A Multitude of Sins

by Margaret Pemberton

  The April sun shone on his thick shock of dark-gold hair. There was the word POLAND on his shoulder-flash. For a moment she was overcome by an overpowering sense of déjá vu, remembering Hong Kong and the perfume of azaleas, and then she was running down the steps, shouting incredulously: ‘Roman. Roman!’

  White teeth flashed in a dazzling grin, and then, moving with an athletic grace and agility rare in a man of his size, he strode towards her. She took the last few steps two at a time, hurtling into his arms, hugging him tight. ‘Oh, Roman! How wonderful! I can’t believe it’s really you!’ she gasped, looking up at him with shining eyes.

  ‘Prosze! Prosze! Whenever I come upon you unexpectedly, you are always knee-deep in flowers,’ he said, his grin deepening; and then, as she continued to hug him: ‘If I’d known I was going to get this sort of welcome, I’d have visited earlier.’

  Laughter bubbled up inside her as she feasted her eyes on him. Even in RAF uniform there was a hubris about him that was totally mid-European.

  ‘You don’t mean to say that you’re stationed near here?’ she asked disbelievingly as he reluctantly released his hold of her and she tucked her arm through his, leading him towards the house.

  ‘I’m afraid so. I’m about ten miles away at Westhampnett.’

  She began to giggle, joyously light-hearted. Roman was home, and soon Raefe would be home. ‘Oh, but, Roman, that’s wonderful!’

  She led him across the terrace and through the open french windows into a large drawing-room dominated by her Steinway grand.

  ‘I’m glad to see that you are still working,’ he said affectionately, moving immediately across to see what it was she had been playing.

  She nodded. All of a sudden the world was once again a sane place. She had someone to talk to about music again, and she had someone at her side who was a bridge into the past, a living proof that the most unexpected reunions took place every day.

  ‘Chopin,’ she said a trifle defensively. ‘I find him so soothing.’

  He gave a deep chuckle. ‘You forget that I am a Pole, Elizabeth. There is no need to apologize for playing Chopin to me!’

  She laughed, as at ease with him again as she had been in Perth. On the podium he was Roman Rakowski, maestro. But here, in her drawing-room, he was Roman, her friend. The man she had drunk Brudershaft with. With easy confidence she sat at the piano, and he stood by her side, filling the room with his presence.

  ‘Chopin is far more than a rose-coloured salonist surrounded by violets,’ he said, the old bond of their mutual passion enclosing them in a world of their own. ‘He must be played with verve and daring.’

  For the first time since her last lesson with Li Pi, she sat down at the piano and played to a critical audience. It was bliss. A totally freeing experience that made her feel as if she were alive again after long months of hibernation.

  ‘Dziekuje! That’s good’he had said, his deep rich voice full of encouraging enthusiasm. ‘Now play a waltz. The waltzes are marvellous, a little hackneyed perhaps, but who cares? They are unsurpassably beautiful.’

  The war faded from her consciousness. She played waltzes and then nocturnes. The great Fantasy in F minor, and the Barcarolle, the Polonaise-Fantaisie.

  ‘Oh, wonderful!’ Roman had said exuberantly, running his hands through his hair in a gesture she remembered from Perth. ‘These nocturnes show Chopin’s enormous talent for condensation. He is a much greater composer-than he is often made out to be. You must always play him like that, Elizabeth, dynamically and with inner drama.’

  When she had played the last note of the Polonaise-Fantaisie, he was quiet for a few moments, the question he had not asked hanging in the air between them. As she closed the lid he said quietly: ‘Tell me about Raefe.’

  She told him, sitting in front of a log fire, serving Earl Grey tea from a Crown Derby teapot into wafer-thin cups. He listened in silence, not interrupting her, making no comments, until she said finally: ‘And so there is nothing for me to do now but to wait for him.’

  The log fire spat and crackled.

  ‘And his name has not been listed by the Red Cross as a prisoner of war?’ he asked, his Slavic high-cheekboned face sombre.

  She shook her head, and something moved within him, an emotion both shocking and disturbing. ‘No,’ she said, not seeing his quick frown, or the way his brilliant onyx eyes had suddenly darkened. ‘But, then, there must be hundreds and hundreds of men who are still alive but whose names aren’t on any list. I don’t imagine the Japanese are being very co-operative with the Red Cross, do you?’

  He had shaken his head, rising reluctantly to his feet, knowing that it was time for him to go.

  ‘Oh, must you go so soon?’ she asked, disappointment flaring through her eyes. ‘I want you to meet the children. Jung-shui is down in the paddock, riding the pony I bought her for her birthday. Nicholas Raefe is with his nanny. She’s a local girl from the village and she takes care of him while I practise. She’s taken him to feed the ducks at the local pond, but they’ll be back at any moment. Please stay.’

  He had been sorely tempted, but he also knew that he had to have time to himself to think before he stayed with her any longer, or before he agreed to see her again. She was desperately in love with Raefe, and one day, God willing, Raefe would be returning for her. To fall in love with a woman so unobtainable would be crass foolishness, and he wasn’t a man who suffered foolishness easily.

  ‘Nie.‘ he said, rising to his feet, his great height and massive shoulders seeming to fill the room. ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but I must go.’

  She had walked with him out to his car, urging him to visit her again, her loneliness, when he had driven away, so acute that it almost robbed her of breath.

  It was a week before he telephoned her and said that he had leave the following weekend. He had never been down to Brighton. Would she care to drive there with him and have lunch?

  She had accepted unhesitatingly. This was what she would one day do with Raefe; that she was doing it now with Roman seemed to her to be the best-possible omen.

  They went to Brighton and a few days later they took Jung-shui and Nicholas Raefe to Bodiam Castle and picnicked, chilly but happy, beneath the great Norman battlements. From then on, he had visited her regularly, swinging Nicholas Raefe up on to his shoulders as they walked the Downs or the seashore, Jung-shui hurrying eagerly along at his side, chattering about her pony and her English school while Roman listened to her with genuine interest, displaying a patience rare in a man of his mercurial talent.

  The war in Europe was rapidly coming to a close, and she knew that he couldn’t wait for the day when he would be demobbed and able to return once more to the concert platform.

  ‘Where will you go first?’ she had asked as they had walked a steeply shelving pebble beach where once, a thousand years earlier, Julius Caesar’s Romans had first struggled ashore.

  ‘Palestine,’ he had said unhesitatingly. ‘Nowhere in the world is there a people so hungry for music. I want to give every ounce of support I can to an orchestra that will one day be the greatest orchestra in the world.’

  She thought of the men who composed that orchestra, the great musicians of eastern Europe who had fled Hitler’s pogroms.

  ‘Perhaps I shall play with them one day,’ she said with a little smile.

  ‘You will,’ he had said with fierce confidence. ‘And when you do I shall conduct you.’

  Roman’s regular visits, interspersed with visits from Adam and from Princess Luisa, relieved her relative isolation, but her sexual loneliness remained acute. There were times when she lay in bed at night, damp with longing, when she almost wished that she had never been awakened to sexual passion. She hungered for sexual relief so fiercely that it shocked and appalled her. ‘Not sexual relief!’ she would say furiously to herself as she swung her legs from the bed and walked over to the window, pulling back the curtains and looking out over the moonlit terrace and the garden to the Downs beyon
d. ‘Raefe. It’s Raefe that I’m hungry for. Raefe that I miss.’

  But on 8 May, when Winston Churchill announced over the wireless that German armed forces had surrendered unconditionally, it was sexual need that brought her world tumbling down around her ears.

  Roman had been on leave that day, and the minute the announcement was made he ran towards his car, leaping into it and surging away from camp in the direction of Four Seasons.

  Elizabeth’s housekeeper had already run to her with the news, and they had stood in the large slate-floored kitchen, celebrating the event with cooking sherry.

  ‘Find a flag!’ Elizabeth said joyously to Nicholas Raefe’s nanny. ‘We must fly a flag from the windows!’

  ‘But no one will see it, ma’am. We’re over a mile from the road,’ the young nanny had protested, dazed by the momentous announcement and the generous amounts of cooking sherry that Elizabeth was pouring for her.

  ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Elizabeth had said determinedly. ‘We must fly a flag!’

  They had found a flag in one of the garages and hung it from the window above the main door, and then Jung-shui and Nicholas Raefe had begged to be allowed to go into the village, where bells were ringing and people could be distantly heard singing.

  ‘I’ll take them, ma’am,’ the nanny had said, eager to take a part in the festivities, and Elizabeth had waved them off, and her housekeeper had begun to bake a special cake for the children’s tea, listening to the wireless and the commentator’s description of the crowds gathering outside Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street.

  Elizabeth walked back towards the drawing-room, sensing her housekeeper’s need to be on her own. After all, her husband would not be one of the men thankfully returning home. Her joy at the announcement of peace would also be mixed with a fresh surge of personal grief.

  She had stood in the large sun-filled room wondering when and if Raefe would receive the news, and then Roman’s battered Morris had surged to a halt in the drive, and she had run towards the french windows to greet him.

  He had taken the shallow stone steps in, two giant bounds and was halfway across the terrace towards her when she catapulted into his arms. ‘Isn’t it the most wonderful news!’ she exulted, flinging her arms around his neck. ‘It must mean that war in the East will be over soon as well!’

  When he had driven through Midhurst, perfect strangers had been flinging their arms around each other and kissing each other, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should crush her against him and kiss her exuberantly.

  The exuberant sexless kiss that he had intended died almost before it was born. Like a spark setting a tinderbox alight, the instant their lips touched, reason and sanity left them. Her mouth parted, her tongue sliding past his, her fingers tightening in the thick mat of his hair. His response was immediate; he swung her up in his arms, striding with her into the drawing-room, lowering her to the rug as he tore off his jacket, his tie, his shirt. She didn’t even remove her clothes, with her skirt pushed hastily up to her hips, her brief panties pushed to one side to allow him to enter her, she pulled him down on top of her, half-senseless with need. He gasped her name, unzipping his trousers, plunging into her hot and hard, and as he felt his sperm shoot from him like hot gold he knew with dreadful certainty not only that he loved her, but also that Raefe was dead. He couldn’t have made love to her, his body would not have allowed him to, if Raefe had still been alive.

  She was sobbing beneath him, her cries no longer the savage cries of satisfied love, but of horror and grief and deep burning shame. ‘Oh, no!’ she sobbed, twisting and turning in an effort to be free of him. ‘Oh, no! Oh, Raefe! Raefe! What have I done? Oh God, what have I done?’

  He eased his weight off her, saying awkwardly: ‘Elizabeth, please…’

  ‘No!’ She pushed her fists against his chest, fighting to be free of him, the tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Elizabeth, please …,’ he began again as he rose unsteadily to his feet, but she wouldn’t listen to him.

  ‘No! Oh God, please go away! Please go away and never come back!’

  He stood for a moment, his magnificent shoulder and arm muscles glistening with sweat, and then he slowly reached out for his shirt and began to put it back on. He picked up his tie, crushing it into his pocket, hooking his jacket with his finger and swinging it defeatedly over his shoulder. Because of a moment’s uncontrolled passion, everything that had been forged between them now lay in irreparable ashes. His pain was so intense that he didn’t know how he was surviving it.

  ‘You have to listen to me, Elizabeth,’ he said again, his voice raw with urgency.

  ‘No!’ She was trembling convulsively, hugging her arms around her as though holding herself together against an inner disintegration. ‘No, please go! Oh, please go!’

  ‘I love you,’ he said with fierce simplicity. ‘I wouldn’t have done such a thing if I didn’t love you.’

  ‘No!’ she whispered again, shaking her head, the tears still falling. ‘I don’t want to listen! Please leave me! Please go away!’

  There was nothing further that he could do. From outside, he could hear the distant sound of the village bells ringing joyously, and knew he would never be able to listen to them again without reliving the pain he now felt.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said thickly. ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth, more sorry than you’ll ever know.’ And with his heart breaking within him he turned away and walked out of the room.

  She covered her face in her hands, sobbing convulsively. Oh God, how could she have done such a thing? How could she have pulled another man down on top of her in such hungry urgent need?

  ‘Oh, Raefe, I’m so sorry,’ she gasped. ‘So very sorry. Oh, please come back to me, my love! Please come home!’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  He telephoned her early the next morning, but she refused to speak to him. He wrote to her, and she destroyed his letters unread. The shame she felt so mortifying, so total, that she couldn’t even imagine ever facing him again.

  In June, Adam drove down to see her, and as soon as she saw his face she knew that he brought bad news with him. ‘What is it?’ she said fearfully, rising from the piano stool and walking swiftly across to him. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, taking her hands. ‘Truly I am.’ Ever since they had returned to England he had been ceaseless in his efforts to try to trace Raefe as a prisoner of war. Now, at last, he had official notification, but it was not the kind of notification that Beth had been so steadfastly awaiting. She knew immediately.

  ‘No,’ she said, taking her hands away from his. ‘I don’t believe it! He’s alive, I know he is!’

  Slowly Adam took the piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket. ‘He’s missing, presumed dead, Beth.’

  She wouldn’t look at the paper he held out to her. She turned on her heel, walking away from him, staring out through the french windows to where the roses were in early bloom. ‘No,’ she said, and her voice was quiet and sure. ‘He’s alive, Adam. And he’s going to come back to me.’

  On 16 August the Japanese surrendered and war in the East was finally over.

  ‘Soon Daddy will be home,’ she said joyously to Nicholas Raefe, cuddling him on her knee. ‘Soon he will be able to come for walks with us and he’ll teach you how to play cricket and football, and we’ll have such lovely times together, just you wait and see.’

  Nicholas Raefe had looked at her lovingly. He had been waiting so long to see the daddy who was only a name to him that he didn’t really mind waiting a little longer. He couldn’t imagine what this strange daddy would be like and he didn’t really need him to teach him how to play football and cricket, because his Uncle Adam already did that. He kissed her on her cheek, wriggling from her knee, running on sturdy little legs to where Jung-shui was waiting for him down in the paddock.

  Now, every day, she waited for news. A Hong Kong Fellowship had been formed in London for the w
ives and widows and relations of prisoners of war and those interned, and she had attended the London-based meetings regularly, hoping to glean some information about Raefe from the newsletters that the Fellowship published at regular intervals and that were a great comfort to many. Extracts were published from POWs’ letters, though they contained only reassuring news, for otherwise the Japanese censors would not have let them through. At the end of September the Fellowship was informed that over a thousand men, former prisoners of war in Hong Kong, had sailed aboard the Empress of Australia, her destination Vancouver, via Manila.

  ‘They are beginning to come home,’ Elizabeth had whispered to herself. ‘It can’t be long now. Oh, please, Raefe, please write. Please let me know where you are!’

  But he didn’t write, and she knew that it was because he could have no idea where she was. She would have to wait for the Army to redirect his letters to her. Helena wrote to her, her letter forwarded by the Red Cross. She was alive and well, though after the years of imprisonment much slimmer than before. She would be returning to England at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘And Lamoon is with her,’ she had said joyously to Adam. ‘Isn’t that incredible? Lamoon is with her, and she and Tom are going to be married at the earliest opportunity.’

  The first ship to arrive in England, bearing Hong Kong prisoners of war was the Ile de France, sailing from Canada. Members of the Hong Kong Fellowship were advised by the authorities that it was not advisable for them to travel to Southampton to meet the returning men. The men were going to be whisked straight away to resettlement camps for at least three days and there would be no opportunities for reunions until then. Elizabeth had taken not the slightest bit of notice. She would be there when the Ile de France docked, even though there was still no confirmation that Raefe would be aboard, and even though the authorities still adamantly held to the view that he was missing and presumed dead.