Aldbourne was much quieter the second time around. So many men hadn't come back with them. Whether wounded, missing, prisoners of war, or killed, it was sobering to walk the streets of Aldbourne and know that the quiet was mostly a result of everyone who'd once been there and now simply wasn't. There one moment and gone the next, with so little fanfare it felt wrong not to acknowledge it somehow.
But no one did.
The first thing Charlie did upon arriving back at the house was tidy up her room. In her haste to get out of the door that last morning she'd left her nightclothes strewn about and hadn't had time to pack away any of the things she'd left out the night before. Now, even as her eyes drooped and burned with fatigue, she ensured everything was neatly back in its place before letting herself change out of her ODs, crawl into bed, and sleep.
She woke up again a few hours later and, when she went downstairs, found the other three nurses already sitting around the kitchen table, talking over cups of coffee. Each of them smiled when Charlie pulled out the remaining chair and sat down, and the conversation progressed naturally as if there had been no interruption.
"... says they're all going to the pub tonight."
"Should we go?"
"Not sure I'm in the mood."
"Might be fun."
"Might be."
"Do you wanna go, Charlie?"
Charlie shrugged one shoulder. She didn't really care. Whilst it would be nice to spend the evening curled up on the sofa with a book, it might also be a good idea to try and escape her thoughts for a while. Alcohol had been a good way to do that in Normandy, thanks to Autumn, so she couldn't see why it wouldn't be a good way now. But she didn't honestly mind.
"If you want to go, then I'll go. If you don't, then I won't."
It was only early afternoon, and they had that day and the next off. They decided unanimously to wait until the evening and then decided if they wanted to go, which was perfectly fine by Charlie. She'd at least be able to get some reading in before later, and maybe even have time to sit down and force herself to write a letter home, too.
Charlie picked up the book she'd left on her nightstand before leaving for France, a book she'd bought the day before they'd been deployed with the intention of starting it that fateful day. She was excited to start it now and allow herself to sink into an imaginary world where wars didn't exist and no one feared the dark corners of every room they walked into, lest there be the ghost of a wounded man hiding there, but she couldn't concentrate on the words on the page. Her mind kept wandering back to France, to the chaos of the field hospital after each battle, to spending her nights trying to sleep in a hole in the ground gradually flooding with rain water. To sitting quietly in the tent with Floyd and reading to him.
Gnawing on her bottom lip without realising she was doing it - without, in fact, realising she'd looked up from the pages of her book and begun to stare at the wall opposite her - she wondered about Floyd. He would be in a hospital in England somewhere, probably not very far away at all. There would be other nurses caring for him, now, but still Charlie worried about him. Even more, she worried that there was some other nurse sitting at his bedside and reading Wuthering Heights to him.
Shaking her head, Charlie looked back down at The Waves and forced herself to focus. It didn't matter if there was someone else reading to him now - that's what books were made for. Reading. And she didn't want him aggravating his wound just to hold a book up over his face.
Before she ever even got to the second chapter, Charlie fell asleep again. She'd lost so much of it over in France she hadn't even realised how exhausted she'd been. Now, in clean clothes in a clean bed with curtains drawn and a roof over her head, sleeping was easy. So much easier than it had been overseas. She could just sleep and sleep and sleep, for days on end, and never feel she wasn't tired enough to sleep just a few hours more.
Mabs knocked on her door a few hours later. Pulling the door open before Charlie even had time to respond, Mabs came in and sat on the edge of the bed.
"Tired?" she asked, looking like she'd just woken up herself. There were dark, heavy bags under her eyes and her hair was a mess, gold strands knotted together and voluminous on her head. She wore the underclothes they tended to wear under their fatigues - a white t-shirt and tight-fitting black shorts - and those looked rumpled, too.
Charlie smiled tiredly as she nodded, pushing herself up to sitting in her bed.
"Boo wants to go out," she said, her words punctuated by a yawn. "Autumn's goin' with 'er. I was wonderin' whether you were still gonna go."
Charlie shrugged and rubbed her eyes, trying to rid herself of her lethargy. "I think I'll go," she said at length. Trying to read hadn't been as successful as she'd hoped earlier and she supposed it would be good to socialise; she hadn't properly seen or spoken to any of the men since sometime just after the Battle of Bloody Gulch (which, incidentally, she thought was a fitting name for the battle which had taken place in the hedgerows in wherever they'd been in Normandy. Some of those casualties had been the worst of any she'd seen).
"You will?" Mabs asked, clearly surprised.
Charlie wasn't fazed by her surprise, having expected as much. Before they'd gone over to France she hadn't ever been the most willing to go out to the pub. Then again, before they'd gone over to France she hadn't really realised how much of a miracle it was to be able to do such things. To drink out of cups, to sit on real chairs, to laugh and joke and talk as loudly as you wanted to: all of those things had been a granted back then, something she'd never even thought twice about. Now, they were nothing short of miraculous. She could hardly believe she'd ever been able to do them, after having not been able to for so long.
So Charlie just nodded her confirmation at Mabs and with that they set about getting ready. Little more than an hour later they were making their way down the cobbled streets of Aldbourne, clad in their summer dress uniforms and wonderstruck by the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of it all.
Charlie had never felt so out of place in a skirt and a beret. She didn't miss her fatigues and helmet so much as felt bare without them. She felt that any minute guns could start firing and she'd have to drop and plaster herself to the ground, and crawl through thick mud to get to the field hospital. Having a small, delicate little beret nestled in amongst her dark curls instead of a big, bulky helmet covering the majority of her head made her feel exposed and vulnerable.
Being back in England would certainly take some getting used to.
The pub was lively when they pushed through the doors. Servicemen and -women were scattered everywhere in amongst civilians, chatting happily as though the war was over and they were only still wearing their uniforms for fun.
Autumn, at the front of their little group, clasped Boo's hand, who clasped Mabs', who clasped Charlie's, and they pushed through the dense crowd in a line, making sure no one could intercept them and draw them apart.
At the bar, Autumn ordered for them, and paid the bartender without a second glance at the nurses on either side of her. Four beers were pushed in front of them and they lifted them as one.
"To being back in England," Autumn declared, raising her glass before she sipped from it.
"To being back in England," they chorused back to her, before clinking their pint glasses together and taking big gulping sips.
Before they all inevitably got separated and Mabs found herself surrounded by eager-to-please men, Charlie turned to her with a half-smile. "It feels weird being back here, doesn't it?"
Mabs smiled sadly back at her. "It sure does," she agreed. "But I'm sure it'll feel normal again soon."
Charlie nodded, hoping she was right, and turned her back to the bar to drink in the atmosphere of the room around her. The lighting was warm, the blackout blinds still up as the daylight flooded in, and each table, whether high or low, was full with people both sitting and standing crowded around it. The dark wood panelling was familiar, as were a lot of the patrons, though Charlie noticed some unfamiliar faces in the uniforms of the British military here and there, likely home on leave after D-Day. One of whom, she quickly realised, had noticed Mabs and decided she was the only woman worth going after tonight.
Charlie smiled to herself and rolled her eyes as she turned back to the bar and her drink. Back here, nothing had really changed at all. Maybe all it really would take was time for her to readjust, and then it would be like Normandy had never even happened.
That was, until they were sent out again, of course. But hopefully that wouldn't be for a good long while yet.
As Mabs was pulled away by the British Naval Officer and Boo disappeared with George, Autumn and Charlie were left to themselves. They chatted idly for a while about this and that before Joe Liebgott found them when he came to the bar to buy another drink and insisted they go with him back to some of the tables Easy had commandeered in one of the corners.
Making sure to take her still half-full pint with her, Charlie shared a small laugh with Autumn before they followed Joe through the crowd, weaving in and out of rowdy drunk people until they came across four tables' worth of American paratroopers.
"Hey, fellas!" Joe called when they arrived. "Look who I found!"
Charlie and Autumn's arrival was met with cheers and clapping, and Charlie flushed and ducked her eyes. She didn't know a lot of the faces gathered before her very well but perhaps that was why it had been a good idea to come; she knew the name, rank, and blood type of every man in the company and yet couldn't match a name to almost three quarters of the faces gathered before her now. She supposed it was about time that changed.
At first, Charlie tried to stick close to Autumn. As much as she was willing to meet all of these new people, unfamiliar men were still unfamiliar men and she still didn't really know what to do with herself around them - that was, if she wasn't otherwise occupied with cleaning wounds and wrapping bandages.
Joe Liebgott, however, had other ideas.
Joe slung his arm around Autumn's shoulders, leaning his head close to her as he talked - clearly already quite drunk - and attempted to lead her over to where he'd been sitting. Autumn pushed his arm off of her almost as soon as it made contact with her shoulder and rolled her eyes as she walked ahead of him, on her own and without his guidance.
Smiling to herself, Charlie turned back to the four tables at large, looking for a seat.
Shifty appeared out of nowhere to come to her rescue. "Here, Charlie, you can take mine," he said, gesturing to where his vacant seat was.
Charlie considered declining and insisting on standing but when she looked into his eyes he looked so hopeful, genuinely wanting to be helpful, that all of her words died on her lips. Instead, she smiled and thanked him and sat down in his seat as he went to find another.
"Hey, you're Charlie, right?" asked the man on her right the instant she'd sat down. "Tab's friend?"
As Charlie nodded, the man across from her barked a laugh. "Tab don't got female friends. He's got dates, and that's all."
Charlie frowned. "Floyd and I are just friends," she told the man with a polite, though guarded, smile.
He scoffed and opened his mouth to say more but the man to his left cut across him. "Shut up, Lesniewski, alright? Runnin' ya damn mouth all the time."
Lesniewski scowled. "Yeah? Fuck you, Penky." He stared at the other man, and the other man stared at him, and then, suddenly, both of them laughed.
Charlie watched with eyebrows furrowed, baffled by what she'd just witnessed.
The man beside her who'd first spoken laughed when he saw her expression. "Don't mind them," he told her, grinning. "Those two idiots couldn't tell ya their own names if they weren't engraved on their dog tags."
"Hey!" both of the 'idiots' protested.
Charlie grinned.
"I don't think we've met," said the man on her right. "Skip Muck," he introduced, holding his hand out for her to shake. "Over there's Joe Lesniewski," he indicated the one who had insulted Floyd, "and Alex Penkala."
As Charlie shook Skip's hand, then Lesniewski's, and then Penkala's, smiling at each of them, Skip went on, "Now, Don Malarkey, who I know you've met because of that spectacular punch you decked him with back in training - nice work, by the way. None of us are ever going to let him forget it - he's around here somewhere, too. He's probably off asking around about that CO of yours, God help him, but he'll probably be back soon.
"Shifty is whose seat you're sitting in, but I bet you know him too," Skip went on. "Next to Penky is Alton More, and then Chuck Grant." Skip turned back to Charlie and winked. "I know you know him." Then he went on, "Then we've got Pat Christenson, and next to me is George Smith."
Charlie's eyes widened as they landed on the man sitting quietly beside Skip. Before she could help herself, she blurted, "You're the one who stabbed Floyd!" which had the entire table of the men Skip had just introduced to her bursting into raucous laughter.
The men jeered at and heckled Smith, whose face burned bright red as he attempted to explain himself. "He looked like a kraut!" he repeated over and over again.
Charlie felt sorry for him, one man against however many when a few of the men from the next table joined in on the heckling, so she attempted to subdue them. "He's okay, though!" she exclaimed.
Like magic, the men fell quiet as soon as she'd opened her mouth.
"Floyd's okay," she assured them, and looked pointedly at Smith to ensure he knew she wasn't angry with him. "The wound wasn't very deep. He'll be back soon, I should think."
"Yeah?" Smith asked quietly, hopeful.
Charlie nodded. "Yeah. He'll be fine."
"So, Charlie," said Alex, his tone of voice making it clear he was about to change the topic of conversation, "how did you become the first platonic female friend of Tab's?"
"Platonic," Skip echoed back to him. "That's an impressive word for you, Alex, well done."
Alex snarked right back at Skip before Charlie laughed and answered, "He was trying to get a leg up on getting Mabs' attention, actually."
"He's a stupid guy if he didn't change his mind and go for you instead when he first laid eyes on you," said Alton More around the cigarette in his mouth. When Charlie looked at him shyly, cheeks aflame, he smirked and gave her a wink.
"Sure hope you're not flirting with my girl, More," said Chuck from next to Alton.
Charlie didn't think it was possible for her cheeks to get any hotter. She couldn't seem to keep from fidgeting in her seat, or get the stupid nervous smile off of her face.
Malarkey was grinning as he elbowed his way between Lesniewski and Alex. "Chuck, you had your chance to make her your girl and we all watched you screw it up. Move on, buddy."
Alton scoffed. "You're one to talk about moving on, Malark, ain't you still chasing after your ex?"
"You know what? Shut up, Alton. No one was talking to you."
"How's it going with her, anyway, Malark?" asked Pat mildly from beside Smith. It was the first time Charlie had heard him speak since he'd nodded to her in greeting, and she was surprised by how low and gravelly his voice was. He didn't look up from his sketchbook as he smirked to himself, his pencil sketching rapidly on the page.
"Well, Pat," Malarkey began, stealing Alex's drink and taking a gulp from it, "that is private information."
"So not very well, then?" Charlie surmised.
This earned her another round of laughter. Alex pointed a finger at her as he looked around at the other men. "Hey, I like this one. I think we should keep her."
"Think Tab'll have a few things to say about that," Shifty said through a smile, finally returning and dragging a chair behind him.
Skip shrugged. "He'll get over it." Then he turned to Charlie. "Say, Charlie, do you play cards?"