He had brought her to pleasure with gentleness, but he had done it roughly, too, with a kind of urgent desperation she understood, even while it made her writhe and gasp. That first time, driving his fingers into her, she had arched and cried out, and he had moaned at the sight of blood on his hands, for a moment not understanding that it was virginal blood, her cry the cry of all women invaded for the first time. It had, however, deepened the bond between them, subtly altering some delicate balance in their relationship. Prior to that she had been the one to encourage and reassure; afterwards he was more dominant, and also, oddly, more protective.
‘I love you,’ he said sleepily, nuzzling her neck, burying his fingers in her tangled hair. He ran a hand over her body, over breasts and belly and thighs, teasing her gently. She turned to him and he kissed her with slow, languorous pleasure, murmuring against her lips, ‘I shall probably wake up in a minute, in that bloody hard bed in Wandsworth’.
His words, regrettably, broke the spell. As she shivered, Liam wrapped his arms around her and held her close. ‘There’ll be other times — we’ll find ways of being together, you know we will...’
But with a mass of impossibilities flooding her mind, Georgina could only cling to him in disbelief. Loving him, wanting to keep him close forever, she could see only the perfection of what they had shared, and the future’s bleak uncertainty. Her father might be away for another ten days, which presupposed one more meeting here; but after that...
There had to be ways, even if it meant meeting in hotels for a few stolen hours; she had money, more than enough, and was prepared to do anything, anything at all, to be with him.
The fog was still thick, but a sense of duty made it incumbent upon them both to attempt a return to their rightful places. Laying out her spare uniform, Georgina set the iron to heat and gathered up Liam’s clothes for pressing. She fetched a razor from the collection in her father’s room, together with a brush and a keg of sandalwood shaving soap, laying them down before a small mirror on the wash-stand in her room.
‘There we are. But if you want to brush your teeth, my darling, you’ll have to borrow mine. I haven’t got a spare one.’
‘Oh, I think I can bear that,’ he responded with a grin.
Bringing a jug of hot water from the kitchen, Georgina left him to it. With a towel wrapped around his waist, Liam washed quickly in the early morning chill, hesitating only briefly before attacking the stubble along his jaw. He had to shave, it was a matter of necessity, and stupid to be so finicky about using Robert Duncannon’s things. But he disliked it, performing the task with as much speed and efficiency as he could muster. Satisfied, dabbing his face dry, he went in search of Georgina and his clothes. Shirt, jacket and trousers were all pressed and ready to wear, commensurate with his tale of staying with relatives as an overnight guest.
While she prepared breakfast for them both, he returned to her room to dress, noticing that the other bedroom door was also open. He saw a large bed with a maroon eiderdown, and on the bedside chest, facing him, a collection of photographs.
He glanced away, was on the threshold of Georgina’s room when recognition swept over him in a wave of guilt. He turned back to look again.
From a silver frame, his mother’s face regarded him. It was a familiar photograph, one taken when she was young, with cropped, curly hair and such a proud tilt to her chin. In his surprise at finding it there, that sense of being caught in something shameful disappeared. He was fascinated by her youthful loveliness, which it seemed he had never before noticed: in his memory she was much older, her face softened by time. But even as he stared at it, the photograph blurred and he had to sit down, almost unmanned by images of childhood, his mother’s constant, reliable affection, her care and gentleness. Assailed by sorrow and regret, he asked whether she deserved the cruelty he had meted out, and knew she did not. His behaviour towards her had been unforgivable.
He thought of the war, and the dozens upon dozens he had killed in the heat of battle; but he had pitied German and Turkish prisoners, even sharing food and water and cigarettes when necessary. It struck him then, and very bitterly, that he had been kinder to sworn enemies than he had been, in recent years, to his own mother.
He picked up the polished silver frame and looked at that lovely young face, and for the first time he was able to view her, not as his mother, but as a contemporary, with thoughts and feelings akin to his own. Like Georgina, about her age, full of life and passion, with the same needs, the same yearnings, reaching out, crossing barriers, taking what love had to offer, while ever it was offered.
Like Georgina. Just like Georgina.
And he thought of Robert Duncannon, whose room this was, a young man then, not much older than himself; and he thought of that tragic marriage, doomed to misery and failure.
Robert Duncannon: keeping his mother’s photograph, still beside the bed after all these years. Suddenly Liam understood the love that must have been between them then, that need to grab hold of happiness before it could slip away...
And Liam thought about himself, loving Georgina, knowing it should not be, yet committing the unforgiveable. Carried away in the heat of the moment, they had both wanted that consummation, both intended it, despite its incestuous nature and regardless of the consequences. If degrees of wrongdoing were to be considered, Liam knew full well that in the scheme of things, adultery was far less culpable than incest.
It made him shiver. He had blamed his mother and Robert Duncannon for heinous sin, yet it seemed to him now that what they had shared was no more than the folly of loving unwisely. He had imagined that his love for Georgina was greater and purer and more magnificent than any man had ever felt before. But in the light of sudden revelation, he wondered whether all men felt like that. All women, too. And passion itself, once tasted, was self-perpetuating; being with Georgina, seeing and touching the beauty of her nakedness, he wanted more, always more.
He would always love her. Always.
Was that what Robert Duncannon felt? Did he, a man in his fifties, still love Louisa Elliott? Did he still long for her in the lonely hours of the night, still regret that parting?
Liam shivered again. That longing seemed present in the room. It clung to the photograph of his mother, to the other, smaller ones which stood beside it. He looked at them for the first time, and with a terrible lurch of the heart, recognized himself as a child. One was familiar, taken with Robin and Tisha some ten or twelve years before, possibly for Robert Duncannon’s benefit, and sent to him in India or South Africa, or wherever he had been stationed at the time.
There was another, one Liam had never seen: three children again, but much younger, and not the same three. A little girl of perhaps seven or eight years old, with long blonde ringlets and a pretty dress, holding a baby, awkwardly, on her lap; and beside them on the chaise longue, a chubby toddler in a sailor suit, stiff and frowning as though told to sit still.
Recognizing himself in the sailor-suit, recognizing Georgina, his throat constricted. It was true, then; it was all true. He remembered the house, the house in his dreams, and knew the little girl as he had always known her in his secret memories. It was Ireland, where his mother had been unhappy and cried a lot; where Father was a big man on a beautiful horse, who had once lifted him up, miles it seemed, to view the world from the height of his saddle.
Lost in that secret world, he never noticed Georgina come to him; became aware of her only as she slipped an arm about his shoulders and pressed her cheek to his. He tried hard to compose himself, but the flashes of memory were disconcerting, unconnected and incomplete. Turning to Georgina, he buried his face in the crook of her shoulder, against the silkiness of her hair. It was impossible to speak, impossible to express the anguish he felt, the riot of emotions to which those sudden revelations gave birth. He was beginning to understand what he had never been able to grasp before, and it was painful, in a deep, wrenching, physical way.
Like a wounded man, he clung t
o her. ‘Hold me,’ he whispered, ‘don’t ever let me go...’
The sister on duty that day was on relief from another part of the hospital. Not knowing her, Liam was able to report with a series of half-truths which seemed convincing enough. Having the previous evening’s record book before her, she accepted his explanations with no more than an expression of sympathy at the state of the weather. Another Australian, she loathed these London fogs herself, and dreaded the coming winter.
With a sigh of relief, Liam let his stiff facial muscles relax, going into the kitchen to see if he could beg a hot drink. It had taken him more than two hours to get back, almost an hour since leaving Georgina at Vauxhall Bridge, and he had missed the usual mid-morning break.
One of the young nurses put the kettle on the stove to boil.
‘Heavens,’ she exclaimed, peering up into his face, ‘you look a bit peaky this morning. Did you have a bad time getting back? Wasn’t it terrible last night? I got lost, just trying to find the nurses’ home! Did you set off from your relatives’ house, or not even try?’
‘Didn’t even try,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘We were having tea and talking, and never noticed it getting worse. Then I went to the door, and everybody said it’d be folly to set off, and I’d better stay the night. I’m glad I did, otherwise I don’t think I’d have made it.’
‘Very wise. Kelly and McLaren didn’t get back till half-past ten from Stockwell – they’d been wandering round the back streets for nearly three hours! And the terrible trio spent the night on the floor at Horseferry Road – found their way so far, but couldn’t get any further. Awful.’
Liam sipped his tea and listened to a few more horror stories, glad to know that he was not the only one missing from the ward last night. Now they were returning to the fold, the wanderers would relate and embellish their stories with gusto, while his tale of a night spent with relatives would be far too dull to provoke interest. It was a relief: he was exhausted after not much more than three hours’ sleep, and the emotional upheaval that followed seemed to have drained his mind completely. He felt incapable of rational thought, and had only one idea in his head: to escape to the library as soon as he had eaten, find a quiet corner and a comfortable chair, and sleep.
Improved by supper time, Liam turned in to bed early, but there was an air of restlessness about the ward, raised voices which had the night-sister out of her office on several occasions, telling them all to remember those less fortunate. But there was nobody really ill; their numbers had been reduced to eighteen, most of them fitter than Liam, and just waiting for their cards to be marked convalescent.
Keen though he had been to elicit some leave, he was now back where he had begun: uncertain as to his feelings and praying for a little time to adjust. It was difficult to sleep. He was beset by too many new impressions, not least of which being that sense of things coming together, which had gripped him so forcibly that morning. Loving Georgina, he had been concerned primarily to avoid unpalatable consequences for her, and while his physical need was great, the very last thing he wanted was to leave her with a child. Had it not been for that consideration, he knew he would have made love to her fully. He loved her, and had it been possible, would have married her; the fact that they were brother and sister had no real meaning for him. That was the trouble: he had never been able to accept it. If he had, Liam reasoned, that innocent, boyish passion would have died years ago.
But it was hard to avoid the parallels between making love to her last night and being brought face to face with other realities this morning. Love and pain, past and present, York and Dublin, had all made themselves felt in a peculiarly harsh way, as though two rusty, long-unused parts of his life had suddenly meshed together with a great grinding of cogs and levers, jerking him forward to a point of new perception.
It was not a comfortable sensation. He had moments of gratitude and others of intense irritation, when he wished it would all go away and leave him in peace. In bed he wanted to think about Georgina, idly to dream about the hours they had spent together; he wanted to savour each precious moment, every new discovery. Yet as soon as he relaxed, it seemed something else came into his mind, like the visits Robert Duncannon had made to York when Liam was very young, or the occasion of his fifth birthday, when his mother and Edward had been married.
Because that memory was so clear, he gave in then, and let his mind settle on that for a while: the party, the surprise at coming home from school to find Aunts Emily and Blanche gathered there, everyone’s bubbling happiness. Having always thought that party was for him, Liam had felt betrayed when he found out; yet now it seemed a necessary deception, the only way to explain the celebration to three innocent, talkative young children. People must have assumed, for long enough, that Louisa and Edward were married, just as he had assumed that Edward was his father.
When had that happened? He could not recall when or how or why he had abandoned his memories of Dublin and Robert Duncannon, but in the light of Georgina’s recollections, he wondered whether, at two years old, the shock of being wrenched away from things known and loved, had had anything to do with it. That dawn parting on a bleak quayside had marked her very deeply: and although he did not recall clinging to her and being dragged away by her aunt, Liam had suffered with her as she told the story. What he did remember, very vaguely, was arriving in the dark of a winter’s night at a strange house, and strange people whose accents he did not understand. He remembered crying with fear and loneliness.
Another incident, much later, stood out very clearly, and it was a memory which had returned that day at the Maddox farm, when Ned bent to examine the horse’s legs. Even now Liam could see Robert Duncannon doing the same thing, and as he rose, saying wistfully, ‘You don’t know what to call me, Liam, do you?’
Standing before that imposing man, the child had been so frightened, so guilty in the knowledge of his own disloyalty, so confused by that sudden and unlooked-for return.
Did I know, then, who he was? Liam wondered. But he could not be certain; only emotion remained, and even that was fading fast with the strange new ability to accept old truths. And he could accept them now only because he had begun to understand.
But truth, as ever, was a two-edged sword. If memory had at last consented to show him the indissoluble link which existed between himself and Robert Duncannon, then it had also revealed the connection between himself and Georgina. There was suddenly less pleasure in recalling that long night of love and mutual exploration, and the arousal it produced was tinged, very definitely, with unease.
When he did sleep, it was not to dream of any of those things, but to experience again, for the first time in weeks, another terrible nightmare about Pozières.
Twenty-six
It was a strange, unsettling week. For three days the fog lingered in a claustrophobic blanket that did nothing to ease his introspection or sense of guilt. When he was not hugging the stove on the ward, Liam was in the library searching for fresh books to read, and when he was not reading, he was busy writing letters, most of which he destroyed.
To whom could he confess; to whom turn for advice? No one, that was the short answer, and yet he had never felt more in need of help. There was no escaping the fact that what he felt for Georgina, what they had already shared, was incestuous; and the matter of incest was taboo, with church and state and society unanimously sweeping the whole subject beneath a dusty carpet of ignorance. He looked back on the hours spent with Georgina in this ward, these grounds, under the eyes of both authority and friends, and knew he could never, ever, confess what was between them. Not to anyone.
It would have helped if he could have seen her, to talk over the things that kept going round in his mind, but the weather resolutely prevented that. He found himself praying, with the fervour of a fanatic, that Sunday would be clear enough for them to make their planned assignation.
Another nightmare about Pozières woke him in the early hours, but in the trembling, sweati
ng aftermath, he heard the steady drumming of heavy rain on roofs and windows. It cleared the sulphurous fog, leaving the morning bright and new-washed, raising everyone’s spirits like a breath of spring. There was almost a fight for passes that afternoon, but Liam was lucky, and a little after one he was on his way to meet Georgina at Vauxhall Bridge. Within the hour they were climbing the stairs to her apartment, and despite his creeping feeling of guilt, very shortly after that he was again making love to her.
The bedroom smelled of roses from a bowl of pot-pourri on a chest near the window, and her skin gave off a similar fragrance, as though she liked to wear, and be surrounded by, a constant memory of summer. She reminded him of summer days, of those last glorious weeks he had spent at home before the war; open cornfields beneath a wide blue sky, the warmth of gentle sun and larks singing with blithe unconcern. She was warm and happy and giving, allowing nothing to mar their brief time together, allowing nothing to intrude. Relaxed, breathing gently, she lay along the length of him, her long and beautiful legs entwined with his, face hidden in a curve of his shoulder, hair lying in glinting strands across her back.
He wound the long, silky hair through his fingers, heart-breakingly aware of her beauty and the love they shared. But for him the innocence was gone. He knew the depth of his desire and he knew it should have no place here, felt it like a weight at the core of his being. Yet he could no more stay away, he thought, than sprout angel’s wings; and he would go on seeing her, go on loving her like this, for as long as it was permitted.
Sensing that difference in him, Georgina stirred, asked what was wrong. He shook his head, said it was nothing, but she was not convinced. Eventually, with much hesitancy, he did manage to put into words what he had been trying to write, without success, for days. Going back to the moment of awareness, that moment when he had finally been able to accept the truth of who his father was, he tried to explain this sudden sense of guilt; and in the telling of it, it seemed to Liam that they had been shown a glimpse of paradise, only to have it snatched away.
Liam's Story Page 48