Broken Rainbows (14 page)

‘What makes you think I'll succeed in getting through to him when the nurses have failed?'

He dropped his fork on to his plate. ‘You don't know?'

‘No.'

‘The night we met …'

‘In the New Inn?'

‘I walked into that ballroom feeling as though I'd been exiled to the ends of the earth and wanting to be anywhere but where I was. Then you came up to the table and smiled and I felt as though I had arrived somewhere civilised after all.'

As the whistle blew, Alexander dropped his pick and pulled his snap box from his haversack. Crouching on hands and knees he made his way up the seam to where Evan was sitting with his back against the coal face. Sinking down alongside him, he opened his box and removed the metal flask of cold tea.

‘Do you think they'll carry out the safety check?'

‘They'd be fools not to.' Evan scrutinised the wooden prop in front of them with narrowed eyes.

‘And if they don't?'

‘We'll have to go to management.'

‘I keep thinking back to my first day underground.'

‘When you wanted to go up top to eat your snap,' Evan laughed.

‘It seemed a normal thing to do at the time. I couldn't understand how anyone could eat in these conditions. Come to think of it, I couldn't even understand how anyone could work in this stinking hole, and here I am two years later accepting it as normal.'

‘You'll be looking to eat your sandwiches in the coal hole when you go back to your museum,' Luke suggested, with a rare flash of humour.

‘Hey, Luke?' one of the other miners shouted across to him. ‘You going to the boxing tonight?'

‘Only if his missus lets him.' Viv Richards's quip raised a laugh. Luke had married Gina Ronconi when he was eighteen and she sixteen. Although they had been married for nearly two years, most of the men continued to rag him as though he was a newlywed.

‘What time does the first bout start?' Luke rose to his feet, dusted off his trousers, and walked over to the others.

‘That boy's shaping up nicely.'

‘That boy's a man, Evan.'

‘Something the matter, other than the state of the props? It's not like you to go off the deep end with Mogg.'

‘Everything and nothing.' Alexander stared at his sandwiches.

‘My daughter-in-law giving you grief again?'

‘I love her. I've asked her to marry me more times than I can remember.'

‘And she's still leading you a merry dance?'

‘It never feels right to be talking about Jenny to you.'

‘I often wonder what she would be like if Eddie hadn't been killed. They should never have married. They were far too young, but Eddie always was reckless as well as hot-tempered. On his last leave they both seemed happy, although it's impossible to predict if things would have stayed that way. You can't build a lifetime of marriage on one two-day leave. And looking back, that's all they ever really had.'

Alexander struggled to decipher the expression on Evan's face; it proved impossible given that the only lighting came from the lamps attached to their helmets.

‘I thought they were married for a year before he was killed?'

‘They spent precious little of that time together. Hasn't Jenny told you?'

‘She never talks about Eddie.'

‘That's not a good sign.' Evan bit into his sandwich and his teeth crunched on a sliver of coal that had fallen from the roof. Turning away from Alexander he spat it out.

‘I thought Eddie lived in the flat above the shop with her?' Alexander hated pressing Evan for information, but he couldn't think of anyone else he could ask about Jenny's marriage to Eddie, as she had consistently refused to answer his questions.

‘He took her back there after their honeymoon night in the New Inn. Her mother was alive then. He didn't stay. A couple of days later he enlisted. He only came home on leave once after that, as I said for two days.'

‘So she was hardly married at all,' Alexander mused more to himself than Evan.

‘I told her not to blame herself. Eddie always was headstrong.'

‘He was a good-looking boy.'

‘Of course, you met him on his last leave. Yes, he was good-looking, but as I've already said, on the wild side, and given Jenny's personality that made for an interesting combination. I think she feels guilty about his death, although I've no idea why. It was hardly her fault that he fell in with a bunch of murderous SS.'

‘Thank you for telling me. It explains a lot.'

‘If it's any help, Alexander, I think that if you can get her to marry you, you might make her happy. She needs stability.'

‘It's good to have your blessing, even if I don't have hers.'

Alexander rose to his feet as the whistle blew again. Pushing his uneaten sandwich back into his box, he stretched his cramped limbs. He would visit Jenny tonight. Talk to her, tell her that no one could live in the past, but above all he would make her understand just how deeply he did feel about her…

‘I wish I'd read as much as you.'

‘Don't you belong to a library?'

‘Now.' Jane looked down at Peter's left eye, all that was visible between the bandages that covered his face and head. ‘But given my shifts in the munitions factory and looking after my daughter, there's not much time for reading other than children's books to her.'

‘I loved Robert Louis Stevenson …'

‘Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped,
but my favourite has to be Captain Marryat's
Children of the New Forest.'

‘I always wanted to be Humphrey.'

‘The farmer, not the soldier?'

‘I admired the way he could turn his hand to anything. Whatever they needed, he built. Traps for game, a cow shed …'

‘… fencing for extra fields.'

‘Then Humphrey was your favourite too?'

‘I liked the idea of living in a cottage and producing everything I needed to survive. Growing my own food, selling the surplus to buy clothes and essentials, cleaning, cooking, washing, sewing …'

‘You actually like housework?'

‘I loved it when I had a place of my own in London.'

‘You'll go back there after the war.'

‘It was bombed,' she said quietly, remembering what Tomas had told her about Peter's parents.

He turned away from her. ‘That's rotten luck.'

‘I have a good roof over my head now, even if it isn't my own. We're staying with my father-in-law. His house is very comfortable.'

‘And you work in munitions?'

‘I think a lot of people are doing things they never dreamed of before the war.'

‘I wanted to be an engineer. Build bridges, carry roads and railway tracks across impossible places, like ravines and mountains in Africa and Australia.'

‘You can still do that.'

‘With a freak's face?'

‘You don't build bridges with your face.'

He stared at her through his one good eye, amazed that she hadn't responded with the platitude that once his operations were over everything would be fine. ‘No one will want to work with a monstrosity.'

‘I grew up in an orphanage. We had to wear awful, grey-striped dresses. I used to stand behind the others and hope that no one would notice me. I was so ashamed of being a charity case and a burden on the parish.'

‘It was hardly your fault that you were an orphan.'

‘I wish that some of the people who looked after us had seen it that way. It took me a long time to learn to stand up for myself, and trust people enough to show them who I really was.'

‘A very pretty girl.'

She recognised the bitterness in his voice. ‘When this war is over there'll be lots of people with scars.'

‘Don't tell me to be proud of them.'

‘You could try not letting them get in the way.'

‘My girl wouldn't see it that way.'

‘She told you?'

‘She wrote me a “Dear John” letter before we flew that last mission. There's some bloody Yank… sorry, I don't usually swear.'

‘If she left you for an American she's not worth having.'

‘Oh, she was worth having all right.'

‘Have you tried writing to her since?'

‘So she can see me like this and offer me her pity? No bloody fear.'

‘Language,' a male voice shouted from lower down the ward.

‘Sorry,' he murmured contritely. ‘But just look at this place – nothing but Yanks.'

‘Who've left their families to fight for us. They're not all after other men's girlfriends.'

‘No? You're married, you've got a daughter, yet you came in with that Yank doctor.'

‘He lodges with my sister-in-law.'

‘So you're just good friends?' he sneered.

‘Not even good ones, we've only met twice.'

‘But you will see him again?'

‘Possibly.'

‘And your husband's at the front?'

Jane sat back wishing she could get Peter to talk about himself instead of asking questions about her. ‘Haydn doesn't like being separated from our daughter, Anne, and me, any more than we like being away from him. But that's the war for you. He's a singer, with ENSA.'

‘Every night something awful.'

‘So everyone tells me.'

‘I'm not being fair, they put on some pretty good shows back at base camp.'

‘That's the first kind word I've heard a serviceman say about ENSA.'

‘Haydn … Powell, your husband is Haydn Powell?'

‘You've heard of him?'

‘Who hasn't? Do you see him often?'

‘Not for the last ten months.'

‘This war is messing up everyone's life.'

‘It'll be over some day,' she declared briskly before he could become maudlin again. ‘You said you wanted to build bridges in faraway places. Have you ever travelled?'

‘No, but I had an uncle, my father's brother, who lived in Africa. He went out there to farm just before I was born. I never met him, but he used to send us photographs and letters, and parcels at birthdays and Christmas full of strange things like wood carvings, and peculiar dried fruits. I always wanted to see the places he described. The jungles, the plantations, his bungalow, the native villages, the animals …'

Jane sat back enthralled as he told her about Africa as seen through his uncle's eyes. All she knew about the dark continent had been gleaned from an ancient Blackwell's reader in the Homes and a Tarzan film. Immersed in his stories, she forgot where she was and why she'd come. Together, they painted mental pictures of the jungle, stocked it with exotic animals and plants, submerged themselves in the romance of ancient and alien cultures, and wandered every track and byway around his uncle's farm.

‘Short stint today, D'Este. You've been working round the clock for the last week, so why don't you knock off early?' the senior RAF surgeon suggested as Tomas dumped his surgical suit in the linen bin in the changing room.

‘Thanks, I intend to.'

‘You look happy. Dare I suggest you have a girl tucked away somewhere?'

‘When have I had time to meet a girl?'

‘Good point. God, what would I give for a social life that included women.'

‘And you a married man.'

‘Far from home.'

‘Your home is in London, sir, not three thousand miles away,' Tomas chided him.

‘It may as well be three thousand miles away for all that I see of my wife,' he grumbled.

Tomas opened his locker and reached for his clothes. Slipping his shorts on, he pushed his dog tags aside and pulled his vest over his head. As he picked up his shirt, he realised the senior surgeon was right: he was happier than he'd been since he'd left home. And all because he had something to look forward to.

Jane was still sitting beside Peter's bed. Tomas glanced at his watch as he stood back, watched and listened. She must have been there for the best part of three hours. Peter's pronunciation was difficult to understand, the result of burns that had affected his larynx and vocal cords, but there was more animation in his hoarse and cracked voice than he had heard before.

Jane looked up as Tomas walked towards them.

‘Not come to take her away have you, Doc?' a boy called out from a bed on the opposite side of the ward.

‘It's time Mrs Powell went home.'

‘Can't we keep her? She looks pretty sitting there, and she gives us something other than the walls to look at.'

‘Bloody doctors get all the luck,' a flight lieutenant grumbled as Jane picked up her coat and hat from the foot of Peter's bed and joined Tomas.

‘You will come and see me next week?'

Jane smiled at Peter, ‘I promise, but as I warned you, I don't know what day it will be.'

‘And you won't forget, any magazines, books …'

‘I won't forget and I'll see if I can persuade some of the other girls to come from the factory.'

‘Great, get them to bring some beer and we'll have a party.'

‘That's all you ever think about, Eric,' Peter protested.

‘Looks like you made a lot of friends,' Tomas said as he opened the door for her.

‘You were right. They're a lot of nice boys, who just need someone to talk to.'

‘I've finished for the day.' He thrust his arms through the sleeves of his overcoat as they walked into the foyer. ‘So, you can ride back to town in the charabanc, or risk the pillion of my motorbike.'

‘I've never ridden on a motorbike,' she said doubtfully.

‘It's no different to a pedal bike, only faster. You'll need to pull your hat down, and button up your coat.' He stepped outside. The rain that had threatened all afternoon was finally falling, a steady, cold drizzle that clung to their coats and eyelashes. ‘Do you have to go straight home?'