“He’s got a bad leg, dear,” explained her mother.
“But he doesn’t talk with his leg, Mummy,” put in precocity; and Patricia was driven to the usual: “Go on with your lessons, darling. Uncle Francis will be quite well again soon.”
But would Francis ever be well again; well in mentality; able to reconstruct his life? Patricia’s reason said “Yes” to those questions; Patricia’s instinct said “No.” She had thought once, long ago at Wargrave, that he might yet do great things, make a name for himself: there seemed a force in him then, a power behind his self-absorption. But this new Francis was not even self-absorbed: there was nothing so positive as self-absorption about him: he might have been anybody. And when he finally shuffled off through Tebbits’ cow-yard, started down the meadow path to his new home, Patricia’s fantasy pictured him a stricken beast, crawling away to die in solitude. . . .
But next day’s telegram from the War Office dispelled all fantasies! Peter was wounded, back in England, in London: the world, for Patricia, shrank to the size of her husband’s left arm.
§ 3
Patricia had waited thirteen months for that telegram; and once her anxious eyes deciphered its exact meaning, she knew no feeling except relief. Her man was home again, out of it, not for a week’s exeat but for months, perhaps for good! They would give him leave. He would see Sunflowers. She would nurse him back to health. . . .
She sent Fry into Arlsfield with telegrams to her father and the invalid; she packed her bag; she urged the children to behave themselves during her absence; she borrowed Tebbits’ trap, and caught the 3:45 from Henley with exactly one minute to spare. Neither in the trap, the train, nor the taxi which whirled her through unfamiliar streets to her destination, did she panic.
At the entrance to the hospital—a great barrack of a building, set foursquare round a gravel courtyard—difficulties began. An R. A. M. C. Sergeant, standing stiffly to attention, informed Patricia that visitors were allowed only between two and four p. m. She asked to see the Matron, and was conducted down a cold stone corridor to an unfriendly waiting-room. After ten minutes, appeared a forbidding woman of uncertain age, dressed in the Regulation Red Cross uniform, who said: “She knew of no patient named Jameson in the Officers’ Ward; but would make enquiries.”
Patricia waited another ten minutes. The Matron returned. She had discovered Peter: he was as well as could be expected: Mrs. Jameson could come to see him the following afternoon.
“But I want to see him at once,” insisted Patricia.