He hardly dared breathe as he straddled her, taking his weight on his elbows, easing his legs carefully down between hers.
‘I’m going to be careful, Beth. Careful.…,’ he breathed, as slowly, gently, he eased himself into her soft sweet centre.
She stirred against him, her fingers tightened in his hair. His hands on her breasts had stirred something deep and dormant in her. She wanted him to touch them again. To bite and suck them. To kindle her new-found feelings and make them burst into flame.
He scarcely moved when he had entered her, his entire body rigid as if he were terrified of hurting her.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered encouragingly. ‘It’s all right, Adam.’
His face was contorted in an expression almost of torment. He could bear no more. She was so small, so tight, so unflinching beneath him. With a single thrust and a deep groan he came, his sperm shooting into her in an agony of relief. As he shuddered and gasped for breath her arms tightened round him. No spasm rocked her own body, her breathing was calm, steady. She felt curiously on edge, as if she had been taken to a wonderful party and, having got there, had found the doors closed against her.
‘Did I hurt you, my love?’ he asked, looking down at her, his eyes dark with anxiety.
She raised her face to his, lovingly tracing the line of his brow, the curve of his cheekbone.
‘No,’ she said with a smile. ‘You didn’t hurt me, darling.’
It was true. She had felt comfort and gentle pleasure and a hungry, almost frightening feeling when his hands had skimmed her breasts, but she had not felt pain. Nor any other emotion.
‘I love you, Beth,’ he said again drowsily, as his breathing deepened into the slow rhythm of sleep. ‘Only you. For ever.’
She turned her head, kissing his shoulder. She had pleased him. He was happy. Everything was all right.
‘Good night, my love,’ she whispered, curving her body against his. ‘God bless.’
Their lives fell into an agreeable pattern. From Monday to Friday they stayed in Kensington. The Royal Academy was only a few minutes’drive away and, no matter what his plans for the day, Adam always drove her there himself. On Friday evening they left London early, motoring down into the heart of Sussex, to Four Seasons. They seldom shared their weekends with any guests. Occasionally, Princess Luisa Isabel would join them with her new lover, a Brazilian millionaire whose only occupation was polo. Other than that, they remained alone, content with each other, needing no other diversions.
To Princess Luisa Isabel’s dismay, Adam had become a socialist, staunchly supporting Ramsay MacDonald, who led the National Government.
‘I don’t understand it,’ she said to Elizabeth with a pretty lift of her shoulders. ‘Adam is a wealthy man. Why is he a socialist? Surely a socialist government will take all his wealth away?’
‘They will take some of it away, Luisa, and it is only fair that they should do so,’ Elizabeth said as they lay in hammocks waiting for Adam and Luisa’s lover to return from a polo match at Windsor.
The Princess sat upright in her hammock. ‘My goodness, have you become a socialist, too?’ she asked, sincerely shocked.
Elizabeth laughed. ‘I think I’m becoming a pacifist. I like the idea of the League of Nations, and of disputes being settled by international collaboration instead of by armed force.’
‘It hasn’t been very successful in stopping Japan from invading China,’ the Princess said tartly, lying down once again and closing her eyes. ‘And I don’t suppose it will be any more successful in curbing the new German Chancellor if he should begin casting his eyes on the Rhineland and complaining that the 1919 peace treaty was unfair to Germany.’
‘He won’t stay in power long enough to complain,’ Elizabeth said confidently. ‘He’s far too unpleasant to last.’
A year later she was having to reconsider. The Oxford Union had passed the motion that ‘This house will in no circumstances fight for its king and country’yet Hitler was growing increasingly obnoxious in Germany, and Mussolini was being equally abhorrent in Italy.
‘You can’t have patriotism and pacifism,’ Adam had pointed out to her in amusement when she had been indignant at the motion. ‘Churchill’s got it right. The League of Nations needs military power to back it if it is going to act effectively for peace.’
By the summer of 1935 she had begun to agree with him. Italy had invaded Abyssinia and the League had stood by, powerless. In Germany, Hitler was adopting conscription in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, and it seemed as if Princess Luisa Isabel’s fears had been well founded. Elizabeth was concerned, but it wasn’t the growth of fascism that was filling her with increasing anxiety, but her failure to become pregnant.
‘Do stop worrying, darling,’ Adam said to her when another month went by and she was disappointed yet again. ‘There’s no hurry for a baby. You’re only twenty-one. We’ve all the time in the world.’
She was about to protest that, though she was only twenty-one, he had just celebrated his forty-fifth birthday when she saw the faint lines of strain around his mouth and decided against it. He had been pushing himself very hard lately, painfully aware of the large workforce dependent on his company’s success. Of the long line of the dole queue waiting for them if he should fail them. His curly brown hair was as thick and as unruly as ever, but it was heavily sprinkled with grey, and the laughter-lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth had deepened.
‘I think I should see a gynaecologist,’ she said, reaching across the breakfast-table for another slice of toast. ‘I don’t want to wait any longer, Adam. I’m impatient for motherhood!’
He grinned. ‘Have you considered how bulky you will look on the concert platform, pregnant and playing Bartók?’
‘The Bartók recital is in two months’time,’ she said, feeling a quiver of anticipation at the mere thought of it. ‘I could hardly be bulky by then!’ She glanced at her watch, her concentration moving from motherhood to music as he had intended. ‘Goodness, is that the time? I have a rehearsal class in thirty minutes! Please hurry, darling.’
The Bartók recital at the Albert Hall was an overwhelming success. Frank Howes, the music critic of The Times, wrote that it was ‘an outstanding performance, glowing with vitality.’ At the end of the year she was chosen to represent Great Britain in the third International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. The competition was held in the concert hall of the National Philharmonic Society in Warsaw, and to her amazement she came first in the preliminary stages, only losing her position in the finals. It was a tremendous achievement, and from then on she knew, with dizzying certainty, that she was on the verge of becoming what she had always dreamed of becoming. A concert pianist of international repute.
Adam’s pride was touched with alarm. He knew how important her music was to her and he had gained pleasure from allowing her to indulge it, but he had never foreseen the extent to which it would affect their lives. The Chopin Competition in Warsaw was followed by other competitions. In Brussels and in Vienna. It wasn’t always possible for him to travel with her, and he hated the separations her music brought, resenting the long hours she spent alone practising at the keyboard.
In May of the following year, she was invited to undertake an eight-week tour of the United States.
‘Eight weeks?’ Adam stared at her in horror. ‘But it’s impossible, Beth. I can’t possibly absent myself from London for eight weeks!’
‘I know,’ she had said, slipping her arm through his. ‘I shall miss you terribly, darling.…’
His eyes were unbelieving. ‘You can’t mean you intend to go?’
It was her turn to look astonished. ‘But of course I must go! It’s a wonderful opportunity! Two recitals at Carnegie Hall! One in Chicago, one in Toronto; goodness knows how many more in smaller cities.’
He felt cold. He knew that if she went she would not miss him. Not as much as he would miss her. There would be other tours. Longer estrangements.
He closed his eyes, remembering how he had charged Jerome with selfishness for wanting her with him at the cost of her studies. If he refused to sanction the New York tour, he would be doing exactly the same thing. And, if he didn’t, he knew that she would begin to be lost to him. That their lives would grow increasingly further and further apart.
They were in the drawing-room at Four Seasons. It was a Saturday morning, and Princess Luisa Isabel and her latest boyfriend were coming for lunch. They were flying in from Paris, and he was due to meet them at the airport in an hour’s time.
For the first time in his life, he was fiercely, burningly jealous. She could not have spent more time from him if she had been having an affair with another man. His knuckles clenched. God damn it. If it had been another man, at least he could have socked him on the jaw. But a piano couldn’t be socked on the jaw. He moved abruptly away from her, walking across to the windows, standing with his clenched fists thrust deep into his pockets, so jealous of the time and passion she lavished on her music that he thought he would choke with it.
She bit her lip, acutely aware of his distress and suspecting the reasons for it. He didn’t want her to go, and he didn’t want to have to ask her not to go. Disappointment surged through her so acute that she almost cried aloud with it. Two concerts at Carnegie Hall! They would have been the most wonderful, most momentous concerts of her professional life! And she knew, as she looked across at his rigid back, that she would not go. That the cost would be too high. As she walked across to him, she wondered how much of her sacrifice was due to her growing guilt at her lack of passionate response to him in bed. For the first few months of her marriage, she had been undisturbed, certain that it would come in time. Now she knew that, though she loved him with all her heart, it never would come.
‘You’re quite right, darling,’ she said softly, slipping her arm once more through his. ‘Eight weeks is far too long. I’ll decline the offer. Maybe we could go away on holiday for a week or two instead? France perhaps, or Spain?’
Relief surged through him, and for a moment he couldn’t speak, then he said gruffly, ‘Not Spain,’ ashamed of not being able to overrule her decision. At not being able to tell her that eight weeks was not too long and that, of course, she must go. ‘The whole country is about to be plunged into the most hideous civil war. Luisa Isabel must be distraught at the thought of what is happening there.’
‘France, then,’ Elizabeth said, glad that his eyes were still avoiding hers and that he couldn’t see the misery she felt. She forced enthusiasm into her voice. ‘Perhaps we’ll be able to make a baby there. The gynaecologist said that, as there was nothing physically wrong with me, it could be that I needed to relax more. We’ll go down to Antibes and stay at the Eden Roc. It’s the easiest place in the world to relax in!’
They swam and sunbathed and laughed and talked, but both of them were aware that a shadow had been cast across the happy surface of their marriage and neither of them was able to dispel it. Adam made love to her with tender frequency, but no baby resulted.
‘Does it really matter so much, Elizabeth?’ Princess Luisa Isabel asked when they visited her in Paris on their way back to London. ‘It would interrupt your musical career and make life very difficult for a while. What if you received an invitation to tour America? You couldn’t possibly undertake it if you were pregnant. It would be far too gruelling.’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said, her voice oddly flat ‘Of course it would be. Do you think it’s true what the French magazines are saying about the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson? There’s nothing in our newspapers at home. Only the occasional discreet mention, “Among the Prince of Wales’s guests was Mrs Wallis Simpson”. That sort of thing. Nothing any stronger.’
Princess Luisa Isabel was glad that she had changed the subject. The lack of a baby was obviously beginning to distress Elizabeth.
‘The French say that the prince is in love with her and that he wants to marry her. Perhaps he is. If so, I feel sorry for him. He will not be able to marry her.’ Princess Luisa Isabel spoke with all the authority of her title. ‘Not if he wishes to keep his crown.’
A month later the prince had become king, and Elizabeth watched with avid interest as he struggled to make Wallis Simpson his queen. She had thought that the Government would make a compromise, enabling him to marry her and remain king, though without bestowing on Wallis the title of queen. She had been wrong. The Government and the king had not compromised, and on 11 December he had abdicated.
‘At least it’s a relief from reading about the fascists,’ Adam said wearily, tossing a log of wood on to the drawing-room fire. ‘How our government and the French government can opt for non-intervention in the war in Spain is beyond me. Especially now that Hitler and Mussolini have officially formed an alliance. God help the rest of Europe if those two start hunting as a pair!’
‘Will it lead to war?’ Elizabeth asked, putting down the music score she had been reading.
Adam’s face was grim. He had fought in one war and had believed, for a time, that it had been the war to end all wars. Now another was looming. One in which he would, most likely, be too old to participate.
‘It will if no one puts a curb on Hitler,’ he said as the wood took hold and the pungent smell of pine filled the room. ‘His marching into the Rhineland is only a beginning. That’s obvious from his rhetoric.’
They were silent, each thinking of the rhetoric that was bringing terror to thousands of European Jews. His statements that Jews born in Germany were no longer entitled to German citizenship. That marriage between Jews and non-Jews was illegal.
‘Horrid little man,’ Elizabeth said, shivering depite the heat from the fire. ‘How I wish someone would put a stop to him.’
They didn’t. All through 1937 the swastika rampaged triumphant. By 1938 war was becoming not just a possibility but a certainty. In September the British government mobilized its navy. Hitler shouted that Czechoslovakia was the last territorial demand he would make, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich to try ineffectually to make peace.
Adam watched events with growing rage. ‘Can’t Chamberlain see that he’s being taken for a fool? Dictators like Hitler don’t honour their word or respect peace agreements! The only thing they respect is force!’
By February of the following year Hitler, not content with Czechoslovakia, was casting lustful eyes on Poland.
‘That’s it,’ Adam said decisively. ‘Another few months, weeks even, and we’re going to be at war with Germany. I went to the War Office today. I’m too old for active service. The most I will be able to expect is a desk job.’ He looked more distressed than she had ever seen him. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to reconcile myself to sitting behind a goddamned desk!’
She had spent all day at the keyboard. She had a Mozart recital in a month’s time, a Bach recital in April, and she had mentally been going over one of the scores she was to play, her left hand moving to the notes and phrases and harmonies that she could hear in her head. With a suppressed sigh of regret she relinquished them.
‘Then, what are you going to do?’ she asked, sensing his inner tension and certain that, whatever it was, he had already made up his mind.
‘I don’t know.’ He had been pacing the room, and now he stood still and looked at her and she knew that he was lying. ‘Beth.…’ He took her hands. ‘Beth, would you mind if we were to leave England before we become trapped here by the war, and before I become billeted behind some bloody useless desk?’
‘Leave?’ The last strains of Mozart and Bach abruptly fled. She stared at him, the blood leaving her face. ‘You mean go to America? Run away?’
His eyebrows flew together. ‘Good God, no! I don’t want to run away! I want to be involved!’
‘But where can you be involved?’ she asked bewilderedly. ‘I don’t understand.’
His hands tightened on hers. ‘The threat of war isn’t only coming from Germany, Beth. Japan has been at war
with China for five years now, and it’s my belief that if we declare war on Germany the Japanese will take advantage of the fact and move towards Hong Kong and Singapore.’
The breath was tight in her chest, the blood drumming in her ears. He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant. There was the Mozart recital, the Bach recital, the Brussels Competition in four months’time.
‘I’m sorry, Adam,’ she said, praying that her fears were groundless. ‘I don’t understand.’
His thumbs pressed hard on her wrists. ‘I want to go to Hong Kong,’ he said fiercely. ‘I want to be in a position to fight when the fighting comes!’
Chapter Five
She stared at him, her disbelief total. ‘Hong Kong?’ she repeated, her voice cracked, not sounding as if it were her voice at all.
He nodded, running his hands through his hair. ‘One of our subsidiary companies is based there. Leigh Stafford, the chap in charge, says that, though the vast majority of people out there ridicule the thought of attack by the Japanese, he thinks it a distinct possibility. He wants us to wind down our business interests and hold over our investments until the situation is more settled.’
She continued to stare at him. In all of the seven years that they had been married, they had never had a serious row. The nearest they had ever come was when she had been offered the eight-week concert tour of America. She had known then that, if she had gone, the very foundations of their marriage would have been shaken. And she had not gone. She had fought her disappointment, determined that there would be other opportunities, opportunities that would not drive a wedge between them. But now Adam was suggesting the impossible. He was suggesting that she leave the Academy; that she leave London; that she abandon her musical career as she had been forced to abandon it once before, many years ago.
A Multitude of Sins Page 9