The Soldier's Bride (46 page)

At least, if anything came of it, Letty thought hopefully, she’d not have the name Beans. Chris had kept the name of Bancroft until last year when he’d agreed to take his father’s name. David in his wisdom had sewn the seed several years
ago but hadn’t pursed it until Chris was absolutely sure in his own mind that was what he wanted.

He had also explained about his investments in Baron & Lampton’s, his intention to leave them to Chris, and about his heart trouble. Chris had emerged from the talk with his father more subdued than Letty had seen him in years, and had finally agreed to his name becoming Baron. Letty thought Eileen Baron would sound very nice and looked forward to something coming of this budding relationship, overwhelmingly relieved that Chris appeared to be smitten enough to make him forget about Spain, death and glory. It was an immense relief to Letty who took to Eileen like a duck to water for that reason alone.

Chris and Eileen got engaged the following April, a month which in their case turned lovers’ thoughts rather heavily to romance. A month in which Letty had thought of David, thought of her life, her beginnings, where it had led her; sometimes wondered what it had all been for. Over the last two years she had lost interest in her business. With a manager now, a competent buyer and a gifted dealer who practically ran everything, including exhibitions, she could sit back.

Over the years she had gained fame, prestige, wealth, the things Dad had always dreamed of, had never achieved. She had time now to notice the passing of her days without David, bringing a sense of foreboding. She awaited her weekends with him with a longing more suited to someone half her age. She was forty-eight and had begun to study each tiny new crease on her long, still graceful neck, every fine vein on her once fresh cheeks; she had also begun to
colour her hair, discreetly, endeavouring to push back an onrush of grey and retain the once vital auburn.

David’s hair was entirely grey now – a distinguished pure grey that enhanced his looks for all that his fifty-eight years were taking a toll. His life with Madge wasn’t easy, was even less easy with all that hurrying here from Barnet and back again each weekend. Trying to pretend to Madge that he wasn’t seeing his mistress – for that was what Letty was – was telling on him. Even though Madge knew full well what he was doing it pleased her to keep him on a leash, it was destroying him. He was suffering ever increasing pain in his chest that worried Letty terribly.

He said nothing to Madge about it, preferring her not to know, but Letty knew how bad it was at times when she saw him grimace, watched him furtively take one of his tiny tablets and perk up a few minutes later. But the intervals between were becoming shorter and shorter. He had regular check-ups at the hospital, always coming back with a smile saying everything was fine. He was smoking more than ever, and that, Letty concluded with loathing, was Madge’s fault.

‘She won’t leave a thing alone,’ he told her. ‘Every time there’s a board meeting she presents herself at the office, hovering outside until it’s over. She says she should be a director. Freddy Wheeler, my idiotic cousin, thinks so too, but Mr Hawke and Robert Lampton are against it. They’re of the older school, think women have their place in the home and not running businesses.’

‘Huh!’ Letty exploded, making him grin and cuddle her to him, telling her she was different.

But David was a worried man with Madge turning up at the board meeting in May to make a nuisance of herself, as usual, Freddy going on about her rights to have a say in the firm as its second largest shareholder after the MD himself, and David compelled to shut him up rather sharply, which reaped a baleful glance from his cousin.

Madge was still hovering when they came out of the boardroom, her face creased with pique. She made towards Mr Hawke who, hurriedly evading her, mumbled something to David about another engagement and took his leave without waiting for the glass of brandy David’s secretary was pouring for directors and managers.

David would have shouldered his way towards Madge through the small knot of colleagues, but Freddy was already there, handing her a drink as though she had every right to be present.

It was hard to say anything to her before Freddy Wheeler. The moment he moved away, David intended to manoeuvre Madge gently out of the offices, going with her to make sure of it. She had no place here.

Seeing her talking closely to his cousin, it struck David that they were a well-matched pair. At fifty Freddy wasn’t so much young in looks as behaved as if he was, delighting in retaining that ridiculously boyish name of his. It was hard for Freddy to be serious for long. He had always sported a debonair attitude in some ways matching the sense of frivolity which Madge too assumed despite being forty-eight. It was the same age as Letty. But Letty could give her a ten-yard lead for poise and elegance even now, and she hadn’t been born into it as Madge had – in her it
had been born, even though she’d started life in the slums of East London.

They were amusing each other now, sharing some joke, Madge’s bubbling laughter dominating the room. She had a hand on Freddy’s arm, letting it lie there, her eyes fixed upon his cousin’s, his upon hers. The sight made David frown but he thrust away the thought as quickly as it had come to him, turning aside to talk to one of his managers.

Britain was in the grip of nervous anxiety. Germany had been rearming for years while Britain had failed to do so, implicitly believing that another war like the last one couldn’t possibly be repeated. Baldwin’s Government had believed it, and while the new coalition Government under Chamberlain had still teetered along upon the path of indecision, Germany had walked into Austria and was readying itself for its next move, pressurising Czechoslovakia none too gently into handing over large areas of its country.

Letty, like everyone, went in fear of war. Many of her clients were Jewish and had opened their homes to relatives, refugees from Germany and German-dominated areas, all with horrifying tales to tell of Hitler’s regime with its satanic hatred of their race. As summer wore on, it looked as though these horrors might easily happen here.

‘They’re digging trenches in Hyde Park,’ she told David when he came one weekend in September.

One beautiful Friday she’d gone there on her own and seen the smooth grassy tracts disfigured by the long dirt gashes and piles of soil, in anticipation of bombs over London itself. In its way it struck her as even more ominous
than the strange silvery whale-like objects called barrage balloons that during the week had been floating some hundred feet above the city on the ends of steel cables anchored to the ground. She’d watched them moving with almost comical majesty one way and then the other in the warm air currents above London, feeling far from laughter. Then had come the first issue of gas-masks, terrifying the life out of her, seeing again the men in the trenches engulfed in creeping yellow fog, coughing up their lungs, temporarily or permanently blinded. Now it might all happen here in her own city. It was unthinkable.

There was frantic talk of evacuating the children, rumour of enforced conscription – every male between eighteen and forty-one. It was fiercely contested by the Labour and Liberal Parties, but all the same very possible, and Letty thought of Chris and nightly died a small death for him.

It was all so different to the onset of 1914 when suddenly the country had found itself at war, everyone excited, going crazy with war fever. ‘It’ll be over by Christmas!’ Those words still rang in her head.

Not so this time. That there was going to be a war, Letty was in no doubt, but this one was creeping up on them all – visible but unstoppable – all the more ominous for their having to watch its approach helpless to prevent it.

‘I’m so frightened.’ Letty echoed the fear of every woman in the land. She dared not voice that fear before Chris, somehow believing that keeping it from him might prevent his running headlong into enlisting as he had almost done during the civil war in Spain.

‘We’re all edgy,’ David said. ‘But somehow I don’t
think it will come to war. We won’t make the mistakes we made twenty-four years ago. We’d be fools to be drawn into a quarrel that’s none of our concern.’

‘God, I hope you’re right!’ Letty said fervently as they stood in the park gazing up at a barrage balloon.

David was right. At the beginning of October the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich to meet Germany’s dictator. He returned triumphant. War had been averted. He had promises, signed by Hitler himself. Relief swept the nation like a refreshing wind.

‘Thank God for that!’ Letty sighed when David came that weekend. In a whimsical mood he bought her a bag of sweets – sugared umbrellas – replicas of that comforting utilitarian object the Prime Minster carried wherever he went and which had become his personal trademark. Opening the bag, her laughter swept away every last vestige of fear as she drew out tiny pink umbrellas.

Everything in life was sublime. Chris had got himself on the staff of the
News Chronicle
. With his university education he had been given a position as one of its political journalists – nothing special as yet but he was doing well, he and Eileen planning to get married next August. They had peace. She had David – or at least half of him, Madge clinging remorselessly to the other half, which prompted David to vow with a sort of desperate determination to spend this Christmas with Letty.

‘What about Madge?’ she asked. Unbelievable that they should be together at Christmas for the first time ever. Madge would find some way to stop him, she could almost bet on it, and loathed her afresh.

‘She’s not coming!’ he said with slow drollery, sweeping away Letty’s disquiet.

Heartened, she pushed him playfully down on to the sofa, a new one – all her furniture was new, beautifully made especially for her. The flat was full of lovely things, expensive things, tasteful things. It was her delight, her haven, her love-nest when David was there. She leaned over him, kissed him, suddenly serious.

‘Dear God, I wish you were free, David. I wish we were married.’

He returned her kiss tenderly, gently, the urgency gone with the years. Even so, Letty yearned to have him to herself wholly, to share him with no one, least of all a wife.

David, on his way to his own bedroom at the far end of the passage from Madge’s, stopped abruptly and turned to stare down at her standing at the foot of the curved staircase, disbelief slowly permeating his brain.

‘What did you say?’

Madge’s smile as she stared up at him was mocking.

‘I said, if you want your divorce, you can have it.’

The mocking smile broadened. She stood, clad in slinky black, one hand resting elegantly on her hip, the other holding a cigarette from which a tendril of smoke wafted lazily upward.

‘Bit of a shock, darling? You’ve waited long enough, haven’t you? Though I suppose coming this late in life it’s a bit of a damp squib, the ardour gone off somewhat. I expect you lost all your get up and go long ago. Never mind, darling, better late than never. You’re still capable of doing a
geriatric scramble over her, aren’t you? Or do you get too out of breath now?’

David ignored the crudeness, and said stiffly: ‘The divorce – when?’

‘Oh, any time, darling! As soon as you like. Aren’t you excited?’

She remained looking up, his silence causing her lips to compress. ‘Don’t you want to know what’s brought about my change of heart?’ she questioned sharply.

He longed to say ‘Not particularly’, but anything like that might make her change her mind. Unless she was merely taunting him, had no intention of letting go of him?

‘I shall tell you,’ she went on. ‘You see, ever since last year, your cousin Freddy and I have had something going. I bet you never even suspected. In fact, Freddy has proposed. Trouble is you’re rather in the way, darling. So, if you want your divorce, by all means. Although I’d rather it be me divorcing you, and naturally your Letitia will be cited as co-respondent. Those are my only terms. Oh, yes, and of course an adequate settlement from you.’

David’s thoughts flew immediately to the shares he held in Baron & Lampton’s. They belonged to Christopher. It was in his will and no one, not even Madge, could contest it. Once he and Letitia were married, Chris could fight off anyone who tried.

‘Whatever you like,’ he said harshly. ‘Except, of course, my shares in Baron & Lampton’s.’

Did he see her face drop a little? Even with her and Freddy’s share combined, they
wouldn’t have a majority vote. And there was always the possibility that Freddy wouldn’t want to see the business go. But David was certain that above all else Madge would have liked to have seen him grovel, to see his fear of takeover. The business meant nothing to her. To him it meant everything – his father’s name, his son’s future, Letitia’s peace of mind. And she knew it.

He steeled himself against Madge’s withdrawing her magnanimous offer of divorce, but after a long tense pause, saw her shrug and relax, her face breaking again into that mocking smile.

‘That suits me,’ she said airily.

Why did he get the feeling there was something up her sleeve?

‘Do you love him? Freddy?’ he queried. She was only using his cousin, surely?

The softening look in her eyes, even from this distance, conveyed the complete opposite, a misty glow of love he had forgotten her to be capable of. The next moment her eyes had become veiled. She lifted one eyebrow very slightly.

‘Now why should you care, darling? You have what you’ve always wanted. Be satisfied.’

It was all too easy. She knew something he didn’t. Had she got to Robert Lampton? Robert hadn’t been too well lately, might very well be making an arrangement. He had no one else to leave his shares to – his wife died years ago and, David had been told, was never able to have children. That Robert didn’t like Madge meant nothing – blood was thicker than water. It seemed he’d have to keep an eye on Robert. With all these thoughts running through his head,
David nodded tersely and turned towards his bedroom.