now waiting for a miracle to happen or for modest manna to drop from the grey skies, or at least for someone who might know how to ease a burned arm that felt fiery. The French family took him across some fields to a farm. The farmer hid him for a day and a night, and then someone came and took him away in a deep vegetable cart. Close to the Belgian border he was handed over to people who specialized in helping escaped Allied prisoners. They took him across the border into Belgium, going north of Westroosebeke in Flanders and then heading south-west towards the coast. His arm made him grit his teeth and at the end of several days of endurance and close calls his Belgian friends managed to bring a doctor to him. The lifting of the original dressing was a fearsome work of medical art and the doctor, almost reluctantly applying a new, treated dressing, advised him to give himself up and allow the Germans to hospitalize him. If not, he was to be got back to the British immediately.
A young Belgian offered to get him through to the coast north of Nieuwpoort. Here, by manipulation of Nieuwpoort’s drainage locks, the area had been flooded in 1914 to halt Germany’s advance. If they could reach this area at a point a mile inland, a specific point, a boat could be used to get him across the flooded canal region to the British side. It was a dangerous manoeuvre, one the Belgians would not normally undertake except when it had been carefully plotted and planned, as it had been several times. It was an impromptu operation this time, but the damp misty weather helped and so did the young Belgian Pimpernel’s knowledge of the route and its hazards. They moved through the night, through the German lines two hours before dawn, launched the hidden boat while it was still dark and were on the grey, swirling waters as dawn mistily broke. Germans manning lookout posts spotted them then and for a minute or so, as the young Belgian pulled hard on the oars, bullets peppered the water uncomfortably close behind them. They reached the British lines in the first real light of day.
He had a brief stay in a base hospital and was then dispatched to England, into the care of specialists at the military hospital of Hattersleigh Hall. They informed him that from his own point of view he’d have been wiser to accept German hospitalization. His arm was a mess.
‘What’s the extent of my own point of view?’
‘You’ve been carrying an arm about with you that’s been in need of intensive treatment. We’ll do what we can.’
They had done all of that. He was lucky. And in France the Americans had joined the Allies. That had to mean the end for Germany. He hoped it would be soon. He had had enough himself. Austria, he was sure, had had more than enough.
Austria.
He stopped his thoughts as Margaret arrived. He got down and handed her up into the trap, then climbed up beside her.
‘Just a ramble, shall we?’ he said.
‘Let Poppy lead, we’ll follow,’ she said. Poppy was the pony. ‘It’s that kind of evening, isn’t it?’ She was still in her uniform but had freshened herself up and wore her blue cape. She looked crisp and colourful.
‘It’s perfect,’ said James and headed for the winding lanes of the dales. He halted the pony before they had gone very far and they sat in the trap and looked at what the evening vista had to offer them. The colours glowed under the flushed blue sky, the sun in descent, little white cotton-wool clouds hanging in its path. In the west the horizon was like a rim of spreading gold, tipping the distant Pennines where they rose in uneven configuration. The Romans had crossed the Pennines, marching north to claim all they could of Britain in its lushest and wildest age. The Picts halted them and harassed them and made them think again about conquering the most northerly regions, and in the end Hadrian built his Wall to mark and hold the furthermost boundary of the Roman occupation. They had left their marks on and around the Pennines. James thought that if one sat long enough and remained quiet enough the echoes of their legions could be drawn out of two thousand years of time. That is, if one’s concentration was not broken by memories as strong and compulsive as his were. Memories that went back only a few years. He could not remember any reasonable period of time when his mind had been free of her. She would not go away, she was a vivid, obsessive recurrence.
Half a mile away the roofs and chimneys of a small village were shot with soft light. Smoke from one of the chimneys hung like fine transparent blue-black fabric in the still air.
‘It’s almost heartbreaking,’ said Margaret.
‘So much peace set against so much war?’
‘Yes, and it doesn’t make me forget the war, as it could, it makes me more conscious of it.’
‘It won’t go away for nurses, will it?’
‘It won’t go away for you,’ she said, and looked ruefully sad. ‘Dr Posford wanted to see you. I said I’d give you the message. You’re going home tomorrow. You’ll have to continue with therapy for a few more weeks, you’ll be given a letter to take to your local hospital in respect of that.’
‘I can’t say I’m overjoyed,’ said James, ‘I’m rather settled in here. You need the bed?’
‘Yes, and you don’t, do you? Not now.’
‘No, I don’t, not now.’ He sat there by her side, pensive. He had been expecting this but was not altogether ready for it. He had a decision to make and would have liked a few more days to think about it. In almost four years Margaret Kernan was the first woman since Sophie whom he had looked at with interest. Not that there had been many women, even on leave. And on leave they could only be remembered as pairs of eyes hinting at a desire to please. There was no coquettish flutter about Margaret Kernan. On duty she was calm, assured and unruffled. Off duty she was a pleasure to be with, a charmer. Physically she was as attractive as any woman, if one could forget Sophie’s electric quality. Margaret, unlike so many restless wartime women, did not demand to be entertained, spoiled, flattered or made love to. In her company he felt pleasantly relaxed. And what was Sophie now but an impossible dream? Given the chance, how could he go back to her and ask for the years of bitter war to be discounted? She would hardly be sitting in Vienna waiting for him. Nor could he believe that other men, Austrians, would let her do that. One of them would have seen all he had seen himself in her, her irresistible sense of humour, her rich vitality, her love of life, her aptitude for engaging in all its diversions and her own striking loveliness. Such a man would have persevered, would have married her by now.
That conclusion, as always, made him inwardly wince. He could not forever live on thoughts of what might have been, punctuated by moments of painful resignation. That way led to a monastic future. To shut out all women because one had been lost to him was to deny life’s purpose. Margaret, if she were willing to consider it, might give him the chance of a post-war future.
‘No, I don’t need the bed, not now,’ he said again.
‘They’ll want you back, the Flying Corps,’ said Margaret.
‘It’s the Air Force now.’
‘Oh, yes. I keep forgetting.’ She felt sorrow, and the peace and beauty of the evening didn’t help. It imbued the sorrow with a touch of melancholy. She knew she would miss him. One did miss some patients for a while. She would miss him a little more than that. He would say goodbye, he would perhaps kiss her, as some of them did, and he would go and not be heard of again. Unless he was mentioned by a member of the staff who might spot his name in a casualty list. That sort of thing happened. Someone would say, ‘We patched up Lieutenant So-and-so to no purpose, he’s just been killed on the Somme.’
James flicked the reins and the pony ambled on. He was silent. But then, she thought, he often was, for all the talk they enjoyed in between. And he never mentioned what was on his mind. He did not use her, as other patients did, as a recipient for confidences. He had to have problems. They all did, those who had been to the front and had to return there. But whatever his problems were he kept them to himself. He never spoke of women, not in a personal way, but she did not think him a man who had passed all women by.
A farm cart approached, the shire horse plodding and pulling, the driver nodding under his shapeless hat. He woke up at the sound of the trap and drew over to let them by, touching his hat and smiling sleepily out of his ruddy, grey-whiskered face. The smile was for Margaret in her white cap and blue cape. She smiled back. They rounded a bend in the lane and stopped again. It was that kind of evening. They had no need to go anywhere. The world was before them, the sky limitless, the sun edging the Pennines with those streams of golden light, the world itself whispering with the sounds of verdant summer life. The wheatfields were high massed carpets of yellow and green, and the dales glided, curved and dipped, the colours a profusion of browns, greys and emeralds.
She had seen the view before, many times. But it was always different, always new, because the moment and the light were never the same, shadows never consistent. The greens were so changeable, sometimes deep, sometimes brilliant, sometimes sombre, and they embraced the stone outcrops in a variety of moods. She thought of the abundant generosity of nature and the inexplicable acquisitiveness of man. For all that nature gave him, man always wanted so much more. To get it he sometimes turned nature upside down.
She glanced at James. He sat in relaxed immobility, drooping a little, elbows on his knees, reins inert in his hands, his eyes quite far away. Because they were good friends and because he was to leave tomorrow she thought she might, at last, be a little intrusive.
‘Is it a girl, James?’
‘It’s summer,’ he said.
‘This summer?’ she asked.
‘Well, there was a special one once. I thought it would never end at the time, but when I look back I wonder if any other could have been as brief. It should have lingered. It didn’t.’
He did not say why it had been so special, so she said, ‘All the summers were like that when I was a girl.’ James set the pony meandering again. The lazy wheels drew up a little indolent dust. The falling sun touched her face with warmth and gilded the brass of the trap. ‘That’s how they seem in retrospect, anyway. I can never remember rainy days, only the warm ones and my father taking us on daily walking tours during the holidays. We could never afford hotels by the sea or even boarding houses. We lived in Hereford and with my parents there were seven of us. As schoolchildren we did see the sea once, on the Cardigan coast. We had a day trip by train. We thought the sand and the waves were wonders of wonders. My father said many places were like that until people invaded them. He said that once you could go to a place like Aberystwyth and walk along the shore for miles without meeting more than half a dozen other visitors. I remember saying that one shouldn’t keep any wonders to oneself, it wasn’t fair, they should be for everybody. My father laughed and said what sort of wonder would it be if everybody visited Stonehenge at the same time on August Bank Holiday?’
‘Your father sounds like mine,’ said James. ‘Mine could also propound the unanswerable when replying to a question.’
‘Fathers exist to profoundly propound,’ said Margaret, looking at the rim of deepening gold, ‘mothers are more practical. When I was walking out with my first young man—’
‘Your first?’ James gave her a smile. She responded with her pleasantly warm one. He thought her the kind of woman who would be handsome at an age when others looked old. ‘Your first, Margaret?’
‘James, I’ve not always been a vocational wallflower.’
‘You haven’t even arrived.’
‘Please raise my morale, do.’ She laughed. ‘But when I was walking out with my first young man I brought him home to Sunday tea. That was almost compulsory. No, it was direly compulsory. After he’d gone my mother, thinking in practical terms, said he was the most upright young man a girl could set her mind on. My father said a man as upright as that while he was still as young as that would turn a home into a church and every day would be like a Welsh Sunday. An adaptable Welsh girl might put up with that, he said, but as I was only part Welsh and my adaptability still unproven his advice was for me to keep a critical eye on the fellow. Although I was fairly enamoured—’
‘Enamoured?’ said James as they jogged down a gentle descent.
‘Be careful.’
‘No danger, not with Poppy,’ said James reassuringly.
‘I meant be careful, sir, how you mock me,’ said Margaret. ‘Well, although I was rather head over heels, shall we say, I was still very much my father’s daughter, so I did keep an eye on my young man. I didn’t find that too much of a strain as he was handsomely clean-cut, but I gradually realized it was my ears, not my eyes, which were hurting. I was being treated to long sermons, even if I only asked him the time. He spoke of time in terms of whether heaven or the devil was to prevail, and I felt he needed a pulpit more than me. So I gave him up. I knew I’d never be holy enough for him.’
‘And the others,’ said James, addicted to any woman with a sense of humour, ‘you gave them up too?’
‘Oh, they gave me up, I think.’ Margaret laughed again. ‘One by one. I was already interested in nursing and couldn’t devote nearly enough time to any young man. I was given up by seven in one year, while I was studying and training to pass my exams. I qualified when I was nineteen and only nursing seemed important to me then.’
‘It still does?’
‘I think it has to be like that,’ she said, ‘I think at my age—’
‘No age,’ said James.
‘At my age there isn’t anything else. When the war does end there’s going to be a depressing shortage of men and a depressing surplus of women, the women all needing to substitute something else for marriage. I’m fortunate. My substitute already exists and has been constant for several years.’
‘It’s not enough,’ said James, pulling his peaked cap farther down to shade his eyes from the huge ball of golden fire.
‘It has to be enough for me,’ said Margaret.
‘Work is satisfying, especially your kind of work,’ said James, ‘but it’s still not enough, or shouldn’t be. It can be creative, but not of life. Only people can create life. People are the result of life that went before and the propagators of life to come.’
‘Are you trying to be profound now? What do you suggest, James, that some men take two wives? With two I suppose a man can double his propagation rate.’
‘No, I mean that allowing for exceptions, as one always must,’ said James, ‘people aren’t meant to live alone. There’s no living creature designed by nature to be solitary.’
‘James, I can’t simply go out, find a man and tell him I’d like us to be creative together. To start with, he might belong to someone else. To become a non-solitary person I need help. Nearly all women do. Unlike men, we can’t ask for what we want. Society demands modesty from us.’
He halted the pony again. The sun-fired Pennines advanced northwards and grey-backed sheep bunched on the rising slope of a wandering valley. The flushed western sky was slashed with red streaks.
She asked her question again.
‘Is it a girl you think about so often, James?’
‘It’s Vienna,’ he said.
‘Vienna?’
‘I’ve an obsession with the past,’ he said, ‘I need help too.’
She turned to him. She wished there had been more time, she wished the hours had not been so full of professional commitment, that she could have had something more than nursing.
‘I only seem to get kissed at Christmas,’ she said, ‘when they hang the mistletoe.’
‘Well, except at Christmas matrons and sisters are a little sacrosanct,’ said James.
‘You mean forbidden or forbidding?’
‘Untouchable,’ he said, ‘but not to all of us.’
He kissed her. She lifted her mouth willingly, gave it warmly. The pony nibbled at the grassy verge and the evening was as silent as if the world had stopped.
‘Thank you, James,’ said Margaret, and he knew she would consider being asked, would consider whether their needs coincided.
‘Margaret—’
‘James, we all have an obsession with the past, we all look back. It’s a sadness sometimes, knowing we can’t actually go back. We can’t even hold a second of time in our hands.’
It came out of that golden summer then, it came so clear and fresh, so well memorized, and the moment with it, the moment that was Sophie.
I stood on the bridge and watched the river
Which passed by
As life does
For life is never still. Is it?
It is only a transient moment
That turns tomorrow into yesterday
Each second comes and is gone
As soon as it arrives
Even a year is a time that has gone
And tomorrow is another year
Full of many things unknown
That a day later are forgotten.
No, never forgotten, he thought. And he knew that when it was all over at last, he had to try again. Despite all the bitter years, he had to.
‘James?’ Margaret’s clear grey eyes held his. ‘There’s not enough, is there, for us? You have to go back, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said James, ‘in the end I must go back. To Vienna.’
Later that evening he watched the sun go down in a blaze of fiery purple. He wondered about them. About Sophie. About Anne and Ludwig. About Carl.