‘So what were the tears
for?’
‘Disappointment, I guess,’
she said ruefully. ‘Edwin came to see me. I sensed he wanted out, so I showed
him the way. But it would’ve been nice to see him put up some sort of
fight.’
Morgan just put his hand over hers in
sympathy. ‘Better that he showed his true colours now,’ he said.
‘Yes, that’s true, and
I’m not broken-hearted, I knew he wasn’t right for me. But –’ she
broke off, unable to say what was on her mind.
‘You are afraid no one will ever
want you again?’
She looked up at Morgan, and her eyes
brimmed with tears. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘That’s how I felt
too,’ he said. ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’
‘We’re a fine pair,’
she said, and attempted to laugh.
As her body healed, the need to sleep
all the time soon lessened, and then the time really dragged. She found herself
dwelling on how difficult life would be with only one leg, fearing she would never
marry and have children, and remembering the joy she used to feel running up the
path on the cliff top at Sidmouth. She wished she’d realized then that her
days of running were numbered, so she might have appreciated what she had a little
more.
By eight days after the amputation, she
felt she might go mad with boredom. It didn’t help that she kept picking at
the scab which was Edwin. Should she have tried to conform and become the kind of
woman his type married? Was she foolhardy agreeing to go to France on the secret
missions?
Should she have just said
nothing about any of it until she was on the mend?
Yet, however she looked at her
relationship with Edwin, it always came back to the same thing. He hadn’t
loved her enough to overcome any problems that presented themselves. And while she
was scrutinizing things under a microscope, she could see that just maybe she had
fallen for the image of a fighter pilot from an illustrious family, not actually for
Edwin himself.
Facing up to her new status was painful.
She’d always imagined going back to New Zealand on the arm of a handsome and
wealthy husband, looking sophisticated, beautifully dressed, and with a wealth of
experience behind her that she could use to dazzle her old friends.
But she would be going back alone, poor,
badly dressed, and her experiences were ones no one would want to hear. To top all
that, she had a missing leg. She would never again be able to leap into a boat
wearing just a swimsuit, leaving the men of Russell goggle-eyed.
‘I am not going to succumb to
self-pity,’ she muttered to herself, whenever such thoughts came to her.
‘I may never be able to leap again, but I can learn to get about under my own
steam.’
To this end, she insisted on trying a
wheelchair, and once she’d mastered getting about in that, she asked to try
out crutches. She was urged by the physiotherapist to take it slowly, but she
didn’t listen. Crutches were harder to master than she’d expected, and
she had a couple of tumbles.
‘You will do yourself a serious
injury, if you don’t listen to what I tell you, Miss Carrera,’ the
physiotherapist said wearily. ‘It takes time to adjust to your body weight
being unevenly distributed now. You have to learn to balance, just the same as you
did when you were a child and learned to
stand and hop on just one leg. Ten minutes a day, for
now, is more than enough.’
Mariette knew her stump had to be
completely healed before she could even be measured for a prosthetic leg, and it
would then take weeks to learn to walk with it. But patience was not one of her
strong points. She wanted to go back to work in Sidmouth because she missed the
banter of working behind the bar. Or, failing that, she intended to find a job here,
in Southampton, so she’d be close to the hospital.
But the reality of it was that no one
was going to employ a one-legged woman.
When Sybil had last visited, even she
had joked that a barmaid on crutches was about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.
She wanted Mariette home, but she’d pointed out that, realistically, Mari
would have to accept that she could only sit in the bar and talk to the
customers.
Mrs Harding brought Ian and Sandra to
see her one day. Even though Mariette made out to them that she was fine about
everything, was enjoying being in hospital, and had lots of people to talk to, she
suspected she didn’t really fool them.
Sandra hugged her, when she was leaving,
and whispered, ‘We like you just as much with only one leg. And so will
everyone else.’
It was strange that a child could pick
up on her real fear – of not being liked, or being ignored, or even being treated
differently. She remembered there had been a girl at school who had a club foot, and
no one really wanted to be her friend. Her family had moved to Auckland eventually,
and Mariette could remember one of the bigger girls saying it was because she had no
friends in Russell.
But she reminded herself that she did
have a friend in
Morgan, and he came to
see her every day, even if he could only spare a few minutes.
‘You’ve got to use all this
spare time productively,’ he told her, when she had moaned that she was bored.
‘You can’t expect people to entertain you, just as when you get out of
here you can’t expect people to wait on you hand and foot. They’ll have
a lot more time for someone who makes an effort to do things for herself. Believe
me, I know.’
She took note of what he said, and she
did try to pass the time productively. She wrote letters home, she read a great
deal, and she started a cross-stitch tapestry that another patient had brought in
and then left behind when they went home. She even asked the nurses to give her
little jobs to do.
But sometimes it was just too hard to be
sunny-natured, optimistic and never to grumble about her lot. She would think dark
thoughts about how unfair it was that people like Miss Salmon, who had talked her
into training for the rescue missions, sat in safety in an office all day. The woman
hadn’t even come to see her in hospital to ask if she needed anything!
It wasn’t so much that she wanted
to see Miss Salmon, but she did want to know about the children she’d rescued
that last night, and maybe get an address to write to them. She was worried too
about Celeste and the other links in the chain in France; the dead soldier must have
caused problems for everyone. Yet what made her really cross was that Miss Salmon
and her colleagues had spoken so often about the need for humanity in this war, but
now that she was hurt, and of no further use to them, the word meant nothing to
them.
But at least letters to and from home
were getting through faster these days. By using the special envelopes and
lightweight paper, they went by plane now, and often they were
delivered within ten days of writing. The day she got
the letter from her mother about Uncle Noah leaving his house in Marseille to her
parents was a real red-letter day. She forgot her aches and pains in her glee at
imagining how angry that must have made Jean-Philippe.
Her father had written to someone he
knew well in Marseille to get a report on the condition of the house, to find out if
it had been requisitioned. His plan was to find someone who could act as caretaker
for him until the war was over and he could sell the property.
Mariette hoped that something really
unpleasant would befall Jean-Philippe before too long. His wife running off with
someone else would do nicely, or his house being flattened in a bomb blast and him
losing everything he owned. Maybe it wasn’t very nice of her to be thinking
such things. But then, he had been so evil towards her.
Finally, after almost four weeks in
hospital, Mr Mercer came to see Mariette and said he was recommending that she be
moved to a convalescent home in Bournemouth. He said that it specialized in fitting
prosthetic limbs and helping the patient to use them well.
‘Bournemouth!’ she
exclaimed. She was about to say she didn’t know anyone there. Why
couldn’t she stay in Southampton, or go home to Sidmouth? But then she
realized Mr Mercer was doing what he thought was best for her. ‘Oh, that will
be lovely,’ she tagged on, and hoped she sounded as if she meant it.
‘I know you’d probably like
to go back to your friends in Sidmouth,’ he said. ‘But it’s my
experience that family and close friends do too much for those with missing limbs.
You must become independent. Anyway, Bournemouth is very nice. And with spring
around the corner, you will enjoy it
there. I did hear a whisper we’re going to invade
France before long. Maybe one more year and the war will be over.’
She liked Mr Mercer; he had kind grey
eyes and a very gentle manner. He was the sort of man anyone would want for a
grandfather. Morgan had told her how good he’d been to him too, encouraging
him to learn to read and getting him into nursing training. ‘I do hope
so.’ She sighed. ‘Everyone has suffered more than enough now.’
‘You must use the year ahead to
master your new leg and be ready for a different kind of life in peacetime. I bet
your family in New Zealand are longing to see you?’
‘Yes, they are. And for my two
brothers to come home safely. They are in Italy with their regiment now. From what
I’ve read in the newspapers, the Allies appear to have the Italians on the
run.’
‘So I believe,’ he agreed,
and smiled broadly. ‘God knows, we need it to end.’
Mariette was taken to Stanford House,
in Bournemouth, by a volunteer in a private car, and Morgan went with her.
The volunteer was a middle-aged woman in
tweeds – a hearty ‘county’ type – and her car was a Riley, which Morgan
was very excited about. ‘Not just a day out of the hospital with pay, but also
a ride in my favourite car!’ he said.
‘You have good taste, young
man,’ the lady owner boomed out. ‘If you behave yourself, I may let you
drive on the way back.’
The woman’s name was Mrs
Dykes-Colman, and she told them she had four boys. One, an airman, had been shot
down over France and was now in a POW camp in Germany, the next was a lieutenant in
the navy – she said he was somewhere around Gdan´sk – the third was in the RAF, but
on the engineering side, and the youngest was a Royal Marine, serving out in the Far
East.
‘Their
father died in 1922, of lung disease after being gassed in the trenches of the Great
War,’ she explained. ‘Such a waste, as he was a wonderful man. His boys
are like him, thank heavens, and I’m praying I get them all home in one
piece.’ She glanced round at Mariette and Morgan, and a cloud passed over her
face. ‘That was a little tactless of me. I’m sorry.’
‘We survived, that’s
lucky,’ Morgan said. ‘And we knew each other before the war and met up
again at the Borough. So that’s pretty lucky too. Can you tell us anything
about Stanford House?’
‘I can, indeed, as I go there most
days to help out,’ she said. ‘They have very dedicated staff, all
experts in their field. You are fortunate, Miss Carrera, that you’ve been sent
there. They’ll have you mobile before you can say Jack Robinson. Now, young
man, if you want a bed for the night when you come visiting Miss Carrera, I’d
be happy to put you up. I live close by, and it’s always nice to have someone
in the house.’
Morgan looked at Mariette and raised one
eyebrow. ‘Do you want me to visit you?’ he asked.
‘You know I do,’ she said.
She was actually afraid he wouldn’t keep in touch, and that would really hurt.
‘But only if you get time. I know you’ve got your nursing exams
soon.’
He took her hand in his and squeezed it.
‘I’ll always have time for you,’ he said. ‘But you are going
to meet lots of good people at Stanford, so you won’t need me.’
A week later, Mariette thought of what
Morgan had said about meeting good people at Stanford. He’d been right. The
other seventeen patients, and around eight staff, were all good. But they were good
as in grateful, worthy, sincere, optimistic, dedicated and enthusiastic. Lovely –
but, like a diet of chocolate, it was getting rather sickly.
She wanted
someone like herself who couldn’t see anything good in losing a leg, who would
grouse about it, curse the world, yet also see the funny side of it. No one did that
here, not even those who had lost two limbs. They were constantly saying how humbled
they were by all the help they were getting, how miraculous prosthetic limbs were,
and how grateful they were that, in a few short weeks, they would be able to go home
and take up their old life.
Only eight of the men were soldiers; all
had lost a limb in some kind of explosion. They’d been brought here, rather
than Netley, because it was believed they would benefit from the specialist care at
Stanford.
The other ten people – six women,
including Mariette, and four men – were civilians. Two were policemen, another was a
farmer who’d got his arm torn off in a threshing machine, and one man had
fallen while trying to cross railways tracks and been hit by a train. The women,
with the exception of Mariette, had all sustained grave injuries during bombing
raids, and later infections had resulted in amputation.
She didn’t feel guilty that she
wasn’t as grateful as the rest of them, because she was not convinced they
were as happy and content as they purported to be. How could they be? It was pie in
the sky to think they could go back to their old life, as if nothing had happened.
The two policemen wouldn’t be able to go back on the beat, and the farmer
would find it hard to drive his tractor with a false arm. As for the man who had
been hit by the train, Mariette was convinced that he’d actually intended to
kill himself, but when he survived, he was too ashamed to admit it, so he made up a
different story.
The women all had husbands who were
soldiers. She soon realized their motives for appearing so calm and grateful was
because they had small children. These children were either with relatives, or in
care, and the women knew that they had to
learn to walk again if they wanted to get home to them.
Any grousing might see the women returned to the care of a general hospital, where
there was no expert to help them. Yet Mariette couldn’t understand why they
didn’t indulge in a private whinge, now and again. She thought it would be
good for them.