The Heroes' Welcome by Louisa Young Read Free Book Online

humour – it was all so bloody tragic round here! But she would hardly write to them while they were on honeymoon: ‘Sorry to tear you from your bliss; can I moan on a bit more about my cousin and his wife?’
If they think of us at all it would be to give thanks to the Lord above that they’re not still stuck here with us
,
she thought.
They’ve escaped. They’re not really anything to us any more. Or perhaps they are. But they’re not family. They’re not responsible like I am.
She realised she didn’t know what wartime friendship meant, now that war was gone.
Would we even have met, without the war?
    It all brought up again a question that had been bothering Rose for a while. Her big question. Should she leave Locke Hill? She’d stayed – had special permission, even, to move out from the nurses’ residence at the Queen’s Hospital – in order to help them all. Her former patient, Riley; exhausted Nadine, back from nursing in France; poor sick Julia; shattered Peter … But now that Riley and Nadine were married and gone, and order – well – order was
meant
to be being restored to the world, did Peter and Julia need their own house back just for themselves and Tom? Because ideas had been emerging even in reliable Rose, over the dark winter, and – not that she could think of mentioning it – she very much wanted to leave. Throughout the war she’d given her donkey work to the hospital, and her affection to Peter and Julia, Riley and Nadine, Tom. Now, her intellect was dragging its nails down the walls of her captivity, demanding its turn. Thirty-two years old, a virgin, an old maid, and likely to remain so.
    In other words, free.
    She pictured Riley and Nadine – or tried to – but as she had never been to the south of France she didn’t have much to go on. Their one postcard (Nadine’s writing: ‘Missing you! (well, not really!)’) showed slender palm trees along a curving road and a curving beach. It was apparently a corniche. She remembered eating cornichons once or twice in France: same shape! Someone had told her – Peter, it must have been – that the word came from ‘horn’ … She pictured Riley and Nadine on a curving beach, eating tiny gherkins, with tiny horns growing out from their foreheads through their curly black hair. They would be wet and happy from the sea, young and beautiful—
    She found herself suddenly blushing. She knew perfectly well what Riley’s body looked like, from nursing him. But he was a married man, not a patient, and she was no longer his nurse.
    *
    Rose spoke to Julia about Peter. ‘I do think,’ said Rose, ‘that he might see a more … sophisticated doctor.’
    ‘Is he ill?’ said Julia. ‘Do you really think so?’ She perked up at the idea.
Of course she would
,
thought Rose.
Illness is something you could do something about. Illness is a reason.
    ‘Worth checking,’ said Rose, and, nourished by this new possibility, Julia agreed to get up after all. Rose’s constant concern was whether Peter was sticking to the new rule – Dubonnet instead of whisky, and not until six o’clock – and how one could civilly find out, without provoking a small English furore.
    ‘You don’t trust me, Rosie darling, do you?’ he’d say, politely, glittering, and she’d say, ‘Oh Peter, it’s not that …’
    And then one morning he interrupted the regular cycle of this dull and dangerous conversation to shout at her, suddenly, ferociously: ‘Then what is it? I tell you what it is – it’s a pretty sorry state of affairs, Cousin
Rose, if a man can’t have a glass of whisky in his own study, in his own house …’ – and Rose stood, pinioned, shocked – ‘without some bloody woman—’ And he stopped as suddenly as he had started, and cocked his head, and then turned and looked at her as if he had no idea where he was.
    *
    Rose had a secret.
    She and Nadine had talked, during the winter, about how a nurse could be, when returned to her family. For