Keep the Home Fires Burning

by S Block

  ‘Jam roly-poly . . .’ he said tentatively.

  ‘What about it?’ Frances replied, sensing a softening in his position.

  ‘I didn’t eat the dumpling. So does that mean I can’t have a bit?’

  On any other day Frances would have insisted Noah finish his main course to ‘earn’ dessert. But this was the night before he was going away from her, and for both their sakes she didn’t want them to part on bad terms.

  ‘On any other night I would say “no pudding”, Noah. Food is scarce, and I wouldn’t put anything on your plate you can’t eat – like that dumpling. That’s how it will be at your new school too. Do you understand?’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘If you don’t eat your main course at school they definitely won’t give you pudding.’

  Frances didn’t know if this was strictly true, but she accurately calculated Noah didn’t know it wasn’t.

  ‘But on this one occasion, even though you haven’t finished your main course, you can have pudding if you want.’

  Noah looked at Frances for several moments and then got down from his seat, walked round the table, crossed to Frances and wrapped his small arms around her and held her tightly. It was the first time he had been this spontaneously affectionate towards her. Frances had seen him hug Claire in the garden and around the house and had felt small pangs of envy at the sight of the little boy becoming overwhelmed with affection towards her housemaid.

  Frances now gratefully kissed the top of his head and thought her heart was about to explode. She blew out her cheeks softly to contain her emotions.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said almost inaudibly, managing not to cry. She’d felt upset on occasions when Peter had to leave on business trips, but Peter had known exactly where he was going, what he was going to be doing there, and when he was coming home again. Noah knew none of these things.

  I’m hurling him into the complete unknown and simply hoping for the best. He has no idea about any of it.

  ‘I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with you and Claire and Spencer.’

  His voice was small and helpless. Though his words hadn’t been framed in a way that asked Frances to change her mind, it nevertheless sounded to Frances as if he was begging her to stop the inexorable process she had set in motion. She squeezed her eyes closed and took a moment before speaking.

  This is what Peter wanted. Peter knew him for years. I’ve known him for little more than a few weeks. Even his grandparents approve of this. This is no time to be sentimental. Keeping him here might make me feel better in the short term but would be to Noah’s detriment in the long. This isn’t about my well-being but his. If he were my own flesh and blood I would be doing the same.

  Frances took a deep breath and composed herself.

  ‘Your father knew going away to boarding school would be the very best thing you could do. He went to one himself, remember? As did I. To a different one, of course. But we had a wonderful time. You will too. I promise. Sometimes we need to do things we don’t want to do because they will make our lives so much better in the future. I don’t expect you to understand that now. But you will. I promise you, within days you will be writing me wonderful letters about all your exploits with the other boys.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Frances was aware that Claire had returned and was standing in the doorway. Though her eyes were markedly red from crying, Claire had brought herself under control.

  ‘May I bring Noah some jam roly-poly, Mrs Barden?’

  Frances nodded.

  ‘Yes, Claire. Thank you.’

  Claire wiped her eyes before she could start crying again, and hurried back to the kitchen. Noah’s grip tightened around Frances.

  ‘You really will have such fun with the other boys, Noah. I can’t begin to tell you.’

  Noah held on to Frances.

  Frances hung on to the hope she was right.

  Chapter 20

  Erica sat beside Will’s bed in the hospital ward. She held his hand, watching him breathe slowly. Even under sedation, Will’s chest moved up and down in a seemingly haphazard movement. Of the six people trapped by the impact of the Spitfire, Will had taken the brunt and was the most seriously injured. He was also the last to be found and rescued, which meant he’d ingested more dust and fumes than any of the others.

  In fact, Will wasn’t quite the last to be found and rescued. After Erica, Miriam, Bryn and Joyce had been dug out and taken to hospital, the crowd of villagers had gathered round the last remaining area where the rescuers were searching. By a simple process of elimination, everyone knew the last person to be found would be Dr Will Campbell, though a whisper quickly circulated that he would almost certainly be found dead after being buried for so long. When the last chunks of masonry were carefully lifted away, Will was finally revealed, curled in the fetal position. When he was gently turned over to be lifted out, his rescuers discovered Miriam’s newborn baby lying securely cradled in a second womb made of Will’s arms and chest. She was all but unscathed, and started crying the moment sunlight penetrated her eyelids and sparked her retinas into life. Somehow, in the seconds between the Spitfire crashing into the house and the house collapsing on top of them, Will must have snatched the newborn and rolled onto his front, selflessly using his back and legs to shield her from the full impact.

  Erica watched her husband’s chest shakily rise and fall, and squeezed his hand a little. His hand didn’t squeeze back. The words of Dr Rosen floated into her mind.

  ‘How long is the contract likely to be?’

  Erica had told the young doctor the situation would be resolved as soon as possible. In her gut, she knew the situation had already been resolved. Will had been suffering from lung cancer for eighteen months, and despite seeming to be in remission when the plane hit, was nevertheless frail. Erica struggled to see him ever returning to work.

  Why didn’t you say as much to her? Why haven’t you admitted it to the girls? What are you waiting for? It’s ridiculously impractical.

  She had been tempted to say something about it to Laura as her daughter made a Thermos of tea for her evening shift at the Observer Corps, but had decided against it. She hadn’t wanted her to sit in the cramped post with little to do but dwell on her father’s health.

  ‘Mrs Campbell?’

  Erica recognised the soft voice of Dr Mitchell and turned. Will’s doctor was approaching sixty, spry, with slim hands that moved elegantly to complement his speech, which was immediately calming, as if nothing he could witness in the field of medicine would ever shock or surprise him, or was in any way out of the ordinary. He had the most natural bedside manner she had ever seen. Even better than Will’s, and Will’s empathy towards his patients was well known. On several occasions, Erica had heard Dr Mitchell say to relatives of other patients on the ward, ‘Life happens to us all’ – his kindly formulation for saying death is a fact of life relatives of the sick must start to embrace. On another occasion Erica had heard Dr Mitchell asked what advice he might give to the young about growing old. Dr Mitchell had smiled, and said, ‘Get used to the idea. It’s coming.’

  Erica stood and faced Will’s physician.

  ‘May I have a word, my dear?’ he said.

  The temperature of the ward was high yet his words sent the iciest chill along the entire length of Erica’s spine. She could tell when a doctor was preparing the ground for bad news. The question was, how bad was it? Erica struggled to retain her composure. She felt her hands begin to shake and clasped one in the other to stop it. Some part of her mind thought if she acted calm and unconcerned then Dr Mitchell wouldn’t dare give her terrible news. She looked into his patient brown eyes.

  ‘Of course.’

  Dr Mitchell glanced at Will and then looked back at Erica.

  ‘Outside?’ he suggested softly.

  They left the ward and sat in the small rose garden at the back of the cottage hospital. Erica was the first to speak.

  ‘Is
he dying?’ she asked, signalling that she simply wanted the truth, and that Dr Mitchell wasn’t to try to manage her expectations in any way.

  Dr Mitchell nevertheless considered her question for a few moments, choosing his words carefully. There was a rhythm to these conversations, and he felt safer keeping to it.

  ‘Mrs Campbell, as you know, we have no cure for lung cancer. It was gaining ground some time before his diagnosis.’

  Erica had no desire to argue with Will’s doctor, yet felt compelled to put up a fight for her husband’s prognosis – it was the closest she could get to fighting for his actual life.

  Hadn’t he been selected for a special programme of radiation therapy in Manchester? Hadn’t that made a significant difference?

  ‘But the X-ray treatment in Manchester apparently reduced the size of his tumour quite significantly.’

  Dr Mitchell nodded. ‘But it hasn’t eradicated it. Will inhaled a great deal of dust and all manner of potentially toxic particles when the house collapsed on top of you all. This material has penetrated deep into his lungs, which is why his breathing remains as laboured as it is. I know you all suffered the same. But he was buried longer than anyone else. And coupled with his pre-existing condition, for Will the consequences are far more serious.’ He paused for a moment and placed a calming hand lightly on top of her own.

  ‘Erica, I’m speaking in complete honesty now. As one medical professional to another.’

  Erica nodded and braced herself.

  ‘I know you retain a hope that Will might eventually recover enough to return to work. It’s perfectly understandable, given how well he seems to have been the last few months. But I have a responsibility to be completely honest with you. It is time for us to embrace the fact that Will’s life as a working GP has come to an end.’

  Erica looked into Dr Mitchell’s eyes. She saw how painful this was for him. It was what made him such a good doctor. She appreciated his use of ‘we’ in ‘we must embrace the fact’. He smiled gently at her.

  ‘Life, I’m afraid, happens to us all.’

  *

  The next morning, Erica sat at the breakfast table with her chin resting on her clenched fists, deep in thought, and yawned until her jaw ached. She slowly closed her mouth and sighed. She suddenly began to cough, her slight frame repeatedly convulsing as her lungs fought to expel the irritant that had made its presence felt. Though the Spitfire had crashed weeks earlier, everyone trapped under the masonry had since been coughing up dust and God knows what else.

  The cough eventually subsided and Erica sat in silence once more, catching her breath. The toast she had made twenty minutes earlier lay untouched and cold on the plate in front of her. The tea she had poured from the pot sat unsipped in the teacup, no longer steaming. She had omitted to put on any moisturiser or make-up, and the skin on her face felt thin and dry. Though she had stopped crying at some point during the night, the whites of her eyes retained the pinkish glow of distress behind her glasses.

  Since Will had been diagnosed with lung cancer they had both known there would be a moment when the time he had left would switch from the probable to the reasonably certain – from years to months to weeks. Yet it nevertheless had taken her by surprise when she’d heard the news from Dr Mitchell.

  ‘Life, I’m afraid, happens to us all.’

  Erica repeated the phrase over and over in her mind, before the sound of the front door opening and closing in the hall outside brought her back into the present. She quickly wiped her eyes and looked up, trying to smile a millisecond before Laura entered, a little crumpled and tired from her night shift with the Observation Post.

  ‘You’re home earlier than I was expecting,’ Erica said, trying to sound as if she had just got up herself and was looking forward to the day ahead – neither of which was true.

  Laura picked up a piece of cold, dry toast and scraped a thin layer of hard butter across its rough surface.

  ‘The east coast is quiet, so Brian said we may as well go home. The next shift will be in position before anything gets anywhere near us – if anything is even on its way over, which Brian doubted. He has it on authority from someone at the Ministry that the Luftwaffe took such a hammering over the summer they can’t risk daylight raids for the time being. I thought I’d have a quick bath and then go up to the hospital.’

  ‘You don’t need to sleep first?’

  Laura shook her head. ‘Do you want to come with?’

  ‘I can’t. I’m showing Dr Rosen around the village. I’ll go later.’

  Laura looked a little puzzled.

  ‘Dr Rosen? I thought you couldn’t wait to see the back of her?’

  Erica had told Laura as much when Dr Rosen had returned to her room at the Black Horse prior to catching the train south this morning. But following her conversation with Dr Mitchell last night everything had changed. Erica had left a note for Dr Rosen with the landlord at the Black Horse to ask if she might stay in Great Paxford for a day or two longer.

  ‘I think there’s more to her than she puts across in a first meeting.’

  Laura munched on the toast and started to eye a second piece.

  ‘Are you actually considering that woman for the locum position?’

  Erica looked at her youngest daughter. She had grown so much in so many ways in recent months. Her affair with a married RAF officer had forced maturity upon Laura sooner than any parent would have wanted. Yet she had emerged from the scandal scarred but stronger, with an enhanced sense of perspective about the world and her place in it.

  Erica calculated Laura would be able to accept that Will’s injuries from the crash meant he would never return to work. And that consequently, overnight, they were no longer looking for a locum to replace him at the surgery but a permanent replacement. But Erica had no way of predicting how Laura would respond when she realised – as Erica was sure she would – that if Will was now too ill to ever work again, it wouldn’t be long before he would die. How to convey to Laura that her father’s life was entering its final stage had kept Erica awake all night. She looked at Laura chewing toast and thought she looked like a little girl again. Erica decided to tackle the matter one step at a time.

  ‘Dr Mitchell made a point of coming to see me at the hospital last night.’

  Laura stopped chewing, looked up at her mother, and waited for her to continue. Erica took a deep breath and drove on.

  ‘Your father’s condition isn’t . . . well . . . Dr Mitchell said it isn’t improving.’

  Laura swallowed the toast she’d been eating, and then calmly said, ‘I see.’

  ‘Whatever he ingested in the accident has reversed any remission he seemed to be enjoying from the radiation treatment.’

  ‘Reversed?’

  Erica nodded.

  ‘How severely?’

  ‘Dr Mitchell thinks it’s very severe indeed.’

  Laura swallowed – not toast, but her own dread at how her mother might answer her next question.

  ‘Will he get well enough to work again?’

  Erica looked at Laura for a moment as she weighed the difference between telling Laura everything Dr Mitchell had told her, or keeping some of it back for another time when she felt more able to deal with the possible outcome. She slowly shook her head.

  ‘On my last visit I did wonder,’ Laura said quietly.

  ‘I’m going to give Dr Rosen a tour of the village and then ask if she might consider a permanent appointment.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘She might be the only qualified applicant we receive for the post. I can’t afford to lose her if she is willing to take it. With a probationary period, of course.’

  ‘Sounds sensible in principle. But if you don’t actually like her—’

  ‘I’m not suggesting she’s the easiest person in the world. Doctors can be quite arrogant at the best of times, and God knows she’s no slouch in that department. But she’s extremely well qualified, from one of the best medical scho
ols in the country, and has excellent references. I can’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth, Laura.’

  ‘There’s a thin line between arrogance and rudeness.’

  ‘I’m hoping it’s a London veneer that will soon rub off. I’m going to spend time with her this morning to see how she is with people she’d be looking after.’

  Laura looked at Erica matter-of-factly.

  ‘You’ve clearly made up your mind.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s been made up for me. For all of us.’

  Erica had an almost uncontrollable urge to deliver the third and final piece of information, and unburden herself of everything she knew so that she and Laura were not held apart by a secret. But as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t steal the last shred of hope her daughter might be harbouring for Will, however redundant it would be. Laura finished the toast and stood up.

  ‘I’m going to have a bath.’

  Erica watched Laura cross to the door, where she hesitated and turned back to her mother.

  ‘He hasn’t got long, has he?’

  Erica felt her deep love for her daughter suddenly surge in her chest. Laura had made the final connection herself.

  ‘No, darling,’ she said, determined to hold her feelings in check. ‘Dr Mitchell doesn’t think he has long at all.’

  Laura looked at her mother blankly for several moments, then crossed back to her and held her tightly in her arms.

  ‘Thank you for being honest with me . . .’

  Erica clasped her youngest daughter. When Laura lifted her head her eyes were wet with tears.

  ‘We knew this would come . . .’

  Erica nodded and stroked Laura’s hand.

  ‘Just . . . not so soon,’ Laura said.

  ‘No, my love. Not so soon.’

  Laura took several deep breaths and wiped her eyes.

  ‘I’ll go and see him later.’

  Erica nodded.

  ‘He’d like that.’

  ‘When will you tell Kate?’

  ‘I’ll write to her this evening.’

  Laura nodded and kissed the top of her mother’s head.

  ‘I don’t envy you having to write that.’