Oh heavens, why had the bus stopped yet again, Grace fretted. They had all been later than they had planned leaving Wallasey, thanks to Bella making a fuss about wanting more photographs of herself in her wedding dress, and then the ferry had been full and they had to wait for the next one, and her precious pass out from the nurses’ home expired at ten o’clock.
It was nearly that now and she had been holding her breath with every stop the bus had made on its way up from the Pier Head to the hospital, trying to make out – through the mesh covering the windows to protect passengers from the danger of flying glass should they be bombed – how far they had come, even though she knew that there would be nothing to see in the dark, thanks to the blackout.
The bus stopped yet again, passengers exchanging seats and standing space, some them getting off, others replacing them in their vacated seats.
They couldn’t be far from the hospital now. The bus picked up speed, allowing Grace’s cramped stomach muscles to relax and then recramp even harder as abruptly it lurched to halt with a squeal of brakes and a suddenness that had standing passengers almost losing their balance. Raised voices started protesting.
‘What the devil …?’
‘Ruddy driver.’
‘Ruddy blackout, don’t you mean?’ one passenger joked, all of them silenced when the conductor called out.
‘Driver says there’s bin an accident up front and he can’t go further until the road’s been cleared.’
‘It’s this blasted blackout,’ the man seated next to Grace grumbled. ‘It ain’t safe out there any more.’
Grace knew that it was true. There was lot of talk about the number of road accidents in the pitch-dark. It was even being suggested that the kerbs might be painted white as a preventative measure.
She really was going to be late now, Grace recognised worriedly as she joined the other passengers getting off the bus.
In the street a small crowd of bystanders had already gathered in front of the bus, which now had its lights full on to illuminate the scene. The driver of a lorry was half hanging out of the side of his cab, looking more like a rag doll than a human being, and to one side of the vehicle Grace could see a pretty high-heeled shoe. Just the one. Nothing else. Grace’s stomach turned over and heaved.
A man in a smart suit stepped out of the crowd announcing, ‘I’m a doctor. Has anyone sent for the emergency services?’
‘Just sent for them now, sir,’ another man responded.
The doctor had made his way to the cab and was feeling for the driver’s pulse. Grace turned away, wondering how she was going to get past the accident and whether she should make a detour down another street.
‘I need help – a nurse …’ the doctor was saying tersely as he went to a car, which Grace now saw was stopped behind the bus, to remove a medical bag. ‘Any nurses here?’
No one answered. Grace’s stomach tightened again. She wasn’t a nurse, not yet, but somehow her conscience was prodding her into stepping forward and saying uncertainly, ‘I’m not a nurse, only a probationer, but …’
The doctor looked at her. ‘Had first-aid training have you?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed.
‘Come with me.’
Gingerly Grace followed him, deliberately not looking at that one shoe.
The driver had gone through the windscreen of the truck before falling back against the side of the cab. Grace’s stomach heaved when she saw his face, and the blood pumping out of his arm, which was hanging as an unnatural angle, but she reminded herself of all the things Sister Harris had taught them as she blocked out the image, concentrating instead on what the doctor was telling her to do, which was really just a matter of not panicking, she told herself stoutly, and ignoring the blood that was now all over her clothes. Determinedly she handed him the things he asked for, and helped him to put a tourniquet on the arm wound. It was, she knew, important that they did not move the driver any more than was necessary because of the injuries to his head.
She heard someone saying grimly, ‘There’s a couple gone under the ruddy truck but they’re goners.’
Her hand trembled slightly.
Not one but two ambulances suddenly arrived, their crews rushing forward. Grace got up and stepped back to allow them to take her place, her face flushing when the doctor said briefly, ‘Good work.’
She felt stiff and cold and very sick, and yet at the same time numb, as though she wasn’t really able to take in what was happening.
‘You all right, love?’
Grace looked up at the ambulance driver. The kindness in his voice made her eyes burn with tears.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Not bin hurt, have you?’ he pressed her. ‘Only you’re in a bit of a state.’
‘I was helping the doctor. I’m a probationer nurse up at the hospital,’ she explained haltingly.
‘We’ve got to go past Mill Road on our way back to the depot. Jump in, love, and we’ll give you a lift,’ he offered.
‘Oh. No. I don’t think …’ Grace began to protest, but his crew were already making their way back to the ambulance, saying that their assistance wasn’t needed because the crew of the other ambulance were dealing with the emergency.
Suddenly Grace felt very weak and dizzy. She could hear concerned voices, and then two firm male arms were supporting her and that same kind male voice was telling her calmly, ‘That’s the spirit, just take a few deep breaths and you’ll be fine …’
‘I’m the one who’s the nurse,’ she managed to find the spirit to remind him as the ambulance driver helped her along the road and then up into the cab of the ambulance, refusing to listen to her shaky protests.
She wasn’t too shaky, though, to notice in the lights of the bus that he was as tall as Luke and as broad-shouldered, with a cheeky grin and teasing blue eyes.
After he had helped her into the passenger seat, he closed the door and then went round to get in the driver’s side of the vehicle.
‘I reckon we’d better introduce ourselves,’ he told Grace, once he had started the ambulance’s engine, ‘seeing as how we’re going to be seeing a lot more of one another. I’m Teddy Williams.’
‘Grace Campion,’ Grace introduced herself. She was beginning to feel better now, and she looked round the interior of the cab with curious interest. The probationers had been shown around an ambulance station and one of its vehicles as part of their training. ‘Are you stationed at Mill Road then?’ she asked him innocently, then blushed when he laughed.
‘As it happens, yes, but that wasn’t what I meant. Mind you, I suppose a pretty girl like you has already got a chap in tow?’
‘No. I mean …’ Grace laughed and blushed even harder when she realised what he was getting at.
‘Well, you could have now, if you play your cards right. I might even let you take me to see a film,’ Teddy joked, giving her a wink.
She liked him, Grace acknowledged. She could sense that there was something kind and appealing about him that went deeper than his outward joking and teasing.
‘Home Sister is very strict,’ she told him. ‘I’ve only been allowed out today because it was my cousin’s wedding and I was her bridesmaid.’
‘Well, in that case I’ll just have to make sure that I’m on the duty roster for Mill Road,’ he told her, ‘if that’s the only way I’m going to get to see you.’
They had reached the hospital now and he had pulled up discreetly out of sight of the night porter’s small lodge.
‘Thanks for … for everything,’ Grace told him, suddenly feeling shy.
He had nice hands, she decided, big and clean and safe-looking, a bit like her dad’s.
‘I suppose you’re wondering why I haven’t joined up to fight.’
His comment surprised her. ‘No, of course not,’ Grace assured him.
‘I had rheumatic fever when I was a kiddie – I’m OK now but the medics wouldn’t pass me fit to fight. I’m only telling you ’cos I don’t want you thinking that I’m avoiding doing me bit.’
‘I wasn’t thinking that at all,’ Grace told him truthfully.
‘Me dad has a small greengrocer’s shop, and rightly speaking this is his van, but he’s lent it out for the war effort.’
Grace nodded. She knew that the emergency ambulance service was based around transport offered by those who owned it, and that both the volunteers and the transport were then equipped as best they could be for medical emergencies.
‘I’d better go in,’ she told him, and then offered shyly, ‘I’ll look out for you being on duty.’
‘Good,’ he responded, ‘because I shall certainly be looking out for you.’
He came round and helped her out of the van, then stood and watched her as she hurried past the porter’s lodge and headed for the door to the probationary nurses’ home.
She could hear him driving away as she knocked on the locked door.
It was Home Sister herself who unlocked it and stood confronting her with a very displeased look on her face.
‘Campion. And what time do you call this? You were supposed to be back for ten o’clock.’
‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ Grace apologised. ‘We were late leaving the reception and then the ferry was full, and then when I got on the bus there was an accident.’
Brought up as she had been, it never occurred to Grace to omit the fact that she had been late getting the bus and simply to use the accident as an excuse, so she didn’t see Home Sister’s mouth twitch into a small smile as she stepped back into the hall and beckoned her inside.
‘An accident, you say—’ Home Sister repeated, and then broke off, staring at Grace and frowning. ‘Where are all these bloodstains from? Were you involved in this accident?’
For the first time Grace realised that the sleeve of her jacket was stained with blood and that there were more bloodstains on the skirt of the Viyella dress she had changed into, not wanting to wear her bridesmaid’s frock any longer than necessary. The jacket and the dress had been new the previous winter, bought with her Lewis’s discount in the New Year sale and her heart sank a little. This wasn’t the time, though, to worry about how quickly she could remove them, not with Home Sister waiting for an answer to her questions.
‘No, that is … not really … A transport lorry had crashed and the driver was hurt. There was a doctor there and he asked for nursing help. I wasn’t going to say anything. I mean, I’m only a probationer,’ she said hastily, seeing that Home Sister’s frown was deepening. ‘But then there was no one and the doctor said that as long as I knew some first aid I would do. It wasn’t anything really, only holding things. The doctor had to apply a tourniquet and …’
‘I see. Very well. Have you had any supper?’
Grace stared at her. ‘No.’
‘I’ll arrange for the kitchen to make you a cup of cocoa. In the meantime you’d better go and have a bath.’
‘Yes, Home Sister.’
Alan had hardly spoken to Bella since they had left their wedding reception and now that they were here in their hotel bedroom, he was still ignoring her, and drinking from the hip flask he had removed from his pocket.
His parents and that wretched Trixie and her mother and father had quite spoiled her day, sitting there with their long faces instead of making a fuss of her like they ought to have done, Bella thought crossly. It wasn’t even as though Alan’s father had had to put his hand in his pocket either, so he had had nothing to scowl about. Her father had paid for the wedding and bought them the house she’d wanted. Well, not bought them exactly, because he owned it, but he was letting them live in it rent free so it was as good as theirs.
They had been later arriving at the hotel than planned and the porter who had let them in had been scowling and unwelcoming. The room itself was nowhere near as elegant as it had appeared in the brochure, and smelled slightly stale and damp.
Bella eyed the double bed, with its slightly grubby-looking dark green sateen eiderdown, with distaste.
Their bedroom at their new home had been freshly wallpapered in a pretty pink and white floral paper and she had insisted of having the most expensive bed linen Lewis’s could supply, and a lovely pale pink eiderdown and matching coverlet. Her trousseau contained a silk lace-trimmed nightdress with a matching peignoir in the same soft shade of pink, just like she had seen Vivien Leigh wearing in a photograph in Picture Post; only, of course, it would look better on her because she was blonde.
She didn’t want to waste her new finery on a setting that so obviously did not deserve it, but since she had nothing else with her she would have to do so. She looked at her reflection in the room’s single slightly tarnished mirror. Her tweed going-away suit, with its fur collar, was the new season’s latest design, the last shipment they were likely to get from Paris, Lewis’s À La Mode Gown Salon had told her. Her hat matched the blue flecks in the tweed exactly and highlighted the colour of her eyes. She was wearing the single row of pearls her mother had removed from her own neck to fasten round Bella’s before she had left the reception whilst looking pointedly at Alan. Bella’s mouth compressed. She had not just hinted, but dragged him to the jeweller’s to show him the double row of pearls she had expected him to give her as a wedding gift, and when he hadn’t produced them she had been furious.
Angrily she removed the pin from her hat.
Alan was sprawling in the room’s single armchair, watching her.
‘You might at least have thanked Mummy and Daddy for everything they’ve done for us,’ she told him as she took off her hat and shook her hair free.
‘Thank them? For what? Forcing me into marrying you?’
He lifted the hip flask to his mouth and then when he realised it was empty, he threw it so hard into the empty fire grate that the grate dented it.
Two spots of angry colour started to burn on Bella’s cheeks. Not once since the night at the Tennis Club had Alan mentioned the circumstances of their engagement and subsequent marriage, and Bella had assumed that he would never do so. He had wanted to marry her really, she had told herself, and it was only that Trixie who had put last-minute doubts into his mind.
‘You’d as good as proposed to me. Everyone knew that.’
‘Proposed?’ He gave a coarse laugh. ‘That’s rich. Propositioned you, maybe, and only that because you’d been chasing after me so hard ever since we’d met.’
‘Me chase you! I’ll have you know there were plenty of other boys wanting to take me out.’
‘Yes, for the same reason as me. Because they wanted to fuck you and they reckoned it would be easy to get into your knickers,’ he told her crudely.
Bella was genuinely shocked. Spoiled and indulged all her life by her mother, and allowed to grow up believing that whatever kind of behaviour she indulged in in order to get her own way was acceptable, she had no awareness of the interpretation others might put on that behaviour, or the boundaries she ought to have put on it herself.
She would no more have genuinely allowed Alan or any other man the kind of sexual favours he was referring to before marriage than she would have contemplated marrying a poor man with no prospects. Physical desire, the intensity of emotional passion – these were not things she had ever experienced, nor did she have any wish to do so, nor any understanding of them. Desire, for Bella, was something she felt for a new frock or a piece of jewellery, for marriage and status.
In the world Bella had created inside her head, a wife permitted her husband the intimacies of marriage in exchange for her wedding ring; if she thought about those intimacies at all it was simply as a duty and nothing more. She neither feared them nor anticipated them. Marriage for her was about being envied by other young women because she was the first of a group to become a wife; it was about having secured the best marriage prize available to her, having the best house, being an adored daughter and daughter-in-law, being the one that all the other women of her group envied and looked up to.
She took off her suit jacket. Their hotel room boasted its own bathroom, a shabby cold little room with a stained bath and a sour smell, and she had already made up her mind that she intended to use it as little as possible.
She had no idea what she could say to Alan and so she simply continued to get undressed, telling herself that he was being so vile because he had been drinking and that he would be his normal self in the morning. She had heard her mother complaining to her father when he had had a couple of G and Ts too many on a Sunday evening. Berating one’s husband for bad behaviour was simply a part of being a wife.
She would have to use the horrid bathroom to finish getting undressed, she acknowledged.
Alan was now lying back in the chair with his eyes closed. Her mouth pinched into a sour look very similar to her mother’s.
When she emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, Alan had fallen asleep and was snoring.
Well, she certainly wasn’t going to wake him. Let him stay there and be punished for his nastiness to her when he did wake up with an aching neck.
Of course, it was a pity that he wasn’t seeing her in her beautiful négligé, but he hadn’t been at all appreciative of her lovely suit or the trouble she had gone to to look pretty for him.
Carefully skirting past him, Bella turned off the lights and climbed into the cold, slightly unaired bed.
It was the sound of Alan being sick that woke her. At first she didn’t know where she was or what the disgusting noise was, but by the time she had focused on the thin light coming from beneath the bathroom door, she was fully awake.
She watched in angry silence as Alan staggered out of the bathroom still fully dressed, and came towards the bed, swaying slightly as he stared down at her.
‘Bloody bitch,’ he swore at her savagely. ‘Bloody, bloody bitch. Well, I’ll show what you’re going to get for forcing me to marry you. There’s only one way to treat a bitch like you.’
He had pulled away the bedclothes and was on top of her before she could move, his breath rank and sour, as he kneeled over her and unbuttoned his trousers.
Bella was too furious to be afraid as she pushed him away. He had left the bathroom light on and she could see his ‘thing’. It was dark red and stiff. She looked at it dismissively.
Bella might not be interested in sex, but she wasn’t ignorant – her mother had seen to that – and anyway, Charlie, being what he was, had thoroughly enjoyed tormenting her when they had been much younger by showing her what boys had that girls didn’t, and showing her too what he could do with it with his hand.
Bella had thought the whole thing totally silly and unnecessary then, and she still did now.
Alan reached for her breast, squeezing it painfully. Irritably she pushed him away, her anger growing as he held on to her nightdress, causing the delicate lace to tear.
‘Now see what you’ve done,’ she demanded, trying to thrust him away from her.
In retaliation Alan pinned her down all the harder, pushing up her nightdress and dropping down on top of her. She could feel the ‘thing’ pressing against her body.
This was what happened when a couple got married, everyone knew that. It was what men expected and what women had to put up with.
Bella gave an impatient sigh and turned her mental attention towards the far more pleasurable activity of planning the furnishings of her new home, leaving Alan to thrust away, making odd grunts as he did so.
It was a pity her father had refused to buy them that new dining set she’d set her heart on, and insisted she had to make do with second-hand instead. And mahogany too. Her father had got it from some woman who was moving to the country because of the war.
What was taking Alan so long? As a boy Charlie had got it over and done with in seconds, and had looked disgustingly pleased with himself for having done so, as he showed her how far he could make the stream of fluid go.
She looked impatiently at Alan. His face was beaded with sweat and he had started to shake slightly. His ‘thing’ had gone soft.
Had he done it then? If so, she hadn’t felt anything, and if he hadn’t, well, that wasn’t her fault, was it? She rolled out from under him whilst he was preoccupied with ‘it’, frowning as he looked at its flaccid paleness, and pulled down her nightdress. Let him sleep on the cold side of the bed, she certainly wasn’t going to.
Jean couldn’t so much as swallow a crumb of toast, her throat felt so raw with pain.
The two men she loved best, her husband and her son, sat at opposite sides of the breakfast table, ignoring one another.
There’d been more angry words between them last night after they’d got home from the wedding, with Sam telling Luke that he’d regret joining up and Luke retaliating that he’d regret even more being a coward. Of course his words to Sam had been like a red rag to a bull, and in the end they had ended up glowering at each other, neither prepared to back down.
Jean had longed to be able to persuade Sam to explain his true feelings to Luke but she knew that he was too proud to do so, and she knew too that Sam would never forgive her if she broke the confidence he had given her. And at the back of her mind she worried that Luke, being young and not understanding how things had been during that other war, might not truly understand how his dad felt and why. But, as everyone knew, you couldn’t put an old head on young shoulders.
She’d been so proud of Luke at the wedding, but in some ways she had wished he had not been there so that the situation between father and son had not worsened.
‘I’ve got to go, Mum, otherwise I’ll miss the boat.’
‘Don’t forget this cake that I’ve made for you then, Luke,’ Jean told him, fussing around busily to hide her tears. ‘We’ll walk with you to the bus.’
‘No … no there’s no need, Mum. I’m meeting up with another lad that had leave; we’re travelling back together.’
She could at least go to the door with him, hoping as she did so that Sam would see sense and come with her to see him off.
At the front door she pulled Luke to her and hugged him tightly.
‘I’m sorry about your dad, Luke. He—’
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Luke told her but they both knew that it wasn’t.
She watched him until he had disappeared out of sight. He had told her that he would be given leave once his training was over.
‘And then they’ll be sending us off to join the BEF, so that we can help them push Hitler back into Germany, so they reckon,’ he had added almost carelessly, whilst Jean’s maternal heart had felt as though it was being squeezed dry of blood.
The BEF, the British Expeditionary Force, had left for France and Belgium almost as soon as war had been announced, and the thought of Luke fighting with them filled her with fear.