Never Leave Me (36 page)

‘Nice to see you two,' Frank Warner said welcomingly as he greeted them at the door of his colonial-style mansion. ‘Come inside. You're just the people I want to help me with a discussion I'm having with Brad Dennington. He says that the war trials at Nuremburg are an unnecessary piece of exhibitionism. What do you think?'

‘I think he's a fool,' Greg said harshly, his face tight, a nerve jumping violently at the corner of his jaw. ‘It should be the entire German nation on trial, not just twenty-one hand-picked specimens.'

‘I'm not with you there,' Frank Warner said, plying them with drinks. ‘You can't make a nation responsible for the crimes of a few. It isn't rational. I have a friend who is German by birth. Lived in Los Angeles ever since he was a kid. You're saying he's as guilty as the animals in the SS simply because he's a German. He isn't. He's charming and cultivated and…'

‘Bullshit!' Greg snapped with such savagery that his host instinctively took a quick step backwards. ‘You don't know what you're talking about, Frank. I do. I was there. And what I saw, you would never believe. The whole race is mentally sick. They have to be, to have allowed the obscenities of Auschwitz and Dachau. Don't talk to me of charming, cultured Germans because there aren't any!'

Frank laughed awkwardly. He'd had no idea that Greg felt so deeply and he had certainly no desire to have his party founder on the rocks of German war crimes.

‘Forget it,' he said, clapping his hand on Greg's shoulder. ‘Let me introduce you to a friend of mine from New York. His company is thinking of changing its advertising agency. You may be able to help him out.'

Greg took a deep, steadying breath, reaching down for Lisette's hand as Frank led the way across the crowded room to a large, white-haired gentleman smoking a cigar.

Lisette didn't hear one word of the following conversation. She felt sick. So cold inside that she doubted if she would ever be warm again. Greg's revulsion against Germans was bone deep. The sights he had seen at Dachau had scarred him for life. In Greg's eyes all Germans were Nazis. There were no exceptions. They were all to be abhorred and shunned. The past that she had tried so hard to forget couldn't be forgotten. It was an impossibility.

‘… and he really is the most fantastic photographer,' Dinah Warner was saying vivaciously to her. ‘His photographs of young children are incredible. I'm sure he'd take the most stunning shots of Dominic…'

Dominic. Half French, half German. Dominic. The child Greg believed to be his son. The child who was the image of his German father.

‘Are you all right?' Dinah Warner was saying anxiously. ‘You look deathly. I think you'd better sit down for a minute. I'll go and get Greg.'

She saw Dinah interrupt his conversation with the New York businessman. She saw Greg's swift frown of concern. Saw him excuse himself and began to thread his way through the crush towards her. She saw the female eyes that turned in his direction. Saw the speculation, the heat, that his powerfully built, slim-hipped body aroused. There was an air of negligent sexuality about him that was infinitely disturbing. A masculinity that was palpable.

She had not married him for his looks, or his wealth. She had married him because he was kind. She had deceived him because she had discovered she was falling in love with him, and she was condemned to live with her deceit because that love had become the mainspring of her life.

‘Tired, sweetheart,' he asked, his brandy-dark eyes looking down at her with concern.

She nodded, confounded by desire for him, rigid with guilt and shame.

That night, for the first time, she had to feign her response when he made love to her. She wanted him with every nerve of her body and she was sexually crippled by the enormity of her deceit. It was as if her body was punishing her for her crime. She was frozen with guilt. Frigid with it.

She lay awake in his arms for hour after hour, tears burning the backs of her eyes, praying that she would become pregnant. That she would be able to give him a child that was truly his. A child that would free her of the self-inflicted nightmare into which she had plunged.

He was delighted when she told him, two months later, that she was expecting another baby.

‘It will be a Christmas baby,' she said, her eyes shining. ‘Won't it be the most marvellous present in the world?'

He held her tightly against him, his hands sliding up into her hair, his kiss her answer. It was a long time before he released her. When he did, he said, with a slight frown, ‘What about our trip? I promised you we'd spend the New Year of '47 in France.'

He saw longing touch her eyes and then she gave a Gallic shrug of her slender shoulders. ‘I don't mind about the trip. I just want to have this baby and make you happy.'

‘You don't need to have another baby to make happy,' he said, his white teeth flashing in a grin of amusement. ‘And I see no reason why we should cancel our plans. We'll have this baby
and
we'll go to France. Are Luke and Annabel still going to be spending the New Year at Valmy?'

She nodded, glad that she no longer felt constraint at the mention of Luke's name. ‘Yes. Papa is eager to show off the restoration work. Luke was over on a visit a few months ago and apparently told him that he thought it would be another five years before Valmy was habitable once more. Papa wants to prove to him how wrong he was.'

‘It will be quite a reunion,' Greg said, slipping his arms around her waist, feeling desire for her grow and harden. ‘All three of us back at Valmy again. Just like it was in May '44.'

She turned her head away from him quickly, but not before he saw a flare of something he did not understand flash through her eyes. What was it? Pain? Anguish? Was she still entertaining regret for having married him so hastily when she believed Luke to be dead?

‘Let's go to bed,' he said, sliding his hands up to her breasts. His doubts and jealousy about her feelings for Luke had been dormant for months now. He wasn't going to let one fleeting moment of doubt resurrect them.

She stilled her inner trembling and turned towards him, slipping her arms around his neck. For a second, the image of Dieter had been so strong that it had taken her breath away. Dieter in the first week of that now long ago May. Racing in to the chateau after his mad dash to Paris. Taking her in his arms and telling her that he loved her, that he would always love her, before sprinting from Valmy to face the approaching invasion fleet. Dieter, dying in her arms, his lifeblood sticky on her hands, staining Valmy's ancient stone flags a dark, hideous crimson.

Gently Greg pulled the pins from her hair, unbuttoning her blouse, pulling her down on the bed. She tried to close her mind to her memories, to respond lovingly to him, but the guilt that had frozen her after the Warner's party still lingered. She couldn't overcome it. She loved him and she needed him, but she could no longer respond to him. And he knew it.

‘What's the matter?' he asked urgently, his brows flying together as he stared down at her. ‘Is it me? Don't you love me, Lisette?'

‘Oh yes,' she gasped, wrapping her arms around him tightly, pressing her cheeks against his shoulder, her tears scalding his flesh. ‘I
do
love you, Greg! It's just that…' She floundered helplessly. The only words that made any sense were the truth. That she was frozen with guilt. Sexually crippled by it. And to tell him the truth would be to lose him. ‘It's just that I'm tired …' she said, hating herself for the feebleness of her lie. ‘It's probably the baby.' She hugged him tighter. ‘I'll be all right in a few months'time, I promise I will.'

It was at a party the week before they were due to leave for Europe on the
Normandie
that she met Jacqueline Pleydall. She had not really wanted to go to the party. She was much bigger and far more uncomfortable with this second baby than she had been with Dominic.

‘You look fabulous,' Greg had said to her, passing his hand caressingly over the full ripeness of her stomach as she faced herself in the mirror, bemoaning her size.

‘The only thing I can possibly wear is a tent!'

‘Then wear the raspberry tent that you wore to Chrissie's birthday dinner,' he said in amusement. ‘You looked stunning in it.'

She made a little moue, unconvinced, and he laughed. She was as beautiful, heavy with child, as she had been when svelte. If it hadn't been for the difference the baby had made to their sex life he would have been quite content for her to have been permanently pregnant. But the baby
had
made a difference. Her tiredness had not abated. He had been forced to the reluctant conclusion that not until the baby was born would things be back to normal between them.

‘Once the baby is here, everything will be all right,' she had reassured him fiercely. ‘I know it will be!'

He had told her not to worry and he had kept a tight rein on his physical desire for her. He had not been at her side throughout her pregnancy with Dominic and this curtailment of the sexual side of their marriage had taken him by surprise. He would be glad when her pregnancy was over. When the deeply sexual side of her nature once more left him in no doubt as to the depth of her love for him.

The raspberry chiffon dress made her feel graceful and almost slender again. She looped a rope of pearls around her throat, put pearl and diamond studs in her ears and sprayed herself with perfume.

He dropped a kiss on the nape of her neck. ‘Ready?' he asked, and she saw the heat at the back of his eyes and knew she had only to reach out and touch him, to say one word of encouragement, and the party would be forgotten.

‘Yes,' she said, turning away from him, hurting with need. She ached for him. Yearned for him. Yet she dare not reach out for him for fear of the failure that would surely follow. The frigidity she would be unable to hide.

Her hand trembled as she picked up her evening purse. In another two months her torment would end. The child that she gave him would be his. She would be free of her burden of guilt.

She had become accustomed to meeting the same, small, wealthy circle of people at every party and function they attended. In some ways San Francisco was as parochial as Sainte-Marie-de-Ponts. It was as they were waiting to greet their host and hostess that she became aware of a tall, willowy blonde girl she had never seen before.

‘Who is the girl over by the window?' she asked Greg curiously. ‘The one wearing a black dress that looks as if it's a Balenciaga.'

Greg looked across the room and as he did so the girl's eyes met his. Lisette sensed Greg tense, saw the girl look away from him quickly, a flush of colour warming her cheeks.

‘Jacqueline Pleydall,' he said with unusual terseness. ‘She's been in New York for the past year. She's a fashion buyer for
Vogue.
'

Lisette felt a stab of shock. Her eyes flew once more in the blonde's direction but her back was now firmly to them and she was in conversation with Frank Warner.

‘Were you once engaged to her?' she asked, oddly disconcerted.

‘No.' His brows flew together. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?'

‘Oh … I thought… I overheard it somewhere…'

‘People assume,' he said, and there was a tight look around his mouth that she had never seen before. ‘We were very close once. But we were never engaged.'

Lisette dragged her attention away from Jacquetine Pleydall long enough to greet her host and hostess, but as they began to circulate she found her eyes returning again and again to the sleek, golden-haired girl who had apparently thought that she would one day be Mrs Greg Dering. She was extraordinarily beautiful. Her hair was shoulder length, falling seductively at either side of her face in deep, undulating waves. Her face was fashionably made up: her eyebrows arched, her mouth a glossy red. She looked very American. Very self-assured. And yet she had flushed like a schoolgirl when her eyes had met Greg's.

She didn't move from her position at the window and Greg showed no hurry to make his way across to her, but Lisette knew that the girl was acutely aware of Greg's presence. She could sense the girl's eyes on her, as hungrily curious as she knew her own were. She wished that she had asked him about her when she had first heard the gossip aboard the
Liberié.
That she had given him the opportunity to tell her exactly what their relationship had been.

‘And so they see it as a form of economic imperialism,' Frank Warner was saying to her.

Lisette gave an apologetic smile. ‘I'm sorry, Frank. I wasn't listening. Who sees what as economic imperialism?'

Greg was talking to their host. Jacqueline Pleydall, now that Frank was no longer monopolising her, was moving easily from group to group, drawing nearer and nearer to him.

‘Stalin,' Frank said as their champagne glasses were replenished. ‘He thinks the Marshall Aid plan for financially propping up war-devastated Europe, Germany included, devious. He doesn't see it for what it is. A genuine attempt by America to set Europe back on its feet.'

Lisette's fingers tightened fractionally around the stem of her glass. She loathed talking about Europe with Greg's friends. They discussed the war and its aftermath so glibly and they had so little real understanding. German jackboots had not marched through San Franciscan streets. Their museums and art galleries had not been looted of their treasures. The Presidio had not been requisitioned by the German High Command. They thought they knew what Europe had suffered, but they didn't. Only the Americans who had been there and who had fought, had any understanding, and even for them it hadn't been the same as it had for the British and French and Russian soldiers. It hadn't been their land that had been ravaged; their cities that had been bombed.

‘… so the Russians see the aid we are giving, even the tractors and lorries, as being politically and militarily motivated…'