‘No,’ he agreed, ‘they don’t look like they’re having much fun. I’m not sure we are either. How about a long glass of something cold at the Gymkhana Club?’
March crept on, edging towards April … Maddy went to the docks to see the ground being prepared for the new Gateway of India – hundreds of sweating workers hauling rocks, dark skin gleaming in the dusty sunshine – avoided the Taj’s Sea Lounge and drank chai at a corner shop instead (The best you’ll find in Bombay), then visited more neighbourhood mosques, the coriander-scented alleyways of Crawford Market. She kept checking the post, always hoping, feeling a little flatter every time the words she’d been waiting for failed to arrive.
Until, at last, they did.
On the back of a postcard from Poona: camels by a palm-fringed lake.
As you can see, I’m a lot closer now to Bombay. I would like, very much, to see you, Miss Bright. Would you meet me? There’s a small coffee shop not far from the terminus (the start of chapter five, if memory serves). I shall be there at noon on Tuesday.
Will you?
Chapter Four
King’s 5th Military Convalescent Hospital, Surrey, 1915
He arrived just before luncheon, on an arctic November morning. The ambulance that brought him progressed cautiously up the winding, icy driveway, wipers flipping back and forth, clearing snowy semicircles on the windscreen. Sister Emma Lytton, who’d come onto the hospital’s front stairs to wait for him, jigged on the spot, rubbing the sleeves of her Queen Alexandra’s uniform in a futile effort to keep warm. She was a seasoned nurse – fifteen years now in the service, as many months of which had been in this hideous war – and ordinarily, in these final few minutes before a patient’s admission, would be focused on nothing but them, running through their notes in her mind. Today, though, all she could think about were the roaring coal fires inside, and that she’d left them a little prematurely.
‘Come on,’ she instructed the lumbering vehicle, her voice leaving her in a cloud of fog. ‘Do come on.’
The ambulance maintained the same, sloth-like speed.
She consoled herself that the patient’s room would be cosy at least. She’d had one of the VADs stoke the fire, put a ceramic hot water bottle between the sheets. A new girl herself, the VAD had wanted to know how they could be sure this patient – Officer Jones, they were to call him, Officer Tommy Jones (it wasn’t his name. No one knew his name) – wasn’t a spy.
‘What if he’s lying about his memory?’ she’d said. ‘What if the Boche has sent him here to find out our secrets?’
‘Our secrets in Surrey?’ Emma had said. ‘Silly girl. The poor man’s just lost.’
The VAD had turned scarlet, spoken not another word as she refolded the corners of Officer Jones’s sheets.
Emma wished now she hadn’t snapped. It was the long nights, the men waking constantly, screaming at their ghosts, then the short winter days trying to coax them into walks, conversation. And now this cold snap, which had frozen the old hospital’s pipes solid … Emma realised there were a lot more having to put up with a lot worse (she remembered them every evening in her prayers), but still, it all took a toll. She resolved to find the VAD later, take her some fruit cake from the sisters’ larder and apologise; it was hardly her fault she was so naive. Comforting really, when one stopped and thought, that the girl had managed to retain some innocence in this world run mad; that she’d still been green enough to believe espionage likelier than a catastrophic head wound.
The ambulance crunched to a halt, interrupting Emma’s sad thoughts. She gave her arms one more vigorous rub, and watched the driver – another young woman, this time in the belted khaki jacket, calf-length skirt and cloth cap of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – climb down from the cabin.
‘Good morning,’ Emma called.
‘Is it?’ the FANY replied, rather curtly, lending weight to Matron’s oft-aired theories about the type of girl one might expect to operate a motor vehicle. ‘Too damn cold.’
‘Nothing a cocoa won’t fix,’ said Emma, wincing inwardly at her own jolly tone, the same one she always found herself using with her most morose patients.
The FANY wasn’t won over. (The patients never were either.) ‘I feel like my toes have fallen off,’ she said, and stomped her feet, presumably to reclaim feeling, then made off round to the back of the ambulance to open the red-crossed doors.
She swung them wide and said something indiscernible to the patient inside. Emma clasped her hands in front of her and waited for him to appear, but there was a delay. Emma felt a brief stab of panic. What if Officer Jones was less mobile than she’d been led to expect? She didn’t have a bath chair with her. Matron had assured her one wasn’t needed, but what if Matron had been wrong? Mistakes did happen. What if this man’s head wound had affected his movement? She would have to leave him in his freezing cabin with this taciturn driver whilst she went in search of an orderly. What a start. Why on earth hadn’t she erred on the safe side? Be prepared for every eventuality. It was her motto, one she passed on to all her probationers, and now here she was, not prepared at all.
She was still berating herself when Officer Jones appeared at the doors in an army greatcoat, his back to her, perfectly agile. She permitted herself a brief, icy exhale, but before her relief was halfway out of her mouth, he turned, looking up at the hospital’s sandstone façade, and she stopped, staring, even though she knew one should never, ever stare.
It took her a few seconds to realise she was even doing it.
Then a few more for her to understand why.
It wasn’t about his face, certainly. Perfectly drawn as his handsome features were, she wasn’t one for going weak at the knees over such things. (Not any more.) No, no. It was something quite different about this officer that took her aback.
Slowly, it came to her. Exhausted as he evidently was (she saw the tell-tale bruises shadowing his strong face, all too clearly), he didn’t look ill. Not at all. Not in the way her other patients did, with their eyes that had seen too much, shoulders that sagged and hunched, that waxiness to their skin. Officer Jones, he seemed so … so … alive. His spine was straight, his shoulders square, and his fists clenched in a way that spoke of so much vigour, that she, who prided herself after fifteen years in the service (fifteen years!) on being nigh on unshakeable, almost blurted out that he must have come to the wrong place.
The FANY coughed pointedly, making Emma realise just how long she’d been staring. She felt heat spread through her frozen skin at her own lack of professionalism, then even more as she caught the FANY’s smirk, and realised the conclusion she’d leapt to.
I swear it’s not about that, she yearned to correct the girl, there’s nothing left in me for any of that.
She said nothing, of course. She’d made quite enough of a spectacle. (What would Matron think?) Sternly reminding herself that she was a nursing sister, Officer Jones her patient, and, whatever his appearance, anything but in the pink of health, she returned her attention to him. A haemorrhage of the mind, Dr Arnold always said, can be just as critical as one of the blood. She repeated the words silently, then again for good measure, willing her embarrassment away. Pull yourself together. She took a step towards Officer Jones, who after all had served, given so much, and deserved the same care and compassion as all her other boys. The kind she hoped her darling fiancé, Freddie, had been given before he was taken at the Marne.