The Nurse's War Read online

  The two small rooms he rented were airless, worse than airless, for the smell of thick dirt was overwhelming and so intense it seemed alive. He could hardly breathe the atmosphere and had to force himself to swallow it in great slabs. The two small windows were glued shut and muslin curtains drooped undisturbed against grimy panes, their colour an elephant grey. Several more flies had buzzed their last since he’d left that morning and now lay shrivelled on the uncovered floor. The room was as dark as it was airless, and through the gloom only the dim outlines of a few pieces of broken furniture were visible.

  He flung himself down on to the iron bedstead, pushing aside a tousled heap of clothes. For a long time he lay there, sprawled across the questionable mattress, and trying not to think. His eyes travelled around the brown-papered walls, blotchy and peeling from the damp, and upwards to the pitted ceiling, tracing, as he had done so many times these past few weeks, the cracks that disfigured it. He no longer saw its ugliness but instead had created a map of his own devising. This was him, here on the left, in the centre of that large, brown stain. The mass of small, thin lines stretching westwards were the waves of the ocean he would soon be crossing, and there on the other side of the ceiling, a solid splurge of colour—old paint, he thought, working its way to the surface—was surely the New World beckoning him to its shore. He lay there, looking upwards, for as long as his eyes would stay open.

  ‘Are you going then?’

  Connie punctuated each of her words with a particularly vicious scrub. The urine testing had been done for the day and now they were in the sluice room, grinding their way through the cleaning of bedpans. It was a messy undertaking, mops and Lysol everywhere.

  ‘I have to. I promised.’ Daisy’s voice trailed miserably beneath the thunder of water. She didn’t want to seek out Grayson, didn’t want to see him again, to see his slow smile and lose herself in those deep blue eyes.

  She felt Willa Jenkins looking at them from the opposite line of sinks. ‘Take care, Willa,’ she called across at the girl, ‘there’s another heap of pans just behind you.’

  It had amazed them when Willa had managed against all the odds to pass her probation on the third attempt. She was slow at her work, constantly getting things wrong, and very clumsy.

  Broken china, smashed thermometers, bent syringes, followed her wherever she went. Daisy had often come to her rescue, helping to hide the wreckage before Sister caught a glimpse. Their fellow nurses had gradually lost patience with such an awkward colleague and were not above joining in a communal teasing that at times verged on unkindness. The girl was an outsider like herself, Daisy thought, but, unlike her, she hadn’t learned to blend in, to stay unobtrusive. She’d done what she could to protect Willa, remembering her own isolation as a servant and the scourging meted out by the shop girls at Bridges. But it wasn’t always easy to intervene and she was aware of how very unhappy the girl must be. And lately she’d become even more withdrawn, ever since the news had circulated that her brother had been killed on his last training flight. Willa’s interest in their conversation today was the first she’d shown for weeks and, at any other time, Daisy would have tried hard to include her. But this was such a very personal matter.

  Connie was still speaking, her voice lowered. ‘Cheer up, Daisy. It’s a good thing, surely. Get the papers Gerald wants and you’re a free woman. Once he’s in America, he won’t come back. You can file for a divorce or an annulment or whatever it is.’

  Her mind stuttered at the thought. ‘There’s a host of things to sort out before I get there. That’s the stuff you deal with at the very end of a marriage.’

  Or when you’ve come to terms with the end, she thought. The truth was that she had no real idea how she felt about Gerald. When he’d accosted her outside the Nurses’ Home, he’d simply been a figure in the dark. He’d sounded like Gerald and, in the brief flare of the match, he’d even looked like Gerald. But somehow his resurgence had seemed fantasy, as though he were a mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes. Today though, in the sunlight of a London park, she’d had to accept that he really had come back to life and was not going away.

  Connie stopped scrubbing and fixed her with an unwavering look. ‘Don’t say you still have feelings for him.’

  She swallowed hard. ‘I found it upsetting today, that’s all. Sitting by his side, hearing him speak, seeing him smile even. It brought back the man I married, the man I loved once.’

  And brought back all the anguish. She’d hidden it well, camouflaged beneath her nurse’s uniform, beneath the harsh training and the relentless routine. But she was still hurting.

  ‘You do still want him out of your life, I take it?’ The bedpans were neatly stacked to one side and Connie had thrown her a towel.

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘So when are you going to see Grayson Harte?’

  ‘As soon as possible. I need to get it over with.’

  She felt a whoosh of air as Sister Elton bustled into the room. ‘No time for talking, nurses. You have patients to prepare for theatre.’

  The ward sister allowed nothing to escape her. Daisy saw her glance towards Willa, still labouring through her pile of bedpans, but the older woman said nothing. From the days of initial training, Willa had constantly been at the rough end of Sister Elton’s tongue, but since the news of her brother’s death had percolated, Daisy had noticed a distinct softening towards her. There was a rumour that two of the brother’s friends, also pilots, had been lost and everyone knew that Willa had a picture of one of them on her bedside table.

  ‘From what you’ve said, Grayson seems a gentleman,’ Connie continued to urge, as they made their way onto the ward. ‘He’s not likely to make you feel uncomfortable, is he?’

  ‘No, I don’t think he will, and that makes me feel worse. When we said goodbye … it was, well, difficult.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me it ended badly. I thought you’d both agreed it was best to part.’

  ‘We did—sort of. It was more that he didn’t understand why I couldn’t make a new start. He tried to understand, but it just didn’t work.’

  ‘I can’t see why not.’

  ‘Neither could he. For him the Indian episode was over. The bad people had been punished and my ne’er-do-well husband was dead, so what was stopping me?’

  ‘He had a point,’ her friend said judiciously. ‘But in any case he won’t remember much of how you parted. It’s not as if he’s still pining for you, is it? You said he looked perfectly happy when you last saw him.’

  CHAPTER 4

  She’d glimpsed Grayson one Saturday afternoon in Regent Street just before Christmas. Nurses had each been given a precious few hours to shop for presents, not that there was much to buy or money to pay for what there was. And there he’d been, strolling along the pavement outside Liberty, with a laughing girl on his arm. She could still feel the fierce jealousy that had taken a sudden grip on her. She’d darted down a side street to get out of their way. And to recover. It was a shock that she could feel so passionately when months ago she’d sent him away, knowing she could never give him the closeness he craved.

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ she managed to reply. ‘Happy, that is. Things move at such a speed these days, they’re probably already married.’ Joking was the best defence, and it was probably not even a joke. War was not the moment to hang about. People met, coupled, married and left each other, all within months, sometimes weeks, even days.

  ‘So meet him as an old friend, an old acquaintance. You’re asking him a favour, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s quite a favour, don’t you think? He’s an intelligence officer and I’m asking him to aid a deserter. It’s not something that makes me feel good.’

  ‘You’ll just have to get over it. After all, he’s in an ideal position to help you. Who better? And if he finds it impossible or he’s shocked to the core, he can say no. It’s as simple as that. And then you can tell that dratted husband of yours that’s it’s a no-go and he’ll leave
you alone.’

  If only it were that simple. But Connie didn’t know Gerald, didn’t know his persistence or his reaction when he didn’t get what he wanted.

  She’d used the bombing as an excuse to stop seeing Grayson. It was true that meeting each other had become more difficult when day after day she was ferrying casualties out into the countryside and had virtually no time free. And with death all around, it was better perhaps to forget relationships, forget friendship for that matter, and concentrate on the work they both must do. But it was an excuse and a poor one at that. It wasn’t the war that was stopping her. Not the fragility of existence, the gossamer line between life and death that she saw every day in the hospital, but the sheer awfulness of what had happened to her. She couldn’t get over the betrayal. Her husband’s, and even worse, Anish’s, the man she had thought her dear friend. She could never again commit herself wholeheartedly to anyone. From her earliest years, she’d lived a solitary life—at the orphanage, as a servant to Miss Maddox, as a working class girl in Bridges’ perfumery. She’d always been lonely and expected nothing else. And then Gerald had come along and for a short while a warmer life had beckoned. Her love for him, her friendship with Anish, had changed her, made her newly vulnerable, opened her to pain.

  She could never be that girl again, but neither could she expect Grayson to understand. His life had been smooth. He’d lost his father at a very young age, she knew, but he had a mother who adored him, uncles who’d educated him, a job he loved and colleagues who were friends. If he survived this war, he would climb the intelligence ladder until he reached its very pinnacle and he would have allies all the way. His was a golden life. He could never understand the raw wash of despair that, at times, could overwhelm her. The feelings of worthlessness, that in some twisted way she had deserved her fate. While she was working, she was happy. That first day of training on the ward, she’d felt a flow of confidence and that had stayed with her. She’d known she could do the job and do it well. But that was on the ward. Out of uniform, her self-belief could waver badly and in an instant render her defenceless. She had to protect herself from further hurt. And protect Grayson, or any man who came too close, from disappointment. That was the result of Jasirapur and the shattered dreams she had left there.

  She stayed on duty into the evening. Several of the nursing staff had gone down with bad colds and been sent to the sickbay. The hospital was very strict about nurses going off duty as soon as they fell ill but it meant, of course, more work for those who remained standing. She stayed until past seven and when she left Barts, daylight was already fading. The long evenings were still for the future. Until they came, she sensed rather than saw her way home. In daytime, the city went busily about its affairs, but at night the unaccustomed darkness altered its rhythm. You went slowly, feeling your way forward, hoping not to bump into walls, lamp posts, stray wardens or huddled strangers. She turned the corner into Charterhouse Square and began to follow the path through the trees.

  Tomorrow she must use her free afternoon to visit number sixty-four Baker Street. How was she to manage this unwanted encounter? Perhaps if she arrived near to the time that Grayson finished work, she might catch him at the entrance. That way she wouldn’t have to brave the building or its gatekeepers. She was halfway across the square when the moon swam from beneath its dark cover. It was a full moon, too, and for a moment it bathed the area in white light, tipping the grass with silver and casting long shadows wherever she looked. A moment only and it had disappeared once more behind the banking clouds. But it had been enough to bring discomfort, enough to make her aware of those shadows and feel again eyes that followed her. It seemed a night for ghosts.

  In fact every night had been a night for ghosts, from the moment Gerald had risen from the dead to stand at her shoulder. Since then she had seen unreal figures aplenty, imagined eyes watching from every corner. She knew it was a nonsense, but it didn’t prevent her glancing over her shoulder as she turned the key in the lock. Nothing. You see, she told herself, there’s nothing and, if you’re not careful, you’ll send yourself mad. In India, Gerald had tried to persuade her that her mind was losing its grip. All those accidents that somehow had a perfectly logical explanation but only seemed to happen to her, each one more serious than the one before, each one a threat to her body as well as her sanity. Now he was playing with her mind again and she must not let him. Tomorrow, she would go to Baker Street and, if she had to, walk through the door of the SOE headquarters and ask to speak to Grayson Harte. For good or for ill, it would be over—or so she hoped.

  It had to rain, of course. The fine weather of the last week broke with a vengeance and Daisy was left struggling to raise a battered umbrella as she turned out of the underground station. She had dressed as well as she could for the occasion in a woollen dress of olive green. It was the only dress she possessed that wasn’t darned or mended in some way. Over it she wore her nurse’s cape. It was forbidden to wear uniform off duty, but in the absence of a winter coat, she had little option but to break the rules. The rain was hammering down and she peered anxiously at her shoes, heeled and soled so many times that they were now perilously thin. They were bound to leak, she thought, and refused to imagine what she would look like by the time she made it to Grayson’s office. And once this pair was completely ruined, there would be no more fancy footwear. Since the start of the New Year, there had been shortages in just about everything. Food especially. Sometimes the nurses had gone hungry and several of them had complained, Lydia at the forefront, at the unfairness that gave labourers a larger food allowance. But Lydia had always been a troublemaker, and, for the most part, people had shrugged and got on with it. But clothing was rationed now and their wardrobes were looking more tattered by the day. Shoes, in particular, were expensive and scarce, and Connie had even taken to mending hers with Elastoplast.

  Splinters of water bounced off the pavement and soaked Daisy’s feet and ankles. The wind had risen and the umbrella was beginning to look more dangerous than useful, but she battled on doggedly, taking what shelter it offered and counting down the street numbers. She had managed to keep her mind from dwelling on the meeting ahead but now she could ignore it no longer. She stopped, facing the glass doors of number sixty-four, and looked up at its façade. White slabs of stone rose towards the sky, a thrusting contrast to the red brick of Mr Baker’s first residential street. There was nothing to suggest the nature of the business conducted within its walls and ordinarily she would have passed the building without a second glance. But Grayson had mentioned all those months ago that the SIS had split into different sections and from now on he’d be working with the Special Operations Executive. They’d recently moved to a new headquarters—he’d be one of the Baker Street Irregulars, he’d said cheerfully. He had seemed to relish the thought of working with them, though she had only the haziest idea of what that might entail. It was sure to involve India since his experience there would be invaluable.

  Fighting against an ever-rising wind, she yanked down the umbrella, and made a decision. There was no sign of Grayson and the storm had already taken its toll, her legs splashed with dirt and her face plastered in a frenzy of wet curls. She pushed through the revolving doors and into the dazzle of black and white tiles, outpolished by gleaming mahogany doors, which stood to attention on either side of the ground floor corridor. On her left, a stone staircase wound its way upwards. Overhead, she could hear the sound of feet, tapping up and down its steps, five or six storeys high, she estimated. Facing the stairs was a lift, its concertina door open, and inside its braided guardian perched on a stool. A reception desk barred her from going any further and a severe-looking young woman, her hair scrunched back into a stubby knot, looked up from the file she was reading and arched her brows in enquiry.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The woman’s voice was as scrunched as her hair and Daisy struggled to find her tongue.

  ‘I would like to see Grayson Harte, if it’s pos
sible.’ She tried not to sound hesitant.

  ‘Yes?’ The eyebrows seemed to suggest that this was a privilege granted to only a few.

  ‘I wonder, is he in?’

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘You must have an appointment. I’m afraid you can’t see him without one, Miss … You do realise this is a government building.’

  ‘Yes, I do. But Mr Harte … It’s important I see him.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’ The woman smiled pityingly at her. ‘Just make an appointment. I can give you his secretary’s number if you wish.’

  ‘I don’t have the time for that.’ Daisy decided she didn’t like the woman, decided she would be happy to lie to her. ‘If he’s in, I need to see him now. It’s urgent. A matter of national importance, you see.’

  The woman’s face changed, her expression chilled by Daisy’s announcement. ‘I’ll see if he’s available.’

  She turned her back and muttered something into the telephone. There was a pause of several minutes at the other end of the line as though someone had gone away to check. What if they were checking up on her? she thought. She’d just told a very big lie and, in the current situation, they might not take kindly to such talk. What would Grayson think when he saw her standing there instead of the matter of national importance? Her stomach tensed. She couldn’t do it. She had to do it. The woman replaced the receiver with a clang but said nothing further. Instead, she returned to her papers as though her unwelcome visitor had ceased to exist. Daisy caught the ring of shoes on the stone stairs. The footsteps were some way off, but coming nearer. They must belong to Grayson. He was walking towards her at this very moment. No, she couldn’t do it after all. She snatched up the dripping umbrella and plunged through the revolving door and out on to the rain-soaked street.