My Sweet Valentine (16 page)

‘It doesn’t have to be real adultery, Dulcie,’ he explained wryly. ‘The solicitor just finds someone – a woman – who
for a sum of money agrees to say that she and I spent the night together at an hotel after Lydia and I were married but before I ended up here.’

‘You mean you’re letting her get away with turning her back on you so that she can marry someone else?’

‘It’s the done thing when one is a gentleman.’

‘Well, I don’t know why you’d want to be a gentleman when Lydia certainly isn’t a lady,’ Dulcie told him roundly, giving him a reproving look when he started to laugh. Dulcie didn’t like people laughing at her.

Someone else, overhearing the sound of David’s laughter, was very pleased by it.

Mr Archibald MacIndoe, the surgeon, accompanied by George, had just entered the ward to take a look at his patients and talk with them. He turned to the younger man and said to him approvingly, ‘Good work getting that young woman to spend some time with the group captain, Laidlaw. She’s obviously raising his spirits, and that’s just what we need to see.’

As George said to Sally later, when he joined her in the room that Sally and some of the duty nurses and other staff were decorating for the evening’s dance, ‘I have to admit that, like you, I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing getting Dulcie to visit David.’

‘You were obviously a better judge of the situation than me,’ Sally told him generously, as he handed her a cup of tea.

The room hummed with everyone’s chatter as they worked, pinning up decorations and inflating balloons, so that George had to move closer to her and raise his voice slightly as he responded.

‘David certainly looked as though he was enjoying Dulcie’s company when I took a quick peek into the ward ten minutes ago. He was actually joking with one of the other men and warning him off attempting to get Dulcie’s attention.’

Sally smiled at him, her smile widening as he gave her an appreciative look.

‘That’s just the spirit we need to see in him,’ George continued. ‘He’s recovered very well from the amputations and the skin grafts, and technically there’s no reason why ultimately he shouldn’t go home. He’ll always be wheelchair-bound, of course, but with both his wife and his parents turning their backs on him …’

‘He feels safer here?’ Sally guessed. ‘Poor boy. Come on,’ she said after she’d finished her tea, ‘if you’ve got some time to spare, you can hold the ladders for me whilst I put up this bunting the local WI has loaned us for the party. Apparently it was made for the celebrations after the end of the last war, so I’ve been warned that it’s getting a bit fragile.’

‘It’s much the same era, then, as the gramophone we were also offered,’ George grinned, ‘and the records. Luckily one of the patients is a bit of a swing music fan and he’s volunteered his own gramophone and records, provided his favourite nurse rewards him with a kiss, apparently.’

‘No patient would ever get away with that at Barts,’ Sally laughed.

‘No, and neither would any other hospital I know of have barrels of beer on the wards for the patients, but then this is not like any other hospital, and our patients are not like most other patients. They are
young, otherwise healthy and fit young men with all that that means, with the kind of injuries that no one should ever have to face. As Mr MacIndoe says, whatever it takes to get them to want to work towards the most normal kind of life they can have has to be undertaken. Mending their bodies as best we can on its own isn’t enough.’

Archibald MacIndoe wasn’t Dulcie’s only champion. Ward Sister, making one of her inspections of her territory, noted the hubbub of activity and laughter coming from the end of the ward where was the group captain whose lack of interest in his own ultimate recovery had been causing her some concern. Speedily she made her way to David’s bed and even more speedily assessed the situation.

A young woman who could look not just comfortable but actually preen herself at the attention she was receiving from a group of young men with the kind of injuries her patients had, and bring a smile to the faces of those young men who were able to smile, was someone who should be encouraged to repeat her visits, as far as Sister was concerned.

If Dulcie herself wasn’t aware of the huge compliment she had been paid when she was actually offered a cup of tea by Sister herself, then others on the ward certainly were and duly took note.

Not that Dulcie was anyone’s fool. She wasn’t. She’d seen the looks one of the pretty nurses had been giving David, and she’d seen too the respect with which he was treated by the other men. With or without his legs, having a man like David as one’s admirer could only add to a
girl’s status, especially now that Lydia wasn’t going to be on the scene.

‘Of course I’m going to the dance,’ Dulcie responded to one young pilot’s question.

‘Good, the group captain can go with you,’ Sister informed Dulcie, arriving at David’s bed just in time to hear Dulcie’s announcement, and quickly forestalling David’s attempt to refuse by suggesting, ‘I’m sure that your friend won’t mind pushing your chair, will you, dear? We can get a couple of the other patients to help you if it’s too heavy.’

‘You don’t have to go to the dance with me, you know. Lydia certainly wouldn’t have wanted to,’ David told Dulcie once Sister had gone, and he had asked the other men to ‘push off so that I can have Dulcie to myself for a few minutes’.

‘Well, I’m not Lydia, am I?’ Dulcie retorted. ‘You don’t want to let her get away with what she’s done, you know, David. Walking out on you and then getting you to give her a divorce when she’s the one that’s done wrong.’

‘I can’t blame her, Dulcie. She and I never pretended to be in love with one another, after all, and she’s not like you, you know.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Dulcie demanded.

‘It means,’ David told her, ‘that you are the kind of girl that a man just can’t help being tempted to fall in love with.’

Dulcie gave a contented sigh. The compliments David was paying her were no more than her due. Of course, it was a pity that David had lost his legs and wouldn’t be able to dance with her like he had done at the Hammersmith Palais that night he had joined her there,
but the truth was that she had enjoyed herself far more here today, basking in the admiration of a group of young men whom she knew would not make real advances to her because she was David’s friend and they admired and respected him, than she did when she went out with Wilder. David was far more relaxing than Wilder, with his sometimes uncertain temper, his unreliability, his constant attempts to persuade her into a more sexual relationship with him than she wanted. That didn’t mean, though, that she intended to traipse all the way down to East Grinstead regularly. It was nearly thirty miles from London, after all, and in the country, which had no appeal whatsoever for Dulcie. She wasn’t like Sally, who had announced over breakfast this morning that she couldn’t wait for the weather to warm up so that she could go for long walks in the nearby countryside.

Although Mr MacIndoe allowed open visiting, knowing how difficult it often was for some families to come down and see their loved ones, hospital routine still had to be followed, and it was time for David to have a rest and for the nurses to attend to their patients’ needs.

Dulcie swept out of the ward as regally as any queen enjoying the adulation of her admirers, feeling very pleased with herself indeed.

She was still feeling pleased with herself over an hour later as she regaled Sally with how well received her visit had been, over an early tea of sardines on toast in their landlady’s kitchen.

‘And Sister specially asked me to push David’s chair to the dance tonight on account of him only agreeing to go because of me. Of course, he was always pretty keen on me.’

Feeling that Dulcie had enjoyed enough admiration for one day, Sally turned to Persephone, who had returned to the house ahead of them, asking her gently, ‘How are you feeling? I hope you don’t mind, but George was explaining to me about your brother’s condition and how both your parents are too upset by it to be able to come and visit him. You’ve been a wonderful sister to him, Persephone, and it can’t be easy for you. I know from nursing patients who’ve suffered mental damage from the war that they are the very hardest to treat.’

Persephone jumped and looked flustered. The poor girl obviously wasn’t used to anyone paying her attention or showing her any concern, Sally thought sympathetically.

‘Poor Roddy,’ she responded unsteadily. ‘He was to have been a professor, you know. Daddy was very cross with him when he enlisted.’

‘Mental damage? Dulcie asked. ‘What’s up with him, then?’

Sally exhaled silently. Really, Dulcie could be dreadfully thoughtless at times.

‘Persephone’s brother was badly burned when he tried to rescue his men. It’s left him mentally scarred, Dulcie. All the men suffer inwardly, as well as outwardly, because of what they’ve been through, but for some men that inward suffering is very bad indeed.’

‘It was Dunkirk,’ Persephone told them both simply. ‘They were captured when they were heading for the coast. They tried to escape, and my brother was shot and left for dead. The others were locked in a barn and then it was set on fire.’

She was sitting bolt upright, the hands she had folded
neatly in her lap shaking terribly. Sally reached out and covered them with one of her own.

‘Sometimes he thinks he’s still there. He doesn’t understand that he’s safe now here in England. He lost his sight so he can’t see anyone. He … sometimes he can be violent. He thinks he’s protecting his men. Then other times he just screams. I think he’d be better if he could come home and have familiar things around him, but Daddy just can’t bear the thought of it. He was so very clever, you see. Brilliant, everyone said, and now …’

Tears rolled down her face, causing Sally’s heart to tighten with angry grief.

There was a good turnout for the dance, with both the nurses and the townspeople there to make sure that the men had as good a time as it was possible for them to have.

Dulcie might have pushed David’s chair into the room where the dance was being held, but naturally she left it to his friends to secure the table of her choice for their party, right slap bang where everyone could see them.

The bunting, despite its age, still managed to put on a brave show, Sally thought, rather like the men themselves, who despite their various injuries were all spruced up and clean-shaven.

Sally, who had lent a hand herself, along with the nurses on duty, to ensure that those men who were not able to help themselves did get a shave, knew how much it meant to these proud young men to feel that they were accepted.

Some of the nurses were already getting their patients up to dance to the swing music records, and Sally quickly
joined in, asking a young man who was undergoing some particularly painful facial reconstruction surgery, and to whom George had introduced her earlier in the day, if he would dance with her.

Just wait until she told Wilder about this dance, Dulcie thought happily. She’d certainly make sure that he knew that she hadn’t been sitting around on her own all weekend because he hadn’t been able to get leave. She’d tell him about David too, of course, and she might even just drop into the conversation the fact that one day David would be a sir. Wilder liked to think that because he was American and had money, that meant that she was lucky to be going out with him. Dulcie hadn’t said anything before, but now that David was back in her life it wouldn’t do any harm to let Wilder know about him.

The young owner of the gramophone had a good selection of records, including ‘Whispering Grass’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and Sally, held tightly in George’s arms when they finally managed to snatch a dance together, certainly didn’t mind the fact that the latter was being played for the third time.

The sight of the stones in her engagement ring catching the light brought a soft smile to her lips and had her moving discreetly closer to George.

‘Happy?’ he asked her.

‘Very. It was so kind of your mother to write to me as she did, George, welcoming me to your family so warmly.’

‘She’d have done that anyway, but I know that having lost her own parents just after she and Dad were married, she’s especially aware of your own loss in that regard.’

For once Sally was glad that George was slightly clumsy on his feet as she missed a step and he apologised as though it had been his fault.

She had never intended actually to deceive George when she had told him that she had no family. That was, after all, what she felt and believed – and very passionately, as well. She had denied her father because she had felt that his betrayal meant that he wasn’t her father any more. Her words, though, were now having unintended consequences. George, and now his family, believed that both her parents were dead, and that wasn’t the truth. George’s mother had written the kindest of letters to her in which she had sympathised with her because of that loss. The reality, of course, was that her father was not only very much alive, but that he had remarried after her mother’s death and that she, Sally, had a half-sister who would be one year old in May.

Sally hated deceit of any kind. It was because of deceit that she had cut herself off from her father. But how could she explain the real situation to George now? She couldn’t. They had initially exchanged family histories as colleagues and virtual strangers. There’d been no need for her to go into detail and she certainly hadn’t wanted to reveal the extent of her own hurt. It had been too raw and she had had no idea then that they would end up loving one another.

And then there was the issue of how George’s mother might judge her – a young woman she had only heard about from the son who had fallen in love with her, and who she was having to trust would love him as any mother would want their child to be loved – if Sally were
to attempt to explain her history now, and her reasons for behaving as she had.

Logical and reasonable though her thinking was, nothing could make her feel comfortable about the situation, Sally knew. She loved George. She didn’t want there to be any secrets between them. But even now, Sally also knew that she did not want to talk about what had happened, even to George. The reality for her was that though her father was alive, to her he was no longer her father. She still believed that it would be a betrayal of everything she felt for her mother if she were to accept even within herself that she had a father and a half-sister. She was the only person now to keep loyal to her mother.