Jasmine Nights (2 page)

‘I can’t do this, Dom, I’m not strong enough,’ she’d said after two weeks. ‘It’s not you.’ She’d swallowed.

‘I’m starting to dread it.’ She’d glanced at the boy in the bed beside him. The side of his face, grafted with his own skin to his chest, looked like a badly made elephant’s trunk.

‘So sorry,’ she’d whispered softly, shortly before she left. Her round blue eyes had filled with tears. ‘Can we stay friends?’

Not the first woman to have bolted out of this terrifying ward, not the last. ‘Amazing how potent cheap music is’: the kind of thing he might have said once to excuse the tears. His Noël Coward imitation had been rather admired at Cambridge. It wasn’t even Annabel so much; it was everything lost, even the foolishly innocent things – perhaps particularly them.

His set, the self-proclaimed ‘it’ boys of their year, had spent days spragged out on sofas, smoking and drinking cheap sherry, elaborately bored and showing off wildly about Charlie Parker, or Pound, or Eliot – anything that amused them. How young they seemed, even at this distance. The first heady days away from home, the steady stream of good-looking undergraduate girls smuggled into their rooms, and they’d had their pick. He’d tried to be fair to Annabel, telling her after her tearful confession that he perfectly understood, didn’t blame her in the slightest, in truth he’d always had the guilty sense that his ardour did not equal hers, that she was not, as people said, ‘the one’. There’d been so many other girls around, and Cambridge felt like a time when the sun would never stop shining.

Smetheren, whose famously untidy room was opposite his on the quad, had been killed two months ago. Clancy, one of his best friends, also a flying fanatic and among the cleverest men he’d ever met, shot down over France a month before his twenty-second birthday. And Jacko, of course. All changed within a year, and the boy he’d been could never have imagined himself like this: in bed at 8.30 in his PJs, desperately trying not to cry in front of a pretty girl. It was nothing but notes. He bit the inside of his lip to gain control: notes and a few minor chords, some well-chosen words. Only a song.

A clink of bottles, a rumble of wheels. The night medicines were coming round on a trolley. They were stoking up the boiler in the middle of the room, dimming the lights.

‘Last one,’ she said.

She was wearing her ridiculous little veiled hat again. The pianist had put away his music, so she sang ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ unaccompanied, her voice strong and clear, her expression intent and focused.

And then she’d walked around the beds to say good night.

Good night to Williams, who had both legs in traction, and to poor blind Billy at the end of the ward, and to Farthingale, who was off to theatre tomorrow to have his eyelids sewn back on again. She didn’t seem to mind them, or was that part of the training?

When she got to Dom, Curtis, the bloody idiot, called out: ‘Go on, love! Give him a night-night kiss.’ He’d turned his head away, but she’d leaned towards him, so close he could see the mound of her stomach under the red and white dress. He felt the tickle of her hair. She smelt young and fresh, like apples.

When she kissed his cheek, he’d said to protect himself, ‘You wouldn’t kiss that if you knew where it came from,’ and she’d leaned down again and whispered in his ear, ‘How do you know that, you silly bugger?’

He’d stayed awake for the next hour thinking about her, his heart in a sort of delighted suspension. Before he went to sleep, he imagined her on the back of his motorbike. It was a summer’s day. They were sitting on a grass verge outside a country inn. They were teasing each other, they were laughing. She was wearing a blue dress, and the sky was just a sky again, not something you fell from screaming.

Chapter 2

ST BRIAVELS,
GLOUCESTERSHIRE

My dear Saba Tarcan
: his first attempt at a fan letter, written from the Rockfield Convalescent home in Wiltshire, was lobbed into the waste-paper basket. It was far too formal and avuncular for that mocking little face. Her address he’d cajoled from one of the nurses who organised the entertainments and who’d promised once the letter was written to forward it to ‘the relevant party’.

Dear Saba, I would like to tell you how splendidly I thought you sang the other night when I heard you at Queen Victoria’s
. Oh, worse! That sounded like some port-winey old stage-door Johnny. Oh fuck it! Damn! He hurled it in the basket. He’d waited six weeks before writing to her, to make sure he was fit to be seen and thinking that once he was home again and not a patient, the old confidence would return and the letter would flow mellifluously from his pen, but if anything, he felt even more bewildered by what he was trying to say, which made him angry – a girl had never made him feel like that before. A poem ran through his mind – one he’d thought about in connection with her.

‘Thank you, whatever comes.’ And then she turned

And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers

Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside
,

Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes

One hour was sunlit and the most high gods

May not make boast of any better thing

Than to have watched that hour as it passed
.

He’d copied it into his diary in hospital, certain he wouldn’t send that either. Poetry made people suspicious when they didn’t know you, and frankly, bollocks to the one-hour-being-lovely idea; he wanted to hear her sing again, nothing else.

‘Coffee, Dom darling?’ His mother’s voice wafting from the kitchen; she sounded more French when she was nervous.

‘I’m in the sitting room.’ He glanced discreetly at his watch. Blast! He’d hoped to finish the letter first. ‘Come and have it with me,’ he said, trying with every ounce of his being not to sound like a person raging with frustration.

His mother was hovering. He’d felt her there all morning, trying to be unobtrusive. Thin as a wisp, elegant in her old tweed suit, in she bounded now with the tray, sat down on the edge of the piano stool and poured the coffee. ‘Thank you, Misou,’ he said, using his childhood name for her.

He took her hand. ‘It’s all right,’ he wished she would stop looking so worried. ‘Nothing hurts now. Look, hold it properly.’ A surge of anger as he felt her tentative squeeze.

She bobbed her head shyly, not sure what to say. She’d been so proud of him once. Now his injuries seemed to have brought with them a feeling of shared shame – there was too much to say and to conceal.

During his months in hospital, he’d fantasised about being exactly where he was today, on this sofa, in this house in St Briavels, a tiny village on the borders of Wales and Gloucestershire. Sitting on the train that took him from Chepstow to Brockweir, he’d been determined to give his mother at least a few days of happiness to make up for the months of misery and worry she’d endured. No talk about flying again; no talk about friends, and maybe, in a couple of days’ time over a glass of wine, an upbeat account of Annabel’s departure.

A taxi had met him at the station. As they crossed a River Wye sparkling in the spring sunshine, a line of swans, stately and proud, were queening it across the water, and on the far side of the river a herd of Welsh ponies grazed, one with a sparrow sitting on its rump.

He asked the taxi driver to stop for a while. He said he wanted to look at the view, but in fact he was having difficulty breathing. The choking feeling, now familiar, came sudden as an animal leaping from the dark, and made his heart pound and the palms of his hands grow clammy. It would pass. He stubbed out his cigarette, and sat breathing as evenly as he could, trying to concentrate on only good things.

‘Lovely,’ he said at last when it was over. ‘Beautiful sight.’

‘Perfect morning to come home, sir,’ said the driver, his eyes firmly ahead. ‘Ready to move off?’

‘Yep. Ready.’

As the car rose up the steep hill, he concentrated fiercely on the field of black Welsh cattle on his right, the scattered cottages bright with primroses and crocuses. He was going home.

A long rutted track led to the farm; from it he saw the Severn estuary gleaming like a conch shell in the distance, and when Woodlees Farm came into view, his eyes filled with helpless tears. This was the charming whitewashed house his parents had moved to twenty-five years ago, when his father had first become a surgeon. Low-ceilinged, undistinguished, apart from large south-facing windows, it stood on its own in the middle of windswept fields. The small wood behind it was where he’d played cowboys and Indians with his sister Freya when he was a boy. They’d raced their ponies here too, dashing along muddy tracks and over makeshift jumps. He’d been born behind the third window to the right upstairs.

The car crunched up the drive between the avenue of lime trees his mother, a passionate gardener, had planted in the days when she was a homesick girl missing her family in Provence. Sparkling with rain, glorious and green, unsullied by the dust of summer, they appeared like a vision. He’d grown to hate the severely clipped privet hedges surrounding the hospital lawns. Beyond the trees, new grass, new lambs in the field, a whole earth in its adolescence.

His mother ran down the drive when she heard the taxi. She stood under the lime trees and took his face in both her hands. ‘My darling Dom,’ she said. ‘As good as new.’

As they walked back to the house arm in arm, dogs swirled around their legs and an old pony in the field craned nosily over the gate. She’d said, ‘How was it at Rockfield?’ All she knew about it was that this was the place the burns boys were sent to, to shoehorn them back into ‘real life’.

‘Surprisingly jolly,’ he said. He told her about the lovely house near Cheltenham, loaned by some county lady, about the barrels of beer, the pretty nurses, the non-stop parties, the complaints from the neighbours, who said they’d expected convalescents, not larrikins. Hearing his mother’s polite, anxious laugh, he’d fought the temptation to hang his head like a guilty boy; early that morning he’d been 10,000 feet above the Bristol Channel, zooming over the grazing sheep, the little patchwork fields, the schools, the church steeples, the whole sleeping world, and it had been bloody marvellous. Tiny Danielson, one of his last remaining friends from the squadron, had wangled a Tiger Moth kept in a hangar near Gloucester. Dom’s hands had shaken as he’d buckled on the leather flying helmet for the first time in months, his heart thumping as he carefully taxied down the runway with its scattering of Nissen huts on either side, and then, as he’d lifted off into the clear blue yonder, he’d heard himself shout with joy.

Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! He was flying again! He was flying again! In hospital, the idea that he might have to go back to a desk job had made him sweat with terror. He’d worried that he’d be windy, that his hands wouldn’t be strong enough now, but he’d had no trouble with the controls, and the little aircraft felt as whippy as a sailing craft under his fingers. The air was stingingly cold, there was a bit of cumulus cloud to the left, and he felt suddenly as if a jumble of mismatched pieces inside him had come together again.

Hearing his shout of pleasure, Tiny had echoed it, and a few minutes later clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Down now, I think, old chap – we don’t want to get court-martialled.’

A noisy breakfast followed – toast, baked beans, brick-coloured tea – shared with Tiny and a pilot wearing a uniform so new that it still had the creases in it. Nobody asked him any questions about the hospital; no one made a fuss – economy of emotion was the unspoken rule here. In the mess, there was even a ‘shooting a line’ book that fined you for any morbid or self-congratulatory talk. And that was good, too. Four of his closest friends were dead now, five missing presumed dead, one captured behind enemy lines. He was five months shy of his twenty-third birthday.

‘You’ll notice a few changes.’ His mother, light-footed and giddy with happiness, had almost danced up the drive. ‘We’ve been planting carrots and onions where the roses were. You know, “dig for victory” and all zat. Oh, there’s so much to show you.’

She took him straight up the stairs so he could put his suitcase in his old room. The bed looked inviting with its fresh linen sheets and plumped pillows. A bunch of lavender lay on the bedside table. He gazed briefly at the schoolboy photographs of him that she’d framed. The scholarship boy at Winchester, flannelled and smirking in his first cricket XI; and there a muddied oaf, legs planted, squinting at the camera, Jacko sitting beside him beaming. Jacko, who he’d persuaded to join up, who he’d teased for being windy, who he’d last seen clawing at his mask in a cauldron of flame, screaming as the plane spiralled down like a pointless piece of paper and disappeared into the sea.

He must go up to London and talk to Jilly, Jacko’s fiancée, about him soon. He dreaded it; he needed it.

His mother touched his arm.

‘Come downstairs,’ she said quickly. ‘Plenty of time to unpack later.’

A whiff of formaldehyde as they passed his father’s study on the way down. On the leather desk, the same gruesome plastic model of a stomach and intestines that Dom had once terrified his sister with, by holding it up at her bedroom door, a green torch shining behind it; the same medical books arranged in alphabetical order.

‘He’ll be home after supper.’ His mother’s smile wavered for a second. ‘He’s been operating day and night.’

‘Things any better?’ slipped out. He’d meant to ask it casually over a drink later.

‘Not really,’ she said softly. ‘He’s never home – he works harder now if anything.’

In the tiled hall, near the front door, he glanced at his face in the mirror. His dark hair had grown again; his face looked pretty much the same.