The Soldier's Bride

by Maggie Ford

  ‘You’re no nearer being free of her than you were two years ago,’ she badgered him when he told her of Madge’s reaction. ‘Two years, David! How much longer does this go on?’

  ‘Have some sense, Letitia?’ he retaliated, sharp with her, taking out his chagrin over Madge on her. ‘I can’t make her divorce me if she refuses to. She’s done nothing to merit my divorcing her. There have to be grounds, Letitia.’

  ‘She’s had ample grounds, hasn’t she? You’ve made it plain enough to her about us. Ample grounds for two years!’

  ‘If she chooses not to exercise her prerogative, what can I do?’

  Bickering, hurting each other, making up in a welter of mutual passionate forgiveness, they might almost have been married. But they weren’t!

  The new Letty fended him off – or was she so new?

  ‘No, David, you’re not moving in. Not until you’re free.’

  They had made love the night before. Again this morning. Christopher as usual was away for the weekend. It was always wonderful having the place to themselves. Lying in David’s arms, naked and fulfilled, her head on his bare shoulder, Letty gazed up at him. He still had a wonderful lean body, a firm jawline for all he was fifty-two. He had got rid of that ridiculous moustache and looked much younger for it. She, at forty-two, looked good as well, felt like a young girl in his arms.

  He stared hard at her. ‘And what’s the difference, making love with you on Saturday night and moving in lock, stock and barrel?’

  ‘The difference,’ she said, lowering her eyes, ‘is that you still have your wife and I have a business to run. But let’s not worry about that now.’

  She snuggled closer under the bedclothes, the bedroom chilly. It was February 1932. A lot had happened in the two years since David had come back.

  Dad had been in hospital twice with fluid on the lungs, was still hanging on like a wind-buffeted spider with a broken web, but had had a stroke in the autumn, leaving his left side useless, and was now confined to home.

  Vinny had remarried, to a gentleman friend. Lucy and family had been invited but not Letty and Chris.

  Lucy’s eldest, Elisabeth, had married a stockbroker’s son last year. Vinny, knowing Letty would be at the wedding, had declined to go. It still hurt, Vinny’s attitude towards her. ‘Nine years,’ she’d remarked to David. ‘You’d have thought she’d have got over it by now.’

  Her gallery’s expansion meant travelling more: to auctions, to fine houses, even across the Channel, conversing with buyers, with dealers, developing an expert and discerning eye for value.

  Letty was now worth a bit more than a few bob, as she put it with an old touch of cockney understatement. Elegantly dressed, outwardly self-assured, she could have owned a fine piece of property by now but still felt more at home, safe, in her flat after a day with affected but hard-nosed art dealers. At times she was so mentally tired, all she wanted to do was to lock herself away from everything. Sometimes she wondered why she had done it all, remembered Dad’s words about getting too big for her boots. Dad whose words were little more than a slur these days.

  David was her solace, her rock to cling to. Looking back over these two years, for all the change in her fortunes, very little had changed between her and David. They still only saw each other at weekends. Perhaps one evening in the week to go to the theatre or a cinema if something special was on. Always aware that he must go back to his wife, his office. Henry Lampton had long known of his son-in-law’s affair but, Madge preferring to keep it from her smart little circle of friends who loved nothing better than a scandal, he had been compelled to turn a blind eye.

  For that reason, Letty spent Christmas entirely alone while David stayed with his wife in a pretence of married bliss. She didn’t go to Lucy’s, knowing her sister would have been all advice, making her Christmas even more miserable. Chris, seventeen and going on to college next year, was full of understanding and spent the day with her, even declining to go out for a walk with a friend. Together they listened to King George’s Christmas message on the wireless; the first ever broadcast by any monarch, Letty listening with special attention.

  Last summer Queen Mary, passing through Oxford Street, had paused to come into Letty’s gallery, had spoken a dignified word with her and departed; the visit was so brief, so unobtrusive, that Letty had been left with a sensation of its almost being a dream. But she had felt a personal tie to royalty ever since and listened, avid as any relative, to the king’s speech, crying at the end of it because he had moved her so and because she longed for David here beside her, though she didn’t tell Chris that. He assumed she’d just been overcome by the uniqueness of the moment and her feelings towards the royal family.

  In the office the telephone on the desk before Letty began to ring. It was lunchtime – she often worked through it, taking a sandwich and a cup of tea while her twenty-four-yearold secretary, Ann Hopper, went off to lunch. Absently, she answered its summons.

  ‘Bancroft Galleries. Letitia Beans speaking.’

  She had changed the name to Bancroft Galleries on acquiring the lease of the bookshop next door. The Treasure Chest had been trite, not worthy of one who now dealt in original paintings and fine art. Beans Galleries didn’t have the right impact either.

  She’d have liked to change her own name from Beans back to Bancroft as well, but still felt an allegiance to Billy for all he’d been gone seven years.

  It seemed like yesterday – as if her life had been stuck in limbo ever since. She still went to the cemetery once every month and laid flowers, dividing them between two green metal containers and arranging them with great care. Afterwards she stood awhile reading the inscriptions on the fast discolouring headstone: ‘William Beans, beloved husband, cherished son. Born 1889, died 22 January 1926. Now at Peace’. She tried to wash away the sacrilegious smears of sparrow droppings and the stubborn circles of grey lichen, gave up, gazed a moment at the crack appearing at one side of the limestone, then came away sad but satisfied.

  She was sad, not for herself any more but for Billy, a strong young man reduced to a human wreck by war. She prayed to God that such a conflict would never recur and thought of Christopher especially, praying he’d never go through what Billy had, or David, or any of those young men who had grown old in a few hours of gas and bombardment.

  But, of course, there was no likelihood of a war like that ever happening again – it had been too terrible ever to be repeated. And with this worldwide depression, so much unemployment, Germany was in such a state it would never again raise its head as a great power. True someone called Hitler had taken up the reins, being hailed as the country’s saviour, but it would never again try to test its strength against others – thank God.

  There was another reason Letty had not changed her name back to Bancroft – always the hope that one day David’s wife would agree to divorce him. Madge couldn’t go on clinging to him forever. She didn’t love him, she had no need of him, wouldn’t miss him. She was just hanging on out of spite. In time she would have to tire of his continual pleas for divorce and give up. And then … wonderful day … Letty’s name would become Baron.

  The voice at the other end of the telephone was Ada’s, gasping as if she was crying. ‘Letty! Oh, Letty – yer dad’s died! One minute ’e was ’ere with us – the next ’e’d gone all funny. They took ’im to the London ’Ospital but ’e died on the way. ’E never even said goodbye ter me!’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The front room of the house in Stratford held a paltry gathering. Most of Arthur Bancroft’s own contemporaries, his several brothers and sisters, had gone ahead of him, or were no longer in any state of health to attend a funeral. Their offspring grown away from his generation had their own families, and hardly knew Arthur much less had come along to mourn him.

  Lucy was already there when Letty, David and Chris arrived. Lucy looked very attractive in a trim black linen suit and white blouse.

  Jack was still the same long thi
n streak she’d brought home to be introduced to Dad twenty-five years ago, a little round-shouldered now, otherwise looking very prosperous in a well-cut black worsted suit.

  Twenty-one-year-old Emmeline, with her mother’s shade of golden hair, had come. So had Elisabeth, Lucy’s other daughter; tall, slim and fair despite her early pregnancy. Her husband was a well-built young man with a handsome if rather flexible face.

  A sister of Ada’s, a woman just as dowdy, shadowed her continually, asking if she was all right. Ada gave perfunctory nods. She looked careworn from nursing her late husband. Seeing her, Letty realised how much the woman must have loved him; recalled and regretted her own uncharitable feelings towards her and Dad when they’d first, as she’d seen it then, deserted her to take up their own lives together.

  A neighbour or two completed the gathering but of Vinny there was no sign. Letty felt bitterness, even hatred, flood over her. Not even to attend her own father’s funeral – because Letty was there! How deep could it go?

  ‘No Vinny?’ she asked Lucy as casually as she could as Ada’s sister handed her a glass of sherry before they were called to depart for the East London Cemetery where Dad was being buried near to Mum.

  ‘Your father’s upstairs in the front bedroom if you want to go and look at ’im,’ Ada’s sister imparted before going on with the tray of tiny glasses containing their thimbleful of wine.

  Letty nodded, forgetting Vinny at the idea of gazing at Dad for the last time.

  ‘Coming up there with me?’ she begged.

  David had already shaken his head, declining the invitation. He hardly had any reason to see the old man. Chris had turned faintly long-faced and looked appealingly at his mother. He was young, had not looked upon death yet, was obviously not inclined to begin now.

  Lucy inclined her head at Letty’s plea in rather reluctant agreement.

  ‘I have been up to see him once, though.’

  ‘Don’t matter then,’ Letty said.

  ‘No – it’s all right,’ said Lucy quickly. ‘I don’t mind.’ And with Letty going ahead, they went with suitably solemn steps up to the front bedroom where the coffin lay, its lid slewed to one side to allow a view of the deceased.

  ‘He looks very peaceful,’ Lucy said in a whisper.

  ‘Old,’ Letty said.

  ‘They’ve done him up well.’

  ‘I don’t like all that make up they use. Don’t look natural.’ Her old childhood way of talking came through. She suddenly felt a child again – wanted to cry out, ‘Dad, can I go down to play?’

  She took a deep breath. She was forty-three years old next month. Far away from childhood. But she felt like a child, saw herself skipping down the street in Club Row, saw again Dad looking out of his shop door, his strong moustache bristling, blue eyes vivid and alive but kind. His voice was kind too. ‘Letitia! Come in now – yer mum wants some ’elp.’

  Tears for those days, for what could never be again, filled her eyes. The moustache was sparse now, had been darkened by the undertaker’s brush, looking ludicrous against the papery skin, its pallor tinted a strange shade of pink. Dad was lying straight in his coffin, his eyes closed. She’d never hear him call her Letitia again. But oh, dear God, how she wanted the past back again!

  Lucy’s arm was around her shoulders. ‘Come on, Let, don’t cry. We can’t do a lot here. Let’s go back downstairs.’

  There was subdued talking, a quiet murmuring, around the room. The two sisters joined it, melting into it unnoticed. The front door had been opened and remained ajar for a brief while. Letty felt the draught of chill April air come into the room from the hallway, taking the heat from the low fire, then cease as the front door closed. She momentarily thought it might be the undertakers but there was no stir of expectancy from the people around her.

  They joined David and Chris. Lucy, now talking to Chris, her head tilted up to his six foot, glanced towards the door and her eyes lit up in welcome. Automatically Letty turned to see Vinny with her new husband and boys, now grown men, standing in the doorway.

  Vinny’s grey-green eyes had roamed the room uneasily. They came to rest on her youngest sister and she blanched, mouth tightening. Held by the other’s stare, Letty saw the woman she had not set eyes on for ten years and was stunned.

  Where Lucy had aged gently, keeping her figure, ample bosom redeeming her slimness, Vinny had grown gaunt. Sunken cheeks, the jaw bone a sharp line above a thin neck, she had hardly any figure, the new shapely fashion doing nothing for her. She was, after all, forty-six now. But Letty had expected her to wear her age well, as Lucy did – she’d been so beautiful as a young girl.

  Still Letty and Vinny stared at one another. Indecision churned inside Letty. Should she keep up the stare until Vinny was forced to turn away, or give way herself, pretend she had not seen her? But that was silly. She gave a nervous smile – it felt more like a grimace. Vinny’s lips never even twitched, remaining a thin scarlet gash. It almost took Letty by surprise when her sister turned away abruptly, seeking Ada to offer her condolences.

  Letty clutched at David. ‘I don’t think I can stand this.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ His hand squeezed hers, firm and reassuring.

  ‘It’s going to be horrible these next few hours. In the same room together and she acts as if I don’t exist!’

  Chris was looking worried. ‘Take no notice, Mum.’

  ‘Probably a bit of a shock to her, your being here,’ Lucy put in.

  ‘She must have known I’d be here. Our own father. Obviously I’d be here. You’d think that after all this time …’

  A faint stir rippled through the gathering. Again a draught swept through the front room making the fire flicker. Dark-suited men in black-ribboned top hats moved past the door, going up the stairs. Conversation ceased, the air was still, then past the door came the long shape, hoisted on the shoulders of the coffin bearers, heads bowed, hands held low and crossed, as expertly they balanced the coffin on shoulders.

  There was a subdued shuffling in the room as the gathering sorted itself into an order of precedence, Ada supported by a brother going ahead, handkerchief to her nose, sniffing softly; the deceased’s three daughters following behind, Vinny on the farthest side from Letty with Lucy a barrier between them. The rest moved out of the house into the chill April air, a silent double file, to find their places in the waiting limousines.

  Lucy sat between her sisters on the back seat, very aware of her role as intermediary, saying nothing to either of them, which was unusual for her, while Ada, comforted by her brother, sat in front.

  After a sad service, which was expected, and words of quiet encouragement from the vicar, they returned frozen to the marrow from standing at the graveside in a stiff April breeze. There was whisky and brandy and warming cups of steaming tea poured by a neighbour who had done the funeral fare of ham and tinned salmon sandwiches and small iced cakes and Swiss roll.

  As whisky began to warm the mourners, conversation livened up. Stories of when Arthur did this or when Arthur did that brought reminiscent laughter and Ada was smiling again.

  Lucy was talking with Vinny, Jack with David as if he were a true brother-in-law; Letty went and sat by the window, gazing out at the large double-fronted bay-windowed houses opposite. Here the blinds had been lifted and a weak sunlight filtered into the room with its high ceilings and heavy furniture.

  A small brandy in her hand, a sandwich on a plate on the table beside her, she tried to ignore Vinny’s presence, thought of Dad then found it best not to as nostalgia descended. She and Dad had grown apart too long ago for her to feel any deep grief but she suffered keenly from a persistent sense of something lost. The past perhaps? Seeing everyone swapping anecdotes, she felt very isolated yet had no wish to join in; she still felt Vinny’s presence like a ton weight, fighting an urge to get up and run out of the house.

  ‘Are you all right, Letitia?’

  Letty jumped, momentarily thought of Dad always calling her
by her full name, looked up, and smiled at David.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘You looked very down.’ He drew up a chair. ‘You mustn’t sit here all alone mourning him, you know. You won’t do yourself any good.’

  She suddenly wanted to throw all the weight of her burden on to him.

  ‘It’s not that!’ she burst out. ‘It’s Vinny. Deliberately ignoring me. I think she just came to make me squirm …’

  ‘No, that’s silly,’ he interrupted gently. ‘She came out of love and respect for her father. As you did.’

  She was being silly. She let her shoulders slump a little. ‘I suppose so. If only she didn’t make me feel that I’m to blame. Chris was my child, not hers. But she’s my sister and I love her, in spite of everything. I don’t want her to hate me …’

  ‘Letitia!’ He leaned close. ‘Give it a chance. And don’t sit here by yourself. Go and talk to everyone while I …’

  ‘But how can I?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He got up, patted her cheek lovingly. ‘Just trust me, Letitia. Now go and talk to someone!’ Wondering, she stood up as he left her, going to seek Lucy once more. Vinny’s boys were standing around, bored. Young men now, they hung about their mother as though she were a lodestone. None of them, Lucy said, had girls, even though they were all good-looking.

  ‘She’s always mothered them,’ Lucy said. ‘Made big babies of them.’

  Letty smiled wryly, sipping her brandy. She felt proud of Chris – the way he spoke with everyone, interested in what was being said. He was very much in command of himself and in September he would be going on to Cambridge. This past year he’d discovered girls and made no bones about it. In her opinion he knocked his cousins into a cocked hat.