The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (43 page)

There was at the bottom of the pile another letter, but written in a different hand, on different paper. Joe couldn’t stand any more. He put it back, let it wait for another time and another mood.

*

Lucy went back on the train the next day. As she watched the endless fields go past she wondered how on earth she would tell Joe that the love of his life was alive and well; that she was living close by and cared nothing for what he was going through and would go through in the future. Lucy didn’t want to tell him, but there was no hope for him and it was better that he should know than to go on believing either that Angela was dead or that she somehow still cared for him.

It took her all afternoon to debate this with herself. In the end it was nothing to do with anything other than instinct which made her get off the train at Durham when she longed to go home to Newcastle. She made her weary way to Mr Palmer’s garage. It was late, and she half thought she would have to go to the tower house and she didn’t want to go there. She couldn’t stand the idea of trying to explain herself away to the Misses Slaters and to be nice to Joe before getting him to herself – then what would she say?

So she was glad and worried when she saw the light on. She knew that it was Joe, that he was sitting at the back of the garage, in the little office, devising ways of bringing cars to people he thought might buy them.

She stood outside for a long time but eventually she made herself go in. He looked up and frowned in the lamplight.

‘Lucy, what are you doing here?’ Then he understood and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

Lucy came forward.

‘I went to London,’ she said.

Joe shook his head. He looked back at the desk and then at her.

‘What did you do that for?’ he said.

‘You know why I did it.’

‘You had no right.’

‘Yes, I did. You have been unhappy for as long as I have known you and even though you think this work will fill your life, it won’t. Work never does. We pretend because perhaps it’s all we have but we need people to fill our lives.’

‘That’s lovely,’ Joe said, looking at her so straight that she wavered. ‘So what did you discover?’

And that was when she lost her voice. She shook her head.

‘Well, come on then – what was the result of your interference?’

He was not quite glaring at her, his dark eyes lit with anger but controlled, waiting. She wasn’t afraid of him, that was the first thing. She thought she would have been, but Joe was patient, even like this. He could be trusted, though it was the first time she had put herself into a difficult situation with a man that she could not see the way out of. Even in London, in Joe’s spacious bedroom, she had not felt as safe as she felt now and yet he was angrier than she had ever seen him. He was on his feet too now and he was a lot bigger than she was, but still she held her ground and didn’t even feel like budging. This was too important to Joe’s happiness for her to let it go. He had done too much for other people for her not to stand up for him even against himself now.

She looked him straight in the eyes.

‘Angela is alive, living in the north here. She is married and has two children.’

Joe stood there for so long, without saying anything or moving, that Lucy worried. She didn’t flinch, she didn’t move back. She stood as if her feet were glued to the floor. She felt so bad. She wished she had not gone to London. She wished that they had never met.

‘Go away,’ he said finally in a very hoarse voice without looking at her.

‘Joe—’

‘Please, just go away.’

Lucy began to feel the tears fill her eyes and although she tried to ignore them they coursed down her cheeks so fast that they tickled her neck. She tried to breathe very carefully so that Joe wouldn’t know – he wasn’t looking at her so he might not have been aware of it – and then she turned and walked out of his office. She got herself along the street and to the end of it before she let go of the sobs that threatened to strangle her throat.

*

It was very late indeed when she got back to Newcastle but Gemma had waited up for her. Her sister, with a big blanket around her shoulders, was there in the hall to welcome Lucy when she more or less fell in at the door.

‘I got it wrong. I shouldn’t have gone there. I made his life worse than it was. The girl he loves is here and she has a husband and two children and I had no right to do this to him. What was I thinking? Am I so stupid, so vain, that I thought I could make things better?’

‘No,’ Gemma said, ‘it’s just love.’

Lucy wept in her sister’s arms.

‘He’ll never forgive me. What a mess I have made. I wish I had never gone. I wish I had never met him.’

Gemma took her to bed and lay down with her. When Lucy had cried herself to sleep Gemma kept her arms around her in case something more should come out of the shadows and haunt her.

*

Halfway through Monday morning there was a knocking on the door. Lucy was expecting Edgar; Gemma had told her about his visit. She hadn’t known what to think. She didn’t want to go back to Durham to work – she didn’t think her sister could manage the two children and her mother and everything else – but perhaps there was no alternative. She braced herself as she opened the door. She had expected to see a very penitent man, since they had not met after he had jilted her.

To Lucy’s surprise Edgar smiled just a little and then said, ‘I’m so very sorry. Will you ever forgive me?’

She let him in. She felt nothing for him. Nothing at all other than glad that he was apparently offering her a job.

She was intending to step out and for them to go to the office and talk there. She was not prepared for the two screaming banshees who ran shrieking down the hall towards Edgar, yelling, ‘Mr Bainby! Mr Bainby!’ in a way which amazed her. They grabbed him by the legs as though he was trying to get away and he lifted them both into his arms. They shrieked and grabbed him and Edgar laughed.

Lucy couldn’t believe it. Gemma rescued him.

‘They think they are going to the park because you are here,’ she said.

‘Are you going later? Could I come with you?’ he said and she assured him that they would be going in the afternoon. He said he would be back long before then.

Gemma took the struggling twins from him and Lucy put on her coat. She and Edgar walked to the office.

‘I didn’t know you liked children,’ she said.

‘I never knew any before.’

‘You went to the park?’

‘Boys were sailing boats and the twins love the swings,’ he said. ‘It was fun.’

Lucy said nothing. As they went along he told her that he wanted her to take her job back and more, that he didn’t want her to sell the premises here. When he said that in time it would be Bainbridge, Featherstone and Charlton, Lucy stopped and put both hands over her face.

‘Oh dear,’ Edgar said, ‘I didn’t think it was going to have that effect.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, standing back and taking her hands from her face. Her cheeks were so pale that Edgar thought she was going to pass out. ‘I just didn’t expect it and I’m rather tired. It’s everything I ever wanted since I was a little girl.’

‘Yes, I suspected it was,’ he said dryly.

She managed to look at him.

‘You think I wanted to marry you because of it.’

‘No – I think we were muddled, both of us, but I ought to have done much better. I haven’t stopped being sorry.’

‘But not regretting not marrying me. I haven’t regretted it either,’ she said, ‘it would have been quite wrong.’

As they walked the rest of the way to the office Lucy thought about her father. It occurred to her for the first time that he would be proud of her now. She couldn’t wait for the day when the brass plaque outside his office read Bainbridge, Featherstone and Charlton.

*

Edgar waited for the visit to the park as impatiently as though he had been a child. The sun was shining as the children skipped and ran and kept coming back to their mother. Once they got there he was on duty on the swings. Gemma sat and laughed and watched. It was mid-afternoon by the time the children tired and were taken back for a little peace and quiet. They had run around so much that they fell asleep on the old sofa in the sitting room while the sun poured in at the windows.

Gemma got up to go and see what her mother was planning for tea but he stopped her with just a slight touch on her arm.

‘Don’t go just yet,’ he said.

Surprised, she sat back down again.

‘I am aware that your first marriage was not as happy as it ought to have been.’

Gemma shook her head.

‘It isn’t something I want to talk about.’

‘No, I understand that. It’s just that I … well, I wondered if it was something you might ever consider again.’

She was staring at him. She looked and sounded so like Lucy when she said baldly, ‘You want to marry me?’ as though the skies would fall first.

‘I know.’ Edgar smiled ruefully against himself. ‘My record isn’t very good and especially having left your sister at the altar – it might put you off just a little – but I feel as if I had the right idea with the wrong sister. I very much want to marry you. I adore you and I love your children. I can’t live without you. I’m lonely and bored and I’m turning out to be incredibly selfish so if you want to end my suffering please at least think about it, will you?’

Gemma was still staring. He wasn’t sure that she had heard a single word he had said.

‘You want to take on the twins? Have you completely lost your mind?’ Gemma laughed as though she couldn’t take any of it in.

‘Yes, I do.’ Edgar pulled a face. ‘And your mother of course if she wishes to live with us. I don’t think Lucy would consider such a thing, at least I hope not.’ He wished he would shut up with the silly banter, but he couldn’t think of anything sensible to say and silence would be unendurable. ‘It did occur to me that perhaps if you thought it a good idea I could come here and live with you and run the Newcastle office when we get that far and Lucy could run the Durham office. I’m getting ahead of myself – I don’t want you to marry me for her sake or for the children or for your mother, especially your mother. I love you, Gemma. Will you marry me?’

At that moment the door opened and Lucy came in with teacups and saucers and plates on a tray. It was, Edgar thought, the most awful timing. Gemma got up to help – she went off to the kitchen to fetch cake and the teapot and other things – so he shot out of the room after her.

She heard him and turned around in the dimness of the hall.

‘Will you? Please?’ he said.

Gemma started to laugh. Even through the gloom of the hall he could see her beautiful eyes shining. She didn’t say that she would straight away and Edgar didn’t know how to breathe for so long that he thought he might expire.

‘I think I had better,’ she said after what seemed like several years. ‘I’m sure my mother would prefer one of us to be married to you. She has been so very disappointed so far.’ She came to him then and kissed him very lightly on the lips.

She got hold of his hand and raised her voice and said as they broke into the light of the kitchen, ‘Mother, we’ve got something to tell you.’

Her mother looked up at her with a worried expression and more than suspiciously at Edgar. He had never felt quite so stupid as he tried to explain that he wanted to marry Gemma. Mrs Charlton studied him for a very long time, then she said, ‘Eh, lad, make your mind up, will you?’

It was a week before Joe appeared at their door. It was Gemma who opened the door.

She looked him up and down as if he were a tradesman and said, ‘What do you want?’

‘To see Lucy. May I come in?’

‘She doesn’t want to see you.’

‘I know she doesn’t, and I don’t really want to be here either – all I want is an address. Surely I can have that.’

Gemma saw him into the nearest room. It stank of damp. He couldn’t think what to say and then he heard the footsteps and turned around. Lucy was even skinner than she had been and he thought, not for the first time, what it must have cost her to go to London to try to sort this out. She was so thin she was almost transparent. Her cheeks were sunken and her eyes were dull so that he could scarcely tell what colour they were.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘You know what it is. I want the address so that I can go and see Angela.’

She looked down.

‘Of course you can have it,’ she said.

‘Lucy, I’m sorry. I got a shock. I didn’t mean to speak to you that way. I know that you were right to go to London and make things clearer, but I found it so difficult. I don’t think I wanted the truth because I long since suspected it – but you knew what was best for me, you knew better than I did. I just couldn’t believe that she didn’t want me. I thought that somehow after all this time I was going to get her back, and I know now that I was pretending to myself. My common sense should have told me that if she had died somebody would have informed me, somebody would know where she was – I should have understood that but I didn’t. I didn’t want to go forward; I didn’t want to stop believing that I would get her back. I’ve always loved her so very much – I can’t take in that she would do this to me, that she hates me so. I want to see her now and ask whether she’ll forgive me for what I did.’

‘She was there too. I won’t have it that way.’

Joe didn’t understand.

‘What do you mean?’

Lucy couldn’t think that she was saying this, but she had felt angry about it ever since she had begun to know what Lady Toddington and her daughter and even Joe’s mother had kept from him.

‘I mean that if women want to be independent and accepted by men as adults and their equals that they must stop blaming them, that they must accept their share of what is done. Angela and her mother had no reason to treat you like that. You didn’t force her, you didn’t compel her to go to wherever you went for the weekend. Presumably she went there of her own free will and gave herself to you as
you did to her. So it’s not right for her to have done this to you. I don’t care who thinks what. I think her father was to blame for trying to get rid of the child, to pretend that nothing had happened, to sweep it all under the carpet, but for you to … to ruin your life over such a woman, well I don’t think it’s right.’