The Soldier's Bride

by Maggie Ford

  He was becoming insistent and she was being persuaded. Chris wouldn’t need to know. And she wanted David’s strength at this moment – wanted him so urgently. ‘Oh, darling. Oh, David …’

  The music faded; the needle, caught in the central groove, began to circle with a jarring repetitious grating. It brought her back to her senses. She wanted David so much. But it would only be the same as before. Her half responding as she fought with her conscience, ending in tears; he frustrated, trying to make out that it didn’t matter.

  ‘It’s no use.’ Better to say it now than in the middle of his lovemaking. It could be perfect, anywhere else but in this flat. ‘It’s no use. I just can’t – especially with Chris here. Please try to understand, David.’

  His expression told her that he was beginning not to.

  ‘I’ll go then,’ he said abruptly, to which she could only nod bleak assent.

  David’s father died in the spring of 1929. In his will he left David a partnership in Baron & Lampton’s, with the full approval of course of his father-in-law, Henry Lampton.

  The news left Letty unhappy. This past year she had been dreaming of the day when he would be hers alone.

  ‘How can I refuse it without giving any reason?’ David asked when she summoned the courage to express her thoughts, hating to see him even more troubled than he already was.

  They sat on a bench beside the Serpentine on the Sunday following the funeral, the weather almost as overcast as Letty’s spirits.

  ‘I’ve always dreaded this day,’ David went on glumly. He missed the lack of sympathy in Letty’s eyes.

  ‘You mean you knew what was in this will?’ she queried, gazing at the ducks feeding at the edge of the water on bread she had been so happily throwing to them before David had dismayed her with his news.

  ‘He told me when I married Madge,’ he said. ‘Before I met you again, so I never thought it would affect me except to better my life.’

  Letty took her eyes away from the ducks. ‘And you’ve never said anything about it to me?’

  He turned his head to look at her. ‘I’ve never known how.’

  ‘You knew there was no chance of ever leaving your wife?’ she said, astounded, anger building up inside her. ‘All those times I talked of us being married one day, you let me go on believing that you’d be free? And all the time you knew that what was in your father’s will would tie you down forever!’

  ‘It won’t be forever,’ he protested, attempting to take her hand which she snatched away immediately. ‘I’ll find a way, darling.’

  Letty’s heart was beginning to race, a sense of betrayal making her feel slightly sick. ‘You knew you couldn’t ask her for a divorce and happily stay a partner with her father.’

  She saw his mouth beneath the thin moustache tremble as he lowered his gaze, but couldn’t stop her outburst, made sarcastic by bitterness.

  ‘Why, all you’ve worked for, schemed for, sacrificed – just to marry me! So you let me go on believing. You never did intend to leave her, did you, David? Not with the security your marriage gave you, while you could come and get what you wanted from me without any risk to you!’

  His eyes darkened with her injustice. ‘That’s not true, Letitia!’

  ‘It is true! You’ve known all along you couldn’t marry me.’

  ‘You’re saying I’ve used you?’ He was angry now.

  ‘What else would you call it?’ Near to tears now, she rushed on: ‘I don’t dispute that you love me, David. But I never thought you could be so selfish with it. You’ve never, ever contemplated giving up your comfortable life for me, have you? Because if you’d loved me as I thought you did, you’d have thrown it all aside for me. It wasn’t as if you were walking into poverty. Lord knows, I’m not penniless. We could have made a wonderful team together in the gallery …’

  ‘I’ve no intention of living off you, Letitia,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s yours. Your business.’

  ‘It could have been ours,’ she wailed.

  ‘I do have my pride …’ he began, but she cut in angrily.

  ‘Oh, of course – a man’s pride mustn’t be damaged! What sort of pride is it to lead me along these three years, quite happy to make love to me every now and again, then going home to your well-ordered life with your well-ordered wife and your well-ordered business. You have the cheek to ask me to go to bed with you, thinking that one day we’d be married, when all the time …’

  Words failing her, she got up, spilling the bread she’d brought for the ducks on to the path, and hurried off almost at a run and hardly able to see for a mist of tears. She could hear David running up behind her, felt his grip on her arm, turning her round to face him.

  ‘Is that what you think of me?’ he demanded. ‘After all we’ve been to each other? After …’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve been to you, David!’ she hissed viciously.

  ‘You’ve been my life, Letitia,’ he cried, still gripping her arm. ‘I couldn’t live without you. If you knew what my life is – at home. Home! It’s no home. It’s a mausoleum where I sit or stand or lie, like one of her precious pekinese. Did I tell you? She has three of ’em.’

  He sounded breathless. ‘They sleep on our bed at night. They eat at our table. She speaks to them before she speaks to me – when she’s not out and about or entertaining her fashionable friends. And I am expected to take a back seat and smile. She’s her father’s darling, and so long as I toe the line, I am his partner by approval. Upset her and I hear hints of some larger concern’s interest in our direction – of shareholders voting to sell out. I’d let him, Letitia, but it was my father’s business. I can’t let him down, let it all go to some huge concern like Selfridge’s. I want it to be as big as them, not part of them – in his memory. I loved my father, Letitia!’

  ‘More than you loved me?’ she challenged hotly.

  He gazed levelly at her. ‘I’ve tried not to talk of our future because I could see no way out of my marriage. But if I could be free, I would. I dream of it night and day. You are my very life!’

  She gazed at him through her tears, her love for him draining out of her. ‘We’ll never be married, will we?’

  He was growing calmer. The well-ordered man in charge of himself once more. His hand slipped down from her arm to her wrist, held it gently. ‘Be patient. I’ve been careful. Madge suspects nothing. But I will tell her about us as soon as I see a way clear, I swear. Come hell or high water, I’ll tell her that she has to let me go. It could mean I’ll be asked to resign from the board, the business my father built … But for you, I promise, we’ll be married one day.’

  ‘When?’ Letty asked. Her tears were drying on her cheeks but they lay in the tremor of her voice still. And a coldness had taken hold of her as she tested him. ‘How long?’ she questioned.

  ‘When?’ she repeated, feeling now like a spur of granite, brittle and cruelly sculpted by the remorseless buffeting of some ice laden wind.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘But we will.’ Determination had put an edge to his tone but it still wasn’t enough. Something inside her wanted him to say: ‘I’ll abandon everything I have for you, Letitia.’ But he hadn’t. And now her own pride took upper hand.

  ‘Then I think it best you go back to her,’ she said haughtily, amazed at her own coldness. ‘Because there’s no point us going on.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lucy had a satisfied look on her face.

  ‘That told him!’ she burst out, and leaned back on Letty’s immaculate brown-striped sofa to add emphasis to it. ‘I really think he’s treated you like a dish rag. I wouldn’t have let him go on this long. Good for you, Letty!’

  She nodded acknowledgement and went on sipping her coffee, thought of David, smiled, and tried to ignore the heavy weight inside her chest.

  It was autumn – a whole summer wasted cutting off her nose to spite her face. David had telephoned her every week consistently these past mont
hs, begging her to see him. She in turn had given a firm denial each time he had craved her patience a while longer until he could find a way to confront his wife. But worse, Chris was constantly asking after him. What could she say?

  On two occasions she had seen David’s green Talbot ticking over across the road from her gallery, and had almost been tempted to run out and across the road to him. So far she’d managed to distract herself in serving customers, learned to ignore the ache in her heart on glancing out later to find the car gone. A good thing perhaps that her gallery was always so busy, helping to keep her mind occupied.

  The business was doing well – not just well, was going from strength to strength. The book shop next-door had become vacant that autumn, a victim of the financial waves being felt in England from a disastrous Wall Street crash in the America. Letty’s first thought was to get in and enlarge her own premises.

  ‘I’m taking the lease on,’ she told Dad when she went to see him.

  Confined to bed with his old illness, now more complicated by what the doctor had called emphysema, his breathing was horribly laboured. The doctor had advised getting him into hospital but Dad had become a stubborn frightened old man with strange ideas. ‘I ain’t goin’ ter no ’ospital,’ he’d said obdurately. ‘Damn dangerous places, ’spitals. Only take yer there ter die. Look at your Billy – ’e died there, didn’t ’e? Well then. If I’m goin’ ter die, I’ll die ’ere in me own bed!’

  Letty, sitting beside him in the cluttered bedroom speaking of her plans – more for something to say than for his opinion – remembered how she’d felt with Billy, saw Dad’s grey face crease with anxiety as she voiced her decision to take a lease on another shop.

  ‘D’yer think it’s the right time? Jobs goin’ ter the wall – all the unemployment.’

  She wasn’t to be deterred. Why should men be the only ones expected to succeed in business? Besides she had a premonition about it. ‘Expand while others are being careful’ had become her edict. She was becoming well known enough to take the risk. She would invest in good modern paintings – something she’d always wanted to do.

  ‘I am doing the right thing,’ she said adamantly.

  Dad still wasn’t convinced. ‘I don’t know why yer want ter go on tearing yerself inside out over this ambition to go all arty-crafty! Yer’ve still got yer Chris ter think of. School fees. Clothes. Them ’olidays that posh school of ’is sends ’im on. If yer ask me, you’ve got too big fer yer boots.’

  Chris at fourteen was hardly home these days. ‘All right if I stay the night with Leslie Allington?’ or ‘Richard Martin says I can spend the weekend at his house?’ Or handing her a letter from his school near King’s Cross, to which he had won a scholarship at eleven, to say a holiday in Switzerland was planned over the Christmas Break and could she send a deposit within the next two weeks? How could she deny him? Popular and outgoing, unlike his father, Chris was never still for a moment. And so once again, Letty was facing lonely evenings and weekends, this year a lonely Christmas unless she made herself go to spend it with Lucy and Jack. As with most ruts, it was hard to drag herself out of it – looking over the rim with envy yet unable to achieve the impetus necessary to climb up into the open.

  David put the phone down with a feeling of complete despondency. There was no escaping that Letitia meant what she said and no cajoling, no pleading, no show of anger, was going to shift her resolution.

  From the pink and gilded master bedroom, came Madge’s voice, high and querulous.

  ‘Who on earth can you be phoning on Christmas Day, darling? People will be arriving any minute now and all you can do is chat on the telephone. Who was it?’

  ‘No one you’d know,’ he called back.

  He heard her give vent to a high-pitched, derisive ‘Huh!’ And then: ‘Not one of your fancy women, darling, is it?’ Her idea of a joke.

  For a moment he was so tempted. To walk back into the bedroom, stand behind her as she sat at the ornate white dressing table with its gilt scrollwork, stare at her mocking reflection in the mirror and say, ‘As a matter of fact, darling, it is. We love each other. Have done for years. And I want a divorce!’

  ‘I said,’ Madge called again when he didn’t respond, ‘not one of your fancy women, is it?’

  He walked into the bedroom, stared at her reflection gazing back at him just as he’d anticipated, and said quizzically, ‘As a matter of fact, it was.’

  His reward was a high rippling laugh, the sort of penetrating yet infectious sound that made her so popular with her set. A woman of striking looks, when she laughed Madge could look positively beautiful.

  ‘Dear God, darling! How deliciously funny!’

  It was only when humour failed her, which was often in his company though seldom in others’, that the sour lines showed. Her high spirits had given her a certain allure that he’d mistaken for beauty when he’d first known her.

  Now as the laughter left her face she peered once more at herself in the mirror and dabbed a touch more powder around her firm jawline and chin.

  Madge was proud of her looks; she was tall, slender still at forty, with a graceful neck many a fashion model would have envied. Her short expertly waved hair was dark and glossy and she meticulously shaped her eyebrows to a fine arch, giving herself a perpetually surprised look. With cleverly rouged cheekbones and wide mouth painted deep red to present a more rosebud line, she could look quite ravishing.

  ‘If you could be as witty as that in front of our friends,’ she went on mockingly, ‘you’d be far more popular than you are!’

  Something in David snapped.

  ‘Yes, have your laugh!’ he grated, seeing her look up at the tone of his voice. ‘But it’s true. I do have another woman.’

  She was peering at him from the mirror. She gave a little nervous laugh, started to look away, but something in his tone arrested her gaze. She turned on the pink-upholstered dressing stool to confront him.

  ‘Look, darling, you’re going just a wee bit too far.’ A pause, then a frown that took away her beauty. ‘You are joking?’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, his voice low. ‘No, Madge, I’m not.’

  She gazed at him, angry now. ‘Don’t be so utterly ridiculous! Who on earth …’

  ‘I’ve been seeing her every weekend for four years,’ he said evenly.

  ‘But you’ve been here! Every weekend! At least these six or …’

  Her expression changed as her voice conveyed recollection of the months before.

  ‘That’s right, Madge,’ David confirmed. ‘I’ve not seen her for some seven months, but now I intend to start seeing her again.’

  ‘You won’t!’ The amber-coloured eyes began to blaze. ‘Not if you value this marriage.’

  ‘I don’t, Madge. It’s been a farce for years, and you know it. I don’t count in your life. I have no standing with your friends. You go your way just as you please and damn what I say – how I feel. If I walked out this very evening, you wouldn’t miss me, physically or financially, and Daddy would take care of the latter detail for you.’

  ‘I don’t doubt he would. Except that I’m not prepared to have you walk out on me, darling! Who is she, anyway? I don’t suppose for one minute she’s some little shop girl. You’re too fastidious for that. Is she well up in society? I bet she is. Wouldn’t want her good name smeared about to all and sundry. Do I know her?’

  ‘No. She’s not in your class,’ he countered caustically.

  ‘Fortunate for you, darling!’ she sneered. ‘But I’ll tell you this for nothing, David – you can go on seeing her until hell freezes, but if you think I’m letting you go, you are very much mistaken. Now go and get ready. We’ve people coming any minute. And you know most of them, don’t you, our friends – Daddy’s friends? One’s a JP and one is that prominent banker Daddy deals with – I can’t remember his name off hand. And Archie Bannister. His father is head of that newspaper – now what is it called? The big one?’

  ‘I c
an give you grounds for divorce,’ David cut in, ignoring the overt threat, his thoughts on Chris, his son. But it wasn’t to be.

  Madge gave another of her bubbling laughs, only just disguising its cynical tone, managed to adopt an air of flippancy. ‘Don’t be idiotic, darling! Why on earth would I go out of my way to have my name bandied about? On everyone’s lips? Pointed out as the wounded wife? Dear God – what a thought! I’m sorry, David. Just can’t do! Now, do hurry yourself. Everyone will be here in a few ticks and I’m not having our party spoiled. Polly!’

  Her voice rose sharply. ‘Where is that girl? These silly waves aren’t setting right. Polly!’

  As a flustered maid came hurrying in, David retired silently to get ready, not sure even now whether Madge had believed him or not.

  Throughout Christmas he wondered where Letitia would be celebrating, how she was faring, whether she was thinking of him? She had to be thinking of him. The love they’d had couldn’t all go for nothing. She had to care.

  It was nigh impossible to phone her until the New Year. The house, large as it was, constantly overflowed with guests. Madge threw a huge New Year’s Eve party. Smoking elegant Turkish cigarettes, behaving like a young thing, sipping champagne with delight, dancing with every man there as though he were the only one … On New Year’s day took her guests to the pantomime – Mother Goose at the Palladium – to throw bits of screwed up programmes at the performers from the front stalls and generally join in the fun and singing.

  David, obliged to go along, sat back in his seat amid the rich and reckless, longing for the serenity of Letitia’s flat. Almost as much, he longed for his son. He had missed virtually all of the boy’s growing years; did not want to miss the rest.

  Next week, Madge at her hairdresser’s, he telephoned Letty like a little boy playing truant – told her what he had told Madge, asked if he was reprieved and was consumed with relief as Letty, voice betraying her own eagerness, agreed to his coming over on Saturday.

  This Letty was far more in charge than the Letty he had once known. Perhaps she had always been, even in their most passionate moments, concerned where everything was leading, how she’d cope with it, always feeling answerable to someone. She no longer had anyone to answer to, not even Christopher, sixteen and a half and broadening out across the shoulders, yet still insisted on being answerable to herself.