‘I believe we will be at war within a few months.’ The man had caught the attention of the group, which turned towards him as one. Immediately fashion was forgotten, I was ignored, and the conversation had changed to politics and the international situation.
I pouted with irritation. This man –who was he? –was undeniably good looking, but I certainly did not appreciate my thunder being stolen. ‘Women,’ I said loftily, raising my voice above the murmur of discussion, ‘would never be seen dead in khaki.’ But I had lost my audience. My fragile blonde prettiness and Balenciaga gown could not compete with the topic that was on everyone’s mind, the shaky state of the peace in Europe.
In the days that followed –to my utter frustration –Edward Massinger proved polite but consistently uninterested in my looks, my conversation or my company.
‘I’m bored,’ I said to my mother, sitting up in my lounger and tossing aside my book. I yawned ostentatiously to underline my point. ‘Bored, bored, bored.’
In September, just as I was due to sail for London after a visit that I had found tedious to the point of numbness, war had been declared and all civilian shipping stopped immediately. To my utmost horror, I found I was stranded in India. What started as a mildly irritating duty visit turned into a nightmare with no discernible end.
‘The dhirzee is coming this afternoon,’ Mama replied, fanning herself wearily in the hazy heat of the morning sun. ‘You could ask him to make up a new dress for you. I’ll buy you some cotton lawn.’
‘Oh, the dhirzee, the dhirzee,’ I parroted impatiently. ‘Who cares about the dhirzee? At Vogue –’
Mama frowned. Her interest in my work at the magazine had long since evaporated.
‘There’s a reception at Government House tonight,’ she said, clearly more in hope than in expectation I would agree to attend. She knew I hated the way she lined up men for me to consider as a husband.
I yawned again and drawled, ‘Terrific. Another boring do with more boring people.’ Then, as much to my astonishment as Mama’s, I added, ‘I suppose I might go. Anything is better than sitting in this dreary place.’
I was being unkind and I knew it. Calcutta was far from dreary: the city teemed with life and colour and every day brought new sights and new experiences. It was just that I had set my mind against them all. I longed for London and for the world of high fashion. Mother’s candidates did not attract me because I had no wish to marry, not in India at least.
I spent the late afternoon in the bazaar. I had little money for shopping but the smells and sounds and the blaze of colour generally lifted my spirits. I might find some trinket to adorn my hair, perhaps, or at least watch the glass blower at work and admire the pretty coloured baubles he coaxed from the end of his pipe. Here was the potter, his brick-red platters and bowls stacked high outside his shop. In this corner was the silversmith, using his bellows to fan the fire in his floor hole to heat his tongs. I stopped to watch him.
‘The process is called annealing,’ he told me in his old-fashioned, curiously lilting English, in response to my questions. ‘When I hammer the silver it goes hard. I have to heat it in the furnace to make it workable again.’
I had no money for his wares but I stopped at the tassel shop to finger the silky cords that hung there: white, green, magenta, gold. Why, I wondered in a rare moment of introspection as I stroked some intricately embroidered trimmings, was I so cantankerous all the time? I held a scarlet ribbon up next to my face and studied myself in the mirror the tassel seller held up for me. A small vertical line had developed on my forehead, like a reproach, and my lips seemed to have become tighter and thinner.
‘I’ll take this,’ I told the wrinkled, nut-brown vendor hurriedly, waving the mirror away.
The truth was, I hated being in Calcutta –and it was beginning to show.
The reception was in honour of a new regiment that had been recruited. Already troops were beginning to move through Calcutta and the atmosphere was increasingly sombre. In August, a friend of Mama’s had called a meeting at the Lighthouse Cinema to form ‘The Ladies General War Committee’. Mama had tried to persuade me to attend, but I had been stubbornly resistant. This war would be over in a few months and I was going back to London, and to Vogue. Why should I care?
I had taken some trouble over my appearance, donning another of Great Aunt Edie’s gifts, a daring scarlet gown, which I set off with a smart bow among my soft curls. The silk ribbon I had purchased was a vivid weal against my fair hair, but suited my present mood. I thought of Lottie and outlined my lips in bright red lipstick. It seemed appropriate: a bloody colour for the bloody war that was keeping me from England.
At the reception, I accepted a glass of tepid gin and bitters and managed to discreetly separate myself from my mother’s overbearing clutches.
Sir John Herbert, the new governor, bore down on me, clearly trying not to look too directly at my rather low neckline. ‘Ah, Miss Arbuthnot, delighted, delighted,’ he said. Then, making a gallant effort to engage me, he caught a passing soldier by the elbow and boomed, ‘May I introduce Captain Massinger? Or perhaps you know him already? I believe you sailed out together earlier this year.’
I turned and found myself staring into familiar inky black eyes. ‘Oh. It’s you,’ I said abruptly, disconcerted by the amusement I read in his gaze.
‘Honoured.’ He took my hand and bent over it, curiously formal, as Sir John’s attention was drawn elsewhere. ‘And how are you finding Calcutta?’
‘Utterly tedious,’ I replied with rash honesty.
‘Really? I should have thought there would be a great deal to do here. Calcutta’s going to be an important hub as this war unfolds. My friends tell me lots of women are already working hard to put support in place for those of us who will be on the front line.’
‘I don’t fancy knitting socks,’ I said, aware, even as I spoke, that the words sounded churlish. I had been distracted because I had just realised that a uniform did something to a man. Edward Massinger, accountant, had been handsome but irritatingly pedestrian. Edward Massinger soldier, though, had another aura entirely. On the ship I had seen him merely as a challenge. Now I felt the stirrings of real interest. Perhaps there might be something in Calcutta for me after all.
‘I concede the tedium of knitting socks,’ he smiled, ‘but I should have thought there would be other openings. The Messenger Service? Red Cross Supplies? The Censorship Office? What do you do with your time, by the way?’
I bridled. Was amusement turning to contempt? ‘I’m extremely busy,’ I lied.
‘Really? I suppose there is a certain amount of work necessary to maintain one’s looks –even for such a natural beauty as yourself.’
The compliment was so backhanded that I felt my breath leave my body. ‘Oh!’ I gasped, my hand fluttering to my heart. Tact was not my strongest suit, but I expected more of it in others.
‘Boredom,’ he added more gently, observing my upset, ‘should be a word in nobody’s lexicon. I apologise for my rudeness, Miss Arbuthnot, but I feel sorry for you. I believe you grossly underestimate how long this war will last and I do believe you might find some interest in some form of useful work.’
He took my hand to shake it farewell, but failed to release it. His eyes drilled into the core of my being and I felt my heart lurch absurdly. ‘You’ve been given many gifts, Cecilia,’ he said in a low voice, as if trying to address my very soul, ‘but you have only one life. Don’t waste it.’
His touch seemed to sear my skin like a branding iron. I felt that he was patronising, and I hated that –but something in a dusty corner of my mind must have registered the wisdom of his words. I had never felt so confused. I wished he would stop looking at me with that amused, gentle gaze, but at the same time I wanted nothing more than to sink into his embrace and dance with him into paradise. In that moment, I sensed a current of electricity arcing between us and knew that he felt it also.
Then he released my hand and was gone.
>
I joined the St John Ambulance Brigade and started my training as a nurse the very next day. There was little thought in my head either of self-fulfillment or of contributing to the war effort, the act was merely a settled determination to show Captain Massinger exactly what I was made of. I chose the St John, if I was honest, because the white dress and short veil offered the smartest uniform of all the volunteer services in Calcutta, and because I had a mental vision of myself as tender heroine, an angel of healing, adored by all. What I had completely failed to consider was just how grim the job would be.
Sister Crawford tried to instil in us the qualities we were expected to show. ‘We wear on our breasts the eight-pointed cross of Malta,’ she told us briskly on our first day. ‘Each point carries a promise assigned to it by the ancient Knights of St John: Loyalty, Perseverance, Tact –’
Commitment and determination I had in abundance, discretion I knew I needed to learn. She went on. ‘ –Dexterity, Observation, Explicitness, Gallantry –’ She explained what each would mean to us as nurses. ‘ –Sympathy.’
Here I struggled. Years of boarding had toughened me to the point of selfishness. I persevered, though. Anything was better than sitting at home with Mama, whose efforts to secure me a husband had intensified. The lectures on First Aid and Home Nursing and the examinations were dull but easy enough. Reality bit when I went on duty at the hospital. I experienced the humdrum of hospital routine and suffered through endless, sleep-deprived nights on duty. A month in an operation theatre began a gruelling process of hardening my soul to the sight of human bodies being sliced open, the flow of crimson blood and the nail-biting tension of emergency surgery. The operating theatre was just the beginning of it. In the wards, I had to steel myself against the hideous stench of gangrenous limbs and suppurating abscesses. I dealt with tuberculosis and venereal disease as a matter of routine.
I thought of the silversmith in the bazaar. ‘Hammering makes the silver hard,’ he had told me. I felt as though my mind and my senses were being constantly hammered. These things offended me but they didn’t touch my heart.
One day, a distraught mother arrived at the hospital with her baby, who had been appallingly scalded by an accident with a cooking pot. The mother’s wails were tortured, but the child seemed to be beyond screaming. She stared at me with terrified brown eyes. A single tear trembled on her cheek. I caught my breath.
‘I can’t bear this,’ I whimpered to my colleague as she started to dress the burns.
The nurse looked at me, irritated. ‘Just be glad that we are able to help,’ she said curtly. ‘And for God’s sake, get me some more liniment.’
It was a turning point. I forgot the hours of tedium spent in rolling bandages in the early days of my training or in staffing the first aid tent at sweltering gymkhanas. I saw how useful the work I had done protestingly at the baby clinic and the women’s outpatient department had really been.
Like the silver in the bazaar I had been plunged into the fire, and my compassion was finally unlocked. I went through the process of annealing, becoming hardened to the sights, smells and sounds of injury and disease, and softened by compassion for those I tended.
It had been almost a year since I had seen Edward Massinger at the governor’s party. I dreamed of him often but the searing memory of his taunts had been set against the grim reality of my daily experiences and had faded into nothingness. I only wished I could tell him.
I met Edward, for the third time, at a party on Christmas Day, 1940. I had arrived, hot and weary, and still dressed in my white uniform dress with the eight-pointed St John Ambulance cross embroidered in black on the left breast. In the saddlebag of my bicycle there was a pretty floral gown and some sandals.
Above me was an open window and I could hear Christmas carols being sung. ‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,’ was being lustily chanted by a dozen mildly drunk voices, and floated through the humid evening air. I started to laugh. The incongruity of song and place and time, compounded by exhaustion and the emotional intensity of the experiences of the day, proved too much for me. My laughter turned abruptly into hysteria and I flopped helplessly to the grass. My bicycle toppled and started to fall and through my tears and wails I had the sense of it being caught by a strong hand, and steadied.
‘Here,’ said a familiar voice, ‘let me.’ The bicycle was swiftly parked against the wall, a khaki-clad figure folded easily onto the grass beside me and a clean cotton square was produced for my use.
‘I’m so-so-sorry,’ I sniffed, when I was able to catch enough breath. ‘This is silly.’
An arm came round my shoulders and I felt a hand tilt my face upwards so that I found myself looking into a pair of eyes as dark as the night.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said, as I had once before.
‘You became a nurse, Miss Arbuthnot,’ he said, surveying my white dress with its eight-pointed cross: Eight promises, the eighth of which is love.
I smiled shakily. This was not at all how I had imagined our meeting. ‘You dared me. I was so angry with you for patronising me I went and volunteered the next day.’
‘Good for you.’
I looked at him sharply. In the bright, clear light of the stars I could see in the flesh the straight nose, the thick, dark eyebrows and strong chin that I had seen in my dreams for so long.
‘Are you being condescending again?’
I’d long since got over my anger. It had not been Edward’s fault that I had been packed off to boarding school half a world away from my family and it was not his fault that I was trapped here by the war. And –though I hated to admit it –he had been right. Working had been good for me, not just because it kept me busy to the point of bone weariness, but also because becoming a nurse had taught me about love.
‘If you thought I was being condescending, I’m sorry.’
The carollers above us trilled energetically into the night air: ‘Angels and archangels may have gathered there.’
I’d imagined my feelings for Edward Massinger were based on anger and had refused to countenance any other possibility. I’d longed to meet him again so that I could brandish my achievements in his face and prove that his opinion of me had been false. I’d wanted to thumb my pert little nose at him.
Now, under the stars, I was overcome by an ineluctable torrent of desire. I wasn’t angry with him, I realised –I craved his approval and I wanted only his love.
Another strain drifted towards us: ‘Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.’
I didn’t think about whether what I was doing was right or wrong –or, indeed, what the consequences might be. I simply lifted my hands and cradled them round his face, pulling his mouth towards mine, my hunger for his touch overwhelming.
‘Still bored, lovely Cecilia?’ he whispered, when at last we surfaced for air.
London seemed a world away, Vogue a ludicrous indulgence. Even if I returned to England after the war, I knew I would never go back to the magazine. Sympathy, Compassion, Love –the eighth promise. I looked deep into Edward’s eyes and saw that he already knew the answer to his question.
I pulled him closer again and we kissed until my breath ran out and my lips became blissfully numb.
‘Yet what I can I give him,’ came the voices from the window above us, drawing the carol to an end, ‘Give my heart.’
A Night To Remember
Nikki Moore
Nikki Moore
NIKKI MOORE lives in beautiful Dorset and writes short stories and touching, sexy contemporary romances.
She has been a finalist in several writing competitions since 2010, including Novelicious Undiscovered 2012. A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, she has contributed to their magazine Romance Matters, has far too much fun attending the annual conferences and has also chaired a panel and taken part in a workshop at the Festival of Romance.
She blogs about three of her favourite things –Writing, Work and Wine –at www.nikkimoore.wordpress.com
and believes in supporting other writers as part of a friendly, talented and diverse community.
You can follow her on Twitter @NikkiMoore_Auth and she invites you to pop in for chats about love, life, reading and writing.
A Night To Remember
‘Oh, bugger! Oops, excuse the language.’
The teenage girl huffs out a breath as she accidentally rams the side of my bulky wheelchair into the doorframe, something metal clanging beside me. Luckily I have learnt to keep all limbs inside its frame; she is not the most graceful of creatures. Mind you, neither am I. It’s still hard to believe that I was stupid enough to trip over our new puppy on the way into the garden, fracturing my shin as I fell onto the cold hard patio slabs. What an idiot.
And now here I am stuck in this stupid thing: a nuisance, an inconvenience. Bloody great. Attempts to wheel myself around have been met with appalled expressions. ‘No,’ everyone keeps saying. ‘You always take care of everyone else, now you have to let us take care of you.’ Hmmph. Is it the fact I’m a nurse that makes me such a bad patient?
‘Stupid thing!’ Pulling me back and then realigning, ‘Hang on,’ she pants, before finally lurching us forward into the large airy room, my plastered leg sticking out in front of me.
A loud cheer erupts from a cluster of people nearby who have been watching our antics with amusement. I crane my neck to see my blonde helper stick her tongue out and a finger up at them in response, though she retracts both upon realising I’ve noticed. She blushes and they cheer again and laugh good naturedly, audible even above the rock band in the corner. The music being played is so loud that I can feel its beat in the pit of my stomach, the thrum of the bass in my blood: thump, thump, thump, thump.
It looks like this is going to be one heck of a party. Gold and white balloons hang suspended from the ceiling in tightly woven nets. A few stray balloons have already escaped and fallen to the marble floor, floating and bouncing around as people talk and drink and dance. Long tables covered with pristine white tablecloths and gold runners form an orderly line against one wall. Sprays of waxen lilies are arranged in bulbous vases full of clear glass beads. They look stylish but I wish they hadn’t used those particular flowers. Funeral flowers. They always remind me of death and decay. Maybe it’s because I see enough of those in my day job to last me a lifetime, to colour my dreams and make me all too aware of how precious every moment is. How quickly those moments can be taken away.
Truly, Madly, Deeply Page 26