Never Leave Me

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘You don’t need to have another baby to make happy,’ he said, his white teeth flashing in a grin of amusement. ‘And I see no reason why we should cancel our plans. We’ll have this baby and we’ll go to France. Are Luke and Annabel still going to be spending the New Year at Valmy?’

  She nodded, glad that she no longer felt constraint at the mention of Luke’s name. ‘Yes. Papa is eager to show off the restoration work. Luke was over on a visit a few months ago and apparently told him that he thought it would be another five years before Valmy was habitable once more. Papa wants to prove to him how wrong he was.’

  ‘It will be quite a reunion,’ Greg said, slipping his arms around her waist, feeling desire for her grow and harden. ‘All three of us back at Valmy again. Just like it was in May ’44.’

  She turned her head away from him quickly, but not before he saw a flare of something he did not understand flash through her eyes. What was it? Pain? Anguish? Was she still entertaining regret for having married him so hastily when she believed Luke to be dead?

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said, sliding his hands up to her breasts. His doubts and jealousy about her feelings for Luke had been dormant for months now. He wasn’t going to let one fleeting moment of doubt resurrect them.

  She stilled her inner trembling and turned towards him, slipping her arms around his neck. For a second, the image of Dieter had been so strong that it had taken her breath away. Dieter in the first week of that now long ago May. Racing in to the chateau after his mad dash to Paris. Taking her in his arms and telling her that he loved her, that he would always love her, before sprinting from Valmy to face the approaching invasion fleet. Dieter, dying in her arms, his lifeblood sticky on her hands, staining Valmy’s ancient stone flags a dark, hideous crimson.

  Gently Greg pulled the pins from her hair, unbuttoning her blouse, pulling her down on the bed. She tried to close her mind to her memories, to respond lovingly to him, but the guilt that had frozen her after the Warner’s party still lingered. She couldn’t overcome it. She loved him and she needed him, but she could no longer respond to him. And he knew it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked urgently, his brows flying together as he stared down at her. ‘Is it me? Don’t you love me, Lisette?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she gasped, wrapping her arms around him tightly, pressing her cheeks against his shoulder, her tears scalding his flesh. ‘I do love you, Greg! It’s just that…’ She floundered helplessly. The only words that made any sense were the truth. That she was frozen with guilt. Sexually crippled by it. And to tell him the truth would be to lose him. ‘It’s just that I’m tired …’ she said, hating herself for the feebleness of her lie. ‘It’s probably the baby.’ She hugged him tighter. ‘I’ll be all right in a few months’time, I promise I will.’

  It was at a party the week before they were due to leave for Europe on the Normandie that she met Jacqueline Pleydall. She had not really wanted to go to the party. She was much bigger and far more uncomfortable with this second baby than she had been with Dominic.

  ‘You look fabulous,’ Greg had said to her, passing his hand caressingly over the full ripeness of her stomach as she faced herself in the mirror, bemoaning her size.

  ‘The only thing I can possibly wear is a tent!’

  ‘Then wear the raspberry tent that you wore to Chrissie’s birthday dinner,’ he said in amusement. ‘You looked stunning in it.’

  She made a little moue, unconvinced, and he laughed. She was as beautiful, heavy with child, as she had been when svelte. If it hadn’t been for the difference the baby had made to their sex life he would have been quite content for her to have been permanently pregnant. But the baby had made a difference. Her tiredness had not abated. He had been forced to the reluctant conclusion that not until the baby was born would things be back to normal between them.

  ‘Once the baby is here, everything will be all right,’ she had reassured him fiercely. ‘I know it will be!’

  He had told her not to worry and he had kept a tight rein on his physical desire for her. He had not been at her side throughout her pregnancy with Dominic and this curtailment of the sexual side of their marriage had taken him by surprise. He would be glad when her pregnancy was over. When the deeply sexual side of her nature once more left him in no doubt as to the depth of her love for him.

  The raspberry chiffon dress made her feel graceful and almost slender again. She looped a rope of pearls around her throat, put pearl and diamond studs in her ears and sprayed herself with perfume.

  He dropped a kiss on the nape of her neck. ‘Ready?’ he asked, and she saw the heat at the back of his eyes and knew she had only to reach out and touch him, to say one word of encouragement, and the party would be forgotten.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, turning away from him, hurting with need. She ached for him. Yearned for him. Yet she dare not reach out for him for fear of the failure that would surely follow. The frigidity she would be unable to hide.

  Her hand trembled as she picked up her evening purse. In another two months her torment would end. The child that she gave him would be his. She would be free of her burden of guilt.

  She had become accustomed to meeting the same, small, wealthy circle of people at every party and function they attended. In some ways San Francisco was as parochial as Sainte-Marie-de-Ponts. It was as they were waiting to greet their host and hostess that she became aware of a tall, willowy blonde girl she had never seen before.

  ‘Who is the girl over by the window?’ she asked Greg curiously. ‘The one wearing a black dress that looks as if it’s a Balenciaga.’

  Greg looked across the room and as he did so the girl’s eyes met his. Lisette sensed Greg tense, saw the girl look away from him quickly, a flush of colour warming her cheeks.

  ‘Jacqueline Pleydall,’ he said with unusual terseness. ‘She’s been in New York for the past year. She’s a fashion buyer for Vogue.’

  Lisette felt a stab of shock. Her eyes flew once more in the blonde’s direction but her back was now firmly to them and she was in conversation with Frank Warner.

  ‘Were you once engaged to her?’ she asked, oddly disconcerted.

  ‘No.’ His brows flew together. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Oh … I thought… I overheard it somewhere…’

  ‘People assume,’ he said, and there was a tight look around his mouth that she had never seen before. ‘We were very close once. But we were never engaged.’

  Lisette dragged her attention away from Jacquetine Pleydall long enough to greet her host and hostess, but as they began to circulate she found her eyes returning again and again to the sleek, golden-haired girl who had apparently thought that she would one day be Mrs Greg Dering. She was extraordinarily beautiful. Her hair was shoulder length, falling seductively at either side of her face in deep, undulating waves. Her face was fashionably made up: her eyebrows arched, her mouth a glossy red. She looked very American. Very self-assured. And yet she had flushed like a schoolgirl when her eyes had met Greg’s.

  She didn’t move from her position at the window and Greg showed no hurry to make his way across to her, but Lisette knew that the girl was acutely aware of Greg’s presence. She could sense the girl’s eyes on her, as hungrily curious as she knew her own were. She wished that she had asked him about her when she had first heard the gossip aboard the Liberié. That she had given him the opportunity to tell her exactly what their relationship had been.

  ‘And so they see it as a form of economic imperialism,’ Frank Warner was saying to her.

  Lisette gave an apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry, Frank. I wasn’t listening. Who sees what as economic imperialism?’

  Greg was talking to their host. Jacqueline Pleydall, now that Frank was no longer monopolising her, was moving easily from group to group, drawing nearer and nearer to him.

  ‘Stalin,’ Frank said as their champagne glasses were replenished. ‘He thinks the Marshall Aid plan for financially propping up war
-devastated Europe, Germany included, devious. He doesn’t see it for what it is. A genuine attempt by America to set Europe back on its feet.’

  Lisette’s fingers tightened fractionally around the stem of her glass. She loathed talking about Europe with Greg’s friends. They discussed the war and its aftermath so glibly and they had so little real understanding. German jackboots had not marched through San Franciscan streets. Their museums and art galleries had not been looted of their treasures. The Presidio had not been requisitioned by the German High Command. They thought they knew what Europe had suffered, but they didn’t. Only the Americans who had been there and who had fought, had any understanding, and even for them it hadn’t been the same as it had for the British and French and Russian soldiers. It hadn’t been their land that had been ravaged; their cities that had been bombed.

  ‘… so the Russians see the aid we are giving, even the tractors and lorries, as being politically and militarily motivated…’

  Greg had turned his head in Jacqueline Pleydall’s direction. She was smiling at him, an uncertain, almost nervous smile.

  ‘I must say I’m not sure myself why the aid has to extend to the Germans,’ Frank continued, helping himself to a lobster vol-au-vent. ‘After all, they were the cause of all the damage, weren’t they?’

  Lisette was not listening to him. Greg had moved away from the circle of people he had been talking to and was now standing with Jacqueline Pleydall. He looked completely at ease, and though she was looking at him with rapt attention, his own attention seemed to be diverted. He kept glancing away from her, as if searching for somebody.

  Lisette’s lips curved into a smile. He was looking for her. The sudden tightening around her heart vanished. She laid a hand restrainingly on Frank’s tuxedoed arm. ‘I’m sorry, Frank. Will you excuse me for a moment?’ and without waiting for an answer, she slipped away from his side and crossed the room to her husband.

  ‘Hello darling, I thought you were lost,’ he said with a grin, his arm sliding surely and securely around her waist. ‘I don’t think you have met Jacqueline, have you? Jacqueline, Lisette. Lisette, Miss Jacqueline Pleydall.’

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ Lisette said, feeling large and bulky and very, very pregnant.

  ‘And I you,’ Jacqueline Pleydall said, but the flush had returned to her cheeks and as her eyes met Greg’s, Lisette saw undisguised misery in their green depths.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Greg,’ she said unsteadily as if Lisette had not joined them. ‘Five years. Frank tells me that Germany was pretty hideous for you.’

  ‘For me and a few thousand others,’ Greg agreed drily.

  ‘I would have liked to have seen you. Been able to talk about it…’

  Greg’s arm tightened around Lisett’s waist. ‘We’re leaving for Europe in a few days’time, but when we return you must have dinner with us. Lisette’s cooking is becoming the talk of ‘Frisco.’

  Jacqueline Pleydall bit her bottom lip and Lisette felt suddenly very sorry for her. Dinner á trois was obviously not what she had wanted. She had wanted Greg, and he had married someone else.

  ‘Will you excuse us, Jacqueline,’ Greg was saying with smooth politeness. ‘We have a lot of people we want to say goodbye to before we leave for France.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Her eyes were suspiciously bright. ‘Have a nice trip, Greg.’

  Lisette knew that her eyes were following them as they crossed the room to speak to the Warners. She wondered what kind of a letter Greg had written from France telling her of his marriage. When he had written … Before they were married, or after?

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he whispered to her, his hand hot around her waist. ‘I’ve had enough of socialising for one evening. I want you to myself.’

  She leaned against him, overcome by desire. Perhaps tonight it would be different. Perhaps tonight she could forget her guilt. Perhaps it could once more be as glorious between them as it had been in Paris.

  In the darkness of the speeding limousine she put her hand in his. ‘Were you very much in love with her?’ she asked, hoping passionately that the answer would be no.

  He had no need to ask to whom she was referring. He flicked the wheel to the right with an easy movement of his hand, speeding up into Pacific Heights.

  ‘I thought I was,’ he said, taking his eyes briefly from the road ahead and smiling down at her, ‘until I met you.’

  She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I think,’ she said, leaning her head on his shoulder, ‘that she is very much in love with you, Greg.’

  ‘And I,’ he said, his voice catching and deepening, ‘am very much in love with you, Mrs Dering.’

  They sped up the last spur of the hill, sweeping into the drive of their home. She knew that she wouldn’t speak of Jacqueline Pleydall again. But she wouldn’t forget her. For if she continued to fail Greg in the privacy of their bedroom, she knew that Jacqueline Pleydall would be waiting, willing to offer him any comfort he might desire.

  She was ecstatic with joy as their ship neared Le Havre. ‘Here we are again, back to the rain and the wind,’ Greg had said wryly, as the mist had rolled back from the approaching cliffs and France had loomed ahead of them.

  ‘Oh, but it’s beautiful!’ Lisette said rapturously, turning her face up the rain, drinking in the sight of the grey, storm-tossed clouds, the rain-washed light.

  Greg shot her a quick, surprised look. In the year they had been in America, she had never given any indication that she might be homesick. He had assumed that she had been as delighted to leave a war-torn France as he had been. In his eyes Normandy was insufferably cold and grey. He found the thickly hedged fields and narrow winding lanes claustrophobic, the high, slate-roofed houses dour. It had not occurred to him that she felt differently and he realised, with a stab of shock, how insensitive he had been.

  ‘Look,’ she cried, as they neared the coast. ‘Salt marshes, Greg! Sand dunes! Oh, is that Sainte-Marie’s church spire? And is that Valmy, Greg? Oh, it is! I’m sure it is!’

  Henri de Valmy was waiting to greet them on the dockside. ‘Welcome home, ma chére’he said, hugging her close. ‘Welcome back to France!’

  ‘It’s so good to be home, Papa!’ She turned swiftly round to where Simonette was standing, a warmly wrapped Dominic in her arms. Joyously she took him from her. ‘This is France, Dominic! You must take your first footsteps on French soil!’

  Dominic, who had already taken many faltering ones on board the Normandie, laughed delightedly.

  ‘Walk, Maman,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘Walk.’

  ‘It’s so good to have you home,’ her father was saying, his eyes suspiciously bright. ‘Your mother is waiting for us at Valmy. She hasn’t been very well lately. A cold that she cannot seem to get rid of.’

  ‘Is she staying at Valmy long?’ Greg asked him as they walked across to the waiting Citroen.

  ‘For the Christmas celebrations and New Year. Valmy is now remarkably comfortable. Reconstruction work has been going on non-stop since April. The left wing is completely habitable, though the main rooms, the grand dining-room and the salon, are going to take much longer to put to rights.’

  ‘Have Luke and Annabel arrived, Papa?’ Lisette asked as they all squeezed into the Citroen.

  ‘Two days ago. His wife is a very nice girl. They came over to visit me shortly after their marriage. I think he would live in Normandy if he could. It seems to have seeped into his blood.’

  Greg asked him how long he thought the reconstruction work would take before it was complete. What he thought of Churchill’s view of an iron curtain having descended across Europe. If de Gaulle’s popularity was still as strong. But as the Citroen roared along the familiar country roads and lanes Lisette fell silent. She had been away for little more than a year and now she was back again and nothing had changed. The landscape was still at the mercy of the sea. The trees along the coast still leaned landwards, leafless and bent beneath the force of the gales that
blew in from the west. The waves still hurled themselves unceasingly at the foot of the cliffs. And Valmy still stood, its golden walk scarred, blackened by smoke, but still wonderful, still superbly magnificent.

  They sped past the gatehouse and she averted her head swiftly. The cherry tree would be bare. Dieter’s grave would be stark. She dare not allow herself to think of it with Greg so close beside her, so aware of every shift in her emotions. She would visit it in the morning. Alone. She would plant spring bulbs and take a posy of winter aconites. She saw her father’s eyes fly to hers in the driving mirror. She saw all his unspoken questions about herself and Greg. About Dominic. About the coming baby. She smiled at him and saw him visibly relax. She would not burden him with the unhappiness she had carried within her for the past few months. It was nearly at an end now. The baby would be born while they were in France. No one would ever know the price she had paid for her deceit.

  The ancient Citroen rattled past the last of the linden trees, rounding the huge circle of grass that fronted the chateau. The winter sun sparkled on the tall, narrow windows. The slate-roofed turret pierced the sky line. The great oak door opened and her mother ran out from the hall towards the still-moving car, Luke and a tall, fair-haired girl walking swiftly in her wake.

  ‘Welcome home, chérie!’ her mother cried, and before the Citroen had even shuddered to a halt, a heavily pregnant Lisette had flung open the car door and was running, hurtling into her mother’s outstretched arms.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was so good to be home that she wept for joy. Valmy’s walls enfolded her. The chateau’s gutted heart had been lovingly rebuilt. The grand dining-room and the main salon were yet to be completed, but Valmy still stood, was lived in again.

  ‘It’s wonderful, Papa!’ she said, gazing round at the new plasterwork, the new woodwork, her eyes shining. ‘I can’t believe so much has been done in only a year!’

  ‘I had nothing else to do with my time but harass the workmen, ma chére,’ Henri said, his pleasure at her approval obvious.