‘It doesn’t have to be real adultery, Dulcie,’ he explained wryly. ‘The solicitor just finds someone – a woman – who for a sum of money agrees to say that she and I spent the night together at an hotel after Lydia and I were married but before I ended up here.’
‘You mean you’re letting her get away with turning her back on you so that she can marry someone else?’
‘It’s the done thing when one is a gentleman.’
‘Well, I don’t know why you’d want to be a gentleman when Lydia certainly isn’t a lady,’ Dulcie told him roundly, giving him a reproving look when he started to laugh. Dulcie didn’t like people laughing at her.
Someone else, overhearing the sound of David’s laughter, was very pleased by it.
Mr Archibald MacIndoe, the surgeon, accompanied by George, had just entered the ward to take a look at his patients and talk with them. He turned to the younger man and said to him approvingly, ‘Good work getting that young woman to spend some time with the group captain, Laidlaw. She’s obviously raising his spirits, and that’s just what we need to see.’
As George said to Sally later, when he joined her in the room that Sally and some of the duty nurses and other staff were decorating for the evening’s dance, ‘I have to admit that, like you, I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing getting Dulcie to visit David.’
‘You were obviously a better judge of the situation than me,’ Sally told him generously, as he handed her a cup of tea.
The room hummed with everyone’s chatter as they worked, pinning up decorations and inflating balloons, so that George had to move closer to her and raise his voice slightly as he responded.
‘David certainly looked as though he was enjoying Dulcie’s company when I took a quick peek into the ward ten minutes ago. He was actually joking with one of the other men and warning him off attempting to get Dulcie’s attention.’
Sally smiled at him, her smile widening as he gave her an appreciative look.
‘That’s just the spirit we need to see in him,’ George continued. ‘He’s recovered very well from the amputations and the skin grafts, and technically there’s no reason why ultimately he shouldn’t go home. He’ll always be wheelchair-bound, of course, but with both his wife and his parents turning their backs on him …’
‘He feels safer here?’ Sally guessed. ‘Poor boy. Come on,’ she said after she’d finished her tea, ‘if you’ve got some time to spare, you can hold the ladders for me whilst I put up this bunting the local WI has loaned us for the party. Apparently it was made for the celebrations after the end of the last war, so I’ve been warned that it’s getting a bit fragile.’
‘It’s much the same era, then, as the gramophone we were also offered,’ George grinned, ‘and the records. Luckily one of the patients is a bit of a swing music fan and he’s volunteered his own gramophone and records, provided his favourite nurse rewards him with a kiss, apparently.’
‘No patient would ever get away with that at Barts,’ Sally laughed.
‘No, and neither would any other hospital I know of have barrels of beer on the wards for the patients, but then this is not like any other hospital, and our patients are not like most other patients. They are young, otherwise healthy and fit young men with all that that means, with the kind of injuries that no one should ever have to face. As Mr MacIndoe says, whatever it takes to get them to want to work towards the most normal kind of life they can have has to be undertaken. Mending their bodies as best we can on its own isn’t enough.’
Archibald MacIndoe wasn’t Dulcie’s only champion. Ward Sister, making one of her inspections of her territory, noted the hubbub of activity and laughter coming from the end of the ward where there was the group captain whose lack of interest in his own ultimate recovery had been causing her some concern. Speedily she made her way to David’s bed and even more speedily assessed the situation.
A young woman who could look not just comfortable but actually preen herself at the attention she was receiving from a group of young men with the kind of injuries her patients had, and bring a smile to the faces of those young men who were able to smile, was someone who should be encouraged to repeat her visits, as far as Sister was concerned.
If Dulcie herself wasn’t aware of the huge compliment she had been paid when she was actually offered a cup of tea by Sister herself, then others on the ward certainly were and duly took note.
Not that Dulcie was anyone’s fool. She wasn’t. She’d seen the looks one of the pretty nurses had been giving David, and she’d seen too the respect with which he was treated by the other men. With or without his legs, having a man like David as one’s admirer could only add to a girl’s status, especially now that Lydia wasn’t going to be on the scene.
‘Of course I’m going to the dance,’ Dulcie responded to one young pilot’s question.
‘Good, the group captain can go with you,’ Sister informed Dulcie, arriving at David’s bed just in time to hear Dulcie’s announcement, and quickly forestalling David’s attempt to refuse by suggesting, ‘I’m sure that your friend won’t mind pushing your chair, will you, dear? We can get a couple of the other patients to help you if it’s too heavy.’
‘You don’t have to go to the dance with me, you know. Lydia certainly wouldn’t have wanted to,’ David told Dulcie once Sister had gone, and he had asked the other men to ‘push off so that I can have Dulcie to myself for a few minutes’.
‘Well, I’m not Lydia, am I?’ Dulcie retorted. ‘You don’t want to let her get away with what she’s done, you know, David. Walking out on you and then getting you to give her a divorce when she’s the one that’s done wrong.’
‘I can’t blame her, Dulcie. She and I never pretended to be in love with one another, after all, and she’s not like you, you know.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Dulcie demanded.
‘It means,’ David told her, ‘that you are the kind of girl that a man just can’t help being tempted to fall in love with.’
Dulcie gave a contented sigh. The compliments David was paying her were no more than her due. Of course, it was a pity that David had lost his legs and wouldn’t be able to dance with her like he had done at the Hammersmith Palais that night he had joined her there, but the truth was that she had enjoyed herself far more here today, basking in the admiration of a group of young men whom she knew would not make real advances to her because she was David’s friend and they admired and respected him, than she did when she went out with Wilder. David was far more relaxing than Wilder, with his sometimes uncertain temper, his unreliability, his constant attempts to persuade her into a more sexual relationship with him than she wanted. That didn’t mean, though, that she intended to traipse all the way down to East Grinstead regularly. It was nearly thirty miles from London, after all, and in the country, which had no appeal whatsoever for Dulcie. She wasn’t like Sally, who had announced over breakfast this morning that she couldn’t wait for the weather to warm up so that she could go for long walks in the nearby countryside.
Although Mr MacIndoe allowed open visiting, knowing how difficult it often was for some families to come down and see their loved ones, hospital routine still had to be followed, and it was time for David to have a rest and for the nurses to attend to their patients’ needs.
Dulcie swept out of the ward as regally as any queen enjoying the adulation of her admirers, feeling very pleased with herself indeed.
She was still feeling pleased with herself over an hour later as she regaled Sally with how well received her visit had been, over an early tea of sardines on toast in their landlady’s kitchen.
‘And