Hothouse Flower (25 page)

‘Please let Charlie be one of them,’ cried Mary on to Olivia’s shoulder. ‘I’d give anything, just as long as he’s safe and sound.’

Olivia decided a treat was in order for the girls to keep their spirits up, and managed to procure two jugs of cider for them to celebrate with. Elsie, without Bill around, had become fast friends with Mary, and joined the Land Girls as unofficial guide on their expeditions into Cromer.

Olivia saw Elsie was sitting quietly in the corner. She went over to her.

‘Elsie, you look awfully glum. Are you all right?’

‘To be truthful, no, Miss Olivia. I’m sitting here, listening to this broadcast and thinking that soon it’ll be my Bill and your Harry. How I’ll cope without him when he’s gone, I really don’t know.’ Elsie wiped a tear from her eye.

Olivia gave her a hug. ‘Try not to worry Elsie,’ she comforted, feeling rather guilty that the thought of her own husband leaving produced little emotional response. ‘Harry says Bill’s just about the best soldier in his battalion, and a little bird tells me he’s about to be promoted to sergeant, but,’ Olivia put her finger to her lips, ‘don’t tell anyone I said so.’

Elsie’s face brightened. ‘Ooh! Really, Miss Olivia? If he was, it’d be the proudest day of my life,’ she announced happily.

23

In the middle of June, as Olivia woke to the beauty of Wharton Park in full, dewy bloom, she heard on the wireless that France had surrendered to Germany.

Hitler was now in Paris, surveying his latest trophy, and she wondered how long it would be before the Battle for Britain, as Mr Churchill had termed it on the radio this morning, would begin.

As she walked into the kitchen garden to collect the daily ration of fruit and vegetables to feed the estate, she thought how difficult it was to imagine the kind of mass-scale death and destruction she’d seen with the girls on the newsreel two nights before actually arriving here in England. When she entered the kitchen with her two heavy baskets of fresh produce, she found Harry, looking gaunt and exhausted, sitting at the table drinking a cup of tea.

‘Hello, darling.’ He smiled wearily. ‘Guess what? I’ve been given a day off.’

‘Gosh!’ Olivia continued unpacking her basket of vegetables. The prospect of Harry being home didn’t excite her at all; rather the opposite in fact. ‘I’m sure you just want to go to bed and sleep.’

‘Actually, I thought we might use it to go out somewhere together. How do you fancy a picnic on the beach?’

Mrs Jenks, the cook, hands in the sink, smiled and said, ‘Yes, Master Harry, take your wife out. She’s been running this place single-handedly for the past few weeks, as far as I can see. She needs a break as much as you do.’ She looked at Olivia admiringly. ‘You’ve picked a good one there. She’s just wonderful, she is. And we all think so,’ she added, so there could be no mistake.

Olivia blushed at the compliments and frantically began to cast around for excuses. ‘But I’ve got to take the girls’ sandwiches down and –’

‘Hush now! You leave it to me, Mrs Crawford, and go and have a day out with your husband.’

Realising that she was beaten, Olivia surrendered. ‘I’ll run upstairs and get out of these trousers.’

‘I’ll meet you by the car in ten minutes, darling,’ Harry called after her.

‘My goodness, I’m jolly glad to be out of it for a few hours,’ Harry breathed as they drove away from the house. ‘It’s a beautiful day and I have a picnic from Mrs Jenks in the boot. I thought we might go to Holkham. It’s perhaps the only beach I can think of that hasn’t been completely spoilt by barbed wire and barrage balloons.’ He looked at her questioningly.

Olivia nodded silently.

They parked a few minutes’ walk away from the beach and headed up to the dunes, Harry carrying their picnic basket. The beach was completely deserted, not a soul in sight. Harry threw himself down full-length in the sand, rolled over and closed his eyes against the sun.

‘What a treat!’ he said. ‘This is the life! Here, it’s actually possible to imagine that the war is a nightmare I dreamt up in my sleep last night.’

Olivia sat down on the sand a few feet away from him. She did not reply. She stared out to sea, willing this day to be over as quickly as possible. When she turned, she saw he was watching her.

‘Fancy a stroll down to the waves?’ he asked.

‘If that’s what you would like.’

They stood up and walked together towards the sea.

‘I just wanted to say, Olivia, that you’ve done the most marvellous job at home. I really don’t know what would have happened if mother had been there alone. She has such delicate health and is so easily upset. I know you’ve been doing the lion’s share of running the place.’

‘I’ve enjoyed it,’ she admitted. ‘It’s been jolly good to be busy.’

‘You’re obviously a natural and everyone at Wharton Park adores you.’ He smiled down at her fondly. ‘As do I.’

‘Oh, Harry.’ Olivia was suddenly irritated. ‘Really, there’s no need to pretend any longer.’

They walked on in silence. Just before they reached the sea, Harry stopped and turned to her. ‘Olivia, I … I’ve been thinking a lot about when we first met. Before any of …
it
happened. I remember thinking to myself you were the brightest girl I’d ever had the pleasure to meet. Not silly and stupid and vain, like so many of the women I’d come across before, but a girl with real intelligence and integrity. I think you liked me then, too.’

‘Of course I did, Harry,’ Olivia agreed quietly.

‘Do you remember how we used to tease each other, laugh together?’

‘Yes –’

‘And perhaps,’ he said urgently, ‘I should have told you then and there that I thought you the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.’

Olivia shook her head in frustration. ‘Harry, do please stop! I understand what you’re trying to do. But it’s just too late!’

‘Darling, please, with things as they stand, I’ll be jolly lucky if we ever have this chance again to be together, for me to be able to explain! I beg you, Olivia,’ Harry implored her, ‘I must at least tell you what happened to me. Please, can we sit down?’

Olivia looked at the desperation in his eyes and relented. ‘Well, I can’t see how it can make any difference, but yes, if that’s what you’d like to do, I promise I’ll listen.’ They both sat down on the sand.

‘I’m going to tell you from the beginning. I accept, as you say, it probably won’t make any difference, but at the very least, you deserve to know.’

‘Please, Harry, just talk.’

‘Very well. And, I swear, I expect no sympathy from you. It is merely an honest explanation. Right,’ Harry was visibly gathering his thoughts, ‘I tried to tell you that night, that when boys are together at boarding school – which I have to tell you, are jolly cruel places to spend one’s formative years – sometimes, out of sheer loneliness and desperation, they develop crushes on each other.’

Olivia could not help but shudder at the thought.

Harry continued. ‘I was particularly desperate and dreadfully homesick for my mother. There was a boy in my year who I got on well with, and we became close. Not on any physical level, may I add. But it was the nearest thing to an intimate relationship I had. He showed me affection, Olivia, he seemed to care about me. And I wondered at the time, to be perfectly honest about it, whether I might well have been in love with him. Which then led me to wonder for the rest of my teenage years whether I was indeed, as you once put it so bluntly, a homosexual.’

He looked at her for a response. Olivia lowered her eyes. She had none to give. Harry forged on.

‘This feeling was, of course, exacerbated at Sandhurst. As you know, I’m hardly a natural soldier, and I really began to believe my lack of eagerness to fight and to be aggressive, combined with my fondness for the piano, was due to my lack of masculinity. When I first met you, I admit I was very confused,’ said Harry. ‘I’d had few dealings with women and certainly no intimacy. To be brutally honest, they scared me half to death. I didn’t understand what they wanted and I didn’t know how to please them. Then …’ Harry sighed, ‘I met Archie that night at Penelope’s dance. And he seemed so very like me in so many ways; his sensitivity, his love of the arts … and, of course, I realised immediately that he was homosexual. He was very encouraging, and I travelled to London a couple of times to meet him.’

‘I
knew
I saw you once in London,’ Olivia butted in, ‘when I was going into the Ritz late one night. You were walking up the steps of a club, further down the street.’

Harry nodded. ‘Yes, I was there. Archie had introduced me to some of his – friends. He’d taken it for granted, right from the start, that I was “one of them”. He put a lot of effort into trying to persuade me.’ Harry hung his head. ‘When he came up for our wedding, he tried to talk me out of marrying you, said that it was all a terrible mistake. And, to be frank, Olivia, I was so confused that day, I really didn’t know what to think. Archie had filled my head with horror stories, about how I’d be unable to perform as a husband with you on my wedding night.’ He looked into Olivia’s eyes. ‘I was so damned scared he’d be proved right. Oh God, Olivia! Believe me when I tell you I’m so dreadfully sorry for what happened that night. I was, quite simply, terrified out of my wits.’

Despite her determined efforts not to believe a word Harry said, when Olivia looked into his haunted, sad eyes, she could not help but feel they were filled with some kind of basic honesty. If he wasn’t telling her the truth, then he was a very talented storyteller.

‘That night,’ Harry continued, now on a mission to finish, ‘when I left you in the bedroom with Elsie, whilst I waited, I went into the library to pour myself a brandy for courage. Archie found me, and told me he loved me then and there. I asked him to leave me be – I was very angry and terribly confused.’ Harry sighed. ‘Whilst you were waiting for me in the bedroom, wondering what the hell had happened to me, I was taking a long walk through the park with a bottle of brandy for company. And that, my darling, on my mother’s life, is the truth.’

‘I see.’ Unable to look at him, Olivia concentrated on sieving the soft sand through her fingers.

‘As you know, three weeks later, at Christmas, Archie reappeared. I was at the height of my confusion, couldn’t see a way out. I looked at you, at your grace, your gentleness, your beauty; yet, at the same time you were so confused and hurt, because of what I’d done to you.’

‘So you knew what you’d done was wrong?’ interjected Olivia. ‘Or at least, what you hadn’t?’

‘Of
course
I did, darling! I just didn’t know how to put it right. And that night you caught me, I’d just told Archie I didn’t ever want to see him again, that I was convinced now I loved you and wanted to be a proper husband to you. He became very angry, then grabbed me and kissed me.’

‘From what I saw, you were hardly struggling to get away from him,’ corrected Olivia.

‘If you’d waited for just a few more seconds, you would have seen me trying to get out of his grasp – he was literally smothering me.’ There were tears in Harry’s eyes. ‘I
hated
it! It felt wrong and unnatural and, whether you believe me or not, I am a
man
!’

Olivia watched him as he sat next to her in genuine despair. She thought it best to stay quiet until she knew what she wanted to say.

Harry recovered his composure. He grabbed her hand and held it fast, twisting himself to look into her eyes. ‘And finally, darling, I just wanted to say this: not only has my admiration and respect for you grown apace in the past few months, but with it, my love. And, because I’m no longer confused about who I am, and I don’t have Archie whispering in my ear, my natural physical urges have surfaced. Olivia, I understand you may find me repulsive, but I must tell you now that I want you. Just as any normal man would want his beautiful wife.’

He reached out his other hand to stroke her cheek gently. And she didn’t flinch. ‘And you are so very beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘And I am so dreadfully sorry.’

‘Oh, Harry, I …’ she gave a huge sigh of confusion as he continued to stroke her cheek. She felt alarmingly comfortable and comforted by it. ‘It’s almost destroyed me,’ she whispered. Harry moved closer to her and put an arm round her shoulder.

‘I know, my darling, darling girl. I understand how much I’ve hurt you, and that I may never be able to mend it. But, Olivia, if you can forgive me, find it in your heart to give me one last chance, I’d really like to try,’ he begged her. ‘I swear to you on everything that’s precious, I will not let you down.’

Her tears fell then, unstoppable, and she buried her head in Harry’s chest. He put both arms round her and held her tight. ‘Olivia, you are strong and brave and beautiful. What more could a man ask for in a wife? I know how jolly lucky I am, and I’ll do anything not to lose you.’

‘Oh, Harry, I’ve loved you so much. The problem is, how can I ever believe you truly love me? That you’re not saying all this to save your own skin? How can I trust you?’

‘Because, my darling,’ he said as he stroked her hair, ‘you’ve already seen how I find it impossible to hide the truth.’

She managed a chuckle at that. ‘You’re right. It was so very obvious to me that something was terribly wrong, even before we were married.’