The Shell Seekers (61 page)

"I don't find it boring at all. But sometimes I get the impression that your life ended the day war broke out. And that's wrong, because you're very young."

"I'm twenty-four. Just," she amended.

He smiled. "When was your birthday?"

"Last month. You weren't there."

"September." For a moment he considered this and then nodded, in a satisfied way. "Yes. That's right. That fits."

"How do you mean?"

"Do you ever read Louis MacNeice?"

"I never heard of him."

"An Irish poet. The best. I shall now introduce you to him, reciting from memory, and probably embarrassing you most dreadfully."

"I don't embarrass easily."

He laughed. Without preamble, he began:

"
September has come, it is hers

Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,

Whose nature prefers

Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.

So I give her this month and the next

Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already

So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy.     > Who has left a scent on my life, and 

left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow 

Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls 

And all of London littered with remembered kisses
."

A love poem. Unexpectedly, a love poem. She was not embar-rassed but found herself deeply moved. The words, spoken in Richard's quiet voice, aroused a flurry of emotions, but sadness too. All of London littered with remembered kisses. She thought back to Ambrose and the night they had gone to the theatre, and out to dine and then back to Oakley Street, but the memories were flat and colourless and did nothing to stir her senses as the words of the poem had done. All of which was, to say the least of it, depressing.

"Penelope."

"Urn . . . ?"

"Why do you never talk about your husband?"

She looked up sharply, for a dreadful instant wondering if she had been actually thinking aloud.

"Do you want me to talk about him?"

"Not particularly. But it would be natural. I've known you all ... what is it ... nearly two months now, and in all that time you've never voluntarily spoken of him nor mentioned his name. Your father's the same. Each time we get remotely near the subject, the conversation is changed."

"The reason for that is simple. Ambrose bores him. Am-brose bored Sophie too. They had nothing in common. Nothing to say to each other."

"And you?"

She knew that she had to be honest, not only with Richard but with herself. "I don't talk about him because it's something I'm not very proud of. I don't come out of it very well."

"Whatever that means, you don't imagine I would think any the less of you?"

"Oh, Richard, I have no idea what you would think."

"Try me."

She shrugged, at a loss for words. "I married him."

"Did you love him?"

Once more she strove for truth. "I don't know. But he was good-looking and kind, and the first real friend I made after I joined up and was sent to Whale Island. I'd never had a ..." She hesitated, searching for the right word, but what was there to say except boy-friend? "I'd never had a boy-friend before, never had any sort of a relationship with a man of my own age. He was good company, and he liked me, and it was new and it was different."

"Was that all?" He appeared totally nonplussed, as well he might, after this garbled explanation.

"No. There was another reason. I was pregnant with Nancy." She arranged her face into a bright smile. "Does that shock you?"

"For God's sake, of course it doesn't shock me."

"You look shocked."

"Only because you actually married the man."

"I didn't have to marry him." It was important to reassure him, lest he was picturing Lawrence with a shotgun and Sophie in tears of recrimination. "Papa and Sophie were never like that. They were the original free souls. Ordinary social conventions meant nothing to them. I was on leave when I told them about the baby coming. Under normal circumstances, I might just have stayed at home and had Nancy, and Ambrose would have been none the wiser. But I was still in the Wrens. My leave finished and I had to go back to Portsmouth, and so of course I had to see Ambrose again. And I had to let him know about the baby. It was only fair. I told him that he didn't have to marry me ... but . . ." She hesitated, actually finding it impossible to remember exactly what had happened. ". . . once he'd got used to the idea, he seemed to think that we ought to get married. And I was rather touched because I hadn't really expected him to do anything of the sort. Once we'd made up our minds, there was no time to be lost because Ambrose had finished his courses and was about to be sent to sea. So it was fixed, and that was it. Chelsea Registry Office on a fine May morning."

"Had your parents met him?"

"No. And they couldn't come to the wedding because Papa was ill with bronchitis. So they didn't meet until months later, when he came down to Carn Cottage on a weekend leave. And the moment he walked into the house, I knew that it was all wrong. It was the most terrible, horrible mistake. He didn't belong to us. He didn't belong to me. And I was horrible to him. Enormously pregnant and bored and irritable. I didn't even try to make it fun for him. That's one of the things I'm ashamed of. And I'm ashamed because I always thought of myself as mature and intelligent, and at the end of the day all I did was to make the silliest decision any woman can."

"You mean getting married."

"Yes. Admit it, Richard, you would never have done anything so foolish."

"Don't be too sure. I came very close to it three or four times, but at the last moment common sense always caused me to draw back."

"You mean that you knew you weren't in love, that it wasn't right for you?"

"Partly that. And partly the fact that, for the past ten years, I've known that this war was coming. I'm thirty-two now. I was twenty-two when Hitler and the Nazi party first came on the scene. At University, I had a great friend, Claus von Reindorp. A Rhodes scholar and a brilliant student. He wasn't a Jew, but a member of one of the old German families. We talked a lot about what was happening in his homeland. Even then, he was filled with foreboding. One summer, I went to Austria to climb in the Tyrol. I was able to feel the temperature for myself, see the writing on the wall. Your friends, the Cliffords, were not the only people to realize that there were terrible times ahead."

"What happened to your friend?"

"I don't know. He went back to Germany. For a little, he wrote to me and then the letters stopped. He simply disappeared out of my life. I can only hope that, by now, he is safely dead."

She said, "I hate this war. I hate it as much as anybody. I want it to end, for the killing and the bombing and the battles to stop. And yet I dread its ending, too. Papa is growing old. He can't have much longer to live, and without him to take care of, and without a war, I shall have no reason not to go back to my husband. I see myself and Nancy living in some horrible little villa in Alverstoke or Keyham, and the prospect fills me with dread."

The admission was out. The words hung in a silence between them. She suspected disapproval and needed, more than anything, reassurance. In some distress she turned to him. "Do you hate me for being so selfish?"

"No." He leaned forward and laid his hand over her own where it lay, palm up, upon the striped blanket. "The very opposite." Her hand was freezing cold but his touch was warm, and she closed her fingers around his wrist, needing his warmth, willing it to spread, to reach every part of her being. Instinctively, she lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek. At precisely the same moment, they both spoke. "I love you."

She looked up and into his eyes. It was said. It was done. It could never be unsaid.

"Oh, Richard."

"I love you," he repeated. "I think I've been in love with you since the first moment I set eyes on you, standing with your father on the other side of the road, with your hair blowing in the wind, and you looking like some ravishing gypsy."

"I didn't know ... I really didn't know . . ."

"And from the very beginning, I knew that you were married, and yet that made no difference at all. I couldn't get you out of my mind. And looking back, I don't think I even tried. And when you asked me to Cam Cottage, I told myself it was because of your father, because he enjoyed my company and his games of backgammon. So I came, and I came back ... to see him, of course, but as well, because if I was with him, I knew that you would never be far away. Surrounded by children and endlessly occupied, but still there. That was all that mattered."

"That was all that mattered to me, too. I didn't try to analyse it. I only knew that everything changed colour when you walked through the door. It felt as though I'd known you always. Like the best of everything, in the past and the future, all happening at once. But I didn't dare to call it love. . . ."

He was beside her now, no longer sitting a yard away, but beside her, his arms around her, holding her so close that she could feel the vital drum-beat of his heart. Her face was pressed to his shoulder, his fingers twined and tangled in her hair. "Oh, my darling, darling girl." She drew away, her face turned up to his, and they kissed like lovers who have been parted for years. And it was like coming home, and hearing a door being shut, and knowing that you were safe; with the intrusive world shut out, and nothing and nobody to come between you and the only person in the world you wanted to be with.

She lay on her back, her dark hair spilling out over the old faded cushions.

"Oh, Richard . . ." It was a whisper, but she was not capable of more. "I never knew. I never even guessed that I could feel like this . . . that it could be like this."

He smiled. "It can be better than this."

She looked up into his face and knew what he was saying, and knew that she wanted nothing more. She began to laugh, and his mouth came down on her open, laughing mouth, and words, sweet as they had been, became all at once unnecessary and no longer enough.

The old studio was no stranger to love. The pot-bellied stove, bravely burning, comforted with its warmth; the wind, streaming in through the half-open windows, had seen it all be-fore. The blanketed divans, where once Lawrence and Sophie had shared their mutual joy, received this new love like kindly accomplices. And afterwards, in the deep peace of passion spent, all was tranquillity, and they lay quiet, entwined in each other's arms, watching the clouds tumbling across the sky and listening to the timeless thunder of breakers pounding up onto the empty beach.

She said, "What will happen?"

"How do you mean?"

"What will we do?"

"Continue to love each other."

"I don't want to go back. To things as they were before."

"We can never do that."

"But we have to. We can't escape reality. And yet I want there to be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and to know that on all those tomorrows I can spend every waking hour with you."

"I want that too." He sounded sad. "But it's not to be."

"This war. I hate it so much."

"Perhaps we should be grateful. That it brought us to-gether."

"Oh, no. We would have met. Somehow. Somewhere. It was written in the stars. The day I was born, some celestial Civil Servant put a rubber stamp on you, with my name on it, in great big capital letters. This man is reserved for Penelope Stern."

"Except I wasn't a man the day you were born. I was a prep-school boy, struggling with the inky miseries of my Latin grammar."

"It makes no difference. We still belong together. You were always there."

"Yes. I was always there." He kissed her then, reluctantly, raised his wrist to look at his watch. "It's nearly five o'clock. . . ."

"I hate the war, and I hate clocks, too."

"Unfortunately, my darling, we can't stay here forever."

"When shall I see you again?"

"Not for a bit. I've got to go away."

"For how long?"

"Three weeks. I shouldn't be telling you, so you mustn't breathe a word."

She was filled with alarm. "But where are you going?"

"I can't say. . . ."

"What are you going to do? Is it dangerous?"

He laughed. "No, you ninny, of course it's not dangerous. A training exercise . . . part of my job. So no more questions."

"I'm frightened that something will happen to you."

"Nothing will happen to me."

"When will you be back?"

"The middle of November?"

"Nancy has a birthday at the end of November. She'll be three."

"I'll be back then."

She thought about it. "Three weeks," she sighed. "It seems for ever. . . .

"Absence is the wind that blows out the little candle, but fans the embers of a fire to a great blaze.