Between Friends (82 page)

They stayed in a small but splendidly appointed inn outside Hendon, sleeping in one another’s arms, waking to the rapture of
the
other’s nearness, to the knowledge that they need not wait, need not fret on what the other was doing, need only reach out to be loved!

‘I would think I had died and gone to heaven, my darling,’ he said lazily on the last morning, ‘if it were not for the fact that we must get up in a short while and be on our way. It’s a long journey from here to Camford and if we don’t make a start soon you will not be back in the bosom of your family by nightfall.’ There was a slight edge of bitterness in his voice.

Meg sat up in the sweet-scented sheets of the rumpled bed and shook back her hair. Martin watched her, putting a gentle hand to her cheek, his eyes bemused with his love for her. She was so soft and lovely, so comely, with all the attributes a man would ever need in a woman and yet, so strong! Her strength confounded him, her spirit warmed and delighted his and he would have given everything he owned to take her hand and slip away with her, vanishing forever from the responsibilities which sat heavily upon them both. She leaned now to look into his face, her own becoming sad. No matter how long they had, or what glorious moments they crammed into their times together it was never enough. She had lied to Tom and to Annie, Tom trusting and reassuring her that of course, she must go to see the latest designs of furniture and household gadgets which were on show, so necessary if they were to open up the hotel and that he would be fine with Will. Yes, a camp-bed could be brought into the room he usually shared with her and if he needed … anything … anything in the night when the demons often came to frighten him, Will would be there to exorcise them.

Annie had said nothing but in her eyes had been deep concern for this thing could only end in tragedy and surely Meg, who was an intelligent woman, must see it.

‘Martin, you knew it had to end. We are lucky to have had this.’

‘
Lucky
! Jesus, Meg … we should …’

‘What?’

‘Oh, never mind! You know how I feel! All these weeks of creeping about … hiding.’

‘What else
can
we do, Martin?’ She tried to kiss his strained mouth but he turned away and the magical joy was gone in the desolation of having to part with her again.

‘God knows … nothing, I suppose,’ he answered harshly.

‘Then … please darling … don’t spoil what we have by …’

‘But Meggie, can’t you see what this is doing to us? Where it is leading …’

‘Leading?’ Her voice had become wary for this was not the first time he had talked like this, as though he must worry and probe at the dark uncertainty of their future. He longed to see the child, his daughter, naturally and had been deeply offended when she would not allow him to come to the hotel to visit her, claiming that the dangerous situation it could create might only upset Tom’s already precarious hold on normality. Martin was arrogant and menacing when he was denied what he thought of as rightfully his. Though, as yet, his pity for Tom was still strong she knew it would not be long before the picture he had carried of his friend the last time he had seen him, became hazed with time and he would not find it hard to convince himself that Tom was not nearly as bad as they made out!

‘Yes, you know what I mean.’ His voice was beset with peril. ‘We cannot just drift on like this, getting nowhere, having no life beyond this … this …’

‘What did you have in mind?’ She asked coolly and the sadness swamped her for the joy had been so short-lived.

‘I don’t know. I have made no plans or even thought … but surely, if Tom were approached … told of the …’

‘Don’t try it, Martin! It would not work and I will not have Tom …’

‘Tom! Tom! Tom! I hear nothing but what is right for
Tom
! I am sorry for the poor devil but would it hurt to bring my daughter to see me at …’

‘
She is not your daughter!
Can you not understand that though you fathered her she is Tom’s child in
his
mind. He adores her and she loves him. She would …’

‘I am not asking you to …’

‘I don’t give a damn
what
you are asking me to do. I will not let Tom and Beth be hurt by what
we
do. I love you Martin, more than anyone in this world … oh yes, I admit it,’ her voice was torn with pain, ‘even more than Tom and Beth, but I care,
care
so desperately about them both I would walk from this room right this minute, turn my back on you and the few moments we steal from … from others and never see you again before I would let you hurt them!’

The air was alive with the intense fever of two single-minded
wills
determined upon their own course. Martin, in the coolness of his mind and the fairness with which he judged and treated others, had not intended to make the demand to be allowed access to his daughter since he knew in his heart, if he was truthful, that it could only cause disaster. He had been testing her, seeing how far he could go, seeing how far
she
would go to protect her husband. His jealousy drove him hard, making him careless of the fragile fabric which made up his relationship with Tom Fraser’s wife. It was the very heart of his life and should he back her into a corner on the subject of Tom and Beth he knew he could endanger it. But that day, as Meg argued and fought with him to safeguard her family, his stubborn impatience with what he was beginning to consider in his recklessness to be her high-handed rejection of him in favour of Tom Fraser put words in his mouth which he had really no intention of speaking.

He sprang from the bed and began to stride about the room, the enormity of his pride and the exacting strength which had brought him through four years of imprisonment, forced reason, compassion and even the love he felt for this woman to be thrown furiously aside. He was a man who had been used, for most of his adult life, to his own way and could be perilous when it was blocked. He was a man who had the ordering of a hundred others, only this woman being allowed to direct
him
!

‘This obsession with what Tom Fraser must, or must not have done to him is making me exceedingly impatient, Meg. Our very lives are encompassed by his … his failure to function as a man. Am I to blame for that? Am I to be made to pay for that?’ His jealous rage made him careless of what he said, his one desire being to hurt her as she hurt him with her need to protect the man he looked on as a competitor for her love. ‘Must we all suffer in order that
he
alone might know happiness. Even our daughter is being brought up in the deluded belief that he is her father and I will not have it. D’you hear?’

Caution was thrown to the wind as he mutinously began to believe that were it not for Tom Fraser’s shilly-shallying ways, Martin Hunter would have not only his love to come and be with him, but the child of that love! ‘If it were not for this … this so-called … illness of his which seems now to be safely contained and catered to by that man you have to guard him, you and I and Beth could …’

Meg flung herself before him, her face an inch from his.

‘
You bastard
! How dare you? Tom is completely destroyed by …’

‘Tom, Tom! Damnation woman, I’m up to my bloody gills with Tom.’ He put his hard hands on her upper arms, forcing her away from him, holding her, shaking her, trying to bend her iron will with his.

‘Take your hands off me, Martin, or I swear I will …’

‘What? You will what, my fine lady?’

For a moment petrified in time they glared into one another’s eyes, hating, loathing, detesting the very sight and sound and feel of one another. Martin’s hands gripped her viciously then, slowly, imperceptibly they loosened and fell away and blazing golden eyes wavered from metallic brown, clouded, hazed with bewilderment and fear.

Martin was the first to speak, to break the rigid pose of horror into which both had fallen.

‘Jesus … Meggie … I … I went mad.’

‘No … you …’

‘I was … insane with jealousy … I love you so I cannot bear to be put second.’

‘Aah, don’t … my love, my love …’

And all the anger drained away as hands which had longed to strike and hurt, lifted to touch and caress and soothe, and later, as they spent their last hour in the big bed before they began their journey back to their separate, hopeless lives, they clung together in the frantic desperation of those who know they must part and simply cannot bear it!

THE FIRST MOTOR
car which did not belong to any of those who lived or worked at ‘Hilltops’, drew up to the hotel’s freshly painted front door in the first week in August. It was a brand new ‘Silver Ghost’ Rolls-Royce with the distinctive ‘Silver Lady’ mascot, the ‘Spirit of Ecstacy’, as its designer had called it, on the front of the bonnet. It was chauffeur driven and when the splendidly uniformed young man who sprang nimbly down from its driving seat, opened the passenger door, from it stepped Nellie and Albert Marrington, looking exactly as they had done over five years ago. A little plumper perhaps, and decidedly more prosperous, but the same, even to the broad, ‘take-me-as-I-am’ north country accent with which Nellie greeted Meg.

‘Miss Hughes … nay, it’s Mrs Fraser now, isn’t it, lass an’ lookin’ a treat an’ all. It’s right nice ter see yer after all these years an’ the hotel looks grand … grand! Well, I said to my Albert if we’re wantin’ a quiet holiday on us own wi’out telephones ringin’ and folk forever fetchin’ him to sort out their problems which they should be able to do theirselves by now seein’ as how he reckons he’s retired, well there’s nowt else to do but but get right away from it all an’ where else can we find a bit of peace and quiet but at yon Miss Hughes’ … eeh, sorry lass, Mrs Fraser’ s place. He’s not one for cruises an’ the like, my Albert. Don’t care for foreigners, yer see, nor the food. We had us some good times up here afore the war and as I said to him, Albert, I said, if Miss Hughes’s kept up the standard she had before t’war, she’ll do fer us. We could a’ done wi’ you a few times in the last few years, I can tell yer!
Work
! He never stopped, my Albert! Well, he wouldn’t, would he, bein’ in textiles, like. All them uniforms, millions on ’em … but there, we musn’t dwell on it, must we? It’s all done with now and best get on wi’ our lives … now … what lass? A cup o’ tea, champion, champion, an’ then we’ll have us a look at yon suite yer promised us.’

It had taken the best part of two months to bring the ‘Hilltop
Hotel’
back to its former splendour and as Edie said, it reminded them of the days, nearly ten years ago now – my God, was it that long? – when she and Annie, Meg and poor Mr Tom, and old Zack – did they remember old Zack, old beggar must be on his grave now, surely … had turned ‘The Hawthorne Tree’ from a ramshackle, run down old coaching inn, into the fine establishment Meg had made of it. Not that ‘Hilltops’ was ramshackle, far from it but five years of lying silently under dust covers with no more than a monthly inspection and a yearly ‘going-over’ had not done much for the lovely suites of rooms. They needed a good ‘bottoming’ in her opinion and when the army of decorators and painters had gone through them all and traipsed their careless feet all over Meg’s lovely parquet flooring, and the carpets had been returned from the cleaners, that’s what she meant to give them. The curtains had been washed and ironed, or specially cleaned in the case of velvet and brocades, and the upholsterers had mended fabric where the moth had got in, despite her efforts with the moth-balls, but she rolled up her sleeves ready for her mammoth and challenging task. She’d need some help, she told Meg for she wasn’t as young as once she had been but two or three good girls should be enough for what she had in mind.

But two or three good – or otherwise – girls, or even
one
were not as easy to come by as once they had been. During the war the lot of women had improved noticeably. The men had gone to fight and the opportunities for their womenfolk to demonstrate what they could do were now readily available. They had become more critical of the conditions under which they worked, and of the work itself and were not really prepared to return to many of the forms of employment which had been theirs before 1914. One of these was the domestic drudge! Many of them, if they were over thirty, and subject to some educational and property qualifications, now had the vote and they were inclined to a growing independence and a reluctance to return to the injustices done to their pre-war selves.

‘What are we going to do, Meg?’ Edie wondered in despair when, in answer to the advertisement Meg had put in newspapers in Buxton and Ashbourne, and even as far away as Liverpool and Manchester, for several smart young ladies to work in the hotel trade, not one had put in an appearance!

‘We’ll just keep looking, Edie, and offer higher wages.’ Meg, deep in the enchantment Martin Hunter weaved around her
whenever
she could get to the little house near Camford, the house they called their ‘home’, floated blithely through the days, nothing, it seemed, coming between her and the strange dream world in which she had existed since the day she had savagely threatened Martin that she would not see him again. It had badly frightened them both, that explosion of passionate rage in which they had fought one another, and in the weeks following it they had both been careful not to create a situation which might disturb the harmony of their love. It was as though it had been a violent and terrifying thunderstorm, brooding over them before its onslaught, pressing down on their unprotected heads, but now, with its might spent, its power diminished, the days of peaceful, blessed sunshine which followed gave her the strength to get through and overcome any difficulty – such as a lack of staff – with a calm which amazed even herself. She was not fool enough to believe it would go on forever, this acceptance of their fragile relationship but for the moment they were living it one day at a time, cherishing what they had.