Spare Brides (50 page)

Mrs Trent’s Tea Shop was a fancy place. Ellie had known her mind, been certain about every detail and gone for it. Her ambitious plan had been flawless. Ruthless.

‘What do you think, duck?’ She appeared by his table. She wasn’t wearing the black and white uniform that the two waitresses were wearing. She was dressed in peach; she looked every inch the proud proprietor.

‘You seem busy.’

‘Rushed off our feet.’ Ellie never wore an expression or demeanour that suggested she was hurrying, but she often talked about her fatigue. Before the war she had been in service; she’d taken the job because her mother had insisted it was a step up. It hadn’t suited her. She had aspirations and lacked the ability to subjugate her will, or even pretend to be doing so. He didn’t blame her. He rather admired her for not settling. He remembered when she first told him that she wanted to own a tea shop. He’d thought it was a fine goal for a woman like Ellie to have. After the war, when she still talked about it, he’d felt himself shrink from the moderate, parochial ambition and the vulgar, grasping woman. It wasn’t her, it was him. He’d come home a different man.

He pulled the papers out of his briefcase.

‘Oh,’ she said, as she leaned forward and fingered the leather, greedily assessing the quality. Edgar sighed. It wasn’t his case. The lawyer had lent it to him so that the papers could remain pristine during transit. He couldn’t afford such a thing. She’d cleaned him out. He didn’t resent it. He didn’t want a penny of the money. It made him sick thinking of it.

Yet he could not forget the hot, sticky afternoon.

Ava Pondson-Callow had arrived at his office. She’d calmly explained that Lydia had discovered he was married and, naturally, did not want anything more to do with him.

‘Just like that?’ he’d stuttered.

‘What did you expect?’ she’d asked. She hadn’t looked at all hot or bothered. He was sweating, shaking.

‘I have an envelope. Inside is a substantial amount of cash.’

Edgar didn’t understand at first. Then he did. ‘I don’t want her money.’

‘The correct thing to do is accept it and leave town immediately. It’s a generous amount. It ought to be enough to ensure there’s no scandal.’

‘I’d like to speak to her.’ He’d remained calm. It was paramount to be the officer, not the shipbuilder. He’d always thought Lid accepted both men; Ava Pondson-Callow would only respond to the officer.

‘That’s out of the question.’

‘Has she sent me a letter?’ For reply, Miss Pondson-Callow had raised her eyebrow in a pastiche of pity.

‘She’s requested you never contact her again. No letters, no telephone calls, no telegrams. If there is the unfortunate situation where you see one another in the street, she wishes for you to walk by. You are dead to her, Sergeant Major Trent. You have broken her heart and humiliated her completely. She cannot and will not forgive you. The only decent thing to do now is disappear.’ Ava had paused, and then her beautiful lips had spat out the words with total contempt. ‘With your wife.’

Lid had once said that there was nothing he could do that would make her think less of him. As the words had tipped into their history he’d felt an incredible sense of doom. He knew she was wrong. He’d wrecked everything before they’d even met; it was only a matter of time before she discovered as much.

A quick fumble with a blowsy chambermaid had ruined his life.

He had not been able to tell Lid about the boyhood marriage. There had never been the right moment, at least not after the initial lie in that village pub. He had not admitted to his marriage when she first asked him because he’d had no idea what she would come to mean to him. Besides, he never thought of himself as married. Those three days in Brighton were the longest he and Ellie ever spent together. He’d come home from France too numb to think of anything, but when he did start to reason, his first thought had been that he must divorce Ellie Edwards. She would not hear of it. She was careful not to give him grounds and she refused to acknowledge it when he repeatedly gave her them. Without her cooperation the process was set to take seven or so years. He’d come home a hero, and although it was quite clear that his intensity daunted and bored Ellie, she thought she would do better as a married woman than a single one in a world where men were better paid and hard to come by. He’d given her half his salary every month; she found that very convenient. He should perhaps have made her situation less so, but it seemed a step beyond dishonourable. He paid the money and cut the woman. He did not anticipate ever becoming involved with another and so decided to let the matter of a divorce slide. What did it matter to him if in the eyes of God and the law of the land he was married? His belief in both had been smashed in the carnage.

Three or four times in the summer he’d tried to start to explain his situation to Lid. He knew he had to. After all, he’d told her all about the war and she’d understood that perfectly, better than he did himself. She’d been a balm and a solace. Out there he’d become a barbarian, a feral and ferocious man; rigid, reduced, realistic. He’d forgotten what a woman felt like, what soap smelt like. He was marooned far from the uninitiated. Then there was her. Silly, crazy party-fiend Lid, and she, somehow, made a connection. Built a bridge across the isolation.

But he had not been able to bring himself to make this final confession. She thought he was pure and heroic. Strong and invincible. He couldn’t stand being dashed in her eyes. He feared she’d have condemned him. Thought less of him. And he couldn’t have borne that, because Lid was everything. She was the reason he’d grown from boy to man. The reason he’d fought, murdered, survived and saved in France. The reason he slept again in England.

He was deeply and utterly ashamed of the thoughtless, undignified marriage. Ashamed that he’d once been a man who had found Ellie Edwards an attractive enough prospect; that seemed ludicrous now. How could he explain it? The truth was, the war had caused a particular type of panic. Everyone had become greedy and grasping. People latched on to second best because the best might not come along, or it might have been and gone, and time was short. Time was definitely short. Maybe if he’d been married to Lady Anna Renwick or similar, he might have confessed. Lid was married herself, after all. But he hadn’t trusted her enough to see past his youthful mistake. He thought she’d be disgusted by the root of him.

And he’d been right.

When she’d found out the truth, she’d slashed him down.

Edgar shook his head. There was no point in dwelling. He wasn’t that man. He needed just two things now. He needed Ellie to sign the divorce papers so he could return them to his lawyer and then he needed to get on the train that would take him to Plymouth; from there he’d set sail for Australia. A new life.

‘Would you like a cuppa? We might as well make it civil like.’

‘No, thank you. I have a train to catch.’

‘As you say.’

Ellie slowly, carefully read the papers. She wasn’t a fool and had no intention of signing anything if she hadn’t read and digested it completely. Edgar fought down a mounting sense of frustration. Ellie had seen a number of drafts; there were no surprises in the agreement. He had paid her a lump sum of £800 so she would sign. She would have no further claim on his income or future prospects; £800 was the entire amount Ava Pondson-Callow had handed over in the envelope.

He had not known what to do with Lid’s money. Giving it back was not an option, since she had banned him from ever contacting her again. If he involved a lawyer, her husband was sure to find out, and that would ruin her. He’d thought he might give it away to charity. He could have used it to buy himself a relatively prestigious foreign commission and in that way fulfil her request for him to leave town, but when it came down to it, he found he could not spend her money on himself. It made him feel dirty.

For weeks he’d forced himself into the accepted pleasure palaces, the nightclubs he’d haunted with Lid and some of the new ones too. He felt he had to be there because he could be and so many men couldn’t, but even when he was there he was absent, apart. He missed her. He found it difficult to stay in conversations, to remember the name of the fella he was playing cards with, the girl who was spreading her legs for him. In the end he’d decided to use the cash to sever his ties with Ellie. Then he used his private savings to buy a passage to Australia. He didn’t have a commission, but he was still a soldier of the British Empire and he could continue to work his way up as he’d done in the war. He had prospects. He would not accept the limits others tried to impose on him.

‘Do you have a pen?’ Ellie asked finally. He did; it was a fountain pen that Lid had bought him. He couldn’t stand the idea of Ellie touching it.

‘No, sorry.’

She borrowed one from the waitress. He blotted the papers. The relief. Freedom. At last. He quickly stood up. Ellie slowly surveyed his impressive physique. ‘I suppose one last tumble for old times’ sake is out of the question.’ She grinned lasciviously.

‘Goodbye, Ellie. Good luck.’

Offended, she snapped, ‘I don’t need your luck. I have plenty of my own. Ta very much.’

It was too true to refute. Sergeant Major Trent tipped his hat and left the tea house that bore his name. He didn’t look over his shoulder.

T
HE TRAIN CLANGED
and juddered to a halt. Edgar swiftly disembarked. He’d been standing holding his suitcase for twenty minutes; it had been a long journey and he wasn’t one for sitting still. There wasn’t any real need to hurry – he had four hours before he had to board
Themistocles
– but he was restless. The chilly air slapped his cheeks and slithered down the back of his neck. He turned up his coat collar and put on his gloves. The gloves that had once warmed her tiny white hands.

It was possible to catch a horse tramcar from the station to the dock, or even a motor bus, but Edgar chose to walk along the narrow and overcrowded streets, despite the icy temperature. He always preferred to be in charge of his own motion. All around there was evidence of slum clearance. The government were finally cleaning things up, as they’d promised. It had been life and death, survival or extinction, personal and national for too long. Now, all society wanted was indoor lavatories and gas cookers. People were unsettled; they wanted what was due. It didn’t seem much to ask. So whilst it was a time of disruption and commotion, the trouble was sweetened with the sense that it would give birth to progress. The air was blue and sharp but tinged with vitality.

He dodged lumbering trucks laden with cargo, and dashing passengers, clasping tickets, who oozed a sense of excitement and anticipation. He was disappointed to discover that he couldn’t share their exhilaration. He’d longed to travel for years, but now that the moment had arrived, he did not feel eager. He felt resigned. He had to go, and go he would, but it was harder than he’d imagined leaving this green and proud land. Leaving her completely.

When he reached the dock and spotted the hulking monster of a ship, he did at least feel a sense of steady relief.
Themistocles
was a reliable old girl. She’d made many trips to and from Australia before the war. During, she worked as a troopship and a hospital ship, resuming service to Cape Town, Sydney and Brisbane on 2nd July this year. He felt he could relate to her. Couldn’t every soldier whose pleasure had been interrupted by enforced duty? She’d be his friend. He breathed in the salty, damp sea air and listened to the gulls screech as though they were anguished. He’d always felt they were greedy, needy birds. Still, they reminded him of Middlesbrough and simpler times when he was a boy, working at the shipyard. He caught a whiff of hot battered fish and chips, laced with vinegar; his mouth watered and he wondered whether there was time for a bite. One last taste of England.

It was not unusual for him to imagine he’d seen her in a crowd. He’d spot her and then, on the double-take, he’d be disappointed. He’d almost trained himself not to raise his hopes. She was up in front of him by about ten feet, leaning over the railings that separated the passengers getting on the ship from the people who had come to wave them off. If he joined the queue to board, he’d file past her. Up close, of course, he’d see it wasn’t her, but just a ghost of her, a less crucial woman, and once again he’d have to manage that jagged spike of disappointment. He glanced away and then back again. Expecting and waiting to note that this woman’s hair was not quite as glossy, that she was a little too tall or that her profile was not as chiselled. He looked once more; she stayed resolute. She remained his Lid. Perhaps more anxious than he’d ever seen her before, and maybe a little bulkier in her enormous fur coat, but it was Lid.

He pushed through the crowds that suddenly seemed to be surging in a way that forced him further from her. ‘Lid, Lid.’ He knew what she’d asked him to do – if they were ever to find themselves on the same street he must ignore her – but this was no coincidence. Couldn’t be. She was looking for him. ‘Lid!’ he yelled above the noise of the crowds and the relentless crashing of cargo being loaded.

She bristled. Her head turned a fraction. Like a doe in a forest, hearing someone’s tread snap a twig. He staggered through the throng, unchivalrously shoving people out of his way, and a moment later he was by her side, his hand almost touching hers. He could smell her. The familiar, wonderful scent of her. Sensuous possibility. A muffled, musky perfume that grasped his heart and squeezed. She did not smell of violets or roses or any other manufactured toilet water; she smelt of something that suggested shadows and depth. Passion. Its darkness was at odds with her beautiful delicate features. He became intensely aware of her body beneath her bulky coat. The cold had settled on his skin in a way that made it impossible to reach out to touch her. He was frozen. He longed to be back in the attic, under the worn sheets and the crocheted patchwork blanket his sister had made and Lid found so quaint. He longed to turn back time. He did not know where to begin.