‘Well, I’m afraid I can imagine,’ said Betty, ‘all too well. And I think you should be a lot more – careful, Grace. For Charles’s sake, if not your own.’
Grace was silent.
‘I don’t mean to criticize him, dear, Mr Lucas that is. He’s very nice of course. Even though he is a bit of a rough diamond. Don’t look at me like that, Grace, it’s true. I just feel it’s a rather dangerous situation. And so does your father.’
‘Well,’ said Grace. ‘All right, Mother, I will be careful as you put it. Don’t worry. Goodness, look, it’s time for the King’s speech.’
A few weeks ago, she thought, she would have been upset, deeply anxious; as it was, she simply found it funny, stored it up to tell Ben.
They went for a walk after the King’s speech, and then played charades. Clifford, doing a gyrating-hipped Dorothy Lamour, enacting Road to Rio, was only bettered by Daniel being Violet Elizabeth Bott in Just William. ‘The males certainly have it,’ said Grace, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. ‘Daniel, you’re a genius.’
After supper, when her parents had gone, she finally lit the precious Christmas tree candles and turned the other lights out. David played some carols on the piano, and they sat gazing at the tree and the tiny flames dancing against the darkness. Daniel came and put his arms round her and said, ‘Thank you, Grace, for a lovely Christmas,’ and she looked back over the day, and for the rest of her life, when she thought about happiness it was a warm, almost dark room filled with the smell of woodsmoke, lit by a Christmas tree, and in the background a small boy playing an out-of-tune piano.
At last the boys went to bed; Clifford, who had fallen asleep over his whisky, hauled himself to his feet and said, ‘If you’ll excuse me, my dears, I must go up. I’ll take a look at those puppies on the way.’
‘Yes, all right, Clifford, thank you,’ said Grace.
‘God bless you, my dear,’ he said, bending to kiss her. ‘And thank you for everything. Goodnight, Ben.’
‘Goodnight, Sir Clifford.’
‘Oh really! That ridiculous name,’ said Clifford and went off chuckling.
Ben looked at Grace from where he was sitting on the sofa, and held out his arms. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘time to get on with it a bit.’
She laughed and went over to sit beside him.
After a while he said, holding her very tenderly, his face in her hair, ‘Will you, Grace? Will you?’ and she said, realizing and hating herself for it, that she was nervous as well as conscience-stricken, shy as much as guilty, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’
‘Then we won’t,’ he said, ‘and there’s no need to start saying sorry either. We won’t until you do know, until you’re ready, and if that never happens, I’ll still be a very happy man.’
‘Will you?’ she said doubtfully. ‘Will you really?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes I will. I love you, Grace.’
‘Do you?’ she said, scarcely daring to believe she had heard it, wanting to hear it again.
‘Of course I do. I’ve loved you from the first minute I saw you. I can remember every minute of it, I can tell you everything about you, what you were wearing, a blue flowery dress it was, how your hair was a bit shorter than now, and all tangled up with the wind, what your face looked like, a bit pale and frightened. I can remember what you said, and how kind you were, and how you held me when I cried, and – well, it was you who got me through it.’ He smiled at her. ‘Long speech. Been thinking it for a long time. But anyway, I do know I love you.’
‘But Ben, you—’
‘I know what you’re going to say. Not how I loved her, of course. She was one thing and one way of loving and you’re another thing and another way.’
‘I don’t think,’ said Grace, speaking very slowly and with great difficulty, ‘I don’t think I ever loved Charles.’
‘You shouldn’t say that,’ he said and he looked anxious.
‘No, it’s true. I’ve thought about it such a lot. I think I do love you, and what I felt for him was nothing like it. Nothing at all.’
‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘he’s a long way away and you haven’t seen him for a long time. You’ve forgotten maybe.’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she said, ‘I haven’t forgotten anything.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘only you know that.’
‘Yes. Only me. And I do know I love you. But—’
‘I know about the but,’ he said. ‘You’re still married to him and he’s still your husband, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s out there, fighting for you, and for me, God help me, me and my boys, and all of us. And you can’t turn your back on him.’
‘No. No I can’t. Not quite. Not yet anyway. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say you’re sorry.’
They lay on the floor by the fire for a long time, and they did not make love; but Ben awoke in Grace sensations and longings just the same that she was quite unprepared for, powerful, warm, piercing in their intensity. He kissed her not as Charles had done, not with the almost detached, practised skill that was the first deliberate step in arousing her, but thoughtfully, slowly, carefully, a pleasure to be savoured in itself. Every so often he would draw back and look at her, study her face, gazing into it as if he had not seen it before and he had things to learn from it; would ask her if she was all right, how she felt, whether she was happy, would tell her again, and with an increasing depth to his voice, that he loved her. She had not known desire before, she realized now, had not known its great surging force, its joyful, all-pervading power, was not prepared for its temptations, its ability to negate thought, sense, conscience. And in spite of what she had said, what she believed, her own fear that she would prove disappointing, she would have gone along with it then in all its insistence, had not Ben himself suddenly drawn back, leant on his elbow and sighed heavily, gazed distantly into the fire.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘I think perhaps we’d better go to bed. Alone, I mean.’
And ‘Oh Ben,’ she said, ‘perhaps I was wrong, perhaps we are being foolish. After all—’
But he put his hand over her mouth very tenderly, traced the shape of it with his finger, and said, ‘No, love, you weren’t wrong, and you mustn’t do it if you don’t want to.’
‘I do want to. More than anything in the world I want to—’
‘I didn’t mean quite like that,’ he said, smiling, bending to kiss her, ‘and anyway, it’s not easy for me either. I never was unfaithful to Linda, we were both virgins when we married, it feels like putting her aside. Saying goodbye, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ she said, shocked at her own insensitivity, that she hadn’t thought of that. ‘Yes of course. I hadn’t really – well—’
She stopped, confused, and he bent and kissed her again. ‘I don’t think your mum liked me much,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Grace. ‘Well, she did I expect, but she didn’t like the fact of you being here. She said I should be careful, that I was still married to Charles and what would Muriel say.’
‘She’s right,’ he said heavily, ‘quite right. I don’t blame her for any of that. What my mum would have said I dread to think. My trousers would be down by now and my bottom smacked. Do you know, she still used to take the hairbrush to me when I was sixteen and out at work, if I got back late. And I used to let her do it, stand there saying, “sorry, Mum.”’
‘Well, it didn’t do you any harm,’ said Grace smiling. ‘No harm at all. Tell me about your parents, Ben. About your childhood and everything.’
And they sat in the firelight and he talked: about a ‘mostly happy’ childhood in the small house in Acton, his limited schooling, his tough, demanding mother – ‘She didn’t understand me much’, the gentle father he had loved so dearly – ‘Nor him neither’; the little sister who had died at five from diphtheria. ‘I really loved her, Sally she was called. I can still remember them taking her off in the ambulance, all the street
watching. I felt guilty it wasn’t me.’ And then his thwarted ambitions to become a teacher. ‘I might have made it,’ he said, ‘if I’d got the scholarship when I was eleven. Then I’d have hung on a bit longer, maybe got my school cert. But I failed it, my elementary school was bad, and Mum just didn’t feel I had the right to go on taking from them, when Dad was so ill. And I expect she was right. So I left. Went out to work.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Depressing,’ he said, surprising her, ‘really boring and depressing. All day at a desk in a big room with dozens of others. I hated it all then, living with Mum and Dad in that street – it’s all right when you’re a kid, you don’t notice, and you’re all in it together, but when I was older – well, it looked like going on for ever. Grey and dull. And then I met Linda. And she made it all – brighter. Better.’
‘Tell me about her,’ said Grace quietly, stifling, crushing her jealousy.
‘She was lovely,’ he said simply, ‘and pretty, fair-haired, you know, good figure, fun, always laughing and joking. My dad loved her. Called her his sunshine.’
‘Oh,’ said Grace. She forced a smile.
‘I loved her so much,’ he said, ‘and she loved me. We quarrelled now and then, but she made life good. That was her thing, making life good. Whatever went wrong. “Buck up, Ben,” she used to say, “cut that long face out.”’
Grace didn’t say anything; she couldn’t. Ben smiled, put out his hand and took hers. ‘I think I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, ‘and don’t. You’re quite different from her but that’s good. It’s good because I can love you differently. Without feeling unfaithful.’
‘I see,’ said Grace uncertainly. She was thinking not just about Linda, but about Ben’s life, its deprivations, its lack of any kind of material richness, of physical beauty, contrasting it with Charles’s golden existence, growing up in his large house, waited upon by cooks and nannies, given ponies to ride, dogs to play with, well dressed, superbly educated – and wondered what fundamental differences these things wrought upon a person, how they shaped them for good or ill. And wondered too where she fitted between these two extremes, how she could be what they both loved – or said they did – both wanted. It made her feel very odd.
‘Penny for them,’ he said.
He had said that before: on the hill, in the hot sun. She smiled at the memory.
‘Oh,’ she said quickly, ‘I was thinking about Charles. How spoilt he was. How someone should have taken a hairbrush to him, like your mum did to you.’
‘I expect they did,’ said Ben, ‘sort of thing that happens at posh schools, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Grace, remembering Laurence’s words at the wedding, ‘I suppose so, yes. Only it was worse than hairbrushes. Much worse.’
‘What – other boys, do you mean? That goes on a lot in those places, doesn’t it?’
‘Well – I don’t know about that. I – I suppose there might have been. I never asked him.’
‘Why not?’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said, genuinely shocked and surprised. ‘Not possibly. It’s not the kind of thing I could have asked him. Too – well, too personal. Private.’
‘That’s strange to me,’ he said, ‘very strange. That you could marry someone, make love with them, and not be able to talk about something to them. Linda and me – we didn’t have anything like that. I can’t imagine there could be anything about her I didn’t know, couldn’t have asked. Even all those – well, you know, women’s things, and when she didn’t want me and when she did, we just talked about it all.’
‘Oh,’ said Grace. She could hear her voice sounding bleak suddenly, bleak and distant. He reached out for her hair, pushed it back from her face.
‘Now don’t start being silly,’ he said, smiling, ‘I’d feel just the same about you, there’d be nothing I couldn’t ask you, or tell you either. That was one of the first things I loved about you. The way you didn’t run away from things. Listen, my lovely, we must go to bed. Or I shall start finding out more than I should. Come on, let’s go and see your babies, shall we?’
She fell asleep smiling, happier than she would have believed possible, savouring the memory of his voice calling her his lovely. And woke up with a heavy, hard boulder of guilt in her heart.
Boxing Day started all right; perfectly all right. Ben had slept late and she and Clifford had gone for a long walk. When they came back, Clarissa was sitting at the kitchen table talking to Ben, talking and laughing, her lovely head bent towards him, his eyes on her face. Such was Grace’s happiness that she didn’t even feel the drift of a shadow over it.
‘Hallo, Clarissa,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I’d forgotten you were coming.’
‘I’ve brought the oranges, darling, and, quite honestly, to get away just for a moment or two from Moo. She is hard work, miserable old bat – oh, I’m so sorry, Clifford, my darling, I didn’t think—’
‘That’s all right, Clarissa,’ she said, ‘I did live with her for over thirty years, you know.’ He smiled, but his face was heavy and he excused himself and went out of the room soon afterwards, closing the door carefully behind him.
‘Poor old darling,’ said Clarissa, looking remorseful. ‘What a stupid cow I am. I bet he still misses her in spite of everything. But honestly, she never stops, started this morning about Robert, about how sad it was he wasn’t there, how much she missed him. Florence told me, Grace darling, about what happened, how absolutely frightful for you—’
‘Oh it was all right,’ said Grace quickly. ‘And at least it cleared a few things up.’
‘God, you’re a saint,’ said Clarissa, looking at her thoughtfully. ‘I was just saying to Ben how much we all of us owe you, how we couldn’t manage without you.’
‘I’m certainly not,’ said Grace, thinking what a dowdy quality saintliness was, promptly feeling drab and uninteresting again. Nobody, she thought, would call Clarissa a saint.
‘Well anyway, darling, I suppose I’d better get back now. I left Jack being forced to admire Imogen while she counted up to seventy. And before that we had to admire her using the potty. And before that, cleaning her teeth all by herself. I do hope Florence’s Giles has got a good admiration quotient.’
‘Yes,’ said Grace. ‘Yes, I’m sure he has.’
Clarissa kissed her and then looked at Ben. ‘Can I kiss you too?’ she said.
‘If you like, yes.’
‘I certainly do.’
He leant down from his considerable height to kiss her; then walked out to the car with her. As she started the engine, he leant in at the window and she said something to him; Grace watched them, carefully careless, telling herself how wonderful it was that she didn’t mind in the least.
It was still all right for a while, even after that; they ate lunch, sat and listened to a concert, Ben played with Daniel and his train set. It was rather unreliable, the key didn’t always work from being so worn and used; he said he could get another made in one of the workshops at Tidworth.
‘Let’s have one of those oranges,’ said Daniel. ‘She’s nice, that Clarissa is. Ever so pretty.’
‘She is,’ said Ben, ‘very nice. And very pretty?’ He winked at Grace over Daniel’s head; later, when Daniel had gone upstairs with David to listen to the cat’s-whisker radio, he said, ‘Clarissa was once engaged to Charles, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Grace, startled, ‘yes she was. Did she tell you this morning?’
‘Yeah. Yeah she did. She was telling me about him.’
‘I see.’ She didn’t know why, but illogically it annoyed her, to think of the two of them discussing her husband.
‘He sounds exactly like I thought,’ said Ben.
‘Oh really?’
‘Yeah. Very English, very stiff-upper-lip, all that.’
‘Yes, well, he is. It’s not a crime, is it? And very kind and generous as well. And brave,’ she added.
‘Of course he is. No one’s doubting that. Don’t b
e silly, love.’
She was silent for a moment, then, ‘Did she tell you why she broke off her engagement?’
‘Sort of. She said it just didn’t work out. That told me quite a bit about him too.’
‘Oh really? What exactly did it tell you?’
‘Oh – I don’t know. She’d take quite a bit of living up to, Clarissa, wouldn’t she?’
‘And I don’t. Is that what you mean?’
‘Grace, of course it’s not. What’s the matter with you?’ He reached out, stroked her hand; she pulled it back.
‘Oh dear. Shall we go and sit by the fire? There’s nobody about.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I don’t think so.’
She suddenly didn’t want to have to start stealing minutes, moments of pleasure; the thought wearied her. She had been alone for so long, lonely for so long, she wanted someone there all the time, someone to talk to, laugh with, share things with. Ben wasn’t going to be that person. He couldn’t be.
He shrugged. ‘OK. I’m going to read for a bit. Would that be all right?’ He was teasing her, she knew, but it irritated her just the same.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ she said, ‘of course it would be all right.’
Much later, after a slightly strained supper, he came to find her. ‘Come and have a cuddle, come on. The boys and Sir Clifford are all asleep. It’ll do you good. I want to tell you I love you again. The novelty hasn’t worn off yet.’
She smiled at him rather half-heartedly and took the hand he held out, followed him into the drawing room. He sat down on the battered old sofa, took her in his arms, looked at her very solemnly. ‘I really do love you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any nonsense about it.’
‘I know,’ she said wearily. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say sorry. You look so lovely, Grace. Clarissa said I must be doing you good, she’d never seen you look so pretty.’
Grace sat back. ‘Clarissa said that! What did she mean? Did you tell her that you – that we—’
‘No, of course not. Calm down. She just said – well, she just said that. You know what she’s like, far better than I do.’
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