The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (4 page)

Joe supposed that depended on how you looked at it; now it seemed like the end of the earth.

From somewhere beyond the library doors Joe could hear laughter, as though the people who were staying for dinner were moving through the hall into another room, probably the dining room. Doors opened and closed, the conversation loud one moment and subdued the next. Toddy looked in the direction of the noise as though he longed to be there.

Things had been bad all his life really, Joe admitted to himself now. His father, unlike most men, had never got over his wife’s death. His father had had plenty of women since, Joe thought cynically, but they were not the kind of women one married.

At that moment the library doors opened and a lovely young woman stepped inside. She was pretty, dark-haired and brown-eyed, with generous lips and a soft, sweet face. She had a slender figure and was wearing a cream dress that accentuated her shape. She was smiling with pleasure and then she saw him and the smile went.

Joe would have gone forward, but she stepped back when she recognized him. He greeted her, but his lips were as stiff as wood. She didn’t reply and turned her gaze to her husband.

‘Are you coming back to the party, darling? Everyone is
going in to dinner.’ She went out without another word. Joe kept his eyes on the door, thinking she would come back in and somehow make things better, but nothing happened.

‘Where’s Angela?’ The one thing which would save his day from total ruin. He looked eagerly at the door as though she might suddenly appear. Even if she couldn’t tell him that everything was all right, she would help, she would comfort him, be there for him, and after they were married he would feel better than he had ever felt in his life. He would have someone all to himself, somebody to come home to, and he would somehow manage to live with his father’s death, awful though it was; he would learn to come to terms with it just as many thousands upon thousands of people had had to do in this dreadful war. If she was there, by him, if they could be together, then he could manage anything.

‘She’s not here,’ Toddy said.

Joe didn’t understand that. She must be here; this was her home. Her parents lived here, it was the family London base, and during bad weather she would not have been anywhere else, especially at this time of the year. And besides, he thought, she would have been waiting for him to come home, she would want to know that he was here. He couldn’t wait another moment to see her.

Toddy sighed and then looked straight at Joe and said, ‘My father has sent her away. You must understand, Joe, that you and Angela can’t be married.’

Joe stared at him. What on earth was he talking about?

‘She couldn’t possibly marry you now. My father would never allow it.’

‘But – we’re engaged,’ Joe said, idiotically.

He was still searching the door as though it would open at any second and she would come into the room and fling herself into his arms, as she had a habit of doing, not caring who was there. Her mother had reproved her often for her open manners, for her adulation of Joe. From the second they had met at a party she had told him that she adored him. He had loved how she had cared nothing for the stuffy manners which other people thought were right. Her eyes, her whole beautiful face with its perfect features, had shone for him. She was his life.

Toddy wandered around the room, finally stopping in front of the fire and giving one of the logs a huge kick.

‘I’m sorry, but you really can’t expect it, you know. Not after what has happened.’

Joe frowned. ‘It’s not the first time a man has blown his brains out!’ He was almost shouting.

‘You have no money and no consequence. A title like yours is nothing without those.’

‘Angela never cared for such things.’

Toddy finally turned around. ‘But she would in time and you could hardly think her family would allow her to marry into poverty – because that’s what you are now. I daresay you have nothing to your name other than your army pay, and the way that you behave probably not much left of that.’

Joe had been well known for treating his men to whatever he could come across to make their lives easier amidst the hell of war. Some of the meaner officers thought him stupid. Some followed his example.

‘Where is she?’

‘My father arranged for her to go abroad. She understands
that she cannot marry you, so there is no point in trying to do anything about it. I don’t know where she is. And since you should behave honourably, it would be best left alone. You cannot think to ask her to marry you in the circumstances in which you find yourself.’

‘I could work.’

Toddy didn’t quite laugh. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘And what on earth are you equipped for other than a reputation for shooting people accurately and getting common soldiers to go over the top? Now I really must go – I have dinner guests to attend to. Trevors will see you out.’

‘No!’

Toddy hadn’t moved, but his look was full of pity. ‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ he said, ‘but there’s nothing anybody can do. You wouldn’t want her to be miserable, would you? She’s used to the best of everything: you know that. If you’re honest with yourself you know you couldn’t make her happy.’

Joe couldn’t bear it. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘She must be here. You’re lying to me.’ He hauled open the door and strode through into the dining room where he and Angela had dined so often with her parents. A dozen pairs of eyes turned as people took in the uniform, the face, who it was, and a frost came over the room so hard that Joe could have sworn he was still in France when things had been at their worst, men dying and horses sinking in mud and confusion and blood. He felt the same numbness he’d had before he led his men out to face the impossible.

He tried to breathe. He saw Sarah, Toddy’s wife, and their guests, all of them supposed to be his friends. Toddy’s parents weren’t there and neither were Sarah’s. He thought
back to the last time he had been home when they had had a dinner like this. Nobody held his gaze, nobody spoke; they turned away or looked down.

He spun around and Toddy, just behind him, stepped back.

‘Where is she?’

‘I’ve already told you. There’s nothing you can do.’

‘You must know where she is.’

‘I don’t know anything about it. I’ve told you what happened.’ Toddy gazed around at the dining room behind Joe, obviously embarrassed for his guests and himself and maybe even for Joe. All Joe could think was he wanted to get hold of him and slam him up against the wall. So he did.

‘You bastard!’ he said.

The men in the dining room got to their feet and two of them pulled Joe off. He turned around and hit them, he downed them both; they had come back from war and had gone soft, falling before him so easily. Some woman began to cry, though he didn’t even care who it was, and then another shrieked. The others, four of them now, held him and dragged him to the door. They threw him out, in spite of his struggling, and the front door was slammed. Joe lay in the gutter, in the bitter night air, which had never been quite as bad as it was now.

He tried to remember what had happened, but he couldn’t put his thoughts into any kind of order so he hailed a cab and sat down, wondering how things could have got so much worse after his five years of soldiering, and surviving. Wondering how he could come back to his father dead and the love of his life apparently gone and with nobody knowing where.

Angela was at the front of his mind, but he was in shock, he couldn’t think clearly, and so he tried to think about his father first because he was dead and hopefully Angela was nothing of the sort. How awful must his father have felt to be so alone, to feel so bad that he didn’t want to be here any more, even though he had a grown-up child. The trouble was that Joe had never made him proud. His father hated soldiering, everything about it. He had wanted Joe to be different. Joe had won medals and done well, but his father had never mentioned it.

Joe could not stop thinking of his father in that bloody great house all alone. He had always been alone, Joe had not been able to stem that loneliness, and by God he had tried as he was growing up. It was no wonder he was no good at school; he was always trying to get home to save his father from the person he had become. He had spent all his childhood thinking that his father would die. His mother had died, so why not?

He had been a coward. He had gone willingly to France because he no longer wanted to face the man his father had become. Every time he left he thought they would not meet again, that his father was fated to meet such an end. France had been his retreat, his cover. It was almost amusing. Other men were terrified to die, scared of having limbs blown off, of being in pain they could not bear. Joe hadn’t understood until now that he was not afraid because somehow in his heart he had known that he would come back to this. And now he had. And the one person who could have saved him from total despair was gone from him.

His first instinct was to run after her, to go wherever she might have gone, to bring her home, to hold her safe, but he knew in an awful way that Toddy was right. She was not there and by God they had made sure he would not find her. What had they done with her?

He tried to see how she would feel about him now that he was nobody and had nothing. He could not reconcile Toddy’s view of his sister with the woman he loved. She would not have deserted him, ever. She would not have let them send her away. She adored him. She had loved him so very much, almost as much as he had loved her.

He tried to think otherwise, that she was young and beautiful and used to the best of everything. Her family was old and respected and she was well loved and cared for and he could not take her down with him to wherever he was going now. It would have been the most awful thing of all to do to her. His lovely golden girl. She would have gone with him and he could have managed something – surely people would have helped? – but what would have been her fate? Her family would never have allowed it. They had talked her round, they had held out something beyond him, they had made sure that she was not there for when he came back. He admitted that much to himself at least.

It seemed strange that the war had not defeated him, yet the homecoming had. What an odd end to it. Worse still, he now remembered the weekend he and Angela had stolen.

He had come back a few months ago, not told anyone, and she had lied to her family because they had wanted to be together so very much. They met at a hotel on the south
coast, used his name, and Joe had the best time of his life. It seemed to him now that he was paying for it hugely. He wondered if she felt the same.

It had been a big place, in grounds which fell to the sea. A gentle summer breeze wafted through the open doors which led to a balcony and they had spent the whole time in bed, calling for room service and going nowhere. She had said there was nowhere else on earth to go and that they would always be like this, always feel like this.

The cabbie dropped him at the house. The street was deserted. Joe pushed at the first window he reached, but it was either stuck or locked and now he could see the shutters behind it, closed and with the lock across them to keep out wind, rain and, doubtlessly, intruders. He left it and tried again at the next and then a third. It moved, he pushed it up and here the shutters were slightly ajar so he shoved at these until they parted and then he heaved himself and his belongings inside and dropped to the floor. The sounds of the floorboards were like cannon blasts to his ears. It wanted to make him run and hide. He pushed down the window, but left the shutters so that he could see through the shadows, though the echo of his feet had already told him that there was little to be seen.

It was his father’s library. It smelled of old books. His father had been no reader, Joe thought, but he had gone in there to smoke and drink brandy by the fire for as long as Joe could remember. The room was so cold that Joe shivered. There had been no fire lit in here for many days.

The oak bookcases which lined the walls were almost empty. What kind of person bought books? Perhaps they
had been valuable. Joe had never been interested in books so he had no idea, but it seemed to him that if his father had been forced to get rid of whatever collections there were he must have been desperate indeed.

His father’s old leather chair stood to one side of the fire. Joe ran his hands over the top of it, remembering his father’s thick dark hair and the quick turn of his head when he was being funny and how his eyes warmed and his mouth curved up before he laughed. Joe made his way into the hall and into the other downstairs rooms. Now not just some but all of the paintings were gone, and so was the furniture in the dining and drawing rooms, as though it had been a house clearance, as though the master of the house had been already dead.

Which room had his father chosen for dying? It made him shiver. There was no blood anywhere and for a few stupid moments he thought there had been a mistake: his father was not dead at all, he would be there in a second, just as Angela would be. Everything would be all right, except that it wouldn’t and he knew it now.

He paused in the hall. The sweeping staircase disappeared into the heights of the house and he sat down on the third step, unable to go further.

In the end sheer tiredness forced him to go upstairs, automatically to his own bedroom. That too had been stripped, even his bed was gone. He went next door to the bathroom and beyond it to the linen cupboards and there, opening big doors, he discovered two blankets and a pillow in the recesses and he took them downstairs. He sat down in his father’s chair, pushed the pillow at the back of his neck and pulled the blankets over him. He thought of his father and
of Angela and that he must find out what had happened. In the morning he would go and see his father’s banker, Reginald Barrington. He would know what to do.

He didn’t even hope for sleep, he knew it wouldn’t come anywhere near; he just sat there as the night blacked and then greyed itself into morning. He didn’t expect any more, he had been awake for so many nights before this, but he was not used to it here in London where he had lived, where he had grown, where he had fallen in love, where his father had been for him. He waited the night through.