The Nurse's War. Merryn Allingham

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      No, he didn’t like to think of those days. She’d been a gentle girl when he met her, vulnerable and soft. Now, though, she seemed to have grown a shell and he could only hope that he’d managed to pierce it today. He wasn’t entirely convinced she would do as she’d promised. Something had happened between her and Grayson Harte which made her reluctant to meet the man. She had better though, he thought belligerently. He’d hated having to confess the hole he was in, having to abase himself by begging for help, but he’d had no choice. No choice either about holding a threat over her head. He could congratulate himself on that at least. He’d hit on the right thing—her job—he’d seen that immediately. The threat of having to leave nursing would make her do what he asked, whether she wanted to or not. It would get him the papers, if anything would.

      He trudged his way back through the West End and into the City, his feet aching and sore. There had been a big raid two nights ago and the roads were still badly damaged. He’d hardly seen a bus on his way to Hyde Park, but even if one had turned up, he couldn’t afford the fare. He could barely afford to eat and the small sum he’d saved from working in France was dwindling by the day. Look at his shoes—the soles almost falling off, the backs broken down. Dear God, what had he come to? A proud officer in a crack regiment of the Indian Army and now this, hiding away in a dingy, rat-infested room, and dependent on others for his deliverance.

      But then he’d always been dependent, hadn’t he? His whole career had rested on a father who’d sacrificed everything for his only son. An ungrateful son. And that was something else he didn’t want to think about. When he’d returned to England, Spitalfields was the first place he’d gone to. He’d had some wild idea that somehow he could reconcile himself with the parents he’d abandoned, the prodigal son returned, that kind of thing. An unspoken thought, too, that maybe his father could get him out of his predicament as he had so many others in the past, though what a poverty-stricken old man could do, he didn’t know. But when he’d rounded the corner of the street—the address had been at the top of the letter his father had sent, begging for money his son couldn’t spare—he’d been appalled. There was nothing, literally nothing. A whole street had disappeared.

      After two years of war, he thought, London smelt of death and destruction. Everywhere shattered windows, roofs caved in, water pipes, gas pipes, all fractured, telephone wires waving in the breeze. The people he passed were every bit as shabby as their city since new clothes were a rarity. Shabbier still in the East End where, for a pittance, he’d managed to rent a room. Street after street of mean little houses with open doors and broken windows; filthy alleys in which ragged children played, their pale, pinched faces speaking of years of deprivation before ever the German bombers arrived. And everywhere stank—of waste, of unwashed bodies, of stale beer.

      He was walking through the City now, past one ruined church after another, their steeples scorched and dis-coloured by fire. There was something heroic in their tragic silhouettes, he thought, heroic yet futile. They belonged to a past that no longer had meaning. It was the New World that promised, the New World that offered a future. In front of the Royal Exchange, an enormous hole in the road had still not been completely filled after the Bank station had been hit in January. So huge was it that the Royal Engineers had had to build a bridge across for people to get from one side of the street to the other. The East End had fared even worse, of course. Whole terraces mown down and streets almost entirely rubble. Grotesquely, the building on the corner of Leman Street, he noticed, still had a side wall intact and a framed view of a Cornish landscape hanging from the picture hook. He crunched his way along the pavement, littered with shards of glass and cracked roofing tiles. The breeze had begun to blow strongly again and pillows of white dust swirled around him. For a moment he had to stand still, his eyes closed against it.

      Turning into Ellen Street, he saw the lodging house ahead, black roof and sightless windows, hovering against the clear blue sky. It loomed discordantly over the dribble of smaller houses, as though it had risen from the pages of a Nordic fairy tale and found itself out of time and out of place. Several of the surrounding properties had been hit on successive nights and had crumbled at one blow. That didn’t surprise him, knowing how shoddily they were built, but at least the debris was light enough for more survivors to be pulled free. Alive but dispossessed. The house adjoining his had had its front cut away as though it were a doll’s house. Skyed high in the air was a dented bath and a lavatory, with a sad little roll of toilet paper still attached to the door. A staircase led to an upper floor that no longer existed. But the house where he lodged had survived all attacks—so far.

      He trod up the stairs as delicately as he could. The ground floor of the house was occupied by an old woman, ninety if she were a day, half mad he was sure. He glimpsed her sometimes through her open door crooning quietly to a cat or slumped in a fireside chair, staring blankly at the bare wall in front of her. Sometimes she would stir herself to fling random curses at whoever was unlucky enough to catch her glance but she rarely noticed his comings and goings, being so deaf that a bomb could have fallen outside her window and she’d not have flinched. It was when he approached the first floor that he steeled himself to tread more softly still. He tried to shut his mind to the ill will he imagined lay beyond that door.

      His years in the army had given him a nose for danger and he was sure the men who lived there were up to no good. It wasn’t just that they’d ended their conversation the minute they realised he understood Hindi, nor the sheer absurdity of finding two Indians living in the middle of the East End in the middle of a war. It was the nagging matter of why they were there. The Indian might be a soldier as he claimed, and the man’s cap badge seemed to prove it, but why wasn’t he with his regiment or returned to India? And what was the Anglo doing here? You couldn’t trust Anglo-Indians, they were neither one thing nor the other, neither British nor Indian. Some of them had chips on their shoulders for that reason. Did this one? Did the man mean to expose him as a deserter, imagining perhaps that he’d be paid for the information?

      He was sure it was this man who’d pushed the white feather beneath his door and that was a warning if ever there was. The sooner he was out of Ellen Street, the better. If Daisy did as she promised and tackled Grayson Harte in the next few days, he might have the papers he needed within the fortnight. Harte could do it if he wished, and he would wish. The man had liked Daisy just a little too much. And his wife had liked him back, despite the doubts her husband had tried to sow in her mind all those months ago when Harte had played at being a district officer. Gerald had no compunction in throwing them together again. ‘Wife’ was just a word now, not that it had ever been much else. For a moment he felt remorse at what he’d done to the young girl he’d met at Bridges. But not for long. There was no point in looking back. And he had no qualms in using Grayson’s feelings for Daisy. Not if it would get him what he wanted.

      He put one foot on the stairway leading to his attic. It creaked badly and he froze where he stood on the landing. He tried to breathe very quietly. Were the men on the other side of the door listening? He edged closer so that his ear was almost touching the blistered wood. Inside angry footsteps paced the bare boards. And there were two voices. Both men were at home. He was sure that at least one of them had been following him recently. Several times he’d half sensed a figure at the periphery of his vision and wondered if it was his neighbour. When you said that aloud, it sounded ridiculous, yet … The men were talking loudly, animatedly. Their voices came to him in blurts of noise. He’d heard them argue before, but today there was a new harshness, a new agitation. They were speaking Hindi for certain and the heat of their disagreement was leaving them careless. He caught words here and there, ‘car’, ‘hotel’, ‘Chandan’—was that a name?—disconnected СКАЧАТЬ