Lakeland Lily (52 page)

‘We belong together, you and I. Don’t deny it.’ His fingers lightly caressed her throat, stroking its sensitive hollows, while his mouth remained tantalisingly out of reach.

‘Bertie needs me.’

‘
I
need you.’

Lily wanted to explain about Bertie’s sense of inadequacy, his jealousy and feelings of neglect, and his heavy drinking. She wanted to defend him. ‘It was the war that did it to him, and it’s been worse since his father died. The manner and timing of Edward’s death seemed to compound his sense of failure.’ She gabbled on, needing to fill the silence with words. ‘I’ve got him working on his power-boat plans again. He’s actually started building one at last. Perhaps that will help. How could I leave him now, when he is so troubled? You were in the war, you must see that’s impossible?’

If she’d hoped for understanding or sympathy, she was disappointed. Nathan was not in the mood to consider another man’s problems, particularly when that man possessed the woman he wanted for himself. ‘The war hasn’t turned me into an arsonist. I’m the one you need in your life. Admit it.’

Lily beseeched him with her eyes not to press for any such admission while Nathan let his gaze trace every beloved feature of her face, as if memorising it for all time. The stubborn purity of her blunt chin, the soft flushed cheeks, a cluster of curls on her brow that never quite stayed in place. And those bewitching hazel eyes, so wide open and honest, utterly frank and appealing. They could make an angel of most men, except perhaps the devil that lived within himself.

‘You are mine, Lily. Always have been. Always will be. Deny it as you will.’ Then he’d pulled her into his arms and in the gloriously crazy moments that followed, Lily proved him right in everything he’d said. Loving him as she did, how could she deny it?

Later, when he’d returned her to the pier, she caught a glimpse of Selene, and guilt came, acid sour in her throat. Hastily she tucked escaping curls beneath her hat, smoothed rumpled skirts and attempted to cool her cheeks with the back of one leather-gloved hand before sneaking from his motor and appearing before her sister-in-law, as if from quite the opposite
 
direction.

It was only Lily’s newly discovered passion for her steamboat business which had kept her sane since that day. She’d found an ambition inside herself that she hadn’t known existed. If it was by way of compensation for her lost love, so be it. Thinking, planning, working with the boats kept her from dwelling on how badly she’d messed up her life.

Only last week they’d uncovered two more scuttled craft and she was busily negotiating for their lifting and restoration. In September she’d bought the remains of a sad neglected vessel for under fifty pounds.

So many people now worshipped speed that enthusiasm for power boating had quite taken over. The leisurely days of steaming were considered far too old hat and Edwardian. Yet the visitors didn’t seem to think this way, or they wouldn’t queue in their dozens to sail on one of Lily’s boats. Any number of steam launches had been dismantled, sold for scrap, or simply left to rot. Her fleet was small as yet, but if she continued to buy them up at this rate, as she intended to do, then in two or three years she would own half a dozen or more.

She dreamed of how one day she might build a much larger ship. A Public Steamer to rival
The Golden Lady.
Then what would Nathan say? She almost smiled at the prospect. If she couldn’t have him as a husband and lover, why not as a business rival? It was better than nothing. And what would she name such a ship?
 
Lakeland Lily II
? Of course.

She laughed at the thought, the lilting sound carrying over the distant valley. Now where would she get the money to build herself such a vessel? She who’d been born and brought up in the mucky Cobbles. Lily Thorpe who couldn’t at one time afford an apprenticeship to a humble dressmaker.

‘Getting above yourself again, lass?’ she scolded as she gazed about her at the dome of a midnight blue sky, shading through paler blues to a pink horizon where it lit up the dark mountain peaks as if with a rose-tinted lantern. Pockets of wispy mist stubbornly clung to the hollows and beneath these lay the lake, a shimmer of silver in the ghost light of early morning.

But the sky was brightening and soon a clamour filled the air: the merry call of the peewit, the soaring song of the lark. The dawn chorus had begun. Smiling, Lily got to her feet and went to work.

It was a week or two later and Lily sat in Hannah’s front parlour. Their fragile reconciliation proceeded with painful slowness and, as always on these visits, the silences between them were long. They sat, a picture of unacknowledged guilt and disappointment, only the boy playing at their feet oblivious to the suppressed emotion in the small shabby room.

Lily tried, as so many times before, to say that things were better, that Bertie was slowly coming out of his depression. Even if this was an optimistic view of his state of health, she felt it necessary to keep up a front. She wanted them to see her as a respectable married woman with a flourishing business. Longed for them to be proud of her, to say they understood. And to forgive the grievous sin of adultery, though Lily knew that to a non-conformist Puritan like Hannah it would have been better had she died. Her fall from grace still lay between them like an unbridgeable gulf.

Arnie sat slumped in the corner, saying nothing, sunk in problems of his own.

Hannah said, ‘Not thinking of adding to your family yet then?’ her eyes on the boy.

Lily fidgeted in her seat, smoothing her barathea wool skirt. ‘Not just yet. There’s plenty of time.’

‘It goes quick enough.’

‘Too quick,’ Arnie said. ‘You’re near thirty.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you happy, love?’ The softening in her mother’s tone brought a rush of tears to Lily’s eyes. She dipped her head, tucking her son’s shirt more firmly into his shorts, so Hannah couldn’t see her face. ‘Why shouldn’t I be happy? I’ve got what I wanted, haven’t I? I’ve escaped from The Cobbles. Have a fine house, good husband, healthy son, and a growing business. I should think anyone would be pleased with all of that. What else could I want?’

A coal shifted in the grate. Nobody spoke or moved.

Then Arnie stirred himself from his corner seat, and tapped Thomas’s head. ‘How about you, young man? I dare say you’d think a twist of liquorice more interesting than talk, eh?’

‘Ooh, yes, please, Grandpa.’

‘We’ll walk down to Mrs Robbins’s shop and see if she’s got any, shall we? Our Kitty used to love bull’s eyes, but she’s a fancy young woman now. Seventeen and courting. Too big for toffee. You’re not, though, eh?’

The two went off happily together, Lily smiling as Thomas asked, goggle-eyed, ‘Was it a real bull’s eye, Grandpa?’

Hannah folded her hands and remarked in her stiff, best-behaviour voice, ‘Well, it’s good to see you again, Lily. We’re allus pleased to have you call. And the little lad’ll cheer Dad up. He’s been a bit down in the dumps lately.’

‘Why, what’s wrong?’

Hannah told her how the fishing was down to almost nothing, how boat building work remained unreliable and Arnie was growing ever more worried and depressed.

‘I wish he’d come and work for me,’ Lily said. ‘I’m rescuing more and more scuttled boats. I could give him enough work to keep him going for years.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘Thee knows your father’s pride as well as I do. He’ll not take work from his own daughter.’

‘He would if
you
asked him.’

But no amount of argument would change Hannah’s mind. In the end Lily was forced to admit that her mother was probably right. Arnie would take help from no one, least of all his own daughter.

Margot had to admit she was bitterly disappointed with life. It had not turned out at all as she’d expected. Britain now had its first Labour Government, for goodness’ sake. Ramsay MacDonald was Prime Minister and had even taken working men into his Cabinet. What was the world coming to?

As she sat with her friends in the little drawing room, enjoying morning coffee on this sunny June day in 1924, not for the world would she admit to the very real disillusionment she felt over her daughter Selene, who simply hadn’t made the progress she’d expected.

Bertie, too, grew ever more gloomy and unpredictable. One day he might be deeply engrossed in bits of wood and glue, the next he would shut himself in his room for hours, or disappear for days on end. What he got up to half the time Margot didn’t care to consider, but she knew who to blame for his misery: his wife. Admittedly that dreadful affair of hers was long since over, but the damage it had done was beyond belief. How could poor Bertie ever trust her again?

The chit certainly gave little thought to her marriage, spending every waking moment on her precious boats.

And although she was making good money and fast repaying the loan, Margot deeply resented the fact that her daughter-in-law scrutinised every penny the household spent. Nothing escaped her notice, insisting they must save. For what Margot couldn’t imagine. Typical working-class attitude! She even had the nerve to prevent Margot from buying the clothes she needed. Lily Thorpe might be content to go about in last year’s fashions but that was not something Margot had ever been forced to endure before. Quite intolerable!

‘How is young Thomas?’ Edith Ferguson-Walsh politely enquired, sipping her tea and expecting the usual bland reply. Instead, Margot’s lip curled and she almost spat out her answer.

‘Boys will be boys, I dare say. Behaves like a young urchin half the time.’ If she’d been certain he was Bertie’s son, Margot might have forgiven him this childish failing.

‘Aren’t they all?’ sighed Edith. ‘Now my own…’

But Margot had no wish to hear about Edith’s brood. ‘That woman has started taking him to The Cobbles again, which only adds to the child’s lack of discipline.’

Edith clucked sympathetically. ‘It’s the war, of course. The lack of a father’s influence during those important early years.’

Margot couldn’t help but agree. She found it increasingly difficult to come to terms with this rapidly changing world. And poor Bertie wasn’t fit for anything now, least of all fatherhood. She woke in the night in a sweat sometimes at the prospect of no genuine heir for Barwick House. ‘The war has destroyed everything. What it hasn’t ruined, it has worsened. Everybody thinks they’re somebody these days. I cannot imagine what we’re coming to. Heavens, I was forced to pull up my own weeds yesterday because Betty declared she hadn’t the time. The very idea!’

Edith tilted her head sympathetically, and tutted. ‘How perfectly dreadful. Did I tell you that my...’

‘What did we win the war for, that’s what I’d like to know, if not to hold on to our standards, now so sadly under attack?’

‘Quite. My own dear Dora has two darling children. Did I mention it?’ Edith said, managing to get her say at last.

When her guests had gone, Margot vented her spleen upon Selene, as she had longed to do all afternoon. ‘Why are you not married? Well past thirty and still a spinster!’

Selene winced at the word.

‘What is Catherine Kirkby thinking of? Why she has not introduced you to someone suitable by this time, I cannot imagine.’

‘She is an invalid, Mama.’

‘And that man - he works you like a slave. Look to your future, gel. Would you stay a companion all your life?’

Selene merely smiled, assuring her mother that slavery was not Marcus Kirkby’s style and she was, in any case, perfectly content, thank you very much, husband or no. ‘The ones I’ve seen so far have really been perfect drips. Quite second-rate.’

‘Rich?’

‘Not even that, dear Mama.’

Margot lapsed into dissatisfied silence, though not for long, for she always liked to have the last word. ‘It won’t do.’

‘It will have to do. The war has robbed me of all hope of marriage, Mama, as it has many girls of my age. Do you expect me to live like a nun?’

Margot went quite white and felt the stirrings of panic in her breast. What was Selene trying to say? Surely she had misheard? ‘Nonsense! See you keep your wits about you, gel. You aren’t turning into one of these fast pieces, I hope? And pray don’t cross your legs, it isn’t ladylike. I can almost see your knees in that skirt.’

Selene demurely put her knees together and tugged at her skirt as Margot peered closer through her
pince-nez.

‘That isn’t rouge on your lips, is it?’

‘No, Mama. It’s lipstick.’

Margot looked shocked. ‘A gel would never have used such a thing in
my
day. We can’t have you losing your reputation, which is perfectly possible even in the house of a gentleman. Men being what they are. That would certainly ruin your chances of a good marriage.’

Sighing, Selene pecked a kiss upon her mother’s furrowed brow while rolling her eyes in Lily’s direction. But her words at least agreed with her mother’s sentiment. ‘I’m sure you are right, Mama.’

Selene made a point of telling Lily, as they strolled along the shore afterwards, while Margot slept off a substantial luncheon, that she considered the new business project perfectly splendid. ‘Don’t let Mama bully you. Someone has to settle her debts and keep her pantry filled, otherwise she’d be destitute in a matter of weeks.’