by Maggie Ford
He’d see Mary all right of course; make sure she’d want for nothing – in fact she could keep the flat and everything in it: her clothes, her jewellery, everything. But he had truly had enough.
He told her that September, leaving time enough for a judge to decree that the divorce must go through quickly owing to the child being bom illegitimate if the guilty parties could not marry in time. Mary had gone potty, tearing at him with her claws, sobbing and shrieking until he thought she would go completely insane. There was nothing she could do but comply to a divorce for adultery.
At the end of January, he and Pamela were married – not a sly little registry-office marriage but a full-blown society one with a huge reception at the Cafe Royal. Though he’d heard rumours of it having financial difficulties, nevertheless it did three hundred guests proud, not one waving an eyebrow at the bride’s condition. Her parents set them up in a spacious Bayswater address, their wedding present to the happy couple. Two weeks later Pamela gave birth to a son whom they called Edwin, Henry having mentioned the name when his own son had been born and Geoffrey having rather taken to it.
* * *
“I just want to finish it all, Henry. I don’t want to go on living.”
It was said without any trace of emotion. Sitting beside her in the lonely flat, Henry started. “For God’s sake, Mary, you mustn’t talk like that!”
It wasn’t so much what she said as the way she had said it, her tone hollow, her eyes empty and staring into space. She had lost weight, was mere skin and bone. During the months he had visited her regularly once a week, so deeply sorry for her, he had seen what little flesh she had fall away. She no longer took care of her appearance. The flat was a mess. There had been a woman come in three times a week, but Mary had dismissed her, said she didn’t want anyone around looking at her, seeing her misery. Neglecting herself, hardly eating, refusing his invitation to leave this place and stay with him and Grace, she sat alone day after day.
His first idea had been that she would be a tonic for Grace who since the birth of little Hugh had herself become insular, housebound, wanting only to bestow all her love upon her son and still cringing away from him if he so much as laid a hand on her arm. Of marital pleasure he had none. It would have been good to have another person in the flat and he thought it might have got Grace out of herself, but Mary constantly refused. Alarmed by her condition, he could only come and visit her. But it was hard going trying to converse with someone who hardly ever spoke in return. Harder still that his heart raced each time he saw her, for all her fast degenerating appearance. It was April now, and he was becoming genuinely fearful for her health, her life.
He ventured an arm about her shoulders, the first time he had ever dared, her stiff composure seeming hitherto to forbid it, and was relieved that she didn’t flinch away as Grace would have done. In fact she leaned against him, the warmth of her thin body penetrating his shirt and waistcoat, he having taken off his jacket in a room hot from her only effort at comfort, the fire in the hearth carelessly stoked up to almost danger height.
“Listen, Mary,” he coaxed. “You mustn’t go thinking things like that. Time will pass and you’ll settle down. Maybe in time you’ll find someone who will be a comfort to you.”
For a moment his thoughts flew to William Goodridge who had once been her fiancé, maybe could be again. Old flames could be reawakened. Then he knew he didn’t want Goodridge to be anything to her. The person he wanted to be something to her was sitting here right beside her. He felt a pumping in his chest, a pumping that was transferring itself to the lower half of his body. Wild imaginings were beginning to consume him and hastily he took his arm away from her. It was then she flinched, as if something dear had been snatched from her. She looked at him, her grey eyes wide.
“Don’t let go of me, Henry. I’m afraid. Don’t leave me alone.”
What could he do but replace his arm about her? His face was close to hers as he whispered. “I would never let any harm come to you, Mary. I shall always be here for you.”
Suddenly his lips were on hers and she didn’t draw away. There was an amazing warmth in those lips. It flowed through his body like treacle. He hardly knew exactly when he pressed her down on the sofa, fumbling at her; hardly knew when she, gasping and sobbing but far from pushing him away, had drawn him into her.
Four
Alone in her flat, no one but Henry calling on her, Mary had felt as the dead might feel, if they could feel. She recalled little of what went on in the outside world, did not read the newspapers or listen to the wireless. The end of 1927 and the early months of 1928 passed her by unrecorded, events of consequence to others seeming incapable of penetrating her brain: London’s worst flood in living memory – fourteen people drowned in their basements as the Embankment gave way at Westminster; Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales – Dickie, as she and Geoffrey had once come familiarly to know him – appointed master of the Merchant Navy. He had thrown an informal party but of course she hadn’t been invited. Geoffrey and his new wife had. She did indeed feel dead.
She had smoked incessantly, no longer using the long elegant cigarette holders she had once used during her carefree society days – they reminded her too much of that time – but straight from the packet, one after another sometimes when she really felt at her lowest. Brandy helped too, but being drunk instead of blanking out her situation only heightened it and made her cry until her nose became blocked, her eyes swollen and her head aching.
It was all gone: the trips to Monte Carlo, tea at the Cafe de Paris surrounded by wealthy friends, and then the Casino; Le Touquet, aboard somebody’s luxury yacht; Paris, lunching at the Ritz, dining at Maxim’s; the races at Longchamps, the motor racing at Le Mans, and shopping, always shopping. Even here, there would be no more of that life: the exciting and often seamy night-clubs; the wild and outrageous parties that went on until daylight; the mad trips to the south coast in open limousines; circuit race meetings at Brooklands; the exclusive hats at Ascot. No more Coco Chanel suits, Patou bathing and beachwear, Paquin cocktail dresses, Reboux hats. Her furs, the silver fox stoles, her fine coats with deep cuffs and collars of fox fur, hung unused in her wardrobe; the gold bangles and pearl necklaces lay untouched in her jewellery box.
But the year had moved on, and that first time Henry had come and made love to her in April had been for her a turning point. Yes, gone was the wild round of continuous fun, but she was beginning to feel less and less regret, and all due to Henry. Six months ago, she had been out of her mind, and later there had been that deadness. Now she had Henry and her life had begun taking a new turn. It wasn’t that she was in love with him in the same way she had been in love with Geoffrey – first love could never be repeated – but his caresses were what her benumbed mind had needed and his love-making what her body craved, and it didn’t seem wrong.
Yes, she was sorry for Grace. She’d reminded him of his wife that first time he made love to her, taking them both by surprise and frightening her even as she clung to him in the need to fill that awful emptiness Geoffrey’s adultery and desertion had left her with. It had brought her close to wanting to destroy herself – the only way she could think of being rid of all that pain of rejection and the knowledge of there being nothing to live for.
Henry had changed all that. Afterwards, instead of expressing regret at what he had done, he had said how he’d loved her since before Geoffrey married her. He’d said how he had tried to push her from his mind by his marrying Grace, but that none of it had worked; said that he had only ever wanted her. He had pushed aside her arguments that he hadn’t been fair to Grace by allowing what had happened, that they must never let it happen again. Yet she had wanted it to happen, a desire inside her equally as strong as that she once had for Geoffrey, and when he had visited her again and again made love to her, Mary knew that she couldn’t help herself any more. Grace was, after all, refusing to allow Henry anywhere near her and only had herself to blame, and in that ca
se she wasn’t being harmed by it. Also, Mary asked herself as Henry’s visits grew more frequent, why should she deny such a kind, lovely and gentle-natured man as he that which he so needed?
But sin reaps its own reward as her aunt had often said. She had died last year. A fatal stroke. Mary had gone to the funeral, Geoffrey off with his mistress though she hadn’t realised it then but had begun to wonder. She had gone alone. She had wept – for the past when she had been young; for the woman for whom she had cared for so many years; for herself that Geoffrey no longer seemed to want to make love to her and was hardly ever at home.
Now, as Mary’s “monthlies” failed, her aunt’s words came back like a blow to the forehead. In a fever of anxiety, Mary waited for the next month. Again nothing. Nor during the third month. Her small breasts began to enlarge and grow tender as they had when she’d been pregnant with Marianne. A visit to her doctor confirmed her fears. When Henry visited that day, instead of rushing eagerly to greet him, she sat waiting, and as he came and kissed her on the cheek, mystified by her attitude, she blurted it all out to him.
“What are we going to do?” Her voice was high and frantic as he sat beside her on the sofa.
This time there’d be no timely marriage as there had been with Geoffrey. Henry was already married. She was caught. This time there could be no backing out of some surgeon’s private back room.
Sitting so close to her, Henry must have read her mind, for he said suddenly, “One thing I am not going to do is sanction any idea you may have of getting rid of it – not unless you yourself decide you really have to. I realise that I cannot begin to know how you feel, but to me it’s taking the life of an innocent being. We both enjoyed what we had without regard for any consequence. Now, when something comes of it, it’s too easy to be rid of our responsibilities by taking the life our lack of caution created. Yet I’ve no right to say what you must do, my dearest. I want so much to protect you, Mary. What can I say?”
Such high-flown ideas were no ease to the knowledge that she was carrying an illegitimate child. The stigma would be upon it for the rest of its life, the brief birth certificate always there to condemn it into adult life and onwards, to be visited upon marriage and children yet unborn.
Sins of the fathers – and the mothers, in equal guilt. Yet sitting gloomily on the sofa, her hand in his, she knew deep in her heart that she could never destroy this life inside her. It wasn’t in her to do so.
“How is Grace these days?” she asked inanely. He shook his head.
“Same as ever.” His tone, like hers, was dull and lifeless. “She dotes on Hugh and has no time for me. I haven’t touched her for eighteen months. It’ll never be any different between us – not now.”
A spark of hope flickered in Mary’s breast. “If she doesn’t love you, Henry, maybe your marriage isn’t working.”
“I don’t know. We seem together only from habit. She pecks my cheek when I leave but never lets me peck hers in return. All she ever cares about is the boy. He’s her life. So long as they are together, I don’t count.”
“She doesn’t deserve you, Henry.”
For a moment it was as though he hadn’t heard her. “The first time I tried to approach her, and that was a full three months after the baby was bom, it ended in a row and her in tears. She refused to let me near her. I felt sure I had given her long enough to readjust to our marital relationship. Grace isn’t one to row and finally she let me touch her, but she lay there like a board, and when I tried, she let out a terrific scream and said that I was hurting her. She never let me even kiss her again, frightened that it might lead to other things. We ended up having separate beds and now she sleeps in the spare room with the boy.”
It was then that the significance of what Mary had said began to register with him. He looked at her. “What did you mean, darling, what you said a moment ago?”
In Mary’s mind her question had taken precedence over everything else. Now she said slowly, “I meant would you consider going on with your marriage under those circumstances, Henry?”
“You mean divorce?”
“Darling, it’s not a marriage, is it? You have adequate grounds for a divorce, surely.”
She didn’t add that, divorced, he could marry her, give the baby his name. Such a suggestion had the flavour of a callous and calculating mind, and she didn’t want him to think that of her. As it was, he was looking at her, aghast.
“I couldn’t do that – not to her.”
Suddenly all the tension of three months burst out of Mary. It came out cruelly. “But you could do this to me!”
For a moment longer he regarded her, pain dark in his sombre eyes, then slowly he got up from the sofa, gazing down at her face, now white and stunned from her own thoughtless words.
“It took two of us, my dear, if you recall.”
She threw aside the fear that began to grip her, that he would walk out and not come back, the blood of his brother lurking there within him.
“Henry… darling.” She found herself gasping, tears of terror misting her vision of him. “I know it’s my fault too. I didn’t mean to say it like that. It’s that I’m so frightened. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to destroy our baby. I couldn’t. But what am I going to do? I’m all alone and I’m so frightened.”
Abruptly he sat down again beside her, took her in his arms, held her close as she sobbed desolately against his chest. His voice crooned brokenly above her. “I can’t divorce Grace. It has nothing to do with what society will think or what people will say. It’s just – I couldn’t do that to her, as much as I couldn’t hurt her by telling her what we are to each other. But I shall find a way. I promise you, Mary. I will find a way.”
The room around them lay silent as Mary’s sobs subsided in defeat. There was no fire in the grate this time of year to crackle away the stillness. Only the small clock ticking rapidly on the tiled mantelshelf made any sound while outside, the hushed roar of passing traffic diminished the quiet in the room even more.
Suddenly Henry was kissing her damp cheeks, her eyes, her mouth. Continuing to kiss her, he bore her back upon the sofa, his hands feeling for her breasts. “I love you, Mary. I love you more than anything else in this world. I’ll never stop loving you. I could never leave you.”
She could feel the heat of him against her bared legs, a hard throbbing heat, the feel of which she had hitherto loved so much. Now it startled her, as though she were being abused. She shot upright, pushing him viciously away from her.
“No!”
He was looking stupidly at her. “What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” Her voice rose to a shriek. “You mean you have to ask? I’m sick with worry and all you can do is… this!”
“I love you, darling.”
“I want your help, not this. Is this supposed to solve our problem? Go and find your wife, Henry. I don’t want you, this way. Go home to Grace. You can even tell her what you’ve been up to.”
She said much more but was no longer hearing her own words, merely her screaming, seeing him backing away. It was as though what love she’d had for him had flown like a caged bird, suddenly released, finding an open window. The caged bird, knowing only the safety of its earlier confinement, would fly headlong into danger, not understanding it, only vaguely aware of it, and it would die. She would die. But she would not be caged by the name of mistress, harlot, kept woman. Nor would she give Henry the comfort of being released from his part in guilt by apathetically sitting back while she made her own decision about abortion. She would keep her child and make her own way in the world, and to hell with him. To hell with all bloody men!
She watched as he left. She couldn’t see her own expression but it felt ghastly, and the look on his face confirmed it.
“I still love you, Mary,” he said at the door. “I will always love you. And I promise I shall find a way.”
* * *
His baby was due in April. Already it was early 19
29. He hadn’t seen Mary since late October, she so stiff and cold when he had last called on her that he had left feeling as if he had been thrown out. On one occasion he had sent her a cheque with some vague idea of helping her with the coming baby. She didn’t reply; it was never cashed. He realised that it had been a stupid gesture. She didn’t need his money. Geoffrey had left her secure, with the flat and a generous allowance, for all she no longer played a part in his life, he and his new wife enjoying themselves, at present in Egypt, the fashionable place for society people to holiday. But her refusal of Henry’s help brought it starkly home to him that she saw it as no more than conscience money. There was nothing he could do. To take his mind off Mary and their present problems he concentrated on the business. In fact, the year coming to its close, business became an overriding obsession which he recognised as the only way of putting her out of his mind. The old idea of making Letts bigger began to cost him sleepless nights during which all he could see was the profits a second restaurant might have made slipping through his fingers. They even became the focus of his dreams, coins and banknotes being tossed in some capricious breeze just beyond arm’s reach.
“We have to grow,” he argued with his mother. “It’s the only way forward. Things these days die if they aren’t moved forward, don’t you see? It’s become a competitive world.”
Geoffrey, of course, seeing only the extra shekels rolling in without a shrug of the shoulders at what it was going to cost before they did, was all for it, while Mother merely continued to miss the point that so many people were forced to book so far ahead it was reaching a ridiculous state of affairs.