‘I’m going to be even more direct. It’s been so – such – well, why not come and have lunch again tomorrow? Please?’
Hope meant to say, through the open window of the car, I can’t, really, even I really shouldn’t, but instead she heard herself saying ‘Where?’ and even as she said it she knew she should quickly alter it, but that was impossible because the look in Jack’s eyes was such that she could not go back on that single ‘Where?’ despite its having taken her one bridge far too far.
‘Stourhead. Let’s take the day out and go to Stourhead.’
‘I’m not sure I can get away for the whole day—’
‘Try. The weather’s meant to be going to be fine, and I want to take some autumn photographs for the cover of my new album coming out next year. The colours there at this time of year are out of this world, literally.’
‘What shall I tell them?’
He knew at once what she meant by them, and in knowing she felt that in some way they were already making love, by his understanding look, by the way he had put his hand into the car and covered hers.
‘At home? Tell them – tell them, I know, tell them I need you as a figure in the photograph. It’s true. Bring a dark coat.’
Hope nodded, but she drove home trying not to realize that because of the last few hours her life had been transformed for ever, and she would never be able to go back to the old one. Try as she might, she knew that this feeling that nothing was going to be the same again had to be faced.
Not home, not children, not husband – nothing to which she was returning would ever look the same, sound the same, or be in any way similar to how it had been before she set out a few hours earlier.
But she was a wife. She was a mother. She could not contemplate any other relationship, and to do so would be to be quite wrong, and yet, even as she went in the cottage door, she knew she was already planning her next lie, yet another small, artless lie, which Verna and Aunt Rosabel, who both knew how much she was looking forward to Melinda’s being able to keep a horse at Hatcombe, would believe without question.
The next day out came that second lie, and it was breathtaking how artless she was able to make it sound, how amazingly truthful, even to herself, who knew it was a lie.
‘I have to go over to Sherborne to see a second-hand saddle for Melinda. It’s a secret. I’m planning it for her birthday.’
‘Oh. She will be thrilled!’
Verna looked up from her ironing, and Aunt Rosabel lowered her copy of the Daily Telegraph and smiled.
‘The old place will soon be just as it was in Uncle Harold’s time,’ she murmured, and went back to the newspaper with a small but happy sigh.
If they had not been so kind and understanding about her lie, if they had not wanted her to find Melinda a good saddle so much, if they had not waved her goodbye so happily, Hope might have felt better, but as it was she felt terrible. And as she turned Verna’s car onto the main road which would lead her eventually to Stourhead, and lunch with Jack in the pub on the old estate, she knew she should turn back, but she was as capable of stopping herself heading for that part of Wiltshire as she had been of stopping herself waking early that morning to think of him, and only of him. Of his tall, rugged looks, his close-cropped hair, the way he laughed, his voice. Everything about him filled her with a wonder that she had never felt before.
He was already in the car park, his dark cashmere coat tightly belted, his thick, short dark hair brushed back and his eyes searching impatiently to see the little Renault turning in to park beside his old Range Rover in the shadow of the former coaching inn.
‘What kept you?’ he wanted to know. ‘I thought my heart would stop. You’re two minutes late, for God’s sake.’
Before Hope could say anything he laughed at the surprise in her eyes, and then went on to explain, ‘My father used to wait thirty seconds, and then that was it, off he’d go. Didn’t matter where or how. It taught us all to be on time – boring man. And now I’m boring. I have become a boring man like him. How about you? Do you feel you’ve become like your mother, say?’
Hope shook her head as she locked the car. The whole meeting was so Jack, she knew that already. They had been together a matter of a minute and he was already demanding to know more about her.
‘No, well, at least – I don’t know, really. You see my mother ran off when I was quite young, and I’ve never seen her since, and to tell the truth, I’m too old to be able to adjust to how she would be now. And having grown up without her, and my father having died as a result, really – I put her out of my mind. Just never wanted to do that to my children. And yet—’
Jack took Hope’s hand. ‘You won’t have to.’
She looked away knowing that no matter what he said, if she told herself the truth, she was about to tread precisely the same path as her mother.
‘This is not a place I should be, Jack,’ she said, after a few seconds. ‘I should not be here with you, I really shouldn’t have come. I can’t stay.’ She did not add, Because I have just remembered my mother ran off with her lover at exactly my age and ruined my father’s life.
‘Pub lunch then photographs, then home,’ Jack said quickly, sensing she was about to head straight back to Hatcombe. ‘Pub, photo, home, pub, photo, home. Right?’
‘That’s all.’
But of course it was not all, and although it was not much either, yet it was everything, for as soon as they went into the pub they became a couple, two people alone at a table with no-one to look at but each other, no-one to distract them, and that in itself, for both of them, was startling and strange.
Being seated opposite Jack was magical and Hope forgot all about home, and all those things that wives and mothers are meant to remember all day every day and all night every night of every week and every month and every year, and all she could see was how masculine Jack was, and how easily he laughed, and how he looked after her, paid attention to what she said, was not dismissive.
At what moment she knew that they would have to make love Hope never could remember. Later, back at Hatcombe, she tried to recall when it was. Was it, she wondered, when the clock on St Peter’s church had shown the time to be two o’clock? Was it when Jack called ‘Look here, Hope’ and smiled before taking the photographs, or was it when he pulled her coat tighter and kissed her on the forehead?
Somehow, afterwards, she fooled herself that if she could only have recognized when, she might have been able to stop what happened next. That she might have been able to put a hand up as someone who puts a hand up to cover a lens on a camera will stop the next photograph being taken, might have been able to stop the ‘if we make love’ turning to ‘where shall we make love?’
And yet at Stourhead they had only talked and walked, and she had posed for him with her dark hair touching the velvet of the collar on her coat, and her face turned away, not really identifiable, Jack said, to anyone but herself and him, so far away would the figure be. And what with the mist rising from the lake and the late afternoon sunshine, and the rust red, russet, terracotta, Titian and henna of the leaves wrestling the coming dark of the early evening, as if in some final colourful fling they could defy the gods to bring on winter, it could all have been so innocent, just lunch, and a photograph, until Jack kissed her.
A kiss was a kiss was a kiss. So he had kissed her? So what? Lots of people kissed and forgot.
And yet.
There was no way that Hope could describe that kiss, no words which could convey the thrill as Jack’s lips briefly touched hers.
She had been astonished, overwhelmed, enraptured, made speechless. She was not just weakened by the kiss, she was made infirm, ill, sick.
She lay on her bed, upstairs in the cottage, after she returned home – feigning a headache, reliving that brief moment again, and again, and again, pining for it, longing only to go back to that moment.
And this was just the result of one kiss, one not very long kiss, just one brief kiss in th
e shadows of the rustling trees, as swans passed on the lake below and she heard the murmur of other visitors’ voices passing up and through the gardens. The winter sun had long moved from overhead, but a light brush on her lips had brought the radiance of summer to Hope.
Lying in the darkness of her room, her heart throbbing with the reality of the knowledge that was slowly coming to her, Hope raised both her hands, palms downwards, and stretched out to reach the memory of that warmth once more, before suddenly putting one hand down quickly to cover her mouth as the wonder of what had happened to her enveloped her. She had fallen in love.
Of course, after that, the lies accumulated, as they had to do, and they found Hope in strange places, away from Hatcombe and the cottage, standing in large department stores where no-one knew her, and no-one could overhear their telephoned conversations.
‘Come to my house. The kids are all up in London next week.’
‘I can’t, not in your house …’ Hope stared despairingly round at the shoppers outside the phone booth where she was standing. Ordinary, nice women, ordinary nice women who would never – or so it seemed to her – would never think of taking a lover, of risking whatever a love affair with a man not your husband put at risk. Those wives and mothers with their pushchairs and their shopping would never surely dream of planning what Hope was planning?
She turned back to stare once more into the booth, unable to observe their innocent interest in a beauty demonstration taking place only yards away, or see the simple unaffected looks that they gave each other, or their husbands, or their children, without being overwhelmed with guilt. She knew she was about to leave the company of those everyday saints who were only interested in making themselves look nice for their husbands. She knew she was about to cross the floor and change for ever, and the worst thing was that she could not find it in herself to care.
‘Where then, where would you like to go?’
Jack’s voice sounded so kind, thank God, it made how she was feeling seem normal and sane once more, not wrong-headed and deceitful.
‘Somewhere where no-one knows either of us, somewhere that is away from everything we know, somewhere that will make me feel I am not me at all, but someone else.’
‘But I don’t want you to be someone else.’
Hope paused, and then she said passionately, ‘I do! And I want it so much. I no longer want to be Hope Merriott, not any more. I just want to be your lover.’
INTERIM
There is only one happiness in life,
To love and be loved.
George Sand
At last they were running away together.
Hope looked in wonder at the November weather, wet, grey, raining, but to her it might have been bright sunshine and blue sky, so great was her euphoria. She was running away with Jack to a house where, Jack said, the beds were old-fashioned and set about with thick eiderdowns, where log fires burned in every grate and no-one would know where they were or who they were.
She continued to stare out of the window as they drove steadily on, further and further away from Hatcombe.
‘Don’t agonize, will you?’ Jack looked at her briefly as he drove on up the motorway. Hope turned to smile at him. She would never ask anything more of life, she thought with a sudden passionate intensity, than this moment in time, Jack driving, the sound of the rain, a tape playing Jack’s music.
‘Why should I agonize?’
‘People do.’
‘There’s no point, now. Even if I wanted to.’
‘I just wanted you to know that I knew it was a great deal more difficult for you to do this than it is for me.’
‘Set against the last twenty years what is three days?’
Jack glanced at her again, but this time he gave his own familiar wicked grin. ‘Was it difficult? To get away?’
‘No.’ She smiled, but shook her head, not wishing to elaborate on how she had won her three days. She did not want to talk about ‘back there’ any more. Back there was her other self, the Hope that had married Alexander to get away from her father’s brooding presence in her life. The Hope that ran after life, always a little too late, it seemed to her now, or a little too early, for everything. Now at last there was one thing happening to her for which she was determined that she would be on time – for Jack, for love. No, the one thing she was not going to do was stop and agonize, as Jack called it.
The house that Jack had borrowed was in Worcestershire on the outskirts of a remarkable village set about with the black and white timber-and-plaster houses typical of the area. It seemed that originally, hundreds of years before, there had been a castle built to guard a road, but the castle had long gone, and now there was only an enchanting village, and a road leading into it lined with a scattering of elegant houses, and an old stone barn, past which Jack drove before eventually reaching the house where they were to stay.
All Jack had said was that he had hired a house for them which was a nice, comfortable place with central heating; not that it was a former medieval great hall converted in the eighteenth century, and then again in the early part of the twentieth to become an enchanting small house with pale-washed stone and Tudor-style windows and a river running through the grounds which led back to the village, along which were perched many square-built cottages with a ribbon of green threading its way past their doors, their frontages reflected in the water of the river.
‘I want to live here!’ Hope turned and laughed up at Jack.
‘You can – I’ll buy it for you, if Landed Heritage will sell it!’
He meant it, which was probably why Hope laughed again, not believing him, and yet believing him too.
There was nothing she could say or do now. Any moment when she could have turned her back on Jack was well past. She could only step into the future and give him her hands, go with him upstairs to a large white room with a patch-work quilt, high-ceilinged but warm with the late morning sun, and as they set down their cases and turned to each other it seemed to Hope that never had making love been so extraordinary. Here at last she was making love with someone else. There were two of them with their hands stretched out to each other, there were two kissing, and two falling onto the bed, and Hope was no longer anxious, the way it seemed to her that she had always been before, but a lover in her own right, and nothing could go wrong; and nor did it.
Later when they went walking they wanted to talk of nothing else except the wonder of what had just happened, of how they had been before, in such contrast to how they were now.
‘It seems so unfair. Why did I marry Alexander, why didn’t I wait until I was older and then meet you, and why did you marry Davina and not wait for me to come along? Then there would be no-one else in the world who could be hurt by our happiness—’
‘Shut it.’ Jack stopped, and kissed Hope’s hand. ‘We promised, remember? In the car coming here? No agonizing.’
‘I’m sorry. You know.’ Hope shook her head. ‘To meet with love now, at my age, at our age—’
‘Means that we will never not appreciate each other. Means that we will never be careless of how we feel. Means that we will never willingly hurt each other’s feelings. Means that we will always think of each other, every hour, every minute, every second. Means that we will never not be making love. Means that whatever we say, whenever we say How are you, are you all right? You look wonderful. Would you like a cup of tea? even that will be making love. Touching your hair, I will make love to you. Holding your hand, I will make love to you. Just thinking of you, just thinking of your reality, will mean I am making love to you. And nothing else matters, not time, not place, nothing, just that I love you, and will always love you. That it just happened, or that it happened thirty years ago, that we have only three hundred or three days together, matters not a damn. We may be stars destined to burn out, or souls destined to live for ever, it’s of no importance compared to this one unalterable fact – that we love each other.’
Hope turned to look up a
t him. It was true. All that did matter was that they loved each other. She put up her arms and held Jack to her, and it was as if, standing together in the shadow of an old tree down a country lane in Worcestershire, they were the only thing on earth that counted, and the least thing too. It was as if in being irreplaceable to each other, the world might at that moment come to an end and they would, at the last, find that that too was unimportant, because that was how important love was – beside it, nothing else mattered in the least.
‘Let’s go back to the house.’
With this new love-making Hope discovered that Jack was right, and that, strangely, afterwards she could remember nothing. So different was their love-making, so much part of everything else, that it was not one thing on its own, but all things making up their time together.
And she saw that he was right, that their love was one whole, nothing separated. The big white room that was their bedroom, the drawing room downstairs, playing Scrabble in front of the fire, buying food at the village shop, bicycling into the Malvern Hills over dead leaves and crackling ferns. Playing darts in an old pub tucked away from all but a few locals, hidden from main roads, small roads, lanes and byways and only reached on foot or horseback, by wandering lovers such as themselves pushing their bikes – everything was one whole, as Jack had said, everything, that is, except their parting.
On the last night he found her staring into the darkness, unable to sleep for the anticipation of the pain that she knew was to come. He put on the light, and laying her head on his shoulder he nursed her to sleep again with the sound of his voice telling her that they would be together again soon. And when they were together again it would be for ever.
PART TWO
Must it be?
It must be.
Beethoven
Love Song Page 15
