Read Always I'Ll Remember Online
Authors: Rita Bradshaw
Always I'Ll Remember (40 page)
She had floored him. He hadn’t thought it possible but she had actually floored him. He glanced at the table in front of him which still bore the remains of the excellent dinner Phyllis had served an hour before. How like her to wait until he had dined before she said anything, thoughtful and considerate to the last. But then it had been that intense drive to mother and look after him which had caused him to feel he was suffocating every day of his married life. Maybe if she hadn’t had the miscarriage a month after they had married, maybe if she had become pregnant again in those early days when he had felt so sorry for her and had tried to be the husband she needed, maybe then they might have had a chance. But he doubted it.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was soft, pleading.
His eyes rose to meet hers. ‘Don’t be, we both know this isn’t your fault.’ A ridiculous thing to say in the circumstances, he thought, and anyone listening to their conversation would wonder what on earth he was on about, but it was the truth nonetheless. No one could have tried harder than Phyllis to be a good wife, but when after a year or so he had found himself unable to perform his husbandly duty, even she had taken exception. He had understood but had been at a loss to remedy the situation. He’d gone to their family doctor who had referred him to a specialist, talked to the priest, even bared his soul to his father but still he had been unable to make love to her.
Impotency, the specialist had declared. A powerlessness to achieve sexual erection or orgasm. Common enough in men who’d been through what he had; the mind and body could be adversely affected for years, often with delayed problems like this one. But James had known it wasn’t that. The longer he had lived with Phyllis, the more he had struggled to keep his head clear of the stifling blanket she had persisted in trying to wrap round him every minute of every day.
Her love took the form of smothering, and to such a degree he had found himself working longer and longer hours just to delay the moment when he would have to walk through his own front door. It couldn’t have gone on. He had been telling himself that for the last few months, wondering how he could broach the fact that they must separate when he knew it would break her heart. But apparently he couldn’t have been more wrong there. The last thought prompted him to say quietly, ‘I had no idea, Phyllis. Why didn’t you speak to me before about this?’
Colour flooded her face. He saw her hesitate, and then she said, ‘I was hoping things would work out between us, I suppose.’
‘But if you love this man—’
‘I don’t love him.’ She cut into what he was saying in a most un-Phyllis-like way, and now she said quickly, ‘At least not like I’ve always cared for you, but . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve had to accept you’ve never loved me like that. I thought when we got married I could make you love me but instead it’s driven you away.’
James didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t the type of woman to bare her soul and it was as painful for him as it was for her.
‘Simon wants me,’ she went on after gulping a couple of times, ‘even though he knows how I feel about you. It’s ... it’s my chance to have a family, children, to be a mother.’
‘I understand,’ he said very softly.
The look she now fastened on him carried sadness and a certain resentment in its depths. ‘I knew you would. Simon wanted to be here when I told you, he was worried you might react badly or get violent, but I told him he couldn’t be more wrong. You don’t care enough to get angry, do you?’
In truth he was feeling nothing but relief at this moment but he couldn’t very well say so. James cleared his throat. ‘I value your friendship very highly, I always have, and I do care about you.’
‘As a friend.’
There was nothing he could say.
She stared at him for a moment more before dropping her head, and now slow tears began to drip down her face. They sat in silence for a minute or two and then Phyllis wiped her face on her napkin and sniffed. ‘The parents will be horrified, of course. There has never been a divorce in our family.’
There hadn’t been one in his either, not to his knowledge. ‘The war’s changed all that sort of thing,’ he said, knowing this wasn’t quite true. Not in the staunch Roman Catholic families they came from.
‘It won’t matter that they know we’ve only attended Mass at Christmas and Easter since we’ve been married, they’ll still expect us to abide by the Church’s teachings. I’ll . . . I’ll be branded a scarlet woman.’
‘That won’t happen.’ He sat up straighter. ‘Do you hear me, Phyllis? I won’t let that happen. I shall make it clear this is my fault, I promise. Look, I’ll move out, all right? You can tell your parents and my mother I walked out; only my father will know the truth and he won’t say anything. You needn’t say anything at all about Simon until you want to, even until the divorce is through if you like. No one will point the finger at you.’
She was sobbing in earnest now, and when, thinking to comfort her, he got up and put his hand on her shoulder, she turned into him, holding him tight round his waist and burying her head in the folds of his jumper.
As always her overwhelming need of him created a feeling exactly the opposite to what it should. He forced himself to pat her shoulder while he murmured what he hoped were soothing words.
It seemed like an age before she drew away.
‘Silly,’ she whispered, ‘but I was hoping even now that when I told you, you’d realise you want me.’
‘Phyllis—’
‘No, don’t say anything.’ She stood up. ‘You would never have asked me to marry you if it wasn’t for the baby, and I have always known that in . . . in my head. I just couldn’t make my heart believe there was no hope, not even when you couldn’t bear to make love to me.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’ He stared at her. ‘Truly, it wasn’t like that. I looked on you more as a sister, I suppose, that was the trouble.’
‘Oh, James.’ The shadow of a smile touched her mouth. ‘That’s probably the worst thing you could say right now.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Would you mind terribly if you moved out tomorrow?’
His eyes widened with surprise for a second but he said, ‘No, of course not, whatever you want.’
‘Thank you.’ She gestured to the glass of brandy she had served with his coffee, which remained untouched. ‘Drink your brandy. I’m going to bed.’
He nodded. They had had separate rooms for the last nine months, ostensibly because he hadn’t been sleeping well and had insisted he didn’t want to keep her awake with his tossing and turning. ‘Goodnight,’ he said softly.
He didn’t go into the office the next morning. Once Phyllis had left for school, he began sorting papers and books and other miscellaneous items. By mid-morning two big cardboard boxes were installed in the boot of his car along with most of his clothes on the back seat, and a waste-paper basket full of torn-up papers had been disposed of in the dustbin.
Just before midday he shut the front door and walked past the sitting room en route to the garage, his heart thudding as he told himself it was the last time he would ever do that here. He felt little except a sense of urgency to get away, which had been with him since he’d woken that morning.
It wasn’t until he had driven down the drive and out into the spacious tree-lined avenue beyond that the breath left his body in a great whoosh of relief. It was over. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly the knuckles showed white.
Whatever furore came from their families he would deflect from Phyllis as far as he could, and he would pay her whatever she wanted in the way of maintenance, but he would never go back to the house again. This was a new start and it had to be a clean break, for Phyllis as well as for himself. She had her Simon and if the fellow was prepared to take her on knowing how she felt, he must love her deeply. It would work out for her. He shook his head at himself, ashamed at the relief again flooding through his mind.
He must book into a hotel, and then he had to go into the office and face Phyllis’s father. He would leave the practice, of course. Today, if her father wished it.
He was driving quite slowly and carefully, aware he had to concentrate in view of the circumstances, but as he passed a young woman pushing a pram, something in her bearing reminded him of Abby. A feeling like a tiny electrical shock ran through him, as it always did if someone or something brought her to mind.
The knowledge that Abby was living and loving somewhere else, with someone else, had nearly sent him mad in the early days. He’d had to school his mind to face the fact that she was alive in the world, breathing the same air and looking at the same sky, but not thinking of him. One of the psychiatrists at the hospital, the only one there who had seen any military action, had told him that trying to understand anything was pointless because mostly there were no answers.
‘Acceptance, old boy,’ Dr Owen had said. ‘That’s the secret. Acceptance. Once you acknowledge that the whole damn world is as mad as a hatter and you’re the only sane one, you’ll do all right. Simple really.’
He hadn’t known then if it was that simple, he still didn’t, but what he did know was that Mortimer Owen had brought him back from the brink of lunacy. For that he’d always be grateful to the small Welshman.
Warning himself to go even slower, he continued along the main road. Although his mind rarely jumped back into the dark dungeon it had taken refuge in after he had been invalided out of the army, high excitement or stress could bring on a funny spell if he wasn’t careful. He had learned, again with Dr Owen’s help, to combat this by concentrating very hard on the immediate task to hand. It didn’t matter what it was - a book he was reading, some work, a car journey - the trick was in refusing to let his mind swing off course for an instant. He had perfected this now, even in sleep he had control of his thought process and he could actually wake himself up if a nightmare took hold.
As James drew nearer to the town centre he noticed many of the shops and businesses were still covered in bunting and the flags of the victorious countries, even though the VJ celebrations had been over for some days. Brass bands, street parties and dancing in Mowbray Park had been the least of it, and even though large areas of the town had been flattened by enemy bombs, folk everywhere had declared it was the start of better things.
Better things. He repeated this to himself. He hadn’t believed that at the time, not with things so bad between him and Phyllis, but now . . . Now maybe it was possible. One thing was for sure, he had survived the war and, God willing, he had another forty or fifty years before he was put six foot under. He didn’t intend to waste them.
Chapter Twenty-three
D
uring the weeks following the euphoria of the victory celebrations the lives of the women at the smallholding were underlaid by a curious feeling of mental exhaustion. If they’d but known it, Abby and her friends were not alone in experiencing this.
uring the weeks following the euphoria of the victory celebrations the lives of the women at the smallholding were underlaid by a curious feeling of mental exhaustion. If they’d but known it, Abby and her friends were not alone in experiencing this.
The years of worry and separation had caused many couples to grow apart but, more than that, women in general had learned to live independently. Most of Britain’s women had been out to work in a ‘man’s world’; others had brought up their children single-handedly; some had managed to do both. Sometimes the sudden return of a war hero meant more than mere domestic inconvenience though. The newspapers regularly reported cases where a soldier came back to discover his wife had been unfaithful and ended up in court for attacking his rival, or worse. Gladys, in common with most of her generation, clicked her tongue, shook her head and declared she didn’t know what the world was coming to. Abby and others of her age knew the world had changed for ever. Everyone was having to adjust and it was strangely tiring.
Abby was now corresponding regularly with Ike again but it wasn’t the same as seeing him face to face, and she ached for the moment they would be reunited. She’d sensed from his letters that the last months of the war had been harrowing, and as the media reported more and more unspeakable horrors, she wondered how he would be when they met. Men all over the world had had their faces, bodies and personalities redrawn by the experience of war, and Ike was such a gentle, caring soul. She felt he would be troubled more than most by the cruelty and depravity they were hearing about.
The government didn’t seem to be in any hurry to rush through the necessary legislation and documentation to enable the thousands of British GI brides to join their husbands across the Atlantic - not that that really affected her, Abby kept reminding herself. She knew from the tone of Ike’s letters that he hadn’t changed his mind about asking her to marry him when they met again, but with the fledgling business and all her new responsibilities, he was going to have to wait for some time. Would he be happy with that? It was a question she asked herself often but to which she received no answer.
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