Winter on the Mersey(57)

‘Laura!’ The voice was husky, as if he had been breathing in the dust that was everywhere. ‘I say, Laura! Over here!’

Laura stopped dead. A chill ran down her back despite the heat of the day.

‘Laura!’ The voice was louder.

She stared ahead. This couldn’t be happening; she was imagining things. Time seemed to stand still as she gazed in disbelief; all the hustle and bustle of the surrounding city faded into silence as she focused on the figure in the doorway.

‘Laura,’ the voice said again. ‘You aren’t seeing things, it really is me, Freddy.’

She ran forward towards him, suppressing a sob as she acknowledged that it was truly Freddy, that dear, familiar figure she’d known all her life. She tried to take in the changes in her handsome brother since last she’d seen him – he was thinner and standing not quite straight, his face etched with worry. His tousled hair was uneven, and did not quite fully mask a deep red scar on his head. Yet she would have known him anywhere. It was Freddy. It really was her long-lost brother Freddy.

She gasped as the full recognition hit her. ‘It’s you. It is you. Oh, good lord. I can’t believe it. It’s you, you’re here.’ She put out a hand to touch his arm, as if to make certain he wasn’t a figment of her imagination. ‘Oh, Freddy, where have you been? What’s happened to you? How did you get back? Are you all right? Your poor head. Do Ma and Pa know? How long have you been back?’

‘Steady on, old girl.’ Freddy’s face broke into an amused smile, revealing deep laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘One thing at a time.’

She took in the sight of him, in his creased and faded blue shirt, trousers rolled up as if they weren’t his and didn’t quite fit, belt pulled tight because he was too thin for the waistband. This was not the dapper Freddy she remembered. What must he have been through to appear so changed? But she didn’t care. He was back; her beloved, aggravating, dearest brother was alive after all. She had dreamed of this moment but scarcely dared to hope it could ever come true. Now here he was, standing on the pavement of a residential street in northwest London.

‘Yes, sorry. Yes, of course. But all the same, how? When and what have you … no, I’ve a better idea,’ she said, trying to organise her tumbling thoughts. ‘There’s a decent pub around the next corner. Let’s go there. They’ve got a garden at the back and we can be cool there and you can tell me everything. Can you do that? Have you got time?’

He laughed. ‘As long as you’re paying. I’ve just about got what I’m standing up in at the moment. I’ll treat you next time, once they’ve sorted me out. I’m on my way to being debriefed – the War Office know I’m back, but I had to see you first before I’m sent back to my unit. I expect they’ll get all the information out of me first, before they give me a decent set of clothes and a bit of spare cash.’

He was smiling, but she could tell he was tired, that this was all a bit of an effort. She offered him her arm and together they rounded the corner and found the little pub, set back from the road, almost empty apart from a few older customers who had called in for a quick drink after their working day.

‘You go and find somewhere quiet to sit in the shade and I’ll get you a nice beer,’ she offered, but he gave her a look she remembered from their childhood that meant he wasn’t happy being told what to do.

‘I’m not quite an invalid, you know,’ he said mildly. ‘Can’t have a girl ordering the drinks, even if she is my stroppy little sister.’

Laura almost argued back out of deeply ingrained habit, but then could see that his pride would be hurt unless she gave way. So for once she didn’t press the point, but let him speak to the barman and carry the glasses out to the garden, where they saw that the table in the corner was free. She waited until he was seated comfortably before taking the wooden bench opposite. There was a gentle breeze blowing the leaves of the neatly trimmed privet hedge. She waited for a moment to see if he would start, but then her patience ran out. ‘Well? What’s happened? Where were you, when did you get back and how did you know where I’d be …’

‘All right, Laura, I’ll start at the beginning and tell you as much as I can remember,’ he said, giving way to the inevitable, ‘but I warn you, there will be gaps. You’ll have noticed I’m not quite the man I was, and there are some bits of the story I simply can’t remember. So go easy on me.’ He rubbed his hand across his face and blond hair, making more of it stick up.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Laura, eager to reassure him and to know more as soon as possible.

‘Well … I was sent on a mission to fly over France,’ he began haltingly. Then, as if the floodgates had opened, he described waking up in a field, his plane on fire beside him, faces staring down at him, speaking a language he could barely understand. The people had argued about whether to leave him, and some of them thought he was already dead. Then the one who appeared to be their leader came closer, realised he was still breathing, and ordered a piece of sacking to be fetched to use as a stretcher. He had been taken to a nearby barn. There he had stayed, he had no idea for how long. He’d drifted in and out of consciousness and had been so ill he hadn’t even worried about where he was or if he was safe.

That had come later, when slowly he had begun to stay awake for long enough to understand he was a problem for the people looking after him. Several women had brought food and water, and he had woken one day and noticed he was in clean but threadbare clothes, not anything he recognised as his own. He still didn’t understand much of what they were saying, but he was gradually catching more and more of it, piecing together fragments of their conversation with snippets that came back to him from lessons at school. But when he tried to think about his school, he couldn’t remember where it was or when he’d been there. He could remember almost nothing, in fact. Try as he might, he couldn’t even manage his own name. He became aware of the seasons changing, working out that he must have been hidden in that remote barn for months on end – if not longer.