had a young mother in the clinic the other day. She’d taken an overdose—and given the same drug to her young baby. We put tubes down their throats and pumped out their stomachs. The baby survived but the mother died. Think of that. We saved a life but we created an orphan.”
Now she attacked what was left of her gin. “Don’t you think our childhood was too tidy, too safe? Don’t you think that Ma and Pa were too protective when we were very young? They wouldn’t let us mix with those gypsy children, they were very strict about climbing trees—remember the time they found out we had been scrumping and made us return the bloody apples, for Christ’s sake? That farmer had two hundred apple trees—more—and would never have missed what we took.” She grinned. “Remember how stolen apples always tasted better than ones you bought?”
I nodded and smiled. “It was embarrassing taking the apples back, I remember that.”
“I didn’t speak to Ma and Pa for a week.” Izzy chewed her food. “And they made such a fuss about keeping us away from that railway line. I mean, couldn’t they see that we would never have done anything really dangerous, like playing Chicken when there was a train coming. I feel… I feel… I know why they did it, of course I do. And I know they loved us. But… well, it was scary running away from that bull, yet at the same time I loved it. We should have had more times like that, more danger.”
“You’re going off to the Front, Izzy, that’s dangerous. Don’t get addicted to danger. I’ve seen that.”
Her brown eyes shone again. “Don’t worry. Your sister’s not a fool. But I was never as bookish as you. I like how untidy life is, adult life. The surprises, the shocks, the confusion, the messes we get ourselves into. I like it because I know—understand—that chaos is the natural order, but that in being a nurse I can bring order—and calm— into at least one part of people’s lives. Teachers can do that, and priests maybe. Even writers.” She sat back and smiled. “Am I being pompous?”
“No.” I grinned. “That’s my job.” I reached out and took her hand. “I’ve seen you covered in chicken pox, remember. All red and blotchy. And I still remember when you once wet yourself. I’ll never think of you as pompous.”
She moved her fingers and dug her nails into the skin at the back of my hand. “Brute!” she whispered again. But she was grinning too.
“What newspaper do you read, Hal?”
I frowned. “The Morning Post—why?”
“I was reading the Times in the train on the way here. With this paper tax and paper shortage it was very thin and ninety-nine percent was about the war. But on page five they have one or two paragraphs, usually without any headlines, that are designed to take your mind off the carnage.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, in today’s paper, for instance, there were just five lines about the guardians of the workhouse in somewhere called Milton-next-Sittingbourne, in Kent, who took a two-year-old—a two-year-old, mind—away from its mother, because it was swearing, using the most terrible curses, and because, when asked if it wanted any milk, asked instead for beer or whisky.”
“You’re making this up!”
“I swear I am not. Obviously, it’s not very funny if you are the mother or the workhouse guardians concerned, but for the rest of us, the other thousands of readers the Times has, it provides us with some relief from the war on all the other pages. I always look out for page five now. They quite often have a paragraph simply called ‘Longevity,’ in which they draw attention to the fact that, out of so many deaths reported in that day’s ‘Deaths’ column, alongside all the mere boys killed in the war, that so-and-so lived to be ninety-five, someone else was eighty-nine, a third eighty-five, that the news isn’t all bad and lots of people are living out their normal life span. I like that. It’s propaganda, of course, in a way, but gentle and it shows the right spirit.”
She finished her gin.
“Tomorrow I’m giving a party at the flat in London, where I shall be surrounded by all my friends. Nurses, theater types, American spies, soldiers on leave, strippers and croupiers from seedy nightclubs, painters, writers, doctors, black-market spivs. What will happen? Something certainly, because a few days later I leave for France and”—she snapped her fingers—“who knows?”
She smiled—a