In hindsight, that didn’t seem as good a suggestion as she’d thought at the time.

  She let out a long groan. All her problems could be sourced to her former husband, Mr. Richard Braithwaite—Dickie. A moderately handsome man, what Dickie lacked in looks he made up for with charm. His bonhomie and easy manners had completely won her over, as they had for all the other women, too, including the one he’d decided to marry after her.

  Following the divorce, the village shunned her, and precisely at the time when she needed friends. The WVS was her success. The jumble sales raised good money. The sewing bees and knitting groups ran like clockwork. Evacuees were housed and schooled. Her canteen was the best run in the country. She had been at the helm of it all.

  And now it had been whipped away.

  She was left with nothing, nobody.

  Betty was the last tangible thing in her life.

  She remembered her only daughter as a baby, the way her small back arched as she sat on the living room floor. And as a little girl, with her mop of brown curls, Betty had danced around the house singing, filling it with magic. And when she’d been older, the games: dominoes, crossword puzzles, the endless card games. Occasionally they’d sit at the dining room table together, shuffling and dealing. At some point—Mrs. Braithwaite couldn’t pinpoint precisely when—she’d stopped letting Betty win, and at some other point, Betty had begun letting her win, making sure of an even draw at the end of every game.

  Mrs. Braithwaite would say, “Goodness, another draw, Betty!”

  And Betty would give her a shrewd half smile. “Well played, Mum!”

  But as Betty grew, she hadn’t needed her mother so much. They’d had less in common. Mrs. Braithwaite had been busy with the village ladies and caring for Aunt Augusta, who’d come to live with them when Betty was nine. Somewhere along the line, Mrs. Braithwaite had decided that the girl was old enough to look after herself.

  She had her own life to lead.

  Then, when war became imminent, Betty had left for London. It was with a deep pang of regret that Mrs. Braithwaite recalled that day. Betty had quietly organized her things and come down to the hallway, her battered brown suitcase in her hand, its broken handle tied up with string.

  “Good-bye then, Mum,” Betty had said in that thoughtful, rather serious way she had. She was wearing a black felt hat over her brown curls, her gray mackintosh belted tightly around her narrow waist.

  “You will stay out of trouble, won’t you?” Mrs. Braithwaite snapped, thinking about the stories of young women becoming pregnant, abandoning their morals “just in case a bomb had their name on it.” Not that Betty seemed overly keen on men, but one could never tell.

  “Of course I will!” Betty said, tilting her head to one side as if to say “you silly old thing.”

  Then there was that awkward moment when Betty turned to Mrs. Braithwaite, waiting for something else, a kiss on the cheek perhaps, an arm around her shoulders. But Mrs. Braithwaite wasn’t keen on that kind of sentimentality. They’d never been a very demonstrative family, Mrs. Braithwaite preferring not to touch other people.

  There was a word for that look on Betty’s face: forlorn.

  “Don’t you remember how I used to run up for a cuddle when I was young?” Betty had said, out of the blue, taking a few steps toward her, trying to lighten the moment with a little laugh.

  Mrs. Braithwaite took a step back. “Children do that, you know,” she said dismissively. “Wait until you have your own; then you’ll find out.”

  “Maybe I won’t have any.” Betty turned to the front door, a strangled sadness twisting in her voice. “I’m not sure I want to be a mother. It seems so hard and exhausting. Sort of pointless.”

  Mrs. Braithwaite knew what Betty was implying, that Betty’s experiences of her own mother had been chilly and distant, but she chose to ignore it. It was too late, she felt. The sooner Betty was out of the door, the less she’d have to think about it. Taking a deep breath, she watched as her only child, suitcase in hand, let herself out.

  Betty’s departure marked the beginning of the end of the marriage. Without Betty at home, Dickie’s work trips became more and more frequent. Then one day he simply didn’t come home. The divorce papers arrived the following week.

  Betty had been in London throughout the divorce, so she’d missed the brunt of the bad times: the pointless arguments, the bitterness, the abysmal chill of what had been home. It hurt that Betty had stayed keenly in touch with her father. She took after him, with her narrow frame, her continual arm folding, the half smile. It became easier for Mrs. Braithwaite to turn her back.

  As the train pulled into Bexley Station, Mrs. Braithwaite felt a twinge of discomfort. How could she have been so cold?

  And that was when she became resolved.

  She had to make amends.

  Whatever Mrs. Braithwaite had been expecting of the Bexley Sewage Works, she found the building far more ostentatious and dramatic than its title warranted.

  “It was the Victorians, madam.” A nasal young woman walked her from the reception desk into the heart of the voluminous, cathedral-like palace. “They saw sewage treatment as revolutionary, a monumental change for the better.” She turned and smiled. “Funny, it gets a bit whiffy in here, but it always looks glorious.”

  “Quite,” Mrs. Braithwaite said, thinking the opposite.

  The interior was decorated like a cross between a parliamentary state room and an ornate public toilet, and as their footsteps echoed around the high-ceilinged corridors, they came to the most opulent part of all: the head offices.

  “This is Mrs. Braithwaite,” the young woman told an older woman behind a desk. “She’s come to see her daughter, who works here.”

  “Name, please?” the older woman asked, without smiling.

  “Her name is Betty Braithwaite,” Mrs. Braithwaite replied clearly. She always pronounced her words properly. Aunt Augusta felt that it immediately put one above everyone else.

  “We don’t have any Bettys here.” The older woman gave Mrs. Braithwaite what could only be described as a withering look.

  “But you must have! She told me this is her place of work.” Mrs. Braithwaite took out the small pile of letters. Selecting one of them, she thrust it, open, before the woman. “You see, it says so here.”

  The woman snatched the letter and studied it, then handed it back with irritation. “This letter was written in September 1939. She must have changed her job since then.”

  If there was one thing Mrs. Braithwaite could not abide, it was someone getting the better of her, but for once she controlled an impulse to raise her voice at the insufferable woman, to tell her to simply find her daughter. She realized with unusual insightfulness that this wasn’t going to get her anywhere. In fact, what she needed to do was to be polite and, most of all, patient.

  “I wonder,” she said with a smile, “would it be possible to look over the files and tell me when she left?”

  The woman glared up at her. “Oh, all right.” She let out a great sigh, pushed her ledger to one side, and went slowly to a filing cabinet.

  After going through four drawers, she returned with a single sheet of paper. “This is the only record we have, from the very beginning of the war. It states that Betty works in the Records Office, but this is the Records Office, and we’ve never had a girl called Betty working here.”

  “If it says so, you must have.”

  The older woman crossed her arms. “Well, I say that we haven’t! It’s only old Mrs. Allen and me here. No one else is allowed to touch the files.”

  “Maybe she works in another part of the building, but they didn’t change her record?” This woman’s attitude was beginning to aggravate her. Muscling forward over the desk, Mrs. Braithwaite put her large, snarling face in front of the woman’s.

  But the woman pursed her lips and snapped back, “I’m afraid, madam, there are no other records of her, no one called Betty or Braithwaite at all.” She softened slightly. “Perhaps you should try St. Thomas’s Hospital. A lot of missing people are found there these days, injured from the bombs.” She took her ledger out and went back to her work, only saying, “Good day to you.”

  “Well, I should like to be able to say the same to you,” Mrs. Braithwaite said in a huff, and throwing a final menacing look at the woman, she headed outside.

  It had begun to rain, cold, fat drops plunging at her feet as if the sky were slowly falling down around her. She retied her head scarf.

  Betty had lied to her.

  But why?

  And where was she now?

  5.

  Mrs. Braithwaite didn’t like going to hospitals. The first time she’d been in one was when she was six, awakening shivery with pneumonia, close to death, her parents nowhere to be seen. But she couldn’t think of that now, and she quickly pushed the muddled sequence of images to the back of her mind, as Aunt Augusta had told her to do whenever they surfaced.

  But ever since then, she’d felt a foreboding that made her gasp for breath at the mere mention of a hospital. And now, today, she knew that she was going to have to brave one again.

  Betty could be injured, dying, or worse. She had to find her.

  Dithering before she entered the massive Victorian building, nausea welled up inside. But taking a deep breath, she strode forward. Memories crowded into her mind: the freezing chill, the smell of antiseptic, the sound of nurses whispering, “Is she still alive?” The images were ungraspable, but instead of shutting them out, Mrs. Braithwaite had to get used to them. She couldn’t let this age-old fear get in the way of finding Betty.

  Aunt Augusta had always warned against thinking too hard. “It’s not how the Empire was won!” she would insist. Death was a subject particularly to be avoided, especially the death of her parents. Hence, it was rarely referred to, they were rarely referred to, and when they were, it was always quickly, brusquely.

  As she took her first steps into the hospital, the huge, galleried entry began to spin. Clasping hold of the front desk, she tried to get her bearings.

  “Do you need any help?” a girl behind the desk asked, getting up to put a hand underneath Mrs. Braithwaite’s elbow for support. “The Emergency Department is through the doors on your left.”

  “I’ve come to find out if my daughter’s here,” Mrs. Braithwaite explained, still jittery. “She’s been missing since Friday.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to join the queue over there.” The girl pointed to a solitary desk with a line of people that reached back to the door.

  “Thank you,” she replied, scowling at the line, which at least had the effect of distracting her from her nerves.

  Mrs. Braithwaite didn’t hold with queues of any sort. Surely the significance of her quest gave her the right to go to the front, notwithstanding the importance of her time.

  So she barged forward.

  The man she knocked out of the way looked annoyed for a second before encountering Mrs. Braithwaite’s sternest face, and then seemed to slip aside, unsure how to react.

  “No pushing in!” another woman called from farther back in the line, a few others muttering, too.

  But Mrs. Braithwaite was already at the desk, jabbing a fat finger on a list and demanding that her daughter be found.

  “There’s a B. Braithwaite upstairs in Ward 10,” the woman at the desk said in a dismissive way.

  Shock hit Mrs. Braithwaite. Had she really expected Betty to be here, in the hospital? What on earth had happened to her?

  Head pounding, she strode for the stairs, forgetting about her phobia, climbing quickly up and marching off to find Ward 10, which was on the second floor.

  At the entrance, she drew to an abrupt halt. The long, darkened hall of beds was deathly silent.

  “I’m looking for B. Braithwaite,” she said to the nurse at the desk by the door.

  “Shh,” the young nurse whispered back, a kindly look about her dark eyes. “She’s in the eighth bed on the left. You can let her know that you’re here by touching her hand.”

  A cold chill stirred inside Mrs. Braithwaite as she walked cautiously into the interior of the ward. The windows were covered with curtains that allowed only a shadowy dark light through the black fabric. Amidst the gloom, on either side, lay casualties of the bombings: women with bandages and casts glowing white in the dank, antiseptic air. Beneath the veil of sterility there lingered an underlying stench of burned skin, burned hair. Some of the bandages seeped with fluids, possibly the source of another putrid smell. An amputee’s leg stump was darkened with blood. Plastered limbs were held up with chained contraptions, likening the scene momentarily to a torture chamber. One woman had so much plaster on her that it was difficult to see whether she was really a person at all.

  The air was lifeless. Still as an empty church, silent as a mortuary.

  Mrs. Braithwaite’s feet echoed on the polished wooden floor as she walked slowly down the aisle. Eyes followed her, even though nothing else moved.

  She was petrified. What had happened to her daughter? She hadn’t been expecting this. No one had warned her.

  Carefully counting the beds, she stopped just before the eighth one. On it was a mound, a body with a heavily bandaged head lying motionless on the pillow. Below the sheets, the mound was diminished at the other end, indicating that one of her legs had somehow come away from her body.

  Mrs. Braithwaite let out a small, hollow cry, “Betty!”

  She rushed forward, stopping before she went to put her arms around her, suddenly conscious that she couldn’t do that. It would be too painful, possibly even harmful. She ended up turning her hands back on herself, gripping them together, kneading them into a tight ball.

  “Betty, are you there?” she cried.

  She peered over, through the dim light, at the small portion of the face showing between the thick bandages. Her eyes were tightly closed, her nose and mouth scarred with scratches, a deep gash coming from the side of her lip, closed together with two reddish-brown stitches. Her neck was held up with a stiff collar, and Mrs. Braithwaite wondered if all of her hair had been burned because nothing protruded from the bandages around her scalp. Not a single wisp.

  But one thing was immediately clear.

  This was not Betty.

  She was older, although not by much, and her nose was too small, her mouth too full. Even with the injuries and bandages, it was plain to see.

  Mrs. Braithwaite felt her whole body go limp with relief, putting a hand on the bedside table for support. The thought of Betty going through all that pain was beyond comprehension.

  She quickly looked down at the face to be sure. Yes, it definitely wasn’t Betty. This B. Braithwaite must have been a Bertha or a Beryl. She wondered what she had looked like, who she’d been. Whether she was aware of what had happened to her, where she had ended up.

  “Touch her hand, to let her know you’re here.” The nurse had come up behind her.

  “But she isn’t my daughter, after all,” Mrs. Braithwaite whispered.

  “It’s all right.” The nurse smiled, as calm and serene as could be. “You can still let her know that you’re here.”

  “But I don’t know her.”

  “I’m sure she’ll enjoy the company.” That smile again, enticing—or was it coercing?

  Even though Mrs. Braithwaite would rather not—it was awkward enough as it was—she didn’t want to cause offense.

  And she didn’t want to seem heartless, not to this kind young nurse.

  One of the injured woman’s hands lay outside the sheet. It was half covered with bandages and mottled with blood and small wounds.

  “She doesn’t have burns on this hand,” the nurse said. “So it’s all right to hold it. I think she likes the connection. It must be terribly lonely for her in there, not being able to see or speak or hear.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She’s a hero. Saved eleven children from a fire in a bombed school before the roof collapsed on her.” She gave a small shudder. “They had to amputate one of her legs to get her out. They didn’t even have time for pain relief, which is probably why she went into a coma. Absolutely dreadful if you think about it.”

  Mrs. Braithwaite decided she’d rather not.

  “She worked at the school, you see,” the nurse went on. “A teacher.” She sighed. “Some people have so much love in their hearts. They’d do anything for anybody. They’re the real heroes of this war.”

  “What about the men fighting on the front?”

  “They’re heroes, too, but not like this courageous woman. No one told her what to do; she simply saw someone hurt, someone in trouble, and found the bravery to go into the chaos, help in the best way she could. It didn’t matter whether it put her own life in danger.”

  “And look how she’s repaid,” Mrs. Braithwaite murmured, looking at the tumbledown brutalized body.

  The nurse smiled calmly. “But think of the children she saved. They owe her their lives! They’ll always remember her. It must be wonderful to know that you made so much difference to so many people’s lives. You enabled them to live! Can you imagine that?”

  Mrs. Braithwaite let the idea roll around her mind. “Yes, I do know what you mean. But it’ll be a difficult life for her when she comes out of the coma.”

  The nurse looked sadly at the woman. “If she comes out of it.”

  Mrs. Braithwaite looked aghast. She hadn’t realized it was that drastic. The poor woman was wavering on the border between life and death, waiting for one to come, the other to gently recede. “Does she stand a good chance?”

  The nurse shook her head, a movement so fragile that it was barely perceptible. “We don’t know how much she can hear, how much her thought processes are working. That’s why we keep touching her hand. We want to make sure she knows we’re here.”

 

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