That she didn’t meant she wasn’t on the road to recovery. So the overworked doctors assured her whenever they stole a moment to spend on reassurances during the gallop that did duty for their rounds. Sometimes she believed them. At least as often, when she was feeling about as sturdy as the custard she’d just spooned up, she thought wasting away seemed more likely.
Sometimes she felt as if it would be a relief, too. Her hair had fallen out-all of it. It was trying to grow back, but it wasn’t trying very hard. She had no appetite and no strength.
The one thing she could say was that she wasn’t in a tent any more. As the weather worsened, the survivors from Fakenham who weren’t able to return to the outside world got hauled down to East Dereham. This building had been a school. Where the pupils were these days, Daisy had no idea. The classrooms made fair wards. The sisters even used the blackboards to write notes to themselves and to one another.
“I feel like I should be working,” Daisy said fretfully. “I’ve worked hard my whole life. I’m not supposed to be lying on my backside all the time.”
“You don’t lie on your backside all the time.” The sister radiated prim disapproval. “You’d get bedsores if you did. We make sure you turn onto your side and stomach.”
They rotated her like a set of tyres, was what they did. Daisy didn’t say that; she knew too well the sister wouldn’t think it was funny. She did say, “You know what I mean.”
“Yes, dear, of course,” the sister answered.
That might have been the most insincere dear Daisy had ever heard. She asked, “When will I be well enough to get out of here and do…something?” She didn’t know what she’d do, or what she’d be able to do. Did the Owl and Unicorn’s insurance policy cover damage from an atom bomb? If she ever got back on her feet again, she’d have to find out.
“When you are, dear,” the sister said. “You are getting better. You’re doing better than some of the other patients I see, not quite so well as others. It’s all a matter of time, and you need to be patient.”
Daisy was impatient with patience, and with being a patient. She put it differently: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired all the bloody time.”
“Language,” the sister clucked. “Thank heaven you’re alive, that’s all. So many poor souls from Fakenham aren’t. I pray they’re in a better place now.” Her conversation abruptly switched from the next world back to this one: “Before I go on to the next bed, do you need the bedpan?”
“Not right now, thanks.”
On to the next bed the sister went. The woman there was in worse shape than Daisy. Along with her radiation sickness, she had an arm and a leg encased in plaster. Half her chimney had fallen on her as she was getting out of her smashed house.
“How are we today, dear?” the sister asked her-again, the delusion that her charges were twins.
“I’ll tell you how I am,” she answered. “If one of those stones had dashed out my brains, I wouldn’t be in such pain now. And I wish I weren’t.”
“That’s not a Christian thing to say.”
“I don’t care. See how Christian you feel when you’re all broken in pieces and your poor carcass doesn’t want to fix itself.”
The complaint hit too close to home. Though Daisy didn’t have all the broken bones the other woman did, her body didn’t want to get well. That was the radiation sickness, still poisoning her. Not wanting to think about it, she picked up a Penguin mystery and started reading. The small, light paperback was easy to handle even for her.
Next morning, a different sister watched the room, one who came closer to being a real human being. A messenger stuck his head in, beckoned to her, and whispered something. The sister came back to Daisy’s bed with a smile on her well-scrubbed face. “Your Yank is here to see you again.”
Daisy nodded. “I’d like to see him. Shame I can’t do any proper primping.”
“He doesn’t seem to mind. I’ll let Joe know it’s all right.” She hurried over to the messenger.
My Yank, Daisy thought. Bruce McNulty was that, sure enough. But now Daisy understood just what he did when he climbed into his B-29. He went out and incinerated cities. He killed people like her neighbors. He left others with radiation sickness, like her. And then he flew back to Britain-not to Sculthorpe any more-and got ready to do it all over again.
And he liked her. He might well love her. She liked him, too, and wondered if she loved him. He made her come alive in a way she hadn’t since she found out Tom was dead.
But he did…what he did.
All the same, she thought his smile did more for the way she felt than all the doctors’ fumblings. “How are they treating you, kiddo?” he said. The lower-middle-class accents she heard all the time carried whiffs of familiarity and mediocrity. His sharp American tones? Those put her in mind of Hollywood. He talked the way people in films did.
“I’m not too bad,” she answered, and smiled back as brightly as she could. “They do keep telling me I’m gaining. Every so often, I even think I believe them.” Mostly when I see you went through her mind. She didn’t say that. She didn’t want him to think she was throwing herself at him, or would have been if she were in any shape to do it.
“Good. That’s good.” He had to know all the women in the ward were basking in his health, in his good looks, in his simple ability to walk in and walk out whenever he pleased. He went on, “I did some poking around up in Fakenham.”
“How did you get them to let you anywhere near it?” she exclaimed. Soldiers had turned her away before she got close to hammered Norwich.
“Remember what my job is,” he said, and his smile stopped reaching his eyes. “I told ’em I wanted a look at what I do on the far side of the Iron Curtain.”
“And they said you could?” she asked, astonished.
“They grumbled. They told me I wasn’t supposed to worry about stuff like that. Then they kind of looked the other way while I went ahead.” He chuckled, not in real amusement, not if Daisy was any judge, but trying to make her feel better. The smile fell off his face altogether. “It was…pretty bad. I’ve seen pictures, but it’s not the same as being there. And Fakenham was a miss-a near miss, but a miss. Sculthorpe…The sun stomped all over Sculthorpe.”
“Now you know,” Daisy said.
“Yeah. Now I know.” Bruce McNulty’s mouth twisted. “Like I said, I did some poking around. I knew about where your place was. I found this. Is it yours? You said your husband was a tankman.”
He pulled a photo out of his pocket. It was creased and torn and the worse for rain and weather, but there were Tom and his crewmates grinning in front of their Cromwell. None of them got out when the Germans brewed it up a few weeks later. Tears stung her eyes. “Yes, that’s mine. Thanks. I thought it was gone forever.”
“Hang on to it, then.” He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “And hang in there. I’ll be back.” He nodded. Then he was gone.
–
“You’re wiggling again, Mr. President,” the new makeup girl said.
“Well, what do you expect me to do when you keep whacking me in the chops with that stupid powder puff?” Harry Truman said.
That might not have been the only reason he was fidgeting. The girl who’d made him presentable for television before had been cute. This one was drop-dead gorgeous, with a shape to match. He was very married to Bess, but nobody’d ever accused him of being blind. It wasn’t fair to imagine such things with a girl almost young enough to be your granddaughter. The only excuse he could find for himself was that most other men who got to his age found themselves with similar imaginings. As long as he didn’t do anything about them, he was okay.
And as long as he didn’t tell Bess.
“If you hold still, it’ll be over sooner,” the makeup girl said. Truman did his best. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to keep staring at her from close range. It didn’t help. His memory was too good. After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been longer than a minute, she told him, “We’re all through, sir. Do you want to see?”