Where the Heart Is (13 page)

‘But you did marry her. She was your wife.’

‘I did marry her, but she was never my wife.’

‘You can’t repudiate her now like that. I won’t let you.’

‘I’m not repudiating her. How can I repudiate what I didn’t have?’

‘You should be grieving for her as your wife.’

‘I can’t. I can only grieve for what she could have been. I want you, Bella. I need you. I need your sweetness and your warmth. I need your being alive and your love. I need
you.’
He was
reaching for her. ‘Come with me, back to your house. Let me love you and be loved by you in return.’

His voice had thickened and she could see, almost feel and smell the desire coming off him.

It would be so easy to do what he wanted, to let him take her, commit to her, knowing that once they had stepped over that barrier and crossed that boundary, there would be no stepping back. Once she had given herself to him Jan would want the banns read and his ring on her finger, she knew. It was so tempting, so much what she wanted–all that she wanted–to be his, to be loved by him, to take him within her body, to have his child, to hold that child to her as she had held baby Janette at the weekend. She wanted all of that so much, but even here in this office, her domain, she could feel that agonised shadow of his dead wife, reminding her of what was owed to her as his wife.

‘No,’ Bella told him. ‘We can’t do that. I won’t do it.’

‘I love you. I need you more than you can know. Time, life, are so precious, and who knows how little of them we may have? Please don’t deny me, Bella; don’t deny us. Let me have the sweetness of your love, let me have that memory.’

He was coming round the desk to her. In another moment he would be touching her, and once he did she would be lost. She wanted to be lost but it was wrong; they could not build their future on his wife’s death. Panic flared and burned inside her. If she couldn’t find the strength to send him away then she must make him go away, but how?

She looked at her desk. Her desk, her office, her nursery, her life, all were dependent on her respectability, her acceptability by her community, and she knew what to say. She took a deep breath and stood up.

‘I can’t and won’t do what you ask, Jan, because, you see, if I did, if I behaved as you want me to behave, it could cost me my job and that is a price I am not prepared to pay.’

‘You said you loved me.’

‘I did, but now I’ve discovered that I love my job more. You surely didn’t really think that I’d be prepared to sit around and think of nothing else but you, did you? You were a married man. I decided that couldn’t allow myself to love you.’

‘So you gave your love to this place instead.’ His voice was harsh with bitterness and disbelief.

‘Yes,’ Bella lied. ‘I really wish that you hadn’t come here like this. We’d agreed that we wouldn’t see one another again. I had hoped that my letter of condolence made my feelings, and the fact that I now see you merely as an acquaintance, plain.’

‘Bella, please don’t do this. Please tell me that you don’t mean any of this. Please tell me that you love me.’

‘I can’t do that. I think you had better leave, Jan. My staff will be wondering what’s going on, and I have an appointment to interview a new nurse in half an hour.’

She took advantage of his stiff disbelieving silence to skirt past him to the door and pull it open.

‘Goodbye.’

‘Bella, I know you love me.’

His face looked gaunt, deep hollows of pain beneath his cheekbones, his eyes sick with pain. Just looking at him made her feel as though someone was tearing out her heart.
Jan, Jan, my love, my heart, my life.
But if she let him stay, if she let him do what he wanted to do, how might he feel when the urgency of his immediate need had faded, and when he looked back and saw their loving as a betrayal, and her as someone who had aided him in that betrayal? What would that do to their love? For his own sake she could not give in. She knew Jan. She knew his integrity and his honesty; she knew what it would do to
him,
when this madness of despair and longing and need had lifted. He would hate himself. She said nothing.

‘Very well. If that’s what you want.’

Bella nodded, only when she could see him striding away from her, tall and handsome and strong, giving in to her own need to say a mental prayer for him–that he might be safe, that his heart might be healed, that one day he would understand the sacrifice she had made for him in not allowing their love to be tainted by the betrayal that would have been done if she had given him her hand and let him lead her to the place she really most wanted to be.

Sacrifice. Such an old-fashioned word, a word she herself would once have openly mocked and scorned, but which now went hand in glove with their wartime lives.

‘Well, the rooms seem to be OK,’ Gina announced with evident relief, as she stood in the open doorway to Katie’s hotel bedroom. They had arrived just over half an hour ago and had been shown up the elegant flight of stairs of the tall four-storey house in the Royal Crescent, the most famous of Bath’s elegant terraces, to their rooms on the second floor, by an ancient porter, who had accepted their tip with an uncommunicative grunt.

‘Too used to desperate men in uniform, oblivi-ous to what they’re tipping, I suppose,’ Gina had whispered to Katie once he had gone, a reference to the fact, as they had been told by their driver, and observed for themselves during their taxi ride from the station, Bath was filled with Admiralty and navel men, evacuated to the city at the beginning of the war.

‘I’ve checked the bathroom. It’s lovely and clean, and there are proper beds with springs–heaven. Doubles, as well–double heaven.’

Katie laughed. It would indeed be ‘heaven’ to sleep in a proper comfortable bed again instead of
her utilitarian single, which felt so hard and resembled a bunk rather than a proper bed.

The hotel had an air of faded shabby splendour about it, the furniture and the fabrics obviously good quality and equally obviously well worn.

‘We can’t expect too much from the food, I don’t suppose.’ Gina pulled a rueful face, and then looked at her watch. ‘It’s not quite two o’clock yet; what do you say we go out and have a look around and see if we can find a tearoom?’

‘That sounds a good idea,’ Katie agreed. She had already unpacked her small case and put her change of clothes tidily away in the wardrobe and the dressing table drawers. Not that she had brought much with her: a smart but plain dress for the evening ‘just in case’; the mackintosh that she had travelled from London in but now didn’t need as there was a clear sky and sunshine; a change of underwear; a clean blouse; and a cotton dress in case the weather should turn warm, plus her night things and sponge bag.

They had had a dreadfully cold winter, but it was April now so she felt reasonably safe to go out for their exploratory stroll wearing one of the mandatorily only-to-the-knee-length skirts that was all the Government allowed in order to conserve fabric and the time spent making it up. In a soft off-white linen, Katie’s had been made from curtain her mother had found in one of her trunks, and Katie was wearing it with a favourite white silk blouse patterned with black Scottie dogs wearing red bow collars, from before the war, underneath her old blazer, which fortunately steamed up well and still looked respectably smart.

A pretty scarlet scarf with white polka dots knotted at her throat brought a brave touch of colour to her outfit, although Katie would have liked something a bit more delicate than her thick lisle stockings to wear with her white T-strap shoes.

Living in the Campion household had given her an interest in her clothes and a confidence about what suited her that she had never imagined having before she had gone to Liverpool. It had been a shock to find that Jean Campion had parcelled up with her other things, and sent to her parents’ address, the gorgeous silk dress Katie had worn the first time she had danced with Luke–a dress that rightfully belonged to Jean’s sister Francine, but Jean had put in the loveliest little note saying that Katie was to have the dress ‘in memory of happy times’.

Katie knew, though, that she would never ever wear it again. She couldn’t because if she did she would think of Luke and then she wouldn’t be able to bear being without him, and she must not weaken and let that happen. Instead she tried to tell herself that the Luke she had loved did not really exist because that Luke would never for a minute have doubted her or her love for him.

Gina was wearing a similar outfit, although Katie felt that Gina, being taller, had a more–and rather enviable–sporty look about her.

By mutual agreement they set off to explore the famous Georgian area of the city first.

‘Oh, isn’t this heaven after poor old London, with its bomb sites?’ Gina enthused as they both stopped to admire the elegance of the Georgian buildings.

‘Yes,’ Katie agreed. ‘I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to be somewhere that hasn’t been bombed.’ She gave a small shiver. ‘Liverpool might have had the heart bombed out of it, but Hitler couldn’t bomb the heart out of its people.’ It was lovely, though, she admitted to herself, to be somewhere that the war hadn’t touched and where there was no destruction, somewhere that was a reminder of how life used to be.

‘This is such a beautiful place,’ she told Gina. ‘I’m so glad we came.’

Gina was an excellent guide, and made no attempt to hide her delight in recognising so many places she knew from Jane Austen’s books. Visiting the Assembly Rooms, which had only been reopened in 1938, after many years of neglect, so they had been told, had been a particular delight, as had Gina’s face when she had said to Katie in an awed whisper, ‘Just imagine, Jane Austen was actually here, in these rooms.’

They’d had afternoon tea at the Assembly Rooms, feeling deliciously self-indulgent although, as Katie had said ruefully, their clothes were rather utilitarian compared with the beautiful gowns of Jane Austen’s era, and tactfully managing to decline without offence the two-pronged approach made on them by a pair of smartly uniformed naval lieutenants.

‘Obviously looking for you-know-what,’ Gina had observed wryly once the lieutenants’ suggestion that they joined up with Katie and Gina ‘to leave a table free for other people’ had been declined.

‘“Life’s short, we should all have what fun we can whilst we can” types you mean? Yes, I thought
so too,’ Katie replied as she and Gina left the Rooms.

They were out longer than they had anticipated, agreeing that there was so much to enjoy in Bath that it would need far longer than a mere weekend to see it all.

When they came across a shop tucked down a pretty Georgian street, with a sign in its window advertising ‘Good-quality second-hand Ladies’ Garments’, Gina urged, ‘Do let’s go in.’

The aroma of good scent and mothballs inside the shop reminded Katie of the smell from the trunks in which her mother kept all her stage costumes.

‘Just look at this.’ Gina lifted the long skirt of a pale grey silk gown embroidered with darker grey bugle beads.

‘You’ve got a good eye,’ the woman behind the counter told Gina. ‘It’s real silk, that is.’

‘Why don’t you try it on?’ Katie suggested.

‘Only if you try something as well,’ Gina agreed, going back to the rail and picking out a pretty floral-patterned silk tea dress with a soft peach background. ‘This will suit you perfectly.’

Half an hour later, flushed and happy, the two girls left the shop carrying their new purchases. In addition to the grey silk, Gina had bought a beautiful cream satin blouse and Katie was the owner of the peach tea dress and a darling little navy-blue knitted cardigan with white banding and white bows on the pockets.

‘You’d never get anything like this in London any more,’ Gina justified their extravagance.

They agreed that it was time for them to head back to the hotel. However, somehow they took a wrong turning and by some small miracle, as they happily agreed, they found themselves in a cobbled street that led to an open area with a pretty green on which was being held a small fair. Eager shoppers were clustered around the stalls. After sharing a mutual look of enthusiasm, the two girls headed for the nearest stall, Gina’s eyes widening with delight as she pointed out to Katie the basket filled with what looked like long ribbons of coarse lace.

‘Do look at this. It’s so pretty.’

With trimmings of any kind so very hard to come by, Katie was as enthusiastic as Gina.

‘It’s called “tatting”, my love,’ the elderly woman managing the stall told them in a broad country accent. ‘I make it myself.’

‘How much is it?’ Katie asked.

‘Fourpence a yard. Or fivepence if you want the wider one.’

‘It would be silly not to buy some,’ Gina told Katie, ‘even if we don’t need it now. It’s so pretty and would trim up an old blouse beautifully.’

Having both bought four yards of the tatting, the girls moved on to stall selling second-hand books and prints.

‘Gina, do come and look at this.’ Katie showed Gina several prints of Regency ladies in elegant gowns.

‘Oh, what a marvellous find!’ Gina enthused, happily parting with five shillings for four of the prints after some brisk bargaining with the stall holder.

Arm in arm the two girls went from stall to stall, learning as they did so that it was an annual event and that a lot of the stall holders had come into Bath from the country to sell their home-made wares.

‘We could walk down to Pulteney Bridge after church tomorrow and explore round there,’ Gina suggested as they strolled back to their hotel still arm in arm, pausing every now and again to admire the tranquil beauty of the city and its wonderful buildings.

‘I’d love to,’ Katie told her.

Gina smiled. ‘You know, I can say now that I was a bit worried after I’d suggested we do this. It was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment suggestion, and afterwards I wondered how we’d actually get on. I don’t know about you but I can honestly say I can’t think of a woman friend I could better have enjoyed today with.’

‘Me neither,’ Katie agreed. She certainly couldn’t imagine Carole enjoying Bath. She’d have been complaining that she couldn’t see any dance halls.