He walked to Chris, helping him up, letting Mary come and grip Chris’s arm, lead him to the logs. Then Ed dragged the other boy up, checked him over and led him from the clearing, right through to the edge of the copse. He told him that if there was any more trouble of any sort it wouldn’t be Chris who dealt with it next time. It would be somebody much bigger. Did he get the picture? He watched as Joe ran back down the track to the village. He’d not be back.
Chris was sitting on the logs. His head hung down. It was still aching, banging and banging inside his skull. His hands felt swollen and his mouth was sore but he looked up when Ed came and stood in front of him.
‘You did real good, Chris. Your pop would have been proud of you. And your mom too.’ He held out his hand and Chris shook it, standing, feeling his legs trembling but he smiled. He felt so good inside.
‘It doesn’t matter if he tells the village,’ Chris said, though it hurt to talk and spit had filled his mouth. He swallowed it.
‘He won’t. Don’t you worry about that. You tell them when you’re ready.’ Ed was passing his cigarettes to Earl and Mario, then lit one himself. ‘I guess it was lucky we were passing but I figure you could have dealt with it anyway.’
He smiled at Chris and they both knew the truth.
‘You’d better get along home now. Get that face cleaned up, spend that money. Give Laura a heart attack.’ Ed laughed. ‘You can make it can you?’
‘Sure the kid can make it, Captain,’ Earl said, helping Chris to his feet. ‘Someone who’s as tough as this can manage just about anything.’ He bent down and picked up Chris’s coat, letting Ed help him on with it.
‘By the way, this is Earl whose family came from Hamburg, and this other guy is from some strange hot place where they eat a lot of pasta.’ Ed winked at Chris.
Chris pulled his coat around him, but he was hot, really hot. He looked at the men.
‘Thanks,’ said Chris. ‘You know, thanks.’ His voice was fractured now and small.
‘I know,’ said Ed, punching him lightly on the arm. ‘Be seeing you then.’
He turned and walked back with the other two men and this time Chris remembered to call.
‘Good luck.’
The next day Laura called the doctor who said that the headache was not schoolboy tension or the result of a scrap but rheumatic fever and an ambulance came. But Chris knew nothing of that, he just knew pain and illness.
He lay in the hospital bed, his legs aching too much to keep still even though the woman in the white apron told him he must not move so the nurses came and put iron bars across his calves and his forearms and the pressure of their weight hurt him even more. He cried and Laura held his hand but her hand was too heavy on his flesh. He was so hot and the screens around the bed were too bright. He wanted it dark, no light, nothing to blind his eyes.
The nurse came again, forcing his lips apart but they were cut. Couldn’t she see they were cut and the medicine was bitter and scoured his throat. He was so hot.
‘Mum. Daddy.’
He was so hot. The screens were still there. They were like Laura’s knickers on the washing line, all gathered, but they weren’t blowing. They were just white, glaring white. His legs hurt. Why wouldn’t they take these bars away, these screens?
‘Mum. Daddy.’
He was crying. He knew he was crying because he was shaking but it hurt his head. Where was his mummy? She’d been away for so long. Where was she?
Helen came on the first train. She took the bus to the hospital and ran in. The nurse at the desk called the doctor who took her into the side office, calling for a cup of tea for Mrs Weber.
‘He has rheumatic fever and is holding his own, Mrs Weber. He has been delirious for two days and we have attached him to a heart monitor. Unfortunately we have had to restrain his limbs to prevent any unnecessary strain on the heart. This of course is the danger with rheumatic fever. It can affect the heart you see.’
He turned as the door opened and the nurse came in with a cup of tea. He was a small man, with lines of tiredness running from his nose to his mouth but then, Helen thought, the nurse had them just as deep.
And yes, she did know that rheumatic fever affected the heart but it must not affect Chris’s. She loved him too much. She mustn’t lose him, not after sending him away. Not after leaving him here without her. No, she mustn’t lose him; she had lost too much of his life already.
She said, ‘Yes, I see. What can be done?’ But she couldn’t drink her tea because she was gripping the cup and the saucer too tightly.
‘The remedy is rest and aspirins in fluid, twice daily. A tablespoon at a time.’ He smiled. ‘Try not to worry, Mrs Weber. It is usually most effective.’ He took her then to see Chris. He lay behind screens and seemed so alone in the large room, but then she saw Laura and Helen was glad that she was there.
Helen smiled as the doctor moved back the screen, lifting it so that there was no noise. She touched Laura on the shoulder, then sat in the chair that the doctor indicated.
Chris was so small, so fevered. His face was red and beaded with sweat and the iron bars were there, pinioning his limbs.
‘He’s doing very well,’ the sister murmured, taking the place of the doctor.
Helen touched her son’s hand, slipping hers beneath his, folding her fingers over lightly.
He opened his eyes. ‘Mum,’ he said and smiled. ‘Where’s Daddy?’
He drifted in and out of delirium for one week and Mary looked in through the window, anxious, unsmiling. Laura stayed some of the time but Helen stayed every day and every night wondering if the flight of planes each morning and evening disturbed him. At the end of the week his fever broke but his limbs still hurt and one moment he was sweating and the next he was cold but now Mary could come in too.
She sat with Helen and talked to him of the boat which Ed had fished for and found. Chris smiled.
Helen left for two hours when Laura came. She walked into the town where the hospital was situated and bought blackout material which was not rationed. She sat and sewed each day and night, sitting at his bedside telling him of the crypt, of the vicar, of Marian. Telling him that it looked as though there would be victory in the Western Desert. Unable to talk of his village and his life but determined that soon she would be able to.
She brought her old lace blouse into the room and cut and hemmed a collar from it and cuffs for the dress which was to be for Mary and listened while Laura talked of the hens and the pigs and Mr Reynolds who had to gather in the cow dung now.
On the tenth day Helen was helping the sister to ease another pillow behind her son and watching as they removed the iron bars because there was no more delirium, no more asking for his father. She lifted the cup with a spout like a teapot to his lips, not allowing him to move at all because the doctor was still concerned about any strain to his heart.
‘There is a murmur, you see, Mrs Weber,’ he said as he watched her wiping Chris’s mouth. ‘A weakness. It is imperative that he rests.’
His words were over-hung with the roar from the aeroplanes as they returned from a flight. Helen looked not at the doctor but out of the window.
‘Yes, I see,’ she said. ‘I will make sure he rests.’ She looked at the temperature chart hooked on the bottom of the bed; the thin red line was more even now. She smiled at her son but he wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the door which had opened.
‘Hi, Ed,’ he said and there was such pleasure in his eyes.
Helen turned and saw the man, so big in his uniform, his hat slipped back on his head, his grin wide.
‘Hi, Chris Weber. So, got yourself a bit of trouble, hey?’ He walked over, his shoes silent on the waxed floor, his left hand in his pocket.
He walked to the bed, tossing some candies on the blanket. ‘You’d better get out of here soon, that boat’s going to get pretty rusty out there and the pitching’s going to go downhill.’
Helen walked to the door with the doctor then turned and watched
this big man talking to her son, his hands strong and kind. He picked at some fluff on Chris’s sleeve, rolling it into a ball and flicking it into the dish on the beside table and Chris smiled.
‘Well, that’s the kind of aim you get when you’ve pitched as much as I have.’ Only then did he turn to Helen, only when Chris was tired and his lids were drooping and for that she already liked him.
He rose and walked with that ambling stride to the end of the bed where she was now standing.
‘I guess you must be Mrs Weber. That’s a fine boy you have there.’ His handshake was firm and his smile broad but there were the same lines of tiredness on his face that there were on everyone’s.
‘I think I have much to thank you for, Captain McDonald,’ Helen said, because Laura and Mary had told her everything.
‘Not a lot, most of it he did himself. Look I can’t stop long, I’ve got to get back to base. We should be training tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘I wanted to get over much sooner but we’ve been kind of busy.’ His smile was wry.
‘It’s enough that you came. He’s been waiting for you,’ Helen said, hearing him rattle the change in his pocket, hearing the hoot of the car outside the window. He moved across and looked out.
‘There’s my lift. I got to go. I’ll come again, if I may?’ He was looking towards Chris and she saw the fine cheekbones, the flickering left eyelid.
‘Please do. Chris would be very grateful and so would I.’
He nodded and smiled at her. The jeep hooted again and he turned towards the door, waving as he went.
Helen watched him and then as she moved towards Chris again she saw the material lying folded on the back of the chair, the lace collar draped across it, and she went running out after him, down the corridor, calling, ‘Captain McDonald, Captain McDonald.’
He stopped and turned.
Helen blushed. ‘I’m making something rather special for somebody but I can’t get any elastic and I’ve heard the Americans have everything.’
She laughed when he spread his arms wide. ‘Well, I guess that’s as good a war aim as any, Ma’am. Leave it with me.’
He came back every other day for the next three weeks and they sat by the bedside as Chris woke and talked, or slept.
He brought the elastic on his second visit and Helen sewed it around the waist of the dress she was making, listening as he told her of the farm in Montana, of the mountains which looked pretty much like Chris’s earlier temperature chart, of the mare he was hoping to breed from. He told her that his mother loved him too much and Helen knew what he meant and so she told him of her own mother but then he said, ‘Oh no, Mom’s nothing like that.’
Mary came the next time, driven by Ed in his jeep. Helen gave her the dress and she held it up against her and then turned to Chris, who smiled at her and then at his mother.
‘It’s got a waist. I’ve always wanted a waist but my sister said I was too fat. How did you know I wanted a waist, Mrs Weber?’ Mary’s face was eager.
‘Every woman wants a dress with a waist, my dear Mary,’ Helen said. ‘And you have been such a true friend to Christoph. It is so little.’
She sat back then and listened as Ed told the children of the heat a cattle herd would build up, of the cowboys’ fear of storms because they spooked the cattle and he asked Chris how a stampede could be halted. Chris told them and Ed laughed and called him a clever kid for remembering.
Then Chris told Ed the German story of the raven coming ahead, warning by thunder and lightning that the gods were coming and everyone should hide and Helen was glad to hear her son talking of his heritage so naturally.
The next time they talked of the Flying Fortresses because Ed’s hands were shaking but he didn’t say why. But when Chris was asleep he told her of the punishment a ship could take, his face pale, his uniform dark against the white walls.
‘The rounds of gunfire, the blasting of an engine and still the old bus will get us home, or some of us.’
They talked or rather Helen listened as he told her that already there were not enough spare parts, not enough spare crews.
He told her how the planes were pouring from the Detroit plants but they would soon be pouring from the skies too, over Germany. That the crews were so young, too young to be killed, too young to kill. That though they would fly high they would fly in daylight and they would not have fighter escort the whole way. That they had twenty-five missions to accomplish before they could go home. He had flown in a British bomber as an observer last week, and now he knew what they would be facing when the training was finished. The next time he came he brought her candies because he had talked too much, but she didn’t think he had.
It was October before Chris was able to sit up, and Helen left him for two days to travel to London and when she returned she told him that she would not be going back. She had spoken to Mr Leonard and insisted on him releasing her because Laura knew someone at the beet factory and they would take her now.
She did not tell him that she had threatened to tell Mr Leonard’s wife that he took flowers each Friday to a lady who lived in Harrow but she told Ed, who laughed and said that he reckoned that even if she did box like a southpaw she was a dangerous dame to meet on a dark night.
Helen did not understand but she laughed with him. When Ed left, Chris woke and picked at the crisp starched sheet with thin fingers, his striped pyjamas caught up above his elbows.
‘Mum, I’ve got to tell the village you know.’
Helen took his hand. ‘No, darling. I must tell them. I’m going to be living here too, permanently soon. I shall tell them, but when the time is right. Now, shall we finish this puzzle?’
She carried over the tray and put all the blue pieces to one side. There were planes coming over again.
‘Mum.’
‘Yes, Chris?’
‘Ed’s great, isn’t he?’
‘Ed’s a very kind man.’ Helen said.
‘But he’s more than that, isn’t he?’
Twelve planes had flown over now.
‘Yes, he’s more than just a kind man,’ she said but he couldn’t be more than that for her, because she couldn’t live with the threat of another loss and she still loved Heine.
CHAPTER 14
Helen signed an official contract to work in the laboratory of the sugar-beet factory on Friday 30 October. She had dropped her cases in the small room at the top of the boarding house on the main street of the town. She had stuffed newspaper in the rattling window frame and beneath the door which had been cut to ride over a now non-existent carpet and then left to spend the days of the weekend at the hospital with Chris and her nights at the cottage. She talked to him of the new Commander in North Africa, General Montgomery, who was beginning a big offensive along the coast at El Alamein, of the Russians who were hanging on grimly in Stalingrad, of the American Marines who had made a successful landing on the Solomon Islands.
She fed him ice-cream which Ed had brought and left earlier in a big container filled with ice. There was too much for him and so the nurses took the remainder for the other patients. Helen had not seen Ed, she had arrived too late and Chris asked why.
She told him of the boarding house, the rattles and draughts. The girls who had been smoking in the small kitchen and stubbing their cigarettes out on a tin lid and who had wanted to talk. So she had not been able to arrive any earlier, had she? She didn’t tell him that she did not want to see the big smiling American who made her feel things that she thought had died with Heine.
She arrived back at her digs on Sunday evening carrying the dungarees that she would need for tomorrow. She had heard the planes straggling back as she travelled on the bus and counted, knowing Ed was flying his first mission, knowing that if he didn’t return Chris would tell her, somehow he would tell her.
She climbed the stairs and slept from ten until five without waking. She was satisfactorily full because Laura had brought a picnic lunch into the hospital; chicken and bacon pie and eggs from
the hens. The bacon had been a surprise but Laura had said little, only smiled slightly and said that the government allowed the killing of people not pigs in the war but after all, wasn’t it strange how one animal could go missing and turn up in separate joints in villagers’ houses? Helen had felt uncomfortable for a moment but then hunger had triumphed.
She walked to work through cold, wet, dark streets, stepping over mud spun off the wheels of the incessant beet lorries. Overhanging everything was the heavy smell of beet pulp which the boarding housekeeper had told her belched out from the chimneys twenty-four hours a day during the beet campaign. Others were walking with her now but nobody spoke, they were too tired.
She arrived at six a.m. and walked from the cold into a barrage of heat and noise. Within seconds she was too hot and she shrugged herself out of the heavy greatcoat, holding it as she knocked on the forewoman’s door. It was opened but the woman could only nod, the noise was too great to hear any words. Her hair was wound up inside a headscarf and her breath was nicotine-heavy as she came up close and shouted, ‘Follow me.’
The smell of beet pulp was thicker inside the building, too thick to breathe but somehow Helen did, following the woman who did not look behind her once. They passed machinery which roared and rocked and women who smiled before turning back, sweat running from their bandana-wrapped hair and from their faces and arms to drip on to the floor. They climbed up an iron stairway, slippery from the dripping overhead pipes and now there were men who wore no shirts and whose backs were beaded with sweat. One turned and whistled. Helen saw his lips but heard nothing but the clang and the clatter. Her short-sleeved shirt was sticking to her now and she held her coat away from her body.
How could these people work like this, how could they bear the noise, the smell? How could she? The woman was walking more quickly now, lengthening her stride, checking her watch, walking down half a flight of stairs, turning left. Helen caught up, taking shallow breaths, looking at the small grey office they were approaching. There were white stencilled letters on the door and she saw that they said ‘LABORATORY’.
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