The Soldier's Bride (41 page)

‘I said,’ Madge called again when he didn’t respond, ‘not one of your fancy women, is it?’

He walked into the bedroom, stared at her reflection gazing back at him just as he’d anticipated, and said quizzically, ‘As a matter of fact, it was.’

His reward was a high rippling laugh, the sort of penetrating yet infectious sound that made her so popular with her set. A woman of striking looks, when she laughed Madge could look positively beautiful.

‘Dear God, darling! How deliciously funny!’

It was only when humour failed her, which was often in his company though seldom in others’, that the sour lines showed. Her high spirits had given her a certain allure that he’d mistaken for beauty when he’d first known her.

Now as the laughter left her face she peered once more at herself in the mirror and dabbed a touch more powder around her firm jawline and chin.

Madge was proud of her looks; she was tall, slender still at forty, with a graceful neck many a fashion model would have envied. Her short expertly waved hair was dark
and glossy and she meticulously shaped her eyebrows to a fine arch, giving herself a perpetually surprised look. With cleverly rouged cheekbones and wide mouth painted deep red to present a more rosebud line, she could look quite ravishing.

‘If you could be as witty as that in front of our friends,’ she went on mockingly, ‘you’d be far more popular than you are!’

Something in David snapped.

‘Yes, have your laugh!’ he grated, seeing her look up at the tone of his voice. ‘But it’s true. I do have another woman.’

She was peering at him from the mirror. She gave a little nervous laugh, started to look away, but something in his tone arrested her gaze. She turned on the pink-upholstered dressing stool to confront him.

‘Look, darling, you’re going just a wee bit too far.’ A pause, then a frown that took away her beauty. ‘You are joking?’

‘No,’ he said firmly, his voice low. ‘No, Madge, I’m not.’

She gazed at him, angry now. ‘Don’t be so utterly ridiculous! Who on earth …’

‘I’ve been seeing her every weekend for four years,’ he said evenly.

‘But you’ve been
here
! Every weekend! At least these six or …’

Her expression changed as her voice conveyed recollection of the months before.

‘That’s right, Madge,’ David confirmed. ‘I’ve not seen
her for some seven months, but now I intend to start seeing her again.’

‘You won’t!’ The amber-coloured eyes began to blaze. ‘Not if you value this marriage.’

‘I don’t, Madge. It’s been a farce for years, and you know it. I don’t count in your life. I have no standing with your friends. You go your way just as you please and damn what I say – how I feel. If I walked out this very evening, you wouldn’t miss me, physically or financially, and Daddy would take care of the latter detail for you.’

‘I don’t doubt he would. Except that I’m not prepared to
have
you walk out on me, darling! Who is she, anyway? I don’t suppose for one minute she’s some little shop girl. You’re too fastidious for that. Is she well up in society? I bet she is. Wouldn’t want her good name smeared about to all and sundry. Do I know her?’

‘No. She’s not in your class,’ he countered caustically.

‘Fortunate for you, darling!’ she sneered. ‘But I’ll tell you this for nothing, David – you can go on seeing her until hell freezes, but if you think I’m letting you go, you are very much mistaken. Now go and get ready. We’ve people coming any minute. And you know most of them, don’t you, our friends – Daddy’s friends? One’s a JP and one is that prominent banker Daddy deals with – I can’t remember his name off hand. And Archie Bannister. His father is head of that newspaper – now what is it called? The big one?’

‘I can give you grounds for divorce,’ David cut in, ignoring the overt threat, his thoughts on Chris, his son. But it wasn’t to be.

Madge gave another of her bubbling laughs, only just disguising its cynical tone, managed to adopt an air of flippancy. ‘Don’t be idiotic, darling! Why on earth would I go out of my way to have my name bandied about? On everyone’s lips? Pointed out as the wounded wife? Dear God – what a thought! I’m sorry, David. Just can’t do! Now, do hurry yourself. Everyone will be here in a few ticks and I’m not having our party spoiled. Polly!’

Her voice rose sharply. ‘Where is that girl? These silly waves aren’t setting right. Polly!’

As a flustered maid came hurrying in, David retired silently to get ready, not sure even now whether Madge had believed him or not.

Throughout Christmas he wondered where Letitia would be celebrating, how she was faring, whether she was thinking of him? She had to be thinking of him. The love they’d had couldn’t all go for nothing. She had to care.

It was nigh impossible to phone her until the New Year. The house, large as it was, constantly overflowed with guests. Madge threw a huge New Year’s Eve party. Smoking elegant Turkish cigarettes, behaving like a young thing, sipping champagne with delight, dancing with every man there as though he were the only one … On New Year’s day took her guests to the pantomime –
Mother Goose
at the Palladium – to throw bits of screwed up programmes at the performers from the front stalls and generally join in the fun and singing.

David, obliged to go along, sat back in his seat amid the rich and reckless, longing for the serenity of Letitia’s flat. Almost as much, he longed for his son. He had missed
virtually all of the boy’s growing years; did not want to miss the rest.

Next week, Madge at her hairdresser’s, he telephoned Letty like a little boy playing truant – told her what he had told Madge, asked if he was reprieved and was consumed with relief as Letty, voice betraying her own eagerness, agreed to his coming over on Saturday.

This Letty was far more in charge than the Letty he had once known. Perhaps she had always been, even in their most passionate moments, concerned where everything was leading, how she’d cope with it, always feeling answerable to someone. She no longer had anyone to answer to, not even Christopher, sixteen and a half and broadening out across the shoulders, yet still insisted on being answerable to herself.

‘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!’

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.