Between Friends (59 page)

‘You will be my wife!’ His voice challenged her to argue with him and an obdurate expression came to harden his face and both of them were aware that they had come to a point – so soon, so soon her agonised heart asked – which was to be vital in their lives. He had, justly, she supposed, assumed that she was to fit immediately into her new role as his wife, the keeper of his house, the mother of his children. There was to be a war, he said, and she had no doubt he would go to it, fight in it and because of it he would want her tucked lovingly away, safe and secure and waiting, waiting until he came home to her. He was a man of many interests, a demanding man and lover. He would be a conventional husband and would expect her to be a conventional wife. Wouldn’t he? But perhaps …?

‘Martin … I cannot just give up “Hilltops” and “The Hawthorne Tree”. I cannot abandon them now. Tom and I have worked so hard, with both of them, built them up from nothing. We have put four years of our lives into them. We have made them our lives. I am good at what I do and Tom is learning. He loves the work he does in the gardens, in the bar. Dammit, Martin, you are to take me from him, you cannot mean to take his work as well. He cannot manage it on his own. I can just as easily work here – we could take a house near by, you and I …’ Her face became eager and she began to move across the room towards him but he turned away, staring fixedly into the fireplace.

‘Please … can you not see … what would I do?’

‘You would be my wife! That is what you would do.’

‘I can be your wife
and
run the hotel, Martin.’

‘I would not wish you to. And it would be too far …’

‘Far from where?’

‘From Camford.’

‘But we could buy a house somewhere between. Then you could travel to the airfield and I could come up here …’

‘You would be
my wife
, Megan, not an hotelier or a businesswoman but my wife and as such will …’

She felt the dread and the anger begin to work in her but still she made a determined effort to control them. This was her life,
her life
, and Tom’s, which was being so carelessly dealt with and she could not allow it to be extinguished lightly. Martin was a strong, self-made man, sure of himself, with all the wilful courage which had turned him, in nine years from a raw and callow lad into an increasingly successful motor car manufacturer and soon, when his Wren was complete, he would enter the aircraft industry and no doubt be just as victorious there. At this moment, her body sated with his, with the love he had poured into her during the past hour she would have done anything he asked for her love for him was just as strong. But if she allowed him this she would lose her own identity in his, she would be an adjunct of him, an important, beloved, but quite useless decoration which he would wear proudly, cherish lovingly, protect strongly but never, unless she fought him over it, allow a place of its own. And Tom! Dear Christ! They could not take everything from him. He might not want to stay and work beside her. He might chose to sell his share of the investments he had chanced with her, his half of the inn and this splendid hotel they were beginning to make so successful and she was certain Martin would be glad to find the money to buy him out. He might not care to have her as his partner, instead of the wife he had hoped for and his instinct might, she thought, be to take himself off and start a fresh life, but he must be given the choice!

Martin watched her indecision and his face lost its arrogant expression and his eyes grew soft for he could see her pain. He took a step towards her, then another until they stood but an arm’s length apart.

‘Meg, please come with me. Come away and marry me. These … these moments we have spent together … how can I describe what they have meant to me?’ His voice was husky, an urgent, desperate whisper. ‘Don’t deny it has not been the same for you. Your … your delight matched mine. We are perfect partners and I cannot live without you beside me. I have waited so long. You
are
my … my heart, Meggie, my best beloved … my only love … please … please …’

His voice broke and he leaned to kiss her, his mouth like velvet against hers. ‘Leave this, my darling, leave it for Tom. He will manage …’

She turned her face away and huge tears began to spill from her eyes, slipping down her face to fall in great patches on the front of her dress.

‘Martin …’ Her cry was despairing, ‘I cannot just go and leave Tom to do it all alone. He cannot … a has no business head and Edie can’t cook …’

His face closed up like an iron glove, hard and clenched and he turned violently away from her.

‘It seems Tom can do nothing without you beside him and it also seems very clear that Tom’s needs come before mine. You will have to choose, lady, and choose quickly for I do not mean to wait any longer.’

‘Martin …!’

‘I shall be at the airfield until …’

‘I must have some time … please Martin …’

‘Time! Take all the time in the world, Megan, but do not expect me to be waiting for you.’ His face was cruel, hard, dreadfully so and his words were meant to hurt. ‘I was never good at waiting, Megan, nor at playing second best!’

He turned then and strode from the room and she heard the sound of the ‘Huntress’ as it thundered down the drive and the echo of it beat in her heart and hurt her with a pain she could scarcely contain.

Five days later, Germany, in order to strike at France, an enemy now, from behind, demanded from Belgium the right to march through her territory into France. The Belgian government declined. Despite this Germany marched into Belgium declaring that it was necessary for them to do so and necessity knows no law.

Great Britain’s plighted word would certainly lead her to join France and Russia when Belgium was invaded for how could any self-respecting nation remain at peace when another held so low a regard for international obligations? The Belgians tried to resist the German Army but within a month the Germans were at the French border and on the 14th August 1914 Great Britain was at
war
with Germany sending an expeditionary force of one hundred thousand which took its stand at Mons.

In all that time Martin Hunter had no word from Megan Hughes and when he left Camford for the Royal Flying Corps training camp at Hendon, Middlesex, he made no attempt to let her know.

IT WAS THE
last day in August. Tom Fraser stepped lightly across the polished parquet flooring at the head of the stairs, hesitating a moment before the closed bedroom door. He looked down at his boots, checking to see that he had completely removed all traces of the heavy black soil in which he had been working, for he knew Meg would not greatly care to have it deposited on the carpet which covered the floor. He held a large bunch of roses mixed with lavender and white babies’ breath in his hand.

Reassured that his boots were quite clean, he knocked gently on the white painted door panel. He did not want to wake her if she was taking a nap, which she seemed to do quite often these days, complaining when he asked, that she was not sleeping well at the moment.

‘It’ll be the heat, love, and worry over the war.’

‘Probably,’ she had answered.

It was mid-afternoon and the hotel was quite silent, just as though all the guests were also napping, pulled down by the excessively warm day. It was close, humid, with big thunder clouds gathered on the horizon, threatening at any moment to tumble across the sky and attack the peaks, to roll across the dales and lash the farms and cottages, and the hotel with treacherous ferocity. Tom would not be sorry if they did for a storm would release some of the springing tension which the heat of the day contained. It would do Meg good as well, if the weather turned cooler for she’d not been looking at all herself lately. It had been like this for weeks now, with heavy skies tinted a strange and sulphorous yellow, pressing down on aching heads, the air almost too hot to breathe and Meg had been pale, listless, quiet as a mouse which was not like her at all. She ate next to nothing, picking at what was put before her, even when she herself had cooked it and scarcely appeared to notice the bickering which went on in the kitchen, the sudden arguments which exploded
over
the smallest thing, the maids oppressed, as they all were, by the days of endless heat.

There was no answer to his soft knock. She must be sleeping, or perhaps she had gone downstairs again whilst he had been in the garden cutting the flowers for her. He had not seen her as he passed through the kitchen where Edie and the girls had been sitting, stupefied by the heat but she could have gone into the wide reception area, or even into the garden at the front of the hotel.

He was about to turn away, the flowers still held tenderly in his large, working man’s hand when he changed his mind. He’d not carry them downstairs again to wilt in the heat, he’d leave them on her bedside table, he decided. She’d not be long, wherever she was and when she came back they would be a nice surprise for her. She loved flowers, did Meg and these would take her out of herself. Cheer her up. He’d been puzzled, he admitted to himself, by her strangeness these last few weeks and was not convinced it was due entirely to the weather. She was vague sometimes, only half listening to what was said to her, giving the impression that she was waiting for something, sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap as patient as could be. At other times she was restless, pacing about the hotel, peering from windows, striding the boundaries of the hotel grounds and impatient with him when he asked her what was to do. The war was on everyone’s mind, of course, and Meg was no exception though she hadn’t said much. Well, it was bound to worry her, wasn’t it? She was a woman and women are left behind to bear the anxious burden of waiting when their menfolk went off to fight, and then there was the added unease of what was to become of the hotel. They had only just got it on it’s feet, so to speak and how was the war to affect it, he asked himself?

Already the manager at ‘The Hawthorne Tree’ had reported a drop in the takings in the tap room and snug as local men flocked to the recruiting centres to take the King’s shilling, though as yet it had not affected the ‘other side’ where the hikers and cyclists still came and the rooms were filled with enthusiastic young men and liberated young women, still determined to enjoy themselves whilst they could.

‘Hilltops’ was filled to capacity for it seemed the prosperous and the privileged were also influenced by the onset of hostilities, and every day the telephone rang constantly with enquiries for their
luxurious
suites as though the nation had gone quite mad in its efforts to take its pleasure whilst it was still available. There appeared to be a feeling amongst many that before long all the diversions of peacetime might be swept away, though Tom could not imagine why, and people seemed desperate to wring every drop of enjoyment from life that there was. They’d settle down soon, Tom thought placidly, when the first shock of going to war had worn off, just like Meg would and if he could persuade her to set their wedding day before … well … it had been a year and that was certainly long enough for any man to wait. She was ready for marriage. She had a certain look about her which Tom, inexperienced as he was in the ways of the flesh, could recognise instantly as a male does, the look of a female who needed to be loved.
Physically
loved. He could not explain, even to himself, what it was or how he knew it. It was an aura, a
feeling
of sensuality, though Tom shyly admitted to himself it was not a word he was comfortable with. It had come about her only recently and it made him more restless himself. He felt nervous – a silly word – in her presence, as jumpy as she was and he felt a strong and compulsive need to sweep her into his arms and kiss her until she was breathless. He had never done that with her for despite her love for him and her agreement to marry him, she had held herself from him in a way which would not quite allow it. He supposed it was only right that she should. She was a ‘good’ girl and should be respected as such but really, he was going to insist she name the day and that it should be soon, especially now.

Quietly he opened the door and stepped inside the bedroom and was immediately wrapped about in a shaft of sunlight, sultry and oppressive which streamed across the carpet from the open window. The curtains were half drawn and except for the bright bar of sunlight, the room was dim and airless.

It was a lovely room and he looked forward to the day he would share it with her. It had a superb view across the lake to the great sweep of the Derbyshire fells and on a fine morning was the first window through which the sun shone. It was simply furnished. A plain carpet in a shade of pale caramel, with walls of the same colour. White woodwork and a velvet chair or two in saxe green. The bed was covered in a cream lace bedspread and the curtains, in silk were a subdued mixture of cream, white and the palest green. There was a small marble fireplace, empty now of a fire
but
in the hearth stood an enormous pottery jug containing a feathery mass of dried grasses.

He did not see her at first for the room was veiled in the hazy shadows cast by the sun and the half closed curtains. A million floating particles of dust lifted in the movement of air caused by the opening of the door, drifting in the shaft of sunlight and for a moment his eyes were sightless. He narrowed them and his mouth curved in a smile for he could smell her perfume. On the bed was some wisp of something in a pale and lovely blue, with satin ribbons, eternally feminine and he put out his hand to touch it but before he could reach it something caught his attention, some sound, slight and soft and when he turned his head she was there, in the shadows. She was sitting before the dressing table, completely motionless, staring at her own dim reflection in the mirror. In her hand was a brush and her hair hung almost to her waist, vibrant and glowing like a flame. She had on a white cotton wrapper, with lace at the neckline and sleeve, tied with a silk ribbon but its whiteness was no paler than her face, and her eyes, though they seemed to look into the mirror, saw nothing. They were expressionless, blank, pale and lifeless, but worse than anything were the huge tears which slipped, almost of their volition, as though Megan Hughes had no control over them, or even knew of their existence, down her colourless cheeks, falling to stain the cotton of her gown. They simply streamed in an endless flow of sorrow from her eyes.