The Promise

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘Yes, I could do a banner,’ Belle said, but her attention was on Jimmy rather than Mog. Despite saying he was going to write to some of his army friends, he hadn’t done so. She just hoped this letter wouldn’t be bad news and make him even grumpier.

  ‘Who’s it from then, Jimmy?’ Mog asked.

  ‘Bin,’ Jimmy said as he pulled out the letter from the envelope. ‘Well, his real name was Jack Cash, but we called him “Bin” because he was always saying he’d “bin there”. He’s the only one of the mates I made when I was at Etaples training that’s survived.’

  Jimmy carried on reading, while Belle and Mog discussed the cake stall.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  Jimmy’s exclamation made both Belle and Mog look at him. ‘What is it?’ Belle asked.

  ‘He’s only gone and found out about the Frog that rescued me,’ Jimmy said. ‘Seems he’s a real hero, been awarded the top award, Croix de Guerre, that’s like our VC.’

  ‘I always thought he was a hero for saving you,’ Belle laughed. ‘But I didn’t know the French gave medals out for that!’

  Jimmy smirked wryly. ‘He didn’t do me any favours, did he? He should’ve shot me and put me out of my misery.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ Mog looked horrified.

  ‘He would’ve been put on a charge for leaving his men and returning to his lines. But according to Bin, he dropped me off and went right back into the fray. Singlehandedly he took out a Boche machine-gun emplacement, then shooting like a madman he found his men and took them on to that day’s objective. Bin reckons his actions saved dozens of Frogs, and they took over fifty prisoners.’

  ‘How wonderfully brave,’ Belle said. ‘Sounds like he really deserved a medal.’

  ‘But the strangest thing is that Bin claims it was a man we’d met before,’ Jimmy said. ‘We were sent down to Verdun back in 1916, to pick up a couple of our men suspected of desertion who’d been picked up by the Frogs. We stopped at this estaminet to get directions for the HQ and this bloke helped us and bought us a drink. He spoke perfect English, never got his name, but we talked for some time. Bin reckons that’s why he rescued me, he recognized me by my red hair.’

  ‘Fancy that!’ Mog exclaimed. ‘So there is some advantage to having red hair.’

  Belle thought this story was amazing, but more importantly to her it was good to see Jimmy animated about something for a change.

  ‘Bin said that too.’ Jimmy managed a little chuckle. ‘He said, “And we all thought red hair was a curse, now we all want it.” He says the story has become one of the legends of Ypres. He said he was intending to find this Sergeant Carrera to thank him personally. But he’s gone west now too.’

  Belle almost gasped aloud at the name but she checked herself just in time. ‘He got killed too?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s what he says. So I didn’t imagine he’d called me by my name. He did know me.’

  Jimmy had told Belle back in the hospital in France that he thought the man who rescued him had called him by his name. But because of the pain he had been in at the time, he didn’t know if he’d imagined it.

  Belle had to turn away from Jimmy so he wouldn’t see the horror and guilt which she was sure must be etched on her face.

  Surely it couldn’t be Etienne? It was far more likely to be just another Frenchman with the same surname. Yet somehow she knew it was him. And now he was dead.

  She took up the iron again, putting it back on the stove to heat up, and busied herself by folding a pillowcase neatly. But Mog was caught up in the story and wanted to know more.

  ‘So you’d met this man before? What was he like?’

  ‘I can’t remember that much now. He was older than me, tough looking, he said he’d learned English in London years before the war. That day we mostly talked about the fighting and stuff. I liked him, well, we all did. But another little mystery has been solved now. You see, I was told he gave my name when he took me in. I thought that was because he’d just looked on my tag. But maybe it wasn’t, because that day at Verdun, Bin and the other lads were calling me Little Red Reilly, and he asked me if I’d just got the nickname since coming to France and what my real name was.’

  Belle’s legs were turning to jelly and she felt queasy. When she tried to pick the flat iron up again she was shaking so much she almost dropped it.

  ‘Isn’t that a wonderful story?’ Mog said. ‘What’s up, Belle? You’ve gone very pale.’

  ‘I could do with some fresh air,’ she said hastily. ‘It’s very stuffy in here.’

  ‘I’ll carry on with that ironing,’ Mog said. ‘Go on up and have a lie down. You never seem to sit down for five minutes these days.’

  Belle did retreat to the bedroom, and fell on to her bed sobbing. In the forefront of her mind was a picture of Etienne kissing her goodbye that last time outside the hospital and telling her that it would all work out and one day they’d be together.

  She had lost all hope of that when she heard Jimmy was wounded, and although a day hadn’t passed since then that she didn’t think about Etienne, she had prided herself on doing the right thing.

  But it wasn’t right that he was dead. Not killed out on that battlefield, buried in a mass grave. Her strong, brave Etienne who meant more to her than she could ever adequately explain, even to herself.

  But why didn’t he tell her he’d met Jimmy back in 1916?

  Was it because if he’d admitted it that evening he came to the hospital, it might have stopped her from going off for the night with him? It almost certainly would have done as it would have made an image of Jimmy spring into her mind.

  Yet for whatever reason he chose to keep quiet about that meeting, it was so honourable of him to rescue his rival. Was he tempted fleetingly to let him die? If he was, it made his actions even more admirable.

  Her insides began to churn alarmingly. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever told Jimmy that the surname of her rescuer in Paris was Carrera. But Noah definitely knew it and if he was to call here and Jimmy told him about this, he would recognize it immediately and wonder why she hadn’t spoken up; after all, that was the natural reaction for anyone, unless they were hiding something.

  She turned her face into the pillow as images of Etienne kept jumping into her mind. It had been hard enough to try to erase thoughts of him all these long months, and now she knew Jimmy, Mog and Garth would be talking about this for weeks to come. How should she react? Should she go downstairs now and say she’d just remembered that Etienne’s surname was Carrera?

  But she knew she couldn’t do it. Not yet. Just saying his name out loud would surely bring tears to her eyes. She had to hold it inside her.

  That evening Jimmy seemed much brighter after getting the letter from his old friend. He even suggested lighting the fire up in the living room, when normally he stayed in the kitchen until about eight then went to bed.

  ‘We could have a game of chess or do a jigsaw together,’ he suggested.

  Belle thought it somewhat ironic that she’d tried to get him to do just that on so many nights without success, yet on the one night she really wanted to be alone, he had a change of heart. But she went upstairs and lit the fire anyway; it was after all a step forward.

  ‘It was good to hear from Bin and all the news of everyone,’ he said once they were both up there. The bar downstairs was quiet, and with the curtains drawn and the fire blazing the living room was a warm and comfortable retreat. ‘I’m going to write back. Though I haven’t got much to tell the lads.’

  ‘They’ll just be happy to hear you’re well,’ Belle said. ‘You can tell them things you’ve read in the papers. Or remind them of funny things you shared.’

  He sat back in his chair by the fire looking thoughtful. ‘I hated it out there,’ he said at length. ‘In a quiet five minutes I used to close my eyes and imagine being here, just like this.’

  ‘But now you are here you wish you were back there?’ she asked.

  He managed a
smile. ‘Not quite. I just wish I was whole again. Working behind the bar, going for walks with you, not feeling so hopeless. But I do miss my mates out there.’

  In the past she would have moved over to him and given him a hug if he was sad. But she had found to her cost that any demonstration of affection made him prickly.

  ‘Tell me about some of them,’ she suggested.

  ‘There was one we used to call “Gannet” because he would finish up any food you didn’t eat. He was a laugh, always scavenging around; somehow he always managed to get drink, some eggs, a chicken or a rabbit. He worked a stall in a market with his dad in the East End before the war, I suppose he learned the art there. Only eighteen but a great lad.’

  Belle smiled. It was good to hear him talking the way he used to before he was wounded.

  ‘Then there was “Father”; we called him that not because he was old, but because you found yourself confessing things to him. I said once that he ought to become a priest, but he said he liked women too much.’

  ‘What sort of things did you have to confess?’

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘Being scared before going over the top; that I often wonder about my father.’

  ‘Do you?’ Belle exclaimed in surprise. ‘You’ve never, ever mentioned thinking about him to me.’

  ‘I never used to, not till I got out there. I suppose it was to do with meeting so many different kinds of men who often talked about their fathers. I always believed that he was rotten to the core because he walked out on Ma, but maybe there’s another side to that story.’

  ‘Have you asked Garth about him?’

  ‘No. He’d take Ma’s side, and there isn’t anyone else to ask.’

  ‘I often wonder about my father too. But as Annie doesn’t even keep in touch with me, she’s hardly likely to want to talk about him. I wish Mog knew.’

  Jimmy smiled at her. ‘He’d be a good, kind man, and creative too. You don’t get any of that from your mother.’

  Belle’s eyes prickled at the compliment, but she didn’t think she deserved such praise. All at once she felt she had to partially unburden herself about his rescuer.

  ‘The man who saved you, you said his name was Carrera. Well, that was Etienne’s name,’ she said.

  ‘What! The man who took you to America?’

  ‘I’d rather remember him as the man who helped Noah find me in Paris,’ she said.

  Jimmy was silent for a moment but he was looking at her intently.

  ‘That day in Verdun, he asked if I was just called Red in the army, that was after he’d heard me called Little Red Reilly. Looking back, that’s an odd thing to ask; no one usually cares what your real name is. He even asked what I worked at before the war. I told him I was Jimmy back home, and about the pub; I told him about you losing the baby and mentioned your name. So if it was the same man, why didn’t he tell me who he was?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t make the connection till later,’ Belle suggested. ‘But if he had, perhaps he thought it best not to bring up the past because you were with other men. I told him quite a lot about you while we were on the way to America, and of course two years later he knew from Noah that you’d searched everywhere for me.’

  ‘So he saved me for you?’

  ‘I doubt he looked on it like that. It’s more likely he just remembered you from the day at Verdun and couldn’t bear to leave you there helpless.’

  Jimmy made a sort of agitated whistling noise. Belle didn’t know what to say now; when she looked at him she could almost hear his brain ticking over, assimilating all the strands of the situation.

  ‘He felt he owed me my life? Why? I’d done nothing for him. He risked being put on a charge for stopping for me. I doubt if his CO would consider rescuing a Tommy any kind of priority when there were dozens of French wounded all around there. So you have to be the reason for it. He loved you!’

  Belle’s stomach turned over. She wished now she hadn’t said anything. Jimmy was a thinker; he’d dwell on this, turn it this way and that, and he’d want answers to anything he couldn’t work out.

  ‘You know very well that he always felt very bad about taking me to New Orleans,’ she said. ‘That is exactly why he came to Paris to help find me. I’d say that was proof he cared about me, but there was nothing else between us. I’ve never been so glad to see anyone as when he broke the door down where I was being held. But after, I couldn’t wait to get back to England to see you and Mog.’

  ‘Funny that you said so little about him on your return,’ he said, his voice tinged with suspicion. ‘I mean, a man saves your life yet you don’t want to keep in touch with him?’

  ‘Of course I would’ve liked to, but I thought it would be hurtful to you. Oh Jimmy, don’t make this into something it’s not. I’d been through several kinds of hell back then, I was home, safe again, I wanted to forget it all and start again.’

  He reached for his crutch and heaved himself out of the chair. ‘I think I’ll go to bed now,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, stir up something then back off to brood,’ she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say aloud. That was what he always did, and she felt she couldn’t stand much more of it as it was like walking on eggshells.

  ‘I wish I could have my old Jimmy back,’ she said sadly. ‘You can’t imagine how much I miss him.’

  He leaned on his crutch looking down at her, his mouth curled into a sneer. ‘How can you expect me to be the same when half of my body is missing? You aren’t the same Belle I married either. What excuse do you have for that?’

  He turned then and hopped away across the room. Belle could only watch him go, her heart even heavier.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Belle hesitated at the open door of Dr Towle’s consulting room. He was sitting at his desk writing up some notes and for a second she felt she couldn’t go through with it.

  But he looked up and smiled. ‘Come in, Mrs Reilly, I don’t bite,’ he said.

  The doctor had something of a reputation in the village as a ladies’ man. As Belle knew him for his kindness when she had lost her baby and the sympathy he had shown Jimmy when he first arrived home, she thought this reputation was unwarranted. But he was undeniably easy on the eye. Tall, well built, with a ready smile, good teeth and a twinkle in his dark eyes. His dark hair was tinged with grey, the only clear indication he was over forty, and she thought it was very sad that stupid people misconstrued his understanding of women’s problems.

  She sat down at his desk very aware that once she’d voiced her problem with Jimmy she could never retract her words.

  ‘You look tired and pale,’ he said, his deep brown voice soothing and sympathetic. ‘Are you unwell? Or is this visit about your husband?’

  ‘Yes, it’s about Mr Reilly,’ she said, hanging her head. ‘I’m at my wits’ end, doctor. He’s so sullen, so …’ She stopped, overcome by tears she couldn’t hold back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to say as she fished in her pocket for a handkerchief.

  It was near the end of July and the weather had been so hot for the last two weeks that it had been impossible to sleep well at night and it was hard to raise the energy to do even the simplest of tasks during the day. But she could have coped with the heat, food going off before it was even cooked, the dust that seemed to coat everything, if only Jimmy would rise out of his black moods.

  Time and again he had asked her questions about Etienne, usually to blame the man for rescuing him, but sometimes with suspicion that there had been something between them in Paris. At least she wasn’t guilty on that count, but he also fired questions about her time at the hospital, what the male drivers and stretcher bearers were like. He was like a dog with a bone, going to it again and again, to the point when she felt like screaming. There had been moments when she was sorely tempted to walk out of the door and never come back. It was only the thought of what that would do to Mog that stopped her.

  The doctor leaned forward, putting his forearms on his desk. ‘I h
ave observed that this appears to be one of the many troubling side effects for wounded men once they come home. Even if they hated every moment of it over there, there was purpose to each day, and now they have none. You and many other wives learned to cope alone while your husbands were away. However much you missed them and wanted them back, it must be very hard to adjust to their return when they are no longer the strong, capable man you said goodbye to.’

  Belle nodded and dabbed at her eyes.

  ‘I’ve had many a devoted wife in here confiding how much attention her husband demands, how critical of her he is, and some say they no longer show them any appreciation. Is this what you are finding?’

  Belle took a deep breath. If other women could confide in him, so could she. ‘Yes. He’s a different man now. Everyone liked Jimmy before this, he cared about people, he was generous with his time and affection. Just a lovely man. But that’s all gone now. He is so bitter, so difficult.’

  ‘It will get better, Mrs Reilly,’ he said.

  ‘Will it?’ she asked bleakly. ‘He’s barely been out the door since he got home. He won’t persevere with his artificial leg. He doesn’t talk to me. He looks at me sometimes as if he hates me. He’s wearing me down to the point I want to run away from him.’

  ‘And how is he with Mr and Mrs Franklin?’

  ‘Not as nasty as he is to me, but there are times when they despair too. I won’t run away of course, I couldn’t possibly be that unfair to Mr and Mrs Franklin. But it is affecting us all, and I don’t know which way to turn.’

  ‘In what way is he nasty to you? Has he hit you?’

  ‘Oh no, he wouldn’t do that,’ Belle said quickly, even though he had moved to do it on several occasions, and she’d jumped nimbly away. ‘But he brings up things about my past, he’s suspicious of me. There is no joy in him any more, not about anything.’

  Dr Towle raised one dark eyebrow questioningly.