‘You will come back afterwards?’
‘I will.’ She smiled fondly at him. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you wake up.’
He reached for her hand to press it. ‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise. You, me and Piotr can listen toRecord Timeon the wireless before I go home and you boys can teach me some more rude words in Polish.’
Bobby smiled. ‘So it’s rude words he’s been teaching you, is it?’
Teddy laughed. ‘Only the purest of my mother tongue, I swear to you, Bobby. The blame lies all with Piotr.’
‘Topsy’s right. We ought to leave you to sleep.’ She stood up. ‘You gave us all quite a fright when we brought you down the mountain, you know. You really are lucky to be alive.’
‘So I understand.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I wish my crew had been so lucky – or else that I had been so cursed.’
Chapter 31
Bobby didn’t have to wait very long for Piotr to reappear. She had no sooner drawn the curtains around the now sleeping Teddy’s bed for him and taken a seat in a vacant chair opposite Piotr’s little cubicle when a nurse pushed the injured gunner into the ward in a wheelchair. He recognised Bobby at once and waved jovially.
‘Is this your wife, Sergeant?’ the nurse asked him when Bobby stood and approached them.
Piotr laughed. ‘I made the same mistake myself once. No, although I believe they wear the same scent. This is my rescuer – a Miss Bancroft, Topsy tells me.’ He smiled at her. ‘And she is very welcome. Nurse Enid will just throw me back into my sickbed, Miss Bancroft, then I shall be ready to receive you.’
She smiled. ‘I think after all we went through together, you might call me Bobby.’
‘If you call me Piotr, then it shall be done.’
‘I will, only I don’t think I can say it quite the way you do.’
The nurse laughed. ‘This is why I still call him Sergeant.’
‘Ah, it is easy,’ Piotr said dismissively. ‘It is merely the Polish of your English Peter. It is Pyohtrr. Pyohtrr, with all the weight in the middle. You must practise now we are to be friends, Bobby,’ he told her solemnly, and she laughed.
‘Pyohtr,’ she attempted. ‘I can’t make the R out right.’
‘A good first attempt. With practice it will soon come.’
The nurse, Enid, opened the cubicle curtains, and, with Piotr’s permission, Bobby assisted her in getting him back into bed. Then the nurse left them alone.
Piotr seemed a cheerful soul now he was free of the concussion and delirium that had marked their previous encounters. While his countryman’s expression had been filled with a sensitivity and sadness that Bobby suspected had been there long before the crash on the mountain, Piotr’s face was filled with laughter and merriment. She wondered what a man with two broken legs, who’d recently suffered the horror of seeing four of his friends killed in that terrible way, had to be merry about. Piotr Zielinski seemed to draw his cheerfulness from some inner source, wherein he kept an unlimited supply.
‘This is a fine place to convalesce, is it not?’ he asked her, gazing around at the oak-panelled walls and oil paintings of Sumner House’s main hall. ‘I feel like the lord of the manor in my bed here, with all these pretty nurses to wait on me. Still, I had far rather be at home.’
‘Your friend Lieutenant Nowak told me that your wife will soon join you here.’
He smiled. ‘Yes, my Jolka. Soon I shall be able to go to her in the little home she has arranged for us, and the doctors will come to poke and prod at me in the bosom of my own family. I cannot tell you how I long to sit my boy upon my knees again and tell him old stories, Bobby.’
Bobby smiled. ‘I should think he’s a fine boy.’
‘He is. He is all his mother’s, for which I am grateful. I should have hated him to be like his worthless father. All the talent and charm are from Jolka, although I am told often that he has my eyes. The same shade of green. His mother teases us that we are left by elves.’
His eyes were indeed a very vibrant shade of green, closer to emerald than Bobby had ever seen before.
‘What age is your little boy?’ she asked.
‘Just two years old, and as fine a fellow as ever breathed. His name is Tomasz, although since he was born an Englishman, we like to call him Tommy.’
‘Why did you leave Poland?’
