Spare Brides (49 page)

‘A cinema or bus ticket. A telegram. Something! Why didn’t I keep a thing?’

‘Stop this at once, Lydia.’ Lawrence was beginning to feel distinctly unnerved. She was making no sense at all and he loathed hysteria. He caught her by the shoulders and forced her to turn to him. She squirmed out from under his grip and dropped to her hands and knees to look under the bed. He bent down, caught hold of her wrists and with a little force pulled her up on to the bed. ‘Sit there and tell me what is going on.’

Lydia’s face was streaked with tears and pain. She seemed to hesitate for a second, and then seemed too exhausted to resist.

‘I had an affair,’ she sighed.

The words flapped around the room. Lawrence was so totally and utterly surprised by them that his initial reaction was a sort of spluttering cough of amusement, disbelief and then outrage. ‘What? Who?’

‘Sergeant Major Edgar Trent.’

Lawrence could not fail to hear the pride and excitement in his wife’s voice as she announced her lover’s name. He knew exactly who Sergeant Major Edgar Trent was. The non-commissioned officer who had blasted on to the scene this year. The man was known for his bravery and was an asset on a hunt. He often had dirt under his fingernails, but no one ever commented because somehow – and of course this was impossible after three years – people thought the dirt was probably from France. Ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly have lingered there, but in some way it might have. The sergeant major was popular in the smoking room; always had a story and a considered opinion if one asked him to contribute. Lawrence had thought he was a good sort – not quite one of them, obviously, but a decent enough chap. Now he despised him and thought he was a low and brutal cad.

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes, I do.’

Lawrence fell back on to the stool in front of the dressing table. It was a flimsy, puny stool and the sad weight of him nearly toppled it. He maintained his balance but his dignity was shot through. He slouched rather than holding himself rigid as he had done all his life. He had always remained upright. Much good it had done him. He raced through a jagged cacophony of emotions. He was incredulous. It could not be. Not Lydia. No, not his dear and sincere Lydia. But it was so! She had just confessed it. It was an absolute and filthy diabolical certainty. It was an outrage. Soiled, disgusting, wrong. Damn you. Just wrong. Then the outrage left him. He was crumpled like a sheet of writing paper, screwed up and tossed into the waste-paper basket.

Lydia said, ‘Please don’t cry.’ She could not stand to have reduced him to such a defenceless wreck.

‘I am not going to cry!’ His heart was angry at the idea but his voice did sound as though he might sob. He clamped his mouth closed. Stiffened his lip.

‘If it makes things any better, he does not love me. He does not want me,’ she added.

‘It doesn’t make anything better.’

They sat silently with their own thoughts. What to do? What to do next? wondered Lawrence. He was all out of ideas.

‘You know the baby isn’t yours.’

‘I know no such thing.’

‘I’m five months’ pregnant, Lawrence. Six at the most. We haven’t … Not for …’

‘I’m your husband, Lydia. If that baby is born while you are married to me, it’s my baby. It’s as simple as that. That’s the law.’ Lawrence rather thought marriage ought to mean something. It ought to mean that a chap and a girl loved one another, and that they kept on loving one another, but if that couldn’t be the case, then it had to mean other things instead. Social standing, respectability, continuity. ‘You will of course be married to me when this child is born.’

‘No. Thank you, Lawrence,’ Lydia replied gently, but with certainty. ‘I thought I could be. I thought it was for the best, but it won’t do.’ Tears were still falling down her face. Fat, splashy, silent sobs. Lawrence followed the progress of a single tear. Down her creamy cheek, to her pointy chin, and then it curved, keeping tight to her smooth, pearly neck. The neckline of her dress was wet with tears. She must have been crying for a long time.

‘You said he doesn’t want you.’

‘He doesn’t, but I know now how being wanted feels.’

Lawrence registered the criticism at once. There was a fire in the centre of her eyes that he didn’t understand. He saw it but knew it was beyond his reach, beyond his initiation. He was not the man she wanted. He would always be lacking in her eyes. He didn’t like being looked at in that way. He did not have to be. He was sick of the constant implied disapproval. He ought to be admired. Respected. Even loved. Was that too much for a man to hope for? He thought of Sarah. Sweet, sweet, gentle Sarah. He’d known her as long as he’d known Lydia. He might well have picked her in the first place, except she’d already been engaged when they met. He remembered thinking Arthur was a lucky chap. She was such a bright, bonny wife. So devoted. Of course, Arthur’s luck had run out. Lawrence had spent a great deal of time with Sarah and her children this summer. She was a warm woman who doused him in a sense of approval. They had shared just one kiss. An impetus moment. Wonderful.

‘What will you do?’ he asked.

‘I shall bring the baby up on my own.’ She squeezed his hand until the white knuckles and blue veins on hers bulged. Lawrence thought her skin was too thin; she couldn’t hold on to any weight, despite the pregnancy. She was losing her looks. They all would. They would all get old in the end.

From the moment it began, Lydia had been undecided as to whether discovery would be a relief or a disaster. She now found it was a relief. She didn’t want to be alone, but she had no choice. The incessant lack would be easier to bear without Lawrence’s best intentions. She thought of the nights that she and Edgar had fallen asleep together. He’d spoon into her, and even if they had just made love, he seemed to be perpetually hot and hard. As they lay on their sides, he’d place his penis between her legs, cup her breast and she’d feel the heat of his chest all along her back. So tight and safe. Her favourite times were when he’d finally trusted her enough to fall asleep by her side. She’d felt his hardness yield, relent.

He’d once promised her that she’d become straightforward and confident; she felt she owed it to him and to herself to finally do so. She thought of how he’d described going into battle, and she now truly understood.

‘You put your hands on the ladder and went over. That was what you had to do. Time after time. Bile in mouth, shit running down your leg; it didn’t matter: one foot in front of the other. Onwards and upwards. And in part it was a relief after all the waiting.’

H
E LOOKED UP
at the heavy wooden sign overhanging the shop front and inspected the font to see what his money had bought.
Mrs Trent’s Tea Rooms
. The gold lettering was flowery and Edwardian. He would not have chosen it himself; he’d have preferred a bold modern art deco design, but he had not been consulted. As he pushed open the door of the tea room, a bell rang announcing his presence; eight of the ten tables were occupied, but no one so much as glanced his way. He slid into a wooden seat at a small table for two, and self-consciously fingered the edge of the white embroidered tablecloth, aware of its overwhelming femininity. He didn’t fit in this place. His bulk, his dark suit, his experience were all wrong. This place was for women. Women with bags of shopping and gossip. Women who wanted to chatter and giggle, indulge with a cream scone or a frosted-top lemon cake.

He recognised the sense of dislocation, which had reappeared with increasing frequency in the past few months. It threatened to overwhelm him. He could not allow that. That was why he’d had to do something about it.

He’d had the same perpetual feeling of isolation when he’d first arrived back from the Front. Camaraderie had collapsed on the boat home. Men were left with nothing but a sense of shame and futility; the memories of the crimes they’d been forced to commit and witness. They’d had a horror of catching one another’s eye; they’d all seen enough to last a lifetime. When he’d got home to Ellie, he’d thought things might improve. He’d hoped that somehow she’d be able to plug the abyss of loneliness and seclusion. That was what a wife did, wasn’t it? But he’d found that Ellie was a stranger to him, just like everyone else. He should have known she would be, since they’d only met twice before he went to the Front.

He used to think she was one of those girls who’d got caught up in the romance of the men going to fight for their country. She wasn’t; her thinking was clearer than that. He’d met her in a pub on Clapham Common. He’d gone there with a bunch of lads from home. They were all heading the same way. Down to the training camp, then across the water. Only one of them had ever been to London before and he had an aunt who ran a pub in Clapham. That was how they’d ended up there that particular night. The war made Edgar understand that that was what life amounted to. A series of arbitrary, almost whimsical decisions that added up to what people wanted to believe was destiny.

He’d bought her drinks all night and then they’d had sex in a back alley, up against a coal shed. There were a lot of women who thought they were doing their bit by dropping their knickers and, in a way, they were. It did make him feel better; stronger, more manly. He wasn’t wet behind the ears like many of the boys. Even though he’d only just turned eighteen, there’d been a couple of girls who had been more impressed than they ought to have been by his height and stature. Ellie was buxom and easy. He didn’t mean that in a derogatory way. She was easy in the sense that she didn’t make hard work of sex. He’d admired her refreshingly frank attitude. The women he’d known up until then had used sex as a blunt negotiating tool or an exquisite bribe. The night before they were off to training camp – where the biggest treat he could anticipate was bread and dripping – Ellie had mattered to him. He hadn’t taken advantage of her. She’d wanted it as much as he had. He thought perhaps they were all terrified of death and they needed to bite at life.

He’d written to her saying that the lads in camp thought it was funny that he’d got a splinter in his arse from the rough wood of the shed. She’d written back and told him she’d fared much worse. She’d got a bun in the oven.

He’d been happy. Overjoyed, in fact. He’d thought that if he died, now it would be all right
because
he’d go on. In a way. He was awarded special permission to leave the camp and get a train back to London so he could make an honest woman of her. Hasty marriages were popping up like mushrooms in warm, wet dung; people understood. The registrars were accommodating.

Ellie had looked pretty. She’d worn a blue dress and carried marigolds, picked from a neighbour’s garden. She’d borrowed the dress from her friend, who had cried throughout the short ceremony because she’d bought it to wear when her fiancé came home on leave, but he was already dead. Ellie had said that the dress shouldn’t have to go to waste. Edgar remembered thinking that she’d make a good soldier, this woman who was about to become his wife.

Her mother came; a big woman who didn’t express much delight or disapproval over the rash union. The dad was long gone. None of his family could get down to London for the wedding. His father wrote and said they hadn’t been given proper notice and couldn’t make arrangements to leave the shop. One of his sisters wrote to say that the truth was his mam was livid that he’d been stupid enough to be trapped by a saucy southerner. He’d thought it was funny at the time. The expression,
saucy southerner.
It wasn’t so funny any more; he now believed his mam had had a point. The wedding was witnessed by Ellie’s mother, her weeping, grieving friend and a bloke he’d met in the pub that morning. Private Harry Wilson from the 9th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment. They’d bonded when they heard one another’s northern accents drowning in a sea of longer vowels. Harry was on leave; his train home wasn’t until five o’clock, so he’d been willing enough to stand as Edgar’s best man. At Wandsworth registry office Edgar found out that his new wife’s middle name was Margaret and that she was three years his senior. Afterwards they ate corned beef and potatoes, followed by jam roly-poly, in a small restaurant. Ellie had liked it because there was a single red carnation in a vase on every table; she said the place had class. He’d paid for everyone’s meal but there hadn’t been time to be alone. He’d sighed with the frustration of an eighteen year old; Ellie had laughed and said there wasn’t any need, not since she was already in the family way. He’d thought that
need
wasn’t the same as
want
, and that his own mother and sisters would never use an expression like ‘in the family way’.

He didn’t die, but the baby did. It didn’t even make it to a proper baby. He’d been on the Front for two weeks when he received the news. By then he was glad the baby was dead, because what man wanted to bring a baby into the sort of world he was part of? Ellie had been very pragmatic about the whole business too. She’d said it was nature’s way and pointed out that it wasn’t as though either of them had ever really wanted a baby. When he wrote to tell his mother the news, she replied expressing doubt at the veracity of the pregnancy in the first place. She’d heard of other girls who’d got a big, daft, honourable man that way. Edgar had been furious at his mother’s suggestion that he was gullible and susceptible to a pretty face. He was already feeling weary and distant. He wasn’t the lad who’d gone to war. She had no right to belittle his decisions. He also resented the fact that she’d articulated something he was trying not to think himself.

The next time he returned to England on leave, he and Ellie missed one another because she’d been invited on a holiday to Ireland and she said it was too good an opportunity to miss, since she never travelled anywhere. She was definitely the sort of woman who liked to seize an opportunity if it came along. It was about this time that he began to understand that his wife wasn’t much of a letter-writer. The second time he got leave they went to Brighton and stayed in a bed and breakfast. He’d been depressed. It was winter 1916. He’d already seen and done too much in France. The continual chaos, uproar and desolation had ground him down. Day by day the bombardments grew in intensity. One side or the other had to pummel their foe out of being. He’d begun to understand that the talk of honour was dishonest. Ellie told him he was a bore and that he ought to buck up. ‘You’re ruining my holiday,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t you know how hard I work, six days a week? On my feet ten hours in a row.’ He wished he’d used his leave to visit Middlesbrough.