The movement must have been noticed by someone because a cool hand closed over mine and guided it away from the bandages and then rested for a moment on my forehead bringing a sense of reassurance and comfort.
Later, at intervals, came a series of impressions, of being lifted, of the murmur of voices, of wind in my face and a curious throbbing sound near at hand. This beat seemed to continue indefinitely and finally it settled down into a steady rhythm. Under its compulsion I lost touch with the debris of reality and slipped into a dream world that had Sennacharib as its background.
It was a very pleasant, soothing dream in which I rediscovered every corner of our personal Shangri-la, from the rutted, high-banked lanes that led down to Shepherdshey, to the pine-dotted uplands beyond the larch wood and Big Oak Paddock. I even saw buzzards wheeling and foxgloves growing on the outskirts of the coppices and heard a chorus of blackbirds in Teazel Wood and under the eaves of the old, ruined tower, but the strangest thing about it was that I knew all the time I was dreaming and that the dream had a time-limit; I knew that soon someone would ring a bell or blast a hooter, and I would be whisked away from the fields and woods and dumped down in more mundane surroundings, an army hut, or the airless attic under the tiles in the Avenue de Medecin. And presently this happened, precisely as I had suspected. A bell tinkled and I opened my eyes and found myself in a freshly painted room with a wide window through which the sunlight streamed and a plump young woman in a nurse’s uniform was in the act of drawing the curtains on an ambulance passing by. It was the ambulance bell that had summoned me.
When the nurse saw that my eyes were open she looked startled and then, but with too much effort, she smiled and said: “Hullo there? Would you like some tea?” in the kind of voice one uses to cajole an idiot or a scared child.
I said that I would like some tea and that I was hungry and she seemed madly delighted by this information and scampered out of the room with a swish of starched skirts, leaving me to grope around for some explanation of where I was and what I was doing in a strange room and a strange bed.
It was a feeling of gross constriction round my neck and chin that gave me my first clue. The bandages were still there, about a hundred yards of bandage, it seemed, and they reminded me of the fact that I had been struck on the head, a very long time ago it seemed, but the memory of the pain introduced other memories of storm and flood. Then, as I fumbled about in my mind, I was able to recall just how I had received the blow, and even the iron bolt that had inflicted it and from here it was a logical step to that crazy totter across half Paris and the picture of Yves de Royden lying huddled under the factory wall, then Diana advancing across the street to the gendarme’s post and finally her voice in my ear reiterating—“Keep moving, Jan! Keep going!”
The recollection was like a landslide, first a trickle, then a stream and finally an avalanche that must have sent my temperature soaring for as the sequences became clearer, I struggled up and shouted at the top of my voice. The nurse came running and threw her arm under me, easing me back into a prone position and making little soothing noises that even then I thought sounded ridiculous.
“Where the hell am I? What’s happened?” I demanded.
She looked at me doubtfully, as though debating with herself whether or not to enlighten me but as I made another move to sit up, she came down on my side.
“In Cheriton Bishop Cottage Hospital,” she said, as though Cheriton Bishop was a capital city and required no amplification. “It’s quite near the airfield, but we don’t have many Service boys in, you’re only the second since the war started! They’ve got their own sick quarters, you know!”
She was a V.A.D. and took her duties very seriously and I realised that I should have to humour her a little.
“Cheriton Bishop? What airfield?”
“Why, Pockington Manor!” she said, a trifle shocked, “you were admitted two days ago! Early in the morning. You had a very nasty bump on the head and you oughtn’t to talk. I’ll fetch the tea now!” and she popped out again, rustling like a dowager at a ball.
I considered this information slowly and carefully, like a man who has discovered a curious object on a market stall. Two days ago. Early in the morning. And Pockington Manor was a satellite about twenty miles from my parent station, in Sussex. I wondered how the hell I could have arrived here, more or less intact, when the last thing I remembered was passing out under an awning in the middle of an early morning thunderstorm in the Avenue des Capucins. It struck me as being about as improbable as crashlanding in a moon crater.
I felt the side of my head under the wad of bandages and found it very tender. When I moved my jaws my skull throbbed and a curious icy sensation swam across my forehead. The V.A.D. came back with a loaded tray containing a mug of tea and some wafer-thin slices of bread and butter. She placed it on my knees and helped me to settle myself. The tea was gloriously hot, sweet and satisfying.
“You can have as much as you can drink,” she said, “you’ve had concussion!”
I thought of covering local V.A.D. displays for the Whinmouth Observer in my youth—“In cases of shock, no alcohol but plenty of hot, sweet tea” and nibbled at the bread and butter. Somehow my appetite had evaporated.
“Did I come here alone?” I asked, and it seemed to me that if she answered in the affirmative I should have flung the tray at her.
“Why no,” she said, “there was a lady, one of those French Resistance people. I must say I admire them! They must be terribly brave!”
I framed my next question very carefully, like a man asking a specialist to tell him the truth about a suspected disease.
“The lady, was she all right?”
“Certainly she was all right! Worried about you, of course, but not knocked on the head, if that’s what you mean!”
I sat back contentedly. The tea tasted like nectar and suddenly I was desperate for a cigarette.
“Can I smoke?” I demanded.
“Well. just one,” she said, “I’ll take a chance on it as nobody said anything about smoking. Here …” and she pulled a packet of Players from her apron pocket, stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it, standing back to watch the effect. It must have pleased her. I exhaled a vast cloud of content. So we had made it, Diana and I. After all the excursions and alarums. After all the tensions and risks. We were home again, together, and Sennacharib was only four hours train journey away.
The plump girl watched me, not professionally but with an awe that I found flattering.
“How did you get that crack on the head?” she asked, presently, the sensationalist evading the trainee.
“With a bolt,” I said, “a damned great iron bolt and there was a nasty square nut on the end. Like a mediaeval mace!” I added, with a touch of pride.
“You were very lucky,” she said.
“Lucky?”
“Lucky it didn’t fracture your skull! Mr. Digby-Warren says so. I heard him say it!”
“Who is Mr. Digby-Warren?”
Again she looked a little shocked. “Our specialist,” she said, as though discussing Pasteur or Simpson, “he comes Tuesdays and Fridays and he was here on a case when they brought you in.”
“Why didn’t I go into R.A.F. Sick Quarters?” I asked.
“They were rather full, but I think the lady had something to do with it. She got you here, too, a private ward! They were going to put you in the Men’s!”
I grinned a little at this. I had a swift vision of Diana throwing her weight and money about among a batch of duty officers and hospital porters.
“Where is she right now?”
“In London,” said the girl, “and that reminds me, I gave her my word of honour I’d phone the moment you came round! I’ve got the number here!”
She scrabbled in her pocket and it was clear that Diana had made a great impression on her. She was an impressionable girl and clearly the Digby-Warrens of this world took shameless advantage of it.
“You do tha
t,” I said, “tell her I’m sitting up and taking nourishment. How long do you think I’ll be here?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know that,” she said, “I’m only a V.A.D.” and she swished out to make the call.
I lay back and finished the cigarette. Then, almost in the act of crushing the stub, I fell asleep again, this time dreamlessly, and when I opened my eyes again Diana was sitting in a wicker chair with her back to me. It was full day again and the morning sun played games in her hair. I watched her for a few moments, drifting along on a tide of thankfulness. Then I called over:
“What’s cooking, Di?”
She leapt up as though she had been jabbed with a hatpin. Standing against the light she looked wan and tense but then, quite suddenly the strained expression left her and she smiled, threw back her curls and rushed across the room.
“Oh Jan! Jan, darling!” and she flung herself down beside the bed, seizing my hand and showering it with kisses. In all the time I had known her she had never done anything like that. Even when we had lain in one another’s arms, it had always been bestowal on her part and gratified acceptance on mine. The hand-kissing was a kind of abdication in itself and perhaps because I was weak it brought tears to my eyes. I withdrew my hand and stroked her hair.
“How long is it since we made that trip, Di? It can’t really be weeks or months.”
“It’s just days. How far back do you remember, Jan?”
“Blacking out under the awning during the storm.”
She looked mildly surprised. “I didn’t think you’d remember that far,” she said, “I thought you would stop remembering about the time we left the car!”
When she said this, it struck me that she had hoped this was the case for it would mean I should have no recollection of the incident with the gendarme. Then she became brisk. “What do you want to know first? Or shall I get some breakfast in? I’ve got this place organised. No visiting hours and that sort of nonsense. I’ve given them a new X-ray outfit!”
I laughed, but inwardly so. What Diana couldn’t charm out of people, she purchased outright.
“It was a good idea, don’t you think?”
“Wonderful,” I said, then, “Never mind about breakfast, that’ll bring Florence Nightingale in. Just tell me how the devil you managed it all!”
“It wasn’t really me,” she said, “it was Raoul mostly and that hatchet-man of his, the moronic, gangling one he calls ‘Pepe’! They stole an ambulance and I put on fancy-dress. Then we drove all the way to the pick-up ground near Le Mans and Jerry waved us through half-a-dozen checkpoints! We got quite careless towards the end.”
“But before that, Di, before you found Raoul?”
“Well, there wasn’t a great deal to that either. When you passed out, I dragged you behind those stacked chairs at the cafe. You’re a frightful weight, aren’t you? I piled them all over you and then I went on to Raoul’s. We were nearly there fortunately.” She gave a little chirrup of laughter, as though she almost enjoyed the memory of the experience. “That dress of mine wasn’t very suitable for the job in hand was it? I ripped it right across the seat getting you under cover and I went all the way down the Avenue des Capucins with my bottom showing! Raoul was there, luckily, half crazy with worry, poor lamb! He sent his man for you and you were in Raoul’s place within ten minutes. He even got a tame gendarme to help get you there!”
Lying there listening to her recital was like rediscovering her all over again. There was absolutely no trace of the fitful, raddled woman who had accosted me after Alison’s funeral, or the cowed, pathetic creature who had helped me to kill Rance, or even of the self-possessed woman who had partnered my pounce on Yves. She was young again, young and gloriously vital and one felt that at any moment she would suggest changing into jodhpurs and taking her mare Sioux for a gallop over Foxhayes. There was a bubble of laughter and devil-may-care under her droll bedside manner and I wanted very much indeed to kiss her hair.
“Well, you’ve got me as far as Raoul’s. What then?”
“I thought we ought to lie up for a month or two, until the hue and cry died down and you were better but Raoul said this was crazy and we ought to get started right away, particularly as he had an air-lift laid on and it would have been very complicated to cancel it and lay on another. He went out and got hold of an ambulance just like that and we made a run for it that same afternoon. In the meantime he got hold of a Resistance doctor who patched you up and gave you a terrific amount of dope to keep you quiet. I don’t suppose you knew a thing about that though, how could you?”
I noticed that she made no reference at all to Yves and it did not seem to me that the omission was due to reticence.
“What about those drawings and the other stuff we managed to get?”
Her face fell and she smiled, wryly.
“They were useful confirmation, but they told me in London that they already had that much information on Reprisal Weapon No. I.”
“Do you mean it wasn’t worth the risks we took to get them?” I said, deflated somewhat.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” she said, “maybe they don’t like their agents to get big-headed! In any case, old Raoul was pleased with the sub-contractor’s book and his people are going to work through the list, workshop by workshop. I expect they’ve already started on them by now.”
Her information regarding the plans should have brought a feeling of anticlimax. It seemed ridiculous to have taken all that trouble and all those risks for “useful confirmation”, and a list of targets for Paris saboteurs, but lying in that clean bed, with Diana smiling down on me, I was able to get the war into a better perspective. We had done our best, a pretty good best, I thought, and we were still alive and together and almost home. Suddenly the junketings of armies and secret services and the whole ebb and flow of the global struggle seemed far away and trivial, something that did not concern us very much. I knew that Diana shared this outlook for she dismissed the plans and reverted to the personal. “How do you suppose Yves got hold of that iron bar? We slipped up badly there, didn’t we?”
She talked as though we had just lost a game of tennis, or had been placed third in a jumping contest at a local gymkhana. Listening to her, it was impossible to imagine that she, personally, had driven a Mercedes full-tilt into her husband and flung him against his own factory wall like a pheasant slow off the ground. I knew then that if we were really beginning again I was the one who would have to bring the subject of Yves into the open and uncover the real reason for her murderously quick reaction to the crisis in the yard. Had she acted instinctively to save our lives? Did she regard him much as a soldier regards an enemy occupying a position that had to be taken? Or was there something altogether more complex and subconscious behind the killing? Had it been opportunism on her part, a chance to be done with all the muddled and futile years which Yves de Royden represented in her life? This was something I had to know now, so I said:
“Do you feel anything at all about Yves, Di? Or might you begin to feel when the excitement has died down?”
She looked me squarely in the eyes. “Not a thing, Jan,” she said, “and the fact that I don’t has absolutely nothing to do with the certainty that he would have turned us in if he had made his getaway!”
“What has it to do with, then?”
“With what Yves represented. It’s like I said, I never have seen this war in black and white like you, and the others opposing Hitler. Yves was right out in front of the arrogant idiots who took a wrong turning about a century and a half ago and won’t be happy until the whole damned lot of us are robots! I’m glad I wiped him out! It’s one less and an important one and the fact that I was his wife had nothing whatever to do with it. He just had it coming to him, like Rance. If they don’t make a clean sweep of them after the war they’ll bob up again so the more we kill now the better our chances in the ’fifties and ’sixties. There isn’t much of a chance, anyway. The few people who want it our way aren’t nearly ruthless en
ough.” She looked at me doubtfully. “Sometimes I don’t think you are!”
She was right about that and I envied her her cold-bloodedness. I had no regrets at all about killing a man like Rance, but Yves was different. He had his dream like the rest of us, and in some ways that dream was objective and selfless. I granted her its menace. All the things that were meat, drink, sun and air to romantics like us were so much sentimental trash to the planners, the watch-the-wheels-go-round brigade to whom Yves had dedicated himself. All the same he was still a human being and a rather pathetic one, a man who had given her his name and let her go her own way so long as she didn’t get in his. It was difficult to share her simplification of the issue and the effort of trying made my wound throb. Diana read as much in my grimace.
“We’ve got the rest of our lives to go into all that, Jan,” she said, gently. “Let’s shelve it and concentrate on getting you out of here. I’ve put in a longish report in town but they’ll need another from you of course. I told them you’ll come to town the moment you get out of here. The specialist is coming again this afternoon and he’ll give you some idea when that will be!”
“Where will you be in the meantime?”
She looked evasive. It was strange that she should still use these routine subterfuges when she wanted to deceive me about something. She never would realize that I could read her expression like the morning headlines.
“I’m going down to Heronslea to see Drip and Yvonne,” she said. “Then there are certain things I’ve got to do about converting funds, and feeding them into the place. I can’t get my hands on a penny of Yves’ money in France, of course, but there’s enough to go on with over here, providing it’s approached intelligently.”
“Can you actually use his money?” I said, less surprised than shocked.
“Oh yes,” she said gaily, “there’s no such thing as war in International Finance! In time I daresay I can get hold of all the money in Madrid and Geneva. Then I’ve got to buy a car. I’ve already got my eye on one and when the time comes I’ll pick you up in it and run you to town. Then, when you get your survivor’s and sick leave, we’ll go home together. Will that suit you?”
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