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  ‘Oh, Ned, come on! It’s you, and I want to know all about it. Do I have to squeeze it out of you?’

  He stopped and swung her towards him. ‘Yes!’

  She put her arms round him. ‘I can’t squeeze too hard because of the sling.’

  ‘That’s just about right,’ he said, and he could feel her breasts hard through the tweed material.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be squeezing the story out of you, remember?’

  ‘I came to sitting in a Carley float with four other chaps.’

  ‘A Carley float?’

  ‘A sort of small raft made of very light wood, like a square quoit, with a net across the open part.’

  ‘Who were the others?’

  ‘One of the bridge lookouts. A Polish naval officer. A wardroom steward. And a Polish seaman.’

  ‘Why Polish? Were you serving in a Polish ship?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, we had some on board and some Polish refugees, that was all. Other survivors were also paddling round in Carley floats.’

  ‘How long were you in the float?’

  ‘A day or two. We managed to keep together, and another ship picked us up.’

  ‘And the medal?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘They usually give one to the senior surviving officer.’

  ‘But surely you weren’t commanding the destroyer, were you? You’re much too young.’

  ‘I didn’t command her to begin with.’

  ‘Oh – but you did at the end. You survived.’

  He nodded. A quarter of them had survived; the rest had been killed by the bombs bursting on the Aztec, been killed in the water when the bombers had flown back and forth, methodically machine-gunning the survivors, or died of exposure. The Teds had been trying to make sure the Polish civilians died – and ironically every one of them had survived; only their rescuers died.

  His arm, particularly the hand, had obviously been slashed by the explosion on the bridge; he had lost a lot of blood in the Carley float, and fuel and lubricating oil had soaked into the wound. And three days later they had been picked up by a submarine, more dead than alive; three days without food had been unimportant; three days without water had been worse. But three days with oil soaking into the wound had been painful and, as it began to swell, grotesque, too.

  ‘A penny?’ she said.

  ‘That’s an old trick.’

  ‘You should be flattered, Lieutenant Yorke. Miss Exton wants to know your thoughts: she might get jealous, too.’

  ‘If she knew my thoughts at this moment she might also get embarrassed.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Clare said. ‘You can’t shock an old widow woman who’s spending the war nursing rough sailors.’

  Chapter Three

  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 Weste
rn 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.’