Lessons in Heartbreak (38 page)

She’d be there by now, garnering admiring glances as she sat with her beloved sister and her brother-in-law’s friends. Lily had been to the Savoy with Diana once before, had drunk in the heady atmosphere of the exquisite Art Deco palace and the frisson that this,
here
, was where it was all happening.

For once, she wished she were back in the nurses’ home: at least in the common room there would always be someone to talk to and a radio to listen to. Right now, she felt so isolated, so not a part of anything any more.

And then she heard it: the low drone of the siren. Instinctively, she looked up, trying to see the deadly V-2 rockets in the sky, as if seeing them would keep her safe from being hit.

Once you could see them, you were safe, surely? Not true: the wards of the Royal Free were full of people who’d seen and yet still ended up destroyed with bomb fragments.

The siren grew steadily louder. As familiar as the sound was, it had taken on a new, terrifying aspect since the advent of the V-2s. Her heart was racing as she tried to remember where the nearest shelter was. Of course: Lancaster Gate Underground.

She joined the river of people streaming towards the station steps and in moments, she was caught up in the crowd, being jostled down into the entrance, past an old ‘Make Do and Mend’ poster with the ends curling up as it came off the wall.

Normally, Lily hated the Underground and steered well clear of it. Some people loved the camaraderie of bedding
down on the station platforms at night, joining in with the sing-songs and taking advantage of the tea provided at dawn. But not her. For Lily, the thought of being buried alive in a narrow, airless tunnel beneath the ground made this a far from safe haven.

New panic clawed up inside her as she reached the ticket hall. The only way down was the lifts. She hated lifts, and especially now, when they’d be full to bursting. Crushed in the human river, she had to fight to breathe. If the entrance was bombed, she’d be buried alive in a small metal box at the bottom of a lift shaft. She knew she had to get out.

Even the V-2s couldn’t be as bad as a slow death in an airless coffin.

‘Let me out!’ she shrieked and turned, pushing against the human river trying to force their way in. It was all she could do to keep breathing, let alone move against the flow, but she knew she couldn’t turn back now.

‘Lily.’

She thought she heard somebody call her name but she couldn’t be sure: it was like being in a nightmare, she didn’t know what was real or not.

‘Lily!’

It was the voice she’d heard in her dreams, and the last person she’d expected to see here today. Jamie.

He was behind her in the crowd with his hand held out, fingers reaching towards her.

‘I have to get out,’ she shouted wildly. ‘I can’t go down in the lifts.’

‘Hold on,’ he yelled back. ‘I’ll get you.’

She knew it was madness to climb back up to the street, but she didn’t care. Only one crazy thought gripped her: once she was with Jamie, she’d be safe.

With a final surge of energy, she reached his fingers first, then his strong hand gripped hers and hauled her against him. Her
face was crushed against the scratchy wool of his Navy uniform, and she breathed in, inhaling his scent and the sensation of being safe.

The crowd was thinner now, and with Jamie holding her, they made it up to the street.

It was only a few minutes since she’d heard the siren, yet it seemed like hours. The streets were nearly deserted, like a ghost city banked up with sandbags: only the foolhardy weren’t seeking shelter.

‘Here,’ he pulled her into the doorway of a big, imposing house with a huge portico above them. ‘It’s as safe as anywhere above ground.’

His arms were around her and Lily held on to him tightly. From the east, they could hear the low rumbling of the bombs. Like counting thunderclaps when she’d been a child, Lily felt a guilty relief that the bombers were targeting somewhere else.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

‘I came to see you,’ he replied.

Lily looked up into his face. His eyes were the most extraordinary colour: a lucent grey that appeared lit from some powerful inner force. They weren’t the sort of eyes that could lie. Searching them, she found nothing but truth.

‘Why?’

‘You know why,’ he said in a low voice.

She kept looking at him, wondering how she knew his face so intimately when she barely knew him. The dark eyebrows, the scar that bisected one and made her long to run her fingers wonderingly over it.

‘I’ve been keeping away from you,’ he said. ‘I made myself stay away. I told Philip I couldn’t meet him later. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to see you again. When I went to the Savoy and Diana told me you weren’t coming, I knew I had to see you.’

‘It’s wrong,’ she said. She couldn’t look at him. He’d come to find her and she wanted him so much, but it was wrong. He had a wife. Under the eyes of God, he couldn’t betray that wife. She couldn’t betray his wife. If they gave in, they would be committing adultery, a mortal sin.

Would God forgive that?

True, her faith had been rattled during the war from what she had witnessed. How could God allow this much pain and death?

Jamie took one of her hands and brought it to his lips. She could hear his breathing deepen. They’d have to think about God afterwards, there wasn’t the time now.

She brought him home, led him up the stairs into her bedroom. It was a large and dark room, with heavy alizarin crimson wallpaper and a vast bed and wardrobe in a rich wood, and no carpet on the wooden floor.

Jamie shut the door, locked it, then grabbed her. It was hard to say which of them was fiercest: Lily wanted to meld herself to him and it seemed as if he wanted to devour her with his mouth, tasting her with his lips, his tongue plunging into her forcefully. Her fingers ripped at the buttons on his uniform. Briefly they separated as he opened his jacket, then tore at her cardigan.

There was no moment to think about what she was wearing: suddenly, she was naked, pressed against him. They fell on to the coverlet, bodies on fire against each other.

Lily had never felt a man’s hands on her naked skin and she arched herself against him, loving the feeling of his mouth on her nipples, biting, licking, sucking. She could feel his erection long and hard against the smoothness of the skin of her thigh and she wondered how she’d ever thought sex must be a strange business, from years of looking at men’s flaccid bodies in the hospital. They were ill, lethargic: Jamie was strong, powerful and a ferocious energy burned within him.

Furious intense ardent aggressive ferocious.

She stroked the long angry red scar on his hip, the scar that had brought him home the first time they met. He barely limped now, she realised: when they’d met at Sybil’s wedding, the limp was noticeable, but not any more.

‘Is it painful?’ she asked.

‘Not now,’ he breathed, fixing his mouth over her breast again.

Lily closed her eyes and gave in to the sensation.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he breathed.

‘I don’t care.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I want you to want me again.’

‘I do.’

‘And not be hurt.’ One long finger reached inside her and Lily felt her body spasm with pure pleasure.

‘We don’t have to –’

‘We do.’

She thought she’d die if she didn’t consummate this now. She swung herself underneath him and straddled him, reaching down to touch him and marvelling at the sensitivity of his body as he gasped in pleasure.

‘Tell me how –’

He positioned her over him and their eyes locked: lucent grey on pure blue, while their bodies slowly moved. Then she felt him nudging inside her and she couldn’t breathe. Still, he stared at her and she could sense him falter, and knew it was for her benefit.

Then she moved her body, sliding so that she was impaled upon him and the huge surge of him inside her made her cry out.

‘Oh, Lily,’ he groaned and then they were moving together, clinging tightly, his hands gripping the soft curve of her buttocks until Lily felt the slow burn of ecstasy ripple out from somewhere inside her and she gasped, arching herself
on top of him, reaching, stretching, and then he was with her.

They lay curled together afterwards, with the curtains still open. The moon was a sleek crescent curve in a dark sky.

‘You’ve no idea how many nights I’ve looked out of the window and wondered about you,’ Lily said, snug in the curve of his arm. ‘I wondered, could you see the same moon, where were you, what were you doing, and if – if you ever thought about me.’

‘I haven’t thought of anything else,’ he said with humour in his voice. ‘They’re not best pleased with me in the War Office. Think I’m going back to the sub soon.’

There was silence. Not talking about where they were going was a part of a submariner’s life and intellectually, Lily understood it totally. Emotionally, it hurt. If he had to go, she wanted to know where, so she could follow every moment in the newspapers, on the radio and in the newsreels. That way at least, she could be close to him.

She knew so little about submarines, only that, unlike battleships, once they were hit, there was little hope for survivors. The sea was cruel and unrelenting. He could die so easily, locked underwater in that claustrophobic tube. The terror of his dying like that pierced her.

‘We shouldn’t have done this,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that we’re going to be punished. You’re married and, in my faith, that’s for life. How can we have a future?’

‘I’m fed up with concentrating on the future,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Life is all about future. If we win this campaign, if the Allies advance here, if the Axis fails there…What about now? What about how we feel now? What about me making a mistake seven years ago when I got married and now having to deal with that every day of my life since I met you.’

‘You made a mistake?’ It was what she wanted to hear. Jamie had married the wrong woman. But she was Catholic.
Mistakes didn’t matter when it came to marriage. Marriage was for life. God was watching, He was tallying it all up. If she disobeyed the rules, she would pay with her immortal soul. That was absolute: there were no grey areas when God talked to you.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

Lying in each other’s arms, he told her about Miranda, the girl he’d grown up knowing as almost a best friend. Their mothers had been bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. In 1937, they’d got married.

‘I knew it was a mistake even then,’ Jamie said. ‘On our wedding night –’

Lily flinched in the bed beside him.

‘– Miranda locked herself in the bathroom and cried. She wouldn’t come out. I told her we didn’t have to do anything, that I wouldn’t touch her, but she refused to come out.’

‘Why?’

‘She was frightened of me, frightened of making love. She’d led a very sheltered life and she had no idea what was going to happen. Whatever her mother had told her had terrified her. She’d kept up the façade until we were alone and then it all spilled out.’

Lily hugged him more tightly.

‘What did you do?’

‘I slept on the floor,’ he said. ‘It was hardly the ideal wedding night, but that wasn’t what worried me: it was the thought of the future. A woman who’s that scared of you isn’t going to get over it easily. She loved me well enough during the day, but at night, she was terrified of me.’

Lily could hear the remembered pain in his voice.

‘She’d been led to believe that men were like beasts, that once the doors closed, we couldn’t control our appetites. She told me that, later.’

‘Couldn’t you talk to her about it?’ Lily asked. ‘Or speak to her mother…?’

‘Her mother was the problem,’ Jamie said. ‘She was the one who’d told Miranda about men being beasts. There was no one I could ask for help. We had to get through it.’

‘And did you?’ Lily asked quietly.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘We didn’t. My mother and, ironically enough, Miranda’s, are always enquiring about the patter of tiny feet and when we’re going to start filling the nursery. Before the war, I thought about divorce, but then I joined up and it was easier to do nothing. Divorce felt like failure and I’d never failed at anything in my life before Miranda. Then I met you…’

He turned to face her. ‘I fought it, Lily, because it wasn’t fair to flirt with you when I was still married. That’s why I didn’t write to you after the wedding. You deserve someone who’s free, you deserve the best. But…’ He kissed her face, moving from her forehead to her eyelids, down the bridge of her nose, to the softness of her lips. ‘I couldn’t help myself. That’s why I made up my mind to talk to you tonight, to tell you I could get a divorce. Miranda wasn’t a failure after all – our sham of a marriage meant I was waiting for you. You’re my future.’

Lily felt her heart ache.

‘I’m sorry, Jamie. There can’t be any future for us. Even if you divorced your wife, I couldn’t marry you. A Catholic cannot marry a divorced person. I’d be excommunicated. I can’t do that, I can’t live without my faith.’

Jamie didn’t say anything for a while and Lily felt angry, angry that he didn’t want to understand.

‘You must see how it is for me,’ she said. ‘I was raised like that, my faith is part of me, part of my family. It’s different for you. God’s important to me.’

As she said it, she could see her parents at Mass on a Sunday, praying, believing utterly. She could see herself in the virginal
white of her First Holy Communion dress, her heart bursting with pride on this special occasion. Didn’t he see that she couldn’t marry him because she’d never be part of her church again? God might forgive her this, but not more, not marrying a divorced man.

‘Do you honestly believe that?’ he demanded. ‘That God gives a damn who you marry? How does He work it out, then? Remember when we first met and you told me about those little boys you saw in the hospital, looking like they were asleep in their pyjamas. Who decided they would die? God? Did He make a good choice? I don’t think so, and I bet their parents don’t think so, either. Who decided that war was a good idea? Are you telling me that ordinary people want it?’ He was almost shouting now. ‘Ordinary people in Germany, do they want their sons killed and their daughters bombed? No.’