‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he thought, ‘you’ve given the poor girl enough of a run around as it is. Let her be.’
Sarah Warne was at her desk in the Transport Office. She was trying to work out the shift rosters for the next fortnight and two of her fellow drivers had already called in sick over Christmas and Boxing Days. She didn’t blame them, she might have pulled the same trick herself if she hadn’t been in charge of the rota, or if she wasn’t well aware that Dr Luke Hughes was also working the full Christmas shift. She frowned, Luke had been distant lately, unusually so. There was something going on and Sarah was determined to get to the bottom of it.
Sarah and Luke met when she was in the West End and he in his second year of surgical studies across the river at St Thomas’s. She knew herself very fortunate to have made it into a West End cast. It wasn’t a major role and in truth, Sarah sometimes wondered if she was a major role sort of actress. She wasn’t sure she had the temperament to be a leading lady, and even though she was the right age, she certainly wasn’t an ingénue either. Hers was a steady, reliable character, useful for steady, reliable parts, those that held the story rather than the audience’s attention. She had been cast because she could do the job and do it well, she was calm and capable when others might fly up into the heights of passion or down to despair, depending on the notices on any given night. The reliable actress was not the most glamorous role in a company, but it was vital and Sarah understood theatre well enough to know she would stay in work a lot longer than some of the glossier girls from dramatic school and weekly rep.
She and Luke were introduced at a post-show drinks party that trekked from their rabbit warren of backstage rooms to the closest pub and on to the Café de Paris. Sarah recalled that she and her fellow actors had arrived, flushed with the success of that night’s show and the several drinks they’d had to celebrate. Luke was leaving when the dashing young leading man spotted him, clasped him to his breast and introduced him all around the bar as a dear old school chum. At first Sarah thought Luke Hughes was shy, not used to the noise and bustle of a group of actors, the back-slapping and kissing, at least two cocktails required to bring them down to the level of ordinary conversation. Left alone with him for a few minutes she tried to make conversation but his replies were so taciturn that she changed her mind and decided he was positively rude. She forgave him a little when he checked his watch, saw that it was gone two o’clock, announced himself exhausted from a day’s surgical assisting and, ignoring the imprecations of the theatricals, said he must leave them to their pleasures. She forgave him a little more when he leaned in to whisper an apology for his behaviour and invited her for supper to make up for his appalling manners that evening—‘Just as soon as these blasted final exams are out of the way’. She was grateful that her fellow cast members were too busy to overhear, fully engaged as they were in outdoing each other with tales of the worst digs they’d endured in provincial tours. Had they heard it, such a proposal would have provoked an inordinate amount of whistling and nudging among her peers and the rather good-looking Dr Hughes would have hightailed it out of the building as fast as his two feet could carry him, with no chance of a slipper on the stair to find him again.
A fortnight later Sarah met Luke for supper and, both keeping such odd hours, both understanding the strains of a team depending upon them—although Sarah well knew that she was not the pivot for matters of life and death that Luke was, regardless of how desperately important her fellow actors believed the theatre to be—a sincere friendship developed. The friendship was definitely edging towards romance when Sarah opened the door of her little flat to a telegram notifying her of her sister’s sudden illness and that her widowed mother needed her help. The long journey home took Sarah from soft London summer to a bitter New Zealand winter and her sister’s death, and all too soon afterwards came that awful, inevitable morning in early spring that brought the declaration of war. Mrs Warne was even happier to have Sarah home then, far from the horrors that London would surely face, even though Sarah herself would have liked nothing better than to do her bit for the city she adored.
Sarah and Luke became proficient correspondents, sending long, honest letters full of friendship and a growing understanding, letters in which Luke proved himself far more open on paper than he had often been in person. Then came a year with just a postcard or two, Luke stationed at a military hospital close to battle lines and Sarah worried for his safety as the months dragged on and the news became darker every week. Finally there was a glimmer of hope and she was understandably delighted when military efficiency determined that a British doctor serving in North Africa was better suited to accompanying a contingent of wounded New Zealand servicemen than returning to England and, while there, he should take a six month stint at a hospital now dealing with military casualties. That hospital turned out to be Mount Seager of all places.
Luke found his first few weeks at Mount Seager extremely difficult. He was not daunted by the workload, the outdated equipment, the broken-down buildings, or the leaking roofs that haunted Matron’s nightmares, these were nothing compared to the hospital tents in which he had been working for the past months. His upset was a champing at the bit of duty. So many of his friends from school were out in the field, the majority of his medical colleagues were caring for wounded soldiers in the heat of battle or coping with the atrocious conditions in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, with wave after wave of casualties coming in from the nightly raids. Luke bitterly missed being in the centre of things and being useful. He spent his first month in New Zealand in a severe funk until Rosamund Farquharson took him to task.
‘Don’t be such a prig, Dr Hughes.’
Luke had been going through his files just before a ward round and hadn’t realized he was grumbling aloud about ‘this blasted backwater’. He certainly didn’t expect a reply from the office staff, no matter how much Miss Farquharson fancied herself quite the catch.
Never one to hold back when she had something to say, Rosamund gave him a piece of her mind, ‘We all want to do our bit, but not everyone can be the hero just because we fancy it, not even the likes of you with your clean white coat and London certificates on the Surgery Office wall. Yes, you probably could be getting your hands dirtier somewhere else, but come on, do you really believe your friends out there, giving their all, would begrudge you this? They’re no mates if they would. Looking after servicemen who’re doing their damnedest here or anywhere else, it’s all part of the work. And by the way,’ she added, her well-defined eyebrows raised, a smile on her rigorously carmined lips, ‘we New Zealanders might gripe about being stuck way over here when it’s going to blazes everywhere else, but you’ll find we’re not so keen on you Pommie chaps doing the same. Some of those lads in the military wards are going stir-crazy, they’re spoiling for a scrap. I’d watch it if I were you.’
Rosamund turned on heels that were definitely not regulation, and flounced off across the hospital yard in a way that several of the recovering servicemen at Mount Seager, taking a breather on the porch of Military 1, found enormously reviving. Even Dr Hughes allowed that being told off by Miss Farquharson was amusing, particularly in conjunction with the way the word ‘Pommie’ sounded in her accent. Rosamund’s New Zealand vowels had been determinedly and intentionally rounded by her years in London. Moreover, he had to admit she had a point. He took note, pulled himself together and, aware that he was now the most senior doctor available to Mount Seager, gave himself to the work with an alacrity that pleased Matron enormously and surprised Sister Comfort even more.
Even though she didn’t expect their friendship to feel the same in wartime New Zealand as it had been in London before the war, Sarah had expected that she and Luke might take up where the letters had left off. Looking back she found it hard to imagine how carefree they had been, even with the constant pressure of Luke’s studies. Now she sometimes wondered if they had been deliberately blind, willfully ignoring the growing tensions on the Continent. Her sister’s death, her mother’s gnawing grief, the awful news that came to them daily, the broken soldiers she met in her work, young men who very occasionally let slip the mask of bravado, all of it meant that Sarah was no longer capable of ignoring the obvious—Luke