The Faithful Heart

by Helena Halme

  The Faithful Heart

  Helena Halme

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Would you like to read on?

  A Note from the Author

  The Good Heart

  Chapter One

  Also by Helena Halme

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  One

  King’s Terrace, Southsea

  Kaisa woke to the sounds of the seagulls calling to each other in the distance. She opened her eyes and felt the empty space next to her. An involuntary smile spread over her face when she remembered the night before, and where she was. After two weeks of married life, she still couldn’t quite believe that she was finally living with Peter as his wife in a married quarter in Portsmouth. She looked at the radio alarm clock, a wedding present from a distant aunt of Peter’s, and saw it was past 9am. Although Peter had gone back to work after their honeymoon in Finland, Kaisa still felt as if she was on a long holiday. Poor Peter had to wake up early, and although he didn’t seem to mind, Kaisa felt guilty that she was able to lie in bed all morning.

  Again Kaisa smiled as she remembered Peter’s first day back at work. On the Monday – Peter was on a training course at the submarine base in Gosport – she’d got up at the same time as Peter and made him bacon and eggs for breakfast while he showered. She’d struggled to operate the gas hob, even though Peter had shown her how to turn on the hissing gas and light the ring the night before. It all seemed so dangerous to Kaisa, who was used to an electric cooker, especially when Peter stressed how important it was to make sure the gas was properly turned off. ‘Leaking gas will cause an explosion,’ he’d told her. Kaisa was horrified. How did people in England manage?

  ‘This is the life,’ Peter had said, grinning at her from the other side of the small kitchen table. Kaisa had still been wearing her dressing gown, shivering in the bleak, unheated kitchen. It had all felt so romantic; Kaisa the young Navy wife cooking breakfast for her husband. But as she’d lifted her head for Peter to give her a kiss goodbye at the door, Kaisa had felt like a 1950s housewife from a black-and-white film. Kaisa went back to bed and thought, ‘This is not why I got married – to serve my husband breakfast before he goes off to work.’ So on the Tuesday, she stayed in bed. Peter thought it funny that it had taken Kaisa only one day to get over the sentimental notion of making him breakfast in the morning, and joked about it in the pub the following weekend.

  ‘If you wanted a conventional Navy wife, you should have married one of the many English girls with a crush on you,’ she’d said when they were back in their new flat.

  ‘Shh …’ When Peter had placed his lips on hers, Kaisa had abandoned her mouth to Peter’s kisses and let herself be led upstairs to bed.

  Kaisa sighed and forced herself out of bed. She pulled on her bright blue satin sports shorts and a heavy cotton T-shirt with a boat neck, and tied her hair back with a satin ribbon. It was a beautiful sunny day, the seagulls were still calling to each other in the distance, and she was going to clean the flat. As she began clearing the living room of a couple of weeks’ worth of detritus, she thought how wonderful it was to be living in a huge married quarter, right in the centre of Portsmouth. King’s Terrace, a large red-brick Victorian building, where each married quarter occupied two floors, had one of the best situations in the city. The shops at Palmerston Road were within walking distance, as was the seafront at Southsea.

  When they’d found out where they would be living, Peter had said they were lucky to be in Southsea – many of the junior submarine officers’ families lived on the other side of the water, in Gosport. That would have been difficult for Kaisa. As well as the job interviews she anticipated attending, all of Peter’s friends lived on the Southsea side, and, as Kaisa didn’t drive, it would have been costly and tedious to take a bus and a ferry across the Solent every day. And the maisonette was huge: there were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large (but cold) kitchen and a separate lounge. But the Navy issue furniture didn’t please Kaisa’s Finnish eye. Every piece was – in one word – awful. She hadn’t told Peter how she felt about this, of course. And she had to admit, the ugly solid teak sideboard, dining table and chairs, the moss-green flower-patterned curtains, the red-and-yellow three-piece suite, were better than having no furniture at all. It was just that so many of the wedding gifts from her Finnish friends and family didn’t go with the decoration. The straight lines of the Aalto vase that her friend Tuuli had given her looked completely out of sync with the teak dining table and the old-fashioned, intricately carved chairs. If only they’d been able to afford new pine furniture. Then Kaisa could imagine how to arrange their things.

  Still, she knew she was lucky. Living like this, together in Pompey – the Navy’s nickname for the city – was what she’d been dreaming about during the many painful years she’d been apart from Peter, when she was living in Finland trying to finish her studies and he was in the UK pursuing his naval career. This is what she had wanted: to be Peter’s wife – a Navy wife. She looked around the messy living room, and began cleaning it with renewed vigour.

  ‘Isn’t it nice that we have one more week together, with me coming home every night?’ Peter had said as they had walked home from the pub the night before. The routine they’d got into during the first two weeks of their married life seemed like a dream to Kaisa. When Peter got home, hot from a day spent in a stuffy classroom, they’d drive down to the quieter part of the seafront in Eastney, swim in the sea, come back home, make love, and go to the pub. Because Jeff, Peter’s best friend and best man, was still away in the Falklands, they didn’t often go to Jeff’s father’s pub in Old Portsmouth, preferring instead to go to places like the India Arms, or King’s in Southsea. Wherever they went, Peter bumped into people he knew. Often he would make arrangements for them to meet up with friends from the naval base in the evening. Kaisa didn’t usually know the people, but they were all outgoing young men like Peter: carefree, good-looking, and full of jokes. Kaisa’s old life in Finland seemed dull in comparison to the sunny days and jolly evenings in Pompey.

  Although Kaisa didn’t always understand everything that was being said, she didn’t mind sitting next to Peter, holding his hand under the table and soaking up her new life. Occasionally they met other young couples like themselves. During their first week of marriage, Peter introduced Kaisa to Mary and Justin. They’d been married for less than a year and Justin was a submariner, just like Peter. Kaisa liked Mary straight away. She was a tall, lanky girl, with a black, even bob, and a fringe that just touched her eyelashes. She didn’t look like any of the other Navy wives Kaisa knew, and she certainly didn’t act like one. Even though she was pregnant, she always had a pint of beer, and wore high-waisted jeans.
>
  ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you,’ she said to Kaisa.

  ‘Oh,’ Kaisa said. She didn’t know how Mary knew about her, but guessed Peter had told Justin all about his new Finnish wife.

  Mary laughed at Kaisa’s confusion, and added, ‘I hope you wanted to meet me, too, right?’

  Mary told Kaisa that she’d known Justin since school, and that her father had been in the Navy too. Kaisa could hear from the conversation between the men and Mary that she knew a lot of technical details about the course Justin and Peter were on, and about the various submarines and ships. Kaisa tried to listen and learn, but she invariably switched off when the Navy talk started in the pub. It wasn’t that she was uninterested in Peter’s career; she did want to know about these things, but felt stupid asking questions, because she knew so little.

  ‘Sorry, Peanut, we’re boring you.’ Peter had his arm around her waist and squeezed her closer to him so that he could give her a quick peck on the forehead.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Kaisa replied and lent into his embrace. She smiled at the silly nickname Peter had coined for her during their honeymoon. When she asked him where it came from, he’d just kissed her and said, ‘You just are my little Peanut.’

  ‘We’ll miss them and their boring submarine talk when they’re away, won’t we,’ Mary said.

  Mary didn’t need to remind Kaisa that soon she was going to be on her own. She knew this blissful state wasn’t going to last – and that she should make the most of Peter’s presence. But she didn’t want to think about his impending absence. They didn’t as yet know which submarine he was going to be appointed to, nor where he was going to be based. Because Kaisa knew Portsmouth, and some of Peter’s friends, from her many visits to the city, they’d decided she’d stay in their married quarter on King’s Terrace wherever he went. Now that she had her degree from Hanken, the school of economics in Finland, Kaisa planned to apply for jobs. But she hadn’t yet filled in one application. There’d be plenty of time for that when Peter was away.

  Kaisa viewed the mess in the large lounge, which had two tall sash windows facing the road. An ironing board was out, on top of which teetered an insurmountable pile of washing. Most of it consisted of Peter’s heavy cotton uniform shirts, which took Kaisa an age to iron. She spotted the bone china mug her mother-in-law had given her on her first Christmas together with Peter in Wiltshire. She could see only half of the beautiful italic text on the flower-patterned mug, but she knew it read, ‘Oh to be in England, now April is here!’ She remembered how tearful she’d felt when she opened the present and saw those words. And how surprised she’d been that her mother-in-law, who barely knew her, could understand exactly how she felt. To be living in England, with her beloved Englishman, was barely a dream then, nearly four years ago. Now the mug was half-empty of cold, milky tea, left there by Peter, as he’d hurried out of the door that morning. As well as the dirty tea mug, on the table were leftovers of their evening meal – a takeaway burger and chips from the new American-style restaurant a few doors down from the flat. This was fighting for space with opened letters, most of which were bills, old recipes, and a few job applications, which Kaisa had planned to fill in. Kaisa speeded up her cleaning and felt good when after an hour the place looked spotless. Peter would be so pleased with her.

  She made herself a cup of coffee, sat on the uncomfortable sofa and began sifting through the job applications. She wanted to start earning money – even though Peter had a good salary, it would make their life easier if they had two pay packets coming in. But Kaisa didn’t want to take any job – she was a graduate after all, with a Master’s degree from a reputable school of economics, not just any three-year qualification in business administration from a polytechnic, or a diploma from a secretarial college. She wanted a job that would lead to a career, just like Peter’s Navy career. Kaisa thought about Peter and how handsome he looked in his white shirt, tie, black trousers, shiny black shoes, and naval officer’s cap, as he bent over her on the bed each morning to give her a long kiss goodbye. His black hair was often wet from the shower, and he smelled of the coconut shaving foam she so adored. More than once, if she was fully awake, she’d pull him into bed and they’d make love hurriedly. Peter had told her how on those mornings he could hardly concentrate during his first lectures for thinking about her, still warm and naked in their bed. Kaisa smiled and sighed. She hadn’t realised that anyone could ever be this happy.

  Two

  The following Sunday Peter took Kaisa to a breakfast party in London. ‘What’s a breakfast party?’ Kaisa asked. She only knew about sillis, herring and vodka breakfasts that the rich kids at her university in Helsinki used to organise after the annual students’ ball and the 1st of May celebrations.

  ‘I expect there’ll be drinking involved, but perhaps not schnapps,’ Peter said and grinned. They were driving up the A3 in Peter’s grey Ford Fiesta, listening to Radio One and singing along to hits like ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,’ by Wham! and ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

  Kaisa had never met Jackie, whose party it was, but Peter knew her through some of his Navy friends. Kaisa wondered if she was another one of Peter’s old girlfriends, but didn’t want to ask. Peter was married to her now.

  Kaisa wore a new sky-blue silk skirt and a matching strappy vest. She was a little nervous, because she was not wearing a bra. Peter had said it would be ‘absolutely fine’ when Kaisa had shown him the outfit, with and without a bra. The straps looked ugly under the thin cloth bands at the top, so Kaisa preferred not to wear one. Luckily it was a very sunny and warm day, the last day of June, and Kaisa took a cardigan that she could always slip on if she became too self-conscious. Her breasts were so tiny anyway that no one, she was sure, would take any notice. Peter had kissed her as they were getting into the car on King’s Terrace and told her she looked gorgeous.

  ‘And very Scandinavian,’ he added. Kaisa smiled and said, ‘You know Finland is not part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, and therefore I can’t look Scandinavian!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Peter said and squeezed her bottom. ‘Miss Geography, no one cares.’

  ‘On the way up to London, Peter told Kaisa that Jackie’s parents were very well to do, and had bought her a flat in a posh area of central London called Chelsea. ‘You know, where the yuppies live,’ he said and looked sideways at Kaisa.

  ‘You know her well, then?’ Kaisa asked.

  Peter shot her a quick look, and said, ‘No, not really. She’s a friend of a friend.’

  Kaisa smiled to herself. She now loved teasing Peter about his old girlfriends, just as he liked to pull her leg about her old fiancé in Finland, Matti. Neither of them was jealous of the other anymore, not since they’d sorted out their pre-wedding nerves. Since being married, Kaisa couldn’t imagine even looking at another man, and she knew Peter felt the same way about her. Peter looked over at Kaisa and squeezed her knee. ‘Fancy a quickie in the car before we get there?’

  ‘Where? On the road while you’re driving?’ Kaisa laughed, and brushed aside his hand.

  The car in front stopped; they’d reached the traffic lights in Petersfield, a small, pretty town between Portsmouth and London. Peter took hold of Kaisa’s arm and placed her hand over his crotch. ‘I’m ready!’

  Kaisa felt his hardness and squeezed it lightly. ‘You’re crazy.’ The traffic had moved and there was the sound of a horn being pressed from behind. ‘Go on, concentrate on the road and stop thinking about sex for one second.’ Kaisa shook her head in mock disapproval.

  * * *

  When Jackie opened the heavy door, she gave a little shriek of pleasure at seeing Peter and Kaisa. She kissed them on both cheeks and said, ‘Come up, please, darlings! You simply must meet everyone!’ She was wearing a pink, flower-patterned dress and holding a cigarette. She darted up a light-coloured staircase and, with the hand holding the cigarette, waved to them to follow her. Kaisa worried about the ash falling onto the carpet, but Jackie
didn’t seem to care. On her feet she had very high-heeled gold sandals that sank into the plush pile.

  The flat was decorated with old-fashioned furniture; against one wall was a polished teak sideboard filled with family pictures framed in silver, and in the far corner of the large room stood a beautiful piano, on top of which was a large vase filled with long-stemmed pink roses. The place reeked of money. In the centre of the room was a table laden with glasses, bottles of wine and a large bowl of punch filled with cucumber slices and mint leaves. A man wearing a striped jacket over a cotton shirt and light-coloured slacks, with bare feet, was pouring Pimm’s and lemonade into the bowl when Peter and Kaisa walked in. He turned around and looked straight at Kaisa. She adjusted the straps of her top and tried to take hold of Peter’s hand, but he moved away from her towards the man.

  ‘Duncan, how the hell are you?’ The two men shook hands. Peter turned around and said, ‘This is my wife, Kaisa.’

  For a moment, which felt like an age, Duncan said nothing but just gazed at Kaisa. He was slightly shorter than Peter, with fine, fair hair and light-blue eyes. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Duncan bent down and kissed Kaisa’s hand. His lips felt soft. Fearing she’d blushed, she moved her eyes down to the floor.