The Soldier's Bride (40 page)

Letty and David were standing together swaying, mesmerised by the strains of Al Jolson’s poignant ballad, ‘Sonny Boy’; a gramophone record she had bought after seeing
The Jazz Singer
, the first ever talkie. Letty, moved to tears by the song’s words during the film last week, could hardly wait to buy it. Now she was made dreamy by Jolson’s compelling voice.

Chris had been packed off to bed, leaving them to a brief nightcap before David made for his home and wife. The music turned down low, they’d danced slower and slower. And now he kissed her, asked why he needed to go home at all tonight?

Letty’s reaction was to press her face to his shoulder, suddenly guarded. ‘Not with Chris asleep in the next room,’ she said hastily. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she finished, knowing how silly it sounded.

It was always the same excuse, even after all this time; it had taken her these two years to get over the feeling of still being married. Ada had once said bereavement was a two-year disease. She had been right.

David had asked before, but only when Chris’s holidays took him to stay with friends. An outgoing twelve year old, popular with his school chums and liked by their parents, Chris was often invited to spend time with this one and that – sometimes for a weekend, sometimes a week in the longer breaks, even going on holiday with them.

She had consented to let David stay on two occasions but each had been a disaster with Letty breaking down, unable to shake off the notion of betraying Billy. David had understood, been so patient with her. But now he was asking again, lifting her face with a gentle hand, kissing her again tenderly. ‘We are his mother and father, you know, darling.’

‘But not married,’ she reminded softly, regretfully, wishing so much that it was otherwise. ‘It makes a difference.’

‘You never used to be so prudish.’ He smiled down at her. ‘Do you remember those years we first knew each other? The beach at Brighton?’

‘I was young and silly then,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t. I was in deadly earnest – loved you with every ounce of my being. I’ve never ceased to love you, Letitia.’

The music forgotten, David held her and kissed her closed eyes. ‘You’re even more beautiful than you were then. These glorious green eyes, the flame in your hair. You’ve gained such poise these past years, I can hardly … Letitia, let me stay tonight.’

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.’

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 months, 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!’