‘Don’t look so gormless, for God’s sake. I ain’t said we’ll fly to the moon together!’ She gave him a gentle push. He toppled sideways, clean out of bed. ‘Maurice!’ She scrambled after him towards the edge.
He pulled her down on top of him, and they lay on the floor, tangled in sheets and eiderdown.
‘It’s settled, then?’
‘What about your pa?’
‘He’s got Annie and Ernie, and there’s Ett and Sadie and Frances. And Rob,’ she added.
That night they slept peacefully, their big decision made. They’d move north. London would be all the nicer to come home to: Duke Street and Paradise Court, with Duke in the old pub, God willing, and Walter on the mend, everything as it was, nicely in place.
Next morning Sadie had her heart set on finding Walter fully conscious and sitting up in bed. Annie, recognizing her change of heart towards her old flame, warned her not to hope for too much. Rob drove her to the hospital to keep an eye on her if Walter turned out not to be as well as she expected. He couldn’t help but feel proud of his sister, walking with her head up, her wavy hair hidden under a cream cloche hat, her pretty dark face set in determined lines. They parted in the waiting-room and Sadie went on ahead, down the already familiar corridor to Walter’s ward.
There were old men in here, mere skeletons, hanging on to life by a thread. There were men with mottled faces and high fevers, men with hoarse, rattling coughs and hollow eyes. Walter was not as sick as any of these, she told herself. He was ten times as strong, with everything to live for.
She approached his bed. ‘He’s awake,’ the nurse whispered. ‘And asking for Sadie.’
‘That’s me.’ Sadie nodded and went forward. The wire cage lay in place. Walter was flat on his back, still connected to tubes.
The only piece of him that seemed alive was his face. With the rest of his body deathly still, his dark eyes slid sideways at her approach. She saw the click of recognition, checked her own distress and broke out in pleased tones, ‘Walter, what have you been up to, you bleeding idiot? Giving us heart failure like this.’ She bustled up and took off her hat, sat down, bent to put one hand against his pillow. ‘What happened? No, don’t try to talk. Tell me later. God, you ain’t half given us all a shock.’ She chattered on, trying to breathe life back into him. ‘What have they told you, Walt? How long are you gonna have to lie there with them tube things sticking in you?’
‘Sadie,’ he whispered.
She put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Sadie.’
‘I’m here. Don’t cry, Walt. I can’t bear it. Listen, Annie and Duke and everyone send their love. Rob’s outside waiting. He says, how’s he supposed to get by without you?’ Gradually her voice broke down. ‘Oh, Walt, what is it? What do you want?’
‘Sadie?’ His eyes beseeched her. The word rolled around his mouth and seemed to fall from his lips like a heavy stone.
‘I’m here, Walt. I’m here for as long as you want me to stay.’
He closed his eyes.
‘Walt!’ She could see he was tired, but it seemed more than that. She was afraid he was going to slip away from her for good.
His eyes opened.
‘You’re gonna be all right, Walt.’
He shook his head and sighed. ‘I want you to stay, you hear? Don’t leave me now.’ He tried to free a hand from under the bedclothes, but the vigilant nurse came and told him to lie still. ‘Don’t send her away,’ he whispered.
Sadie looked up through her tears at the nurse.
‘I don’t know about that.’ She looked doubtfully down the ward. ‘I’ll have to ask Dr Matthews.’
‘Please.’ Walter managed another faint sound.
The nurse nodded and went off.
It would have taken an army of doctors to shift Sadie from Walter’s bedside. ‘I’m still here, Walt. You sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.’ She stroked his cold, clammy face, she listened to his breathing, scarcely moving a muscle in all the hours she sat there.
Matthews, the thickset doctor in the good City suit, with the gold watch-chain and the look of a prosperous merchant, reported instead to Rob. ‘Your sister’s still with him, Mr Parsons. He’s very poorly, I’m afraid. The fluid has seeped into the chest cavity. We’re doing our best to clear it, but our guess is that it’s gathered around the heart and that will affect the rhythm of the heartbeat. He’s a strong young man, granted, and the heart muscle’s good, but it’s a matter of draining off the fluid before it affects things too badly. There may be an infection too, and that can inflame the heart.’ He shrugged. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’
Rob nodded. ‘But he ain’t gonna die?’
‘Touch and go, Mr Parsons. Touch and go. Try to persuade your sister to have a rest. There’s no point her wearing herself out, you know.’
‘You won’t prise her away from there,’ Rob warned, as dogged as Sadie herself. ‘Ain’t no point even trying.’
During the course of the day all the Parsons family filtered in to sit for a few minutes with Sadie by Walter’s bedside. No one spoke much. Sadie stroked his face and whispered to him. He woke in the early hours of next morning to find her still sitting there. ‘See,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d wake in your own good time.’
He smiled weakly. She slipped her hand between the sheets and held on to his.
‘Anyhow, Walter Davidson, just hurry up and get better and let’s get you out of here. I can’t stand hospitals, they make me come over all shaky.’
He gripped her hand. ‘You and me, Sadie. You and me both.’
‘Well, that’s a good enough reason to get you out,’ she promised with a brave smile.
If her willpower could do it, combined with Walter’s strength and courage, they would get him home. Between them they’d pull him through, for all the doctors’ shaking heads and the nice, neat nurses’ cold sympathy.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Fever set in. The infection that the doctor had feared took hold and racked Walter’s weakened frame. For days he was delirious on a nightmare sea, dredging past horrors to the surface; the whine of bullets, the stinging stench of mustard gas, the unburied dead.
He saw the faces of his young pals, smoking cigarettes, hunched up in the trenches over letters from homes that they would never see again. He stepped over them, facedown in the mud, praying that the whine of the shell with his own name written on it would never reach his terrified ears and send him reeling down into the chambers of darkest hell.
They fought to keep down the fever, tried to persuade Sadie to get some rest.
‘He won’t know you, even if he does come round,’ they told her. ‘Not at present.’
‘I said I’d be here,’ she said stubbornly. She turned to Walter’s unconscious form. ‘I will be, Walter. There ain’t nothing or no one can take me away from you, never again.’ She would only agree at last to give up her place at the bedside to Rob, who volunteered to sit with his friend on the third night after the accident. ‘You send for me the minute he wakes up,’ she made him promise.
Annie took her home to see Meggie and to persuade her to sleep.
Rob took up the vigil. A strange calm came over him as he sat at the bedside in the quiet ward. Walter’s face was thin and pale but not much marked, except for the livid scar on his forehead. There was no sign of struggle; only sharp, shallow breaths and beads of sweat on his brow, which Rob sponged with a cold cloth. The night nurse passed occasionally. Far off down the ward, a man coughed and turned in his sleep.
At three o’clock, Walter opened his eyes. He turned his head towards Rob. ‘Where’s Sadie?’ He sounded peaceful and rational.
‘At home, having a rest.’ Rob leaned forward so that Walter could have a clear view of him. Walter nodded and sighed. ‘Know something? I think things is gonna be fine between us from now on.’ He had a misty memory of Sadie leaning over him and whispering that nothing would take her away ever again.
Rob nodded. ‘
I said I’d sit with you for a while.’
Walter hovered on the edge of consciousness, lured by the warm, drifting haziness of sleep, alarmed by his crisp, clinical surroundings. He focused on Rob. ‘What time is it?’
‘Three in the morning. Don’t you worry, Walt, they’re taking good care of you.’
Walter sighed. ‘How’s Sadie?’
‘Worried sick, if you must know. She don’t let on though.’ He thought she’d been a marvel of toughness and loyalty. It had taken the accident to do it, but her feelings for Walter were shining out strong and true.
‘And little Meggie?’
‘Happy as Larry.’ Rob kept his voice to a whisper. He knew the nurse was keeping an eye on them. ‘What about you, pal?’
‘Not so good, Rob. I’m weak as a bleeding kitten.’
‘I ain’t surprised.’ Rob whispered an account of the accident and Walter’s injuries. He took care not to upset him by mentioning Richie Palmer’s probable part in the whole ugly business. ‘We all knew you’d give it your best shot, though. Sadie, she won’t listen to no Jeremiahs. She says you’re tougher than any bleeding tramcar!’
Walter smiled.
Rob leaned forward to speak in his ear. ‘I reckon she might be right. We’re proud of you, Walt, for doing what you did. The kid got off without a scratch, thanks to you.’ He watched his friend give a faint nod.
‘I ain’t done nothing special.’
‘We think you have, and you gotta keep that in mind. It’s a hero’s welcome for you, Walt, when we get you out of here, back to the old Duke.’ Rob’s voice trembled.
‘How’s that?’ Walt stared at him. Had he heard right?
‘I said, back to the old Duke. That’s where we’ll be celebrating when you get back. Pa just got the word from Wakeley at the brewery. The licence came through for George this morning. He’s taking over. It’s all signed and sealed.’
Walter grasped his hand.
Rob nodded. ‘We’re all thrilled to bits. Ett says she’ll finish with the Sally Army. Her major says it’s the right thing. She says Ett’s given the Army more than most already, and God won’t mind her helping to run a decent, honest pub. You know Ett, she’d give her last farthing away. She’s a saint.’ He chatted on, knowing that the good news would help raise Walter’s spirits.
‘Whoa!’ he protested. ‘You say it’s all settled?’
‘Signed, sealed and delivered.’
‘Blimey.’
The nurse came up at last and warned Rob not to overtire her patient. She checked his temperature. ‘Going down nicely,’ she reported.
When Sadie came in early the following morning, Walter was sleeping peacefully. Dr Matthews came and studied his charts, sounded his chest without waking him. He nodded briefly.
‘What’s he say?’ Sadie demanded of another brisk, pretty nurse, as soon as the doctor had passed by.
‘He says things look a lot brighter than they did this time yesterday,’ she reported.
Sadie held her breath. She thought she saw the colour creep back into Walter’s cheeks as he slept.
So far, since she’d realized the depth of her feelings for Walt, she’d merely managed to outstare despair, convincing herself with blind faith that he would pull through. Now she relaxed as she looked at him. His breathing was deeper, he slept soundly, without the haunted, tormented look. They said he was over the worst.
He would come back to Duke Street. She thanked God and the doctors and nurses. For the first time since the accident, she was able to think beyond Walter lying in danger on his hospital bed, to having him home safe and well.
There was a collective deep breath down Duke Street as Walter Davidson turned the corner on the road to recovery. His survival raised spirits and was seen as the triumph of courage over adversity. It made a change from short-time working, rising prices and dire warnings on the radio against the depraved new craze for Dixieland jazz. This, and the prospect of Duke returning to his pub, under the auspices of George and Hettie Mann, brought the year of 1925 to a happy close.
They likened Richie Palmer’s disappearance to the famous music hall illusionist, Lafayette. He’d vanished in a puff of smoke. It was just as well: a lynching mood overtook the men of the area whenever they thought of him tampering with the brakes on Rob’s car; an ugly, riotous intention which the police were glad to see dissolve, as Christmas approached. There was no trace of Palmer, either in Mile End or in Hoxton, and they made no great effort to bring him to book. People said he’d joined the restless, unhoused tramps whose shadowy figures drifted under the railway arches and along the Embankment: anonymous, faceless, hopeless men who shrugged off another layer of their humanity with each cold and bitter night they spent, numbed by drink, drifting into oblivion.
Sadie shivered when she thought of him. Richie and Wiggin began to mingle in her mind. She cried when she thought of what he might have been, decently set up in the motor trade, with a loving family. She forced her mind over what had sent him downhill on his destructive path. In the end, she saw that forces of degradation were too strong for some; for every Maurice who rose out of the bleak misery of East End poverty there were ten thousand Richies. She felt that in her own distress she had judged him too harshly. ‘Poor Richie,’ she thought now. ‘I read him wrong, right from the start.’
As usual, Annie was the one to pull Sadie out of the past. ‘Ain’t no use moping, not when you’ve got more than enough to do already.’
‘I ain’t moping, Annie.’ Sadie folded freshly laundered clothes for Meggie.
‘You been over to see Walter lately?’
‘This morning. I took Meggie along. He’s nicely on the mend, he says.’
‘And what about you and him?’ Annie’s inquisition was less sharp than it sounded. She wanted to heal the wounds for good, now that Walter had been given a date for coming home. ‘We don’t want no more rows over you-know-who!’
Sadie sighed. ‘Over Richie. No, I ain’t gonna think no more about him. Walter says I weren’t the one to blame.’ She ran her fingertips along her forehead. ‘It’s good of him, Annie, but it ain’t all that easy to forgive myself.’
Annie took her up sharply. ‘Oh, so you meant Richie to go and take them bleeding brakes to bits, did you? You meant Walter to jump right into Rob’s car and have his accident? On top of getting yourself dumped with a kid and no job? It was part of your plan? Oh, very clever, I must say!’
Sadie felt her eyes smart. ‘’Course not.’
‘Well, then.’ Annie’s fierce gaze drew a smile from her stepdaughter. ‘Listen, girl, if Walt’s forgiven you, I should say you’re duty bound to let yourself off the hook, otherwise we’ll all end up in the cart!’
‘You’re a hard-hearted woman, Annie Parsons. Can’t a girl have no guilty feelings?’
Annie shook her head. ‘Who did you intend to harm? That’s the test.’
‘No one.’
‘Well, then.’
‘But it ain’t just the accident: I treated Walter rotten from the start.’
‘Bleeding hell, if they handed out medals for feeling bad, you’d be the first in line. Like I said before, did you plan it so that Walter Davidson would mope after you for the rest of his life? Or did he choose that for himself?’
Sadie shrugged. ‘I never meant to hurt him, you know that. And so does he. I told him that in the hospital this morning. He’s been very good.’
‘More fool him, then.’
‘Annie! Whose side are you on?’
‘You just mind how you go, and don’t go leading him on, not unless you made up your mind this time.’
Sadie was exasperated. She went through to the other room to lift Meggie and get her ready for a trip to the market. ‘I thought you said not to feel bad.’ Now she couldn’t make head nor tail of Annie’s inconsistent advice.
‘Just don’t take him for granted, that’s all.’ Annie took Meggie into her arms and smiled down at her. ‘Dress up nice for his homecoming. He’d l
ike that.’
Sadie grinned. She saw that Annie wasn’t beyond a spot of matchmaking. They went downstairs together and walked up the court, Annie still carrying Meggie. They paused on the corner to watch the workmen restore the old pub name. Down came the Prince of Wales, up went the Duke of Wellington, in traditional gold letters against a beautiful green background. Annie beamed and nodded. ‘Prince of Bleeding Wales!’ she chuntered, handing Meggie over to Sadie, shaking her head and trudging back up to her haberdashery stall.
Walter came home from hospital on 12 December. Rob drove him down an empty Duke Street. It was half past five. The traders had packed up their market stalls and the street-lamps were already lit. Walter noticed the lights on in Cooper’s old place. The co-op was already well stocked for Christmas, with game-birds hanging in windows piled high with cheeses, tins, pies, cakes, nuts and dates. There was a buzz of activity. Shop boys mopped the floors and shook out the doormats. Girls wiped down the counters. Blinds came down and lights went off as they closed up for the day.
‘Good to be back?’ Rob grinned. He held open the door for Walt to step on to the pavement outside the Duke.
Walter stared up at the old building. The name felt right. He wasn’t so sure about the electric lights as he stepped inside. Gas ones had been good enough before Bertie Hill came and upset the applecart.
Sadie came out on to the front step to greet him, dressed in a lovely, soft dress of pale blue wool. She held out both arms. For a moment he clasped her to him.
‘Come on, you two love birds, get a move on!’ Rob stood on the pavement in the icy wind.
Sadie ignored him. ‘I love you, Walter Davidson,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care who knows it.’
‘At this rate, that’s the whole bleeding world,’ Rob grumbled. He pushed past the embracing couple and swung open the doors into the crowded bar.
Inside, Tommy led the rousing cheer of greeting. He stood there grinning like a Cheshire cat, a pint in his hand. Walter released Sadie at last and went up to shake his free hand warmly. He let the noise die down before he walked across to the bar, leaned both elbows on the copper top and waited for Duke to come up and serve him.
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