What the Heart Keeps

by Rosalind Laker

  “It’s your box!” she exclaimed, going to kneel down by it. “You brought it home!” Then so many memories came flooding over her that she put a hand over her eyes, fighting against breaking down. He came and dropped to one knee beside her, but when he would have looked into her face she turned her lowered head away.

  “I’m remembering,” she said in a cracked voice. “That’s all.” “I’ve never forgotten.”

  He took her by the shoulders and drew her with him to her feet again. She dropped her hand to her side and he waited, still holding her at a little distance from him until she was ready to raise her bowed head and meet his eyes. Everything they had felt for each other in the past was still there, changed in context perhaps, weathered by endurance, mellowed by other powerful relationships, but the unique bitter-sweetness of their special love remained for each to see.

  He whispered her name. Slowly his arms went about her and the strong pressure of his hands on her back brought her to him. As his mouth descended to take hers, she uttered a little cry, throwing her arms in abandonment around his neck and meeting his kiss with an unleashed ardour of her own. They were locked together. Their kiss went on and on, neither wishing or wanting or able to assuage the force of love in a single embrace.

  *

  The steamer was preparing to sail. In agitation Minnie paced the quayside, intending to delay by any means she could muster the raising of the gangway. Again and again she looked at her diamond-and-platinum watch. The loading of cargo had been completed. The bags of mail had been delivered and taken aboard. A couple of late-coming passengers had arrived in a taxi, but still there was no sign of Lisa. Already Minnie was wondering how to face Alan and admit to him that she had let his wife go off alone with the one man able to persuade her that he and she had been given another chance to renew their lives together.

  “Please go aboard now, madam. We are ready to sail.”

  Minnie looked in panic at the young steamship officer in his white-topped peaked cap who had spoken to her. She brought all her melting charm into play. “Mrs. Fernley hasn’t returned yet. You can’t sail without her.”

  “I regret we cannot delay for any reason. Our schedule is strictly timed. If you please, madam.” He made a courteous but firm gesture towards the gangway. Not even for a request from Minnie Shaw, whose beautiful face he knew well from the screen, could the coastal steamer be delayed by as much as a minute.

  Deliberately Minnie dawdled on the gangway, stopping to look back over her shoulder in the direction from which Lisa should come, but without result. The officer followed her, a hand on each of the rails as if he half-expected her to dart down again. Then suddenly she saw the flash of sun on Peter’s car as it came into view.

  “Mrs. Fernley is here!” she exclaimed breathlessly.

  Peter had sprung out of the car and he cupped Lisa’s elbow to escort her to the ship. Behind them the window-boxes of the Alexander Hotel held an abundance of scarlet, white, and blue flowers. Lisa herself was carrying the bunch of Molde roses that Peter had given her earlier. When they reached the gangway she drew one of the rosebuds from the bouquet and tucked it into his buttonhole, each of them gazing at each other. Then she turned and hurried up the gangway, the impatient officer springing up after her and signalling that all were safely aboard. The gangway was hauled away. Hawsers were released forward and aft. Azure water churned as the steamer edged out from Molde’s quay.

  Lisa stood watching Peter as the distance between them lengthened inexorably. Spoken and conventional farewells in the hearing of others had been unnecessary. They had made an ending together that had been a final enrichment of all that had been between them. He had wanted her to stay but had understood why it could never be. It was too late.

  When the last faint speck on the quayside that was Peter and even the pastel spread of the Town of Roses was lost to sight, she moved from the rails and went to her cabin with her bouquet. Minnie was waiting for her there.

  “Are you going to see Peter again?” she demanded anxiously. “No.” Lisa put the roses into a vase that the stewardess had given her.

  “Never?”

  “That’s right.”

  Minnie gave a wail. “If only I’d known!” She sank down in a chair twisting her hands together. “I’ve done a terrible thing.”

  Lisa, having given a last touch to the arrangement of the flowers, regarded her with puzzlement. “What are you talking about?”

  “I cabled Alan that you were meeting Peter!”

  “Why?” Lisa sat down slowly on the edge of the bunk.

  “Because I didn’t want to see you go back to Peter and I was convinced that was what you intended to do.”

  “Yet you’ve always compared my love for him to yours for Risto. What made you so against my having another chance?” Lisa’s eyes sparkled with a rare anger. “Are you admitting to jealousy?”

  “Maybe I am! I don’t know. But it’s more than that. Alan is the one who’s loved you more than anybody. It’s your own fault that he has allowed himself some diversion that means nothing to him. You’ve neglected him. You’ve always put somebody or something before him. He has never come first in your life. I didn’t want to see you go from him once and for all without giving him the opportunity to do something about it.”

  “What are you holding back?” Lisa demanded perceptively. “Are you saying that Alan knew there was more between Peter and me than has ever been spoken of?”

  “He’s always known. Harriet told him.”

  “No! She promised to keep it secret!”

  “Alan knew that. But when she was dying Harriet became fearful for your future. She implored Alan to remember you were alone in the world, and in a confused and feverish state she spoke of the hardships you had endured. The early loss of your mother and the later loss of a Norwegian emigrant, Peter Hagen, whom you had loved dearly. Then, during my first evening at Dekova’s Place, when we were sitting on the porch, you spoke of meeting Peter again. Why do you think he took you back to England when he did? It was to get you away from Peter! Nothing else! He had been going to surprise you with the news that he was purchasing a house in California and his intention was to move there when he left the lumber company, and I was to go with you. He told me much of this when we were all frantic with worry about you in the fire. As soon as I heard he had switched arrangements to go to England, I guessed the reason why.”

  Lisa put her palms together and laced her fingers with slow deliberation. “You have just confirmed what I have often wondered about. Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

  “I was selfish, I suppose. I didn’t know what the outcome would be if the truth came out and I was afraid of anything that might separate Risto and me.”

  “I can understand that.” Lisa’s eyes were at their most thoughtful, reflective and absorbed. “My secret dream has always been that one day I should meet Peter again, never supposing that it could happen, and that he would ask me once more to spend the rest of my life with him. Then today, when that dream could have reached total fulfilment, I turned away from it. I love Peter. I’ll always love him, but the years have bound me closer to Alan. Maybe that’s the strongest kind of love. I don’t know. All I do know is that I’ve had to fight for many things in my life. Now I’m going to fight for Alan. All the time you and I have been voyaging north with this reunion with Peter getting nearer every day, I’ve been weighing up what my decision would be. Before I even saw Peter again, Alan had won the day.”

  Minnie was distraught. “Now I’ve ruined everything for you! I’ve brought it all out in the open.”

  “Maybe that’s the only way that Alan and I can rid ourselves of the barriers that have always been between us. When did you send the cable?”

  “Yesterday. The reply was delivered to me while we were at Molde.” Minnie took the crumpled cable from her pocket and held it out to Lisa. “He’s on his way to Norway now. He’ll be in Bergen when we get there.”

  Lisa read the cab
le and then closed her eyes briefly with relief, a smile on her lips as she folded it up again. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you realise what this cable means?” Still smiling, Lisa handed it back to her. “He doesn’t want to lose me. He’s coming to get me back somehow. No doubt he thinks he did it before and he’ll do it again. Only he doesn’t know yet that this time there’ll be no opposition.” Putting her head to one side, she regarded Minnie more seriously. “I remember you said once that you wished the chance would come your way to do something for me in return for whatever I’ve done for you during our years of friendship. You did it a thousandfold in sending that cable, Minnie. You’ve eased what might have been a difficult path. You will have brought Alan and me truly together for the first time.”

  The next day the steamer sailed into its home port of Bergen. Alan was on the quayside, having left for Norway immediately upon receiving Minnie’s cable. His dread had been that he would find only Minnie on board, but when he saw his wife with her, the tension in his face did not relax. For all he knew, she might have come to Bergen only to break the news to him that the past had claimed her after all. Yet he would not let her go. No matter what she had resolved, he would not leave this northern land without her.

  Minnie’s tact in leaving the two of them on their own to sort out all they had to say to each other culminated in her declining Alan’s invitation to join Lisa and him on a motoring tour to Sweden and Denmark, travelling home from Copenhagen.

  “It’s kind of you to suggest including me, but I’ll go back on the North Sea ferry as originally planned,” she said. “It’s a long time since you two have been able to get away on your own, and in any case I have appointments to meet people in London about making a motion picture there before I return to the States.”

  *

  There was no immediate reconciliation between Lisa and Alan. She had no wish to rush anything and he was assailed by jealousy over what might, or might not, have happened between his wife and her former lover during their brief hour of reunion. Nevertheless, as he drove the hired car through countryside thick with wild flowers out of Norway into Sweden, the strangeness and the rawness of the situation began to ebb, for each had the will to begin again and the love to overcome whatever difficulties remained. Gradually, and not without pain on both sides, everything was talked out between them.

  “I’ve made mistakes,” he admitted sadly. “Too many. And I should have realised, knowing you as I do, that whoever is fortunate to be loved by you is loved forever. I must have been crazy to think that Peter Hagen had been swallowed up by the past.”

  “Is Harriet quite lost to you?” she asked quietly. It was rare for them to speak of his first wife in recent years.

  “No. I remember her. I remember loving her. But that part of my life ended in her death. It had to. Memories have to take their rightful place.”

  She nodded reflectively. “I know that now. Sometimes it takes a long while to work them out, that’s all.”

  He reached out and took her hands into his. In understanding. In friendship. And in love. The path was cleared for their future ahead.

  Upon their return home to England they went straight to Maple House. Lisa rang Catherine and then Harry to let them know that she and their father were safely home again. She had expected Alan to make a host of business calls immediately, but instead he suggested they take a stroll around the garden to see how it had fared in her absence.

  It was a warm evening and the roses had opened wide to the July sun during the day, a carpet of fallen petals under many of the bushes. Alan’s arm was about her waist.

  “We’ll take vacations more often,” he said. “With time, Harry will carry most of the responsibility of the Fernley circuit and I’m training him towards that end. That means eventually you and I can do whatever we want with our lives together.”

  They had reached the orchard, and she paused, bringing him to a standstill, and looked back at their home. It stood large and mellow in the sunset, the windows catching the rose-gold light. “There’s something I’d like to do with the house or, to be more specific, the wing where the orphans used to stay on summer holidays. Now that the orphanage itself is in the countryside, the children will be going to the seaside instead of coming here. What I have in mind for that wing will need your agreement.”

  “You have it,” he said without hesitation. He could tell by her tone that it was something far more important than a spate of redecoration and refurbishing. “What did you have in mind?”

  She dived into the pocket of her silk jacket and pulled out a cutting from an English newspaper she had bought abroad which she opened wide. It was a photograph that had taken up the full spread of half a page. She gave him one corner to hold while she held the other, turning it to the late sun’s glow, and they studied it with their heads together. It showed the sad, frightened faces of a group of little Jewish children, newly arrived in England from Nazi Germany. Some were orphaned, some sent by parents desperate to get them to safety while there was still time, and all of them in a state of terror at finding themselves in alien surroundings that might prove to be, for all they knew, as terrifying as the conditions of the country they had left behind. In them she saw faces from her own childhood. Amy and Minnie and Cora and Lily and Bridget and many more little children who had been made to suffer through no fault of their own.

  “You speak German, don’t you?” she said to him. “And I could learn.”

  He drew her gently to him and held her within his encircling arms. “So you want to begin all over again, do you?”

  She nodded seriously. “In more ways than one. For this venture I’d want your help and support the whole way. We’d be partners all over again.”

  “How soon can we take the first of these children?”

  Her eyes reflected the depths of her feelings for him. “I love you, Alan. With all my heart.”

  He had waited a long time for that full declaration — ever since he had first set, eyes on her far away in another land. They kissed lovingly. Then with his arm about her waist again they continued their stroll through the quiet orchard. Already she was looking forward to the sound of children’s laughter amid the trees.

  If you enjoyed What the Heart Keeps you might be interested in The Fragile Hour by Rosalind Laker, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from The Fragile Hour by Rosalind Laker

  Chapter One

  Anna parked her car at the roadside, but made no move to get out. Instead she clenched her hands on the wheel, making her knuckles show white. The car radio was playing the latest hit by the Beatles, but she was not listening as she steeled herself for the ordeal that lay ahead. Through the windscreen her haunted gaze barely took in the vista of the great Norwegian mountains all around her.

  It had been a private decision to come here. Nobody else knew of it. She had flown in from Heathrow at mid-morning, caught a connecting flight that had brought her within range, and hired a car to drive the rest of the way. All because a short paragraph in one of yesterday’s London evening newspapers had caught her eye and hurled the past back at her in a way she could never have foreseen.

  A policeman came across from the grass verge opposite to bend his head down at the open window. “You can’t park here, frue. Drive farther along.”

  She stirred herself and gave a nod. “Could you tell me what’s happening at the lake? Has the wartime fighter plane been brought to the surface yet?”

  “No, there’s been a last minute delay and it will be early evening before it comes up. It’s ten days now since the off-shore company installed a crane on the bank and brought their working-boat up-river, but the aircraft is lodged precariously on a rock ledge deep down. One false move and it could go plummeting into the depths and that would be it.”

  He thought she shivered, but that was impossible on such a hot August day. Stepping back, he waved her on and Anna drove
past the long line of vehicles parked at the roadside to the first available space. It was not surprising that so many people had come here today, for the new road through to the coast had made this once isolated area easily accessible. By now the music had given way to a newsreader, who announced that Nixon had won the Republican nomination for President and, in the next breath, that mini-skirts had become so short that in London the dry-cleaners were charging by the inch. Anna switched it off and parked for the second time.

  Everywhere else in the world life was going on, however important or trivial, but she had come to face up to the past, whatever the consequences might be. Yet she had never expected to visit this lake, even though what had happened there was an integral part of her relationship with a man who had torn her life apart. It was like coming to the opening of Pandora’s box.

  How easy it was already to picture how it must have been for the pilot of the fighter plane, a Mosquito, on the March night when he had to make a crash-landing here on the snow-covered plateau. That had been during the savage days of the German Occupation of this peaceful land. With his aircraft badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire and losing height rapidly, he had still hoped to save the special cargo that he carried aboard. If he had not been familiar with the area, there would have been no chance, but he watched out for the dark gleam of the frozen lake that the wind had made patchy with snow.

  Anna shut her eyes tightly, seeming to hear the spluttering engines as the aircraft descended swiftly out of the night sky. There came the vibrating thud of the crash-landing followed by the screech of metal as it careened wildly before finally coming to a standstill with its nose deep in a snowdrift. It was then that there came a noise like thunder as the ice, thick though it was, suddenly cracked and split into great glittering fangs that soared upwards as if to devour this unexpected prey. Briefly the Mosquito remained propped at a desperate angle, one wing high, a curious quiver passing through its fuselage as if it hovered like its namesake, until it began to sink slowly down into the churning water. The pilot, badly bruised and shaken, watched from the snowdrift where he had managed to crawl to safety. He uttered a long and despairing groan as his fighter plane disappeared from sight.