Where Earth Meets Sky (38 page)

‘Sorry,’ she said, frowning with concentration. ‘It’s difficult. I can’t see terribly well.’

‘Am I going to lose it?’

‘Hard to say as yet.’

With his good eye, Sam took the opportunity to study her and it helped take his mind off the discomfort of the operation. In the morning light he was very struck by the change in her. He knew he would not immediately have recognized her had she just walked past in the ordinary way of things. With her hair covered by her VAD veil, her face was uncrowned by its pale, curling prettiness and was thinner than he remembered, and sagging with exhaustion. She didn’t look tense any more, or at least not in the way he remembered, her seeming to push other people away as if they might contaminate her. Instead, as well as a deep tiredness, he saw something quieter and more vulnerable.

‘How is everyone?’ he asked. ‘The family, Captain Fairford, young Cosmo?’

She had just drawn back with something pinched in the end of the tweezers which she disposed of into a kidney dish.

‘Nasty big piece there,’ she murmured. Then, staring down in the direction of Sam’s chest, she braced herself to say, ‘Charles was killed – in 1915, at Neuve Chapelle. I was told he was shot. Isadora died the year before the war. Heart failure, at thirteen. And my dear Cosmo – well, he’s fifteen now . . .’

‘Oh God,’ Sam said. There had been so many deaths, yet this one, of the fit, energetic captain he had known in India, seemed impossible and utterly tragic. ‘You poor woman.’

He hadn’t expected to say that, not to her. It seemed too presumptuous and intimate, but that was what came out and he was surprised at himself. Once more her face was gripped by a terrible spasm of grief.

‘They say he was very brave,’ she said heartbrokenly. ‘And I know this should matter, should compensate in some way. But it’s not true, of course, it doesn’t. Nothing does. And now we look as if we’ll lose the war as well, after all of it . . .’ There was a pause. ‘He never loved me, you know, not as I loved him, but . . . All I want . . . I just want him alive . . .’ With a convulsive movement she reached into her pocket for a handkerchief. ‘Selfish of me, I know, but that’s how it is.’

‘There can’t be a grieving wife who doesn’t feel the same,’ Sam said, moved. But even as he said it, he thought, Would Helen feel it? Would she? Would he?

Susan Fairford wiped her eyes and set to work with the tweezers again. ‘I’m sorry. I’m very tired. And I must get on before I’m called away.’

‘How is Cosmo?’ Sam asked. ‘He was to go to Eton, wasn’t he?’

She sighed. ‘He was expelled from Eton. He nearly burned his house down – and it was not an accident. They weren’t having any more of him. His housemaster said some terrible things about him. He’s now in another establishment in Hertfordshire – Charles’s brother’s paying. Cosmo loathes it there, but what can I do? It was what Charles wanted for him, an education like his. I only pray to God the war will be over before he takes it into his head to join up. He’s so reckless and he’d have no qualms about lying about his age. I’ve seen younger than him in here.’

‘Yes,’ Sam agreed. Boys as young as fourteen were fighting on the Western Front.

Delicately she fished several more tiny pieces of glass from his eye. He winced, trying not to cry out.

‘Sorry . . .’ She frowned with concentration. Once she had eased the eye a little, she said, ‘Mr Ironside, you have a family? I’m afraid I can’t remember.’

‘I do. Three daughters. The last time we met I think we only had Ann and Nancy. Now there’s Ruth as well.’

‘Of course!’ Susan stopped to look at him again. ‘Mussoorie! My memory is so bad, I don’t know what’s happened to me! We were there with Lily – and Izzy was riding horses with Charles every moment she could . . . Oh, if I’d known . . .’

The memory was so sharp for Sam, so painful. Lily Waters. God, what he had felt for that woman! And she had played with him: let him down. The burn of it had never left him. It had made him ill for a time after. When he got home, and was so thin and sad and withdrawn, Helen had thought it was some disease he’d picked up in India.

His tone chill, he asked, ‘And what news of Miss Waters?’

‘Oh, I believe she’s doing well – with a family in London. She’s invaluable to them, I believe. And she’s been so good to Cosmo – never forgotten him. She writes to him and so on.’ Another sigh. ‘Sometimes I feel she’s more like a mother to him than I am. But I’m grateful, I suppose. At the moment. I had to come out here, you see – to be near Charles, close to where . . . I had to
do
something. We had gone home at the beginning of the war . . . I knew I’d go mad staying with my people in Sussex. At home all everyone complains about are the shortages – food, servants and so on, and living on their nerves waiting to hear bad news all the time. You feel stuck,
suffocated
. And of course I wasn’t used to England, after all that time away. At least here you can be of use.’

Sam could see now why she had changed, her face scoured by grief.

‘I think,’ she said, peering into his injured eye, ‘that I have taken out everything I can by this method. Not very satisfactory, I agree, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll bandage you up – then I must go and see to someone else.’

‘I’m very grateful,’ Sam said, feeling a distance between them again. He didn’t know where he was with this woman, though she had moved him in her sadness. The war changed everything, and she seemed a softer person, whom he began to like, though things like class could quickly rear their head again.

But she looked down at him, and amid the exhaustion, there was something kind and genuine.

‘It’s so good to see a familiar face,’ she said. ‘In all this madness.’

Brooklands Racetrack, Surrey, 1922

‘All right, Ironside? Marks? Have a good ride down?’

Sam saw a cheery, familiar face through the crowd soon after he and his friend Loz Marks arrived at Brooklands, walking stiffly, cheeks air-burned after the long morning’s ride from Birmingham. On their way across to the track, Sam bought a race programme from one of the eager young volunteers who sold them, spending the day moving among the excited crowds in order to be close to the racing. Lucky lads, Sam thought. Had he lived close when he was young he’d have done just the same.

Resentfully, he tried to recall the name of the man who had attached himself to them and it came to him: Jack Pye, someone he had known at Daimler before the war. Sam groaned inwardly.

‘There’re going to be some marvellous outings today. Count Zborowski’s Chitty 1’s lapping later – highlight of the day for me, of course,’ the man was saying. Sam was barely listening. He found Jack Pye irritating, with his chubby, drinker’s complexion and his obsession with high society bods, collecting them the way some people did with loco numbers. The bloke was like a flaming walking encyclopaedia of toffs. Course, he was going on about Chitty 1 because she was built by a count’s son, not because he really cared about the engineering involved, Sam thought sourly. He knew he had grown sour about a lot of things these days. God, life was a weary business compared to when he was young! The one thing that lifted his spirits was being somewhere like this, anywhere to do with motors, without it being spoilt by some boring sod like Jack Pye. He moved away, morosely, and left Loz to deal with him.

Sam drank in the sight of the race ground, breathing in the clean air laced with cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, hearing the motors roaring and the excited social chatter all about them. In the distance he could see the steep curve of the track, crowds of spectators in the middle. There was a race about to begin and the roaring of engines thrilled him. Brooklands attracted enthusiastic crowds for every event and the Whitsun bank holiday meeting seemed to mark the real beginning of summer, and visitors sprawled on the grass, luxuriating in the spring sunshine. High society people came from all over the region with sumptuous picnic hampers, the women in splendid gowns and feathered hats, men in sharply tailored clothes and cravats. Some removed the seats from their motors and sat on them to eat their picnics and sip champagne. These were the ones Jack Pye was inexplicably interested in. Then there were the more ordinary types, eager for a day out, coming into Weybridge on the train, or turning up on motorcycles and sidecars, or pushbikes – and there were the real motor enthusiasts with know-how, like Sam and Loz.

Sam kept one hand in his pocket holding his handkerchief and brought it out every so often to dab his watering left eye. The bright light made it worse. He cursed under his breath as a teardrop escaped and began to roll down his cheek.

‘Damned thing!’ Then he was ashamed. He’d come all through the war with only some minor scars on his body and that dodgy eye. Some of the glass was still in there and its vision was not good but he didn’t have much to complain about.

‘Family all right, Ironside?’ Jack Pye was at his side again, persisting in talking to him. ‘How many chil-dren’ve you got now?’

‘Four,’ Sam said, resigned to conversation. ‘All girls.’ He wasn’t going to mention Joe. They never did mention Joe, of course. Not at home. And Helen’s mother had never said a word afterwards. His own mother had tried to bring it up once or twice but Sam had changed the subject. No good digging it up. It was as if Joe had never been, yet his presence, the ghost of his two-month visit into their lives, lay between himself and Helen more emphatically than any living person.

‘Blimey – a houseful of women!’ Jack Pye chortled. You must be glad to get out of there, pal!’

Sam laughed it off.
Yes, I am
, he could have said. But it was too close to the truth to joke about. He dreaded going home these days, to the resentment which seemed to be Helen’s constant expression. He knew that under it her heart ached with grief for Joe, and for Laurie, who was lost somewhere on the Somme, but she could not show it. She had become a hard, discontented woman and all he saw was her anger and disappointment with him.

He had thought a new start would make things better after the war, leaving Daimler, going to live in Birmingham. Racing had been part of the attraction there, of course, the races Austin had taken part in before the war. They’d been one of the very few British entrants in the Grand Prix as early as 1908. And he’d struck lucky, been one of the handful of engineers taken on by the Austin works out at Longbridge. Business was still hanging by a thread, of course, with the slump, but Sam knew he couldn’t have gone back to Daimler and taken up his old life as if nothing had happened. It had been bad enough back in ’07, after India, trying to settle back into a life that seemed so shrunken and dull after Ambala and all the travelling he’d done with the captain; after Lily. The thought of her sent a spasm of pain through him, as it always did. After the war there was too much change amid the claustrophobic dullness: too many blokes missing from the neighbourhood, and too much change inside him. No, he’d had to move on or he’d have gone mad. He told Helen, ‘I can’t stay here.’ He never gave her a choice. That was another thing she held against him, uprooting her from her friends, miles from her mother. All his fault, of course and she never let him forget it. She’d never liked Birmingham.

He and Loz managed to shed Jack Pye and cut across quickly towards the track. Along the railings there stood the bookies in top hats taking bets at their stalls. A woman stood close to one of them with a male friend, giggling uncontrollably. Sam saw with distaste that she had bad teeth.

‘You going in for a flutter, Sam?’ Loz asked.

‘No,’ he snapped. No point in wasting money.

‘All right, I only asked,’ Loz said.

The first race was about to begin. It was a small car handicap race and the two of them stood loudly discussing the entrants among the excited crowd, as the expectant roaring of the engines grew louder and louder despite the silencers on the cars. One was a 20 hp Austin, a sports model. God, Sam would have liked to be part of the Austin race team, but he hadn’t managed to wangle it yet. At least there was some hope of that, more than of he and Loz building their own ‘Special’, one of the cars put together privately by amateurs for racing. Loz was forever on about it. Old Loz was a dreamer, pie in the sky.

Sam stood breathing in the scent of exhaust fumes, his eyes fixed on the track. This was the only place where he could almost feel happy. Brooklands was the only track for car racing in the country – the first in the world of its kind. The three and a quarter mile outer track had been built in under nine months and there was a purpose-built test hill for putting the cars through their paces on a steep gradient. All around the grounds were a hive of activity also, sheds divided into workshops where cars were maintained and developed, giving off that engine-oil smell which was the breath of life to Sam. Of course, there were areas fenced off where you could only go if you were an Automobile Racing Club member and he had not reached that hallowed position. Like almost everything else, he couldn’t afford it, in this land fit for heroes. The members had their own separate bridge over the track for viewing, as well as a clubhouse, and Sam’s usual resentment of the upper classes stirred in him when he thought about it. But that was not something he was going to let spoil his day. He looked round and grinned at Loz.

‘We’ll be here,’ Loz shouted to him, his snub-nosed face beaming with enthusiasm. ‘One of these days we’ll be racing our own!’