by Judy Nunn
‘Why?’ Jane refused to be shocked, but it seemed a dangerous idea to her, and an unnecessary one at that. She, too, felt moments of frustration and desire, but it seemed sensible to hang onto one’s virginity for the right man. ‘Why not wait?’
‘Because I don’t want to die having known only one man.’ It was a typically Phoebe statement, Jane thought, she was being deliberately provocative. ‘It’s perfectly acceptable for men to have sex before marriage,’ Phoebe continued, ‘and I think it should be so for women too. What if my husband isn’t any good at it? I’ll be left never knowing what it’s really like. It seems a very practical solution to me.’
‘But what you don’t know you don’t miss, surely,’ Jane countered.
‘Oh I’d know that something was missing,’ Phoebe said gravely. ‘I’d know that all right.’ For once Jane was wrong: Phoebe was very much in earnest. ‘But then,’ she shrugged, ‘if I’d already discovered sex, then I’m sure I could live without it. Or without it being the be-all and end-all in any event.’
‘This is all based on the assumption that you love your husband, and that he isn’t any good at it,’ Jane said with a touch of derision. Phoebe’s arguments were very often based on assumptions.
‘Well, it’s perfectly possible, isn’t it? Not all men are expert lovers.’
‘Aren’t the two supposed to go together? Love and sex?’
‘Of course, in a perfect world, but I’m not going to take the risk, I’m going to have sex before marriage just to be sure.’
‘I don’t believe that women can have sex without love, Phoebe. I’m sure I couldn’t.’ Aware now that her friend’s intention was serious, Jane’s look was one of concern. ‘I’d be very careful if I were you.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Phoebe assured her, ‘I’m going to be selective. I intend to wait for the perfect opportunity.’
And the perfect opportunity had presented itself in the form of James Hampton. But the situation became a little more complicated than Phoebe had anticipated. Although she told herself that she was not in love, she was as much in James’s power as he was in hers. She was sexually obsessed with him.
‘I found out,’ she said simply to Jane.
‘James Hampton?’ Jane had suspected as much. Phoebe nodded. ‘Do you love him?’
‘No. And he doesn’t love me. But it’s wonderful.’ Phoebe was glowing with a womanliness words couldn’t express. She knew it, and she didn’t attempt to hide it. ‘It’s wonderful, Jane.’
Phoebe was fooling herself, Jane thought, and she couldn’t help but feel a touch of envy. Phoebe Chisolm was in love in every sense of the word, and Jane longed to feel the same way.
During the afternoon following Churchill’s broadcast, James Hampton did not lay a brush to the painting. There was no need, it was finished. And when he and Phoebe scrambled down the ladder from the loft in the broad glare of the summer afternoon, both still breathless from their sexual abandonment, he reluctantly agreed that the following evening he would unveil the portrait to the family. He must take the bull by the horns at some stage, he realised, he couldn’t continue to escape the inevitable.
‘It’s a fine likeness, James,’ Arthur Chisolm said, ‘a very fine likeness. Indeed, it’s a masterly painting, I’m most impressed.’
James’s relief knew no bounds. It had been his own guilt working overtime, he realised. No-one was reading anything untoward into the painting. But as the doctor continued, promising to put in a good word with his father, proposing a toast to his talent, James started to feel wretched. What would the man say if he knew that the person whose praises he now sang had seduced his daughter under his very own roof? Then Phoebe was saying, ‘He’s captured the real me, hasn’t he, Daddy,’ and James didn’t know where to look.
Several days later, when the renovations commenced on the stables, James’s situation became even more insidious. Phoebe would visit him in his room in the dead of night and they would make furtive and feverish love, muffling the sounds of their mutual pleasure in pillows and bed linen and each other’s bodies, aware that in the bedroom directly below them Arthur and Alice Chisolm lay sleeping. Then Phoebe would slip silently away and, in the morning, James would awaken to his rumpled bed and a sense of shame. Their coupling seemed sordid now, dishonest and unworthy. There had been a form of innocence to their trysts above the stables. A sense of irresponsibility, as if the portrait had them in its control. It had been the portrait which had aroused their mutual passion. But the portrait now hung above the mantelpiece in the downstairs drawing room of Chisolm House. It was complete, and a chapter was closed.
James wished he had the strength to end it, but he didn’t. Phoebe’s desire was insatiable, and so was his.
‘Martin, this is Phoebe. Phoebe Chisolm, Captain Martin Thackeray.’ Martin was seated in his wheelchair in one of the front sunrooms of the Royal Victoria when Jane made the introductions.
‘Hello, Captain Thackeray, do you mind if I call you Martin?’ Phoebe said offering her hand.
‘So long as I may call you Phoebe,’ Martin replied as they shook. ‘I’ve heard so much about you I feel we’re already old friends.’ So this was Phoebe Chisolm, he thought. She was certainly beautiful, Jane had said she was. ‘Everyone falls in love with Phoebe,’ she’d said. Not quite everyone, Martin thought as he smiled at Jane. ‘She’s exactly as you described her,’ he said. But she wasn’t as beautiful as Jane Miller, he thought. Nobody on God’s earth was as beautiful as Jane Miller.
‘The man’s madly in love with you,’ Phoebe announced half an hour later as she and Jane walked in the hospital gardens. ‘You can see it a mile off.’
‘Oh don’t be ridiculous, Phoebe.’
‘Of course he is. He’s as madly in love with you as you are with him.’
‘I’m not in love with him at all,’ Jane said a little impatiently. Phoebe was acting like a schoolgirl.
Phoebe had insisted upon meeting Martin Thackeray, about whom Jane had been talking for weeks. She was convinced that Jane was in love and was now delighted to observe that the feeling was reciprocated. Good heavens, Phoebe thought, the man had barely looked at her. In the full half hour they’d chatted, he hadn’t taken his eyes off Jane.
‘He’s a bit on the thin side, I prefer men more beefy,’ she continued, ignoring Jane’s irritation, ‘but apart from that he’s quite handsome. And he’s tall, that’s always preferable. Well, he looks as if he’s tall, it’s difficult to tell when he’s sitting down, isn’t it?’ Jane didn’t laugh as she usually did when Phoebe discussed men in such a blithely detached fashion, and Phoebe hoped that being in love wasn’t depriving Jane of a sense of humour. ‘As for the voice, you’re certainly right about that. The voice is absolutely gorgeous.’
‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ Jane said enthusiastically, she couldn’t help herself. ‘I love his voice, I could listen to him all day.’
‘So you’ve said.’ Didn’t Jane realise that she’d said as much at least half a dozen times over the past several weeks? It had been a dead giveaway. ‘Voices are very erotic, you know.’
Jane hadn’t thought of Martin’s voice as erotic, but she found herself agreeing. ‘Yes, they are, aren’t they. Well, Martin’s is anyway.’ And before she knew it, she and Phoebe were deep in girlish discussion as to the attributes of Martin Thackeray, an older, highly educated man and a minister to boot. It really wasn’t right, but then Phoebe always brought out the worst in her.
Jane hadn’t considered herself in love with Martin; she admired him tremendously, and perhaps she had a bit of a crush on him, she’d be willing to admit, but …?
‘You’re in love with him, Jane,’ Phoebe stated categorically, ‘it’s quite obvious. And as for him, he’s utterly besotted. So what are you going to do about it?’
‘About what?’
‘Well, he’ll be leaving the hospital soon, won’t he? You said they’ll have him walking in the next week or so, and they need all the beds they can get.�
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‘Yes, but he won’t be able to travel for at least a month. He’ll have to convalesce before he can go back to Scotland.’
‘Easy,’ Phoebe grinned. ‘Just leave it to me.’ As always, Phoebe had the instant solution.
‘Daddy,’ she said that very same night, ‘the stables will be finished in a fortnight, and I think the first occupant should be Captain Thackeray.’
‘What an excellent idea, Phoebe,’ Arthur agreed.
A week later, a small farewell dinner was held at Chisolm House for James Hampton. The following morning he was to return to active service.
‘Just au revoir, my boy,’ Arthur said as he proposed the toast. He realised that he sounded a little too hearty as he said it, but then what did one say to a young man going off to war? he wondered. ‘We’ll look forward to seeing you back at Chisolm House on your next leave. To James,’ he said, and they all raised their glasses.
‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when …’
Despite the fact that the drapes were drawn in accordance with blackout regulations, they sang with pre-war gusto, determined to make it a party night. Alice was once again at the piano, Arthur by her side, his hand on her shoulder. James, Phoebe and Jane stood beside him, and Dora and Enid had been called away from the dirty dishes in the kitchen to have a glass of port and lend voice.
‘But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day …’
James was touched. He felt Phoebe’s hand creep into his. He knew she wasn’t looking at him, and he daren’t look at her, but he squeezed her fingers in return.
It was well after midnight when she came to his room and there was a desperation to their lovemaking that night. Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms staring up into the blackness, not daring to turn on the light. They were silent for some time, each lost in thought.
Phoebe was questioning herself. Was Jane right? Was it not possible for a woman to have sex without love? It had certainly been Phoebe’s intention, and she thought that she’d proved it possible. But now James was going off to war and might never come back, and she was sick with fear. She turned her head into his shoulder and snuggled as close to him as she could.
James held her to him. Her naked body, normally erotic and a source of instant arousal, felt vulnerable and childlike. He kissed her forehead and stroked her hair and cuddled her like a baby. ‘I love you, Phoebe,’ he whispered. He hadn’t thought that he did, but in that moment she was his whole world, something warm and tangible to cling to.
She knew as he said it that he meant it. But he didn’t really love her, she was sure of it. He was a man fearful of what lay in store for him. If she said she loved him in return, he would take it as a commitment; he was an honourable man. She had seduced him and used him, aware of the guilt he’d suffered as a consequence. He owed her nothing. She kissed him.
‘Come home safe, James,’ she said.
In the morning, she stood at the front doors of Chisolm House with her mother and father and Dora and Enid and they all waved at the army Austen ‘Tilly’ as it backed out of the driveway, James waving back through the passenger seat window. Phoebe’s grin was as seductively teasing as it had been the first day he’d met her. She made sure that it was.
On the morning Martin Thackeray arrived at Chisolm House, Jane accompanied him from the hospital as his nurse, and Phoebe was there to greet them at the stables.
‘You’ll be very comfortable here, Martin, I’m sure of it,’ she said. ‘It has quite a background, the stables, a lot of love has been shared under this roof.’
Jane cast a look of horror at Phoebe. How dare she allude to her illicit affair with James.
But Phoebe’s smile was virtuous. ‘Jane and I grew up here as children. They were our happiest days, weren’t they, Jane?’
‘They were indeed,’ Jane agreed, her eyes issuing a warning but, as Martin looked about admiringly at the stables, and Phoebe gave her the wickedest of secret winks, Jane had to fight back the impulse to laugh.
‘It’s charming,’ Martin said. ‘I’m very grateful to your father, Phoebe. And to you too, Jane tells me this was your idea.’
Phoebe’s face was once again the picture of innocence as he turned to her. ‘Yes, it was a good one, wasn’t it? I’ll let you settle in,’ she said and she left the two of them together.
The stables had been converted to an open-plan living space with a bed in the corner and a small bathroom at the rear. The loft had been sealed off and Arthur planned further renovations to convert it to a separate living area, either for servicemen or for convalescing patients who could manage the stairs. At the moment, the situation was perfect for Martin, who could walk only short distances with the aid of a stick. There was a small gas stove and an icebox, and Dora kept the kitchen cupboard well stocked for him when she did the shopping for the big house. During the days, Martin looked after himself but, at the doctor’s insistence, he joined them for dinner each evening at the main house.
Jane became a constant visitor to the stables whenever she could get time off from the hospital, which was quite regularly, Dr Chisolm himself being her strongest ally in this. Aware of the delicate psychological state of Martin Thackeray, Arthur Chisolm was firmly convinced that Jane was the best cure to hand. And he was right. In the most tortured moments of his restless nights, Martin often contemplated leaving the church. How could he serve God when he had such doubts about His wisdom? Jane was the only person to whom he spoke of such matters, and she, in her simplicity, restored his faith more than she could possibly know.
‘Surely God needs all the help He can get these days,’ she said. ‘And the men who are fighting this war certainly need those who can support them in their faith.’
‘How can I support others in their faith when I doubt my own, Jane?’
She didn’t have an answer for that, but just talking about it served a purpose, she could tell. Even as he voiced his insecurity, she could see that, by sharing his torment, he was growing stronger daily. ‘You can help because you know what they’re going through, Martin. You’ve been there yourself.’
Despite their discussions and the growth of their friendship, as the days became weeks, their relationship continued to be principally that of grateful patient and caring nurse. Jane always queried whether he’d taken his medication, and he’d laugh and remind her he was a doctor, to which she’d reply ‘they’re usually the worst’. She helped him with his painful stretching exercises, and supported him as he slowly paced the courtyard, determined to do away with his stick.
Phoebe, observing them, was becoming frustrated with their lack of progress. ‘Hasn’t he said anything yet?’ she demanded. He couldn’t have, she thought; if he had, Jane would surely have told her.
‘About what?’
‘About the fact that he loves you of course.’
‘No.’ Jane was beginning to doubt whether Phoebe was right. She was aware that Martin needed her, and it was clear he enjoyed her company, but that hardly constituted love.
‘Then you’ll have to take control of the situation yourself, there’s nothing else for it.’
‘And how exactly do you propose I go about it, Phoebe?’ Jane’s tone was heavily laced with irony. ‘Should I throw myself at him and seduce him the way you did James?’
Phoebe laughed with delight, she wasn’t at all offended. ‘Hardly. I mean he wouldn’t be up to it, would he, in his condition. Just let him know that you care for him.’ Jane still appeared unsure, and Phoebe threw her hands in the air, exasperated. ‘For God’s sake, Jane, stop being a nurse and be a woman!’
That night, upon Phoebe’s insistence, Jane agreed to dine at Chisolm House. She prepared her father’s dinner in advance, as she always did when she was invited to the Chisolms for the evening. And she sat companionably with him as he ate. It was an inconvenience to neither. Ron Miller always settled down to his dinner on the dot of half past six, and the Chisolms always dined a good two hours later. They cha
tted about the postcard that had arrived from Dave that morning. Both the Miller brothers had joined the army and were on active duty. Ron was proud of his boys ‘doing their bit’, as he said, and he never voiced his innermost fears. It was only right for a man to fight for his country, he said. If he was thirty years younger he’d join up himself. ‘Be there like a shot, I would.’
He asked about Martin Thackeray. ‘He’ll be going back to Scotland within a week or so, you say?’ Ron liked Captain Thackeray, they’d shared many an amicable chat as Ron tended the Chisolms’ garden.
‘Yes, he’ll be fit to travel by then. Do you want another cup of tea?’ Jane jumped up from the table before her father could delve into the subject any further.
‘Wouldn’t say no.’ Ron Miller was of the same opinion as Phoebe. As far as Jane was concerned anyway. His daughter’s dedication to the man’s wellbeing was far more than that of a nurse to her patient, and he was sure she was in love with the man. But whenever he asked any leading questions she avoided the issue. Ron wondered what Martin Thackeray’s feelings were for Jane. The Reverend Captain certainly wouldn’t be leading the girl on, being a man of the cloth and all, but if he should care for her, then Ron certainly approved the match. A minister, as he was, and a doctor to boot. By God but his little girl’d be coming up in the world with a husband like that.
‘Thanks, love,’ he said as she set the cup down on the table. ‘You’d best be off then.’
She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Bye, Dad.’
‘You take care now, and have a good time.’
Over the dinner table, as Arthur carved the roast, Phoebe studied Martin and Jane. Jane wished that she wouldn’t. Tonight was the night, Phoebe had instructed her. She wasn’t sure how she was to go about making Martin aware of her feelings and Phoebe’s close scrutiny wasn’t helping.
‘Have you heard from James, dear?’ Alice asked her daughter.
‘No,’ Phoebe replied bluntly. Her mother knew very well she’d not heard from James. Alice Chisolm scrutinised the mail as soon as it arrived each morning.
