Wives & Sweethearts

by Lilian Harry

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

A novel of love, separation, infidelity and indecision set in the 1950s and 1960s Clare and Kathy are young, inexperienced and very much in love with their men. But being 'married to the Navy' is harder than either of them imagined. With a husband at sea and a new baby to consider, Clare finds herself coping with motherhood alone, and when Martyn returns he is unsure how to deal with his wife's new-found independence. As for Kathy, newly engaged to Brian, temptations come her way which are impossible to ignore. Even when all their lives seem to be settling into some sort of routine, it seems that their troubles are only just beginning...

Release date: August 19, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 417

Sample

The shrill of the bell sliced through the quiet murmur of the ward, signifying the end of visiting time. Clare, lying on her back in the high hospital bed and holding her husband’s hand tightly in her own, felt as if it had sliced her life in two.

In a few moments, Martyn would walk out of her life, leaving her to face alone the reality of childbirth, the unknown of a baby, a new person for whom she – and only she – would be responsible. For her, within hours, life would change for ever, while for him it would be just as he had planned and expected it to be. And it would be a year before he could even begin to catch up. A year before she would see him again.

The bell rang for a second time. They stared at each other, agonised.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Martyn said miserably. ‘Oh, Clare …’

‘It’s all right.’ She gazed at him, her brown eyes almost black with misery, trying to memorise every detail of his face, trying to ignore the slow tightening of her stomach. ‘I know.’ Her mouth quivered suddenly and she turned her head away slightly, feeling the hard lump in her throat. The tightening sensation had eased. She reached out her hand and touched his face, letting her fingertips move slowly over cheeks, chin, eyebrows, nose, as if trying to learn his features that way. It’ll be a year before I can do this again, she thought despairingly, a whole year. We won’t be together again till 1960. Nineteen-sixty. And we’ll be different people then. We’ll be parents. Her stomach tightened again.

‘I’m sure it’s starting. I’m sure it is.’ Her hand shook. ‘If it’s born before five o’clock in the morning, you’ll be able to see it. Just for a few minutes. Oh, Martyn, you will ring up, won’t you? Just in case.’

‘Of course I will, but I won’t be able to come for long. The ship sails at seven o’clock.’ He laid his face beside hers on the pillow and kissed her lips. ‘It’s you I want to see most. I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. A year. A whole year.’ He rubbed his nose gently against her cheek and stroked her long fair hair, lifting it in his hand and winding it round his fingers. ‘At least you’ll have your family and Kathy to keep you company.’

Kathy Stubbs was Clare’s best friend. They had known each other for years – since they were five years old and had sat nervously at the same desk in infants’ class on their first day at school. Kathy’s fiancé Brian and Martyn had been friends for years too, and had been apprentices together at HMS Collingwood. Now they were serving on the same ship. The four of them had met at a Collingwood dance and had gone about together a lot, sometimes swimming at Stokes Bay or going to a summer show at South Parade Pier in Southsea. They’d got engaged at about the same time, but when they found that the ship would be away for a year, Clare and Martyn had brought their wedding forward while Kathy and Brian had decided to wait.

When the boys were away, the two girls would meet at least once a week, and Kathy had been into the maternity home once already, in the week before the ship came into Portsmouth harbour. She was almost as excited about the baby as Clare.

The bell rang again, insistently, warning the stragglers. The other husbands were straightening up, moving away from their wives’ beds. Nobody glanced towards the corner where Clare and Martyn struggled with their goodbyes. They all knew that he was going away for a whole year, and that Clare’s baby was due almost any minute. They kept their faces averted, to give the couple as much privacy as they could. It was such a shame that they couldn’t have spent their last night together in their own home, the new bungalow they had scraped together the money to buy, instead of in this public place.

‘I don’t know why they can’t let you have your curtains drawn,’ Marge in the next bed had said as the women sat up in bed, brushed and combed and made-up, waiting for visiting time to start. ‘It’s cruel, making you say goodbye in front of everyone.’

‘It’s so that no one thinks there’s something wrong.’ Clare had asked the staff nurse already and been refused. ‘Someone might get scared.’ But they would soon have been reassured, she thought. Everyone in the ward knew about her and Martyn. Not that it had mattered all that much anyway. She and Martyn were too absorbed in each other to worry that others might be watching them. Nothing mattered on this night, in their last few moments together for a whole long year.

It was their last kiss. She felt his lips, hungry and despairing. She clung to him, wanting to pour all her love into this last anguished caress. For just a few moments more, he was here in her arms, warm and solid, smelling of that curious smell that was his alone, a mixture of coaltar soap and sweat and fresh white shirt and navy-blue doeskin uniform. She drew in her breath, wanting to hold his warmth, his scent, in her memory and in her heart.

‘Goodbye, Clare, my darling,’ he whispered, and she closed her eyes as he drew away.

‘Goodbye, Martyn.’ Determinedly, she held on to her voice, willing it not to shake. ‘Take – take care of yourself. Write as often as you can.’

‘I’ll write every day.’

He was standing up. He was moving away. She watched him turn from her, walk down the ward. At the door, he paused and looked back and lifted his hand. She touched her fingers to her lips, and then he was gone. The space where he had stood was empty.

She caught one more glimpse of him, walking past the window, lagging a little behind the other husbands, his head bent as if he was trying to hide his tears. A tall, slender young man, not quite twenty-three years old, soon to be a father. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps after all this wasn’t their goodbye and he would be back in the morning, arriving with the first trill of the blackbird, to catch a glimpse of their baby almost as soon as it was born. But she didn’t think it was likely. The contractions, if that was what they were, were too faint, too far apart. The nurses had told her that first babies usually took longer to arrive. There wasn’t much chance that this one would be born before morning.

Now he was truly gone, and the ward was beginning its late-night bustle. The flowers had to be taken out to a side room by the mothers who were up and about, the cocoa and biscuits handed round, the babies brought in for their last feed. Clare, who was not allowed out of bed except to go to the toilet, and who had no baby to feed, lay back on her pillows. She stared for a minute or two at the sketch she had once made of Martyn and had framed beside her bed, but it made her want to cry and she looked round for the first time and caught Marge’s eye.

‘You all right?’ the other girl said, and Clare nodded. ‘I think you’re ever so brave. I couldn’t let my chap go off like that, knowing I’d not see him again for a year. I’d be in floods.’

‘It wouldn’t help him, would it?’ Clare said. ‘It’d just make us both feel worse.’ She knew that if she started to cry now she wouldn’t be able to stop. The lump in her throat was so hard she could barely swallow the cocoa, and the biscuit was as dry as sand.

She watched the babies come in, the nurses carrying two at a time, one on each arm, and she felt her stomach tighten again, but that was all it was: just a tight feeling. It wasn’t a pain. The baby wasn’t going to be born this side of tomorrow.

‘I think I’ll go to sleep,’ she said, and lay down, turning on her side away from the other women, looking at the drawing again. He’d be on the bus now, she thought, going down to Portsmouth harbour. He’d get on the little ferryboat and chug across to Pompey, and then walk up the Hard on the other side and in at the dockyard gate and through the yard, past HMS Victory in her dry dock and so to the Southern Railway jetty where his own ship was moored. And then he’d get undressed, folding all his clothes neatly and putting them in his locker, perhaps looking for a minute or two at the picture of the Isle of Wight she had drawn for him. Then he’d get into his bunk and lie there like her, maybe sleeping, maybe just lying awake, dreading the long, empty year that stretched ahead.

Except that it wouldn’t be empty. By the time they met again, Martyn would have been all round the world. He would have been to the Far East, to Australia, to the Caribbean. And Clare would have had her first baby. The baby would be a year old.

You knew it would be like this, she told herself. You knew if you married a sailor you’d have to be separated a lot. But she hadn’t known that she’d have to let him go the night before their baby was born. She hadn’t known that the pain of letting him go was going to be like this.

Her stomach tightened again, slowly, softly, like the tender squeeze of a lover, but it still couldn’t really be called a pain, and it wasn’t enough to keep her awake. Worn out by bitten-back misery, she closed her eyes and slept.

When she woke next morning, it was half-past seven and Martyn’s ship had been at sea for thirty minutes.

Martyn was on deck as it steamed slowly out of the harbour, passing the masts of HMS Victory in her dry dock, and the semaphore tower to the port side, and the jostling yachts at Camper & Nicholson’s, and the ferry pontoon at Gosport to starboard. He gazed longingly up the little creeks in the direction of Elson, where Clare was lying in her bed at the maternity home. He’d telephoned at five, as he’d promised, but there was no news and he’d been half disappointed and half relieved, knowing that there would have been barely time for him to get there and back in time for the sailing, and such a brief time together, even seeing the baby, would have been almost too painful to bear.

It had never occurred to him, when he’d signed up for twelve years’ service, that he would fall so deeply in love, or that leaving would tear him apart like this. Going to sea had been his ambition ever since he’d first been taken to Plymouth as a small boy and gone aboard one of the naval ships in Devonport. Although it hadn’t quite fulfilled his romantic, boyish dreams – the life was harder than he’d expected – it was also much more demanding and satisfying. And he liked the companionship of the other men, and the runs ashore in foreign ports.

All the same, he had never foreseen the dreadful ache of having to leave the woman he loved, and the thought of her giving birth to his baby – perhaps at this very moment – and then being on her own for a whole year, stabbed him with anguish. A whole year before he saw her again, a year before he saw his child for the first time. It wouldn’t be a baby by then, it would be a toddler, crawling, perhaps even walking, starting to talk. Would Clare teach it to say ‘Daddy’? Would she show it his photograph, and would the baby understand?

Suppose it didn’t like him …

‘Come on, Martyn,’ Brian said as they made their way down to the mess. ‘A year’s not so long, really. And babies aren’t much cop for the first few months. It’ll just be getting interesting when you go home.’

‘Well, it’s all part of the deal, I know,’ Martyn said, casting a last look at the Gosport shoreline as the ship passed out of the harbour into the Solent. ‘And Clare understands that too. But it still tears you to bits.’ He glanced at his friend. ‘Don’t you feel that too? Aren’t you missing Kathy already?’

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ Brian, too, gave a last swift look at the ferry gardens. Kathy had promised to be there to wave goodbye and he was sure he could see her, leaning on the rails. ‘But I’m not going to let it stop me enjoying this. A year at sea, Martyn! Think of it – and think of all the places we’re going to see. It’s what we always wanted. We’re going to have a whale of a time.’

He clattered swiftly down the gangway and Martyn followed more slowly. The smell of frying bacon was wafting up from the mess and he was aware of sudden hunger. He still ached for Clare, but he knew Brian was right. They’d dreamed of this for years. There was no point in not making the most of it.

Sixteen, that’s all Clare Whiting had been when she’d first met Martyn Perry, and he’d been nineteen. He was an apprentice at HMS Collingwood, the Naval shore training station between Gosport and Fareham. He’d just got a motorbike and joined the local motorcycle club. Clare’s brother Ian belonged to the club too, and Clare often went with him to watch the trials or scrambles that the club organised. She’d met Martyn at one of them.

Ian was in the Navy too. He was in the Fleet Air Arm, servicing aircraft. He’d been away a lot when Clare was younger, serving his own apprenticeship in Scotland, and then spending time at sea on aircraft carriers. At the time when Clare had met Martyn, he was stationed at HMS Siskin, in Gosport, and able to live at home with her and Mum and Dad. He’d been specially active in the motorcycle club then, and had encouraged Martyn to join in the activities.

‘Not many Collingwood boys join local things,’ he’d said when he was telling the family about the young apprentice who’d turned up with a little 197cc motorbike. ‘They go to dances and that sort of thing, but that’s about all. He’d make a nice boyfriend for Clare.’ He winked at his sister.

‘Clare doesn’t need a boyfriend,’ their father said at once. ‘She’s only just turned sixteen. Plenty of time for her to be thinking about that sort of thing. We’ve got enough trouble with our Val.’

Valerie was their elder daughter. She was two years older than Clare and the two sisters had always been good friends. Now Valerie was talking about getting engaged to Maurice Hutchins across the road, whom she’d been going out with for the past eighteen months, and the subject seemed to occupy every conversation. Bill Whiting didn’t have any objection to Maurice himself – he’d known the Hutchins family ever since they moved into Abbeville Avenue before the war – but he didn’t approve of young girls getting serious about boys too soon. On the other hand, he still expected them to get married and have children rather than jobs, and as Valerie remarked, you couldn’t have it both ways.

‘He just likes to assert his authority,’ she said unworriedly. ‘He’ll come round, once he’s convinced himself it’s his decision.’

‘Like Mum, when she wants the living-room wallpapered,’ Clare said, giggling. ‘She puts the idea into his head and then waits for him to come out with it as if it was his in the first place.’

Valerie and Maurice wanted to get engaged on Valerie’s birthday in July. Valerie, who worked in Portsmouth, spent all her lunchtimes wandering down Commercial Road, gazing into the windows of the jewellers’ shops, choosing her ring. Clare had gone over on the ferry with her one Saturday afternoon and had a look for herself. She wondered what ring she would choose when her time came.

Not that that would be for years yet, if Dad didn’t even think she was ready for a boyfriend at sixteen.

The next Sunday, Clare went to the club trial at Browndown with Ian and looked out for the young naval apprentice. He was there with his little blue bike, looking out of place in his uniform: apprentices weren’t supposed to wear civvies when they came out of Collingwood. He wasn’t taking part in the trial but he was standing by one of the sections, watching as the riders came through.

Browndown was a large area of rough ground between Gosport and Lee-on-the-Solent. It had been used by the military during the war and was still nominally under their control, but it was open now for people to go and wander its paths and little woods, and pick blackberries. There were numerous little hummocks and hollows amongst the bracken, left by the explosions of military exercises, and children used these to make dens or play games. It was ideal terrain for the rough scrambling or trials-riding so beloved by the motorcycle club.

Clare went out on her pushbike, riding down the long, straight Military Road, past Siskin. She left the main road and cycled along the rough track till she came to the part they were using for the trial. They had marked out a number of sections which would make tricky little tests for the motorcyclists – narrow, twisting paths through the trees, along ditches and in and out of the steep little hollows. You were supposed to get through in a certain time, without having to put your feet down for balance. Most of the riders fell off at some point and landed in deep, soft mud, to the delight of the onlookers. There was a watersplash too, which they all went through as fast as they could, sending up clouds of mucky spray.

When they had all gone through one section, the little crowd moved off together to the next. Clare found herself next to the tall young sailor.

‘Hello,’ she said, catching his eye. ‘You must be the chap my brother was telling me about. You’re at Collingwood.’

‘That’s right,’ he said, looking surprised that anyone would have bothered to discuss him. ‘Is your brother in the motorcycle club?’

‘Yes, he’s Ian Whiting. That’s him, coming through now.’ They watched as Ian approached the steep hummock above the watersplash. His bike gathered speed as it came down the slope and it hit the deep puddle at the bottom with a shower of liquid mud. Everyone squealed and ducked out of the way, and Ian emerged from the deluge with his teeth grinning white through the grime plastered on his face.

‘Mum’ll never let him in the house,’ Clare said with a giggle. ‘He has to hose his bike down every Sunday afternoon before Dad will even let it in the garden. He’ll have to hose himself down as well this afternoon.’

‘I don’t think I’d better stand too near,’ the young apprentice said, looking down at his uniform. ‘I wish they’d let us wear civvies when we come out. It’s a darned nuisance having to worry about your clothes all the time. Number eights would be better for this job.’

Clare knew all about the numbered grades of uniform that the artificers wore. Standing somewhere between the matelots in square rig and the officers with scrambled egg and gold rings, the ‘tiffies’, as artificers were known, wore suits and peaked caps. Number ones were their best uniforms, kept for special occasions, and from there you went on down to number eights, the overalls that could get as dirty as necessary.

‘You ought to bring them out with you,’ she said. ‘Or put your number eights over the top.’

‘I would, if I had anywhere to change. I’d be in trouble if anyone saw me, all the same. Your brother could shop me if he wanted to.’

‘Ian wouldn’t do that. He’s been through it all himself.’

She hesitated. Dad didn’t want her to have a boyfriend yet, but this was Ian’s friend, not hers. And she’d often heard Mum say what a shame it was that all these young boys were away from home and how nice it would be to invite one of them to tea some time, just for the friendliness of it. She’d hoped someone would do the same for Ian when he’d been far away in Scotland.

‘Would you like to come back to tea with us?’ she asked. ‘Mum wouldn’t mind, and you can talk motorbikes with Ian.’

Martyn looked at her. He was quite good-looking, she thought. He must be at least six feet tall, a bit thin, but that was better than being fat, and he had nice blue eyes. Clare’s were brown, very dark, and she’d often wished they could have been blue, which would have gone better with her pale blonde hair. All the Whiting family had eyes of some shade of brown. He had a nice smile too, she noticed.

‘Thanks. I’d like that. If you’re sure it’ll be all right.’ He paused. ‘I’ll take you on the back of my bike, if you like. Or will you be going with Ian?’

‘On that mucky thing? No thanks! I came on my pushbike. It’s not all that far.’

They watched the rest of the trial together. At the end, everyone’s points were added up and a small silver cup presented to the winner. Ian came second. He received an even smaller cup, which he accepted with great pride. It was about big enough to put a robin’s egg in, Clare thought, but it would look nice on the mantelpiece alongside the other bits and pieces that had been acquired over the years.

As Clare had promised, Iris Whiting wasn’t in the least put out by the unexpected visitor. She opened another tin of pilchards, set another place at the table and put an extra teaspoon of tea into the pot, taking it for granted that Ian had invited the young apprentice back. They all sat round the table together and Bill Whiting asked the boy what his job was, and seemed impressed when Martyn said he was training to be a radio and electrical artificer.

‘That’s good. You’ll have a decent trade at your fingertips when you come out. Say what you like, the Services give a chap a good grounding. Get a job anywhere. Mind you, if you’ve got any sense you’ll stay in, you’ll never get the same security anywhere else. I keep telling our Ian that.’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ Martyn said. ‘I’m in till I’m thirty, anyway. If I still like it then, I might have a go at getting promoted above deck.’

‘Above deck!’ Clare said. ‘You mean be an officer?’

‘That’s right. Chaps do, sometimes. You can get quite high these days.’

‘Catch me doing that,’ Ian said, helping himself to salad to go with an extra pilchard. ‘I’m coming out as soon as my twelve years are up. The Navy might give you a good grounding, but they want to own you. Civvy Street’s the place to be.’

‘Ian!’ his mother said. ‘You’ve only been in the Navy five minutes.’

‘Five years,’ Ian corrected her, ‘and it feels like a lifetime. I’ll be glad when I can thumb my nose at ’em, I’ll tell you that.’

Bill looked down his nose. ‘Don’t know when you’re well off, that’s your trouble. Why, when I was a boy it was considered a privilege to serve in the Royal Navy. And there was plenty would have liked your job, during the Depression.’

‘And what about during the war?’ Ian said. ‘Was it a privilege to get killed?’

Bill flushed an angry red. He had been in the Navy himself until 1930, when he’d come out and gone to work in Portsmouth dockyard. He’d gone back into the Navy during the Second World War and narrowly escaped drowning when his ship had been sunk. He was back in the dockyard now, a big solid man doing a hard day’s work and proud of it.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen blokes getting killed during the war. Good blokes, better than you’re ever likely to be. And, yes, as a matter of fact, I think they were proud to die. They died for their country, and their names are up on that war memorial to prove it. And they’re entitled to a bit of respect.’

‘All right, Bill,’ his wife said. ‘No need to get all aerated.’ She was small and round, with a smiling face and white hair, and seldom got flustered. She turned to Martyn. ‘Would you like a bit of fruit cake?’

‘Yes, please, Mrs Whiting,’ he said, and she cut him a generous slice. ‘It’s good to have a real tea. I miss my mum’s fruit cake.’

‘Where d’you come from?’ she asked him. ‘You sound a bit West Country.’

He nodded. ‘I’m from Devon. Little place called Ivy-bridge. It’s not far from Plymouth – near Dartmoor. My mum and dad keep a shop there – electrical stuff, mostly – and Dad does electrical repairs.’

‘Dartmoor!’ Bill said. ‘I went there once. Gloomy sort of place, I thought it was – all fist and mog.’ The family laughed and Martyn looked bewildered. Clare took pity on him.

‘Dad’s always doing that – swapping round words and letters. They’re called spoonerisms, Dad,’ she told her father. ‘I heard about it the other day on the radio. There was this man at Oxford called Dr Spooner, he was a lecturer in one of the colleges, and he did it all the time. He told one of his students once that he had tasted two whole worms, hissed all his mystery lectures and been caught fighting a liar – see, Dad? – in the quad, and he told him to leave Oxford by the next town drain.’

‘He did what?’ It took Bill a few minutes and at least two repetitions to figure all this out, but at last he laughed and slapped his knee. ‘Well, d’you hear that, Iris? If an Oxford don can do it too, I’m in good company. I must be brighter than I thought.’

‘I reckon you could pass exams in it,’ Iris commented dryly, knowing that her husband would be worse than ever now that he had, as it were, official permission.

Bill loved to play with words, using the wrong ones deliberately and making puns. He drove small children mad by referring solemnly to herds of sheep and flocks of cows, and he swapped about the first letters of words or even whole words themselves, so that his conversation was peppered with phrases like ‘roaring with pain’ to describe a wet day, or ‘let’s fight the liar’ on a cold one. Sometimes the phrases turned out rather rude and Iris scolded him, but all the children could see that she was trying not to laugh.

‘If you say that thing about darting about among the fishes once more …’ she warned him, but he gazed back at her with an innocent look on his face.

‘I can’t help it, Iris, you know I can’t. It’s like stammering – a peach insediment.’ And she had to laugh despite herself.

Martyn stayed till nine o’clock, helping Ian to wash down his bike and look it over for any repairs that might need doing after its rough afternoon, and then coming in to listen to Variety Bandbox on the wireless with the rest of them. Iris made cocoa and he drank a cup before standing up to go.

‘Thanks a lot,’ he said. ‘It’s been really nice. I hope I see you again.’

‘Well, so do I,’ Iris said. ‘Any friend of Ian’s is welcome here. Come to tea any Sunday. We’ll be pleased to see you.’

He thanked her and then looked suddenly awkward, as if he didn’t know quite how to get out of the door. He glanced at Clare.

Clare stood up. ‘I’ll see you out.’ She went past him and opened the door to the little passage leading to the front door. Out in the cool evening air, she looked at him and giggled. ‘They think Ian asked you back!’

‘I know.’ He grinned. ‘Does it matter?’

Clare considered. ‘I don’t think so. So long as you come again. You will, won’t you?’

‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘Look, there’s a scramble on next Sunday, up at Trafalgar Farm. Will you and Ian be going to that?’

‘I expect Ian will,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought about it yet. But I could.’

‘I could come and fetch you,’ he said. ‘Save you riding your pushbike up Portsdown Hill.’

Clare had ridden up Portsdown Hill plenty of times. But she nodded and smiled at him.

‘All right. Come round after dinner, and then you can come back to tea afterwards.’

They both grinned with sudden excitement. Then he got on his bike, kicked it into noisy life, and roared off up the street. Clare watched him out of sight before turning to go back indoors.

I reckon I’ve got a boyfriend, she thought with a shiver of delight.

The rest of the women came and gathered round Clare’s bed, sitting there with her all morning, knitting and chatting. Some of them had husbands in the Royal Navy too, and knew what it was like to be separated for long periods. They understood the loneliness, the hours spent writing letters, the eagerness with which their husbands’ letters were awaited. They all felt sorry for Clare, having to say goodbye only hours before her baby was born.

‘She’s such a kid, too,’ one of them commented later when Clare was in the bathroom. They hadn’t realised the door was slightly ajar and she might hear as they talked about her. Listeners never hear good of themselves, she thought as she stood before the mirror, her hands freezing in the middle of brushing her long hair. All the same, she didn’t move away or pull the door shut.

‘Not twenty till July, she told me. It’s too young to be married and expecting, if you ask me. Her mum and dad ought to have known better.’ Jean Baker was the oldest mother in the ward, thirty-six years old and having her fourth. She was a nice enough woman but had great faith in her own opinions. ‘They ought to have made her wait till he came back. Now she’s tied to a baby and a house, and she’s not even out of her teens.’

‘Seems older, though,’ Marge said fairly. ‘I mean, she’s not a flibbertigibbet. She’s got her head screwed on.’

‘I’m not saying she hasn’t. What I’m saying is, she’s being left with a lot of responsibility, and it ain’t fair on a youngster. She ought to have been let to have a bit more of her own life before getting saddled with a baby. And going in for a mortgage at their age! Daft, I call it.’

Clare decided she had heard enough. She gave her hair one last fierce brush, ran water noisily into the washbasin and then pushed open the door. The other women were talking about something else by the time she came through it, some of them sitting in their beds, others in the small armchairs that were gathered in a circle in the middle of the ward. They looked up as she came in, smiling sympathetically. She tried to smile back, knowing they meant well but feeling annoyed about the way they’d criticised her parents. Mum and Dad had understood, she thought