The House by Princes Park Read Free Page A

Next door’s deaf as a post and the street won’t mind.’
    ‘I’d sooner not. And I don’t feel all that bad. Most of the births that I remember were much worse than this.’
    The time passed slowly. Children could be heard playing in the street outside. Someone knocked on the door but Madge ignored it. A woman in a house behind was singing, her voice carrying clearly in the still, evening air. ‘Keep the home fires burning...’
    It was the song the men used to sing in France, Olivia remembered. It could be heard late at night, from miles away across the fields, when the fighting had finished for the day. Some nights, the nurses and the patients joined in. They’d been singing it the night when she and Tom had made love...
    ... the sky had been spectacular, she recalled; deep, sapphire blue, as lustrous as the jewel, and powdered with a myriad glittering stars. The waning moon was a delicate lemon curve.
    Although not yet completely dark, it was dark enough to disguise the fact that the French landscape was a battlefield on which more than a million men had died. In daylight, the flat ground was a sea of dried mud, a jigsaw of trenches, empty now that the fighting had moved on.
    Spurts of white smoke could be seen on the horizon, where the battle now was, where shells were landing, killing yet more men. The smoke occasionally turned to flames, indicating a building had been hit. On such a night, the flames even added something to the splendour of theview, flickering as they did like giant candles at the furthest edge of the world. A few broken trees were silhouetted like crazy dancing figures against the lucid blueness of the sky.
    People had come outside the hospital to marvel at the magnificent sight amidst so much mayhem; staff, a few of the walking wounded. There was the faint murmur of voices, the occasional glimmer of a cigarette.
    ‘Olivia! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
    ‘Tom!’ Olivia turned and instinctively lifted her arms to embrace the man limping towards her. She dropped them as he came nearer and hoped he hadn’t noticed. He was her patient. He mustn’t know how she felt, though she sensed he had already guessed. After all, she had a strong suspicion he felt the same, something of a miracle when he was so attractive and she so plain.
    ‘Great night,’ he said, panting slightly. The walk had been an effort.
    ‘Beautiful,’ she breathed. She nodded towards the smoke and the flames in the distance. ‘That spoils it rather. And there’s something sinister about not being able to hear the explosions.’
    ‘Or the screams,’ Tom said drily. He took her hand, his fingers curling warmly inside her own. She made no attempt to pull away. ‘So, this is it! Our last night together.’ He gave the glimmer of a smile. ‘Or should I say, our last night in the near vicinity of each other. I’m sorry my leg is better. I feel tempted to take off my clothes, wander into the darkness, and pray I catch pneumonia again.’
    ‘Not if I have anything to do with it!’ She pretended to be outraged. He was joking. He was American, and the Americans joked all the time. They seemed exceptionally good-humoured. ‘I’m a nurse. I want my patients to get better, not worse.’
    ‘Don’t be so practical.’
    ‘Nurses are always practical, they have to be.’ She didn’t feel practical, not now, with her hand held so tightly in his.
    He gave another tiny smile. ‘Couldn’t you be impractical just for tonight?’
    ‘Not if it means you catching pneumonia, no. Anyway, it’s exceptionally warm. You’re not likely to catch anything except a few insect bites. Mind you, they can be nasty.’
    ‘In that case,’ he said lightly, ‘Maybe we could forget about war, explosions in the distance, illnesses, hospitals, doctors and nurses, and just talk about each other?’
    She should really say no, that’s impractical too. Instead, she murmured, ‘There’s nothing much to say.’ She already knew quite a