by Caroline Lea
In spite of the turmoil churning in his gut, Maurice had to grin.
‘I did offer one of the patrols a delicious nightshade tea,’ she continued. ‘He nearly drank it too. But one of his cronies spotted it, so I spent a few nights in Gloucester Street Prison. Which I wouldn’t mind, but it’s freezing at night in there and my old bones can’t be doing with stone floors. Do you know, buggers didn’t even give me a bed? At my age. Barbarians! Still, it gave me a chuckle to offer him the tea. I wouldn’t have let him drink it. But then, you never know what you can do, once you’re driven to it. I think most folks surprise themselves, when they’re pushed.’
Maurice caught her glancing at the apple-mush and the smashed bowl, a few white flakes of tablet showing. He shifted his boot to cover them.
Edith looked back out to sea and carried on, just as if they were having a cosy chat in a tearoom.
‘Still, it beats taking the whole thing lying down. I like to shake them up a bit—if we do everything they say then they really have beaten us. Speaking of which, have you been out on your boat yet?’
How does she know?
She reminded him of a tiny owl: head cocked to one side, eyes bright and sharp, looking right into him. So he didn’t tell the story he had prepared for anyone who asked about his boat: that he had sunk it when he heard the Germans were coming.
Instead he said, ‘Not since they arrived. I can’t leave Marthe, you see.’
‘Ah. Well, I’ve overheard a whisper that they’re sending out a patrol to search the caves around the coast. Some swine has given out that people are hiding their boats there. Can you credit it? Folk giving information to the enemy, just for a little extra bread? I think it’s sickening, I really do. Anyway, they’re starting the search in an hour. They’ll stop just before curfew tonight, I’d have thought, once they’ve been around all those caves.’
A muddle of words unspoken stretched between them. How did she know he’d moored his boat in one of the caves? It didn’t matter, he supposed. But it did mean he had to get to his boat as soon as he could—keep it away from the island while the search went on.
Perhaps he could sneak out through one of the sheltered inlets where he wouldn’t be seen? He could catch something decent, put it on the black market. Perhaps trade for some warmer clothes for the winter and some milk. Marthe did love her milk. But it was the same old problem: what could he do with her while he was gone?
As if she could read his reeling thoughts, Edith said, ‘I can look after Marthe for you.’
He held up his hands, shook his head, ‘No, no, I—’
‘Why? What’s the bother? You’re at your wits’ end, Maurice. Any fool can see that. I suppose you haven’t much food?’
He slumped, sighed.
‘Well, neither have I,’ she said. ‘Just scraps and leftovers, and I enjoy fish now and then. So off you go. Go on, chop chop!’ She smiled suddenly. ‘I’ll look after her as if she were my own, love her.’ She stroked Marthe’s hair and the tenderness in that touch decided him.
‘Mèrcie. Mèrcie!’
‘Don’t be grovelling, I haven’t done anything worth thanking me for yet. Now, off you go. And don’t worry about her food in the meantime. We’ll make do. But I’d love a mackerel for supper, if you chance across one.’
He laughed. ‘Of course.’
‘And once you’re back, I have a boon to beg of you.’
‘Yes, yes. Anything!’ He felt as light as the winged gulls, swinging through the air.
‘Don’t run ahead of yourself, we’ll talk later.’
She bent down and lifted Marthe gently, as if she weighed nothing at all.
‘Come on, my love. We’ll be all right, won’t we?’
He kissed Marthe’s forehead, once, twice, I love you more than life, my soul. And then he started to run down towards the caves. The wind buffeted Edith’s words after him.
‘There may come a day when I’ll be holding you to that favour, mind!’
CARTER was near breaking point. It was November, nearly five months after the Germans’ arrival and they were making patient care impossible. Not only was he contending with the lack of medication and the slippage in the standards of nutrition, which meant that more people were succumbing to fairly minor illnesses, but there were the rules, the endless blasted rules.
By the time winter set in, the number of laws issued by the Commandant was absurd. The curfew and blackout were expected by everyone, and as long as the ward sisters used a little common sense when they organised the shifts, then the law wasn’t much more than a minor irritation, but other rules were ludicrous. For instance, the regulation forbidding more than four people to meet in one place at any one time. It made gaining a reasonable consult or discussing a patient’s progress almost impossible. The soldiers who patrolled the hospital seemed especially suspicious of the nurses, as if their harmless chatter were a plot for insurrection.
One soldier in particular took this law very seriously and questioned any doctor, nurse or patient he observed in long discussion. His name was Hans Haas and he was a burly brute of a man, pig-faced, with skin like corned beef; he enjoyed being able to push others around. Many of Carter’s conversations with his patients were interrupted by shouts of ‘Beeil dich!’ with an accompanying wave of Hans’s pistol if Carter did not immediately scuttle away.
Carter always obeyed, but felt like a boy again and suffered the familiar feeble, simmering rage that plagued him whenever faced with a bully, whether it was a snot-nosed boy in the schoolyard or his own father at home, towering above him, face brick-red from bellowing.
Carter and Father had parted, before he came to Jersey, on uncomfortable terms. Because of Will, of course.
Will had been a friend from university. At twenty-six, Carter was older than the other students, having already tried (and failed) to learn how to manage the farm alongside Father. So when he started his training, Carter knew he had to succeed, to prove to Father that he was not a dreamer, a feckless disappointment.
Carter had kept himself apart from the other students, preferring to spend his free time studying instead of drinking, and they soon stopped trying to talk to him. But Will, bright-eyed and sunny-natured, had gone out of his way to befriend Carter, always trying to pair with him in laboratory and dissection classes.
When Carter had looked askance at him, Will had grinned. ‘Why on earth would I avoid you? You’re my safest chance of qualifying, Tim.’
Tim. Carter had liked the warm way Will had said his name. And he began to like other things about him too: his easy laugh if a practical went badly; the way his blue eyes widened with joy when they had done well; the soft curve of his mouth when he met Carter’s gaze. The way he shouted, ‘Good man, Tim!’ and pulled him into a quick, hard embrace when they gained the top marks in their class.
Carter felt like a stone against Will’s warm body, but the memory of the touch settled into him, as water will seep into cracks in a rock, pushing the boulder apart, even as it freezes.
And, by slow degrees, Will became the only person Carter wanted to see. He spent nights in Will’s tiny flat and slept on the sofa or on the floor. Gradually, it seemed perfectly natural to sleep side by side, in the same tiny, single bed, bodies crushed together. Despite Will’s hipbones digging into his side and the way he flung his arms out and elbowed Carter in the face in the night, Carter felt blissfully peaceful, separate from the world. Life and everything in it had squeezed closed, like the contracted fist of a heart. The only things that existed were this room, this tiny bed, this bright-eyed man, who teased light and life into Carter’s darkness: tickled him until he couldn’t breathe; tenderly bit his shoulder; mumbled, through bleary half-sleep, ‘You’re wonderful, Tim.’
The rhythm of Will’s breath on his back, as he slept, rocked Carter as the sea rocks the land, as the pulsing heart rocks the body. He felt, for the first time in his life, utterly content.
Outside the room, among the other medical students,
despite the dull thud of shame and fear Carter felt whenever he caught Will’s eye, there was also something else: a secret thrill of belonging, of being known.
After they had finished training, Will returned to London.
‘Come with me, Tim,’ he’d pleaded, holding Carter’s hands in his. ‘We’ll find a flat near one of the London hospitals. Imagine it—our own little hovel. We can live on boiled potatoes and wine.’ He laughed.
‘I…’ Carter shook his head. ‘I couldn’t bring that shame on you. Your parents—’
‘—don’t give a damn about me.’ Will finished, his eyes hard with a defiant sort of triumph. ‘Mum and Dad are happy in the wilds of Cornwall and will swallow whatever lies I feed them. Anything to avoid confrontation, that’s their motto.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Carter thought of his own father at home, seeking out confrontation at every opportunity. Imagining Father’s snarling mouth, Carter shrivelled.
Will snapped his fingers in front of Carter’s face. ‘Tim. Say you’ll live with me.’
But looking at Will’s hopeful eyes, his wide and easy smile, Carter knew he couldn’t do it. How could he rain shame and ruin upon this wonderful man, this bright boy who carried light and laughter wherever he went? Will would be better off without him. He would be happier, ultimately. And as he thought this, Father’s growling seemed to quieten.
Carter returned home to Father and joined a small practice in the village. He missed Will dreadfully in the months that followed, and tried to forget about him, but Will sent letters every week and begged to be allowed to visit. Eventually, he relented, and when Will finally came up from London, it was impossible to resist the pull of his eager smile, his muffled laughter, his hot breath on Carter’s skin.
Carter crept into Will’s room every night and they talked and smoked and made love and then talked again, for hours—about Will’s life in London and how Carter might join him one day. They laughed about escaping to live in a log cabin in the wilds of Canada.
‘You can learn to fish and I’ll go hunting with a spear,’ Will chuckled. ‘I hope you like eating rats.’
It was early one morning, when the watery sunlight was just seeping under the curtains. Will and Carter had been awake into the early hours and were now exhausted, or one of them would have startled at the thudding footsteps on the stairs. They would have roused before Father came bursting into the bedroom and saw his son and that man, limbs tangled together in sleep, naked.
It was a cool night, Carter had stammered. They had huddled together for warmth. Nothing perverse in that. Just high jinks, tomfoolery, don’t you see?
But Father, disbelieving, disgusted, had raged at his son’s abhorrent behaviour.
Carter had gabbled more excuses. But even as he spoke, his mind had been full of thoughts of Will: outlined against a window, dark shadow stitched in gold. Like a naked angel fallen to earth, still burning in Carter’s arms. He was so beautiful—every part of him. How could he fail to love the man? What other option had he?
To his father, Carter had said, ‘It isn’t what it seems.’
But Father had scowled. ‘I have always wondered what was wrong with you. Get away from me! You’ve always been weak. Now I see why. Repulsive!’
He had allowed his son the time to dress and pack a suitcase, then thrown both him and Will into the street. He would not have a deviant under his roof. He would not listen to Carter’s pleas and explanations.
Devastated, bewildered, nauseated by himself, Carter had left, and he and Will had walked to the park, where Carter had sat beneath a willow tree, hiding in the low hanging branches and trying not to weep.
Will had put his arms around him. ‘It’s dreadful for you, but now he knows. Now you can come and live with me.’
Carter had pushed Will away, roughly. ‘Get off me. This is all your fault, don’t you see?’
‘My fault?’ Will frowned. ‘I know you’re in a lather, but this is for the best. I want you to be happy, Tim—’
‘Happy?’ Carter spat. ‘My life is in ruins and you want me to be happy?’ His voice was an ugly growl, and now he couldn’t stop the poison spilling out.
‘You’re a simpleton, Will. A sweet, vacant-headed fool. How could I come and live with you? Do you imagine they’d let you keep your job if they knew what you were?’
Will was white-faced but he stretched out a hand and put it on Carter’s shoulder.
‘Tim, it’s…love. You know that.’
Carter brushed his hand away. This was the right thing to do. They needed to be free of one another. Perhaps he could make amends with Father. Will would be happier without him, in the end.
‘Go. Get on your train.’
‘But Tim—’
‘Go!’ Carter didn’t turn around as he heard the crunch of Will’s receding footsteps. Once the park was silent again, he sat on the bare earth and pulled his knees up to his chest.
He had never felt so utterly lost and entirely alone.
Carter moved into a small boarding house and tried, for two years, to build up a practice near Barford. He tried to forget about Will and attempted to regain Father’s trust, visiting him weekly to sit in the drawing room, with the slow ticking clock marking out the distance between them. It would have been better, he knew, if he could have forced himself to marry, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Carter spent his nights lying awake, burning—longing for dreams of Will. But if the dreams came, they were unfulfilling. Sometimes Will was talking, but in another room, his words muffled. Sometimes he was laughing, but tantalisingly out of Carter’s eyeline. Occasionally Will kissed him, long and deep, pressing his body against him, and Carter woke feeling his loss as the stinging pain of a fresh wound.
After two years of trying to forge a solitary life for himself, Carter admitted defeat and eventually decided to find a post elsewhere.
He wrote to Will, his phrasing stiff and formal, apologising for his behaviour at their last meeting and asking if he might possibly visit him in London.
Carter held little hope of a reply—after so long, he had no doubt that Will would have found no shortage of men, ready to fall in love with him.
But a return telegram arrived within the week, passed to him by Mrs Burton, who was purse-mouthed with displeasure.
Tim, you bloody fool. Come immediately.
‘I don’t approve of such language,’ scowled Mrs Burton.
‘I’ll scold him roundly,’ Carter grinned, practically skipping from the post office to pack a suitcase and board the next train to London.
Will greeted him as if they had never parted, clapping him on the back at the station and then, once they reached his tiny flat, embracing him and kissing him with a hot and open mouth, and Carter, who felt like he’d been frozen for two years, found his touch dizzying and he backed away, breathless, holding up his hands.
‘I wanted to apologise—’
‘Shut up, Tim.’ Will grinned and kissed him again.
Carter lived in the London flat for the next five weeks, and the time spent within those walls, in the fug of summer heat and burning electricity of desire, were the happiest he had known. But as soon as he stepped outside the flat, with Will at his side, he was conscious of people’s eyes on them, sidling glances, hushed whispers.
‘They’re laughing at us,’ he said to Will, when they were safely back in the flat.
‘Don’t be ludicrous. How could they know? You’re not branded with a Q, Tim.’
Carter frowned and Will hissed the word ‘Queer’ with narrowed eyes, then chuckled and knocked his forehead lightly against Carter’s. ‘You’re so very grave, Tim.’
Carter couldn’t bring himself to laugh—the joke was too close to the bone. Even if people weren’t giggling and staring now, they soon would be.
So when he saw the newspaper advertisement for the post in Jersey, he applied. As long as he was near Will, there was no escaping from the looming shadow of disgrace and shame, no matter
how much pain it might cause them both. He just couldn’t do it.
‘I’m taking the post in Jersey. You’re better off without me, Will. You’ll see,’ Carter said, miserably.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Will grabbed Carter’s shoulders and shook him, roughly. ‘How could I be better off without you?’
‘If I stay, it’ll ruin you. You don’t understand—’
‘No, you don’t understand.’ Will released Carter and paced the space of the flat, then turned to face him, his eyes blazing. ‘You say you’re concerned about gossip? About people up in arms because of how I live my life behind closed doors? I don’t care what anyone else says, Tim.’
‘But your job…your landlady. I’ve seen her staring. You could end up on the street—’
‘I’ll happily live in a wooden crate under a bridge, next to an open sewer, if you’ll stay with me.’ Will’s eyes were frantic and he threw himself at Carter, wrapping his arms around him and kissing his face again and again. ‘Don’t you see, this is all that matters? This. Here. Both of us. You must see that.’
Will’s mouth was fiercely alive and, in that kiss, Carter could feel all the pent-up years of longing. He could sense a glimpse of a future there, a possibility of hard-won happiness within his grasp. But something inside him shrank and he pushed Will gently away and shook his head.
‘I…can’t do it.’
‘But why, for God’s sake? Tell me that this isn’t wonderful. It’s perfect, you know that—’
‘It’s not real. Shuttered away like this. It seems perfect here, in these rooms. But it wouldn’t last, out there.’ Carter gestured to the door, to the cold, pitiless glare of the outside world.
Will exhaled and hung his head, then smiled, bitterly. ‘I love every part of you, Tim. But I do wish you weren’t such a bloody coward.’
‘I’m sorry. I wish…’ Carter shook his head. He didn’t know how to wish to be different, for such a wish would have made him a more acceptable son for his father, a more respectable man to the world outside. Such a wish would have changed him so that he didn’t desire Will, and Carter couldn’t imagine wanting to change the love he felt at this moment, agonising as it was.