The House of Secrets by Sarra Manning (27)

 

School had broken up, the little girls all gone to the coast so they could spend the long days sticky and sunburned.

Hugo was going away too. To spend four weeks with his wife taking in the sea air at Aldeburgh, strolling along the promenade, sitting out in the lush green garden of the house that they rented every summer.

He’d waited until after they’d made love and Libby was stretching languorously, waiting for Hugo to light and pass her a cigarette as he always did. Instead he cleared his throat and told her the news in a flat voice.

Libby felt as if every one of her nerve endings had been zapped with an electrical charge. She’d known it! Known it all along! That Hugo, for all his fine words and talk of love, was just like the rest of them. ‘You’re taking a holiday with your wife? The same wife that you’re so desperate to be free of?’

‘Darling, don’t be like that. Susan is back from Switzerland and Robin’s down from Oxford. This is the last chance for all four of us to be together. As a family.’ Hugo had met Libby’s wounded expression with an even stare as if she were the one being unreasonable. ‘Please be understanding about this.’

‘How can you expect me to be understanding when you tell me that you love me, you want to marry me and then, without a by your leave, you go off with her?’ Libby was already sliding out of bed, tugging the sheet with her because she felt vulnerable and naked enough without actually being naked. ‘Besides, what do I know about being part of a family? Not a bloody thing!’

‘Is there any need for that kind of language? There’s certainly no need to be such a dog in the manger about this when you know you have my heart, that I want to make a home and a life with you and yet you haven’t even said you’ll marry me.’ If Libby had expected Hugo to be more conciliatory she’d been sorely mistaken. ‘Be honest with me, have you even written to Freddy to ask for a divorce?’

‘I said I would and I have, though now I wish I hadn’t when you’re waltzing off with your precious Pamela!’

Libby had written to Freddy after the first weekend she’d spent with Hugo. I’m in love with someone else, she’d said, quite plainly. There’s enough evidence to divorce me on the grounds of adultery so please contact your lawyer soonest to start necessary arrangements. It’s best this way, don’t you think?

It had been hard to draw this final line through their brief, unhappy union but Libby wasn’t the type of woman who would string two men along. Not when one man said he loved her and the other man couldn’t give a brass farthing for her affection. No wonder she was teetering on the precipice of a quite majestic flounce out of the room, but still she had to pause to wonder why she was behaving like this. Being so shrewish, so petulant, when she’d refused to make any claim on Hugo’s affections, only admitting that she loved him under duress. But who could blame her when her heart had been broken so many times? It was a miracle that it still worked at all.

Swathed as she was in the sheet, Libby could only stagger as far as the window seat, then collapse upon it. ‘You’re being so silly,’ Hugo told her in a gentler voice, once it was clear that the storm had passed. ‘I can’t wait to see Robin and Susan, to remember happier times when they were little, but Pamela and I are agreed that at the end of the holiday we’ll tell them about the divorce.’

Another poisoned dart lodged itself in Libby’s heart at the thought of Hugo and Pamela’s cosy tête-à-têtes as they discussed how best to break up their once happy home. ‘Will you tell them the truth? That she was the one who…?’

‘No!’ The word was torn out of him. ‘She’s their mother. It’s the whole reason…’ He smiled, though Libby couldn’t imagine why, then got to his feet to walk over to where she was sitting and drop to his knees. ‘How can I be angry with her any more? If it weren’t for Pamela, I’d never have met you, would I?’

Libby caressed his cheek with the back of her hand and he leaned in to her touch, his eyes closed as if he were exactly where he wanted to be and damn a month in Aldeburgh. ‘You’re still pleased that you met me, even though I can be absolutely horrible sometimes?’

‘Not so horrible,’ Hugo decided, with a tiny playful smile. ‘Most times, you’re adorable.’

She wasn’t but it was so sweet of him to say she was. ‘Will you tell them about me? It will come out sooner or later, with the court case; there’s sure to be reports in the paper.’

‘There might not be,’ Hugo said, but they both knew there would be. There was nothing people liked more than reading all the titillating details of a divorce as they ate their toast of a morning and lingered over the last cup of tea from the pot. Before all this unpleasantness, Libby had been one of them. ‘Let’s worry about it then, for now I’m only going to worry about how much I’ll miss you. Might you miss me too?’

Libby pretended to give the matter some thought. ‘Perhaps,’ she decided at last. She held up her thumb and forefinger, maybe an inch apart. ‘I’ll miss you that much.’ She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘If you take me back to bed and make love to me again, I promise I’ll miss you even more.’

 

With Hugo gone, no lessons to teach, nothing much to do but brood, Libby wished that she wasn’t spending summer in town on her own. There had been a time, when she was performing, that she’d visited what felt like every coastal resort in England, and quite a few in Scotland and Wales too.

Libby had loved doing summer season. They barely bothered with rehearsals and would spend each day on the beach. She remembered what fun it had been, splashing through the water then retreating to the safety of a big parasol as she did burn so easily. Sand between her toes, the illicit feeling of the sun caressing her bare legs, usually hidden under stockings, sending the most juvenile of the male leads off to buy ices.

This summer was a world away from those carefree summers of the past. It was probably the strain of Hugo gone and waiting for Freddy to reply to her letter requesting a divorce, but all through the hot sticky nights Libby hardly slept but would lie very, very still because even kicking the covers off made her head pound and her stomach heave. The only thing that helped was when Hannah thudded up the stairs each morning with a glass of ginger ale and a couple of arrowroot biscuits and wondered aloud if Libby was dying of consumption ‘’cause you are awfully pale and in a book I read where the heroine died of consumption she was awfully pale too’. After sipping the ginger ale and nibbling on the biscuits, Libby would be restored, until late in the evening when it would start all over again. So, during the day when she felt quite well, Libby was glad to leave her bed and take in some fresh air.

At the end of term, Libby had asked Beryl Marjoribanks if anything might be done for Hannah – if there were some benevolent organisation that might deliver the poor girl out of Millicent’s clutches and offer her a scholarship so she could go back to school. Beryl had promised to look into it and when they’d discovered that they were both staying in town for summer, it seemed silly not to meet for a walk.

Libby hadn’t expected that a stroll on the heath one afternoon would mean that she’d end up seeing Beryl every day. She suspected that the other woman was lonely. Her family, two aged parents, an older brother and his domineering wife, lived in Devon in a small village and never came to London to see Beryl.

‘They visited Cambridge once when I was at university, but they didn’t like it much. Said it was far too noisy, too many people,’ Beryl had recalled sadly, that first day on the heath, before embarking on a long treatise about how dismayed they’d been that Beryl had turned out bookish because being bookish could only lead to a lonely life of spinsterdom.

Spinster she might be, but Beryl had travelled to Germany to study under Rudolf Steiner himself. She’d also visited Austria, Hungary, Norway, Holland, Belgium and along the way embarked on many intense friendships with other bookish women, only to have her hopes cruelly dashed when her affections weren’t returned.

Libby suspected that Beryl’s tastes ran in the same direction as Deidre Withers, but Beryl, for all her travelling and good works among the needy, was a naïf. Libby was sure Beryl didn’t even know that two women could be together in that way. ‘I could never see myself married,’ she’d said to Libby as they meandered across the Vale of Health one day. ‘I’ve met some perfectly nice chaps in my time, but you can never truly be yourself with a man.’

Still, it was no hardship to meet up with Beryl to go swimming in the Ladies’ Pond, even though Libby was terrified that there might be pike or carp or some other sharp-toothed fish lurking in the weeds to strike at her legs. The two women would float on their backs then lounge in the grass meadows and wait for their cossies to dry off.

Libby had missed the camaraderie of the dressing room; the confessions and confidences shared after the curtain came down. And if Beryl weren’t also Libby’s employer, then Libby may well have confided in her too. Instead, she stuck to just one side of her sad story – that her husband was in Spain, reporting for the Herald and the Mirror, and when she mentioned Freddy by name one hot July afternoon, Beryl gasped, her eyes especially wide.

‘Frederick Morton? I’ve read all his pieces. He writes awfully well, doesn’t he? Makes one feel you’re there in Spain, seeing it for yourself,’ she said. ‘You must be terribly worried about him.’

‘Why should I worry about Freddy? Gosh, I’m sure he’s having the time of his life,’ Libby snorted rather inelegantly. ‘Yakking it up with all the other reporters and also-rans in the hotel bar. Drinking too much. Arguing about politics. Pontificating. He’ll be in his element.’

‘Sounds rather fun,’ Beryl said a little wistfully then assumed a more serious expression. ‘But the situation’s a bit sticky out there. Riots, strikes, talk of a military coup.’

Libby sank back down on the grass. ‘Freddy will be fine. He’s not one to get his hands dirty. Honestly, he’s the sort to run away at the first sign of trouble.’

Libby refused to worry about Freddy but not two days had passed since Beryl’s dire warnings when it was in all the papers, the big black letters striking dread in her.

 

 

‘I never knew Morocco was in Spain,’ Libby said, as she squinted at the words.

‘That’s because it isn’t! Just as well you don’t teach geography, Libby.’

In the end, Beryl drew a map in pencil on the paper bag from the cherries that Libby had bought on her way to the heath. The cherries were then deployed to portray the different factions: the Republicans – who Beryl said were the good guys, even though they seemed to be a motley collection of anarchists, Trots and concerned citizens – had taken up arms against the Nationalists, who were Fascists trying to seize control of the country. Libby knew enough about politics to know that she wouldn’t trust a Fascist as far as she could throw one.

‘But Freddy’s in the press corps,’ Libby said as Beryl made her head spin with all the Spanish names: Franco, Quirago, Giral; and places: Majorca, Minorca, Sierra de Guadarrama, Pais Vasco. ‘He won’t be fighting. He’ll simply be reporting on the fighting from a safe distance away, won’t he?’

‘I’m sure he will,’ Beryl said. ‘He’s in Barcelona, isn’t he? I think the Republicans have managed to hold Barcelona. Let me just see.’

Libby scrabbled for the Daily Mirror and they both bent over it to read about the police, soldiers and ordinary men fighting with any kind of weapon they could muster against Franco’s rebel army. How roads full of shops and houses and offices had become battlegrounds.

‘Could you imagine if there were hundreds of men fighting along Hampstead High Street?’ Libby wondered.

‘Did we learn nothing the last time? Men! It’s always men, isn’t it? Wanting what isn’t theirs and sacrificing the lives of thousands to take it.’

There couldn’t be another war. It was too horrific to contemplate but Libby did contemplate it, and from her silence she supposed Beryl was too, then their reverie was abruptly broken as a shadow cast over the two of them.

‘Disgusting! Mrs Morton, have you no shame?’

Libby blinked because Mrs Morton was cloistered in Willoughby Square, then she looked up into the furious, jowly face of one of Millicent’s friends. An awful woman called Virena Edmonds. Unlike Millicent, who fancied herself an invalid, Virena was often to be seen yomping about Hampstead poking her large red-veined nose into matters that were absolutely nothing to do with her.

She’d once reported Hannah for loitering in the library and ‘reading filthy books’, though Hannah had been on an errand for the aunts and was flicking through the new Florence Crawford, which they’d specially requested. Virena had also tattled on Potts when she’d spied him eating a meat pie ‘in the street like a common vagrant’, and now she was glaring at Libby and Beryl as if they were personally responsible for the many wrongs in the world.

‘Will you cover yourself?’ Virena hissed. ‘You’re a married woman, even if you fail to act like one.’

Libby glanced down at her pale legs, made paler by the lush green grass. Her swimming costume was hardly indecent. It covered just as much of herself as the leotards she’d used to wear at dance rehearsals.

‘We’re at the ladies’ bathing ponds,’ Libby pointed out, though she wondered why she was bothering. Arguing one’s case with Virena was as much use as howling at the moon. ‘We’ve been bathing, hence our swimming costumes.’

‘Besides, there’s nothing shameful about the female form,’ Beryl piped up. Beryl wasn’t the sort to back down when injustice was afoot. ‘It’s one of God’s works, after all. When you stop to think about it, it’s like saying trees or lambs or flowers are shameful too.’

Virena must have been bathing too but now, despite the heat of the July sun, she was back in tweed skirt and twinset, her fleshy face sweaty, iron-grey hair frizzing at the temples.

‘God made woman from one of Adam’s ribs,’ she intoned wrathfully, which was neither here nor there. ‘I’ve held my tongue until now, out of respect for dear Millicent but… this brazen display, your impertinence, it really is the last straw. She deserves to know that she’s been harbouring a viper in her bosom.’