The Heart of the Family (33 page)

Another Christmas would soon be here. Her second with Tommy. Emily’s heart swelled with love and pride. Away from Liverpool and here in Whitchurch, apart from that funny incident when they had first moved here, Tommy had come on by leaps and bounds and was now doing so well at school that his teacher was talking about him being one of her cleverest pupils. When he got back from school today she and Tommy were going to finish writing the Christmas cards they had made together the previous weekend. Emily felt obliged to send one to Con, just as she also felt obliged to write to him every week. Not that he always wrote back to her, except when he wanted something. Emily always felt a bit guilty when she realised not only just how little she missed her husband but, even worse, how little she actually cared about him at all.

For her and Tommy this Christmas would be very different from last year’s. This year they knew and understood one another a lot better than they had then. Tommy still never mentioned his past, but Emily had no wish to force him to disclose to her what had happened to him or how he had come to
be on his own. Deep down inside she knew that she was afraid of discovering that somewhere there were those who might have more claim on him than she had. Tommy had chosen to be with her, she reassured herself, and if that was good enough for him then it was good enough for her.

Emily had already ordered her goose from the farmer’s wife, and out of good manners rather than anything else she had invited her neighbour to come and have dinner with them. She would much rather have invited Wilhelm, who had done so much for her with all his hard work in her garden, and especially her vegetable plot, but of course that was not possible. Wilhelm would be having his Christmas dinner with all the other POWs in their camp several miles away. Emily had been relieved to be told when she had questioned him anxiously about their camp and the way they were treated that in Wilhelm’s opinion their English guards treated them very well indeed.

Jan and Bella were together on the plush fabric-covered sofa in Bella’s front room. Its maroon colour toned perfectly with the striped burgundy-red and off-white striped Regency wallpaper. The heavy burgundy velvet curtains, with their bobble trip of cream, had been closed, ostensibly to keep in the warmth from the fire. Behind the larger of the two armchairs stood a standard lamp with a striped burgundy and cream lampshade. The smart blond wood radiogram and matching cocktail cabinet gleamed in the soft light from the fire, and the wheels of the tea trolley had sunk into the thickness of the handsome burgundy and cream floral-patterned carpet.

Neither of the occupants of the sofa had touched the tea that Bella had made or cared much about the room’s décor, though. Instead they were seated facing one another, Bella’s slim delicate female hand held fast between Jan’s two much larger and stronger male hands.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Bella protested shakily. ‘How can you say you love me now when before …?’

‘I lied before,’ Jan told her simply, adding thickly when he saw her expression, ‘Ah, my love, please don’t look at me like that. It is true, I swear to you. I loved you from the first moment I set eyes on you but I knew then that if I had given you my heart you would have crushed it and broken it, and me.’

‘You said you felt sorry for me. You said you despised me …’

‘Not you, Bella, not the true sweet wonderful you I knew you really were underneath – it was only the things you were doing – things you were being made to do because of what others had taught you – that I questioned. Here, though, in my heart where I have known the real you I have loved you more than it is possible for me to find enough words to say, and I always will.’

Bella’s eyes smarted with loving tears. Everything that had happened had come as such a shock, a sweet thrilling realisation of shock, it was true, but a shock none the less. She wanted to reach out and touch Jan to make sure that she wasn’t merely dreaming. She wanted to relive every precious heartbeat of those wonderful moments she had just spent in his arms when he had whispered so passionately to her of his love for her and she had felt her heart
beating so fast that it had been as though it had wanted to burst out of her chest to give itself into his hold. Once all of that would have been all that mattered, but she was not that Bella any more and there was something that mattered very much indeed, and that something was the fact that Jan was married to someone else.

Bella took a deep breath and turned to face him.

‘You say these things to me, Jan, lovely wonderful things that I’m not even going to pretend that I haven’t wanted to hear, because I have and I do.’ She gave him a smile that touched Jan’s heart with its sweet sadness and made him want to reach for her and hold her safe against all the world’s pain and difficulties for ever. But as though she knew what he was feeling she shook her head and continued shakily, ‘But the reality is that you are a married man and as a woman I know it is my duty to respect that woman and your marriage, just as I would want and expect another woman to respect me and my marriage if our roles were reversed. When you married you gave her a lifelong promise to be her husband. I cannot and I will not allow you to break that promise with me.’

The shudder that took her body showed how much she wished things were different, even without the tears Jan could see in her eyes.

‘I should never have married,’ he told her sombrely.

‘But you did marry her,’ Bella pointed out quietly.

‘I felt I had no choice, Bella. She was so vulnerable and so afraid so … so much in need, and her family such close friends of my own. Unhappily what I had believed to be merely the effect of the natural fears of a young woman who experienced at first-hand the
horror of her country being invaded and overrun by the enemy, has turned out to be something far more serious.’

Bella frowned, her own despair pushed to one side by a surge of protective female love for this man as she recognised the very real anguish and hopelessness in Jan’s voice. Instinctively she reached out to him, and then tried to pull back when she saw the fierce burn of passionate longing in his eyes. But it was too late, she was in his arms and unable to stop herself from responding to his kiss with all the pent-up love in her own heart.

‘I love you so much.’ Jan’s voice held a raw edge of passion. ‘I’ve dreamed of holding you in my arms like this so often. I’ve been such a fool.’

‘Shush, you are not to say that,’ Bella protested softly. ‘And you are not a fool. You are the man I love, the only man I will ever love. Oh, Jan!’ He was so dearly familiar, so already known to all her senses and yet at the same time her intimacy with him felt new and exciting. Dangerously so, she recognised as their kisses became deeper and more intense, neither of them holding back from showing their love. She wasn’t a girl any more. She was a woman; she had been married; carried a child; her body was a woman’s body, her love a woman’s love and the intimacies she craved with Jan went far beyond mere kisses, no matter how passionate.

But that could not be. Jan was married and the new Bella she had evolved into so painfully would not allow them to do something they would both regret. It took all her inner strength to end the kiss and push Jan away, denying them what they both wanted.

‘I want you so much, but we mustn’t,’ she told him when he tried to gather her close to him again. ‘You’re married, Jan.’

‘Married, yes. But I do not have a wife, and even if I did she would not be you; she would not be the woman I love.’

The look he gave her turned her heart over inside her chest. It was the look of a man in torment. Something was very obviously wrong with Jan’s wife, and in his marriage.

Bella’s heart lurched with real pain for him, as she pressed him anxiously, ‘Jan, what is it? What’s wrong?’

‘We don’t really know. The doctors we have seen – and by “we” I mean her father and I, as she refused to accept that there is anything wrong, even though she refuses to so much as allow me to share with her a bedroom or its bed – believe that the trauma of her mother’s death has somehow become associated in her mind with the German invasion of Poland, and because of the brutality she witnessed she has developed a fear and loathing of any kind of marital intimacy. And yet ironically she has also become so fiercely jealous that she cannot witness me having a conversation with my own sister without flying into the most dreadful rage, during which she tears at her own skin with her fingernails. I feel so dreadfully sorry for her, Bella, and so guilty. If I had not married her perhaps her hold on normality might have strengthened, but it is as though her marriage to me has pushed her over an edge into some terrible dark abyss from which she cannot find the way back. The doctor believes that her poor mind is irreversibly damaged by what she witnessed when the serving
girls were dragged from the house and raped by the German soldiers, but we cannot be sure as no one really knows exactly what it was that set off this terrible mental affliction that has taken her over.’

‘Oh, Jan, how dreadful for you, and for her as well. What a terrible thing to have happened to you all.’

‘It is my mother and her father who feel it the most, as they were the ones who brokered our marriage and who had such high hopes of it. My mother feels dreadfully guilty, and all the more so I think because I suspect she has guessed how I feel about you.

‘I hadn’t planned to tell you any of this. I hadn’t even planned to see you but somehow I found myself walking down your road and then I was knocking on your door and feeling more disappointed than I could bear to admit because you were not here. I am a coward and worse for coming to you as I have when I know I can never have any right to your love, and when I know too that for your sake I should be encouraging you to give it to another and a better man who can give you his love with honour and a promise of marriage.’

‘There is no other man I could ever want,’ Bella told him fiercely and truthfully, ‘but as much as I love you, Jan, and I do, we must not see one another again.’

She could feel his pain and see it in his eyes, dark now with tears as he gripped her hand so hard his hold was almost hurting her.

‘It is for the best,’ she told him bravely, ‘and because I love and respect you. We cannot sink to the level of conducting an illicit relationship behind
your wife’s back. You are too honourable a man for that, and I have my own responsibilities now – to the crèche and to Lena as well. She has been so very brave over Charlie’s dreadful behaviour, but her reputation is bound to be damaged by her husbandless state and if it were to be known that I was having an affair with a married man her reputation would be further damaged and that would not be fair to her. She is such a darling girl, and so bright and clever, and so eager to make something of herself that … well, I want to set her the best example I can. If I could have had a little sister, then Lena would have been the sister I would have wanted.’ Bella bowed her head, knowing that somehow, she who had always done exactly what she wished without any regard for others, was now going to do the exact opposite and put the needs of those she loved above her own. She also knew that it was going to hurt – an awful lot – and that it was a pain she would have to carry with her for the rest of her life. Was this what people meant when they said that the war was bringing out the best in people, she wondered grimly, as she tried to swallow against the dry misery gripping her throat.

‘We can’t see one another ever again, Jan,’ she said miserably, ‘not even to say hello or to hold hands, not even when we are with other people. It would be wrong now knowing what we both do about our feelings. And besides,’ she took a deep breath, looked straight into his eyes and then held her breath against the sheer agony of the pain that felt like a knife being struck straight into her heart, ‘if I were ever to see you again I couldn’t promise that I would not revert to the old Bella and demand that you have your
marriage set aside and annulled so that we could be together.’ She couldn’t help it: as soon as she had finished speaking the tears rose up and spilled down from her eyes, splashing on their locked hands.

‘Oh, my love, my love, I should never have come here and unburdened myself to you. I have been selfish and weak, a coward who was unable to resist his own longing to see you and be with you, and because of that I have hurt you terribly.’

‘No,’ Bella stopped him fiercely. ‘You must not say that because it is not true. You are brave in so many different ways, Jan, and I respect and admire you for that just as much as I love you. Your gift to me of your love is what will give me the strength to carry on, because I knew secretly that I loved you and it hurt so terribly knowing that you did not love me back. I can bear the pain of not sharing my life with you far more easily than I was bearing the pain of loving you and believing that you despised me. My main regret is for you.’ Bella lifted her hand and touched the side of his face in a gentle, almost maternal caress. ‘I wish with all my heart that your wife could be healed and your marriage made whole. I never knew before that real true love meant putting the happiness of the person you love above your own happiness, but I do understand that now.’

Jan reached for her hands, holding them tightly as he lifted them to his lips, kissing them passionately, his emotions overwhelming him so that his tears fell on her skin leaving the long dark lashes she had always resented a mere male possessing, damp and clumped together, his thick dark hair falling over his forehead as he looked at her with a mixture of helpless longing and despair. This was how their child
would have looked at her at those times when he was hurt and afraid and, just as though Jan were their child, Bella gathered him in her arms and rocked him gently against her own body, whispering tender words of love and solace over the dark head.