The Dust That Falls from Dreams (41 page)

1

The Grampians

Gaskell Old Thing, Beloved Green-Eyed Monster, etc. etc.
,

I have foolishly gone and bought three machines for next to nothing from the Aircraft Disposal Board, which I have to collect eftsoons from Farnborough. They are an Avro 504 trainer, with dual controls, a Snipe and a Pup. I couldn’t bear to be without a bus or two
.

The trouble is, I have nowhere to put them. Do you have any empty barns on your family estate that are visibly yearning to house some heavier-than-air machines? I would be most rippingly pleased if you did. I could collect them when I have a more certain notion of what the future holds. I trust you have decent fields to land in
.

Yours fondly and irresponsibly, and love to the ever-radiant Christabel,

Daniel P
.

PS Can I come shooting again one day? Not that I want to pot any poor feathered friends myself, because I am a far better shot with an aeroplane than I will ever be with a gun, but because I want to witness once again your extraordinary ruthlessness and proficiency in batting them out of the sky
.

2

Our Lamentable and Disgusting Hovel in Chelsea

Dear Daniel, Irresponsible and Feckless
,

All is arranged. A barn is cleared out, and the adjacent field will be mown and rolled, given due notice. But when will you ever be able to
get up there to look after them and fly them? Don’t you have any landed and moneyed friends nearer by? I mean, apart from me? Won’t they fall into decay? What about fitters and riggers?

And the condition is that you teach me to fly. I am certain there are many aviation records for women that have not yet been attained. First to fly upside down to Austria? First to loop the loop twelve times with both legs down the same trouser?

No deal otherwise
.

Affectionately
,

Gaskell the GEM (Green-Eyed Monster)

PS Have just done my enormous painting of a decomposing horse. I am sure you’ll adore it. You can positively smell the rot
.

PPS Christabel’s photographic
The War at Home
exhibition has gone frightfully well, and she has made pots of money. Well, one pot
.

PPPS Does Rosie know about your latest folly? What is it worth not to tell her?

R
osie received a telegram which said simply
‘MR PITT VERY ILL STOP COME QUICK STOP MARY BURKE STOP’
.

During her frequent fits of doubt and guilt, it had occurred to Rosie many times that life would be easier if Daniel were to disappear or die. Whenever these thoughts occurred to her, she was revolted by them and shut them off, knowing that they were unchristian, horrible and wrong, and during the times when she felt that she genuinely loved him, she had thoughts that were quite the opposite. It was then difficult to conceive how she might live without him. She havered between the extremes offered to her by the ambiguity of her feelings. Half of the time she looked forward to moving up to Warwickshire, but the thought of it also induced a kind of panic, because she loved to be in Eltham in the house where she had grown up, and most of all, she loved being with her father, about whom she worried constantly.

Now that Daniel was very ill she felt the same horror as she had experienced when she realised that Ash had been wounded the day after she had failed to pray for him. She flew into a frenzy of activity. She asked her mother to look after Esther until she returned, and told Mr Wragge to prepare the AC so that he could take her directly to Euston Station.

Hamilton McCosh had recently found Mr Wragge with the engine of the motor mower in pieces, decoking it, and had discovered that he was a formidable mechanic, as a result of which he had been bought a smart grey uniform and cap, and, along with a rise in wages, been appointed the family chauffeur. Mr Wragge had erected a wooden garage in the place at the side of the house where people used to tether their horses, and still did if the AC happened to be out. From the iron hooks set into the walls to hold cages of hay, there was now suspended a collection
of inner tubes. Mr Wragge was delighted with his extra job, and almost entirely gave up sleeping with the cat on his chest in the wheelbarrow under the conservatory when there was little to do in the garden. Instead, he went and polished the AC.

Rosie was duly dropped at Euston with her suitcase, and Wragge left the AC ticking over outside as they went into the station to buy a ticket and look for a porter. Finding none, Rosie bought Wragge a platform ticket and he carried the case on board the train himself. When he came out, he found that a small crowd had gathered round the AC because it had overheated, and was generating an interesting amount of steam from the radiator. He went to a cafe, ate jellied eels and drank tea, and when he returned he removed the radiator cap gingerly, and topped it up with water from the horse trough.

In Birmingham the weather was cold, damp and still. It smelled of soot and coal dust and wet smuts and sulphur. When she descended from the train it was impossible not to cough. A porter, also coughing, took her case and guided her to the hansom cabs.

She was surprised by the humble terrace in which Daniel had found lodgings. The houses were filthy but well cared for, and the cobbles glistened like dark fish underfoot. The women had been soaping their doorsteps, she noticed. There was no washing hanging across the streets, as one would have expected, because today the air was too full of soot. Urchin and ragamuffin children in hobnailed boots kicked cans in the street, fought and played their clapping games.

After she had paid the cabbie she knocked on the door and waited. She turned to look at the street and noticed to her left that there was a sizeable pack of people of all ages running towards her.

She then realised why. Chasing them along, as high as the houses, was a dense wave of roiling yellow smoke. She saw an old man stumble and fall, and two younger men seize him under the arms and drag him. She turned to the door and hammered on it again, desperate to get out of its way.

The door opened and a small woman in early old age poked her head out. She saw the wave of smog approaching, said, ‘Feckin’
Jaysus,’ and nipped aside for Rosie to enter. She stuck her head back out and shouted to the smog as it rolled by: ‘Missed again, yer feckin’ gobshite!’

‘Does that happen here often?’ asked Rosie.

‘Every day,’ replied Mary Burke, ‘give or take. It’s all the factories and coal fires and the bleedin’ rain and the cold. It’s a brew.’

‘It stinks,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘The stink’ll be the brimstone,’ said Mrs Burke with some satisfaction. ‘It’s the one true stench of Hell. It’s the twenty-four-carat fart of the Devil.’

‘We often get fogs like that in London. You can get completely lost quite suddenly, because you can’t see anything at all.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Rosie Pitt,’ she said, and Mrs Burke replied, ‘I was hopin’ yer was. You’d better be coming up the stairs, and mind yer head on the low bit. This house was built for the faeries, so it was.’

‘Do you believe in the faeries?’ asked Rosie, who had been particularly fond of her Irish wounded at Netley, and had held many conversations with them on the subject of the Little People. Mary Burke replied, ‘Course I don’t. I’m not stupid.’ She paused and added, ‘They’re still there, though. But you shouldn’t be talking about them at all. It’s highly unlucky to go in for superstition, so it is.’

Rosie found that Mrs Burke had done her very best for Daniel. The small fire was generously banked up with incandescent orange coals, and the patient would certainly be warm enough. There were other signs of care. An apple, a jug of water. A crucifix with a rosary wrapped around it was on his bedside table, propped upright against the wall. Rosie looked down at the unconscious face, with its mouth open as Daniel’s sterterous breath rattled.

‘What happened?’

‘Well, he got a headache for two days, and that knocked him out. Then he was in and out of his mind for two days, and couldn’t do a thing, you know, too weak to talk even. Then he had the collywobbles and the vomits, and then he had the hot and cold shivers, and the hot and cold sweats, and then he was all right, or so I was thinking, and then I was just on my knees with thankfulness, and he goes back to bed and can hardly breathe at
all and it hurts too much to cough, and he coughed up brown stuff. And it was then I sent for yer. Poor boy, poor boy.’

‘You must let me pay you back for the cost of the telegram,’ said Rosie.

‘Be gone wid yer!’ exclaimed Mrs Burke. ‘He’s like me own son. If you love that boy like I love that boy, he’s a lucky feller!’

‘He’s had influenza and now I think he’s got pneumonia,’ said Rosie.

‘I knew it, I knew it,’ muttered Mrs Burke.

‘Did you get in a doctor?’ asked Rosie.

‘Heavens, no. He was askin’ fer yerself. He was saying, “My Rosie’s a nurse, my Rosie’s a nurse.” ’

Rosie said to Mrs Burke, ‘If you don’t mind I’ll be the only one in this room, just to keep out the risk of infection, and if you want to come in, could you put a mask across your mouth and nose? A clean tea towel would do.’

‘I’ll be glad to be handin’ ’im over,’ replied Mrs Burke. ‘The responsibility and the worry was surely killin’ me. How long d’you think you’ll be stayin’?’

‘The crisis comes in seven to nine days,’ said Rosie, ‘then the temperature drops and I’ll take him home if he’s still with us. Mind you, I suppose it could be PUO.’

‘PUO? What the devil would that be, I’m wondering?’

‘Pyrexia of unknown origin. There was a plague of it amongst the soldiers and airmen in the last year of the war. It was thought to be a bacterium and not a virus. It was just as bad as one. It sometimes turns into TB, or so I’m told.’

‘Jaysus, Jaysus,’ lamented Mrs Burke, and she retired down the stairs to put on the kettle.

Rosie settled happily back into nursing. She loved the sheer purpose of it, and she loved the caring of it. It took her completely out of herself, and it was a pleasure to be watching so eagerly for the signs of deliverance. If she had only one patient, it gave her an immense amount of time for thinking, reading and praying. She looked around the tiny room and memorised every single feature of it. She stood at the window and watched the rain.

She propped Daniel up, knowing that a pneumonia patient
should not be lying down, and she listened to his chest. She was sure that the disease was single rather than double. She ran through all the possible complications and sequelae in her mind: pericarditis, meningitis, abcess, gangrene, colitis, nephritis, jaundice, empyrema, thrombosis – killers, all of them. When she washed him she discovered that he had three bullet wounds, and a burn, and wondered why she had never noticed them before. She thought often of Hutch, and of poor Millicent, rigid with grief and loss, but unable to let it show. She had lost Hutch, but she was certain that she could save Daniel.

Rosie slept in the only easy chair in Daniel’s room, and in the morning went out and returned with a bedroll and sleeping bag from the Army & Navy store. She also bought carbolic, a steel dish for the infected sputum, mouthwash and gargle for herself, Friar’s Balsam, imperial drink, sodium bicarbonate, calf’s foot jelly, Brand’s meat essence, Valentine’s meat juice, orange juice, cascara and Dover’s powder. She very much hoped that she would not need oxygen.

The first time Daniel opened his eyes and saw her, he just said, ‘Darling Rosie, I’m a complete WO,’ and closed them again.

‘Well, I’m not writing you off,’ said Rosie.

Rosie went to see Daniel’s colleagues at Henley Motorcycles, and was touched by their concern, and their insistence on Daniel taking off as much time as he needed. They told her that they had been making plans to export to France, and that then Daniel would be quite indispensible. They told her what prestige it brought them to have a colleague who was such a well-known fighter ace, with twenty-five victories and the DFC. It was the first time that Rosie had ever given a thought to him being anything other than the boy who used to live next door. It occurred to her that poor Ash, though no less a man, had not really managed to achieve anything at all. They said that when Daniel was ready to go home and convalesce, the boss would drive them both home personally in his Bentley, and he said that on the way he would show them a lovely little house in Wootton Wawen that might suit them very well.

When she was not tending to Daniel, Rosie went downstairs and helped Mrs Burke. She was an irredeemable tittlemouse,
and everything needed to be repeatedly scrubbed, dusted and inspected. Mrs Burke showed Rosie how to make colcannon, and they fried up a great many sausages and slices of liver, creating overflowing white jugs of dark gravy with which to drench them.

Quite often they talked about Ireland. Rosie said she had never been, and Mrs Burke observed, ‘You’d better be going soon, before we’re all long gone.’ She told Rosie that the reason she was in England was that she had ‘married a feckin’ Proddy dog, and the fecker died, and now I can’t go feckin’ home’. They talked about St Brigid and religion in general, and about the last Pope who was a saint, and many times they set the world to rights. They drank stupendous quantities of thick tea made with condensed milk, and Mrs Burke poured some whiskey in Rosie’s tea, just for the craic. Rosie thought how sad it was that her mother would never invite someone like Mrs Burke to stay, and wondered briefly what it would be like to have the nice little house in Wootton Wawen, so that she might see the entertaining and convivial Mrs Burke again.

Rosie had lost her snobbery at Netley, and after tending so many soldiers in agony, had become completely immune to picturesque speech. She loved being with Mrs Burke, and realised that she was going to miss her, when, on the ninth day, Daniel’s temperature broke and his fever subsided.

A week later, with Daniel wrapped up in an eiderdown and looking very like the Michelin Man, they were delivered home to Eltham in the Bentley.

Here Daniel, who had been pining for a cigarette, lit one up, inhaled deeply, and doubled over and choked. He was so disgusted that he threw the thing in the fire and ran to wash out his mouth with Listerine. ‘Never a-bloody-gain,’ he declared. ‘That is absolutely bloody vile. Why the hell did I ever take it up, for God’s sake?’

Rosie thought, ‘Ash didn’t smoke, and now Daniel doesn’t.’

Daniel was weak for a long time, and felt terribly cold at night, so Rosie climbed in beside him, and spooned him for warmth. They had grown closer on account of the crisis. He bought her a silver necklace with an amethyst in it, for saving his life. She
often questioned herself as to why everyone else loved and esteemed him so much better than she did. She was beginning to understand that it is not enough to love someone deeply; you also have to learn to love them well.