The Bannister Girls (45 page)

‘What are you doing here, Angel?' The words seemed to be dragged out of him. Even to himself, he sounded like a shuffling old man, dazed and senile. It was so ludicrous, because he was feeling totally unlike the way he had expected to feel on this day. He should be dancing on tables…

‘Daddy, what's happened? Tell me,
please
! I can't bear to see you like this. I know it must be something awful!'

Angel mumbled into his shoulder. When she raised her face against his in mute sympathy, he could feel the moist warmth of her lips, and the soft melting tears on her lashes. He was reluctant to break this spell. If it was some kind of miracle that had brought her here tonight, then he never questioned the existence of miracles. It was the second miracle today.

At the thought, bile rose in his throat. He couldn't help it. Hale and hearty though he was, good news or bad had always had the same effect on him, and it was frequently only
due to his iron will that he kept it inside his gut and not spewing out of him. Right now, though, he felt in danger of losing that particular battle, and made a supreme effort. Angel felt his limbs go rigid, and mourned for whatever loss he had suffered.

‘Please tell me, Daddy,' she whispered, still holding him. ‘Share it with me, like you always used to say to me.'

She brushed everything else aside. Old hurts didn't matter, compared with this … to her horror, she felt him relax against her again, so swiftly that she was almost unbalanced from her kneeling position. Heavy sobs racked Fred's body again, and furious with himself, he knew the words had to be said.

‘I'd share my dreams with you if I could, my Angel,' the words seemed ground out of him like chips of ice. Feeling the brittleness in him, she realised she was breathing shallowly to catch every word. ‘But I lost that right when you discovered that my dreams weren't high and mighty like you'd always imagined. You put me on a pedestal, and then I toppled –'

‘It's not important now –' she was more distressed than she could say. Didn't every daughter put her father on a pedestal, believing him superior to every other man?

‘Yes it bloody well is!' Fred's voice was harsh with the pain of pent-up feelings. ‘It's Harriet I love more than life, and it's Harriet whose name I can never mention to another living soul, and I can't possibly make you understand how that feels. How can you know the torment to a man living his life with a frigid wife? The gradual breaking down of his confidence, and his very masculinity? And then to meet a warm, caring woman who makes him feel he's ten feet tall every time he walks through the door? You wouldn't understand how it feels to be suddenly alive again, after years of being the so-called master of my own home, when that farce stops at the bedroom door. And I'm sorry if it shocks and offends you, my darling, and I shouldn't be
talking to you like this, but the relief of today has taken all the stuffing out of me, when it should be the other way round. I should be getting drunk and celebrating, and instead, I'm a rag doll blubbering like a baby, and God knows why –'

‘Daddy, for pity's sake stop treating me like a child and tell me what's happened.' Angel's voice was a thin thread of sound. She couldn't bear this torrent of words. None of it shocked or offended her. To her own surprise, not even the mention of Harriet's name did that on this particular night. She could only feel supreme sadness to see her father so disorientated when he had always been so strong.

Fred looked down at her upturned face as if seeing her for the first time. He felt a lump in his throat. She was so young and beautiful, his Angel. She was everything he had ever imagined her to be when he had named her with what Clemence called that impossible name. He had always known she would be special to him, and God knew he needed that special closeness between them now.

‘I thought Harriet was going to die,' he was still hoarse with emotion. ‘For months we've lived with the fear of it. I could see her slipping away from me, and I could do nothing about it. The doctors couldn't discover what was wrong with her. They strongly suspected consumption, yet they couldn't be sure. She's been in and out of hospital for test after test, and it's been a nightmare. And then, quite suddenly, she began to put on a little weight, and her face started getting rosy again, and we finally got the verdict today that she's in the clear. My Harriet's going to live. She got the miracle she always wanted, and I just wish to God I had her faith so that I didn't feel so bloody guilty for ever doubting it –'

He leaned against Angel, and supporting him, she could feel the dampness of his tears on her cheeks. She ached to find the right words, but somehow there were no words. She rocked him close as if he were the child, and compassion and love for him overcame everything else.

‘Daddy, I do understand,' she said quietly, one thought
illuminating everything else. ‘When I thought Jacques had died, I wanted to die too. And the memory of times we had spent together sustained me more than anything. I
do
understand.'

She couldn't say more. This was her father, and propriety still prevented her from actually admitting that she and Jacques had been lovers. But perhaps he would understand too, in that peculiar bond they had always shared, and which seemed miraculously restored to them now. If nothing else, the barriers had been broken down, but Angel knew she must do one more thing to prove it to him.

‘This is a fine way to celebrate Harriet's good health!' She forced a more cheerful note to her voice. ‘Can't we find some wine in the cellar and cheer ourselves up? The house is cold now, but there's a fire in my room. Let's take the wine in there and play some music and pretend I've just come home from college and you want to hear everything that's happened!'

With one great leap she bridged the gap that had existed between them. Taking them back into the realms of a happier past, but with the shared knowledge of the present. Accepting and forgiving the flaws in each of them. Fred drew her to her feet and held her close.

‘Your place will always be in my heart, darling girl. No one could ever usurp it.'

‘I know it,' she said simply. ‘It just took me a little time to realise how alike we are.'

They were determinedly bright for the rest of the evening, talking long into the night by the leaping flames of the fire in Angel's room. Fred needed to talk about Harriet, and Angel let him. It no longer seemed strange or a betrayal, because it was obvious that it was a dear and special relationship her father had with Harriet, and it didn't touch anything else. Clemence would always be Lady Bannister, and Fred's daughters would still be his girls.

Angel had secrets too. Everyone did. And not even to Fred in that sweetly intimate atmosphere did she reveal her own plans for marrying Jacques.

Even Louise had secrets, Angel discovered, finally asking what Fred was doing in London, when they had all thought he was in Yorkshire. Mellowed with the wine, he gave a short laugh.

‘Louise wants to sell the house, lock, stock and barrel, and you know what a fuss your mother would make about that. She still thinks fondly that Louise and Dougal will move back there after the war, near enough so that when we all return here, she can see her grandson whenever she likes.'

‘Poor Mother,' Angel murmured, thinking that eventually she and Jacques would probably settle in France, and the family would be split even more.

‘Poor Clemence,' Fred agreed. ‘But you girls must lead your own lives, and Louise is quite adamant that the house must be sold, so I'm seeing to the details for her. Once it's all settled, I shall inform your mother.'

Out of all the mass of words said between them on that emotional night, Angel remembered those particular ones. Weeks later, they were still uppermost in her mind. ‘You girls must lead your own lives.' She remembered them as she stood beside Jacques in the cool dark interior of the tiny church in St Helene, lit only by the early spring sunlight pouring through the stained glass windows and dazzling the altar with iridescent splinters of coloured light.

She remembered little of the brief ceremony. The man of God solemnly intoning the words that bound them together until death did them part; the two strangers asked to be witnesses, because she and Jacques wanted this marriage to be as private as possible; the vows and responses; the coolness of the gold ring sliding onto her finger; the knowledge that this was an irrevocable step, and one that she wanted to take above all else in the world. And the only real moment,
Jacques' kiss on her lips, the first kiss as man and wife.

She hardly noticed hands shaking hers in congratulation, or the document that they signed, proof that they now belonged in the eyes of God and man. It was all unreal, a day so longed for that it seemed almost an anti-climax when it actually happened. And she was so perfectly attuned to her father's reaction over Harriet's good health that she was humbled by the thought.

But if the day was a little unreal, then the night was everything that Angel had anticipated. They had one night to share together. The demands of the war denied them the pleasures of a normal honeymoon. But that night in a small hotel in the town of St Helene, a stone's throw from the Abbey, might have been in a different world. Together in the deepest sense of the word, at last they truly belonged.

‘If this was the only night we had, my dearest one, it would be enough,' Angel whispered into the bronzed bare flesh of her husband. She heard Jacques' low rumbling laugh as he leaned over to kiss her breasts.

‘It would never be enough for me,
chérie
. If we had a lifetime, it would never be enough. So since we have only this one night, let's not think of sleeping. I've waited too long to call you my wife.'

Angel thrilled to the music of the words. This was her husband, the man she had vowed to love and cherish, and would do so until the day she died … but this was not a night to think about dying. Tonight was theirs, for love and comfort, and the end of all parting … she pushed aside the thought that the morning would be here all too soon, and theirs was a love that seemed destined for parting…

Eventually they drifted into sleep, still entwined in each other's arms. And when Angel awoke in the pale early light of day, it was to find Jacques studying her face as if to imprint every pore of it on his memory.

‘Don't look at me so intently. I'm a sight first thing in the morning –' she begged smilingly.

‘And such a beautiful sight. You have a vagueness about you before you're properly awake that is totally enchanting, my Angel. I love that soft, sleepy look on your lovely face. It's very sensual,
chérie
.'

‘Is it?' She looked up at him provocatively, half-closing her lids again. ‘Perhaps I should practise it then, to tempt my husband –'

His answer was to pull her into his arms, where the soft warmth of their skins melted together. His reply was teasingly fierce, loving every part of her. His fingers traced around her mouth and down the smooth slender throat until they met the warm swell of her breasts. Beneath the cocoon of the sheets, she felt the sharp sweet excitement begin, seeing the sudden passion in Jacques' eyes, feeling the proof of it in his young body.

‘You need do nothing to tempt me, darling wife. Everything about you is a temptation, and a delight. Sweets for the tasting –'

‘And you have such a sweet tooth, dear husband!'

She breathed the words, unconsciously seductive, winding her arms around him as the familiar pattern of their love-making began, each new sensation the source of a glorious and abandoned pleasure.

Angel delayed writing home, knowing that eventually the news must be told. She had considered telephoning, but the thought of her mother's reaction quickly prevented that idea. Clemence would be very upset, outraged and undoubtedly furious to know that Angel was married, but her father's words still rang in her ears. ‘You girls must lead your own lives.'

And so she had … so she had…

She still hadn't written home two weeks later, when Mother Superior sent for her. Angel's face whitened.

‘Mother, I didn't ask for this!' she stammered.

The nun looked at her with some impatience.

‘I understood from Sister Yard at Piersville that you were very keen to take on ambulance duties, Bannister.'

‘But here in France! Not in England!' Tears of frustration studded her eyes. ‘You can't send me back there!'

‘Don't you have a family, Bannister? You have a sister, I believe, and you seem to receive plenty of letters –'

She was tempted to say that she also had a husband, but they had decided to tell no one at Brighton Belle or the Abbey of their recent marriage. Angel wore the wedding ring on a chain around her neck, safely inside her high-necked dress.

‘I also have a fiancé,' Angel said shakily instead. ‘And I want to be near him, Mother.'

The nun put a cool hand on Angel's tense arm.

‘I do understand, my dear, but you've been here for some while, and nurses get battle-fatigued as much as the men. There was a time when we were quite worried about you –'

‘You know I'm quite over that episode!' Angel said heatedly. Then she stopped, her shoulders sagging. The nun's face was implacable. Why were these people looked on as being so compassionate, Angel raged!

‘When are you sending me away?'

‘My dear, don't look on it like that! It won't be for another month yet, but I thought you would like to know.'

Another month. It would be early May by then. A beautiful time in England when everything would be green and fragrant with blossom … but she felt so strongly now that her place was in France, with Jacques…

‘I don't want to go!' She was near to tears as she clung to Jacques, the next time they managed to snatch a few hours together.