Lakeland Lily

by Freda Lightfoot

  ‘Mummy, look at me! Look at me, Mummy! I’m swimming like you showed me.’

  ‘Not without me to hold you.’

  He could see her now, running towards him, but he wanted to prove how clever he was. Thomas lifted one foot which, unfortunately, was his undoing. Somehow his other foot rolled about on the slippy shingle in the lake and the next instant the water was over his head as he went down with a bump.

  Then he was being lifted from the water, bright lights exploding in his head as he was held up high in the air, dripping like a fish on the end of a line. And, horror of horrors, he was crying.

  ‘Mummy!’ But it wasn’t his mummy. It was a strange man who held him. His mother was there beside them in the water, and Thomas was instantly concerned. ‘Mummy, Mummy, you’re getting your pretty frock all wet.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, darling. Nothing matters but you, my sweet.’

  ‘You’d never think so, after what I’ve just witnessed. While you sleep, your son is drowning. My son was drowning.’

  Lily looked up into her husband’s furious face with a fast-sinking heart. For more reasons than one.

  ‘It’s all right, I’d seen him too. I would have got to him in time.’

  ‘So you say.’

  Lily sat on the edge of their bed, her face in her hands as she struggled to wipe away the tears. Thomas had been scolded, bathed and put to bed, but still she shook with shock. ‘I would. He’d only been gone a minute. He was simply being naughty and running away because I’d told him it was time for his nap. Children are like that, up to mischief all the time. Sometimes I wish I had eyes in the back of my head. He’s totally fearless, very much your son.’ She’d said the right thing at last. Looking up, she saw the ghost of a smile. ‘Don’t be cross, Bertie. I’m so very glad to see you.’

  She didn’t say ‘at last’. She didn’t ask where he had been all these months, or mention that everyone else had long since returned. He put out one hand and awkwardly touched her cheek. ‘You’re right, old thing. It was only a few inches of water. I was probably over-reacting. Tend to these days, don’t you know? Anyway, the little chap’s come to no harm. I’d best teach him to swim, though, starting first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘That would be an excellent idea, living as close to the lake as we do.’ She put her hands to his face and kissed each cheek then his lips. There was no emotion in the kisses, only a friendly formality. ‘I can’t believe you’re actually here.’ She laughed. ‘Listen to the pandemonium downstairs! Margot will be killing the fatted calf. She’ll expect you down there for tea shortly, all spruced up and ready to answer her every question. You’d best hurry to bathe and change, or she might come up and do it for you!’

  Bertie smiled. ‘Mama wouldn’t dare do such a thing. Not even when I had diphtheria.’ But the jokes had eased the tension between them, established some kind of rapport, however shaky.

  Lily stepped back from him. ‘You look well.’

  It was a lie. She looked into his frozen face, still handsome, still framed with a riot of sandy curls, to all outward appearances the very same man she had married years before. Yet not the same. Something had changed. Something indefinable had died within him.

  ‘You too. I hear Nathan is home.’

  She paused very slightly before asking as brightly as she could, ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Mama. She says the engagement to Selene is off. Why?’

  Her smile had become stiff again, and a little forced. Lily walked to the door. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. There isn’t time now.’

  He nodded. ‘I won’t be long.’

  Margot was a picture of solicitude and attention, bubbling over with happiness at the return of her darling boy. She fussed endlessly over him, fetching books and newspapers, cups of tea and cocoa, anticipating his every request so he never needed to stir from the chair opposite hers. And the questions poured out. ‘Have you suffered terribly, my darling? Is that why you didn’t come home right away? Or did you dread it for some other reason?’ Casting a glance in Lily’s direction.

  ‘I’d some matters to sort out in my mind,’ was all he would say on the subject, and Margot was punctilious in her understanding. ‘Of course. How dreadful it must have been over there. I’m so proud of you. Your father too. Our very own hero.’

  Bertie glared, then for no reason Margot could fathom, got up and walked out of the room. She turned instantly upon Lily, but even Margot could lay no blame on her on this occasion, for Lily had not said a word.

  She wondered how much grace Margot would give her before revealing all her sins to Bertie.

  They did not sleep together. That first night Lily tried to prepare herself, worrying over what her answer would be if he asked. He was her husband after all, and she was still fond of him. Yet she didn’t feel quite prepared for taking up where they had left off. Nor was she ready to confront him with the facts of her love for Nathan. But he solved the problem for her.

  ‘If it’s all right with you, Lily, I’ll sleep in my dressing room for a while. Need to get properly acquainted, don’t you think? Used to each other again.’

  ‘Of course. I agree.’ Trying not to sound too relieved.

  ‘Mama told me you’ve been living on the boat?’

  Lily jumped as if pricked. ‘Did she?’

  ‘Something about Thomas playing pirates. He’s a grand little chap, Lily.’

  She released a quiet sigh. ‘Yes, isn’t he? Now go to bed, darling. You’ve had enough excitement for one day.’

  The next day was spent quietly. Bertie pottered about the house and gardens. He walked in the woods and down to the lake, not venturing far. Sometimes Lily would catch sight of him standing on the sloping lawns, gazing out across the sweeping landscape of lake and green fields, neatly hedged in between pockets of woodland. And at the distant majesty of the hills beyond, as if reminding himself of their eternal beauty, making them a part of him again. But he made no move to take out the steam-yacht, nor even his own small dinghy.

  Bertie did keep his promise to begin teaching his young son to swim. The two of them laughed and splashed together, Thomas seeming to blossom under his father’s care and attention. Bertie too showed signs of the carefree, reckless young man he had once been. He became more relaxed, the lines of tiredness smoothing out of his old-young face, the haunted quality of his gaze warming to a new, if brittle, brightness. Lily watched them with pleasure.

  He’d returned safe and well and so long as they were all three happy, what else could matter?

  When Bertie came to her room on the fourth night and asked to get into her bed, Lily could not find it in her heart to refuse.

  He lay beside her quietly at first, not touching her, not speaking. It was Lily who broke the silence.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  No reply. She could hear him breathing quietly in the darkness as she worried over what she should say, what she should do.

  ‘We ought to talk, I suppose,’ she said. ‘About you and me. Thomas. Our future. There are things I need to say. How about you? Would you like to talk now?’

  ‘No.’

  Lily swallowed. ‘As you wish. I’m so glad to have you home, Bertie. I’ve missed you.’ Knowing that she genuinely meant it.

  ‘Have you?’ There seemed to be doubt in the question, a new insecurity. She searched for any indication in his voice that Margot had already been divulging secrets. Surely she would give her son time to settle in before tearing apart his marriage? Particularly since he was obviously still suffering from whatever had happened to him out there in France.

  ‘Was it bad?’ she asked now, very quietly. She wanted to tell him about Nathan’s problems and about how, bit by bit, he had reacquired his power of speech, even regained a little movement in his useless hand. But she dare not, for that was dangerously close to the other matter which must not yet be discussed.

  But she owed him something, didn’t she? Some comfort at least. Lily quietly dr
ew in a deep breath and slid an arm about his stiff shoulders.

  ‘Would you like to make love to me then? Is that why you came to me tonight?’ And to her amazement Bertie broke down into pitiful tears. He lay against her breast and sobbed out his anguish while she lay in stunned dismay, not daring to move as the sobs racked his too-thin body. She stroked his curly hair, kissed his cheek, and held him close as if he were a child.

  ‘Poor Bertie. Darling Bertie. All that pent-up emotion. You’re home now, my love. Quite safe. Smile for me and be happy.’

  She steeled herself for the inevitable. She could love him. She must love him. Bertie needed to be loved. What would it cost her to show a little affection? Nothing. She owed him that much at least. He was still her husband, and they’d never stopped being friends.

  Slowly he began to respond to her kisses. Lily took off her nightgown and encouraged him to slide his hands over her breasts and hips. ‘Oh, Lily, I’d forgotten how very beautiful you are, how soft and silky your skin. You’re as smooth and precious as a lily. I’m afraid I might bruise you if I press too hard.’

  ‘Nay, lad, you’ll not bruise me,’ she teased, playing the old Lily. He lay on top of her and she slid her arms about his neck. ‘Relax, Bertie. We always did get on well, didn’t we? We’re man and wife, remember, so how can it be wrong? Remember how you used to say that?’ She chuckled at this old joke between them.

  But he wasn’t listening. He was making small grunting noises, kissing her face, her throat, her breasts, striving to recapture what they had once enjoyed. In his mind he saw other faces. Rose’s, pretty and loving, which then changed into one with a gap-toothed grin, thin and hard, with life’s experiences engraved in every line on the pallid dry skin. He could hear a laughing voice tease him.

  ‘Come on, Bertie boy, don’t be shy.’ He’d hated it when she’d called him ‘boy’. It reminded him of Edward, forever criticising, condemning.

  ‘What game d’you want to play today, dearie?’

  ‘Who’s a naughty boy then?’

  ‘Get on with the job in hand, boy, that’s Florrie’s motto.’

  Boy? But he hadn’t behaved like a boy, had he? The games he’d played these past months had been those of a man. A sick, disillusioned man.

  Raucous laughter seemed suddenly to fill the room, fill his head, fill every part of him, and he put his hands to his ears to block out the sound. He could feel the sweat breaking out all over his body, the rigid stiffness in his legs, the flaccid warmth of his penis. Dear God, what was wrong with him? He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t defile Lily after what he’d done with those others. She had no idea exactly what he’d been up to during these months away. But he knew. Dear heaven, he could remember very well.

  Lily kissed him again, trying to help him, but with a cry of anguish deep in his throat, Bertie thrust her aside and flung himself out of bed. The slam of his dressing-room door seemed to echo throughout the house.

  The euphoria of homecoming had quite gone. Bertie became so highly strung that Lily could almost feel the energy emanating from him. He jumped at the slightest sound, complained of tiredness and lethargy yet could not sleep. He suffered constantly from headaches, argued with her over everything, and his naturally pale face seemed drawn with pain and worry.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘We’re bound to feel odd together at first.’ How could she tell him now, when he was suffering so? Yet how could they go on living this lie?

  Was that the cause of this problem between them? Had Margot told him already? Or had Bertie heard rumours from the village gossips? Yet somehow Lily couldn’t bring herself to confront the issue, in case he hadn’t heard and the knowledge of his wife’s betrayal only added to his difficulties.

  As his irritability increased Lily strove to be patient. Sometimes in that first awful week, when it all became too much to bear, she would go and sit in the Faith, which was rather like visiting an old friend. Here, in the quiet backwater, lay a world far removed from either of the other two she struggled to occupy. A place she could call her own.

  After that first terrible night Bertie refused, absolutely, to come to her bed.

  ‘The war has made me impotent,’ he told her.

  ‘I won’t believe it. You need only relax and you’ll be fine.’ Not that she wanted him to make love to her, but Lily felt she ought to try. Her heart ached for him, an emotional cripple, longing to help but not knowing how. Bertie surely deserved her support, even if she couldn’t give him her love?

  She would so like to have loved him, to have been a good and faithful wife, but knew she could not. Nor could she explain that while he’d been away she’d hurried twice a week, as eager as a young girl, to spend hours in another man’s arms. In the woods, on the fells, wherever they could lie together away from prying eyes.

  It no longer mattered that she’d dashed Selene’s hopes of marriage, because she knew her sister-in-law was far too selfish to make Nathan happy. It hadn’t really mattered that she’d been cast off by Margot, her parents, and the rest of society. All that mattered was her love for Nathan.

  Living through the days without him had been the hard part. Purgatory in fact. Desperate for his hands upon her skin, his heart beating against hers, how could she have resisted him? He had been a part of her all her life. Lily wanted only to spend every moment she could with Nathan, and for all it shamed her to admit it, had no real regrets for her infidelity.

  Her one regret was that somehow she must give him up. And for what? For a sick husband who was no longer a man.

  Somehow, Lily knew, she must find the strength to face Bertie with the truth. Before he learned it elsewhere, and further damage was wrought.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  By the end of that first week, when Edward was due home from Manchester, Bertie scarcely spoke a word all day. Edward, on the other hand, had never seemed more lively as the entire family gathered about the long dining-room table. He insisted on opening a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Or two perhaps. A man should celebrate the return of his hero son.’

  Lily saw Bertie flinch but, her mind still busy with her own problems, only half listened to the discussion which ranged back and forth across the table during the long meal. Margot related gossip of past friends and how they had fared, who had married whom and how many children they now had. She talked of her own war work and how exhausting it had been.

  ‘What a relief it is to be rid of it all. If I’d known the war was going to last so long, I would never have volunteered in the first place.’ As if the Germans had deliberately prolonged the war simply to wear her out.

  Selene, in cream and pink gauze, talked only of herself, as usual, and of the new friends she had found at Rosedale Lodge.

  ‘Poor Catherine is quite the invalid. I’ve promised to go over more often. Marcus so appreciates my help.’

  Bertie sat still as stone, appearing to listen to their chatter without taking in a word. She offered him a sympathetic smile, quietly whispering that perhaps he might like to retire early if he felt tired. But Edward was bringing out the port, instructing Margot to ‘leave we men to it’, and she was refusing, insisting he pour her a glass too.

  ‘Very well, m’dear, we could break with convention on this special occasion. We shall drink a second toast to the return of our boy hero.’

  ‘Will you stop that!’ Bertie was on his feet, knocking his glass over as he shouted the words into the startled faces of his family. ‘I’m not a boy. And I’m not a bloody hero! I did my job, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course you did your job. And of course you are a hero,’ Edward said, surprise and a hint of annoyance in his voice. ‘Why do you always put yourself down? Didn’t you go behind enemy lines? Capture prisoners? Your commanding officer wrote and told us so when you were in hospital. I’m proud of you, boy. At last. Doesn’t that please you?’

  A hush seemed to descend on the assembled company while the words ‘hero’ and ‘boy’ sank deepe
r into Bertie’s tortured mind. To his father he would always be a boy, a child who liked to play, who refused to grow up if it meant he must work hard. If playing the hero, as Edward so desperately wanted, would make everything right between them, he might just do it. But it could only work if it were true.

  Bertie saw again a familiar, haggard face, the visions that haunted his sleep, appetites that could not be quenched. His wife’s body, pure and white, that he dare not defile.

  Somehow it all seemed to add up to the loss of his manhood. In that moment the failure became too great to bear. He pushed back his chair, rocking it on its back legs so that it almost fell over, put his hands to his head and began to keen softly, as if in great pain. Then as Margot put out a hand, he swung away from her to pace about the room, wanting to escape yet needing to stay and make them understand. Bertie knew that finally he must find the courage to face his father.

  ‘All my life I’ve wanted you to be proud of me, yearned for it. I thought I might impress you with my boat designs, hoping you might find one you’d want to build. But, no. You mocked them as some kind of foolish game, not work at all.’

  Bertie’s eyes glistened with what Lily recognised to her horror as unshed tears. If he broke down in front of Edward it would finish him for good. ‘But I never got my hands dirty, did I?’ he was saying, lip curling. ‘So it couldn’t be proper man’s work.

  ‘Now, when at last you are proud of me, it’s all false. I don’t deserve your damned pride. I’m not who you think I am.’

  Margot again tried to catch his hand as he strode by, but failed. ‘Bertie dear, do calm yourself. Your father has every right to be proud of you. So am I. My son a...’

  ‘Don’t say it again. I’m no bloody hero! How could I be? Bertie Clermont-Read, the idle fool. Isn’t that how you’ve always seen me?’ He stopped his pacing, fury making him punch the table with his fists as he yelled into their startled faces. ‘You’re right. I am a useless fool. You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you.’