Only Love Can Heal

by Rosie Harris

  ‘Yes, I am sure she would,’ Kate said drily. ‘You never even told me you had taken a flat, Robert.’ She began to move around the living room, wandering through to the kitchen and then pushing open the door into the bedroom.

  ‘It was meant to be a surprise. I took it on when you said your mother was better and that you would be joining me. When you didn’t arrive, I agreed to sub-let it to Maria.’

  ‘Without even moving in yourself!’

  ‘There was no point in doing so since you were not coming,’ he said smoothly. ‘It is more convenient for me to stay in Barracks.’

  ‘Yet you keep your clothes here!’ Kate said cuttingly.

  ‘My clothes?’ A dark flood of colour suffused Robert’s face and he frowned fiercely. ‘I don’t follow you, Kate.’

  ‘Unless your friend Maria is entertaining another Captain in our apartment, and he is the one hanging up his uniform in our wardrobe.’ She looked witheringly not at Robert, but at Maria. She pushed wide the bedroom door as she spoke to show Robert’s uniform hanging inside the open wardrobe alongside some of Maria’s clothes.

  ‘Oh, that is a spare one! In fact, that is what I have come to collect.’

  ‘Well, don’t forget to collect your dressing-gown at the same time, will you,’ Kate snapped, her chin jutting angrily. ‘It is lying over the armchair in the bedroom.’

  Maria rolled her eyes dramatically, hunching her shoulders in an expressive gesture. ‘I think it is time that I went to work,’ she said with a tight little smile at Kate. ‘It has been much pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘I bet it has, a most unexpected pleasure at that,’ Kate retorted, her brown eyes glittering.

  As the door slammed behind Maria, Robert moved to take Kate in his arms but she moved quickly out of reach, her eyes glazed, her lips trembling. She could see that he was upset, a tiny vein throbbed high on his temple and the colour was beginning to creep upward from his collar again. She felt too outraged to think clearly. Undoubtedly, Maria was the reason why Robert had not come home once since they had been married, she thought bitterly. She wanted to hit out, to wound with words, anything to dispel the sense of deep bewildermeant that had taken hold of her.

  ‘Come and sit down and let me try and explain,’ Robert said hesitantly.

  Kate drew away, feeling disgusted and bitter. She stood looking at him dispassionately, the tall masterful figure, so upright and military in his impeccable uniform, the three gold pips glinting on the shoulders of his jacket. The man who had haunted her thoughts, waking or sleeping, for over three years. The man she had married less than five months ago and who had already taken a mistress. Raising her eyes to look into his face, at the handsome square cut profile beneath the burnished flame of hair that glowed like a halo in the gathering dusk, she saw that his brilliant green eyes were fixed on her in an intense, pleading stare.

  It was disturbing to find that her parents had been right. It would seem that her mother had been able to recognise Robert’s philandering nature, even though she had been blind to it. She even wondered whether her father’s initial dislike of him, his repeated attempts to stop them marrying, had been because he, too, was aware of the type of man Robert Campbell would prove to be.

  The thought of going back home and admitting she had been wrong and having to concede that her marriage was a failure, before it had even started, made her cringe inwardly.

  Resolutely, refusing to accept defeat, and with an outward calm she was far from feeling, Kate walked over to the settee and sat down.

  ‘I’m waiting to hear your explanation,’ she said coolly. ‘I only hope it is convincing.’

  Robert stared as if unable to believe his ears. The story he had begun to concoct the moment he had realised that Kate and Maria had met, now seemed fatuous in the extreme. As he looked into his wife’s candid brown eyes he took a tremendous decision and decided to tell her the truth.

  Kate heard him out in complete silence. When he had finished she stood up and walked into the kitchen. ‘How would you like your coffee … black?’

  For a moment Robert was not sure whether he had heard aright. He found it hard to believe that Kate could take the situation so calmly.

  He walked over to the kitchen door feeling utterly perplexed by her attitude. He had been expecting tears and recriminations, not this cool acceptance of his misdemeanours. How could Kate take it all so calmly if she really loved him?

  In that moment he knew she was the only woman he truly wanted, and that the deep feelings he felt for her were totally different from his lust for Maria. He wouldn’t deny that Maria was an exciting lover, but she was just a plaything that he was now ready to discard. Kate’s love was something pure and lasting and he felt angry with himself that he had betrayed her trust.

  Instinctively he knew that Kate would never betray him and take a lover. Humbled he remembered the suspicions he had once harboured about her and Captain Parkes, until he had met him. Now, instead of feeling relieved that Kate was faithful to him, it suddenly irked him because he had nothing with which to reproach her.

  ‘Is that how much you care?’ he frowned angrily, lounging against the kitchen door and glaring at her.

  With a light shrug she began to spoon coffee powder into two mugs.

  ‘I thought you loved me!’

  ‘I did … and I still do,’ she answered in a low voice.

  ‘It is all your fault for not joining me out here, you know that, don’t you?’

  Her long lashes hid the expression in her dark eyes as she turned to face him. He saw that her lower lip was trembling as she started to speak and watched as her teeth bit down, trying to quell the quivering. She looked so vulnerable that he wanted to sweep her into his arms, shower her face with kisses and beg her forgiveness. Instead he thrust his hands hard into his trouser pockets and averted his eyes.

  ‘May I pass, I want to sit down,’ Kate said handing him a mug of steaming coffee and carried her own into the living room.

  He followed her and sat at the opposite end of the long settee. He felt as nervous as a schoolboy being hauled before the headmaster.

  ‘How … how long are you staying, Kate?’

  ‘Here? Just until I have finished my coffee.’

  ‘I meant in Germany, had you come for good?’

  ‘No, just for a long weekend. I meant it to be a surprise. I seem to have succeeded pretty well!’ she added with a brittle laugh.

  ‘Please, don’t talk like that, Kate.’

  ‘I should have let you know I was coming and then I would never have walked into this. You could have kept it all quite separate from our life. I did wonder why you had never come home on leave … never once in five months!’

  ‘I haven’t had any leave, Kate. If you remember I managed to get an extension for our honeymoon and that meant I went right to the bottom of the list for any future leave. I should have some due soon. I intended to write and tell you as soon as I knew the dates.’

  ‘And you’ll be home then?’ She drained her coffee cup and stood up, looking tall and slim in her tailored blue wool suit and in perfect control of herself.

  ‘Of course I will!’

  Before Robert realised what was happening, Kate had picked up her suitcase and was walking towards the door.

  ‘Kate, wait. You can’t just walk away like this …’

  ‘I’ll expect to see you when you get your leave … at Walford Grange.’

  Head held high, tears streaming unchecked down her cheeks, Kate swept out of the apartment, wishing she had asked the taxi to wait after all.

  Chapter 14

  September was a golden month. The sun shone from early morning until late afternoon and the entire countryside was bathed in warmth. Everywhere was a medley of yellows, oranges and browns as the leaves turned, the corn ripened and the gleaming hedgerow berries glistened like polished rubies.

  Kate sat beside her mother on the terrace, her hands lying idle in her lap. The sewing she had brought
out to do was lying untouched on the table beside her. Her mind was blank.

  This sense of being suspended in time, as if waiting for something to happen, had stayed with her ever since she had walked away from the apartment in Hanover. She had somehow found her way back to the airport and had sat there for almost four hours, not even bothering to check onto a plane back to England.

  It was not until a security guard became suspicious, and stopped to tactfully enquire if he could help, that she remembered where she was and that she wished to return to London as quickly as possible.

  Knowing there would be awkward questions if she arrived home several days early she had stayed in London spending the time window shopping and walking aimlessly through streets she had known so well when she had been stationed there.

  When she had eventually returned to Walford Grange no one asked how Robert was, or even how she had enjoyed her visit to Germany. Her mother’s health had given cause for concern while she had been gone and there was a general air of relief that she was back.

  She couldn’t bring herself to write to Robert, not even to let him know she was home. And, in the weeks that followed, any letters that came from him she took straight up to her room and put them away m a drawer unread.

  By keeping her mind blank, Kate found she could manage to submerge all thoughts of what had happened in Germany. Even at night she refused to let memories invade her mind. She read copiously, sometimes without comprehension, until her eyelids could stay open no longer and the book dropped from her hand. Often she would wake, many hours later, to find her bedside light still on.

  She lost weight. The delicate curves of her cheeks disappeared, her cheekbones became more prominent, and there were deep furrows running down either side of her nose to her mouth giving her a careworn look. Her mouth, permanently set in a firm unyielding line, added to her austere expression. No one at Walford Grange appeared to notice any of these changes. Or if they did they made no comment.

  Lady Dorothea was perfectly content as long as Kate was within call. Mabel Sharp walked around with a smug smile, as if delighted that Lady Dorothea’s illness was keeping Kate from joining Robert in Germany. As for Sir Henry, he was far too involved with his many new farming projects to give Kate’s welfare more than a passing thought.

  The only person who did seem concerned was Eleanor. Sublimely happy in her marriage to Ralph Buscombe, she was impatient for Robert to join Kate.

  ‘Just think of the great times we could have going around in a foursome,’ she enthused. ‘You can’t stay at home sitting by your mother’s bedside for ever. Life’s whizzing past and you are having no fun at all.’

  Kate refused to be drawn into either an argument or discussion. She didn’t wish to confide in Eleanor any more than she wanted to think about what had happened or what the future held. She nursed a blind optimism that if she put it right out of her mind, and did nothing, then eventually everything would be all right.

  It was not in her nature to accept ‘second best’ so if she rationalised about what had happened she knew the only course open to her was to dismiss Robert from her life. Loving him as she did, that was impossible. Which left her with no alternative but to accept his explanation of how the raven-haired girl came to be in his apartment. Doubts churned deep in the recess of her mind and heart but she was determined not to let them surface. She could not face the truth, not yet.

  Kate realised that Robert was not entirely to blame, and that was why she was prepared to make allowances. Her family’s opposition to them marrying, the three long years of waiting and all the other obstacles deliberately placed in his way, had been the underlying cause.

  She realised now that most men would have openly rebelled at their wife going home to her parents after just one night of their honeymoon! Robert had reconciled himself to the situation. He had, or so she had thought at the time, even understood that she was only doing her duty when at the very last minute she had cancelled her plans to go with him to Germany. And, if she had forewarned him of her visit, instead of trying to surprise him, then the misunderstanding would never have arisen.

  She smiled wryly as she realised the truth of this. If he had been pre-warned Robert would probably have sent Maria packing, and removed every trace of her presence. Or else he would have taken her to an hotel and never mentioned the apartment. Either way she would have remained oblivious of what was going on.

  Robert sent a picture postcard to let her know he would be on leave over Christmas and the New Year. The view of Hanover stirred up memories but she pushed these resolutely to one side, knowing she must face up to realities. She didn’t reply but waited with a kind of fatalism to see what would happen.

  As the memories which she had so ruthlessly quelled were gradually allowed to surface so too did the pain and her heart still ached because she loved Robert so desperately. The next few weeks would, she felt, determine the rest of her life.

  As Christmas approached, Kate grew increasingly apprehensive. She kept telling herself that if Robert came back to England for his leave, despite her silence, it would signify that she still meant something to him, and that he still cared and wanted her.

  Night after night, as she sat by Lady Dorothea’s bed, holding her mother’s frail hand until she fell asleep, Kate would torture herself wondering whether perhaps she had been wrong in what she had assumed. Was it just possible that Robert had been telling the truth and that he had only rented the flat to Maria? Somewhere m her handbag was the telephone number she had been given when she had phoned the Barracks asking for Robert.

  As she waited for her connection Kate’s heart was pumping. When the whirrs and clicks died away and a woman’s voice answered she swiftly cut off. She felt the colour flooding her cheeks before she went cold and began to shiver. She tried reasoning with herself that it might be some other woman and not Maria who had answered the phone. After this length of time, knowing she was not going to join him in Germany, Robert would surely have given up the flat!

  She tried to remember Maria’s voice, but her own mind was in such a turmoil that she found this impossible. Then fresh doubts surfaced. Had she phoned the right number?

  She paced the room, trying to summon up her nerve to make the call a second time. When she did, she knew for certain that it was Maria. There was a cold hollow inside Kate as she replaced the receiver. She had wanted to ask for Robert, but was afraid to do so in case he was there.

  She still wanted to believe that he had been telling the truth when he had said that he had sub-let the flat, and that was why Maria was still there and had answered the phone. Perhaps it was all in his letters, the ones she had put away unopened. As she rushed upstairs to her room to find them, Kate remembered that it was army property so Robert would not be allowed to sub-let and the last shred of hope flickered, guttered and died.

  She brooded over the problem, desperate for a solution. In fairness to Robert, perhaps she ought to offer him his freedom. She couldn’t expect him to live like a monk when it was not of his choosing. Yet the thought of losing him forever brought a bitterness that was unbearable. The alternative, sharing him with Maria, was equally unpalatable.

  Perhaps if they had a child? The idea excited her yet she was quick to see the disadvantages of that happening while her mother was in such poor health, and Robert living away.

  She recalled her own childhood, when her father had been in the army and she had seen him only for brief spells. At times, when she had been quite young, she had resented his intrusion into her well-ordered life. When he was not at home she had been the centre of attention with Lady Dorothea and Nanny dancing attendance. All that changed as soon as her father came on leave. His tall, military figure dominated the scene, everyone scurried to do his bidding and even her mother had spent most of her time with him, making only fleeting visits to the nursery.

  As she had grown older, she had come to appreciate him and a deep friendship had developed. She had studied hard, won her way to U
niversity and achieved good results because she wanted him to be proud of her. And he had taken an inordinate pride in her ATS record during the war. It was only in her choice of husband that she had failed to come up to his high expectations. Since Robert’s promotion to Captain, however, she hoped this was forgotten.

  She knew her father would advise on how she should handle the situation but she felt reluctant to confide in him. It was her predicament and if she wanted to hold on to Robert there was no easy or short term answer.

  If only he could be posted back to England she thought optimistically. If he was stationed in London or Windsor, or even at the Guards’ Depot at Pirbright, he would be able to come home every weekend, or she could visit him. Surely, her mother could learn to live with that arrangement, Kate mused.

  Snow was already powdering the ground on the morning of Christmas Eve when Robert arrived in a taxi. Kate had just finished making her mother comfortable for the day and was walking across the hall to see if any help was needed in the kitchen when the doorbell jangled and she paused to answer it.

  ‘Kate!’

  Robert was shocked at how drawn she looked and steeled himself, afraid she might turn him away. He noticed that the white jumper and brown tweed skirt she was wearing seemed to hang loosely, as if she had lost weight.

  Framed in the doorway, Robert looked immensely tall and masculine in his Guards uniform. The piercing greenness of his eyes startled her as his gaze locked with hers. She heard a thud as the case he was carrying dropped to the floor and then she was in his arms, crushed against his hard chest and his firm mouth was homing in, covering hers in a demanding sensuous hunger.

  She responded just as fervently. Those first minutes of his homecoming atoned for everything and wiped out all the months of mounting doubts for both of them. Cheeks flushed, her brown eyes glowing with happiness as she looked up at Robert, Kate felt confident that her fears were groundless and that everything between them was all right.