My Sweet Valentine (12 page)

‘I might be,’ Dulcie responded coquettishly.

‘There’s no way that Mr MacIndoe is going to let you go dancing tomorrow night,’ one of the other men warned. ‘You’ve got surgery on Monday.’

‘All the more reason to have a good time on Saturday,’ the young man responded.

The doors at the other end of the ward opened to admit a pretty young nurse, accompanied by George and Sally.

‘Dulcie, what are doing in here?’ Sally asked.

‘You were gone so long I thought I’d have a look round,’ Dulcie fibbed. She wasn’t going to make herself look daft by admitting she’d got herself lost.

Sally gave the ward sister an apologetic look. It was typical of Dulcie that she’d managed to find her way into the ward that contained in the main those men who were reaching the final stages of their treatment and rehabilitation before being discharged, and who were therefore far more likely to react as high-spirited young men in her presence than very sick patients.

Since George had come into the ward with the ward sister only to check up on another of his patients, Sally pointed to the doors through which she and George had just come, and told Dulcie, ‘We’re going back this way.’

George had finished checking up on his patient and was waiting for them to join him. As they did so, Dulcie glanced casually at the man George had been examining and then stopped, moving closer to exclaim in astonishment, ‘David!’

It was David James-Thompson, the dashing barrister who had married Dulcie’s arch-enemy from Selfridges – the posh daughter of one of Selfridges directors.

How Dulcie had enjoyed flirting with David and encouraging him to pay attention to her as a means of getting at the snooty Lydia, who had made it so plain that she looked down on her. David had wanted to take things further than the mild flirtation Dulcie had instigated, but Dulcie had refused. If she’d been the type to allow herself to fall in love, which she wasn’t, then falling in love with a man like David – a man who would one day inherit a title and whose mother had chosen his wife for him – could only lead to heartache. But even though she knew that she had made the right decision, standing here looking at him was making her heart thud in a most un-Dulcie-like way – something that Wilder had never been able to achieve.

David’s handsome face was exactly the same, even if the amusement and the confidence had gone from the familiar hazel eyes. It was very rare for anything or anyone to wrong-foot Dulcie or catch her off guard. But right now something had.

David wasn’t looking at her. He had turned his head right away from her so that he didn’t have to look at her, turning his body away from her too, and that was when Dulcie recognised from the movement of the bedclothes that David no longer had much of a body; that in fact beneath the bedclothes where the outline of his legs should have been there was nothing. David has lost his legs. And most of one of his arms, she realised as she looked properly at him. She had been so surprised to see him, so taken off guard by the sight of his familiar
handsome face that initially she hadn’t looked beyond that face.

Sally’s hand on her arm was drawing her away, George coming to stand on the other side of her, both of them almost walking her out of the ward so that she was through the doors and in the corridor beyond it before she could think to object.

David watched her go. Seeing Dulcie had affected him in a way that he had truly believed was no longer possible. Not sexually – that was impossible, thanks to his injuries from the Messerschmidt bullets, which had ripped apart his lower legs and his groin as well as damaging his arm. No, seeing Dulcie had brought back to life, if only briefly, his war-numbed emotions. Seeing Dulcie had reminded him of a past that in its way had been every bit as bleak as the only future he could now look towards.

He had been very young when he had recognised that his mother didn’t even like him, never mind love him, absorbing that knowledge as a truth without any need for it to be put into words, as young children do. Later, using his legal brain to try to rationalise his mother’s attitude to him, he had decided that initially her antipathy toward him sprang from the loss of her own elder brother toward the end of the Great War. His mother had worshipped her elder sibling; she talked about him all the time. Her private sitting room had been filled with silver-framed photographs of him where it had been bare of photographs of both David and his father. David had never been allowed to touch those precious photographs, his small chubby baby hands smacked hard whenever he tried to reach for them when his mother was holding them.

David could still vividly remember his mother’s excitement on her brother’s rare visits, even though he had been very young at the time. No one had been allowed to interrupt them. His mother had wanted her precious brother to herself. Apart from these rare glimpses, David’s visual memories of his uncle came from his mother’s photographs. These had shown a thin and delicate man, as befitted the poet he had been. A poet who, according to David’s mother, had made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

Perhaps things might have been different for David if he had taken after his mother’s side of the family and physically resembled his dead uncle, but he did not. David had the strong muscles and the height of his father’s family, and that had been another reason for his mother to reject him. His father’s family were good country stock but not anywhere near as blue-blooded as his mother’s family, with its earldom at the top of their family tree. At the top of the family tree and far out of the reach of his mother’s branch of the family until the Great War had scythed through its younger branches, resulting in the deaths of the three male cousins, their deaths putting his mother’s brother, Eddie, in direct line to inherit the earldom on the death of the then current earl.

He had been a child still when his uncle had been sent home from the trenches, suffering from the gas poisoning that had killed him. A child with scarlet fever, whose mother had therefore been banned from going to nurse her sick brother, the sick brother who had died, whilst he … the naughty child, whose illness had meant she was unable to see her brother, to nurse him, maybe to save him, was then the cause of the whole family losing
the earldom and the status and riches that went with it. His mother had never forgiven him for that, and David knew that she never would.

His marriage to Lydia had been the price his mother had demanded from him as mere interest on the debt she believed he owed her. Lydia would ultimately inherit a very good fortune indeed and Lydia’s family, with their connection to trade through the great-grandparents from whom that fortune came, had been keen to cement their progress up the social ladder by marrying their daughter to a young man who would ultimately inherit from his own great uncle and then his father the title of Sir David and the pretty Oxfordshire manor that went with it. Not that his mother, forced to accept his father’s proposal when the Great War had left so many young women of her generation without prospective husbands, thought very much of his father’s family title. A mere baronetcy could after all hardly compare with an earldom; good stout hearty beefy English county blood could not match the purity of blue blood that for centuries had never been mixed with anything other than more blue blood.

How his mother had railed against the fact that, as the last of her family, she could not claim the earldom and all that went with it, always concluding her furious tirades with the cruel words that David could never have been good enough to wear the family ermine.

‘How I came to produce a child like you I shall never know,’ she was fond of declaiming.

If fate had been unkind to her it had been equally unkind to him in giving him a mother who had no love for him. His father, a decent, good man in his way, had quickly been cowed by his far more domineering wife,
and David had learned from him that it was easier to give in to his mother than to stand up to her. He had often wondered if Lydia realised that, for all her fussing over her, his mother secretly despised her. Lydia would certainly never have been considered good enough for his mother’s precious brother or the earldom.

Perhaps it was that early rejection by his mother that had made him the man he was, and that had fostered in him that streak of earthiness and enjoyment of the company of rich robustness of ordinary people. People like Dulcie. David didn’t know and he cared even less. In fact, he didn’t care about anything right now other than the pain where his lower legs should have been. No, he didn’t care, but he still couldn’t help watching Dulcie walk away from him, until she had disappeared through the door at the other end of the ward.

‘You know the group captain, do you, Dulcie?’ George asked once they were out of the ward.

‘Yes, I do, not that you’d know it from the way he went and showed me up by ignoring me,’ Dulcie responded with a small angry sniff. ‘Of course, it will be on her account, that stuck-up wife of his. Always was jealous of me, she was, and I dare say he won’t want any of his pals telling her that he’s been talking to me when she comes to visit him.’

‘That won’t happen, Dulcie,’ George informed her. ‘Neither David’s wife nor his parents visit him. They’re ashamed of him, you see, because of his injuries, and that will be why he didn’t acknowledge you. He’d be afraid that you would reject him like they did.’

Dulcie could hear the disapproval of Lydia and of
David’s parents in George’s voice, and immediately played up to it.

‘Not visit their own son? Well, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, him being like he is. Mind you, I never liked the sound of that mother of his, and as for Lydia, the only reason she married him was because one day he’ll have a title.’

George seemed to be considering something, but even Dulcie, who made a point of never allowing anything to catch her off guard, was surprised when he asked her, ‘Dulcie, how would you feel about visiting David tomorrow afternoon at visiting time?’

‘What, after him ignoring me today?’

‘We desperately need to get him properly on the road to recovery and that’s not going to happen until he feels that people accept him as he is, and that they still care about him despite his injuries.’

Listening to her fiancé as they walked towards the hospital exit, Sally tried to send him a warning look. She didn’t think that Dulcie was the right person to ask to show compassion to a man in David’s condition.

But George was giving her a small shake of his head as he continued, ‘Of course, I realise that it would take a really special girl to do that for David, Dulcie. Not many girls would feel comfortable talking to a young man as badly injured as David is – a young man who right now is feeling very sorry for himself and very angry indeed because of the way his wife and mother have turned their backs on him. It would take a very unselfish and kind young woman indeed, a young woman who is the complete opposite from his wife.’

Sally grimaced to herself. She knew what George was
doing and why. He was using on Dulcie the psychological skills he was being taught at the hospital for helping his patients, but Sally still wasn’t sure that was a good idea.

Listening to George, Dulcie, oblivious to what George was doing, bridled with delight at the thought of doing something that would make her look better than Lydia. How she’d enjoy telling them back at Selfridges that she’d had to step in and help David because his wife had turned her back on him. That would show everyone who was the better woman. And it would show David as well. He might have been sweet on her but he had still gone and married Lydia. Not that she, Dulcie, had wanted him to marry her, but she wouldn’t have minded having him ask her.

Ever practically minded, though, she asked George, ‘What if he doesn’t want to talk to me? There’d be no point in me visiting him then, would there? And I’d look a real charlie sitting there with him refusing to even look at me.’

‘I think he’ll want to talk to you, Dulcie. He watched you leaving the ward. I turned round to have a look. It was probably a shock for him to see you. And I expect he was worried about what you’d think. After all, I dare say the last time you saw him he was standing on his feet and uninjured. Now he’s lost both his lower legs and an arm, and there were other injuries … to his groin.’

A flutter of something unfamiliar gripped Dulcie’s belly. David had been such a tall, broad-shouldered, male man, as proud of being a handsome man as she was of being a pretty girl.

‘Well, his face is all right,’ was all she allowed herself
to say, ‘and you can’t see that he’s not got any legs whilst he’s in bed, can you? Mind you, I can’t say that I’m surprised about that wife of his – she never did have much about her. And I dare say there won’t be an heir then now either, by the sound of it.’

‘No, Dulcie, there won’t,’ George confirmed sadly. ‘It’s a lot to ask of any young woman, Dulcie, I know that, and I wouldn’t blame you one little bit if you felt that you aren’t up to it.’

‘Who says I’m not up to it? I’m not like that stuck-up wife of his. Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with his face.’ She paused and then asked anxiously, ‘He can still talk, can’t he? I mean, what’s happened to him hasn’t …?’

‘Yes, he can talk, Dulcie,’ George confirmed.

‘All right, I’ll do it then,’ she agreed.

They were outside the hospital now, the thin fitful moonlight glistening on the wet road as George opened the car doors for them and then got into the driving seat.

‘Nancy’s just arrived,’ Mrs Morrison told Olive in a rueful whisper as the two WVS ladies queued up for their mid-meeting cup of tea in the church hall.

‘She said she’d be late this evening,’ Olive replied. ‘Her husband’s on fire-watching duty this week and she wanted to wait for him to come in before she came out.’

‘I’ve never known anyone make her own virtue so much of a stick to beat others with,’ said Mrs Morrison pithily. ‘I know she’s your next-door neighbour, Olive, and I don’t like speaking ill of anyone but—’

‘She doesn’t mean any harm,’ Olive felt bound to  defend her neighbour, even though privately she
agreed with what Mrs Morrison was saying. ‘It’s just her way.’