The Hills and the Valley (50 page)

The elation lasted until she reached home. Marcus was already there and she could tell from his expression that he was in a surly mood.

‘Where have you been?' he greeted her brusquely.

‘To see Dr Hobbs.'

‘What for? There's nothing wrong with you is there?'

Her heart sank. She did not want to tell him like this. She wanted to choose her moment.

‘I'm not ill, no.'

‘So what did you go to see him for?'

There was no avoiding it.

‘I wanted him to confirm something I already suspected,' she said. ‘I'm going to have a baby, Marcus.
We're
going to have a baby.'

For a moment he stared at her in disbelief. Then his eyes narrowed with the dark look she had come to fear.

‘All right. Whose is it?' he barked at her.

It was her turn to stare blankly.

‘What do you mean? Yours, of course.'

‘Don't give me that!' He crossed the room, taking her by the arms. ‘I'm not capable, Barbara. We both know that. So whose is it? Who have you been with? Tell me or I'll beat it out of you!'

‘Marcus, for heaven's sake, you're mad!' she cried, frightened by the violence in his face. ‘Of course I haven't been with anybody else. When would I have the chance, anyway?'

‘You're out often enough. Off to Bath. How should I know what you get up to? But I'll find out. And when I do I'll break his bloody neck …'

His fingers were biting into her arms. She jerked angrily.

‘Let go of me! You're hurting me!'

‘I'll hurt you a lot more if you don't tell me the truth!'

‘It is the truth! It's your baby!' she sobbed. ‘Though I wish to God it wasn't!'

His face contorted and she thought he was going to hit her. But he did not. Instead, he hurled her away from him, across the room. She cannoned into the edge of the bed and sank onto it, trembling with shock and fear. He followed, towering over her and she shrank back.

‘Don't touch me! Don't dare touch me! If you harm my baby I'll never forgive you!'

For a long moment neither moved. Then suddenly he was on the bed beside her, his arms around her. His mood had swung once more with the terrifying abruptness she had come to expect and now there was tenderness in his touch and contrition in his voice.

‘I'm sorry, darling, forgive me! Are you really going to have a baby?'

‘Yes. And it is yours.'

‘Oh, I didn't know … I didn't know … I'm so useless, so bloody useless. How could I manage to …? Am I really going to be a father?'

Her heart melted. It was almost as if he only remembered his failures, she thought, the times when he had tried to make love to her and been unable to and those other times, the times when he took her by force, had been wiped clean from his memory. Perhaps he was more of a Jekyll and Hyde than she had realised and he not only acted differently but became someone else, someone who ceased to exist and all his deeds with him, when he reverted to the other, normal Marcus.

‘Yes, you are going to be a father,' she said. ‘In June.' She paused. ‘Do you think – please, do you think we could make a fresh start?'

He held her. ‘A baby. My baby. I can't believe it! Oh Barbara, it's wonderful news. Wonderful!'

She smiled, smoothing the hair back from his face.

‘I'm glad you're pleased,' she said. And thought: maybe, maybe at last everything is going to change. Maybe at last it is going to be all right.

They told Sir Richard and Lady Erica that evening after dinner and because they were talking about the baby they did not listen to the news as they usually did. When Milly, the old and faithful maid, came to serve coffee, she commented on the fact.

‘You haven't got the wireless on tonight then, sir.' They looked at her in surprise. It was unlike Milly to venture such comments.

‘No, we haven't, Milly,' Sir Richard said. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘You'll have missed it then, won't you?' She sounded excited.

‘Missed it? Missed what?'

The coffee pot was shaking in her hand. ‘They gave it out just now. We were listening in the kitchen.'

‘Gave
what
out?'

‘The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor.'

Sir Richard banged his napkin down on the table so hard that all the crockery and glasses rattled.

‘Have they indeed? The American fleet! You realise what this means? The Yanks can't sit on the sidelines any longer. They'll be in the war now.'

Suddenly, they were all as wildly excited as Milly had been. If the Yanks were in the war, Britain was no longer alone. For the moment they spared no thought for the ships which had been destroyed and the men who must have been killed. The Yanks would be in and their help would shorten the war by years, perhaps make victory all the more certain.

‘That's wonderful! Wonderful!' Marcus exclaimed.

‘Oh, I'm so glad!' Barbara added.

‘The Axis powers have made a bad mistake this time!' Sir Richard pronounced.

Only Lady Erica remained as unmoved as ever.

‘Darlings, this is all very well, but don't you think we should have our coffee before it gets cold?' she cooed.

One Wednesday afternoon in late February Joan Tiley walked down the sloping road that led to Combers End and the cottage that should have been her home. She plodded along solidly, head down against the biting wind, but her legs, clad in her calf-length zip-up boots felt heavy as lead and the hand which held the knot of her headscarf inside the neck of her coat was trembling a little.

It was the first time that Joan had been to the cottage since Alec had jilted her. From the day he had marched into the recruiting office and signed on for the army the door had remained locked and the house untouched – a monument to the marriage that had not been. It was folly, Joan knew. She should have done something about it long ago. Alec had left it to her to sell the place, trusting her to give his share to his mother once she had deducted enough to compensate her father for the expense over the cancelled wedding. But she had not been able to bring herself to do it. She could not face going coldly through the rooms which had once been the cradle of all her dreams taking down the curtains she had sewed with such love and hope, packing away the bits and pieces she had installed to make the place homely, and she did not want to let her mother do it either, though she had offered. For one thing it seemed cowardly to delegate the task; for another Joan had clung to the superstitious hope that so long as they still had the cottage Alec might one day come home, marry her, and live with her there as they had planned. In spite of what he had done to her, in spite of the fact that almost two years had gone by, there was nothing she wanted more. And strangely enough with the passage of time it had begun to seem to her that it was nothing but the war that was keeping them apart. The cruel hard fact that Alec had jilted her first and joined the army afterwards had been blurred by her own wishful thinking and she had clung to the hope that when the war was over and Alec came home everything would be as it had once been – just so long as she kept the cottage.

But still she had kept away from the place without really knowing why. It was not a conscious decision, but something which had begun when she had been so heartbroken she had felt she never wanted to see it again and which had become habit. Sometimes her mother would raise the subject, telling her she must make up her mind one way or the other – it was stupid to just leave the place there getting damp and cold.

‘Much longer and it won't be fit for anyone to live in!' she would say. ‘Much longer and you won't be able to
give
it away.'

‘I'd rather Alec saw to getting rid of it,' Joan said stubbornly. ‘He paid for it mostly and I don't feel it's my place, whatever you say.'

‘You don't owe that little bugger a thing,' Arthur Tiley, her father said. ‘Not after what he did to you. And anyway he's not here, is he? He's off in India or somewhere. Meanwhile, as your mother says, that house is going to rack and ruin.' He managed to make it sound as if Alec was on a holiday rather than fighting for his country.

‘The war won't go on for ever, Dad,' Joan argued. ‘He'll be back.'

Arthur had snorted angrily but Joan remained firm. She could be as stubborn as a mule when she wanted to be. A few more months wouldn't make any difference. The Yanks were in the war now – it couldn't go on much longer.

But throughout December and the first weeks of the New Year the news from the Pacific grew worse and worse. With a sinking heart Joan followed what seemed to be the unstoppable advance of the Japanese. After the fall of Hong Kong they were swarming all over the islands and the Malay Peninsula. She lay awake at nights worrying about Alec for it was so long since they had heard from him and consoling herself that if anything had happened they would have been notified. But the news became blacker still and when Singapore followed the fate of Hong Kong in the middle of February. Joan was shocked into facing facts. Singapore was impregnable, they had said. Now she had fallen and those Allies who had not been killed in the fierce fighting were now prisoners and would be for the duration of the war. It would be a very long time before Alec came back – if he came back at all.

And so Joan came to the conclusion she had spent so long trying to avoid. She would have to do something about the house. And the first step was to go there and see what sort of shape it was in.

Wednesday afternoon was half-day closing in Hills-bridge and when she had drawn the blind down over the door of the newspaper shop where she worked, Joan put on her coat and zip-up boots and started out in the direction of Combers End. Though she had spent most of the morning nerving herself up, she still had to fight the almost irresistible urge to turn and go home to the bacon-and-potatoes that was the regular Wednesday fare before she and her mother went upstairs to ‘do the bedrooms', sharing a mop and a dustpan and brush and calling cheerfully to one another as they worked.

As she approached the cottage Joan felt in her bag and found the key, but when she attempted to fit it into the lock her hand was shaking so much she had to make more than one attempt. Then she turned the handle of the door and pushed it open for the first time in almost two years.

The stale mustiness came out to meet her just as she had known it would and with it a cold that chilled her to the bone. Two winters had permeated the very stones of which the cottage was built. Joan shivered and closed the door behind her.

Apart from the mustiness and the cold there was an air of unreality about the kitchen – like the
Marie Celeste
it had been abandoned suddenly and the evidence of occupation remained – a mug, the dregs of tea long since turned to murk in the bottom, on the draining board, a newspaper on the table, Alec's paintbrushes still in their jar on the window ledge. But there were the dead flies, too, scattered about the cobwebs festooning the corners and hanging in long unbroken streamers from the centre light.

Joan brushed through the cobwebs and went up the stairs, numb with the cold and the feeling of desolation. But when she entered the bedroom a lump began to choke in her throat as she remembered how she and Alec had made love here on this bed in the days when the future had seemed to stretch ahead like a rosy summer day. She stood for a moment biting her lip and looking around and the echoes of the past sounded ghostly murmurs in her ears – Alec's voice as he humped the heavy old wardrobe into position – ‘Well, what do you think of that?' and her own reply: ‘Looks quite good. Unless the light might be better on the mirror over there …' Oh happy days, when the biggest problem in life had been the best position for a wardrobe! The lump grew, tears pricked Joan's eyes and she sank down onto the bed, unaware of the damp cold of the blanket through her thick coat.

How long she sat there she did not know, weeping for the past and what might have been, and for Alec who might be a prisoner or who might be dead and past making plans with anyone ever again. Suddenly, through the thick walls she heard the sound of what she took at first to be someone crying. She sat listening, head bowed, hands pressed over her mouth. Things were no better next door then, no better than when Alec had taken pity on that … that woman. Then it occurred to her that what she had thought sounded like sobs was actually closer to laughter. The back door slammed but the squealing continued and in spite of herself Joan got up and crossed to the window.

In the yard below were Bryda Deacon and a young soldier – one of those whose regiment was billeted in the Scouts'Hall, Joan guessed, and she was indeed squealing with laughter as he chased her. As Joan watched he caught her in the coalhouse doorway, grabbed and kissed her, pushing her back into the darkness. Joan stood riveted, hardly able to believe her eyes. Was this the poor downtrodden wife for love of whom Alec had jilted her and fought a man? Why; she was no more than a trollop, getting off with any man who came her way behind her husband's back.

Angrily she moved away from the window. The spell had been broken, her nostalgia was all gone. Just as well to put the house on the market and everything in it. Even if Alec did come back, even if they did make things up – and the way she felt just now that seemed fairly unlikely – she couldn't live here with him next door to that … that cheap little cow. She looked around, swept a few knick-knacks into the leather patchwork bag she had brought with her and clattered down the bare stairs. Let the rest of the stuff stay here. She didn't want it. It could be sold with the house and good riddance.

As she went out slamming the door behind her she heard movement across the yard and saw Bryda and the soldier peeping curiously out of the coalhouse. She lifted her chin, turned abruptly with the intention of ignoring them. But as she passed the coalhouse Bryda giggled. The sound infuriated Joan and she swung round on her.