Where Earth Meets Sky Page 28

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  France, March 1918

  ‘Oh God, here we go!’

  Sam’s hands tightened automatically on the truck’s steering wheel. His convoy had just set off as the bugle sounded across the wide expanse of hospital huts to summon the nurses for emergency duty. Already they could hear the planes. Should he stop and turn back?

  A small convoy of them had been ordered to drive desperately needed supplies to the casualty clearing station at Armentières. The raids had been coming night after night now the stalemate along the front had been broken by the German assault. Things were bad, very bad. The reception huts in the hospital were flooded with wounded, Allied and German, the place was like a scene from hell and all of them knew the war was hanging by a thread. The Germans were coming closer – they had reached Amiens.

  Gripping the wheel, Sam eased his shoulders up towards his ears for a moment, a movement which had become so habitual that he no longer noticed it. His body had been forever taut during the three years he’d been in France; now it was pulled tense enough to snap. It was as if, in this endless hell of war, there was nothing but fear and exhaustion, no other state.

  ‘Where are you buggers, then?’ He leaned forward to try and see the droning threat in the darkness. He could hear nothing now, over the roar of their own truck engines. The Boche would be after the Étaples railway, which ran between the wide settlement of the hospital and supply depot and the sand dunes of the coast. Ambulance trains moved relentlessly along the tracks day and night, bringing the wounded from the Front, and it was the main artery along which the supplies to service General Haig’s vast army were carried from the base depot. Shell that, and others like Calais and Boulogne, and they would paralyse the Allied supply lines. Just what they wanted, of course, Sam thought grimly. His mind slid round the fear: And they’ll win the war, and then what? What will happen? But he buried the thought immediately.

  He fixed his gaze on the lights of the lorry behind him. Bert, the driver, had leaned from the cab before they set off and called chirpily through his Woodbine, ‘Don’t lose sight of me, Ironside – no kipping on the job!’ Act as if nothing was happening, that was Bert. That was all of them, come to think of it. Close down: don’t think.

  And you had to use every grain of strength to stay on the road. These rural routes were being grossly overused, bottlenecked with the traffic servicing the vast army, the roaring lorries and ammunition wagons, the horses and carts, the files of khaki-clad men. The area was already low-lying and marshy and the combination of spring rains and constant churning by wheels and hooves and feet had turned the roads into a quagmire of liquid mud, filling the deep holes and ruts. He began the usual lurching trial of strength which driving in these conditions involved, fixing his mind on it, trying not to think of anything beyond . . .

  He didn’t hear it coming. Afterwards he knew it was a shell, that it had landed in the mist-filled pasture close by, that it had hurled his lorry over on to its side. But all he knew then was instant blackness.

  For a long time he passed in and out of consciousness. When he surfaced, groggily, he knew he was lying somewhere hard, that his face felt stretched and tight, he didn’t know whether with caked mud or blood or both, that there was something strange about his left eye, that there were pains all round his body and that he was shaking. He was aware of a dimly lit place, of groaning cries, of a ghastly stench. And then he dipped under again into the darkness.

  He was aware of being moved, much later, lifted higher on to a bed; of an atmosphere of chaos, and light in his face.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much wrong, despite the look of him,’ a man’s voice said. ‘He’ll lose the eye, that’s all. Not urgent – leave him till later, Nurse.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Sam tried to say. His mouth tasted metallic, of blood, and nothing sensible came out.

  A woman’s voice came next and with his good eye he caught a glimpse of her in the dim light of the oil lamp: the VAD uniform, a white veil, her face pale and thin beneath, dark circles under the eyes. And she understood what he was asking

  ‘You’ve got an eyeful of glass and a lot of bruising. But you seem to be all right otherwise. You’ve been very lucky. I’ll come back to you later . . . Too many others to see to . . .’

  He drifted again, but each time he surfaced, his mind snagged on something. You’ve been very lucky . . . Too many others to see to . . . Something familiar. That voice, prim and well spoken. He knew that voice from somewhere.

  ‘Water . . . A drink . . .’ His mouth was parched, foul-tasting.

  His head was lifted and he sipped water. God, water was lovely. He just wanted to keep lapping it, more and more, but the cup was taken away.

  Sam opened his good eye. It was that nurse again.

  ‘What time is it?’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Why?’ Her voice was flat and exhausted. ‘Does it make any difference?’ Then her natural good manners took over. ‘I suppose it’s five in the morning, or so.’

  ‘Thanks. Am I going to be blind?’

  ‘Can’t you see out of that one either?’ She came a little closer. Yes, he could see out of his right eye, and he knew then. She had changed a good deal. Had it not been for the voice he wouldn’t have known her. But with the voice he was sure now. What on earth was she doing here? Would she remember him?

  ‘I’m going to see if I can get some of the glass out of your eye,’ she was saying. ‘Before another convoy arrives and we’re swamped again.’ She seemed about to move away, perhaps to fetch instruments, but somehow he couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Aren’t you . . . I mean . . . I know you, I think . . .’ he said, confusedly. He was stunned, disorientated by seeing her again, here of all places.

  ‘No.’ Her voice was brimful of sadness. ‘I’m sure you don’t. I’m not your mother, or your sister, dear. But I’ll look after you, all the same, as if I were.’ The utter sweetness with which she spoke brought a lump to his throat.

  ‘But you’re Mrs Fairford – aren’t you?’ As he said it he even wondered himself if he was hallucinating. ‘Captain Fairford’s wife – Ambala Cantonment?’

  With only his one blurred eye he could still make out the change in her face. There was shock, and then she began to tremble. He thought she would weep.

  ‘I seem to recognize you as well . . .’ Her voice was high and tremulous, just in control. ‘I’m not imagining what you’re saying, am I?’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘Sometimes I start to doubt myself . . . I’m so very tired . . .’

  ‘No – it’s all right. I’m Sam Ironside – remember? From Daimler. I brought your husband his cars.’

  He saw her staring hard at him. Even now he felt himself tense, waiting for the response he remembered in her when they first met, the class superiority, her cool snobbishness. Her words came out haltingly, the recognition sinking in.

  ‘Your face – you’ve so much blood on it I can hardly tell . . . Ironside . . . Of course, Charles’s driver . . . We had picnics with the children, and Charles . . . Oh!’ The last was an uncontrollable cry. ‘Oh God!’ She put her hands over her face, her shoulders shaking. ‘I’m so sorry . . . Oh, forgive me . . .’

  For a few anguished moments, Susan Fairford stood sobbing at the side of his bed.

  As the dawn light increased through the windows of the hut, she bent over him, the lamp hanging from a hook near her head, and assessed his injuries again. She was quite collected now. He was covered in blood, she told him, because of a large number of cuts from small glass splinters, which had made his injuries seem far more serious on first sight. Sam realized the tightness in his cheeks was because of the dried blood. His eye was the only thing more seriously damaged and he knew he was one of the most fortunate blokes in there. Even losing an eye was as nothing compared with what some of them were going through.

  ‘There’s a bit of a lull,’ Susan Fairford said. ‘Let’s see what I can do.’

  And she bega
n to try and remove some of the glass. Her only equipment was a small pair of tweezers. As yet, though, there was no pain, or very little, only a numbness, a feeling that his eye had been punched rather than pierced. As she worked, with great care, he did begin to feel the sharpness in his eye and he winced.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, frowning with concentration. ‘It’s difficult. I can’t see terribly well.’

  ‘Am I going to lose it?’

  ‘Hard to say as yet.’

  With his good eye, Sam took the opportunity to study her and it helped take his mind off the discomfort of the operation. In the morning light he was very struck by the change in her. He knew he would not immediately have recognized her had she just walked past in the ordinary way of things. With her hair covered by her VAD veil, her face was uncrowned by its pale, curling prettiness and was thinner than he remembered, and sagging with exhaustion. She didn’t look tense any more, or at least not in the way he remembered, her seeming to push other people away as if they might contaminate her. Instead, as well as a deep tiredness, he saw something quieter and more vulnerable.

  ‘How is everyone?’ he asked. ‘The family, Captain Fairford, young Cosmo?’

  She had just drawn back with something pinched in the end of the tweezers which she disposed of into a kidney dish.

  ‘Nasty big piece there,’ she murmured. Then, staring down in the direction of Sam’s chest, she braced herself to say, ‘Charles was killed – in 1915, at Neuve Chapelle. I was told he was shot. Isadora died the year before the war. Heart failure, at thirteen. And my dear Cosmo – well, he’s fifteen now . . .’

  ‘Oh God,’ Sam said. There had been so many deaths, yet this one, of the fit, energetic captain he had known in India, seemed impossible and utterly tragic. ‘You poor woman.’

  He hadn’t expected to say that, not to her. It seemed too presumptuous and intimate, but that was what came out and he was surprised at himself. Once more her face was gripped by a terrible spasm of grief.

  ‘They say he was very brave,’ she said heartbrokenly. ‘And I know this should matter, should compensate in some way. But it’s not true, of course, it doesn’t. Nothing does. And now we look as if we’ll lose the war as well, after all of it . . .’ There was a pause. ‘He never loved me, you know, not as I loved him, but . . . All I want . . . I just want him alive . . .’ With a convulsive movement she reached into her pocket for a handkerchief. ‘Selfish of me, I know, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘There can’t be a grieving wife who doesn’t feel the same,’ Sam said, moved. But even as he said it, he thought, Would Helen feel it? Would she? Would he?

  Susan Fairford wiped her eyes and set to work with the tweezers again. ‘I’m sorry. I’m very tired. And I must get on before I’m called away.’

  ‘How is Cosmo?’ Sam asked. ‘He was to go to Eton, wasn’t he?’

  She sighed. ‘He was expelled from Eton. He nearly burned his house down – and it was not an accident. They weren’t having any more of him. His housemaster said some terrible things about him. He’s now in another establishment in Hertfordshire – Charles’s brother’s paying. Cosmo loathes it there, but what can I do? It was what Charles wanted for him, an education like his. I only pray to God the war will be over before he takes it into his head to join up. He’s so reckless and he’d have no qualms about lying about his age. I’ve seen younger than him in here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam agreed. Boys as young as fourteen were fighting on the Western Front.

  Delicately she fished several more tiny pieces of glass from his eye. He winced, trying not to cry out.

  ‘Sorry . . .’ She frowned with concentration. Once she had eased the eye a little, she said, ‘Mr Ironside, you have a family? I’m afraid I can’t remember.’

  ‘I do. Three daughters. The last time we met I think we only had Ann and Nancy. Now there’s Ruth as well.’

  ‘Of course!’ Susan stopped to look at him again. ‘Mussoorie! My memory is so bad, I don’t know what’s happened to me! We were there with Lily – and Izzy was riding horses with Charles every moment she could . . . Oh, if I’d known . . .’

  The memory was so sharp for Sam, so painful. Lily Waters. God, what he had felt for that woman! And she had played with him: let him down. The burn of it had never left him. It had made him ill for a time after. When he got home, and was so thin and sad and withdrawn, Helen had thought it was some disease he’d picked up in India.

  His tone chill, he asked, ‘And what news of Miss Waters?’

  ‘Oh, I believe she’s doing well – with a family in London. She’s invaluable to them, I believe. And she’s been so good to Cosmo – never forgotten him. She writes to him and so on.’ Another sigh. ‘Sometimes I feel she’s more like a mother to him than I am. But I’m grateful, I suppose. At the moment. I had to come out here, you see – to be near Charles, close to where . . . I had to do something. We had gone home at the beginning of the war . . . I knew I’d go mad staying with my people in Sussex. At home all everyone complains about are the shortages – food, servants and so on, and living on their nerves waiting to hear bad news all the time. You feel stuck, suffocated. And of course I wasn’t used to England, after all that time away. At least here you can be of use.’

  Sam could see now why she had changed, her face scoured by grief.

  ‘I think,’ she said, peering into his injured eye, ‘that I have taken out everything I can by this method. Not very satisfactory, I agree, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll bandage you up – then I must go and see to someone else.’

  ‘I’m very grateful,’ Sam said, feeling a distance between them again. He didn’t know where he was with this woman, though she had moved him in her sadness. The war changed everything, and she seemed a softer person, whom he began to like, though things like class could quickly rear their head again.

  But she looked down at him, and amid the exhaustion, there was something kind and genuine.

  ‘It’s so good to see a familiar face,’ she said. ‘In all this madness.’

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Brooklands Racetrack, Surrey, 1922

  ‘All right, Ironside? Marks? Have a good ride down?’

  Sam saw a cheery, familiar face through the crowd soon after he and his friend Loz Marks arrived at Brooklands, walking stiffly, cheeks air-burned after the long morning’s ride from Birmingham. On their way across to the track, Sam bought a race programme from one of the eager young volunteers who sold them, spending the day moving among the excited crowds in order to be close to the racing. Lucky lads, Sam thought. Had he lived close when he was young he’d have done just the same.

  Resentfully, he tried to recall the name of the man who had attached himself to them and it came to him: Jack Pye, someone he had known at Daimler before the war. Sam groaned inwardly.

  ‘There’re going to be some marvellous outings today. Count Zborowski’s Chitty 1’s lapping later – highlight of the day for me, of course,’ the man was saying. Sam was barely listening. He found Jack Pye irritating, with his chubby, drinker’s complexion and his obsession with high society bods, collecting them the way some people did with loco numbers. The bloke was like a flaming walking encyclopaedia of toffs. Course, he was going on about Chitty 1 because she was built by a count’s son, not because he really cared about the engineering involved, Sam thought sourly. He knew he had grown sour about a lot of things these days. God, life was a weary business compared to when he was young! The one thing that lifted his spirits was being somewhere like this, anywhere to do with motors, without it being spoilt by some boring sod like Jack Pye. He moved away, morosely, and left Loz to deal with him.

  Sam drank in the sight of the race ground, breathing in the clean air laced with cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, hearing the motors roaring and the excited social chatter all about them. In the distance he could see the steep curve of the track, crowds of spectators in the middle. There was a race about to begin and the roaring of engines thrilled him.
Brooklands attracted enthusiastic crowds for every event and the Whitsun bank holiday meeting seemed to mark the real beginning of summer, and visitors sprawled on the grass, luxuriating in the spring sunshine. High society people came from all over the region with sumptuous picnic hampers, the women in splendid gowns and feathered hats, men in sharply tailored clothes and cravats. Some removed the seats from their motors and sat on them to eat their picnics and sip champagne. These were the ones Jack Pye was inexplicably interested in. Then there were the more ordinary types, eager for a day out, coming into Weybridge on the train, or turning up on motorcycles and sidecars, or pushbikes – and there were the real motor enthusiasts with know-how, like Sam and Loz.

  Sam kept one hand in his pocket holding his handkerchief and brought it out every so often to dab his watering left eye. The bright light made it worse. He cursed under his breath as a teardrop escaped and began to roll down his cheek.

  ‘Damned thing!’ Then he was ashamed. He’d come all through the war with only some minor scars on his body and that dodgy eye. Some of the glass was still in there and its vision was not good but he didn’t have much to complain about.

  ‘Family all right, Ironside?’ Jack Pye was at his side again, persisting in talking to him. ‘How many chil-dren’ve you got now?’

  ‘Four,’ Sam said, resigned to conversation. ‘All girls.’ He wasn’t going to mention Joe. They never did mention Joe, of course. Not at home. And Helen’s mother had never said a word afterwards. His own mother had tried to bring it up once or twice but Sam had changed the subject. No good digging it up. It was as if Joe had never been, yet his presence, the ghost of his two-month visit into their lives, lay between himself and Helen more emphatically than any living person.

  ‘Blimey – a houseful of women!’ Jack Pye chortled. You must be glad to get out of there, pal!’

  Sam laughed it off. Yes, I am, he could have said. But it was too close to the truth to joke about. He dreaded going home these days, to the resentment which seemed to be Helen’s constant expression. He knew that under it her heart ached with grief for Joe, and for Laurie, who was lost somewhere on the Somme, but she could not show it. She had become a hard, discontented woman and all he saw was her anger and disappointment with him.