Work Text:
Seeing him again should have been awkward. It wasn’t. Susan followed her best friend and her sister-in-law up the aisle. The wedding dress, worn first by Nancy in the last few days of peace fitted Peggy perfectly. (That was more than could be said for Nancy’s uniform which seemed a little tight.) Peggy looked lovely. Mrs Blackett (or more likely Nancy) had organised a meal for the eight of them. Afterwards, Jim lit his pipe. Nancy almost immediately paled and left the table. After a few minutes, Susan followed her.
Nancy was washing her hands and had splashed her face with water. She saw Susan’s questioning look “John’s letter hasn’t reached you, yet? He said he wanted to write to you himself.”
“It may be waiting for me when I get back.”
“Probably, I had a letter this morning.” Nancy was grinning now.
“You told your mother and Peggy?”
“I didn’t need to tell Mother. I won’t say she just took one look, but she worked it out very quickly.”
“When’s the baby due?”
“In March.”
“Nancy? You know that conversation when I had the broken arm? At Beckfoot?”
“Yes?” Nancy’s expression immediately became more guarded.
“You didn’t tell anyone about it?”
“Not even John.”
“Don’t.” said Susan vehemently. “Not ever.”
Nancy nodded, holding Susan’s gaze in hers. Susan found herself explaining.
“Peggy deserves to be first sometimes. Not always being compared. Not being a second choice.”
Nancy grinned and clapped Susan on the shoulder.
“She is my only sister, so to me Peggy never has been second anything.” Nancy said in a voice so quiet it seemed at odds with the hearty gesture. “And she’s got a first-rate best friend.”
When they returned to the table, Jim, his uncle and his best man were outside smoking. Peggy was talking to Jim’s aunt. Nancy sat down next to her mother and started to talk about returning to Beckfoot in the autumn.
Susan drifted outside and stood a little way apart from the men, absently admiring a convenient rose bush. Jim left the others and came over to stand next to Susan.
“I have to thank-you.” he said, “for having more sense than I did, six years ago. If you had said yes and then I had met Peggy and got to know her, it would have been unbearable. And I probably embarrassed you horribly at the time. I was an idiot to be so wrapped up in my feelings, or rather what I thought my feelings were, that I never properly thought about yours.”
“We were both very young. I probably hurt your pride.”
“Too young to realise how young we were.”
There was the pause that seemed to happen in conversations now. People remembered the things they wanted to forget; except that forgetting would somehow be a betrayal.
“I never told her about asking you.” he continued.
“Don’t. Not ever. Peggy’s my best friend. She deserves to be first in someone’s life.”
“She always will be in mine.”
Satisfied, Susan nodded.
Being married was warmer than Peggy had been expecting. Admittedly it was still only September, but they seemed to be quite warm enough with only the sheet and the thin blanket covering them. With the black-out curtains closed, it was hard to tell what time it was. She reached out to the little traveling alarm clock that had been her twenty-first birthday present. Jim’s arm tightened around her waist.
“Peggy?”
Awake or half asleep? Had he woken in the night and simply watched her sleep as she had watched him, amazed and grateful that they were both here, both safe and finally married?
“Peggy, are you alright?”
She turned round in his arms.
“Of course.”
“Really of course?”
“Really of course.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Morning tea!” came a cheerful shout. Jim wriggled out of bed, grabbed a much-mended dressing gown and went to the door. Peggy slipped out of bed and peered around the black-out curtain. It was daylight. Perhaps eight o’clock or thereabouts? It looked like one of those days that starts off overcast – as if to remind you that autumn is beginning - and then relents and reverts to summer eventually. The other curtains were a pink and white floral design and were thin and over-washed. This side of the hotel was not really overlooked, but she left them closed anyway. There was enough light filtering through the curtains to see easily. Jim had put the tray down on the dressing table while she was pulling back the black-out curtains.
“Do you want to get into bed before I hand you the tea?”
Peggy scrambled back into bed and was handed a cup and saucer.
“Careful with the saucer. It’s been broken and mended once.” Jim warned her. Everything seemed to have been broken at some point. An astonishing number of things had been mended at least once. Jim put his own cup and saucer on the bedside table and climbed into the bed next to her. Still thinking about things broken and mended, Peggy reached out and ran an affectionate hand down her husband’s left arm. He twitched it away.
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mean… It’s just that the nerve…The arm works fine but the skin feels numb and when you touch me it tingles. I mean an unpleasant sort of tingle, not the other sort. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s just..when you said it didn’t hurt anymore..”
“It doesn’t. Mostly it doesn’t. Anyway there were plenty of worse things happening. At one point there was a fellow in the next bed..” Jim’s voice trailed off again as if he was trying to decide something.
“Burns?” asked Peggy.
“No. Nerve damage. I suppose that’s why he was in the next bed – they grouped like with like I think. He had been on an oil-tanker that had been torpedoed. He was one of the few lucky ones. We both were really, of course, because we were injured enough to be shipped out of the way before the surrender. It certainly made me think as well – mostly about you.”
He carefully put one arm around her shoulders and took the cup and saucer with his other hand, reaching across to place it next to his own.
“I had plenty of time to think of course. I’m glad I did.” Jim held Peggy closer and kissed her, first of all on the lips and then on her closed eyelids, fingers tangling in the soft, wavy hair that tumbled down to her shoulders.
“Speaking of plenty of time to talk – I do have something to confess.” he continued.
She couldn’t help it. She stiffened and felt as if her heart had fallen out of her and was somewhere in the rooms below. What an idiot she had been! She was second best, again. She supposed it was almost inevitable with all those weeks on the Goblin, sailing about the Baltic. Of course he would admire her; everyone admired her. Of course admiration would lead to infatuation. She felt too much despair to even think the word “love”. Jim had realised in those weeks of recovery that he had no chance with the girl he really cared for and had decided to settle for her instead, the next best girl. She was probably similar enough to make it seem like a sensible idea.
Perhaps she shouldn’t blame him. She should be grateful that he was alive. She had after all offered one of those bargains, the sort that Mrs Lewthwaite had always disapproved off. “I’ll do anything, put up with anything, if you’ll just let Jim be alright.” She was not even sure who or what she thought had been listening, but she remembered saying the words aloud in one of her few moments of solitude. Now was the beginning of payment. She must not shirk her side of the bargain.
“Go on then.” Peggy said, as encouragingly as she could manage. She could not quite manage to look at him and hide the despair. She settled for nestling her head against one broad shoulder instead.
“It isn’t anything really dreadful that I’ve done. More of a sin of omission really. The fellow in the next bed.”
“The torpedoed oil tanker one?”
“Him, yes. He had jumped over-board at pretty much the last minute. There were already some life-boats nearby. He landed half in one.”
“Head or legs in the lifeboat?”
“It was more a case of left or right.”
Jim handed her cup of tea back, watching her work it out. She was still warm and rosy with sleep. She was looking down at the tea. Her eyelashes were improbably long.
“Oh,” she said, “and he jumped rather than dived. Better than a fractured skull I suppose, but still jolly bad luck.”
Practical, looking on the bright side and sympathetic. He loved her. Jim continued.
“Anyway, we ended up having a lot a time to talk. We talked more than we would have, probably, if I had been an officer on the tanker – or he had been in the Navy.” Bill had talked and Jim had listened, mainly. “He certainly had some traveller’s tales. He’d been working as an engineer for about twenty years on various ships. Doesn’t seem to have stayed all that long on any of them. I already had the feeling that he was the sort of chap you could trust with your life but not your wristwatch.”
There was a pause. They both sipped at their tea. It didn’t have much milk in it, but that was perhaps just as well, since it was very weak.
“Anyway,” Jim continued, “after a week or so, he let slip that it was all a scam, in a way.”
“He’d not really been on all those ships?”
“Oh, he had, and as an engineer. That was the scam. He’d done it all, but on forged papers. He showed me. They were very good. I certainly wouldn’t have known the difference if he hadn’t pointed it out to me.”
“Wasn’t he afraid you’d tell someone?”
Jim smiled at her ruefully. “He must have been a good judge of character – because I didn’t. Oh, I didn’t just shrug my shoulders and forget about it. I could move about of course, so I made it my business to go and visit the others from that tanker who survived and were injured. Those that were in any fit state for conversation said the same thing – very competent engineer, fair enough boss, if offers you a deal on something, don’t take it. So there it is. I’ve knowingly colluded with fraud I suppose.”
Peggy laughed. “I’m hardly going to sneak on you. And I’m not going tell anyone, so I’m as bad as you.”
Jim kissed her again and took her now empty cup and saucer to put on the bedside table.
“Wives can’t be compelled to give evidence against their husbands. I have thought about it on and off – whether I did the right thing. He was certainly walking by the time last saw him. He was planning to go back as an engineer on some other ship as soon as he was fit enough. Did I do the right thing?”
Peggy might not have the same imagination as Titty or Dot, but she knew enough to picture the scene with the oil-tanker. She was quite sure she didn’t want to imagine it any more clearly.
“Yes.” she said, quite definitely, “You did the right thing.”
She felt Jim relax slightly next to her and felt suddenly and wildly happy that such a slight thing as her approval meant so much to him.
“What were you afraid that I was going to say?” he asked, wrapping the other arm around her and holding her closer.
Peggy heaved a sigh. Of course he had noticed.
“I was afraid that you were going to say that I wasn’t the person you really wanted to marry. You were all together on Goblin and I wondered if you only asked me because I was like her.”
“Like her?” Jim echoed, unable to think of anything else to say. Was he going to have to lie to Peggy in a minute? He had given his word to Susan. He hated the thought of lying to his wife, but hurting her would be even more unbearable.
“Everything with Nancy is an adventure and I’m just Peggy. Lots of people just see me as a second best to Nancy. Not Nancy herself, of course, and not Susan, nor Mother nor Uncle Jim.”
“Not me either.” Jim said very firmly. “I can promise you that I have never for a minute thought of Nancy in that way at all. As for an adventure, I think I know what you mean, but that has no attraction for me whatsoever.”
“And,” he continued, “You don’t even look that much alike. Any mirror should tell you that you’re much prettier.” He let his finger-tips wander down from her face to her neck and from there to the little bow that fastened the neckline of her parachute-silk night-dress. “But I’m quite happy to tell you how beautiful you are as often as you want to hear it.”
“Did they say when we had to be down for breakfast?” she asked, although she was already letting her hands embark on their own voyage of exploration, carefully avoiding his left arm.
“No idea – but it’s bound not to be for ages yet.”
“Good.”