AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘I won’t want to get back,’ said Brendan, his eyes flicking over her as she stood by the Jeep. ‘I’ll want to be with you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You can’t possibly come home with me. My mother would horsewhip us. First you, then me.’

  ‘Sounds kind of fun.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘Nor was I.’

  ‘Well anyway,’ said Caroline, trying to ignore the throbbing that was going on somewhere deep within her, ‘more to the point you’d get lost. It’s utterly dark and there aren’t any roadsigns and, even more to the point, I’m supposed to be with a friend. I can’t turn up in a Jeep.’

  ‘Couldn’t I be your friend?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  In the event, they were friends before they were lovers. Frantic as she was for sex, and more frantic still for sex with Brendan, Caroline had learnt at least a little caution.

  ‘No,’ she said, pushing him away from her in the back of the Jeep where they had climbed, on the second time Brendan drove her home. ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m a nicely brought-up girl, that’s why not.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said, laughing. ‘Well brought up you are not. That’s why I like you.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not well brought up?’

  ‘Well-brought-up girls don’t ask strange men for cigarettes. Not where I come from at any rate. Or take lifts from them. Or kiss them in a fairly forward manner before saying goodnight, on the very first date. Or ask them when they might be around again. Your father may own half the land in Suffolk and your mother may be no end of a lady, but you are not well brought up. Not in the way you mean.’

  ‘OK. I’m not well brought up,’ said Caroline. ‘But I’m still not going to sleep with you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Of course it’s true.’

  ‘You feel as if you want to,’ he said, moving his hand gently up under her skirt, feeling the wetness of her pants, the tender, eager trembling of her, the shudder that went through her as he touched her.

  ‘Well I don’t. And don’t do that.’

  ‘All right,’ he said suddenly, surprisingly. ‘I won’t. Now here’s the phone box, are you going to call your pop?’

  ‘No, I’ll cycle.’ She sighed. ‘Papa’s not there, just my mother and she’s not well. I don’t want to wake her up.’

  ‘But I thought you got clearance to see a film with a girlfriend?’

  ‘I did. But that was this afternoon. And she doesn’t believe me anyway. If she wasn’t ill she’d have been over to fetch me.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘She suffers from terrible migraine. Brought on by – oh, a miserable nature.’

  ‘Why does she have a miserable nature?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well anyway, surely you could tell her all about the film? Since we just saw it? Every detail of the plot? And the newsreel?’

  ‘No. She has a very suspicious nature. As well as miserable.’

  ‘Why suspicious?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said lightly, ‘I’ll tell you one day.’

  She did tell him. She told him a few weeks later, when, weary of talking, he tried to force her to have sex with him; stabbing at her through her pants, clinging to her, almost shouting, ‘Please, Caroline, please,’ over and over again.

  ‘Oh, just stop it,’ she said, dragging her skirt down, pushing him away. ‘I can’t. All right? I just can’t.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, tears beginning to flow, ‘yes, I think there is.’

  Falteringly, diffidently, she told him about the baby.

  So it was they became friends, talking endlessly; he heard about her parents, her schooling, her odd solitary childhood and the screaming boredom of her war. And she heard about him, about the large Irish family he came from in Brooklyn, about his mother Kathleen (‘She can’t be called Kathleen, it’s a cliché.’ ‘My family is one big cliché, Caroline, and don’t knock it’), about his four sisters, Edna and Maureen and Patricia and Kate, and the small house near Fulton Street in Brooklyn where they lived, and about how Brendan was going to be the Gary Cooper of the forties or, well, maybe now the fifties and how his agent was confident, really confident, that he could make Hollywood; about his father who had died of a heart attack the day Brendan got his first ever part, before he could even hear of it, and about Kathleen, so warm and loyal and proud you could get a hold of the love in her (‘You don’t know how lucky, how terribly lucky you are, Brendan’) and so determined he was going to make it she was practically packed, ready to go with him to Hollywood.

  Caroline, listening enthralled, as much of her mind on Brendan’s future as she could detach from a growing obsession with his penis, felt that she too could be as lovingly convinced of his potential success as the devoted Kathleen.

  ‘I’ve been to town,’ he said, beaming, producing a packet of Durex from his breast pocket the next time he drove her home (two weeks later, Caroline having been curfewed after failing to catch the bus home twice). ‘From now on, you’re quite safe with me. In more ways than one. Now will you come on and get into the back with me?’

  ‘Oh, Brendan,’ said Caroline, ‘I still don’t think I can.’

  ‘Caroline,’ said Brendan, ‘next week I start flying. Daytime raids on Germany. I may never come back. Don’t you think you owe me a few happy memories?’

  Caroline climbed into the back.

  Sex with Brendan was wonderful. Even in the back of a Jeep. He was experienced, skilful, gentle; he led her all the way, and then waited while she came, over and over again, crying out, clinging to him, her head thrown back, her hands clawing the air, her entire being absorbed in her passion and her pleasure, before he would release himself.

  ‘How old are you, Brendan?’ she asked, as she lay finally stilled in his arms, the first night. ‘Are you really only twenty-three?’

  ‘I’m really only twenty-three.’

  ‘You’re very clever,’ was all she said, ‘for only twenty-three.’

  She crept into the house that night, high with happiness and sex. It was totally silent. She went and got herself a drink of water, then slowly inched her way up the stairs. She had just, she thought, reached safety, when the door of her mother’s room shot open and her mother appeared, the light behind her snapped sharply on.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Out. I told you. To a film with a girlfriend.’

  ‘That was this afternoon.’

  ‘It wasn’t. It was this evening.’

  ‘Caroline,’ said Jacqueline, ‘I may be stuffed with drugs, but I am still capable of telling day from night. Now will you kindly tell me what you have actually been doing.’

  ‘Seeing a film.’

  ‘What film?’

  ‘Oh, Mama, the one that’s on in Woodbridge, of course. Casablanca. Do you want me to run through the plot with you?’

  ‘No, thank you. I can’t be taken in by that old trick. I don’t believe you.’

  Caroline shrugged. ‘Believe what you like. I’m tired, can I go to bed please?’

  ‘How did you get home?’

  ‘I cycled.’

  ‘From Woodbridge?’

  ‘Well of course.’

  ‘I don’t believe that either.’

  ‘Mama,’ said Caroline suddenly, ‘if you treated me with a little more respect, and – and affection – you might learn a lot more about me.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’d find that very difficult,’ said Jacqueline. ‘Oh, just go to bed, Caroline, for
God’s sake. But please don’t think we’ll bale you out of difficulty again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you again,’ said Caroline.

  For some reason after that, probably her own increasing ill-health, and what was undoubtedly a quite severe clinical depression, Jacqueline began to leave Caroline alone. She spent more and more time in her room, ceased cross-questioning Caroline, and gradually appeared to lose all interest in what she was doing. Stanley spent most of his time in Ipswich; consequently Caroline spent all of her time, or all the time that the United States Air Force would allow, with Brendan: and fell helplessly and promptly in love with him. They had a lyrically perfect year; he had a great deal of freedom (the USAF being more generous in that department than its British counterpart) and almost unlimited access to a Jeep. Most evenings, and many days, he would drive over to Wickham Market, or sometimes, if Jacqueline was sufficiently unwell, right up to the house (although she would never allow him through the gates, saying their luck would run out, that it would be pushing things, that he would get gunned down, that she would get pregnant, that he would find someone else, and he said of all those things, the only one that was totally unthinkable was the last).

  If they were together during the day, they would go off into the Suffolk countryside. Determined he should learn to appreciate it, Caroline took him on a painstakingly thorough inch by inch guided tour of it, down the lanes, across tracks, through villages. They looked at the beautiful houses that studded the breadth of the county; stood in the small but oddly grand churches in the tiny perfect villages, such as Earls Soham and Hartest and Grundisburgh; walked across the wide just-rolling fields, in the thick, fairytale forests of Rendlesham and Tunstall, and through the wild, windy marshes at Aldeburgh, and Orford, where the sea-birds cried and the grasses moaned and soughed in their relentlessly sad melody. The beaches were all ravaged with rolls of barbed wire, but the cliffs at Southwold and at Minsmere were still sharply, freely beautiful, the Alde and the Deben flowed placidly along, and the peace of the countryside seemed oddly undisturbed. Caroline made him learn the strange, rather grand names of the towns and villages, with their French and even Latin connotations: Walsham Le Willows, Thornham Magna and Boulge and the almost Chaucerian notes of Walberswick and Saxmundham, Culpho and Hoxne. She insisted he saw the perfection of Lavenham, of Long Melford, of Chelsworth; she made him visit the abbey at Letheringham, took him to Melford Hall, Sutton Hoo; and in nearly all those places, sacred ones apart, they had sex, endlessly joyful, inventive, loving sex, in woods and fields and ditches, in stables and barns and ruined cottages, on clifftops, in marshes and, most of all, in the safe haven of the Jeep.

  But they were not always alone: Brendan took Caroline to dances in the mess, and she took him to hops and barn dances in the villages, they met his buddies in the pubs, and for the first time in her entire life, Caroline realized, she was happy.

  There were only two things that came between her and her contentment: one was the chilling, choking terror she had to live through every time Brendan was on a raid, which was frequently two or three times a week, and the other was a hot sweating fear that she might become pregnant. But as the months went by and the first year became the second and 1942 became 1943 and the Battle of the Atlantic had been virtually won, and the Allies had invaded Italy, Brendan survived again and yet again, piloting his stubby little Thunderbolt – more commonly known as a jug – through the hazardous skies, and her period continued to arrive with an almost fearsome regularity, she began to relax, to trust in her happiness, to think that the God who had done so little for her up to now had decided to smile on her after all.

  And then with a stark, dark cruelty, He abandoned her again.

  She found it almost impossible to believe, the three events that so totally changed her life, all happening at once, early in 1944: Brendan taking her hand in his and telling her he had to move, that he was being sent to Beaulieu in Hampshire, but that he would be back, and when he was back he wanted to marry her; and then her father, her huge, kindly, useless father, dying quite suddenly, of a heart attack, and then her mother, having quite genuinely mourned his death, taking off to London with a squadron leader in the air force with almost indecent haste; and then her period stubbornly, determinedly failing to start. She told herself it was emotion, nerves, that once Brendan had gone, the funeral was over, her mother had returned, she had sorted out the worst of the dreadful bleak post-death administration, it would be all right, but time went by, weeks and months of sad occupation, and she found herself quite, quite alone and indisputably pregnant.

  She had no idea what to do; her mother had, if nothing else, at least seen to the organization of her abortion. She went to the doctor; he shook his head, said yes, she was undoubtedly pregnant, about four and a half months, maybe more; he could suggest nothing really except putting her in touch with an adoption society. What about an abortion? she said to him, tears of terror running down her face, but he had looked at her coldly and said did she not realize abortion was illegal and besides it was too late, far too late for such a course.

  Sick with fright, as much as from her condition, she tried to be calm, to think what to do, but she couldn’t begin; finally, oddly reluctant, driven to it by her utter despair, fearful of seeming to put pressure on him, she wrote to Brendan, asking for help. Brendan did not reply.

  Sir William Hunterton asked Caroline to marry him on 31 December, the night she went into labour, and weary of loneliness, wounded almost beyond endurance by Brendan’s silence, fearful of what was to become of her, she accepted.

  William had been a great friend of her father’s; he was forty-three years old, and had never married. He was a shy, very quiet man, he lived alone in a very beautiful small house in Woodbridge from which he ran an extremely unsuccessful antiques business. He was tall, very thin and stooped considerably; he had grey, slightly thinning hair, pale blue eyes, a long slightly hooked nose and a chin which one of his small nephews had once described with masterly tact as ‘a little bit not there’. He was only ever to be seen wearing shabby tweeds, and a shabbier British warm, which was replaced in the summer by a series of crumpled linen jackets; he was kindly, learned, and much respected in Suffolk circles, and his friendship with the bluff, ebullient Stanley Miller was generally regarded as totally inexplicable. When Suffolk circles heard he was engaged to be married to Stanley Miller’s daughter, they pronounced it not just inexplicable but outrageous. Had anyone actually stopped to think, they would have realized both relationships had their roots in the same thing: William’s need to be with a stronger, tougher, more outgoing personality which would overcome his own shyness and inability to communicate; and at the same time, a knowledge that there were very real things he was bringing to the partnership – a calm, steady outlook, an orderliness of mind, and a surprisingly quirky sense of the ridiculous. It was this in particular which gave him the courage to propose to Caroline.

  He had of course attended the funeral, and had stayed after the small gathering of friends and neighbours had left Moat House, ostensibly helping her clear up (Jacqueline having taken to her room with a more than usually appalling migraine), but actually keeping her company in the nightmare post-funeral let-down.

  ‘We shall miss him,’ he said, ‘you and I. He was the best friend I ever had.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caroline. ‘William, would you like a drink?’

  ‘I would, my dear, yes. A very large whisky I think. Why don’t you have one too? You look a bit peaky.’

  ‘I feel it,’ said Caroline, sitting down suddenly.

  ‘You’ve got a lot to cope with,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll get the drinks. How do you like yours?’

  ‘With ice,’ she said and, reminded forcibly why she liked her whisky iced, started to cry.

  ‘There there,’ he said, patting her hand awkwardly. ‘Don’t cry.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said, sniffing hop
elessly. ‘Why shouldn’t I cry?’

  ‘I don’t know, my dear. I really don’t. You’ve got a lot to cope with. You must let me help you. With the arrangements and all that sort of thing. Have you seen the will yet?’

  ‘Yes, I have, and he’s left everything to Mama. Quite rightly of course.’

  ‘Of course. Well, you must let me know if there’s anything I can do. Now or in the future.’

  ‘Thank you, William. I will.’ She looked up at him and smiled suddenly. ‘What did you admire about my father, as a matter of interest? You never seemed – well, kindred spirits exactly.’

  ‘Oh, well there you’re wrong. We were, in our own way. We both liked houses, and nice things to put in them, and we both loved the countryside round here, although I did find it hard to watch him massacring the wildlife. And I enjoyed talking to him; we both had a great love of jokes, you know. We were – relaxed together. And I admired all sorts of things about him. His quickness. His courage. His ability to take risks. I have none of those things.’ He looked at her. ‘I think you do, though.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Caroline, smiling up at him. She wondered how he would feel if he knew exactly what risks she had been taking.

  William took to coming in once a week, to help her with the mountains of paperwork, and she would invite him to supper, and they would sit chatting for hours. Jacqueline had gone now, with her squadron leader, and he made her feel peaceful and less alone, and quite often he would manage to make her laugh, telling her some ridiculous joke or other.

  One night, about two months after Stanley’s death, when she was feeling particularly low, she drank far too much claret (her father’s cellar was still extremely well stocked) and suddenly, in the middle of one of William’s stories, felt faint and very sick; she excused herself and just made the lavatory in time.