The War Before Mine Page 21

  ‘George.’ The man raised his soft brown eyes to his wife. Philip’s eyes. The same colour. The same long girly lashes. ‘This is the new nurse. She’s come to spend the afternoon with you.’ In the bright light, Rosie saw the lines of sorrow around Philip’s mother’s mouth, the streaks of grey in the coarse dark hair. Mrs Seymour glanced briefly at Rosie, ‘Though I must say she is not very appropriately dressed for it.’

  ‘Please read this,’ said Rosie, offering the letter, but Mrs Seymour was staring at her husband’s lap, at his fingers plucking the blanket.

  ‘Oh, my heavens. You know what that means, I suppose. You’ll find what you need on the trolley. Will you come down and see me at say, four? We can finalise arrangements and I will show you your accommodation. My cook Mary Edwards will be in the kitchen if you need anything.’

  Philip’s father was now scratching more urgently at his lap.

  ‘But what’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Did they tell you nothing? He had a stroke, they think brought on by the news about my son.’ The jowls trembled a little. ‘At four then.’ The door closed.

  Rosie watched, paralysed with stage fright, as the man pushed the blanket to the floor and struggled with his one working hand to open the buttons of his pyjama trousers. He looked pleadingly at Rosie and she found on the trolley a white china bottle with a funnel-shaped neck. She tried to give it to him, but his hand was very weak, so she bent to open the last button, helped him insert the flabby pink penis into the funnel and listened to the feeble but protracted trickle of urine. Finally, he pushed the bottle away and she set it down, buttoned him up and replaced the blanket over his knees, ‘All right now?’

  He said something; a gargling sort of noise. She nodded as though she understood. The joke of it all hit home. Beryl’s verdict. ‘Yer know what your trouble is darlin’. Can’t keep yer hands out of men’s trousers.’ Here she was in her smart suit and high heels, with a bottle of piss at her feet. Not even had time to take off her hat. She did so now, sliding out the long pin and placing it and the hat on the shelf above the fire. He was watching her, searching her face, as though asking her why she had come. She knelt to poke at the coals and it rewarded her with a burst of flame. ‘There. You’ll be warmer now.’ She turned and spoke into the puzzled brown eyes. ‘I know Philip. Philip. Your son.’

  A crease appeared in the smooth brow. ‘Philip. I’m a friend of Philip’s. Do you understand?’ His leg twitched under the blanket and he jerked his head back across one shoulder, his eyes sliding away from hers towards the window. ‘What’s the matter?’ He was writhing and gargling something.

  ‘You want to look out?’

  His eyes came back to hers again. Liquid. Pleading. Rosie kicked off her high heels to get a better purchase on the floor, turned the chair and pushed it to the window. One of her precious stockings snagged on the wooden floor.

  ‘Bugger.’ Swearing in front of a vicar. But his face wore an expression of bliss as he gazed out over the garden, green as only spring could make it. At the far end, beyond the vegetable patch, a bank rose, and beyond that, the soft grey stone of the church. She pushed the latch across, pulled down the sash a little and let in the hum and twitter of early summer. In the distance, a bell chimed. She took his good hand and squeezed it. There was a slight returning pressure but he was rapt in contemplation of his garden, his head pushed forward eagerly towards its music.

  There were other sounds too. Heavy footsteps coming down the corridor. The door opened and there, red–faced, was Mrs Seymour, and behind her a puddingy woman of about fifty, wearing a white apron. In her stockinged feet, Rosie felt tiny compared to these two angry giants, but she was also ready to have her say at last.

  ‘Who are you?’ Mrs Seymour demanded. ‘How dare you deceive your way into my house in this manner?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Rosie stepped into her shoes, painfully aware of the ladder advancing up one leg.

  ‘Do you deny impersonating Miss Foster here? Coming here with who knows what intentions?’

  Rosie felt a surge of anger. Fuck the vowels, she thought. ‘Aye. Of course I deny it! You assumed I was her. I tried to tell ye but you just marches us up here giving it the yak yak yak all the time. I couldn’t get a word in.’

  Like trolls in an unexpected sunrise, the two older women seemed turned to stone. Rosie retrieved her hat from the mantelpiece, angled it carefully on her head and jammed in the hatpin. She looked at Philip’s mother. ‘I need to have a word with you in private.’

  ‘Oh no. You are not to be trusted. Miss Foster here will have no objection to witnessing anything you may have to say.’ Miss Foster nodded and planted herself beside her employer, lips pursed.

  ‘Just as you like,’ said Rosie, though she felt a tremor in her throat now that it had come to it. There was a pause. Rosie glanced at the figure in the wheelchair, seeking support, but he was oblivious to the drama, and gazed on into the garden. ‘I’m a friend of Philip’s.’

  The room waited for what was to come. Birdsong pierced the silence. Rosie took a breath. ‘We became…close, in Falmouth, before he left. Afterwards, I found I had fallen pregnant. When he didn’t come back I had to do as best I could, so I’m living in a mother and baby home, with me son, your grandson. He’s a beautiful bairn… Eyes just like his father…’

  The two women facing Rosie nodded their heads up and down as though controlled by some puppetmaster concealed in the ceiling. ‘Money, Miss Foster,’ said Mrs Seymour. ‘It is money she is after.’

  ‘For your grandson. So I don’t have to give him up. Give him to strangers.’

  ‘My grandson? You expect me to believe this ridiculous story? My son would not have given a little slut like you the time of day.’

  The word was like a slap, but the letter, crisp in her jacket pocket, gave Rosie the strength to continue. ‘Look. I’m no slut and I’m no liar. It’s all in this letter. He wanted to marry me. What will he say if he comes back and finds you threw me out?’

  Mrs Seymour’s voice rose. ‘Coming here to a place of God and a place of mourning with your threats and your filthy tale.’

  ‘Will you not read the letter?’

  ‘Put the letter where it belongs, Miss Foster.’ Eagerly, the other woman rushed to take the letter and throw it in the fire. But Rosie dodged and all Miss Foster achieved was the upsetting of the bottle on the floor. The urine ran quickly towards Mrs Seymour’s brogues. ‘Oh my land! Get out! Get out!’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m going.’ Rosie walked towards the door, ‘This is no place of God. God isn’t here. Only cruelty. Cruelty and neglect.’ She looked over to Miss Foster, who was mopping at the floor with a towel. ‘And ye should watch where you’re walking, ye fat wussock.’ Rosie moved her eyes around the room, committing to memory the serene face of Philip’s da, still absorbed in his garden, and that of his mother, now crumpling horribly. Then she walked along the corridor and down the stairs, stopping for a moment to address the portrait. ‘I knows she’s your mam, but she’s a horror. I’m sorry to say it, my darling, but yer mother’s a right cow.’

  A pale tired face peered up from the gloomy hall, its hand yellow with duster. ‘And I’ll bet ye agree with me an’ all.’ Rosie crossed the hall and pulled the front door open, slamming it behind her.

  The journey back was a nothing, a blur, even on the boat when she met the officer again and plunged with him down into the warm fug of the buffet, drinking three gins in as many minutes, it was all somehow at a distance. Nothing seemed real.

  But then, suddenly, it did. His hand on her knee was real, achingly real, and the fingers groping above her ruined stocking. Real and furious, the desire that bastard Philip had awakened before disappearing on her. There was nowhere to go but his car. He talked into his hair about dying, about pilots dying all the time, and begged her to hold him, and she thought as he gasped and shuddered against her there was something horribly funny about the whole thing. ‘Two pricks in one day. You are a di
rty slut.’

  Her body wanted so much to be touched, she could hardly trust herself. But she stopped his wandering hands and started to talk instead. Legs curled under her, she sat on the front seat as he drove back to London and told him everything. Well, he was obviously puzzled by the milk seeping through her blouse and it was such a relief to tell someone, particularly someone she’d never see again. She told him about Naz House and the nuns, and they laughed about Sister Frances, who was obviously a boy-girl but had a good heart and didn’t want anything more than to be allowed to comb Rosie’s hair every now and again as a treat. He looked at her sideways and said he understood completely, about the hair anyway, and they laughed. He was nice, she liked him; she liked the gap between his front teeth.

  ‘So what will you do?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She liked him even more for not telling her what to do, not telling her to give Alex away to strangers. When they arrived, he parked on the street outside and asked her to stay with him for a little while he had a cigarette. He smoked and held her hand. ‘That’s the worst thing,’ he said. ‘We have so little choice. You could run in there and pick up Alex and we could go off and get married and live happily ever after. Only I’ve got a plane to fly tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and about the only choice I’ve got now is to leave a note with my CO saying what music I want played at my funeral.’

  What have I got to complain about? she thought, For a moment, his hand was rigid in hers; then he relaxed. He wound down the window and flicked out his cigarette end.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what would you ask for?’

  ‘Oh. Well it’s a toss up between “Abide with me” and “Me Little Stick of Blackpool Rock.”’

  She gave him a little kiss goodbye and he drove away, leaving her to step into the tiled hallway and confront the critical gaze of Mother Ignatius, knowing she looked no better than she should be, with her hair a mess, stained blouse, laddered stockings.

  Alex’s cry reached her as soon as she started up the stairs. Beryl was jigging him up and down as he wailed with hunger. ‘He wouldn’t have the bottle,’ Sister Frances said, as Rosie clamped her baby to her engorged breast. The relief of it!

  ‘How’d it go?’ Beryl sat down beside her.

  ‘Not too well.’ She shifted Alex to her other breast. ‘There you are, my lovely boy. Have some of the other one.’

  ‘Who was that bloke brought you home?’

  ‘Just someone I picked up on the boat. You know what I’m like.’

  24

  Gibraltar, February 1943

  The war had eaten a maze of tunnels into the Rock of Gibraltar. Philip followed a cheerful private down one of the long, feebly-lit corridors blasted out of stone. On British soil at last, and here he was feeling nostalgic for Spain.

  ‘Did you hear the fuckin’ news?’ the private turned. ‘Couple more fuckin’ Italian ships fuckin’ sunk last night. He canna hold out much longer, fuckin’ Mussolini.’

  The torrent of army swearing disconcerted Philip and a pause opened up. He’d forgotten how to do it, felt as though in the ten months away from the military his tongue had seized up. Finally, he managed a reply, the words sounding uncomfortably prim. ‘Some of my Spanish friends will be pleased about that.’

  They rounded a bend. The private glanced across at Philip, looking puzzled. ‘We haven’t got any fuckin’ friends ower there like, have we? Aren’t they in cahoots with fuckin’ Adolf?’

  ‘Some are. A lot of them want us to defeat him and then come and get Franco.’

  ‘Ah.’ He still looked confused. Well then, I suppose you could say it’s one fuckin’ down, fuckin’ one to go. Funny, ye knaa. I never think about Spain being that bastard close.’

  ‘Could burrow into it without much effort.’

  Two naval officers approached, walking abreast, evidently expecting army privates to squeeze themselves into the wall as they sauntered past.

  ‘Fuckin’ arrogant bonnie lads, aren’t they?’ the private said, dusting grit off his jacket.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Stanley, County Durham. God’s fuckin’ own.’

  ‘Someone I’m looking forward to seeing talks a bit like you.’

  ‘What? Swears all the time, you mean?’

  ‘No. What I fucking meant was the fucking accent.’

  The private grinned. ‘The Major’s office is this door. Just wait here. He’ll come and find you when he’s good and ready.’

  Philip waited, his head stooped to avoid the low ceiling, watching drops of condensation running down the walls. Thirty minutes passed. Fuck it. He sat on the ground. British soil it might be, but it felt like a nasty damp patch of earth. The stale air smelt of mould and sweat, making him think of those great clean lungfuls he’d sucked in on the Spanish side of the Pyrénées. Fresh air. Two words that actually, come to think of it, summed up his whole experience of Spain, its skies so bright after all that darkness; the outline of the winter landscape so crisp, so defining; the people he’d met so…impressive. Right from the first person, Juan, the man who’d risen from under the check blanket and introduced himself as their guide.

  Fascism. It’d been just a word before Spain, before he’d seen the expressions it put on the people’s faces. Hungry, frightened, suspicious. Then, out of sight of authority, like withered flowers refreshed by water, those faces opened, smiles laid creases into thin faces, hands offered bread though there was obviously none to spare. Dark eyes trusted you to help.

  Tonight, with the news of more Italian losses, Philip knew there’d be celebrations in the Bar de Centro in Manresa, where Juan had taken him for a few beers with those who called themselves anarchists, or socialists, or communists, or anarcho-communist-syndicalists or whatever. He’d struggled with no Spanish to understand the differences, all the crazy, passionate politics of the defeated, but they’d united in welcoming him as a representative of anti-Fascist forces, clashing glasses, ‘Salud! A los Ingleses! A los Escocés! A los Galés. A todos los Britanicos!!!’ Juan’s private toast. ‘My friend.’

  The door opened. Philip scrambled to his feet and saluted. The major stared at Philip with fish eyes. ‘Come in. Take a seat.’

  A carbon copy of the form Philip had completed earlier was on the desk. The major put on a pair of rimless spectacles to study it minutely, turning the pages with the very tips of his fingers, as though fearing contamination. Finally, he spoke. ‘Well. All the way from St Nazaire. To be congratulated, of course. But a bit of a cock-up that, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Well…I gather so.’ He paused, looked at Philip over the top of his glasses. ‘And out over the Pyrénées.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘To Manresa.’ He enunciated each syllable as though tasting it. ‘And then by train I suppose to Barcelona?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘To the British Consulate…’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘…which is where I get a little confused.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘According to my reckoning, they could have arranged transportation here three weeks ago.’

  ‘I was with an injured man, a Jew, and his young son. I waited for him to be well enough to travel.’

  ‘Very noble of you, Private Seymour. I trust he’s now recovered?’

  ‘Yes sir. I have just seen them off on a boat to England.’

  The major got up and started to walk in a slow circle around Philip and the desk, fingers laced behind his back. Underneath the sharply creased khaki trousers, Philip pictured thin white legs, knobbly knees. ‘It cannot have escaped your notice that there is a war on?’

  ‘I don’t see how that could have escaped my notice. No.’

  ‘Flippancy is hardly appropriate, Seymour. Your procrastination on the inadequate grounds of assisting a non-combatant I regard very seriously. Very seriously indeed. Your regiment needs you, and yet you chose to delay in Barcelona,
having already cooled your heels in France for…’ He stopped, squinted at the form and then turned to the calendar propped up on his desk. ‘Almost a year.’

  ‘Not exactly cooling my heels. May I ask what it is you’re suggesting?’ Philip wanted to punch the glasses right through the major’s trout face and out the other side; felt quite ready to spend the rest of the war in prison in exchange for that pleasure.

  The officer glanced at him, looked away, scribbled something on the form and said, ‘No need to get upset, Seymour. You just should have been here earlier, that’s all.’ He frowned at the form with exaggerated concentration, a slight tremor afflicting his cheek. ‘The first bit of good news is the doctor says you’re A1.’ Philip waited. ‘Second thing is, some of your lot are in Alexandria, and I think we can get you there to join them.’

  ‘I was rather hoping to go home.’ He wasn’t going to ‘sir’ the bastard any more.

  ‘That’s a bit tricky. You see a demolitions chap is just what they want. We can get you on a plane to Malta tomorrow, and from there to Egypt is just a hop, skip and a jump. No doubt they’ll let you have a spot of leave when you get there. I gather it’s a beautiful place.’ The eyes bulged at Philip. ‘Bloody brave, those Maltese.’

  Unlike you, was the unspoken message. People like the major seemed to find the very existence of commandos, active fighting soldiers as opposed to snuffling underground pen pushers, a personal affront. A fucking regular army fucking moron. But Philip’s thoughts moved quickly on to readjust his vision of the future. Funny how he’d thought his war was over. Kidded himself anyway, because there’d always been that fatalism, the sense that it couldn’t possibly happen, that he was never just going to step on a boat and be taken home.