Between Friends

by Audrey Howard

  ‘… Serbia is bound to appeal to Russia to come to her assistance. They are natural allies and the Germans will come in on the side of Austria-Hungary. France will join her ally, Russia and as the whole thing escalates how can we not become involved?’

  ‘Oh Martin, surely not. It has nothing to do with us.’

  ‘No, on the face of it, perhaps not but …’

  ‘And why should it involve you, or Tom?’

  As she spoke Tom’s name it was as though the mention of it had brought his absence from the hotel to their attention and the realisation that for the first time in months they were here alone together without his unspoken reminder to Martin that Meg belonged to him.

  ‘Well … if there is war … there’ll be fighting …’ Martin found he could hardly speak. His thoughts had become scattered and fragmented, thoughts of his ‘Wren’ and the Royal Flying Corps, his own intention, clear and perfectly formulated in his mind only an hour ago, dissipating as his own breath caught in his throat. He felt his heart buck painfully in his chest. Her eyes were still on him and she seemed bewitched, her attention rapt, wondering, distracted from what he was saying by what she saw in his face.

  ‘Meggie …’

  ‘Yes … I see … but really … I cannot think we will go to war …’

  ‘Perhaps I am being unduly …’

  ‘I am sure of it …’

  ‘Of course.’

  They had moved a step closer to one another, only a foot or so of space separating them. They spoke the words, their lips forming sentences, answers and questions, their brains functioning automatically at a certain level but they, they, Meg and Martin did not speak them, nor hear them for they were fast now in the drifting dream world of the moment, the moment towards which they had been moving since they were children. He had recognised the truth before she did and he felt the desire grow, a desire which was not romantic but a fierce masculine need to put the mark of his love on what belonged to him and he reached out his hands for her. She hesitated, understanding in that last second what he had in mind for her but her eyes still clung to his, speaking, telling him what he wanted to know and he smiled triumphantly. Her face whitened and her lips parted in refusal for her despairing mind registered wildly that she had a hotel filled with guests but her eyes begged him, pleaded with him to go on. They spoke for her, denying the hand she put out to stop him, denying the words which were forming in her dry throat. Her expression was haunted and she felt her heart tear loose and thrash about in her breast but still he smiled, his body almost touching hers now, his manner saying quite clearly that what was Martin Hunter’s would never be taken from him. It was there in his face, in the strong brown hands which gripped her shoulders, what he meant to do!

  ‘Martin … please …’ she whispered, clinging to the last shred of compassion for the man they were to crucify. ‘Tom … he is … oh, please, don’t do it … the guests. Don’t force me …’

  His face was dark and his eyes were fierce with his love.

  ‘As to that, I have no intention of forcing you, my darling, none at all. The moment you ask me to stop, I will. I shall lock the door and no-one will come. I love you you see. I have loved you with all my heart, feeling it grow slowly inside me for many years now. Have you the least notion of how I have agonised over my feelings for you, have you, Megan Hughes? It did not seem … right, you see. I have anguished on it since the day you sat at my bedside after the crash at Brooklands. Four years, and I have held off, fighting a despairing battle to keep my filthy hands off you, believing that what I felt for my little ‘sister’ was unhealthy, abnormal, perverted. I had been conditioned, you see, for almost ten years into thinking of you as a child, a young and innocent girl whose protection had been my responsibility. The longing I had to touch you, to put my arms about you and kiss that rich and exciting mouth of yours was the very emotion in other men, the lust I had seen in other men from which I must protect you. I have stayed away from you, taken other women … oh yes, even in these last months, do not doubt it for I am a man with a man’s needs and I could not wait for you to make up your mind to tell Tom. So, I began to convince myself that what I felt for you was no more than a passing thing. You had grown beautiful, womanly and I was a man and was it not natural for a full-blooded man to desire a beautiful woman? Oh yes, I told myself, young Meg is growing, maturing, gaining confidence in the business world and what were you to me really? One day I said confidently, I will meet a woman who will be more to me than an amusing companion, a lover to soothe and delight me in the night. I would marry when she came along and I would marry well for it does no harm to ally oneself with a family who can give you a push as you claw your way to the top which is where I mean to go. Perhaps a woman with money. Robert Hemingway would know of one and I have kept in touch with him. I have dined with him and his family and you may laugh at this, my darling …’ His own face grimaced in self-contempt, ‘… had even considered the fifteen year old miss who is his grand-daughter. She was still a child but I could wait.’ His voice became soft then and he held her away from him so that she could see into his eyes. ‘I held back my emotions, Megan Hughes, those that you aroused in me, concentrating everything I had on my work. But …’ He lifted his head and his laughter was completely without mirth. ‘… whilst I held my lust in check, virtuously believing I was doing the gentlemanly thing, Tom Fraser had the bloody impudence, the gall, to take what was mine … mine! Oh, I could convince myself, just, that Megan Hughes was not for me but by God, if I was not to have her, neither was any other man!’

  His face was vibrantly alive, the colour in it high and racing beneath the skin. His eyes were almost black, so dark had they become and she could feel and smell and taste the sweetness of his breath as it exploded from between his lips, inches from her own.

  ‘So, my darling, if you are willing, and you have only to say if you are not, I shall hold you in my arms and kiss you and when that splendid virginal body of yours comes alive, as I know it will, then you shall decide who it is you are to love, and who is to love you, but I tell you this, Megan Hughes, Meggie, oh my dearest Meggie, I do not believe it will be Tom Fraser!’

  He backed her up to the door and turned the key in the lock, then holding her hands out against it as though she was on a cross, he began to kiss her. Gently at first, a mere brushing of his mouth on hers and when she turned her head desperately away he placed his warm lips beneath the lobe of her ear, kissing and licking until she felt the pit of her stomach begin to warm and throb and melt and her arms struggled, not to escape him but to clutch him to her. They were round his neck and her hands gripped his hair and she began to whimper in her throat. The whimper became a moan. She was a woman who had known no man’s touch beyond the loving, almost brotherly hand of Tom Fraser. She was, as Martin said, virginal, but she was no innocent sixteen-year-old. She was a woman, ready for loving these past six years and she wanted this as much as Martin.

  His hands went to the neckline of her gown and with great deliberation he pulled it from her shoulders and down about her waist and looked in wonder at her glorious, full-nippled breasts. They seemed to spring into his eager hands and he bent his mouth to them and did not stop to ask her if she wished him to go on!

  ‘When will you marry me?’ he said an hour later as he lay with his head on her breast and she told him soon, soon, quite bewitched by him but he raised his head to look into her face and they were both sadly aware that they were about to break the steadfast heart of Tom Fraser.

  ‘We’ll tell him together, Meg. That’s what we should have done months ago.’

  ‘Dear Lord … Martin …’

  ‘I know, sweetheart, but he has to be told now. You know that.’

  ‘Will you let me … I promise this time …’

  ‘What, my love?’ He bent his head and put his lips to the curve of her silken eyebrow, then brushed back the tangled riot of her hair. They lay on the soft rug, their naked bodies united in the beauty of their
love, their bodies beautiful in their love, young, supple and thrusting with the strength of it. He was ready again but she held him back, her face strained, its rosy glow gone now in the pain she knew she must inflict on Tom.

  ‘I will tell him, Martin. No, I really will this time …’ as he reared away in disbelief. ‘He will take it better if you’re not there to see it.’

  His hand was at her waist, fitting the brown strength of his fingers into the soft turned whiteness, urgent again, demanding, refusing to be denied and she lifted her lovely rounded hips and raised her arms to his head as his mouth travelled down the length of her body and Tom was forgotten, forgotten as though he had never existed as Meg Hughes took her second journey to that place of ecstacy into which Martin Hunter led her.

  They dressed later, their eyes soft and wondering. His hand cupped her breast before she covered it and lingered on the long white beauty of her leg. She put her face against the brown hardness of his muscled chest and smelled the masculine fragrance of soap and sweat and some indefinable something which was, she knew now, peculiarly her’s and Martin’s. They whispered and laughed softly, and the busy hotel about them had no being. They were lost in the loveliness of their new love but at last they were as they had been an hour before, but would they ever be that again, their fingers asked as they drew irresistibly together, linking quite naturally in a way which Meg could still not quite believe. This was Martin, her heart exulted, her love, her lover and yet he was Martin her friend, her companion of almost twenty years, familiar, dependable, a part of her life which remained unbroken from the day on which she had put her child’s hand in his. It was strange to her, this new relationship with a man who had been one thing and was now another. Strange and wholly delightful and she felt a sudden wave of shyness engulf her and she hung her head before him, like a child with a friendly stranger. He saw it and was enchanted, putting a finger to her chin and lifting it, leaning to kiss her blush away, smoothing her cheek with a hand which trembled for he could not believe even yet that she was wholly, irrevocably his!

  As though she read the glow of possession in his eyes, the possession of a man for his woman, hers became sad again, dimmed and he knew the reason why.

  ‘Shall I wait?’ he said, his hand going to her cheek again for it seemed he could not get enough of touching.

  ‘No …’

  ‘I feel we should share it …’

  ‘It would be best if … he and I were alone. Put yourself in his shoes, Martin. Would you like to have him there whilst I told you?’

  ‘Aah … don’t, my love …’ His face clenched for it was the first time he had actually considered what Tom Fraser was to suffer. And yet if he could change it, would he? If Meg was to ask him to leave, to let her go, would he? If he could spare his friend, if it was in his power to take his pain from him by giving Meg Hughes back to him, would he?

  He shook his head sadly and knew he would not.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘I will come for you tomorrow.’

  She turned to look at him then, surprised.

  ‘Come for me! What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ he smiled confidently. ‘You can hardly stay here with Tom, can you, now that you and I are to be married?’

  ‘But … but I live here.’

  ‘Of course you do, my darling. It has been your home. It belongs to you and Tom, but you are to be my wife and will come and live with me in a home you and I will share. As man and wife.’

  ‘But … but where?’

  ‘Perhaps you could go and stay with that woman in Great Merrydown? What was her name … Annie Hardcastle, until we are married. You don’t want a big affair, do you, my darling? A registry office, surely, by special licence for I cannot wait to have you with me all the time. You can wear a white dress, despite the fact that you are no longer the virgin you were this morning …’ He grinned audaciously, his eyebrows lifting, his tall frame leaning towards her with all the certainty in the world that she would raise her face for his kiss, amenable, compliant, a woman led as was right, by her man’s wishes.

  ‘With Annie! In Great Merrydown.’ She reared back from him with all the effrontery of a woman who has just been made an indecent proposition. ‘How the hell can I run the hotel from a distance of fifty miles? Do you expect me to motor up each day or am I to put a manager in as I did at “The Hawthorne Tree”?’

  ‘But damnation Meg, surely Tom and that woman, what’s-her-name, Edie, can cope until you find a buyer?’

  She became quite still then and the amazed pique which had coloured her face to crimson began to drain away, leaving it white and stiff, like cement which had hardened. She moved away from him, her body oddly rigid, stiff and painful, or so it seemed, and went to stand at the French window, staring unseeingly at the sun-drenched garden and the guests – they were still there – who sat about in groups or walked beneath the shade of the trees.

  ‘You are saying I am to … to give up my work, are you, Martin?’

  He sensed the withdrawal in her, the sudden widening of a cool gap between them where there had been only warmth and trust and he frowned, straightening defensively from the position of lounging, confident indolence he had taken up at the fireplace. She turned to face him. ‘You are saying that I must sell my hotel, leave it all and come and live with you?’

  ‘You will be my wife!’ His voice challenged her to argue with him and an obdurate expression came to harden his face and both of them were aware that they had come to a point – so soon, so soon her agonised heart asked – which was to be vital in their lives. He had, justly, she supposed, assumed that she was to fit immediately into her new role as his wife, the keeper of his house, the mother of his children. There was to be a war, he said, and she had no doubt he would go to it, fight in it and because of it he would want her tucked lovingly away, safe and secure and waiting, waiting until he came home to her. He was a man of many interests, a demanding man and lover. He would be a conventional husband and would expect her to be a conventional wife. Wouldn’t he? But perhaps …?

  ‘Martin … I cannot just give up “Hilltops” and “The Hawthorne Tree”. I cannot abandon them now. Tom and I have worked so hard, with both of them, built them up from nothing. We have put four years of our lives into them. We have made them our lives. I am good at what I do and Tom is learning. He loves the work he does in the gardens, in the bar. Dammit, Martin, you are to take me from him, you cannot mean to take his work as well. He cannot manage it on his own. I can just as easily work here – we could take a house near by, you and I …’ Her face became eager and she began to move across the room towards him but he turned away, staring fixedly into the fireplace.

  ‘Please … can you not see … what would I do?’

  ‘You would be my wife! That is what you would do.’

  ‘I can be your wife and run the hotel, Martin.’

  ‘I would not wish you to. And it would be too far …’

  ‘Far from where?’

  ‘From Camford.’

  ‘But we could buy a house somewhere between. Then you could travel to the airfield and I could come up here …’

  ‘You would be my wife, Megan, not an hotelier or a businesswoman but my wife and as such will …’

  She felt the dread and the anger begin to work in her but still she made a determined effort to control them. This was her life, her life, and Tom’s, which was being so carelessly dealt with and she could not allow it to be extinguished lightly. Martin was a strong, self-made man, sure of himself, with all the wilful courage which had turned him, in nine years from a raw and callow lad into an increasingly successful motor car manufacturer and soon, when his Wren was complete, he would enter the aircraft industry and no doubt be just as victorious there. At this moment, her body sated with his, with the love he had poured into her during the past hour she would have done anything he asked for her love for him was just as strong. But if she allowed him this she would los
e her own identity in his, she would be an adjunct of him, an important, beloved, but quite useless decoration which he would wear proudly, cherish lovingly, protect strongly but never, unless she fought him over it, allow a place of its own. And Tom! Dear Christ! They could not take everything from him. He might not want to stay and work beside her. He might chose to sell his share of the investments he had chanced with her, his half of the inn and this splendid hotel they were beginning to make so successful and she was certain Martin would be glad to find the money to buy him out. He might not care to have her as his partner, instead of the wife he had hoped for and his instinct might, she thought, be to take himself off and start a fresh life, but he must be given the choice!

  Martin watched her indecision and his face lost its arrogant expression and his eyes grew soft for he could see her pain. He took a step towards her, then another until they stood but an arm’s length apart.

  ‘Meg, please come with me. Come away and marry me. These … these moments we have spent together … how can I describe what they have meant to me?’ His voice was husky, an urgent, desperate whisper. ‘Don’t deny it has not been the same for you. Your … your delight matched mine. We are perfect partners and I cannot live without you beside me. I have waited so long. You are my … my heart, Meggie, my best beloved … my only love … please … please …’

  His voice broke and he leaned to kiss her, his mouth like velvet against hers. ‘Leave this, my darling, leave it for Tom. He will manage …’

  She turned her face away and huge tears began to spill from her eyes, slipping down her face to fall in great patches on the front of her dress.

  ‘Martin …’ Her cry was despairing, ‘I cannot just go and leave Tom to do it all alone. He cannot … a has no business head and Edie can’t cook …’

  His face closed up like an iron glove, hard and clenched and he turned violently away from her.