‘He’s been given a skin graft on his face, which is healing now. He’s lost the sight in his right eye, though, and he’s paralysed from the waist down – probably permanently, the doctors say.’
‘Oh, the poor man,’ Bobby said feelingly.
‘Of course that means he’ll never fly again, but the wound in his stomach is getting better nicely,’ Topsy said. ‘He’s in a lot of pain, poor boy, but he so rarely complains. I only wish I could persuade him that the crash wasn’t at all his fault, but being the pilot, you know, he feels responsible.’
‘Whichever officer sent them out in that weather ought to feel responsible,’ Bobby said, scowling. ‘No pilot could have been expected to see where he was going in all that fog. It was shocking negligence.’
‘I know. Teddy doesn’t talk of it often, but I know he feels guilty about it. I try to reassure him but he only pretends to believe me, I think.’
‘What family does he have in Poland? A wife? Children?’
She shook her head. ‘Just his mother, father and two little sisters. I’m glad he isn’t married, for I’m sure I’m in danger of being a little in love with him myself very soon. I’ve made him my particular pet, because he does need such a lot of care and the nurses here are very busy getting ready for the new patients who are to arrive soon.’
Bobby smiled. Topsy was always a little in love with someone but it was hard to take her passions seriously. Like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower, she soon craved fresh nectar.
‘Well, may I meet this marvellous young pilot of yours?’ Bobby asked. ‘The first time we were introduced, he wasn’t in much of a condition to chat.’
‘Oh yes, you must! Come over with me. He’ll be thrilled, because naturally I told him all about you and how he owes his life to you.’
‘He owes it far more to you and Mary, since you helped Dr Lazenby to operate on him. But I’d very much like to meet him.’
‘Then you shall.’ Topsy took her hand to lead her to Teddy’s bed, where she drew open the curtains.
The man in the bed was lying in a half-doze, but he opened his uncovered eye fully after the curtains were drawn. The other eye, and in fact the whole other side of his face, was covered by a bandage where the new skin had been grafted on. Bobby felt a surge of relief that the monstrous burns she’d found it so hard to look at the night of his rescue had been covered, then instantly berated herself for such an unworthy sensation.
The man was so heavily bandaged that he seemed almost half-mummy. As well as the dressing on his face, his stomach was tightly wrapped from navel to armpits – so thickly that the jacket of his hospital uniform hung open – and one of his arms was chained to the bedframe in a cast. But despite his injuries, the boy smiled pleasantly at his visitors. His one visible eye was very handsome. It was dark, sort of dreamy and poetic, as if his mind was filled with beautiful things. Although, supplied the more cynical part of Bobby’s brain, the dreamy expression could just as easily be from his last dose of morphine.
‘Teddy, this is the friend I told you about,’ Topsy informed him gleefully. ‘My friend Birdy, who went up the mountain with the men who brought you down. She’s going to be modest in a minute and do everything she can to talk her way out of it, but she was really the mastermind of the business.’
The man held out his hand to her. ‘It seems I have a lot to thank you for, Miss Birdy.’
Bobby laughed as she took his hand and pressed it. ‘It’s plain Roberta Bancroft, I’m afraid. Only Topsy calls me Birdy. But you’re very welcome to call me Bobby, Lieutenant.’
‘And you are very welcome to call me Teddy. Nearly everyone does, you know.’
‘I’ll bring another chair and you can sit with us, Birdy,’ Topsy said. ‘Teddy was teaching me a little Polish before he dozed off. I thought it a rather ugly language the first time I heard it, but the way he speaks it sounds quite beautiful.’
Teddy watched her go. Bobby thought she detected a certain wistfulness in the man’s expression.
‘She is something quite special, your friend, is she not?’ he said. ‘When I woke, all was white. The bed was white and the doctors were white and the pain that blinded me, even that seemed to be white. Then this Topsy came like an explosion of colours to blow the white away.’
‘She does rather feel like that, doesn’t she?’ Bobby said, taking Topsy’s chair.
‘You are not married, Miss Bancroft. Bobby.’ Her name felt strange in his accent, but she rather liked how exotic her homely English ‘for short’ sounded on his lips. ‘Do you work?’
‘Yes, I’m a…’ She paused, wondering if the word ‘reporter’ was one that would translate well into his native tongue. ‘A sort of writer, for a magazine. Actually, it was my editor who asked me to visit today, although I’d planned to anyhow just as soon as you and your friend were well enough to see me.’
He laughed. ‘A magazine editor? Are we so interesting here?’
‘Very much so,’ she said, smiling. ‘My editor thinks the story of how we brought you down the mountain might boost morale – I mean, it might give people hope. Survival against the odds and all that.’
‘Hope.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose it may. Yet it does not seem so fortuitous to me. It should not have happened. I should not have allowed it to. And now… my friends are gone, and I am… I am something other than I was.’
‘No one could have seen a thing in those weather conditions,’ Bobby said soothingly. ‘You should never have been sent out in them. What happened wasn’t your fault.’
‘So says your friend too. And yet it feels differently in my heart.’
He made an effort to reach for a glass of water by his bedside. Bobby passed it to him and he took a few groggy mouthfuls.
