The Black Mountains (53 page)

A light showed at the end of the ward, and she put her finger to his lips again.

“It's time you tried to go to sleep again. And if the nightmare comes back, just yell, and I'll be here.”

“Promise?”

She smiled, her mouth a generous curve in the half light.

“Promise. Now go to sleep.”

And she was there, whenever he needed her. The dreams came less and less frequently, and in the end they hardly came at all, so that he felt somehow as if she had stopped them.

She had said that if she loved him, she wouldn't let it make any difference. She didn't love him, of course. She would have said the same to anyone in the same position. But her words became a talisman, a part of him not forgetting the closeness they had shared in the sleeping ward.

They talked again, often, but never on quite such a personal level. The opportunity did not often arise when she could spend more than a few minutes with him uninterrupted, and he suspected that if he had not been so ill that other night Stella would never have been allowed to stay so long with him.

For the most part, the nurses were rushed off their feet, and the VAD's fared worse than many, coming in for the most distasteful tasks and most of the criticism. As Jack grew stronger and more observant, he noticed how tired Stella often looked, her face drawn with strain, and circles deepening beneath her eyes. She still bustled and smiled, but her tongue grew sharper, and he thought she was beginning to look much older than her years.

Lying despondently against the pillows and watching her at work, he wished desperately he could talk to her again, but it was hardly possible with Nick Morland all ears in the next bed, joking and ragging every time she came near.

One day, he told himself, I'll have the courage to tell her the feeling I have for her. Until then …

As soon as he was allowed out of bed, Jack threw himself wholeheartedly info the business of learning to walk again, and before long he was hopping up and down the ward on his crutches. But as his new-found friends cheered his progress, they little guessed the black despair that gripped him still when the lights went out and the ward quieted down for the night.

All this, Jack kept to himself. The doubts as to his acceptability as a man and particularly as a potential husband and lover festered on in the depths of his being.

Slowly his stump healed, not sufficiently for him to be fitted for his new artificial leg, but enough for him to wear a peg-leg for short periods at a time. By the end of March, he was declared fit to go home, provided there was someone willing and able to nurse him for the rest of his convalescence.

Jack knew, without asking, that this was exactly what Charlotte had been waiting and praying for, but he wrote all the same, explaining what the doctors had told him, and waited for her answer before telling them that his bed could be used for some other wounded flier just as soon as they were prepared to boot him out.

“You're a lucky bastard. You always were,” Nick Morland told him cheerfully when he heard the news. “ You'll be glad to see the back of this place, I know.”

Jack nodded without replying. He had no intention of telling the voluble Nick how mixed his feelings were on that score. It would be good, of course, to be able to tuck into Charlotte's home-cooking again instead of the tasteless swill that passed for food here, but the thought of leaving Stella was a lead weight on his heart. However slight their contact, it was better than nothing. And once he left London, who knew how long it would be before he saw her again?

She had been away from the ward now for several days, taking, he supposed, a well-earned rest, but her absence had already given him a foretaste of the days to come when he would no longer see her bustling figure or generously smiling mouth, and he was beginning to be afraid that he might have to leave before her return.

The day before his discharge arrived, and there was still no sign of her.

It was 1st April, the day when the Royal Naval Air Service was officially merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form a brand-new fighting force of the skies—the Royal Air Force. But even that momentous occasion was submerged by the fact that it was also All Fools Day and an excuse for every man in the ward with an ounce of fun left in his body to indulge in one April Fool joke after another, so that when Jack eventually asked one of the VAD's for news of Stella, she simply took it as another prank and gave him a tart answer before bustling away. Another nurse he asked pretended to know nothing of Stella's plans, and he abandoned the attempts as futile. The nursing fraternity were like a branch of a secret organization, he thought, tight-lipped and prepared to defend one another's secrets to the very last ditch.

By the time the lamps were lit and the black-out curtains drawn against a possible air-raid attack, he had almost given up hope. But as the night staff came on duty, he found himself holding on desperately to this one last chance. And his prayer was answered—there she was walking along the ward!

At first his relief was so great that he was content to lean back against the pillows and simply allow her presence to flow over him. Then, after a while, he wanted to speak to her. Would she never venture to his end of the ward? Would someone else put the lights out, so that he would have to try to sleep, knowing that she was in the office with the duty Sister or attending to some of the more seriously ill men in the side room and not being able to speak to her?

The thought spurred him to action. He rolled back the blankets and swung his good leg over the edge of the bed. Then he hoisted his crutches under his armpits and began to hop down the ward, hoping that the nurses and other patients would assume he was going to the W. C.

He reached the double doors at the end of the ward without being challenged, but as he pushed them open and began to steer himself through, he heard her voice behind him, brisk and good-humoured but painfully impersonal.

“And where do you think you're going, Lieutenant? Just because you're now a member of a brand-new fighting force doesn't mean you can take off too.”

He swung round, smiling his surprise. He hadn't expected her to be so well-informed.

“The Royal Air Force,” he said, savouring the words. “ I'm sorry to see the old RNAS go, of course, but it does make you feel that you're appreciated as a separate unit with a tradition all your own, not just an appendage of the old guard.”

She tutted at him and tucked her hand under his elbow.

“Well, don't let it go to your head, that's all. Now, if you're going nowhere in particular, I would get back to bed if I were you, and make the most of it while you have the chance.”

Her nearness started a slow fire in him, and for a moment he forgot his disability and the shyness it had magnified a hundredfold, forgot everything except that there would be some other wounded man in his bed tomorrow, with calls on her time and attention, while he would be two hundred miles away.

“I'm going home tomorrow,” he said, but he could detect no answering flicker of dismay in her attitude. She simply continued to propel him up the ward with firm good humour.

“Tomorrow, is it? I thought it must be soon.”

He ached with desperation. How could he get through to her, let her know what was in his heart without messing it all up? And how could he phrase it so that there would be no embarrassment if he had misread her thoughts.

“Stella …”

She eased him round, her eyes wide and serious, meeting his.

“Yes?”

“Will you be coming home at all?”

“Oh, sometime, I hope!”

“Maybe … well, when you do, I'd like to see you. It'll be a while before I'm any good on this dummy leg of mine, but …”

He heard the sharp intake of her breath; she was quite unable to conceal it.

“It'll be quite a while before I'm home,” she said tonelessly.

A heaviness began to ache inside him which seemed to accept the inevitable without feeling any pain. That would come later, the pain. For the moment all that mattered was to keep pride flying high, to pretend that her answer didn't matter.

“Oh well, never mind, it was just a thought. Since we both come from Hillsbridge …”

“Yes.” The expression in her grey eyes was quite unfathomable, and she settled him back against the pillows, deftly flicking the blankets across his leg. “I'll be a long way from Hillsbridge, though.”

“Not that far,” he said before he could stop himself. “Mam and Jim, my brother, are coming up for me tomorrow by motor car.”

“Yes, but I won't be in London. I'll be in France.”

“France?” His voice rose anxiously. “What do you mean, France?”

“I've volunteered,” she said evenly. “ They're always looking for nurses to work behind the lines, and I think I've been here long enough. I leave next week.”

“Stella, you can't! For God's sake, it's hell out there …” He broke off, aware of the inadequacy of the clichéd expression.

There was no way he could tell her, in words she would understand, of the horror, the raw, uninitiated butchery. She was a nurse, yes, but the wounds she had seen had all been removed from their immediate savagery by two or three healing weeks. She had never seen a man with half his face blown away, moments after it had happened, or a boy still holding his guts into the cavern that had been his stomach.

There was no way he could tell her, young and confident as she was, of the effect of nightly shelling on taut, jangling nerves. Or of the other things war spawned—the nurses who had arrived as fresh and innocent girls who had fallen so quickly for the advances of desperately lonely young men so that they were sick with VD, or pregnant, almost without knowing how, in a matter of weeks.

There was no way to tell her, and no time. But as if she read his mind, her mouth curved a little, although he noticed the usual sparkle had gone from her eyes. “I'm not so green as you seem to think,” she said briskly. “I've been nursing men wounded in this damned war since 1916, and I happen to think I'll be more use out there, that's all. It's not as if I've got anything to stop me. Or anyone.”

He recognized the hint of challenge in her voice, and his heart leaped in him. He sat up, catching her wrist with his fingers and forcing her to go on looking at him.

“Don't go, Stella,” he said. “Come home to Hillsbridge for a rest. Tell your conscience you're coming to look after me if it makes you feel better.”

For long seconds she did not answer. Her eyes had gone misty, and he thought her mouth trembled slightly. Then she tightened it into its characteristic upward curve.

“Selfish bastard!” she teased. “ One man on the way to recovery doesn't need a nurse all to himself.”

“Don't you believe it,” he heard himself say. “And the language you've picked up from all these officers is shocking, Nurse O'Halloran!”

She laughed, and for a moment it was all there again, the closeness they had shared that night. Elation lifted him. So he hadn't imagined it! They were reaching out to one another with the fingers of the mind, touching more gently and more surely than his fingers on her wrist, meeting in a fusion that seemed to him to blaze with light.

For timeless moments it lasted and he was unaware of anything but her face, blurred but smiling, the face of his dreams. Then, with a sense of rude awakening, he became aware of a commotion at the end of the ward. Voices called, bowls clattered, and Stella, stiffening, had wrenched her hand from his to become a nurse again.

As she bustled away, leaving him with a feeling of cheated frustration, he became aware of Nick Morland watching him from the next bed with unashamed interest.

“Inconsiderate of old Bates to take a turn for the worst just at that moment,” he said good-humouredly. “Never mind, you wouldn't have got anywhere, anyway. But don't let it worry you. We all fall in love with a nurse sooner or later. Angels of mercy, you see. In our position, it's only natural. And they understand. They're used to it.”

“For Christ's sake, shut up!” Jack told him, at the same time wondering if he was making a fool of himself. Was he letting his imagination run away with him? He didn't know, and only time would tell.

All night he waited, watching the figures that moved like shadows against the soft light at the end of the ward, but she did not come back to his bed. And as the hours ticked remorselessly by to that low abyss that is sleepless dawn he was forced to the conclusion that he had been wrong to think she returned his feelings in even the slightest degree. She was a nice girl, a kind girl, and she had treated him with all the compassion that was in her nature. But as soon as he overstepped the mark, she would keep her distance, because to do so was easier than to tell him the truth—that she did not really care for him, that he was only another patient.

All night he waited, while the ache inside him grew and spread. But he had no way of knowing that while he dozed and fretted, Stella had let herself out a side door as soon as the ward was quiet and stood alone in the moonlit passage, her hands tightly folded together in her apron, tears running unchecked down her cheeks.

If only I'd known! Stella O'Halloran whispered over and over again. If only I'd had some inkling of the way he felt! But he was always so indifferent, always so distant. And now it's too late. I'm committed to the thing I decided to do to forget him.

Then, almost as if she had heard Nick's words to Jack, the selfsame thought repeated itself to her. But maybe it's for the best I'm going, anyway. Patients always think they are in love with their nurses—it's something for them to hold on to in an alien world. We try to be kind and understanding, and they take it to heart. But when they get back to normality, they soon forget. They want to forget. And if there was more than general sympathy behind the care we offered them, they never know it, and it is best they should not.