The Fleeting Years

by Connie Monk

  But surely he knew that man, or at any rate he knew him by sight. He was the one who played the piano in Mum’s quintet, he’d seen him once when he’d gone with Gran to a recital. But why would he come here?

  ‘Hello, Gran,’ he called. ‘I cycled over to tell you something.’ And from the way he said it she guessed the news he’d brought. Until he had interrupted, she and the man had been sitting at the garden table, the remains of what must have been tea in front of them. But on hearing what Tom said, she jumped up, whispered something to her visitor whose instant reaction was as spontaneous as hers, then they both came towards him, their expressions making him feel ten foot tall.

  ‘You’ve been accepted?’ she called, unable to contain her excitement until she reached him.

  If he’d passed an academic exam, no matter what, even though she would have spoken the same words of praise, they all knew this was different. This was music; his young success and his outlook for the future seemed to carry her back down the years to the heady days when Zina left college with such great hopes for her future. But Tom wouldn’t throw everything up and get married. When he married he would be even more inspired to climb to the heights in his career.

  ‘Pop indoors and get yourself a cup and saucer – and a plate,’ Jenny told him, delighted to see him with a chance to get to know Derek Masters. ‘There are cakes to be eaten up. We’ll talk some more all about it. If the others are in America you know you can always come to me for breaks too short to go over there. Oh, what fun it’s all going to be!’ Tom loved to hear her talk in that excited way; he had been sure that would be her reaction. He hurried off to collect his crockery, eager to join them, feeling himself to be well on the way to belonging to the world of established musicians. It really had the atmosphere of a party and how good it was that her visitor was Mr Masters.

  ‘We were having a sort of lunch cum tea picnic,’ Jenny told him when he came back with his crockery. ‘You can fetch another garden chair or you can sit on the grass, it’s quite dry.’

  ‘I’ll fetch a chair, Gran. If I’m down there on the grass I can’t see what there is to eat and those cream doughnuts look good.’

  ‘Sorry we’ve eaten all the ham salad, you’ll have to make up on cakes.’

  Derek Masters was watching him, his quick smile in Jenny’s direction telling her that he liked what he saw. That this was the grandson she had talked of with such pride fitted into the picture he had formed in his imagination. Of course he knew Zina, but only as a member of the quintet, never really on a personal basis. There was something reserved about her that told him she wouldn’t welcome the relationship that had developed between himself and Jenny over these summer weeks. A man who’d been a loner for more than thirty years, he had the strangest feeling that today destiny had brought the three of them together for a purpose.

  Once the last of the cakes had disappeared and the teapot run dry, Jenny stacked the tray, Tom carried it to the kitchen and Derek went through the open French doors to the drawing room. It did strike Tom as an odd thing for a casual acquaintance to do, but when he heard the first chords from the piano he forgot to be puzzled.

  ‘You go and join Derek,’ Jenny told him, ‘he’s calling you to the piano. A pity you haven’t your fiddle here.’

  But before she had the crockery washed up and the kitchen clear she could hear they were playing a duet. How proud she felt. Always darling Tommy had been the shadow following Fiona, but even in this one day, now that he knew his future was settled, she could see a difference in him. And what a tale to tell them when he got home and said that he had played with Derek Masters. What a tale indeed, she added silently and with a worried frown as she thought of the things Zina had said. Well, let her think what she liked. It was a long time since she had felt so free, so much herself, as she had over these summer weeks. Was he such a confirmed bachelor that he didn’t even suspect the longing that being with him stirred in her? As if in self-protection she took her handbag from where she’d dropped it on the hall table when they’d come in and retouched her make-up. Then with one last quick glance in the mirror she went to join the others, going into the room quietly and sitting down believing she hadn’t been noticed.

  ‘Will you play something, sir? Please?’ Tom asked as the duet ended, speaking as he might to Mr Messer at school, the ‘sir’ coming quite naturally.

  ‘And then you must go, Tom,’ Jenny reminded him, ‘you’ve a long ride ahead of you and they’ll think something is wrong if you’re not home before dark.’

  But the evening had about it a touch of magic, at least Tom knew that it did for him, and time slipped by until it was Derek who said he had some rope in the boot of the car and if they tied the bike on he could still get Tom home before the last of the daylight faded.

  And so ended an evening which Tom felt he would never forget – in all probability an evening he did never forget, the end of a day which had lifted him from childhood to adolescence and in Derek Masters given him a role model to emulate. Derek refused his invitation to come into the house, saying it was time he was on his way, so at the end of the drive of Newton House they untied the rope and lifted the bicycle to the ground.

  ‘Thank you for bringing me, and thank you for … for … the music and letting me play with you.’

  ‘Give it all that you are, Tom, and in a few years it will be me who will be thanking you.’

  Jenny was watching from the window. He hadn’t actually said that he would come back once he’d taken Tom home, but neither had he said goodbye or made arrangements for when they would see each other again. Please make him come. It has been such a specially wonderful day, this morning listening to an organ recital in the cathedral then, on the way back, stopping at that old inn and sitting outside in the sunshine, simply idling the time away with comfortable conversation. Make him come back; please make him want to be here as much as I want him. Yes, yes, that’s his car, but he’s coming from the wrong direction. Why would he have gone into the village at this time of evening when the shops are closed? He’ll see I’ve left the double gate open. She cared nothing for prying neighbours, although in fact there was no one about to see him turn in at the gate, or Jenny as she came out to meet him. When he got out of the car she saw the reason for his trip to the village. In his hand he had a bottle of champagne. Her heart seemed to miss a beat.

  ‘I thought that delightful grandson of yours needed us to drink a toast to his future,’ was his explanation as he followed her back into the house and through to the drawing room where the French doors were still open even though by now dusk was turning to darkness. ‘He tells me he didn’t start lessons until he went to that boarding school. It’s remarkable what he’s done in the time – and seemingly on two instruments. Yes, I see his as a future to be watched, especially now that he’s to get first-class training.’

  She tried not to let him guess what her first reaction had been when she saw the champagne.

  ‘I don’t know how he’ll feel when the others go and he’s left behind. He’s not quite the man he feels himself to be today.’

  ‘He’ll have you, dear Jenny.’

  ‘A grandmother. He and Fiona have always been so close. He needs youth.’

  ‘Youth is relative.’ Derek was looking at her in a way that defied her turning away. ‘What would the young think if they knew what knowing you has done to me? Probably laugh at me, at both of us. Do you know what I’m saying?’

  She reached towards him and raised her hands to rest on his shoulders.

  ‘I know what I hope you’re saying.’

  ‘For more than thirty-five years I’ve not let myself even think about sharing my life with anyone. I’m human. I’ve wanted, yearned, for someone to love. Sometimes I’ve despaired at the hopelessness.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You say you’ve never thought of sharing your life and yet you’ve yearned for someone to love.’

  ‘Jenny, you and I could make a full and happy life together. I
’m right, aren’t I? These last weeks since we’ve been so much together I’ve known a sort of inner happiness I hadn’t believed possible.’

  She moved closer to him, raising her face. Her heart was pounding, her legs and arms left weak as she pulled his head nearer, her mouth slightly open as it sought his.

  Whatever his good intentions had been, they were lost as, with the pent-up emotion of years, he kissed her.

  ‘No! No. I can’t. Oh God, Jenny, why have I let it happen?’ He pulled himself back from her yet he hadn’t the strength of will to move right away. ‘More than anything in this world I want you for my wife—’

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ she breathed.

  ‘I can’t marry you. All these years I’ve known I can’t marry. Jenny, I ought not to have let this happen. I have a wife.’

  She felt stunned. Whatever she had expected him to tell her, it wasn’t that he was married. ‘But … but … are you separated?’ It didn’t occur to her that he might have a wife at home and all these weeks had been philandering with her.

  ‘Not in the way you mean. I’ll tell you the whole story. I’m not proud that I let this happen, God knows the last thing I want is that you are hurt. You are dearer to me than anything in this life.’

  ‘Then nothing else matters. Whatever you are going to tell me can make no difference. If you love your wife, then go home to her. But if it isn’t as marriage should be, a true bonding of two spirits, then nothing you tell me can come between us.’

  He drew her to the sofa so that they sat side by side.

  ‘Eva and I met just as I was leaving college. It was at a party; mostly my fellow students but someone brought her as a guest. There was a lot of music – and she sang in the purest soprano I had ever heard.’ He was talking with his eyes shut and Jenny knew memory was carrying him back. ‘A glorious voice. At twenty-one I fell in love. She haunted my every thought. Emotionally it was the same for both of us. My parents were against our marrying. The usual reasons: too young, I’d only just trained for a career, had no hope of keeping a wife etc. Her father wasn’t happy with the idea either, but he didn’t oppose it as mine did; she had no mother. She was already twenty-one and we got married despite all the objections. I expect they were right and we were too inexperienced, but the first few months we were in seventh heaven. Then she was pregnant and everything changed. Physically she wasn’t ill, but she changed. It was as if she was full of fear; not just about the coming baby but fear of life, fear she couldn’t control. She couldn’t sleep and the doctor gave her some sort of tablets. One day I came into the room to find she had the whole bottle of them tipped into her hand and one by one she was taking them. I was terrified. I didn’t know how many she’d taken. I doubt if she knew either. She had just one goal, to finish her life. I got the rest of them away from her and forced my finger down her throat. She struggled, screamed, sobbed, fought, all the time retching as I moved my finger to the back of her throat. At last, thank God, she was dreadfully sick. It was a nightmare that haunts me until this day. That night she lost the baby. At the time that seemed like a tragedy, but I know now it was a mercy. I was earning a meagre living from recitals and supplementing it by teaching, often having to leave her on her own, but always she was on my mind. I knew she shouldn’t have been left by herself. Then about a month or so after the sleeping pill incident I came home to find her unconscious, a knife by her side and her wrist slashed. There was blood everywhere. She was deathly white but I knew she still lived, for the deep gash on her wrist was still bleeding. That was the end, Jenny. We were given no choice. The ambulance carried her away but there could be no bringing her back. After the incident with the sleeping pills and losing the child, she had seemed to recover, sometimes even to be her normal self. But this time was different. In the hospital she had to be restrained, all she wanted was to escape from a life that terrified her. She was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. To this day that’s where she is. In the first year or so when I visited her I liked to think she knew me, I even tried to make myself believe that she would recover and come home. But that was thirty-five years ago. She knows no one, not even the nurses who attend her every day, feed her, bathe her, care for her like a young baby. Hope died a long time ago. In these circumstances I know I could have divorced her but such a thing never entered my head. My career became my whole life. Jenny.’

  Derek’s eyes were open now as he turned towards her and gripped both her hands. ‘Can you understand why it is I can’t do it? She wouldn’t even know. But I can’t.’ Jenny saw his eyes redden as they filled with the burning tears he blinked away. ‘I think of us as we were, so full of hope and confidence – and I can’t do it to her. She had no control over what her life was to become, hers and so mine too. Only later I heard that her mother went the same way, and her aunt. So perhaps I should thank God there was no child. But if I’d been told when I first fell in love with her, it would have made no difference. I would never have believed it could happen to Eva.’

  ‘Life can be so cruel,’ Jenny whispered, imagining the agony Eva must have endured in those early months of marriage when she had suspected the first signs of what was happening to her and been terrified of what was ahead. Moving her fingers gently against Derek’s, Jenny suddenly remembered the day he’d come to her rescue at the petrol pump, how she had silently scorned him for the care he’d taken of his hands. Then he had been a stranger. Who would have believed how over these summer months he could have come to fill her life?

  ‘Poor, poor, Eva,’ she said softly, ‘and you too, Derek. Of course you can’t do it to her. It makes no difference that she wouldn’t realize – you would and I would and it would cast a cloud.’ She sat a little straighter as if that would add emphasis to what she was going to say as she turned to look directly at him. It even surprised her that she could take the step she proposed and have no sense of wrongdoing. She was nearing sixty years old, her code of morals rooted deeply in her since childhood. And yet she felt no wrong. ‘Derek, Eva will be your wife as long as she lives. The young husband you were all those years ago will always belong to the Eva you married and surely somewhere, deep in her soul, that young girl still belongs to you and always will. And, for me, nothing will ever take away anything I felt for Richard, felt and feel still and always will. But our lives should be more than “yesterday”, there’s today and tomorrow. You and I can’t be man and wife with a certificate to prove it; but nothing we share in the future, nothing we feel for each other, can cast a cloud on the love you and Eva shared. Neither can it touch the love I had, and shall always have, for Richard. But what of the rest of our lives? Do you really care if people see us as immoral?’ Then with a chuckle that took years from her, she added, ‘For myself, I don’t give a jot.’ She tried not to think of Zina as she said it.

  ‘What are you saying? Jenny, I want us to be together for the rest of our lives, not just a few hours of each day, but everything, all that we are. Are you saying that even though we can’t marry, our lives can still be bound? Are you willing to flout convention and live with a man who isn’t your lawful husband?’

  Jenny felt utterly carefree as she nodded and said, with the chuckle he found so endearing, ‘My grandad used to say—’ and she took on what she considered a manly voice – ‘“the law’s an arse” and as for local gossips, well, who cares? If I were young enough to give you children I might change my name to yours for their sake, but we have no one but ourselves to consider. What we bring to each other is very different from that first experience. Perhaps it’s richer, deeper, based on a foundation of experience.’

  ‘No young swain ever felt more desire than I do for you, Jenny. For so long I’ve tried to deny every natural urge or need, but …’ He drew her close against him, as he said, ‘You haunt me. Never in my life have I craved love, whole and complete love, as I do from you.’

  Her answer was to move her mouth against his and, knowing exactly what she did and why she did it, let the tip of her tongue gent
ly explore.

  Pulling her head back a little, she whispered, ‘Stay with me. Tonight. We have the rest of our lives, but first don’t leave me tonight.’ Then, suddenly fearful of losing the wonder of loving, of letting it be swamped by all he’d told her, she added with a laugh hiding behind her words, ‘We’ve no need to wait three weeks for the banns to be called.’

  A reliable and unchanging mother and grandmother, that may have been as the family thought of her, but she had had a happy and full marriage. When Richard had died, with her heart and mind she had missed the companionship, the sharing of jokes, of music, of their home and garden, while with her heart and body she craved the love that no amount of filling her days with good works or outside interests had lessened. In the loneliness of night her body ached for love. And tonight she and Derek would find that miracle together.

  Suddenly she stood up and walked to the open French doors looking up at the night sky. Then she turned and held her hand for him to join her. Together they walked out into the summer night.

  ‘This is where we make our vows, under God’s starry sky. And I do, solemnly and with all my heart I swear before God that I will be as a wife to you and love you all the days of my life.’

  He was almost afraid to trust his voice. He spoke softly, his gaze on that summer night sky as he made his vows. ‘I vow before God that I will love you faithfully and with all that I am until my life’s end – and then, please God, beyond.’

  There was no passion in the kiss they exchanged, rather a reverence as if they were surrounded by a mystique beyond worldly understanding. Then, without a word they went back inside, and while she closed the French doors he uncorked the champagne.

  The next day she would have to tell Zina, but on that night she was ready to leave tomorrow to take care of itself.