The Silent Tide

by Rachel Hore

  ‘Jimmy?’ She’d wring Jimmy’s neck for not passing it on.

  ‘That’s him. Please, Isabel. May I see you? There’s something important I need to say.’ He was pleading now and she finally gave in. Besides, she was curious about what he wanted to tell her.

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ she said.

  He took her to a restaurant you’d never know existed, tucked away in a side street in the heart of St James’s. It was a place of thick carpets, rich furnishings and low lighting, more like an opulent drawing room than a commercial establishment. Here the waiters trod softly and spoke in low voices, and there were no prices on the menu, which was all in French. The head waiter greeted Hugh with enthusiasm, but regarded Isabel curiously as he showed them to their table, tucked in a corner.

  ‘he champagne ce soir, m’sieur?’ the man enquired of Hugh.

  Hugh hesitated. ‘Perhaps not. How about a gin and tonic, Isabel?’ She nodded. ‘Two doubles, then.’

  ‘And ze light hand wiz ze tonic?’ the man said with a crack of a smile.

  ‘That’s the ticket.’

  ‘You’ve been here before?’ Isabel asked when they were alone.

  ‘Once or twice,’ he said. ‘Jacqueline likes it.’ He smiled. ‘She says it makes her believe the war never happened. The man must have remembered we had champagne.’

  ‘Oh.’ With the unexpected mention of Jacqueline’s name, all Isabel’s feelings of uncertainty returned.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, concerned. ‘Are you still angry with me?’

  ‘Hugh, I didn’t hear from you and I was worried,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘And now . . . now you tell me you bring other girls here. To drink champagne.’

  She was put out when he laughed and said, ‘Is champagne so immoral? I didn’t know. Anyway, Jacqueline isn’t a girl, she’s a married woman. No, that doesn’t sound quite right either, does it? Look, she’s hitched up to this chap Michael, who works for Military Intelligence, didn’t you know? He’s away a very great deal and she gets lonely. I’d be a poor friend if I didn’t take her out occasionally to cheer her up.’

  The way he explained it made sense and she felt a measure of relief. And yet she remembered the way Jacqueline had been at party, how she had practically fawned over Hugh. Isabel glanced up at him, wondering if she had the courage to speak of this, but she saw only innocence in his hazel eyes, and warmth, so said nothing.

  ‘You do believe me, my darling?’ he begged and she nodded. She believed him.

  At that moment their drinks arrived. Next there was the ordeal of ordering food, French dishes she’d never heard of, but which Hugh decided for her, then the shaking out of napkins, the laying of cutlery. Thick soup was brought in wide-brimmed plates, white rolls in a silver basket. Finally they were left in peace.

  Hugh hardly touched his soup. He said gravely, ‘I must explain about my mother. The attack was unusually severe. A reaction to dust, the doctors think. From the spring cleaning.’

  ‘Poor lady,’ Isabel murmured. ‘How is she now?’

  ‘Much better.’ He smiled. ‘She kept me very busy running errands. I hardly had a moment to telephone.’

  Isabel nodded, allowing herself to be pulled round, placated, as she desperately wanted to be. He hadn’t neglected her, not really; it was right that he was solicitous of his mother. He’d tried to ring. Jimmy had admitted he’d forgotten to tell her and she’d given him a dressing down for it. Suddenly she began to feel hungry. The soup, when she ate, was warming, delicious.

  ‘I should have tried the office again,’ Hugh admitted. ‘Somehow when you’re down in Suffolk it’s easy to let time drift.’

  ‘It didn’t drift for me, Hugh,’ she told him. ‘I thought you’d changed your mind, that you regretted our day together.’

  ‘No, far from it,’ he said, putting down his spoon and regarding her earnestly. ‘I thought about Brighton all the time, how sweet you were. And then the business with the burst tyre; you were so steadfast, so patient. I told Mother all about it.’

  ‘And what did she say?’ Isabel, sensing the importance of Mrs Morton in his life, was anxious.

  ‘She was impressed. She’d like to meet you,’ he said lightly. ‘Really though, not every girl would have put up with that situation as cheerfully as you did.’

  ‘Perhaps you underestimate our sex,’ she said, her eyes dancing.

  ‘No, it confirmed to me that you’re special,’ he said. ‘I feel I’ve waited a long time to find you. Since I lost . . . well, you’ve read about her in Coming Home.’

  ‘The girl who was Diana?’ Part of her was curious about the girl who’d died, but another part felt that mention of her was an intrusion.

  ‘Her real name was Anne. Anne Sinclair. I’ve taken girls out since, of course, but I’ve never met anyone . . . Oh, as bright and pretty and smart as you.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’ll have to go through doors sideways, my head will get so big.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful head. You’re completely beautiful.’

  ‘Shh, people will hear you!’

  ‘I don’t care if they do. I love you, Isabel.’ He seized her hand and imprisoned it in his, regarding her with an expression of such sincere adoration that the very last trace of doubt was washed away. The previous few days didn’t matter. All the times she’d felt confused, unsure of him, the misunderstandings, didn’t matter. Everything was all right, after all.

  ‘Oh, Hugh’ she whispered joyfully. ‘I love you, too.’ She’d never seen him so happy. He kissed her hand, then leaned across and brushed her cheek with his fingers.

  ‘Isabel, my dear girl,’ he murmured. ‘I know this will come as very sudden. You may think we haven’t known one another long enough, but this week I’ve come to feel sure about it. I’ve waited so long to find you, and now here you are. I love you so much. You’re so darling and funny oh, and passionate about things. I can’t bear to risk you slipping away.’

  ‘I won’t slip away, Hugh. Not if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘I don’t. I want to be with you all the time.’ He took a breath. ‘Do you think you could take me on, Isabel?’

  Take him on? What did he mean?

  ‘Don’t look at me so oddly. I’m asking you to marry me.’

  For a moment she was so surprised her mouth opened but she couldn’t speak. It had all happened so fast. Could it be only a week ago that he’d first kissed her? She’d known for a long time that she loved him, of course, but still . . .

  She could hardly think straight. A warning voice in her head said she should wait to answer, but she ignored it and instead raised her face to him like a flower and spoke from the heart.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and watched as his eyes filled with wonder and delight. They stared, holding hands across the table, smiling stupidly at each other for what seemed like an eternity. Never had she felt so perfectly, ecstatically happy.

  ‘Would m’sieur like ze champagne now?’ the head waiter asked when he brought the next course and found the pretty mademoiselle gazing in wonder at a ring sparkling on her finger.

  They decided that it shouldn’t be a long engagement. Hugh didn’t want to wait. There were no real difficulties about money and his flat was large enough to suit them both, at least for the moment.

  In the end they rejected the idea of a mad dash to a register office. Isabel felt it wouldn’t be fair on her parents. Pamela wanted her daughter to have a ‘proper’ wedding in a church, not that they were a church-going family by any means, but that was the way her family in Norfolk had done things, and Isabel remembered that her mother had missed out.

  Caught up in the excitement of it all, Isabel forgot that she’d ever had doubts about Hugh. She was deliriously happy. She’d enjoyed surprising her colleagues, too, who were all delighted for her, even Audrey, who seemed after all to think Isabel had been ‘clever’ in landing Hugh. Admiration from Audrey was not something she was used to, but then Audrey had softened since the
occasion of her own marriage, seemed more mature, and Isabel secretly wanted that for herself, too.

  She’d taken Hugh down to meet her parents on the Sunday after their engagement. It had not been an easy meeting. Mr and Mrs Barber had been surprised, of course, and asked Hugh all sorts of questions, which he answered readily enough, but she could tell that her father was on edge. Her mother, coming from a similar section of society to Hugh, was more gracious, but both of them were worried about the idea of a July wedding, not so much because it was all a terrible rush, as because the couple had not known one another long.

  ‘People got married at the drop of a hat during the war,’ Hugh reminded them.

  ‘And some came to regret it.’ Mrs Barber’s retort was gently expressed, but it was still an admonition. Yet Isabel was insistent, passionately so. Her parents could only shrug and give in.

  Now she would have to meet his mother. She wondered nervously how Lavinia Morton would regard her. Hugh was her only child, after all, and Isabel already had an inkling of how important mother and son were to one another.

  They drove down to Suffolk the following Saturday.

  Isabel was surprised that he knocked on the door of the drawing room before entering. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘this is Isabel.’

  Mrs Morton rose slowly from her chair by the fire, and Isabel crossed an interminable acreage of carpet to greet her future mother-in-law.

  ‘How do you do.’ Hugh’s mother spoke in regal tones as she took Isabel’s hand briefly into hers. ‘Welcome to Stone House.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Isabel found herself looking up into a pair of hazel eyes, Hugh’s eyes, in an oval face framed by lacquered waves of greying hair. Mrs Morton might be nearly sixty, but she was determined not to let time win. She was very well made-up, her eyebrows painted arches, her thickening figure tightly corseted. Her manicured hand rested elegantly on one hip as her gaze flickered over her son’s choice of wife. Something told Isabel that she was disappointed by what she saw.

  Hugh didn’t seem to notice. He was opening an envelope he’d found addressed to him in the hall. ‘Oh blast,’ he said, ‘some local society wants me to address them.’

  ‘I do hope you will, Hugh. I’m afraid it was I who mentioned your name to them.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t, Mother.’

  ‘But, dear, you must put yourself about to further your career. Now, will you show Isabel her room? I’ve given her Magnolia.’

  Left by herself in a bedroom at the back of the house whose decor gave off a pinkish-white aura like medicine, Isabel at last felt able to take in her surroundings. She had built up a mental picture of Hugh’s beloved childhood home from his descriptions, but Stone House was somehow bigger than she imagined, chilly inside, and alarmingly remote. She went over to the window and found herself looking out across a great apron of lawn edged by a gravel path and flowerbeds. Beyond the garden was a field, and beyond that, as Hugh had told her, the marshes. A line of glittering silver in the distance must be the river. She pushed open the casement, admitting a draught of cold wind. Rich scents of earth and greenery, the desolate cries of seabirds, filled her senses. She leaned over the sill and immediately drew back, shivering. It was a steep drop to the flagstones below.

  She did not enjoy the weekend much. Hugh was subdued, not at all his usual self, and she sensed that Mrs Morton was playing some power game with her, the rules of which she did not know, and in which she had no desire to engage. Typical of this was the discussion over dinner of what Isabel should call her.

  ‘I’m thinking it’s too familiar for a young person to call me Lavinia,’ the woman intoned. ‘I would feel most uncomfortable.’

  ‘Isabel can’t call you Mrs Morton,’ Hugh said. ‘That would be impossible. How about “Mother”?’

  ‘But I am not her mother, Hugh, do be sensible.’ Sometimes Lavinia spoke to him as though he were still a young boy. ‘How about ‘‘ Mother-in-Law’’? Yes, I think that would be best.’

  Mother-in-Law? Isabel tried it once or twice but it sounded ridiculous. She decided she would get round it by calling her nothing. Thereafter she thought of her always as just ‘Hugh’s mother’.

  That evening, Mrs Morton insisted on sitting up with the engaged couple so Isabel made her excuses and went to her bed early, hoping that Hugh might not be long. She read her book for a little, then turned out the light and waited in the darkness, listening to the wind outside. It wasn’t long before there was a soft knock on the door and Hugh put his head round.

  ‘Are you still awake?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, of course – come in,’ she replied, and he felt his way to the bed.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said.

  ‘Here,’ she replied, drawing him down towards her. Their mouths found each other in the darkness. She pulled him closer, but he resisted.

  ‘We’d better not,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mind, really.’

  ‘No, my temptress, we must wait. It’ll be all the nicer then, you’ll see.’ She wondered vaguely how he knew this , but would never ask.

  ‘I wish you would stay. I won’t break.’

  ‘I know, and I want you madly, but you’ll see I’m right. Good night, darling,’ he murmured, and in a moment he was gone.

  She missed him already. When they’d talked about it the previous weekend he’d said the same thing. They shouldn’t go to bed together until they were married. It wouldn’t be long. She was so young, he told her, and he wanted to protect her. It was the right thing to do.

  She thought about this long after he’d gone. She wanted him so much but she could hardly beg him, could she? She imagined that being so much older, he was more experienced. Perhaps she should trust him, even though her body cried out for him? She hugged herself for comfort as she waited to fall asleep.

  Chapter 17

  Emily

  It was Valentine’s Day. On the top of the bus to work, Emily watched teenagers in school blazers torment each other. One girl, pretty and flirtatious, waved a card in a pink envelope, which the boys snatched away and threw to one another. The girls all shrieked and giggled as they tried to retrieve it. A young man in a City suit bounded up the stairs carrying a bunch of red roses in cellophane that still bore its price sticker. Emily couldn’t help smiling at his self-conscious air, but inside she felt forlorn. There would be nothing for her today. ‘It’s only stupid commercialisation,’ she remembered Matthew telling her once. Even if they’d still been together, he probably wouldn’t have sent her anything. He hated following the herd. She tried to remember when she last had a surprise Valentine from anybody. Not since school, that was for sure.

  The office, of course, had gone Valentine’s crazy. A bestselling romance author sent in a huge box of heart-shaped cupcakes, which did the rounds. Someone strung up pink bunting over the mirrors in the Ladies. Even the sullen girl who administered royalty payments displayed a huge bunch of flora on her desk. Her beatific smile transformed her.

  Emily’s email box was full of horrors. An overenthusiastic marketing assistant had set viral messages to arrive every hour about a book on internet dating. The Finance Director picked the day to circulate several forms about annual budgets. Filling them in would take Emily hours of meticulous work. And no one seemed to have told Big Brother, aka the Chief of Operations, that it was a day of goodwill. For round about midday a very unloving announcement hit everyone’s inbox, ominously labelled Maximising Profits. From around the room came little sighs and groans as her colleagues opened it. The management consultants were coming. The words ‘cost savings’ were mentioned, which everyone knew meant redundancies. Suddenly the joy was gone from the cakes, the bunting and the flowers. Everyone was fearful.

  ‘The bastards,’ Liz muttered.

  ‘I don’t know what we’ll do if I lose my job,’ Sarah told the others, her eyes round and anxious. ‘Jules has already had to take a paycut.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Emily said, trying to com
fort her. ‘The Young Adult list is doing brilliantly. I don’t see where they can cut in editorial, anyway. We’re already stretched too thin.’

  ‘That won’t stop them,’ Liz murmured. ‘You watch. They just don’t care.’

  Emily spared a moment to worry for herself – last in, first out being the phrase that rose to mind – and she had a mortgage to manage. But she’d survived redundancies at the old firm, and it was Gillian herself who had recruited her, so she tried to be philosophical. Also, she was feeling that she’d started to prove herself. Her marketing colleagues were keen on a historical novel she’d acquired and she’d been allowed to offer for Tobias Berryman’s literary thriller. It was set in a sort of dark, alternative Elizabethan world that had resonances of today, very cleverly evoked and spine-chilling, highbrow yet readable at the same time. The Sales Director was crazy about it. Surely they wouldn’t get rid of her now. And she genuinely thought they needed Sarah. Everyone relied on her long-term knowledge of the firm.

  They can’t possibly let you go, Sarah. No one else can keep Jack Vane in order.’ One of the firm’s big money-spinning authors, Jack was a notorious complainer.

  Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Not having to deal with the Vain One any more. That would be a consolation prize for redundancy.’

  She spoke lightly, but Emily saw how jittery she was.

  Emily spent a late lunch hour idling the carpeted halls of a huge bookshop on Piccadilly, trying to think how she’d brief the jacket of Tobias’s novel. The bookshop was one of her favourite haunts, where she discovered useful hints of what and how to publish. She loved the look and feel of new books, the smell of the paper, the wondrous possibilities that each one suggested.

  She picked up a paperback from a table of debut novels, lured by the illustration on the cover, a silhouette of a girl opening a birdcage and a bluebird flying away. Maybe, it said to her, by reading me, you too will escape to a world you’ve never dreamed of before, and your life will be changed. She was reading the blurb and wondering whether to buy it, when a woman’s voice said, ‘Hello, Emily. It is Emily, isn’t it?’ and when she looked up, she was startled to see Lorna Morton. Maybe she used her married name, not Morton, but Emily still thought of her as Hugh’s daughter.