The Scarlet Thread (6 page)

“Oh, Gawd,” the boy beside her kept repeating. “Oh, Gawd. It's so good to be home. Aren't you glad, Nurse? Aren't you bloody glad?”

“Not as bloody glad as you,” she said, and managed to smile at him. “Are you being met?”

“Mum and Dad,” he announced. “They're down there somewhere. Can't bloody well see anything in this mist.”

There was a cheer when they actually docked, and then the gangway rattled up and one by one the men on stretchers and in wheelchairs were helped off the ship. The rain had stopped by the time Angela went down to gather up her bag of belongings. In spite of her cloak, she shivered in the cold. There were long queues at the public telephones, until someone, seeing her waiting, called her and gave up his place. She didn't know how forlorn and tired she looked.

Her mother's voice sounded crackly and far away. Angela had only a few English coins to feed the coin box.

“Angela darling. Where are you?”

“I'm at Southampton. I'll catch a train home. No, no, I'm fine. How are you? How's Daddy? … I don't know. It depends when I can get a train.… No, don't keep anything hot for me; God knows when I'll get there.… Yes, longing to see you both too.… I'm running out of money. Bye, Mum darling.”

She pushed the door open and an eager serviceman thrust past her. “Sorry, must phone the wife.” For a brief moment he watched as she maneuvered her way out of the booth. He wondered what on earth she had to cry about.

“What do you mean there's no line? I know there's a goddamned line!”

The army telephone operator went red. She took off her headphones and stood up. Officer or no officer, she wasn't going to be talked to like that. And by a Yank. “I'm sorry, sir, but I've told you. There is no line to that number on the island. I'm closing the switchboard.”

He moved a little nearer. He looked dangerous, as if he might do something violent. “It's the military hospital at Palermo,” he said. “So don't give me that crap about no number. Try again.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “How much will it take? Twenty U.S. dollars?”

The military hospital? Hadn't he heard?
I'd better be careful
, she thought.
I'd like to give him one in the eye, but I'd better not chance it
.

“Just wait a minute, please. I'll get someone.” She hurried out of the office to find her sergeant. She wasn't about to give that nasty customer the bad news.

He had been busy for the past fortnight, meeting groups of partisans in the wild Calabrian countryside, cut off from all communication with Naples. There was no letter from Angela waiting for him, and he had sent off three in succession through army channels before he went upcountry.

No letter, no message from her, nothing. No civilian lines of communication were open, so he had naturally gone to the military telephone service. It was ten o'clock at night, and the offices were closed. Only the sullen English girl was on duty. He shouldn't have lost his temper with her. He should have kept calm.

“Evening, Captain. Can I help you?”

There was a hostile look in the man's eye. She'd gone in and complained, of course. He wouldn't get much cooperation from the sergeant either.

“I've got to get through to this number,” he said. “It's very important. Your operator said there was no line. Telephone communication was established with Sicily over a week ago. So I know there's a line. Will you try it for me?”

The sergeant said flatly, “The military hospital at Palermo doesn't have a line, sir. It was bombed to the ground yesterday morning.”

It was a freak, they told him. A German Heinkel, off course and limping away from the beachhead at Salerno, jettisoned its load over Sicily, and the hospital was hit. The plane crashed shortly afterward in the mountains. It was called an atrocity, though the most likely explanation was that the pilot didn't even see the Red Cross markings on the roof of the building. The way the Heinkel dived into the mountainside, he was probably wounded or dying at the controls.

Steven boarded a reconnaissance plane. When it landed, a jeep and a driver were waiting for him. No casualty lists were available yet. Nurses and patients were still being brought out of the debris. Some had been identified; others were crushed beyond recognition. A temporary morgue had been set up while the rescue work was going on. The driver told him all about it as they approached the devastated site. There was still a huge pall of dust hanging in the air. All the buildings had been destroyed, and fire had broken out in the rubble, adding a new dimension of horror. Water had turned the ground into areas of squelching mud. There was debris everywhere. He picked his way through it, looking for someone, anyone, who could tell him if Angela Drummond had been rescued.

“Eighty percent killed,” the driver told him. “Probably more when they get the last lot of bodies out. Lousy bastards, bombing a hospital.” One of the NCOs in charge of digging people out shouted across to him that there was a casualty list of sorts. It was down at the warehouse off the Via Presolli. They were taking the dead there for identification.

It was a meat-storage unit, and they had kept the temperature low. He went in, and the chill and the smell of death nearly turned his stomach. A medical orderly gave him a typewritten list.

“It's chaos,” he admitted. “Half of the bodies will never be identified. Nurses, patients, Italians cleaning out the wards. Christ, Captain, it's worse than any combat I've been in.”

Her name was not on the list. He heard the orderly say, “We've got personal effects over here. Do you want to take a look?'

There were stains on the gold watch—bloodstains—and the dial was shattered. Steven Falconi picked it out of the box.

The orderly looked at him. “You recognize it?”

There was no answer. He turned away, leaving the captain alone. Better to let him cry it out.

TWO

The damp mists of early morning had lifted. By afternoon it was a beautiful autumn day. Angela had forgotten the brilliant reds and golds that glowed in the sunshine. The air was clean and cool, with the fresh smell of rain lately fallen; she had breathed desert dust for so long, she had forgotten what English air was like.

It all looked so familiar and yet so strange. She got a lift from Sevenoaks station and walked the last half mile to the village near Haywards Heath. Her childhood and young life rose up to greet her. There was the little school where she and Jack had gone before they went away to what her father called their “proper schools.” And there was the War Memorial in the center of the green, some faded flowers at its base. In memory of those who gave their lives for King and Country in the Great War, 1914–1918. “Their names liveth for evermore.” She knew the words by heart. She wondered when they would put her brother's name there, and those of the others who fought and died in another war, 1939 till when?

The house was close to the green. There was the old eighteenth-century brick wall, with the iron gate and the slope of the red-tiled roof above it. The gate squeaked, as it had always done. Her father's polished brass plate shone in the sunshine. Inside the front garden, a wooden notice was staked firmly in the grass.
SURGERY
, it said in black letters, and an arrow pointed to the side of the house. Would he understand?

She rang the doorbell. It jangled inside the hall. The bell had been there during her grandfather's time. The surgery door had an electric buzzer. She lifted her bag and waited.

Then she heard the quick footsteps. She could imagine her mother hurrying to the door. She would understand, surely. The flash of imagination became reality. The door was opened, her mother was there with her arms wide, her father in the background. There was joy on their faces, a warm welcome home for their surviving child.

“We're disgraced, you realize that? Absolutely disgraced.”

Her mother was crying. Her father, his dead pipe pointed at her like a weapon, kept moving in small circles around the room. She had been home for twenty-four hours before the opportunity came to tell them. At first she had been tempted to say nothing. Their eagerness to look after her made it more difficult. Jack's death had aged them. Her mother's grief had turned inward, gnawing at her energy and enthusiasm for life. Her hair had gone gray before Angela sailed overseas.

She had slept late, exhausted by the long journey. The tiny child was making its own demands upon her. Her father had morning office hours. He joined them for lunch, as he had always done. There were no concessions to shortages and rationing. The dining room table was polished and laid, and the daily help, who'd been there since Angela was a toddler, did the washing up afterward.

“My goodness, you've put on weight, Angela. That dress is quite tight. I suppose it was all that starchy Italian food.”

The dress wouldn't fasten properly. None of her skirts fitted comfortably either.

“Mummy. Daddy,” Angela said. “I've got something to tell you. It's not the food, I'm afraid. I'm getting fat because I'm going to have a baby.”

Her mother was pouring tea. There was no coffee to be had. She stopped, the pot suspended, and slowly a red flush crept up her face.

Her father spoke first. “I hope that's a joke. Even if it is in bad taste.”

“No.” Angela tried to keep her voice steady. “I wouldn't joke about a thing like that. I'm pregnant. That's why I've been sent home.” She looked at their stricken faces and had managed to say, “I'm so sorry. So sorry to burden you with this,” when her mother burst into tears and her father lost his temper.

“Disgraced,” he cried. “Thrown out of the Red Cross and sent home. Angela, how could you have done such a thing?” He didn't wait for an answer, or an explanation. “Didn't you think how we'd feel? What about your mother? Hasn't she gone through enough after Jack's death, without you letting us down?”

“Don't. Hush, don't,” her mother pleaded. “It's no good going on like this. Calm down, darling. Don't upset yourself.” Then to her daughter, she said, “He's not been at all well lately. He shouldn't get worked up.”

“I don't want to upset either of you,” Angela said. “I didn't know you hadn't been well, Daddy. I shouldn't have said anything. I wish to God I hadn't. I wish I hadn't come home at all.”

She got up and stumbled out of the room. There was no key in her bedroom door. She wanted to lock them out, to weep her disappointment and hurt away without either of them having second thoughts and coming up to talk to her.

She put her hands on her stomach and clenched them defensively. “Poor little thing. Nobody wants you. I won't stay. I won't have you born here if they feel like that.…”

And of course her mother came and knocked after a little while and sat on the bed and tried to make amends.

“Daddy didn't mean that. He was just upset. We've talked it over, and naturally we'll do what we can for you. You must understand, my dear, it's quite a shock for us.”

“I know it is.” Angela felt so weary. She looked at her mother for a moment and said the unthinkable. “Weren't you in love, Mummy? Can't you remember how you felt?”

“Of course I was,” she protested. “But I waited till I was married.”

“I
am
married,” Angela said. She got up and began aimlessly to comb her hair.

“What do you mean? You never said anything about being married!”

“It won't count here,” she said. “But he wanted it. He minded a lot about the baby. So he got a priest in Sicily to marry us. He's American. He wanted me to go to the States, to his family.”

Her mother said, hesitantly, “Why didn't you?”

“I had a good reason,” Angela said. “I didn't want to bring up the baby in that environment.”

“Bring it up? You mean you're going to keep it?”

Angela put down the comb. She set it straight in line with her old silver hairbrushes and the little glass jars with silver lids.

“Don't tell me you'd want your grandchild to be adopted.”

“It might be the best thing for you,” was the answer. “But there's no need to talk about that now. Come downstairs; your father's very upset, Angela. It's become so dreadful, and we were so excited to have you home.”

“All right, Mother. You go on, and I'll tidy myself up and come down. Just ask him not to shout at me, will you?”

“He won't,” her mother promised. “He'll be calm. We've got to work out what we're going to say to people.”

“That's not a marriage,” Hugh Drummond muttered. “Some mumbo jumbo, without a certificate or any legal proof. He just made a fool of you, Angela.”

There was no use trying to explain Steven's attitude. She remembered Major Thompson's contemptuous remark: “They don't mind murder, but they won't accept a bastard child.” What would her father make of that?

“I've been thinking,” Angela said. “I shouldn't have come home and just landed you with this. You're right, Daddy. It was bad enough losing Jack. I've got a little money in the bank; I can go to London and get a job and have the baby there. It'd be best, wouldn't it?”

“No, it would not!” he retorted. “Don't be silly, Angela. Of course you'll stay here; it's your home. You can have the child in the cottage hospital. So don't even think of doing anything else, please.”

He was not a man given to displays of affection. Even the ritual kiss good night had been dropped before she became an adolescent. But he showed his irritation easily enough. His children were supposed to take his love for granted, but Angela never had. And now she couldn't see the remorse that had followed the sharp reproof.

Joy Drummond understood him. She said to her daughter, “Angela dear, your father and I love you, and we want to help you. We were just shocked and upset. You weren't very tactful, you know.”