Daughter of Riches (46 page)

‘Does it matter whether I mind or not? You're going anyway, I suppose. And I can't say I blame you. Who in their right mind would want to stay with half a man?'

Viv coloured. ‘ Nicky, you're not …'

‘How else would you describe me then? No – you go, Viv, and good luck to you. I should have had the guts to tell you to get off and leave me long ago.'

‘That's just stupid!' Viv flashed, her own underlying guilt making her voice sharp. ‘You're twisting it. You know I care for you. I waited for you, didn't I? All those years?'

‘Did you? Are you sure about that?'

Her colour heightened. ‘Of course I'm sure!'

‘Well I'm not. I never have been. You weren't cut out to be a nun, Viv. I never said anything. I didn't think I had the right. Only don't pretend to be a bloody vestal virgin. It doesn't suit you.'

‘I've had enough of this.'

‘You mean you've had enough of me.'

‘Stop it, Nicky, please! I can't bear it.'

‘
You
can't bear it!' he said bitterly. ‘Well that really is tragic.'

She swallowed hard. ‘Don't be like this, darling, please. Look, I've said I'll come back just as often as I can. And it will be fun. We'll have lots of things to talk about …'

‘You might. What am I likely to have? Oh. I suppose I could always regale you with the exciting happenings in a tourist office or update you on the latest thing in wheelchairs.'

Viv felt sick. When Nicky had first come home he had seemed so brave and well adjusted. Now he was bitter and in a permanent state of depression. Somehow she had failed him and now she was about to walk out and leave him altogether. But perhaps that was the best thing for both of them. Perhaps she was too much of a reminder to him of the past, the days when things had been so different. He was upset now, but later he would be free to meet someone else, someone who would accept him just as he now was. With her there would be no echoes of what had once been, with her he would be able to build a new life based only on the reality of the present. It was what she had told herself whilst she had been planning what she was going to do and the sentiments had salved her conscience. Now, however, faced with Nicky's anger and distress, it seemed a hollow and rather selfish deception.

I still love him, Viv thought. But the way things are it is quite impossible. I have to make a new life for myself and allow Nicky to do the same.

‘You'll have lots of other things to talk about, Nicky,' she said. ‘You have to look on, not back, and you'll do it better when I'm not around.' He did not answer. She went towards him intending to kiss him but he turned his head away and instead she trailed her fingers around his neck and lightly brushed his hair. Nicky sat stiff and unresponsive. Viv crossed to the door and went out. Nicky did not turn to see her go.

‘Poor old Nicky is in a pretty state about Viv going isn't he?' Paul said.

He had some leave from the RAF and had come to spend it in Jersey. He, Catherine, and Sophia – who was pregnant again – were relaxing in the garden before the rush to put on the evening meal began.

‘It's understandable,' Sophia said, shifting a little in her chair to relieve the discomfort that she was experiencing. At least this time she did not feel nauseous all the time as she had when she was expecting Louis, but she had grown much bigger and was carrying her baby very low, and the recent hot weather had added to her discomfort. ‘I only wish there were something I could do to help but there isn't. There's nothing anyone can do except be there for him and at the moment that seems to be the last thing he wants.'

‘I can't understand it,' Paul said. ‘When he was in hospital in England he seemed to have taken it all so well. I was the one in shock. Now it's as though there's a black cloud surrounding him. He's a different bloke.'

‘It's all Viv Moran's fault,' Catherine said venomously. ‘I never liked her. How can she just go off like that and leave him? It's cruel!'

‘You can't blame her entirely,' Sophia said. ‘She has done her best for him as far as I can see and it's not her fault her father has lost all his money.'

‘But if she loved him …'

‘I wonder if she ever told him about the baby,' Paul said thoughtfully.

They both looked at him.

‘What do you mean?' Sophia asked. ‘ What baby?'

Paul flushed. He had never mentioned to a soul the conversation he had had with Viv and he knew he should not have done so now but it was too late, the damage was done.

‘She was pregnant,' he said awkwardly. ‘ When Nicky went off to join the army he left her pregnant. He didn't know, of course, and Viv had an abortion. That's all.'

For a moment they gazed at him open-mouthed.

‘An abortion? Viv was expecting Nicky's baby and she had an abortion?' Catherine said. ‘I don't believe it!'

‘How do you know about this?' Sophia asked.

‘She told me. I never said anything. I didn't think it was my place.'

‘And Nicky doesn't know?'

‘I don't know. She's probably told him by now. Look – just forget it. It's none of our business. What we should be thinking about now is what we can do for Nicky. Maybe one of his old friends could help – do you remember that chap Jeff McCauley? He and Nicky had been in hospital together and he came over once when Nicky first came home. Perhaps he could get through to him.'

‘You're right,' Sophia said, trying to pull herself together. ‘What he needs is someone who has been through a similar experience, someone he would feel could understand. I think I've got Jeff McCauley's address in the visitors' book. I'll write to him.'

She and Paul went on discussing ways to help Nicky, successfully silencing Catherine who was thoroughly disappointed at not being able to find out more about Viv's abortion.

But that night, as she put pen to paper to Jeff McCauley Sophia sat for a long while thinking about what Paul had said, and wondering how different things might have been if Viv had borne Nicky's baby, instead of taking what she could not help thinking of as a coward's way out.

In the September of 1947 Sophia was heavily pregnant but according to her doctor not due to give birth for another two weeks. Since Louis had been almost three weeks late Sophia assumed, quite wrongly, that the same thing would probably happen again and one warm afternoon she set out with Louis in the pushchair and with Lola in tow for a walk and a picnic.

Bernard, when he heard her plans, had tried his best to dissuade her, but Sophia with her mind made up was not for turning.

‘The exercise will do me good,' she argued, strapping Louis into his pushchair. ‘Sitting cramps me up and gives me heartburn. And besides I want to get Mama out of the kitchen before the chef gives notice.'

‘Well, if you think you'll be all right,' Bernard said. He was still doubtful about the wisdom of the excursion but getting Lola out from under the feet of the new chef he had hired was a powerful argument. Stefan Polanski produced dishes that were truly inspired and were beginning to attract just the kind of reputation Bernard wanted for the hotel, but he was also temperamental and resented what he considered Lola's interference.

‘Of course I'll be all right!' Sophia said impatiently as she set out.

It was the most pleasant of afternoons, the sky that deep rich blue that is like an accumulation of all the lighter blues of summer pasted layer on layer, the sun low and bright and there was enough breeze going to keep the air pleasantly fresh. Though there was still an almost childlike quality about Lola she had recovered well physically. She could stride out with a resolve that almost surprised Sophia each time, they took a walk together, and now she set a cracking pace along the coast road. As she struggled to keep pace Sophia felt, but ignored, a niggling pain like a toothache somewhere in the depths of her body. It felt quite different to the pains she had experienced when Louis was born and it did not occur to her that one labour is rarely exactly like another.

Sophia was sitting on a rug on the beach, watching Lola digging happily with Louis when she experienced a sudden hot rush between her legs. Oh God! she thought in panic. Either her waters had broken or she was having a haemmorhage. Trying to conceal her anxiety from her mother Sophia struggled to her feet, squinting over her shoulder at the wet patch on the back of her skirt. At least it wasn't blood – Sophia supposed she should be grateful for small mercies. But the thought of walking all the way home with this sticky fluid dripping down her legs was not a pleasant one. And besides she had no way of knowing how long it would be before she went into labour proper.

‘I think we should be going, Mama,' she said briskly.

‘Oh, but we have only just arrived!' Lola protested, disappointed as a child. ‘ It's such a lovely afternoon! Can't we stay a little longer?'

‘Not now. We'll come back another day.'

‘But soon it will be winter. You know how cold it is in winter when the snow comes.'

‘You're thinking of Russia, Mama.'

‘Am I? Oh, perhaps I am. I get so muddled sometimes. I had a beautiful fur hat and a muff. Did I tell you, Sophia? We would go skating and sometimes we would go whooshing over the snow in the sledge drawn by horses. It was wonderful. Except when we heard the wolves. They make such a mournful sound, you know, when they call to one another.'

‘Yes, Mama.' Another rush of fluid trickled down Sophia's leg. Oh God, she thought, I am going to die of embarrassment!

She bent over, folding up the rug and putting it into the carrier on the pushchair. Lola was still chattering and it was only when she straightened up again that Sophia realised that Louis was missing.

‘Louis!' She looked round anxiously. ‘Where is he?'

‘He was here a moment ago. He can't have gone far.'

There were a couple of families on the beach but no sign of a small fair-haired boy in a white blouse and blue shorts.

‘Louis!' Everything else forgotten Sophia ran to and fro, a few steps in one direction, a few in the other. Louis seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Someone had kidnapped him, she thought in panic. Or else he'd run down to the sea and drowned! She would never see him again! ‘Louis! Louis!' she called frantically. ‘Where are you?

‘Excuse me!' a voice called. ‘Have you lost your little boy?'

‘Yes!' Sophia called back. ‘Did you see what happened to him?'

‘He's here, playing with my daughter.'

Sophia looked. She could see nothing. ‘Where?'

‘Here – behind my pushchair.'

‘Oh!' Sophia wanted to weep with relief. She ran across the beach. Sure enough Louis was squatting on the sand hidden by the pushchair and completely engrossed in a baby, about six months old, who was lying gurgling on a rug. ‘I though I'd lost him!' she gasped.

She bent over to scoop him up and as she did so the first pain caught her, almost taking her breath. As it passed she straightened to see the young mother gazing at her anxiously.

‘Are you all right?'

‘No, not really. I think … my baby's started.'

‘Oh Lord! Is there anything I can do? Call an ambulance or …?'

Sophia was overcome with longing for Bernard and the aura of safety he always engendered. ‘Perhaps if you could phone my husband …'

‘Of course.' The young woman got up, lifting her own child into her pushchair. ‘Look, you wait here, or make your way slowly up to the road. I'll get help for you if you give me your husband's number. I'm Susan Feraud, by the way. And this is Molly.'

Sophia nodded, too engrossed in her own situation to take much notice. Another pain gripped her as she watched the young woman struggle across the beach with her pushchair and child. And she little realised that as a result of this chance encounter she and Susan would become firm friends and the reverberations would continue for another generation.

Thanks to Susan a very worried Bernard was soon on the scene with his newly acquired car and was rushing Sophia, Louis and a very confused Lola, home. Then he called the doctor and sat holding Sophia's hand and rubbing her back until he arrived.

‘Off you go and have a cigarette or a stiff whisky while you wait,' the doctor told him. ‘ It won't be long and she's in safe hands now.'

‘I'd rather stay,' Bernard said.

The doctor shot him a glance. A father present at the birth – unheard of! But everything was happening so fast he was too busy to argue. So it was that Bernard was there, a little pale, but very excited, when Robin Charles Bernard Langlois made his hasty and quite unexpected appearance, crying lustily and looking very pink and fresh and also very hurt at being thrust into the world a little before he was ready for it. As Bernard afterwards told everyone who would listen, he would not have missed it for the world!

In the spring of 1948 Bernard called a family conference.

‘I want to talk to you, Nicky and Catherine,' he said to Sophia, who was in the middle of bathing Robin. She looked up in surprise, supporting Robin with one hand and lathering soap with the other.

‘What do you mean, you want to talk to us? You see Nicky practically every day and I'm here. Talk to me now.'

‘No, I want to talk to all three of you together,' Bernard said. ‘Really Paul should be there as well but since he is in Germany that's obviously out of the question.'

‘Is something wrong then?' Sophia asked, slightly alarmed. ‘The hotel isn't in trouble, is it? It's been doing so well!'

‘Everything is fine,' Bernard said. ‘It's no use you ferretting away, Sophia. As I said, I want the three of you together.'

‘Well that sounds pretty silly to me,' Sophia replied, needled. ‘ I am your wife, after all. I hope you're not going to become pompous in your old age, Bernard.'