by Maggie Hope
‘Oh, look! Isn’t it lovely?’ She gazed out at the twinkling lights of the promenade below. She was trembling uncontrollably now.
‘Darling! You’re shivering.’ Tom came up behind her and took her in his arms. ‘You’re not frightened of me, are you? Surely not. Don’t be a little goose, Ada.’ He lifted her chin and kissed her tenderly on the mouth. ‘I won’t hurt you, I promise I won’t. Go on now, change and hop into bed. I’ll just smoke a cigar on the balcony before I join you.’
Ada turned obediently and as she turned he patted her bottom, playfully. ‘Go on, now,’ he said.
Immediately a spectre rose up before Ada. She could still feel the touch of his hand on her bottom, just as she could always feel the touch of Uncle Harry’s hands for hours afterwards; it sent shivers up her spine.
‘My God!’ Ada breathed under her breath as she undressed and slipped into a fine lawn nightgown. ‘It’s going to be Uncle Harry all over again!’
All thoughts of damaged goods were driven from her mind. She climbed into bed and lay there, rigid. All she could think of was that night when Uncle Harry had come into her bedroom in the attic in Tenters Street, and it was all going to happen again, just as it did then. Ada closed her eyes and fought for self-control, struggling against the images racing across her eyelids: Uncle Harry’s leering face, the wet hair of his moustache, the hand descending to slap her. Gradually, the images began to fade; she gained a tenuous hold on herself and concentrated on her racing heartbeat, willing it to slow down, and it did. Ada relaxed a little.
So that when Tom slid into bed beside her she was thinking only that this was Tom, Tom, repeating it over and over in her mind. Tom, who loved her, Tom, who would never, never do anything to hurt her. And at last she could lift her face up to his kiss. Everything was going to be all right.
But as soon as she felt his hands on her body, cupping her breasts, they tensed against the hurt they had known. As his hands slid down over her hips and stomach, to the mound of thick, dark hair, lingering, she stiffened. There was nothing at all she could do to control it now.
Her mouth opened in a soundless scream of horror; taking Tom completely by surprise, she fought him, silently, as she had tried to fight Uncle Harry so long ago. She fought Tom mindlessly too, with nails out to tear and scratch, her teeth bared in a grimace as he released her abruptly, shaken to his core. Ada scrambled from his embrace to crouch at the furthest end of the bed, glaring her hatred.
‘Ada,’ he cried, ‘for God’s sake, Ada! Whatever is the matter?’ He sprang out of bed, his cheek bleeding from where she had managed to catch him with her nails. Eyes wide, he looked at her, stretched out his arms to her.
‘Don’t! Don’t touch me.’ Ada shrank further onto the pillow, pressing herself against the ornately carved, wooden bedhead. Losing her balance with the instinctive gesture, she almost fell out of bed and had to catch hold of the bedpost to regain her balance.
Tom stood, frozen, staring at her; he didn’t know what to do or say. Gradually the wild look faded from her eyes and as she returned to normal she began to realise what had happened. Her grip on the bedpost slackened and she bent her head as the tears came. Covering her face with her hands, she wept bitterly.
Tom was even more bewildered – nothing in his life had prepared him for this. Oh, he knew girls were often shy and ignorant of the sexual act, but usually they were girls from a sheltered background, whereas Ada was a girl of the people and a nurse at that. Where was the efficient, self-reliant, happy girl he knew and had grown to love? This was a new Ada altogether. Now she was reduced to a shivering bundle of misery, her thin shoulders shaking with the force of her sobbing. His heart turned over as he saw it.
‘Don’t, Ada, please don’t, Ada. I’ll not touch you if you don’t want me to,’ he said at last, hesitating to go to her. ‘Not like that, I won’t. Just let me comfort you, please, let me comfort you.’ Tom opened his arms and after a long moment, Ada crept into them.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wept. ‘I am, Tom, I am. I can’t seem to help it. I should have told you.’
‘Sh …’ Tom rocked her in his arms, his face puzzled. He opened his mouth to frame a question but Ada was still talking.
‘Don’t ask me, Tom, not now. Later maybe, but not now, I couldn’t stand it.’
Tom continued rocking her back and forth, back and forth, as he would a baby, feeling the sobs racking her slender body. And after a time the sobs lessened and she was quiet, her shoulders stilled. He waited, his thoughts turning bitter now he was getting over the shock. Now, when it seemed that all his plans, all his dreams were coming to fruition, they came crashing down on him. All through their long engagement he had been patient with her. He had respected that ‘touch me not’ air of innocence about her but he had never thought it would be carried over into marriage.
‘Oh, Ada,’ he said helplessly. How could she have nursed, seen life on the wards of a general hospital and yet know so little of human nature, of human sexuality? He tried again. ‘Tell me, Ada, tell me what it is. You can’t be so frightened of me, really you can’t.’
Dumbly Ada looked back at him, the tears still beading her lashes; her violet eyes were enormous in her white face. What could she say? she wondered dumbly. She found herself altogether unable to tell him about Uncle Harry – the years of sly touching and squeezing, the years of feeling dirty and worthless, and the night of the rape, which had been the culmination of those years. Her mind shied away from it all; no, she did not have the words to speak of it.
Tom saw the conflict in her face, the torment in the shadowed pools of her eyes. The white skin round them was red with weeping. And Ada, he knew, did not weep easily; there was more to this than he could see now, there surely was. Wearily she brushed a tear away with the back of her hand, like a child. Indeed, she felt like a child to him as he held her slight body, his child not his wife. What had reduced his tough little Ada to this? he wondered again.
‘Never mind, petal,’ he said softly. ‘It’s been a long day, we’re both exhausted. Let’s go to sleep now, eh? You’ll see, everything will look better in the morning, everything will work out fine.’
Ada smiled gratefully at him: dear Tom, how had she got them both into this mess? But she couldn’t disguise the fact that she was relieved that tonight at least she could sleep in peace.
‘I’ll sleep on the sofa in the sitting room, dear,’ he said, putting her gently from him and covering her with the sheet.
‘Thank you, Tom,’ she whispered. What else was there to say? she thought. It was hopeless and she should have known it. Though why she should have foreseen it she wasn’t quite sure.
Tom settled down to a wedding night which was very different from the one he had looked forward to so eagerly only that morning. Only that morning, he mused as he lay sleepless, but a lifetime ago.
Chapter Nineteen
Breakfast on the first morning after their wedding was a sombre meal for Tom and Ada even though the weather was near perfect. The sun shone through the windows of the dining room, and Ada looked out at a sparkling sea, calm and blue, in complete contrast to her troubled spirits.
They both picked at their food. Tom picked up his coffee cup and stared moodily into the murky brown liquid. Ada grimaced as she sipped hers. Why on earth, she wondered distractedly, had she not asked for tea? She hated coffee. Was her self-confidence shattered even to the extent that she was nervous of saying what she would like to drink? She regarded Tom covertly; he looked so unhappy, poor man.
I will control myself tonight, she resolved. It’s only an aversion. If I can drink coffee and appear to like it, I can make myself be a proper wife to Tom. She’d tell him so.
‘Tom –’
‘Ada –’
They both began to talk at once and stopped abruptly. Somehow the tiny coincidence broke the ice and they smiled at each other.
‘You first,’ said Tom.
‘I was just going to say I’m so sorry –’<
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‘No, don’t say it. We’ll forget about it today, we were both tired last night. Today we’ll go out and enjoy ourselves, take a carriage ride to the North Shore, maybe even walk back. What do you say?’
Ada assented. She could see that Tom was determined to put the night behind him. He couldn’t really believe her behaviour was anything but an aberration, so he had decided it was all due to wedding fatigue. There was no point in talking about it, he was right about that. And in any case, it was going to be all right that night, it was, really it was, she told herself.
They rode along at a spanking pace in an open carriage drawn by a dapple-grey horse. Ada shaded her complexion with a parasol on the insistence of Tom, though she giggled inwardly as she thought of the picture she made; Eliza would have laughed at her. They paid what Ada considered to be an exorbitant amount for the privilege and afterwards walked back to the south pier and listened to the band. Then they sat on deck chairs on the sand watching the waves roll in and breathing in the fresh, salty air. They watched the children riding on the donkeys and smiled at one little girl who stood with hands on hips and glared her outrage at her parents for their supposed desertion when she at last saw them. Ada had noticed the child’s momentary panic after thinking they had left while she took her trip on a donkey wearing a straw hat with ‘Daisy’ on it.
‘You moved!’ the child insisted, stamping her little foot.
Her parents, who had not moved an inch from the chairs where they had been sitting watching her, laughed and the child got angrier and angrier. But when the mother gathered her up and hugged her and the father vowed he would never have lost his little treasure, she was mollified.
‘Just wait, in a year or two it could be us sitting here, an old married couple, watching our children on the donkeys,’ Tom said.
‘Oh, yes! Wouldn’t it be grand?’ Ada replied. Tom gathered her hand in his and his love for her shone from his eyes. Everything is going to be fine, Ada told herself as she returned the pressure of his fingers.
As the lovely day wore on, both Tom and Ada began to recover their spirits and their appetites, so that by the time they eventually arrived back at the hotel to dress for dinner they were laughing at the antics of Punch and Judy and marvelling at the hydraulic lift which had brought them up the cliffs to the hotel.
‘A great feat of Victorian engineering,’ Tom declared, ‘which only proves the power of water.’
They dined to the sound of a string quartet playing romantic melodies and this time they both ate well, the sun and the sea air had done their work. And afterwards, Ada felt happy and confident as she went upstairs on her husband’s arm. This time it was going to be fine, she would be able to control herself and Tom would be happy and pleased with her.
It was not fine, it was a disaster to equal the disaster of the night before. There seemed to be nothing she could do about it, nothing at all, she simply couldn’t face the act of making love. The episode ended once again with Tom sleeping in the sitting room and Ada, exhausted with emotional turmoil, falling asleep in the small hours to dream endlessly of Uncle Harry, his watery eyes close to hers; his face somehow turned into the face of Tom but when she relaxed with the relief of it, it was Uncle Harry once more.
She must have talked in her sleep, shouted even, for the next morning Tom entered the bedroom and sat down on the end of the bed.
‘What was it that Uncle Harry did to you?’ He came straight to the point.
Ada was bereft of words for a while, she had no idea what to say. ‘Did I talk in my sleep?’ she asked, biting her bottom lip as she looked at his grave young face.
‘You did. Now tell me, Ada, what was it that your uncle did to you?’
Ada couldn’t tell him – how could she? What would he think of her?
‘Ada, tell me, I have a right to know.’ As Ada continued staring at him, her violet eyes dark-rimmed with lack of proper sleep, he tried a little persuasion.
‘Ada, it might surprise you to hear it, but I am a doctor and I’ve worked in a hospital in a big city. Believe me, I don’t think there’s anything you can say that will be new to me or shock me. I’ve seen it all, things which are not mentioned in polite society. Did your Uncle Harry beat you? Is that why you’re so frightened?’
At Ada’s expression he moved closer to her, taking her in his arms and holding her to him. ‘Tell me,’ he repeated.
Ada couldn’t hold out any longer. ‘My Uncle Harry …’ she said and paused.
‘Yes?’
‘My Uncle Harry is in prison,’ she said at last, her voice low. ‘He is in prison for molesting little girls.’
‘But Ada, you can’t be blamed for that, surely – My God! Do you mean to say that he interfered with you?’
Tom sat back and Ada could see that he was desperately wanting her to say it wasn’t true. But Ada nodded, dumbly. He looked as though a great blow had knocked all the wind out of him. His hold on her slackened, she felt his physical recoil from her. Oh, she knew she shouldn’t have told him!
‘Er, I’ll just get a glass of water, dear,’ he mumbled, fled back into the sitting room and poured a glass of water from the jug standing on the table. He took it over to the window and drank, giving himself a minute or two to think.
He had seen quite a lot of the seamier side of life; the slums of Newcastle were teeming with every kind of vice and the victims frequently ended up in the Infirmary. But that was Newcastle, that wasn’t home, not his own family – they were distanced from all that. Such things were never even mentioned in his home world, never. That his wife should even know that it happened, let alone experience it – his mind shied away from the thought. He pictured Ada, her anxious little face as he walked out of the room, his feelings mixed. Of course he still loved her, it wasn’t her fault, how could it be? It was the fault of that uncle of hers. Such things were common among the labouring poor, he thought, overcrowding and all that. It bred such beasts. For the first time, Tom began to doubt the socialist principles of his father; he couldn’t help the thought sneaking into his mind that this would never have happened if he had married someone from his own level of society.
He sat down on the sofa, suddenly feeling his legs couldn’t bear his weight. He had married Ada because he loved her, she was all he ever wanted. And no doubt she was lying in bed on the other side of the bedroom door, wondering if he was going to cast her off because she had told him the truth. Pulling himself together, he went in to her.
Ada was not lying in bed. She was up and dressed and facing the door with a pale, determined face. She lifted her chin as the door opened, resolved that if his face still showed the signs of revulsion she had seen earlier, she would offer him his freedom. It was only fair.
Tom crossed the room and took her hands in his, kissing her lightly on the forehead. ‘We will never talk of this again,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s go down to breakfast.’
The outbreak of war on 4 August gave Tom the perfect excuse to cut short his honeymoon in Scarborough. The situation was becoming intolerable to him, Ada could see it in his face. He smiled much less and laughed not at all, not even at the comic on the end of the pier.
Every day Ada resolved that if Tom still wanted her she would give herself to him, she would not panic again. Every evening Tom would come to her bed, trying desperately to turn his marriage into a normal one. Every evening they both failed miserably. Ada watched his unhappiness, feeling guiltier all the time.
‘We must pack immediately.’ Tom left his meal and rose from the table when the announcement was made in the dining room. ‘We’ll take the first available train back to Durham.’
There was an excited hubbub among the diners as people left their meals untouched and forgotten. Action seemed to be called for, though what particular action wasn’t clear at first. They stood around in small groups, talking the news over with one another, most of them exhilarated and only the odd few looking gravely solemn.
Ada was oblivious of all this; sh
e was staring at Tom in surprise. How would going back to Durham help? she wondered. Somehow, outside troubles, even the enormous one of war with Germany, seemed insignificant to her against her own, just now.
‘Must we?’ she asked, but even as she uttered the question she felt a great sense of relief. The forlorn hope she had nurtured that they might be able to put things right before they went home to their little house in Hallgarth Street died.
‘I think so,’ Tom was saying as he moved round behind her chair to pull it out for her. She rose obediently.
‘Yes, of course, Tom.’
As they came downstairs to the lobby of the hotel, followed by a porter with their bags, Ada saw that the place was bursting with activity. She waited beside the luggage while Tom paid his bill, looking round at the hustle and bustle. The general air was one of heady anticipation rather than dismay at the thought of war. Tom had to wait in line to settle his account, for a number of other people had also felt the need to cut short their holiday and rush home. Ada still couldn’t understand why.
They had to wait for a cab to the station, too, and the journey home was very different from the one they had taken only a few days before at the start of their honeymoon. This time they sat opposite each other in a crowded carriage. The train was so full that Ada had thought they would have to stand, but Tom, with his usual efficiency, secured them seats at the last minute.
The other occupants of the carriage were discussing the probability of a quick war which would be over in a few weeks, but Tom and Ada spoke little. Both of them stared out of the window at the passing scenery.
‘I will enlist tomorrow,’ Tom said abruptly, sounding as though he had come to a decision and was going to stick to it.
‘But what about your father, the practice?’ Ada turned startled eyes upon him. ‘Won’t it be too much for him?’
Tom made a dismissive gesture. ‘Father will manage.’
Ada stared at him miserably. If it hadn’t been for her and the unhappiness she caused him he wouldn’t be going, she knew. She felt even guiltier than she had before. She gazed out of the window again, unseeingly. Because of her, Tom was going to war and could very well be killed. Ada had read the books Mr Johnson had lent her about the Napoleonic Wars and the one about Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. Soldiers got killed and injured in wartime, war meant battles and battles meant casualties. She was not blind to this fact as so many of the people around her seemed to be.