The One I Was (33 page)

‘He’s rich?’ Naturally he would be.

‘Made a mint in America during the war. Peter’s lived over there since he was a child. His firm built bits and pieces for American tanks. He’s going to bring his business over here, open a factory in the Midlands.’ She was talking very fast now. ‘Metal bands used in locomotive construction. They can be used in prefabs, those temporary little houses. Peter says we still need prefabs.’ She came to a halt.

‘You don’t love him.’ He said it as a statement.

‘He’s very generous, very kind. He knows I love this house and he wants me to live here and restore it. How could I not love someone like that?’ Her voice sounded pleading. ‘Try to understand.’

‘So this,’ he pointed to the sofa, ‘was just a kind of pleasurable diversion for you?’

She shook her head.

‘A bit of fun while you waited for your fiancé to come over?’

‘I kept wondering what you’d done with your life, Benny. I had to see you again.’ She looked at him, seeming to see the doubt on his face. Her expression hardened. ‘And I really did need to sort out the books. Smithy has been going on about them.’ She couldn’t keep up the disapproving tone. ‘I kept imagining how our lives would have been in different circumstances. If I hadn’t been older than you, if I hadn’t been married.’

If, if, if.

‘And when I saw you again I remembered what happened years ago,’ she went on, her voice soft now. ‘I just wanted you.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘God, listen to me. I sound like a sex maniac. That’s how you make me feel, Benny.’

He strode towards her, sending the cat, still glowering at him, diving for cover under the sofa. ‘Don’t marry this Peter, Harriet. You know it’s not right.’

‘I have to, Benny.’

‘Keeping your bricks and mortar is more important to you than marrying the wrong man?’

‘Peter’s not the wrong man.’ She laid a hand on her abdomen.

‘His money is the only right thing about him, I’m guessing.’

‘Guess away. You know nothing.’

‘This isn’t Jane Austen. Women don’t marry for material reasons these days. This –’ he tossed his head towards the entrance hall – ‘is just an old house.’

‘It’s my home!’

‘Millions have lost their homes, Harriet.’

‘Exactly.’ Her back stiffened. ‘Are you naive enough to believe that women in London and Berlin and Warsaw don’t marry just for bricks and mortar, for new homes?’

‘There must be another way of keeping Fairfleet. Rent it out to a school for a few years. Start a nursing home. A convalescent home for injured airmen, anything.’

‘I have to marry Peter. It’s too late.’ She pinched a fold of her skirt and looked at it. ‘I’ve been such a fool. I was lonely, for Sidney, and England, and for this house and for …’ She swallowed and looked at him. ‘I have to do what’s best for everyone concerned. And he’s a good person. I know he’ll look after both of us.’

‘Both of you?’ He looked at her, at the position of her hand underneath the belt of her skirt. Still didn’t understand. Looked again at her and saw the truth in her eyes. She was
going to have a child. ‘Peter and you?’ He couldn’t spell it out, didn’t know why it made him feel so bitter. He had never felt like this about her sleeping with her first husband, but this unknown man in America, why?

‘I told you, I was lonely.’ Her cheeks were pink. ‘And a long way from home.’

If she’d returned to England Benny would have come running any time she’d called. Just one word,
come
, and he’d have been at her side.

‘I can’t afford for things to go wrong, Benny.’ She was pale, he saw. ‘If Smithy says something to Peter about what she’s seen this afternoon …’

‘Alice won’t want to harm you.’ Hadn’t she always doted on her mistress? ‘But Harriet, this baby –’

She sat up straight, looking every bit the landed lady, the member of the local gentry, the aviatrix. ‘Don’t, Benny. Don’t ask me about the child.’

‘Is it the reason you and Peter are marrying?’

She reached for her cigarettes and a silver lighter. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. I’m sorry. Actually, Benny, I feel ashamed.’

He touched her free hand. ‘Don’t. You and I, we were made for one another.’

‘It’s impossible, Benny.’

He knew it then and felt his head fall forward, resting almost on his chest. He felt very weary, very old.

She drew on the cigarette and some of the strain left her face. Perhaps she smelled defeat on him, knew he wouldn’t put up further resistance. ‘Smithy has very high standards. She might think I’ve let them both down. She’s met Peter several times. They think highly of one another, you see.’

‘She’s just the housekeeper. You don’t have to worry about her. She isn’t Mrs Danvers from that Daphne du Maurier novel, you know.’

She laughed, but he could see she was still nervous.

He waited for her to say something more, but she was silent. ‘I suppose I’d better get those books.’ He felt exhausted. Harriet wanted me, he reminded himself. Even though she’s getting married. She hadn’t been pretending just now on the sofa. He knew enough about women now to be sure. If Alice hadn’t come in, if they’d finally consummated the affair, Harriet wouldn’t have been able to resist him. A rotten film at the local cinema had finished them off. He could almost have laughed.

‘What time’s your train?’

‘Should be one in about an hour.’ She followed him out into the hallway.

‘Would you like any help with the books?’

‘Don’t worry.’ They might have been the merest acquaintances. No sign of Smithy. He climbed the stairs. The first floor seemed unchanged, darker, shabbier, perhaps. He opened his old bedroom door. The bed was covered in a dustsheet, as was the desk. The books on the shelves were ones he’d forgotten he still owned. He’d taken the rest of them to Oxford and then on to his lodgings. These were mainly schoolboys’ novels: Robert Louis Stephenson. John Buchan. He wouldn’t be able to carry them all. He took just half a dozen, Christmas presents from Dr Dawes. He wondered where his old football was. Down in the basement, perhaps.

He took a last look round his room. He’d left here a kid and was now a man. But it didn’t seem right to be leaving Fairfleet; yet what choice did he have? He wouldn’t return when this Peter person was installed. And the baby was born. But he needed to know that Harriet was going to be all right in the future. Something about her in the kitchen after Alice Smith had returned had made him worry for her. She was a strong, athletic woman, at the
peak of her life. There was no need to be concerned about her. He was just jealous, he told himself as he closed the bedroom door. But it didn’t feel like jealousy. He felt protective of her, which was absurd, as she was so very capable of looking after herself, and the new husband would cherish her.

Alice Smith came out of a room on the first floor as he descended, an armful of sheets in her arms. ‘That you done, is it?’

‘I couldn’t take all the books,’ he said.

‘I’ll box the rest up and put them in the cellar. You might not feel able to come back again.’ She watched him calmly. ‘I’ve already called a taxi. It’ll be waiting at the end of the drive to take you to the station.’

You’d never have guessed that she’d caught them together on the sofa. But he looked more closely and caught the glint of something in her eyes. Malice, he thought, at his discomfiture. But something else, too: relief. Why did she still resent him after all these years?

‘Done well for yourself, have you? No surprise, given the start you were given at Fairfleet.’

‘I’ll always feel gratitude towards Lady Dorner for what she and Lord Dorner did for me.’ He sounded very stiff.

‘More than most would have done for you.’

‘True.’ He carried on down the stairs.

‘You were always a bit different, though, weren’t you?’

He stopped. Turned and looked up at her.

‘Not like the other boys.’

‘What are you talking about?’

She gave a little smile.

How did you know?
He forced himself to keep the question to himself. He wouldn’t have put it past Smithy to have carried out her own secret racial investigation. Perhaps she’d interviewed the other boys. He’d been careful about dressing and undressing in front of them, but one of them might have noticed, have passed on comments which Smithy had overheard.

Or perhaps it had been nothing more than her possessing an instinct for him being an ornament on display with the wrong collection. Or a cup stored in the wrong cupboard.

‘Don’t spoil it for her.’

He must have looked perplexed.

‘You always were a handsome boy, Benjamin.’

Nobody had called him that for years.

‘Hang on.’ She put down the sheets and reached into her deep pinafore pocket. ‘You can take this with you.’ She laid the peacock feather on top of the books. ‘Never could stand them in the house. Probably best you keep yourself busy with your career in London. Then nobody’ll have to mention any doubts, will they?’

He could have said more but carried on downstairs; feeling now as though he couldn’t wait to leave the place. Smithy’s cold gaze followed him as he reached the bottom of the stairs. He knocked on the kitchen door and opened it.

‘I’ve taken some books.’

Harriet was sitting at the kitchen table with a cigarette. She rose as he came in. ‘You’re going so soon. I thought we’d have longer.’ She stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I shall miss you so much.’ Her voice shook, but perhaps it was just that he wanted to hear it shake. ‘Maybe it’s for the best.’

‘Not for me,’ he said shortly. Or for her, either. She looked suddenly smaller. More fragile, despite her still athletic frame and the bloom that the pregnancy must be causing. He still couldn’t help feeling that she needed him – him, Benny, refugee working hard to make a
career for himself. Why would Harriet, soon to be married again to another rich man, possibly need anything from him?

She looked at the books in his arms. ‘You’ll drop those. Put them on the table, I’ll wrap them up for you.’ He did what he was told. ‘
Great Expectations
,’ she read the title of the book on top of the pile. ‘Benny, you
must
have great expectations for yourself. I know you’ll go far.’

‘I don’t really care.’

Her eyes filled. ‘Please care. For my sake? Be happy and successful.’ She wiped her eyes and found a sheet of carefully folded brown paper and string in a drawer. In a few folds of paper and tight knots his past was parcelled up, books and feather closely married. She cleverly wound the string into a handle so that it wouldn’t cut into his hand. He wished she’d left him the luxury of feeling physical pain. It would have been a distraction.

She came towards him, hand stretched out. ‘Oh Benny, it’s a mess and I didn’t mean it to be.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ But it did.

‘I do love Peter. Even if it looks … He has this problem with his moods,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he gets terribly low. The doctors think it’s a chemical imbalance. They’re clever, those American doctors. They’ve tried electric shocks, all kinds of things.’

He couldn’t find a word to say about this revelation.

‘Then I came back home,’ she went on. ‘It reminded me, of everything. Of you and me that night in 1945. And before, out in the topiary garden.’

Still speech eluded him.

‘It still haunts me, you know.’

He knew she wasn’t talking about her private life now, that her mind was snagged on the friend’s smashed and blackened body lying on the Wiltshire hillside. He knew how it felt to be trapped like that.

‘Will you write, Benny?’

He remembered the implicit threat he’d just received on the staircase. He pictured Smithy taking in the post, spotting his handwriting on an envelope. He swung the parcel of books slightly.

‘I don’t think I can bear it if you just disappear. Fairfleet feels strange without you.’

She looked very young now, younger than him, even though she had dark shadows under her eyes. Or perhaps because of those shadows.

‘I’ll always be interested in Fairfleet and everyone who lives here,’ he said. It was a stilted way of responding, but he dared not risk anything else. ‘How could I not be? And I hope to be able to visit some day.’

‘I’d like that,’ she said. ‘You keeping a distant eye on me. And on the house. The house is me, Benny.’

He kissed her then, couldn’t help it, even though he knew that Alice Smith was somewhere in the background, possibly even watching them.

She clung to him for a second then gently shook herself free.

He walked out then, without looking at her again.

*

Then the years flashed forward again, as though his life were an express train flying past stations. Benny was an old man, lying on his deathbed. And there she was again now, Harriet,
in her flying suit, waving a fan made of peacock feathers, standing laughing at him in his bedroom, at the age she’d been when she’d first fallen in love with him.

‘Told you we’d meet again,’ she told Benny. ‘I always knew you’d come to me if I needed you. And now I’m doing the same for you.’ He tried to murmur a greeting to her, but she put a finger to her lips. ‘We were always interrupted, weren’t we?’ She smiled. ‘Every single time. Perhaps it was as well.’

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ he said, finding that he could talk now.

‘I already know, silly. Perhaps I always did. But it doesn’t matter, it never did, that you’re not really Benny, that you’re Rudi. Not long now and we’ll be together always.’ She waved her fan one last time and faded away.

This time they’d be united and nobody would separate them and it wouldn’t matter that there were her two husbands and his beloved Lisa.
They neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.
Words from the Bible, words he’d heard in German, as a child, came to him.

And Harriet knew his secret. And she hadn’t rejected him.

37

Rosamond

Benny murmured something underneath his oxygen mask and pointed at the wall. He stared hard at the blank space between the windows on the opposite side of the room. Sarah came into the room and watched him.