Snowflakes in the Wind Page 29

  ‘Children!’ Gerald snorted contemptuously. ‘Do you seriously think you will ever see this farm girl again? I think not. And I tell you this, boy. I pray every night she’s long since dead and gone. You haven’t heard for a while, have you? Well, think on.’

  White to his lips, Nicholas stared at the tall military figure standing across the room. This was the end. He had thought it was the end on several other occasions over the last two and a half years when his father had been particularly obnoxious, but his father had never expressed his thoughts about Abigail quite so openly before or with such venom.

  The mad rage, that had him wanting to leap across the room and smash his fist into the cold handsome face and keep on smashing it until it was a bloody pulp, drained away. His voice quiet and flat, he said, ‘From this moment on I have no father and you have no son. I never want to see or hear from you again, is that clear?’

  ‘Spare me the histrionics.’ Gerald’s voice was scornful. ‘And shouldn’t it be me who is saying that? I’m the one who has been wronged.’

  Nicholas shook his head slowly. ‘You actually really believe that, don’t you? You have gone through life throwing your weight about and expecting everyone to dance to your tune, and on the whole they have. This war, the devastation it has caused in people’s lives and the sacrifices so many have made haven’t touched you in the slightest. You’re still encapsulated in your own little world where you are lord of the manor. I find it incredible that a soldier, as you have emphasized to me so many times you are, can have so limited a perspective.’

  ‘How dare you.’ Gerald had been hit on the raw. If there was one thing he was proud of it was his military background. ‘You didn’t fire a shot in this war so don’t come the hero, not with me, boy.’

  ‘I’ve never pretended to be a hero, just a doctor doing the job he was trained for. I’m not a soldier, I’ve never wanted in the slightest to be a soldier as you know full well.’

  ‘Oh, I know it, and as you say, only too well. Making excuses for you at the club when they enquired when you would be following in my footsteps—’

  ‘And there we have it,’ Nicholas interrupted bitterly. ‘It’s all about you again. Following in your footsteps, doing what you decree. Well, I’m done with that, Father, for good or ill. I’m done with it all. I pray Abigail will come back to me but whether she does or she doesn’t, this is the parting of the ways. You can call it histrionics or anything else you choose, but I want nothing more to do with you.’

  ‘And does that include your mother?’

  If Gerald had thought he’d played an ace card he had another think coming as Nicholas’s next words said only too clearly. ‘Mother made her decision about what she wanted in life and what was important to her a long time ago. If she wants to see me she knows where she can find me. If not’ – he shrugged – ‘then so be it.’

  ‘You would turn your back on your own flesh and blood for this . . . this . . .’

  ‘I think the word you are looking for is my “wife”, Father.’

  For a moment the two men stood staring at each other, a mutual enmity so strong each could taste it, and then Gerald flung open the door and was gone, his footsteps sounding on the tiled floor in the hall outside before the front door opened and then crashed to.

  Nicholas sank down into his chair, his stomach churning. It had always been going to happen. This confrontation, it had been on the cards for years. He just hadn’t been expecting it today. But then that was his father all over. Catch the enemy when he was off his guard.

  Nicholas ran a hand over his face as he began to sweat and shake. His teeth clenched and his eyes closed, he fought the wave of darkness that he knew would consume him if he didn’t master it. Take a deep breath. Slowly now, slowly. That’s right. His medical expertise kicked in as though he was talking to a patient, which he supposed he was, in a way. He hadn’t had one of these episodes for some months, but then again he hadn’t seen his father for a while. Strange that, but even when he’d first been back in England and enduring one operation after another he had been able to cope with it all, except when his father paid a visit. One of the doctors, an intense young chap who some of the more uncooperative men on the ward scornfully labelled a headshrinker but who was, in fact, an extremely gifted and compassionate psychiatrist, had told him that it was shell shock exacerbated by stress that caused the attacks.

  ‘We’re beginning to understand that shell shock can manifest itself in a hundred different ways,’ Dr Reynold had explained earnestly. ‘We’re wonderfully and fearfully made, Captain, and the human mind and body were never meant to experience the horrors that this war has thrown at it. There’s no disgrace in being ill in the mind any more than there is in being sick in the body. Get that clear in your head and you’re on the way to dealing with how you feel.’

  The good doctor had stopped Gerald from visiting for some months, which had gone down like a lead balloon, Nicholas thought now as the roaring darkness retreated. He’d been a doctor after his own heart, had Dr Reynold. Utterly focused on his patients and to hell with pandering to the likes of Gerald Jefferson-Price.

  Still breathing slowly and deeply, the way Dr Reynold had taught him, Nicholas swung his chair round from his desk to look out of the window.

  It was late June, and the sky was as blue as cornflowers with not a whisper of a cloud marring its beauty. Outside, the essence of summer was everywhere. Clusters of creamy-white blooms prominently decorating dogwood and elder, and the white clover’s heads of clustered flowers and patches of forget-me-nots painting meadows and stream banks with intense patches of colour. It was in town and village gardens where the reality of war had intruded; instead of lupins and hollyhocks and wallflowers there were stretches of vegetables in neat rows. No plot was so small that it hadn’t been turned into a ‘victory’ garden, and even flat-dwellers had been encouraged to utilize windowboxes and grow radishes, lettuce and dwarf beans, and sunny windowsills all over Britain boasted tomato plants in flowerpots and seedboxes containing mustard and cress.

  Nicholas’s housekeeper, an elderly, rosy-cheeked widow of seventy-odd years who had more energy than a woman half her age, had taken the minister of food’s declaration that housewives were war workers to heart from the outset. ‘Potatoes and onions are munitions of war as surely as shells and bullets,’ she had told Nicholas on several occasions, and even the Anderson shelter in the garden had lettuce, beetroot and marrows growing on top of it while inside they shared the cramped space with buckets of rhubarb and mushrooms.

  It was this little powerhouse of a woman who now knocked on the door of Nicholas’s study before entering with a cup of tea and a slice of her eggless sponge cake which actually tasted surprisingly good. ‘I gather you sent Lord Muck away with a flea in his ear,’ she said, without any preamble.

  From her first run-in with Gerald Jefferson-Price, shortly after Nicholas had arrived to take over the position of doctor in a small market town to the south of Durham – the previous doctor, who had been well advanced in years, having dropped down dead whilst digging up potatoes for Sunday lunch – she had referred to him in this way. Nicholas didn’t mind; in fact, he agreed with his housekeeper’s summing-up of his father.

  ‘Left in a right old tizz-wazz,’ she added with considerable satisfaction, placing the cup of tea and plate on Nicholas’s desk. ‘If we had a dog, he would have kicked it.’

  In spite of himself, Nicholas smiled. Mrs Wood often had this effect, and he thanked God for it, and her. Swinging round to face her, he shook his head wearily. ‘He’s a devil of a man, Mrs Wood, and I’ve had enough. I’ve told him not to show his face here again.’

  ‘And not before time.’ Gracie Wood didn’t let on that she had been listening at the keyhole and had heard what had transpired between the two men. As uppity and full of himself as the doctor’s father was, she could scarcely believe the evil old beggar had wished the lad’s young wife dead, and her a nurse taken captive while doing her
job to help folk as well.

  From the moment Nicholas had come to the practice twelve months ago, just a short while after his final discharge from the hospital where he had been incarcerated for well over a year, Gracie had labelled him a lad in her mind. It didn’t matter he was a grown man of forty and more; to Gracie he was and always would be a lad. He had arrived one weekend looking like death warmed up, as she had termed it to herself, and had made most of their patients appear positively glowing with health in comparison. From that day, never having been blessed with children herself, Gracie had assumed the role of fussy mother hen to her one damaged chick, and had been fierce in her determination to make sure Nicholas ate properly and took enough rest. Unbeknown to Nicholas, he had taken the place of the son she had never had and she loved him dearly.

  Nicholas reached for his cup of tea and was irritated to find his hand was shaking, causing the cup to rattle in the saucer. One of the many operations he’d gone through to remove the shrapnel peppering his body had resulted in nerve damage in his right shoulder; sometimes his right hand was as steady as a rock, but when he became tired or upset the shaking could occur. This had effectively ended his career as a surgeon. Barely discernible to most people, such a handicap could be potentially disastrous whilst operating on a patient. The osteomyelitis that had ravaged his leg had left him with a pronounced limp, but that was of little concern. It had been the knowledge that he would never use a scalpel with minute precision again, never bring a patient back from certain death purely by his skill and expertise, that had been hard to take. But none of that could compare with the anguish and guilt and grinding torment about Abigail.

  When he had woken up in an English hospital, having no memory of how he had got there and being amazed to find some weeks had passed, he had nearly gone out of his mind with worry and remorse that he had left her unprotected and alone. Dr Reynold and others had spent hours trying to convince him that the decision hadn’t been his, that their parting and separation had been taken out of his hands, but it had made no difference to the self-condemnation and shame. He had vowed to cherish her and what had he done? Abandoned her into the hands of those murdering vermin. For a time his thoughts had unhinged him, his only respite being when he was pumped full of drugs to combat the pain of his lacerated body and render him unconscious for an hour or so.

  For a long while after he’d arrived back in England it was as though Abigail and the rest of the Hong Kong-based nurses had disappeared off the face of the earth. No one could establish any information regarding their fate following the fall of the island, but then chilling rumours and snippets of news about rape, torture and murder of women prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East began to filter through. Enduring his own kind of captivity in the hospital and unable to find out anything definite about his wife, Nicholas had not been the best of patients.

  It was only at the beginning of 1943 that he had received notification, as Abigail’s husband and next of kin, that she was one of a number of army, navy and Canadian nurses being held captive in a POW camp on Hong Kong island. The relief of knowing that she was alive had immediately been followed by torment about what was happening to her. He had written to her at once, and had also seen to it that her grandfather and brother were informed that she was a POW. How long it took for his letter to reach her he wasn’t sure, but it was a long time – nearly twelve months – before he received a reply written on a postcard of twenty-five words, all the prisoners in the camp were allowed.

  She had sounded delirious with joy that he had survived and that had broken him afresh. She’d written that she would come home to him one day and that she was well, but had made no mention of the conditions in the camp. She had told him Delia was with her and that had been of some comfort to him.

  To his great surprise, shortly after he had written to Abigail’s grandfather, the old man and her brother had come to see him at the hospital. He hadn’t been expecting a reply, let alone a visit, and when they had walked into the ward he had thought he was in for a difficult time. They had been the main reason she had refused to marry him all those years ago, after all, and as far as they were concerned, nothing had changed. He was still the hated laird’s son, one of the gentry, a spoiled and privileged man who wasn’t worth his weight in washers. That was the way they would think and he couldn’t say he blamed them. And now Abigail was his wife. It couldn’t have gone down well.

  Wilbert and Robin had walked slowly to his bedside and none of them had spoken for a moment. Then the old man had said in a tone that could only be described as gentle, ‘By, lad, you don’t look too good if you don’t mind me saying.’

  He had smiled, he couldn’t help it. ‘I’ve felt better, I must admit.’

  ‘They told us’ – Wilbert inclined his head towards one of the nurses – ‘you’re lucky to be alive. Miracle, they called it. Said you’ve been through the mill, lad.’

  Nicholas shrugged, and then winced as the movement disturbed his recently operated-on shoulder. ‘I can’t complain. I can see and hear and I’ve still got two arms and two legs. There’s plenty worse off than me. I just hope’ – he swallowed hard – ‘Abigail is being treated well. You hear things . . .’

  ‘Don’t think that way, lad, else you’ll go stark, staring barmy. And our Abby’s a survivor, she’s had to be. So, you two being married came like a bolt out of the blue, I don’t mind saying. How come Abby never told us?’

  Nicholas looked at the old man and then at Abigail’s brother. They didn’t seem hostile, just the opposite in fact, but then knowing that she was a POW would have moderated their attitude to him. He decided to tell them the whole story, starting from when they had first met and her reasons for refusing to continue their association, and then their meeting up in Hong Kong and their sudden wedding on the eve of the Japanese invasion.

  By the time he had finished talking, Wilbert seemed happier. ‘I thought it was strange my girl didn’t tell us she’d got wed but I can see how it happened now. And frankly, lad, she was right about the other thing – me and our Robin not wanting her to get mixed up with the laird’s son – but this war has changed everything, hasn’t it. Made you think about what’s really important, I suppose, and a blind man could see you’re not like your father. I can’t see that old blighter wanting to help his fellow man by becoming a doctor, not him.’

  Robin had nodded his agreement, and now Nicholas looked at them both as he said quietly, ‘Thank you for giving me a chance. I promise you I love Abigail more than life itself. I always have. All I want is for her to get out of that hellhole – nothing else matters.’

  ‘No, you’re right there.’

  ‘Will you write to her and tell her everything’s all right between me and you two? I know it would mean the absolute world to her.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll do that, lad. I’m not much of a letter writer but I’ll pen her a few words and our Robin can put in his two penn’orth an’ all. Rachel’s the letter writer, she’ll fill the lass in on everything that’s going on at home an’ the like.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Nicholas had suddenly felt exhausted, much the way he was feeling now after the confrontation with his father although for polar opposite reasons.

  ‘There’s a full waiting room out there.’ Gracie’s voice was disapproving. She believed half the patients only came to natter with each other, the main topic being the D-Day landings at the beginning of the month. She’d got so she was sick of hearing about it. She was also annoyed that patients who could dose themselves at home for things like a bad cough or the belly ache troubled the doctor. But there, she told herself, it was the lovely manner he had with him that drew them to the surgery half the time. Nicholas had told her on more than one occasion that some of his patients who had received one of the dreaded telegrams, telling them that a loved one would never be coming home, just needed to sit and talk to someone outside their family. Most folk knew his wife was a POW too, which immediately made him seem more approachable. And then the
re were the young women – brazen, some of them were – who clearly had fallen for the deliciously handsome doctor who had been wounded doing his bit for King and country. She always made sure she popped into his study at least once or twice during their visits, the young madams. Girls were so much more forward these days, not like when she was a lassie.

  ‘Right.’ Nicholas stretched his shoulders and rotated his neck for a few moments. His body had been so hammered by the effects of the explosion that he was always full of aches and pains, but since he knew Abigail was alive he was just thankful he had made it. ‘Let’s get the first one in then, shall we, Mrs Wood?’

  ‘Right you are, but you drink your tea and eat your cake first, Doctor.’ It was an order, and Nicholas recognized it as such, especially because he knew Mrs Wood would stand over him until he obeyed. She did exactly that, talking about the weather and how her precious vegetables were doing – never anything about the war. She had once said to him that she wouldn’t give Hitler the satisfaction of thinking that he had made her life revolve around the war, and although Nicholas didn’t think the leader of the German people cared overly much about what a little old lady in a small market town near Durham did or didn’t think, he admired the sentiment.

  The tea drunk and the cake eaten, Gracie picked up the cup and saucer and plate. Fixing him with an eagle eye, she said, ‘I’ve got a nice bit of brisket for tonight’s meal, Doctor, and it’s been pot-roasting slowly all day, just the way you like it. I shall expect you to clear your plate this evening, Lord Muck or no Lord Muck. All right?’

  ‘All right, Mrs Wood.’ Nicholas grinned. She’d made it her life’s mission to try and get him as fat as a pig and would allow no upset to get in the way of that. He didn’t know how she had come by the brisket because he was sure they’d already had more than their meat ration on the table this week, but there were certain things you didn’t ask of Mrs Wood.