by Mary Nichols
That first dinner was spent learning more about each other. She told him about her mother and how miserable she had been when she died. ‘It was her heart,’ she said. ‘I never guessed…’
‘I am sorry,’ he said, putting his huge hand over hers.
‘It was six years ago and Dad and I have come to terms with it now.’
He told her he lived with his widowed mother in a terraced house in Victoria Street in the old centre of Melsham and leased a builder’s yard from which he ran his business. But he had plans, had mapped out his progress through life as if planning the route for a long trek, step by step, including, it seemed, when he should marry. Thirty or thereabouts was the right time, he told her, when he’d had time to make something of himself, a little money behind him to offer a wife, to know what he wanted.
‘And what do you want?’
‘A thriving business, a motor car, a nice house, and a wife and family.’
She laughed. ‘In that order?’
‘It is the most sensible order.’ He seemed relaxed, but he was twirling the stem of his empty wine glass in his fingers and she realised he was nervous. It made him suddenly more human.
‘Are you always sensible?’
‘I try to be. It’s the way I’ve been brought up, I suppose. Having no father, I’ve been the man in the house since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. My mother made great sacrifices to give me a good start in life and I can’t let her down.’
‘I’m sure you won’t,’ she murmured, wondering how long it would be before the stem of the glass broke in his hands.
‘I served my apprenticeship with Gosport’s before the war. Even then old Gosport was a doddery old fellow, too slow by half.’
‘You didn’t go into the army yourself?’
‘Yes, I served nearly two years.’ He had been twenty-three when war broke out, fit and healthy, just the sort of man the army were looking for, but his mother had persuaded him she needed him more than his country did: he was her only support and without him she could never manage and so he had resisted the blandishments of the posters telling him his country needed him. That did not mean he was a coward but, as his mother pointed out, not everyone was a fighter and someone had to keep the country running. He could also see advantages: with so many men away, the war might provide opportunities for advancement if he kept his wits about him. In 1916, short on volunteers and with more and more casualties decimating the numbers of men in uniform, the government had introduced conscription and he had been called up.
To his mother’s enormous relief, he had not been drafted overseas immediately but set to work with a paintbrush on some barracks being built for the new intake, and later for the Americans who came over in their thousands. He had kept his head down and got on with his work but the time had come when he was put on a draft to go to France. The week before he was due to go, the war ended.
‘You didn’t go back to Mr Gosport afterwards?’ she asked.
‘No. I decided the time had come to set up on my own account.’
‘And stole his customers.’ She didn’t know why she made such a bald statement, except perhaps to pull him out of his complacency, but if that was the case it didn’t work.
‘It’s a competitive world out there, Barbara. Gosport understands that. I only took the small stuff he didn’t want. I’m not big enough to compete for anything else. But one day I will be. The profit I make from the flats will be ploughed back into the business, into getting more and bigger contracts. Then I’ll take on more men; I’m going to be somebody in this town, Barbara.’
‘Do you always get what you want?’
‘Not always right away, but I persevere until I do.’
He was insufferably confident and she didn’t know why she agreed to see him again but she did, and over the long vacation, except for the fortnight she and her father were walking in Scotland, they spent almost every evening and Sunday afternoon together. He treated her with courtesy, bought her chocolates and flowers and made her aware of her own sexuality, though he had done no more than kiss her. And that he did well, making her want more, but afraid of where it might lead. He must have known how she felt, because he always drew back from the edge, leaving her aching and breathless, but at the same time relieved. She didn’t think she would have the courage to say no if it came to the crunch. Was she falling in love with him?
When the new term started they would not be able to see each other so often. If she learnt to forget him while she was away, involved herself with student activities, she might find the chemistry was not as strong as he supposed. The trouble was that he had no intention of allowing her to cool off. There was an enormous bouquet waiting for her in her room when she returned to college. ‘I miss you already,’ it said on the card.
And then there were letters, a barrage of them. He didn’t seem to mind that her answers were brief and impersonal. He loved her, he said, and one day she would acknowledge that she loved him. She was young and he wasn’t asking her to name the day or anything like that. He needed a few more contracts before he was in a position to ask her to become his wife. She wondered if he had confided in his mother or whether she was being left to guess, just as her own father was.
He knew she had been seeing George during the holiday and had called him ‘that brooding Byron’ but he didn’t know the extent of their relationship. She didn’t really know it herself. Dad might have been able to advise her, but she couldn’t talk to him about it, couldn’t help feeling disloyal, as if she planned to desert him. They had not talked about what would happen if and when she married. She was only nineteen; there was plenty of time to cross that bridge when they came to it. Then the bridge loomed up long before she expected it, and it was not her doing, but her father’s.
She came home for the Christmas holidays a day early, intending to surprise him, buying the ingredients for dinner on the way. She loved to cook for him, and they would sit over the fire and talk about college and farming and what had been happening in her absence, and make plans for Christmas, just the two of them.
She took a cab from the station and let herself in the front door. The house was quiet, but then she heard the sound of running water in the bathroom. She put the food on the kitchen table and carried her case upstairs, meaning to call out to him, but as she reached it the bathroom door opened and a young woman came out wearing nothing but a towel. She had a superb figure, with long, shapely legs, and though Barbara could not see her hair which was also wrapped in a towel, her face, even without make-up, was stunningly beautiful. Barbara, glued to the spot, was aware that her mouth had fallen open, but she couldn’t find anything to say.
It seemed an eternity before the girl laughed. ‘You must be Barbara.’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was a croak. ‘Who are you?’
‘Virginia Conway.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Oh dear, I can see by the scowl on your face this is going to be difficult.’
‘I’m not scowling, simply asking a perfectly straightforward question.’ She turned her head as her father came out of his bedroom in a dressing gown. A dressing gown in the middle of the afternoon! She couldn’t believe it of him. Tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked hard.
‘Barbara, we weren’t expecting you.’
‘That much is obvious. How could you, Dad? How could you? And in Mum’s bed too.’ That was what shocked and hurt most, the fact that he could forget his dead wife so far as to take another woman into the bed he had shared with her all the years of their marriage, the bed in which Barbara had been born. Unable to face them, she ran into her room and slammed the door.
‘Barbara!’ her father called. ‘Come out, love, and let me explain…’
Leaning her back against the closed door, she heard Virginia’s voice. ‘I told you to tell her, didn’t I? You should have done so ages ago. Now, we’ve got off on the wrong foot.’
Barbara couldn’t believe her ears, didn’t want to believ
e them. Her father and… Who was she? How and when had they met? She stood leaning on the door, staring at the portrait of her mother hanging on the opposite wall. She had painted it from a snapshot, the year after her mother died. Painting was her escape, her release for emotions she didn’t know how to handle. She had shut herself away for hours, concentrating on colour and form, forgetting everything, even the time, and some very weird creations resulted, things she destroyed almost immediately, their therapeutic work done. But the portrait, painted a little later when her emotions had calmed, was kept. Everyone who saw it said she had managed to catch the essence of her subject, the laughing eyes, the smiling mouth, the person Margaret Bosgrove had been.
The memory of her dying mother sent the tears rolling down her cheeks. She and her father had sat by her bed for hours, while the clock ticked her life away, and afterwards, numb with grief, they had clung to each other. Had he forgotten that? Had he forgotten how sweet and wonderful his wife had been, how she had soothed him when he had had a bad day, laughed with him, cried with him, scolded him sometimes? How could he take another woman into that same bed and not be reminded?
‘Barbara!’ The sudden knock on the door made her jump. ‘Come out, please. We must talk about this. I know you’re upset…’
‘Has she gone?’
‘She’s going.’ She heard him speak to Virginia and the woman’s angry response and then a door banging. ‘She’s gone to get dressed, then she’ll leave.’
Barbara waited until she heard footsteps going down the stairs and the front door slam, then slowly eased open the door. Her father was sitting on the top step of the stairs. He stood up slowly and came to her, putting his arm about her shoulders. ‘My poor pet. What a way to find out. I meant to tell you, I really did.’
‘When?’ She allowed him to lead her downstairs and into the kitchen, where she sat at the table and watched while he put the kettle on. It was a big room, the hub of the farm, with a black-leaded cooking range, a large dresser on which plates were arranged and cups hung on hooks. There were cupboards on the other walls and shelves for pans and above their heads a washing line that could be lowered and raised by a pulley. It was the domain of Mrs Endersby, who came in each morning to cook and clean, but she had gone home and the kitchen was empty.
‘When what?’
‘When were you going to tell me? When did it start? How long…?’
‘In the summer, while you were at college.’ He spooned tea into the pot, keeping his back to her. ‘She called, said she’d heard I had some stabling I wasn’t using, wanted to know if she could keep her horse here. I said yes. After that she came every day and somehow we seemed always to be bumping into each other.’
Barbara had seen the horse in the stables when she had been home in the summer, but her father often let people keep their mounts there and she had thought nothing of it. ‘But you didn’t have to bring her into the house. You didn’t have to take her upstairs, did you? Oh, Dad, how could you? Whatever would Mum say?’
He turned to face her. ‘I think, my love, she would be pleased that I had found someone who made me happy.’ He sat down opposite her and reached for her hands. ‘Virginia does make me happy, you know. I want to marry her…’
‘Marry her!’ She pulled herself out of his grasp. ‘But she’s—’
‘Young. Yes, I know. She’s thirty. But that’s no barrier to falling in love.’ He rose as the kettle whistled shrilly and poured boiling water on the tea leaves.
‘But you loved Mum.’
‘Of course I did. There will never be anyone like her, but, darling, I am still young enough to want the love of a woman. One day you will want to marry yourself and then—’
She gave a cracked laugh. ‘And I felt guilty, as if I were betraying you, just because George wants to marry me.’
‘He does?’ He sounded surprised.
‘Yes. I told him I couldn’t leave you.’
‘Leaving me is not the point. I accept that it will happen one day, but you are young and still at college. There is no hurry.’
‘But you are in a hurry, aren’t you? You couldn’t even wait to put the ring on her finger.’
He chuckled. ‘Did I raise a prude? You are the young one, Barbara, part of the modern generation. I thought you would take it in your stride.’
‘Would you take it in your stride if you found me…you know…?’
‘That’s different.’ He paused and pushed a cup of tea towards her. ‘Oh, this is so difficult and I didn’t want it to be. I want you and Virginia to be friends. This is your home, it always will be, but I want it to be hers too.’
She looked up, startled. ‘It’s all been arranged, hasn’t it? Cut and dried. That’s why she was angry when you asked her to leave.’
‘I’ll go and talk to her later. I’m sure she’ll understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘That you were taken by surprise and once you get used to the idea…’ His voice tailed off. What could he say? That she would welcome a new mother, that they might become friends? That whatever she said, he would not change his mind? He had found love a second time and that was not something granted to every man and he was not going to let it slip through his fingers, not even for his outraged daughter, whom he loved too.
It was all too much to absorb in one go. She scraped back her chair, grabbed her coat and left the house, churning everything over in her head, but the shock was too raw to think rationally. She told herself it was the secrecy she hated, not the fact that he had fallen in love. If Virginia had been his own age, if she had not been so beautiful, most of all, if they hadn’t used her mother’s bed, she might have understood. How she got to the middle of Melsham, she could not afterwards remember. She must have walked, though it was three miles.
George was driving home along the road beside the market when he spotted her sitting on the low wall surrounding the fountain, staring into the far-from-clean water. He stopped the van and walked over to her. ‘Barbara, what are you doing here?’
She turned a tear-streaked face towards him. ‘Oh, George.’
He sat down beside her and put his arm about her shoulders. ‘What’s the matter?’
She didn’t answer but put her head on his chest and, try as she might, she could not stop the tears from spilling. ‘Don’t cry, love. Tell me what’s wrong and I’ll see if I can put it right…’
‘You can’t.’
He took a large handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her. ‘Try me.’
She sniffed and mopped up her tears. ‘It’s Dad. He’s got another woman.’
‘Good for him!’
‘How can you say that? You haven’t seen her. She’s been in my mother’s bed with him.’
He hugged her to him, smiling over the top of her head. ‘I can understand how you feel. I’d feel the same if my mother…’ He paused, thinking of his mother; he would hate it if she married again, but pigs would fly before that happened, she had told him more than once. ‘But, darling, your father is still a young man, still in his prime, it’s only natural he’d want some company. You were at college and he was lonely.’ He waited for her to argue, but she didn’t. ‘How has it hurt you? He doesn’t love you any the less…’
‘He loved my mother. What they had was special…’
‘I’m sure he doesn’t love her any the less either.’ He put his finger under her chin and lifted it so that she was forced to look at him. ‘I bet she’s not a bit like your mother, is she?’
‘She’s young and pretty, not that Mum wasn’t, but… Oh, I don’t know. You think I’m being unreasonable, don’t you?’
‘No, I think you’ve had a shock, that’s all. Now, cheer up, sweetheart. Think of it as a stroke of good fortune for your father. One day you will marry me and then he’ll need someone.’
She smiled suddenly. ‘You never miss a trick, do you?’
‘But it’s true.’ He raised her to her feet. ‘Come on, you’ll freeze to death sit
ting here. I’ll take you home.’
She walked with him back to his van. ‘He says he’s going to marry her. She’s going to come and live at the farm. I don’t know how I’m going to cope with watching her handle Mum’s things, seeing the way he looks at her…’
‘Then we will have to do something about it, won’t we? Marry me now, instead of waiting. It means a slight change of plan, but nothing I can’t handle.’
‘Do you always try to turn everything to your advantage?’
‘I was thinking of you. If something has made you unhappy, then I want to put it right. I love you, Barbara, you know that, it’s no secret…’
‘And you always get what you want.’ She spoke flatly, but it was comforting to know he cared.
He opened the passenger door of the van, wishing it were a car. But he needed a van for his work and at the moment he couldn’t afford both. He brushed the seat with his gloved hand and waited for her to settle herself, then shut the door and walked round to the driver’s seat and started the engine. It was decidedly noisy and not conducive to conversation. He waited until they stopped outside her house before he spoke again. ‘I’ve got tickets for the New Year’s Eve Ball at the town hall. You will come with me, won’t you?’
‘I don’t know…’
‘Oh, come on, Barbara, the world hasn’t come to an end, you know.’
‘I know it hasn’t. I’m not a fool.’
‘Then you will?’
‘Yes, I’d love to. And thank you for being so understanding.’
‘That’s what love is all about, isn’t it? Mine, yours, your father’s.’
‘Yes. I’m being very naive, aren’t I?’
‘It’s one of the things I like most about you.’ He leant over and kissed her cheek before getting out and opening the door for her. She was so confused she didn’t question that naivety was a strange attribute to find endearing.
She let herself in the house, determined to talk to her father, to try and understand how he felt, to put herself in his shoes and tell him she was happy for him. She would be bright and cheerful and ask him about the wedding, be grown-up and sensible. But he was not at home; he must have dashed off after Virginia the minute she left.
