The Soldier's Bride

by Maggie Ford

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘Give me time,’ she’d said. ‘It’s Christmas the day after tomorrow. I can’t do anything – think of anything – until that’s over. He’ll need me over the holiday, perhaps for weeks to come. His chest’s so bad in winter. I must give some time to him.’

  January was almost over now and she’d heard nothing from David. She was on the edge and unable to sleep. She resisted the temptation to find his home telephone number; almost rang Baron & Lampton’s, but hadn’t the nerve to.

  When at the end of January David rang her while she was in the office, her heart leapt and thumped so much she felt physically sick, having to breathe deeply to calm herself down.

  ‘I thought I ought not to get in touch too soon,’ he said, his voice clipped and rapid, though he tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Do you think we could meet for lunch – same place as before?’

  Her words tumbled out with equal haste. ‘That’d be nice – yes, I suppose I could.’

  ‘Saturday? This Saturday? Or if you like dinner in the evening? Whichever.’

  ‘No,’ she said, immediately alarmed. ‘It had better be for lunch.’

  An evening together – it was begging for trouble. That’s what frightened her – the upheaval that seeing David again threatened. Her life in its safe little rut, just looking after Billy, a wall built high and strong around them. Frightening to realise how easily that wall was in danger of being breached. She didn’t want to see any intrusion from the world beyond her own. The shop door closed, shutting outside the day’s dealings, the curtains drawn, she and Billy could be safe together. No, she wanted nothing to invade her world. And yet …

  ‘Lunch then,’ he said. He didn’t sound too disappointed. ‘Say one-thirty – the same place as last time?’

  Even this, as she agreed, was one step through the breach he had made. Could she, ought she, take another, then another, until on turning round she found the wall closed up behind her?

  Christopher came in from school as she hurried upstairs and followed her into the flat.

  ‘Been out, Mum?’ His wide dark eyes scanned her. ‘Gosh! You look jolly flushed. Sort of out of breath.’

  His own face was bright from the biting January wind after coming just fifty yards from the bus stop at Tottenham Court Road. Cap askew, his satchel hanging haphazardly halfway down his arm, socks down his calves, knees rosy from the cold and hair all tousled, he was a typical schoolboy. Ten this year and he’d adjusted marvellously, hardly ever mentioning his years with Vinny who might as well have left the face of the earth for all he spoke of her – in fact, for all she ever contacted him or Letty.

  ‘I’ve had a busy day,’ she excused herself.

  ‘How’s Billy?’ Chris’s mind flitted from one thing to another with the randomness of a moth. In that he was like his Aunt Lucy.

  ‘Not too well.’ She was glad to talk of Billy. It made her feel more normal, stopped that sickening beating against her rib cage. ‘The doctor will be in tomorrow to take another look at him. Not much can be done until the weather gets warmer and drier, though.’

  ‘I think he must be jolly sick of staying indoors all the time,’ said Chris as he dropped his satchel on to the striped moquette settee and clambered out of his coat and scarf. The blue blazer had small dark pear-shaped stains on the lapel. Letty leaped on them, glad of something domestic and safe to tune in to.

  ‘Oh, look at that, Christopher!’

  He drew in his chin, staring down his nose to where she’d indicated.

  ‘It’s ink.’

  ‘I know it’s ink. I’m going to have to try and get that out before tomorrow. Why are you so careless?’

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ said Christopher. ‘Anthony Lovett flicked his pen at me – the nib was full of ink. He did it on purpose.’

  ‘You’re all the same at that school – no regard for how much your uniforms cost. A poor family could feed itself for a week on what that blazer’s worth.’

  She stopped short, a little guilty at making the comparison as Chris hung his head sullenly. Letty altered her tone. ‘I can’t afford to keep buying new uniforms. Give it to me. I’ll have to sponge it out right now.’

  Sponging energetically, she tried not to think of Saturday. She hadn’t told Chris about his father yet. He’d have to be told at some time, but that meant telling Billy who wasn’t well enough for any shocks. A month or two more wouldn’t hurt. In the meantime, she must keep David at bay. After all, she told herself as she dabbed at the uniform, one Saturday each month couldn’t really hurt. What was so sinful anyway, about having lunch with a friend?

  In fact David behaved like a perfect gentleman, speaking of his wife, Madge, and Letty of her life with Billy and Christopher. It was all quite innocent.

  As February moved into March, Billy slowly improved though each passing winter debilitated him that bit more. He had grown so thin and haggard, Letty hardly recognised the young man she’d know in 1914; would have walked right by had she met him for the first time since then. Yet she knew every inch of his face. It was her job to shave him, wash and dress him, help him to the toilet, so weak had he become during the winter.

  Dr Cavarolli said with doleful expression that there was little of his lungs that wasn’t congested with fluid. She could almost see him mentally predicting the time Billy had left to him. Letty refused to acknowledge the gloomy prediction. Billy had years in him yet. Had to have. Life without him was unthinkable.

  ‘You’re lots better,’ she told him one day when he was at last able to get to his chair by the living-room window.

  ‘Till – next time.’ He grinned. It was hard for him to maintain that old humour of his these days, yet he could still grin at her, making light of his breathlessness as he fell gratefully into the chair. ‘God – I don’t ’arf fancy – a cuppa! I’d make it – meself – but I wouldn’t – want ter do you – out of the job.’

  March slid into April, then May, June, David reluctantly bowing to her wish not to tell Christopher about him just yet though she could see how he longed to meet him. He honoured too her wish to keep their meetings to once a month, but in June insisted on dinner together, her birthday being the previous Monday, and refused to take no for an answer.

  ‘Birthday treat,’ he said, and as she finally agreed, ‘I’ve tickets for the Wyndham Theatre afterwards.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she hissed into the telephone mouthpiece, hoping no one would come into the office at that moment. ‘That’s going too far, David. I can’t possibly. Where’s it going to end? I’m making enough excuses now to Billy. I can’t overdo it.’

  All the signs were pointing to this relationship becoming too deep, despite her good intentions. She’d even declined his suggestion of a stroll in Hyde Park, the weather growing warm and heady.

  ‘And there’s your wife,’ she reminded.

  ‘I can handle her.’

  He sounded so confident that for a moment there was a certain seediness to it all, to what was supposed to be lovely and romantic.

  ‘Oh, I forgot,’ she said haughtily, forgetting to lower her voice. ‘She doesn’t care where you are, so long as she’s got her own friends and her bridge parties. Well, Billy’s a different matter. He cares for me and he’s so damned unsuspecting it makes me feel rotten. He thinks I’m attending business meetings, and I detest lying to him like this – he’s so good-natured about my going and leaving him.’

  ‘Darling, there’s no harm to anyone,’ David said hastily, but she couldn’t subdue the feeling of deceitfulness that had come over her.

  ‘I can’t start telling him I’m going to even more meetings, and then stay out half the night. I can’t! Not that he’d guess anything but I would know it was wrong. I’m already ashamed of what I’m doing to him. No, I can’t come, David, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Have you thought what it’s doing to me?’ he asked slowly after a long pause.

  ‘I know, David,’ she said bleakly. ‘I’m sorry.’


  He too sounded bleak. ‘You’re saying you’d rather not see me at all?’

  ‘I didn’t say that!’ she cried, lowering her voice instantly to a whisper as Mrs Warnes looked up at the glass of the office window. ‘I didn’t say that. I want to go on seeing you, David. I don’t know what I’d do if …’

  Her voice was dying away. She hated to think what she would feel if he put the phone down on her. So far she’d been astute, allowing no chance to be alone with him; he hadn’t even kissed her yet, merely allowed his hand to touch hers over the table, and, oh, how she wanted him to kiss her!

  ‘If?’ he prompted quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you don’t know what you’d do if …’

  ‘I meant – I don’t know what I meant.’

  ‘You meant if we were never to see each other again?’

  ‘No.’ She was confused. Then suddenly she wasn’t. ‘I couldn’t bear losing you again. Yes, I’ll come. I’ll make some excuse.’

  She was almost panting now, with relief and anticipation. ‘Where do I meet you?’

  David sounded equally urgent. ‘Take a taxi to Leicester Square – I’ll be waiting.’

  The two of them made their furtive plan – it was seedy. Yet as she thought of David, Letty felt elated.

  ‘Go off orright, did it?’

  For a moment Letty stared at Billy. He had been waiting up for her, sitting in the armchair, looked tired. She felt her face grow warm.

  ‘Did what go off all right?’

  ‘The lady yer said yer was meetin’. What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, I said I’d go and see the paintings,’ she lied. ‘Next Saturday at her studio. It’s across London – in Middlesex. I think they’d be worth looking at. I’ll have to stay overnight. She was very nice. I met her husband …’

  Embroidering, as those who lie very often do, to sustain the story, to convince listeners of its authenticity with more bits of information than need be. And Billy sat listening, smiling, believing every word. God forgive her!

  David had held her hand through the play; had kissed her in the taxi bringing her home; had held her urgently, one hand on her breast.

  ‘No, David, you mustn’t!’ But her willpower had melted. She had lain in his arms while the taxi driver concentrated on steering his vehicle through the streets, having seen it all before – the couples who rode in his cab to kiss and cuddle and giggle. So long as he got paid well for it, why should he care? He’d smiled broadly at the good tip David gave him, the cab pulling up some yards from Letty’s home.

  ‘I must see you next week,’ David had begged. ‘I can’t go on like this. Come away with me for the weekend. We’ll go to Oxford. Spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday there.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Fear and love were stifling her. ‘What excuse can I make?’

  ‘Say you’ve got some business to attend to.’

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘I’ll say the same to Madge. She won’t even miss me.’

  ‘My Billy would. There’s the gallery too – I have to be there.’

  ‘You have your assistant. Darling, I need you! Say you will?’

  And here she was, lying in her teeth to the most trusting man God had ever put breath into. It was sickening, yet what could she do?

  Oxford bowled her over – or was it that she was with David? In the hotel, calling themselves husband and wife, that night she was his wife. But daylight re-awakened conscience. Anxious to appease it, she insisted on returning home immediately. But what a wonderful night it had been. Not to be repeated though without asking to be found out.

  Not since her early days with David had she gone out and about so much. Thinking back, from the time David had first disappeared from her life, hers had been a narrow world in a way, apart from those few years going up West with Ethel.

  Now she was rubbing shoulders in Piccadilly, in Leicester Square or the Strand, with flappers, those bright young things with not a care in the world; Letty at thirty-five was mature, her taste fashionable but conservative against the beaded and fringed hemlines flapping around the girls’ rouged knees. With vaselined eyes and Max Factor lips for a Vamp look, shingled hair concealed under shimmering sequined helmets, their escorts dapper in dinner jackets, they hurried on to clubs and dance halls to do the Charleston, the tango, the foxtrot, the shimmy. But none of them was happier than Letty.

  David looked so handsome in a double breasted dinner jacket as he took her to the theatre, dinner, or seats at the classier cinemas. At forty-five was still good-looking, a strand of silver here and there amid the dark wavy hair but the dark eyes as fine as ever they’d been. One arm looped through his, Letty felt she was where she belonged, dressed to the nines and feeling a million dollars.

  The year was passing like a dream. They still met just one Saturday in four, sometimes in five so as not to arouse suspicion, the odd snatched evening midweek came very seldom, but what joy those evenings were. Beyond help, needing David’s love as she needed air to breathe, Letty tried not to think about Billy; she fretted for David every moment she was away from him. In the intervals between she immersed herself in her business.

  ‘Yer ’alf killin’ yerself,’ Billy told her, much recovered after a good summer but aware there was still next winter to face.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she sang. ‘I’ve got hidden strength.’ She tried not to dwell on the underlying truth that her strength came from David’s love.

  Many people would remember 1925 as the year Madame Tussaud’s Waxwork Exhibition burnt to the ground, the year Mr Winston Churchill lowered income tax by sixpence and gave widows a ten-shilling pension as well as the elderly insured at sixty-five, the year Amundsen flew over the North Pole and Oxford sank in the Boat Race.

  Letty would remember it quite differently. She would recall sitting in the circle seats at the Tivoli in the Strand, David’s arm about her shoulders as he smiled down at her, she hastily wiping away her tears at the overwhelming climax to King Vidor’s stupendous war film, The Great Parade. She watched it without shuddering, knowing David was with her, was alive. Nevertheless she was embarrassed as the pitiless cinema lights went up at the end to reveal her reddened eyes.

  She’d remember it too as a year of torment, of longing, of furtive meetings. David was asking more and more to see his son, despite the photos she gave him. David would kiss her hungrily in darkened taxis as she hurried home to Billy, thinking the world of her husband while aching for those stolen minutes with David, minutes that had become her very life’s blood.

  Billy no longer smiled so readily.

  ‘I didn’t fink yer’d need ter go ter so many meetin’s.’

  ‘Nor me,’ she lied, becoming adept at it. ‘Goes with the job, I’m afraid.’

  ‘’Oo are they, the people you ’ave ter see?’

  ‘Oh … just people.’

  ‘Same ones every time?’

  ‘No, different ones.’

  ‘What sort of people?’

  ‘Well, you know.’ She could feel herself growing irritable with him. ‘Art people. Dealers. Collectors. You know. I do have to do a lot of negotiating for some of the things I sell. There are auctions. Important auctions. You don’t like going to them. You get bored.’

  He had never been that interested, art going over his head, so she had never browned him off by including him or showing to him all that came in. Which was just as well as, although she hadn’t planned it, it did serve as an excuse. That was, so long as he didn’t start delving as he was doing now.

  She watched him shrug, not entirely convinced, hoped he wouldn’t ask any more questions, detested the way she was having to lie, with no idea how to make it all right for him without lying. A year of scheming was beginning to get her down, making her feel vaguely ill. The Sunday before Christmas, Billy as expected having gone down with his chest, she decided she must have some respite from deception, at least for a couple of months, or go out of her mind.

  Billy in b
ed listening to his beloved wireless set, Christopher out somewhere with friends, Letty sat at the table in the living room, pen in hand, a sheet of writing paper before her, reading what she had written so far.

  Darling,

  I’ve been thinking about us and I feel angry with myself, tormented by every second we’re apart. But I have to have a little time to do some thinking. I know it’s going to be awful for you, darling, but I must try to give myself a little time to recoup from the misery we are causing to ourselves. I really do feel I have to be with Billy over Christmas and give my whole attention to him – that’s if I can possibly tear it away from you whom I love so much I could die. But I do need to try not to think only of myself. A few weeks, that’s all. I owe him that. His chest trouble has started up again – it always does in winter. I shall have to watch him, be with him all the time in case it gets any worse. I wish I knew how to tell you how I feel about him. I can’t understand how I can be so devoted to him and yet love you as I do; how I can want to nurse him yet can be so unfaithful to him. How can I make you understand how I feel when I don’t really know myself?

  Please understand, darling. It probably appears terribly selfish to you but don’t telephone me. I’ll let you know when circumstances allow me to see you again. If you want me to, that is. But never forget, David, I love you very much.

  She stared at the letter, re-reading before going any further. It sounded so awful, so pathetic. How could she write such drivel to him? If it didn’t make him laugh, it would hurt him.

  ‘Letty!’

  Billy called from the bedroom. Immediately she was on alert, knowing the sounds. He’d been struggling with his lungs on and off for nearly a week. It had started up, as it usually did, as the year grew damper in late-October. The ever present bronchial cough, at first slight but becoming more persistent. Then, as the fluid built up, the damaged air passages unable to cope, these full-blown attacks.

  ‘Letty!’

  ‘Coming!’