I felt uncertain and got up from the bath and stood there blindly thinking about Michael in another woman’s arms. It was awful. The door opened abruptly and Michael stared at me. I stood there naked, seeing a sudden light in his eyes and I felt nothing but joy that he was really seeing me for the first time in his life as the growing woman I was.
He shut the door as abruptly as he’d opened it but I smiled a womanly, somehow triumphant, smile before I reached for the towel and began to dry myself.
I would like to think that everything changed from that moment, but it didn’t. Michael was the same to me as he’d ever been, casually affectionate, and in my heart I knew he’d seen not me but an older woman, a real woman, not the child he’d rescued from the cold fields. He was seeing my sister Hari.
Twenty
Hari knew Kate was nervous. She clung to the door handle of the car, her knees were tense, and when the car swayed around a bend Kate winced as though something pained her.
‘All right, Kate, if you want to stop for a bit there’s a little café up ahead. Shall we have a cup of tea?’
‘Please, Hari,’ Kate said softly.
Hari was worried about Kate; it was as if all the life had gone out of her. She was cowed and frightened and the fun, the spirit, had left her. Kate was diminished, shrunk into a dark world of pain, changed forever by the tragic events of her life.
They drank their tea, which was stewed and the café was cold. Soon, Kate pushed back her chair. ‘Let’s get on,’ she said, ‘it’s freezin’ here so it is.’
The hospital smelled of disinfectant and the walls were a dowdy brown and cream; along the corridors the nurses bustled with wings of pristine hats flying.
‘Hari, my dear girl.’ Her father looked well, his cheeks a little flushed as it was warm in the hospital with the heating going full blast. He was sitting outside the bedclothes, his brightly coloured paisley dressing gown tied around his waist so that his thinness was betrayed by the drape of the cloth.
Hari kissed his cheek. ‘Father, here’s Kate who’s come with me to see you.’ She gestured to him that Kate couldn’t see him and he nodded and took Kate’s hand.
‘Hello, Kate, how are your folks keeping?’
‘All dead,’ she said flatly. Hari saw her father frown. ‘I’m sorry, Kate, really sorry.’
Hari shook her head. ‘Anyway, Father, tell us what happened to you?’
He was eager to talk. ‘Well, Hari, we were ordered to advance. There was a nest of Germans in a hut and, as the officer, I naturally had to go ahead and throw a grenade into the viper’s bed. I got shot.’ He looked sheepish and Hari suppressed a smile.
‘What injuries, Father?’
‘A leg wound, not bad really, but my foot got infected. In the end it had to be amputated, same as some of these other boys here.’ He gestured round at the young men in the beds near him.
One of the men looked up and Hari recognized him. She had met him once at a dance; he’d given Kate stockings and Kate, well, Kate had given him comfort. All his limbs seemed to be intact but his face was badly scarred.
‘Hari!’ Stephen had spotted her. ‘And Kate! It’s me, Stephen. Come and give me a little bit of your time, there’s a love. I haven’t had a visitor since I’ve been here.’
‘Who is it?’ Kate held out her hand and Hari, with an apologetic smile at her father, led Kate to the other bed.
Stephen took Kate’s hand. ‘It’s me, the brash airman who once was so young and arrogant. What’s happened to you then, Kate?’ He pulled her until she was sitting on the bed beside him.
‘The war happened, Stephen,’ she said, ‘I got blown up in the munitions factory, lucky to be alive, so they tell me. I can’t see any more, you’ll have to tell me what happened to you.’
‘Shot down, what else?’ he said. ‘I’m scarred, my face… Not too bad though compared to my friends who were burned to toast where they sat in the pilot seat. I still hear their screams. Sometimes I’m afraid to go to sleep.’
Kate touched his face with her fingertips. ‘As you say, not too bad, Stephen.’ She smiled for the first time that day, Hari noticed.
‘Anyway, weren’t you always too good-looking for your own good?’
‘Kate, I’m sorry—’ his voice was soft—‘not for loving you but for taking advantage. I did care about you, you know, and then I went away and when I came back I heard about the other pilots and I didn’t feel special any more.’
He kissed her fingertips. ‘Mind, you put me in my place very well that night in the ice cream parlour. I never felt so small in all my life.’ He turned her hand over and kissed her palm. ‘I’ve learned a lot about life and death since then.’
Hari stood undecided between the two beds, she couldn’t leave Kate, she would want to come back and talk to Father and yet, their conversation was so private.
‘Stephen, I fell in love—really in love—with Eddie, remember my darling Eddie? You almost ruined that for me, you and that spiteful girl you were with. But he came back, he loved me in spite of everything.’ Her voice broke and Hari wondered if she should intervene but Kate’s next words stopped her.
‘I was having Eddie’s baby when the… the explosion happened. Now Eddie’s missing in action, I’ve got no mammy or family, I can’t see anything at all and I feel my life is over so I do.’
‘Of course your life’s not over!’ Stephen protested, ‘you are still a very beautiful woman with your dark Irish curls and your eyes are still the cornflower blue they always were.’ He stroked her hands. ‘Look, will you help me when I get out of here? I’ll need someone to help me—a housekeeper—I can’t cook, I can’t make beds, I’m a useless sort of a man it seems.’
‘I’m all right as I am, living with Eddie’s mammy,’ Kate said. ‘In any case I can only cook the simplest of meals. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll write down my address in case you ever need me,’ Stephen said. ‘If you do I’m sure Hari will help you find me, won’t you, Hari?’
‘I suppose so,’ Hari said reluctantly, not at all sure this meeting was what Kate wanted. Kate moved away from the bed and Hari took her arm. ‘My father’s getting a bit rattled, he thinks we’re neglecting him.’
‘We are,’ Kate said. ‘Come on let’s go and cheer the old boy up.’ Her demeanour was different as if talking to Stephen had regenerated something of her old spirit.
‘Fancy he wanted me with him, Hari,’ she said, ‘sure I’m not entirely helpless, even if I’m blind. I suppose I could still look after a man, at least Stephen thinks so. Sure I might find the cooking a bit of a challenge but I could always open a tin of spam.’
‘Thinking of accepting then?’
‘No, I couldn’t leave Eddie’s mammy, not for the world.’
‘You know that boy?’ Hari’s father’s voice was truculent.
‘Yes, Father, he’s a friend of Kate’s.’ She paused. ‘Now, when you come home I’ve got the perfect room for you.’
‘I won’t be able to get up stairs very well, Hari, have you thought of that?’
‘I’ve got a nice little house with a parlour at the front, I’ll put a bed in there for you Father, you’ll be as cosy as anything. I’ve even got a half decent wireless for you.’
‘What about that rascal, Meryl, she’ll be there after school to make me a cuppa now and again, won’t she?’
Hari frowned. ‘Now you can’t stay an invalid all your life. You will have to learn to get to the kitchen yourself—and Meryl is in the country, an evacuee, you know that.’