Free Convoy by Dudley Pope Page A

own as well.
    The third letter…the writing small, educated, by a woman with a strong personality who had studied Greek. She had written it the second night after telling him about her husband.
     
    ‘I am sitting here at the desk in the middle of the ward looking at you sleeping. The lamp is so shielded that you are just a shadowy figure. The four other patients are snoring but you aren’t. You don’t snore. I don’t know if I do. I wonder if you are dreaming. Dreaming of your loved one is, I believe, a myth; I’m told (by a doctor specializing in psychology) that however much two people are in love, they usually dream of other people, and if the dreams are erotic, then they are almost never of the ones they love. Are you having an erotic dream at this moment? Who is the lucky girl? Who has flown into your sleeping thoughts and roused you in a way I cannot because I am Nurse Exton, on night duty in Ward BI? I hate her; I am jealous; I want to walk over and shake you until you wake up, so that she has to go away, because I know she exists only while you sleep and no matter what you might try to do to keep her, she will vanish the moment you wake.’
     
    He continued reading the letter slowly, picturing her at the desk – which was now empty except for the lamp with the green shade which looked like one of the first electric lights ever made – and thinking of her watching him as he slept.
     
    ‘You were jealous of the memories you thought I had of my previous (unhappy) existence, but I wonder if you realise how many happy new memories I have already even though Lieutenant Yorke and Miss Exton have known each other such a short time? Just think of yesterday – the look of shock, amazement and then relief on your face when I told you how it had been: I knew then that although you might have a girl in every port, I am the important one. And then finding the German leaflets. How right you are, about the Germans not bothering to drop them if they were really winning. Anyway, I have put one of them among my few treasures, to look at again when I am an old lady.
     
    ‘Then, already surprised how well you knew the countryside here, I suddenly realized the coincidence of your name and the name of the big house we can see in the distance, so I cycled over there. Yes, the old gardener finally broke down under fierce interrogation by Nurse Exton, even though he felt loyalty to the family meant he should say nothing about anything to anyone.
     
    ‘So that was your home until the war began. How your mother must have hated giving it up “for the duration”. And you grew up there. I still can’t picture you as a small boy. Did you collect birds’ eggs and have a catapult? Did you get measles and have to stay in bed and eat jelly and blancmange? And, my darling Ned, all those paintings that are boarded up in various rooms (the gardener let me see the house) – are they portraits of your forebears or dreary landscapes, where the varnish has darkened so much that high noon over the Weald of Kent now looks like midnight in Limbo? Don’t tell me, and I liked the mystery as I walked through what I suppose was the dining room and saw those rectangles of bare wood, the size of picture frames. I realize they must protect paintings on the actual wall, or set into the plaster. Perhaps some long-dead Yorke commissioned Rubens to cover the walls with chubby pink and naked cherubs.
     
    ‘How I wish I could have shared those early years there with you. And yet had I done so they would not seem so intriguing now. The fun is speculating about the boy Ned; knowing might be disappointing! It is better to imagine rather than to see a small boy with measles sitting up in bed counting his birds’ eggs and repairing his catapult and then feeling sick because he’s eaten too much blancmange.’
     

Chapter Four
    Walking round the south side of Trafalgar Square with the clouds streaming in low from the west, a scud warning of rain, he felt