As Time Goes By

by Annie Groves

‘Yes … thank you.’

  He had turned to follow her towards the kitchen table so Sally stopped and turned round.

  ‘I’ve laid the table for you in the dining room.’

  She had lowered her gaze and was keeping it fixed on the wall to one side of him but she knew anyway exactly the look that would be in his eyes, and how her sharpness would make them darken with anger.

  ‘I’ll eat in the kitchen, if you don’t mind. It will be warmer than the dining room.’

  This was the first time he had challenged her determination to keep him at a distance.

  ‘Very well.’

  He went to wash his hands in the downstairs cloakroom as she dished up the rabbit stew she had made earlier in the day. Molly’s dad had brought the rabbit round, along with some veg from his allotment. As soon as she had put the plate in front of him Sally went to put the kettle on.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea and then I’ll be up off to bed. The washing-up can wait until morning.’

  ‘Sally, don’t go. Please stay and have a cup of tea with me. I’m not really in the mood for my own company tonight.’

  She’d be a fool to stay, she knew that.

  ‘Very well, Doctor.’

  She could hear him exhale as though he had been holding his breath.

  ‘You’re always rushing around so much – come and sit down for a minute.’

  ‘I’ve got the tea to make.’

  ‘Then when you’ve made it. I feel so envious sometimes when I hear you and the boys laughing and talking over your meals, whilst I’m eating alone in the dining room.’

  ‘Harry isn’t exactly talking yet.’

  ‘That’s only because Tommy does his talking for him. Harry can understand what’s being said well enough. They’re two bright little chaps, Sally.’

  It must be so hard for him always having to live with knowing that his own sons were gone. She knew she would not have wanted to be in his shoes. Losing a husband or a wife was one thing but to lose a young child, no more than a baby really …

  She poured them each a cup of tea.

  ‘Sit down, Sally, please,’ Dr Ross repeated.

  She shouldn’t be doing this. It would lead to no good, she warned herself as she did as he had asked.

  ‘I thought after losing my boys the sight of death could never touch me like that again, but tonight, seeing those children … as if they didn’t have enough to bear with the war, without having their lives taken in a bus accident.’ He put down his knife and fork. ‘I’m sorry, Sally, but I’m just not hungry.’

  The cuff of his shirt had turned bright red with blood. His blood, Sally realised.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she told him.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Let me see.’ She was up and out of her chair and at his side before she had time to think about what she was doing.

  ‘I cut my arm on a piece of glass, that’s all.’

  Ignoring him, Sally unfastened his cuff and rolled back his sleeve, just as she might have done for Tommy. Or Ronnie? She pushed that thought away. The cut was on the inside of his arm below his elbow, sharp and, she suspected, quite deep, the flesh gaping to ooze blood.

  ‘It needs cleaning up and a bandage putting on it. Stay there. I’ll go and get a bowl of water.’

  She went over to the kettle, pouring what was left in it into a bowl and adding a bit of salt. Salt cleaned wounds; Doris had taught her that. And then she took a clean cloth from the cupboard and carried the bowl and the cloth over to the table, putting the bowl down and then dipping the cloth into it, working firmly and determinedly to clean the skin round the cut in exactly the same brisk fashion she would have done if he had been one of her sons. One of her sons – not her husband! A boy, not a man!

  The only sound in the room was the occasional hiss of rain coming down the chimney onto the fire, and their own breathing, his slow and regular and her own equally steady. Each measured breath she took was an effort but if she gave in to what she was feeling her breathing would give her away.

  ‘There,’ she told him when she was satisfied that the cut was clean.

  She was still holding the bowl and when he stood up and took it from her, she let him, not realising until it was too late what he intended to do.

  ‘Thank you.’ He bent his head and brushed his lips against hers.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Sally!’

  She was in his arms and he was kissing her as she had dreamed and longed for him to do, a man’s kiss filled with passion and need, his man’s arms holding her tight, his man’s body pressed hard against her own. It had been so long since she had known this, and that was why she wanted him so desperately – because he was a man and not because he was him – but even as she told herself her lies her heart refused to accept them, and tears spilled from her eyes because of her own guilt and despair.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t cry. Sally, I’m sorry … I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I promised myself that I wouldn’t do anything that would make you run away from me …’

  It was wrong that she should allow him to bear all the guilt and blame. She pulled away from him but before she could speak he told her, ‘Having you living here with me is part heaven and part hell. I feel like a man dying in the desert from the lack of water I can see but I can’t touch or taste. Sometimes the torment of that … I love you, Sally. I’ve tried not to, God knows. Every morning I wake up telling myself that I mustn’t love you, but then I see you and I know that I can’t help myself. I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you. You were walking past the house …’

  ‘… and you were horrible to the boys.’

  ‘Was I? I didn’t mean to be. It was just that what you made me feel was such a shock. I swore after the way my wife lied to me and deceived me that I was better off being alone.’

  His words jerked Sally out of her own pain and guilt. ‘What do you mean, she lied to you and deceived you?’ This wasn’t how she had expected to hear him speak about the woman she had believed he considered so superior to herself, and had loved so very much.

  He said quietly, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. We’re always told that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. And after all, she wasn’t responsible for the fact that I was fool enough to believe her lies, or that I let my physical desire blind me to reality. But since I did say it, well, the truth about our marriage is an ugly one that does neither of us any favours. I rushed into it, driven by a mixture of lust and guilt because of that lust, and her fulfilment of it, never stopping to think or question why she might want to marry me. She never failed to let me know that in marrying me she had married beneath herself.’

  ‘But your marriage brought you your sons,’ Sally reminded him.

  ‘My marriage brought me an expensive house that was too big for us, filled with a domestic staff that looked down on me almost as much as the wife who despised me. Like our marriage, the house was a barren cold place, controlled by my wife’s never-ending reminders of how short I fell below her standards. I wanted a wife and a home that were warm and loving, the kind of home I had known with my adoptive parents. They were good friends to me, counselling me to think carefully about marrying her but, arrogant young fool that I was, I believed my wife when she told me she thought their concern sprang from a resentment that my marriage would take me away from them and into a new social strata. She was the daughter of an eminent titled physician, you see, a spoiled pampered adored daughter born after several sons. Sir Charles worshipped her and thought nothing too good for her. I own that I was surprised when she assured me that he would look favourably on me as a prospective son-inlaw, but then of course I didn’t know the truth.’

  Sally waited, sensitive to his need to unburden himself.

  ‘Fleur … what is it?’ he asked when Sally made a small sound.

  ‘Nothing really, just that it’s such a pretty name, so delicate and elegant … not like Sally, that’s so … so or
dinary and dull.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Sally is love and warmth and caring. Sally for me means home. As for Fleur being delicate, well, she liked to give that impression but in reality she was unyielding and selfish, determined to have her own way no matter what the cost to others. She told me shortly after she had discovered that she was pregnant that the only reason she’d married was because she couldn’t marry her lover, because he was her cousin. She had tried everything she could to persuade her father to relent and sanction their marriage but he would not do so. It seemed there had been some intermarriage in the family in previous generations, which had resulted in the birth of a child with a number of physical problems. Her father, being a physician, was vehemently opposed to them marrying because of the risk of this happening again, as was his brother, who was her lover’s father. They had both been told they would be disinherited if they didn’t give one another up, and so Fleur had conceived this idea that she would find herself an amenable husband to marry so that they could continue with their affair in secret.’

  ‘But she was your wife … You had two sons …’

  His mouth twisted into a bleak tormented grimace. ‘No, I did not have two sons. Those poor little souls had been fathered by her lover. That was why she had to tell me about him. You see, whilst our marriage had been consummated, we had ceased to share a bed within a few weeks of returning from our honeymoon. I could see no point in continuing with an act that brought me little pleasure and so much bitter self-disgust. She claimed that it was only the lower orders who expected to feel passion and delight in the physical side of their marriage, and that I should remember how much marriage to her had elevated me socially and professionally, and be satisfied with that. She pointed out the humiliation she suffered when her friends questioned her choice of husband and shuddered over my uncouth ways, and said that I should do more to show my gratitude.

  ‘And then, of course, when she told me that there was to be a child, she had to tell me the truth. I remember thinking then that perhaps her father had been right to forbid her marriage to her cousin because sometimes it crossed my mind that she herself was not quite … well, that her thinking was not quite as rational as it might have been. She was convinced that once her father had seen that the two of them had produced a normal healthy child he would relent and that with his blessing she could be allowed to divorce me on some trumped-up grounds so that she and her cousin could marry. Sadly within a year of his birth it was obvious that little Euan was not going to be the child she had hoped, but by then she already knew there was to be a second child, and I imagine she put her hopes on this coming baby … She took to referring to Euan, when addressing me, always as “your son”. Poor little lost soul, I wish I might have been a better father to him, for God knows it is true he needed one.’

  Sally was too appalled to speak. She remembered the photograph she had seen, and the two beautiful-looking children in it. Tears filled her eyes – for them and for their ‘father’.

  ‘Physically both children were perfect, good-looking replicas of their mother and their true father, but whilst they were gentle loving boys, they did not have that … that spark of intelligence that is so evidence in Tommy and Harry. I loved them, though – not perhaps as a father, but as their protector, for I could see that Fleur was bitterly resentful of what she could see they would become. I would often come home to find them locked in their nursery, unwashed and hungry, whilst Fleur had gone out with her lover.

  ‘And then he was moved to London. His father obtained a post for him in one of the ministries to keep him out of uniform. Fleur wanted me to apply to a London hospital but I refused. There was the most terrible row. I told her that if she went to her lover then she would go alone, that the children must stay with me and that I would go to her father and put the whole sorry business in front of him preparatory to arranging a legal separation. If only I had known then that by delivering that threat I was sealing the boys’ death warrant. She waited until I was out of the house and then she left for London, taking the boys with her. The rest you know. The house was bombed and she and her lover and their sons lost their lives.’

  Now she could understand so much that she had not understood before, Sally’s heart flooded with love and compassion.

  ‘I never wanted to fall in love with you, Sally, but now that I have I can’t bear the thought of living without you,’ Alex told her. ‘You and the boys have taken away the emptiness and loneliness inside me. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted or ever could want in a wife. Just watching you whilst you’ve been here has shown me that over and over again. A doctor ought to be careful about choosing a wife, for her sake and for the sake of his patients.’

  His wife! Sally’s heart jerked against her ribs.

  ‘So having me here as your housekeeper was just to test me out to see if I could measure up, was it?’ she demanded in an attempt to cover up what she was feeling.

  ‘No. Never! I am the one who needs to measure up to you, Sally, not the other way round.’

  Somehow or other one of them had moved, or maybe even both of them, Sally admitted, because she was back in his arms, openly inviting him to kiss her for all that she knew she should be reminding him – and herself – that she was only newly widowed and had no right to be so much as talking with him like this, never mind anything more. But being here with him in the cosiness of the fire-lit room was so very, very sweet that she couldn’t deny either him the comfort of her loving arms or herself the joy of their shared intimacy.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It wasn’t even six o’clock yet, but it had been pointless her lying in bed when she knew she wouldn’t sleep. Far better to be down here in the kitchen, Sally told herself, busying her hands with tasks even if she couldn’t busy her head with enough thoughts to distract her from what had happened last night.

  She opened the back door. The sky had that depth of wintry darkness that warned that it would be a day when it couldn’t lighten properly at all.

  Like her heart?

  She might have gone to bed as though dancing on clouds, warmed by love and deliriously happy, but it hadn’t been very long before guilt had filled her, telling her how wrong it was for her to love Alex with poor Ronnie so recently dead. What kind of woman, what kind of wife was she? Ronnie deserved better from her than that. He certainly deserved that she mourn his memory properly and for a decent enough time instead of wantonly throwing herself into the arms of another man.

  When she heard the hall door into the kitchen being opened she knew without turning round that it was Alex. Alex. How sweet and at the same time shocking it felt to be able to think his name inside her head, just as last night she had tasted it and him on her lips.

  ‘My bed was very empty after you left it,’ he told her softly.

  Sally didn’t speak or move, keeping her back to him. She had had to force herself to leave the warmth of his arms and his bed for the cold emptiness of her own but he knew as well as she did that they couldn’t have Tommy waking up early and finding her missing from her bed. And they certainly couldn’t have him taking it into his head, to go to ‘his doctor’s’ room and find his mother there. Being the lad he was, ready to chat with anyone, he’d be telling everyone about it before she could stop him, too young and innocent to know what he was doing.

  ‘I’ve been thinking …’

  Sally stiffened as he came up behind her. ‘So have I,’ she said, evading him as he tried to wrap his arms around her. ‘What happened last night wasn’t right.’

  ‘Of course it was. It was the most right thing that’s ever happened to me in the whole of my life,’ he stopped her tenderly.

  ‘No!’ Sally denied, panic sharpening her voice. If she could feel this weak and be filled with this much longing just because of the sound of his voice then how was she going to be able to do what was right if she had to look at him; if he touched her?

  ‘You can’t say that. You mustn’t … I should never have let you …�
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  ‘My darling, wonderful, precious girl, what’s wrong?’ He was laughing tenderly, unaware yet of what had to come. Sally felt as though a knife was twisting in her own heart at the thought of how much she was going to hurt him.

  ‘Everything’s wrong. Me. You. Us. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘All I can see is the woman I love, the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.’

  ‘No! You mustn’t say things like that to me.’

  She turned round and then wished she hadn’t because now she could see him her heart was telling her what she had already known and that was that she ached with love and longing for him. And that was wrong, so very, very wrong. Just as what she’d done last night – going to him, giving herself to him, loving him with a passion she had never ever experienced with Ronnie – had been very, very wrong, she told herself desperately, trying to whip herself up into the mood of self-disgust she needed to see things through.

  ‘Why not? Last night—’

  ‘Last night shouldn’t ever have happened – it was wrong.’

  ‘How could anything so beautiful be wrong? Last night when you gave me your sweet self, Sally, you gave me something I never imagined my life would have.’ He reached and touched her face before she could stop him, causing her to make a small moan of protest and longing.

  ‘I can’t stay here now. Me and the boys will have to leave.’

  ‘No! I won’t let you go. You love me, Sally, you told me so last night, and I love you.’

  ‘I can’t love you. Not with me being newly widowed and you being the doctor. I can just imagine what folk like Daisy Cartwright would have to say about me getting ideas above me station.’

  ‘Ideas above your station? What nonsense! You will make a perfect doctor’s wife, Sally. Is that really all this is about? Some silly woman who doesn’t know any better, gossiping about us?’

  She could hear the relief and the love in his voice.

  ‘Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have a fresh start, you, me and the boys. We could move away from here to somewhere where no one knows us. We could be married quickly and quietly first, and then we’d be Dr and Mrs Ross, and anyone who dares to think of upsetting my wife will have me to answer to.’