The House of Secrets by Sarra Manning (28)

 

Beryl offered to come back to the house with her, but Libby demurred. Best to face the music alone, especially as Virena had hinted at other crimes. The only crime that Libby was guilty of was adultery and she’d rather that Beryl didn’t know about that. Their friendship was so new, even precious in its way, and for all her knowledge of the wider world, Beryl knew nothing of the smaller world, that tiny sphere only big enough for a man and a woman.

By the time Libby had queued for a changing room and changed into one of her tired summer frocks, Virena had a good twenty minutes on her.

She traced her steps back across the heath, the long grass bleached by the sun and scratching at her legs. Libby could feel one of her heads coming on again and as she turned into Willoughby Square, dread making her feet like lead, the churning in her stomach had returned with a vengeance so just climbing the three steps to the front door made her feel as if she were in a rowing boat perched on precarious seas.

She’d barely got her key in the lock when the door was wrenched open and Libby was almost mown down by Virena Edmonds. ‘Well, I’ve said what I had to say,’ she announced, as she descended the steps. ‘Not that it gave me any pleasure, I quite assure you. When I was a girl, we believed in the sanctity of marriage. You young people carry on as if it were the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah.’

‘Hardly Sodom and Gomorrah,’ Libby muttered, though as a very impressionable nineteen-year-old she’d been taken to a party in an old Turkish baths and had seen such shocking sights that the next day she’d gone to confession for the first time in years. Whatever gossip Virena had taken great delight in sharing with Millicent couldn’t come even halfway close.

As it was, Millicent was standing with her mouth agape, hand in its favourite position atop her chest, not moving, so it was easy enough to brush past her.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Libby said. ‘I don’t feel at all well.’

‘Are you expecting?’ Millicent hissed, reaching out to seize Libby’s wrist. ‘You weren’t well last time you were expecting a child out of wedlock!’

It was the cruellest of opening parries, cutting to the quick and thrusting deep. ‘No, I am not,’ Libby hissed back because it was impossible, though at times it did feel like the same kind of wretchedness she’d experienced a year before when anything and everything had made her nauseous. There were even moments during the night when she couldn’t sleep that Libby wondered if those damn doctors in Paris hadn’t left part of the baby inside her. A ghostly limb, a puny organ, skin and bone festering deep in the heart of her. ‘What a nasty insinuation,’ she added, aware of a rustling, the drawing room door ajar and no doubt the old ladies lurking behind it, desperate to catch every word. ‘I insist that you apologise.’

Libby was on safer ground now. Unless Virena had happened to be wandering along Muswell Hill Road one Friday evening a couple of months back and had glanced up at the windows of a mansion block, she had nothing incriminating to report to Millicent.

‘I will not apologise. You were seen with a man in the bakery on the High Street buying cakes!’

Libby nearly laughed in her face. ‘That wasn’t a crime last time I checked. Shall we go down to the police station just to make certain?’

Millicent took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, and drew herself up as if she were a decrepit, ancient dragon desperate to breathe fire one last time. ‘And one of Virena’s bridge friends saw you walking in Highgate Woods with a man too!’

Libby could have cobbled together some tale of a colleague, a friend of Freddy’s, someone who’d stopped to ask her for directions, but she simply couldn’t be bothered. She wasn’t a married woman. Hadn’t been ever since Freddy abandoned her. She could do what she liked. Was free to fall in love again without being spied on by a gaggle of spiteful old ladies. ‘How ridiculous you sound! Just listen to yourself,’ she demanded, hands on her hips. She closed her eyes just for a second so she wouldn’t have to look at Millicent’s furious, sallow face but that made the world swim about her.

‘I will not have a trollop under my roof. Yes! A trollop! How do you explain this?’ Millicent thrust something at Libby, a piece of paper.

It was a postcard. A beach scene. Sea, shingle and some distance away, a row of higgledy-piggledy houses. ‘Greetings from Aldeburgh.’

Libby turned the card over, Millicent sucking the air in between her teeth as she did so.

A few lines on a card that meant everything to Libby and would mean nothing to anyone else, unless that person was determined to twist the innocent words into something ugly.

The indignation rose in Libby like bile, even though she was guilty. She was carrying on – a married woman having an affair with a man who wasn’t married to her. Those were the facts, but the circumstances of their affair absolved both her and Hugo of their sins. Even if they didn’t, Libby was so used to playing a part, to becoming a different character, that now she’d assumed the role of the innocent party, the wronged wife, as if she were born to it.

‘It’s unspeakably rude to read someone else’s mail, especially when it’s a postcard from an old friend, nothing more,’ Libby said in hurt, injured tones. ‘Goodness, I doubt there’s anything that Harriet, yes the H stands for Harriet, has written that even the Archbishop of Canterbury could object to.’

‘But you’ve been seen with a man on several occasions and who knows what you’re about when you disappear on the weekends,’ Millicent said, determined to win back the upper hand.

She stepped closer to Libby, who took a step away until she felt several hard protuberances against her spine and realised she was backed up against the umbrella stand and quite unable to escape Millicent bearing down on her, reeking of menthol and musk.

‘I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,’ Libby said. ‘Besides, I have far more pressing concerns.’ She pulled out the now-damp copy of the Daily Mirror, which had been folded up next to her swimming costume in her string bag. ‘There’s a war going on in Spain and Freddy is caught up in the middle of it. Shouldn’t you be worrying about him?’

‘My darling boy!’

Millicent was shrieking now and though her voice had reached a piercing pitch, Libby could barely hear a word. She watched the other woman’s lips move, spittle collecting at the corners of her mouth, could smell the damp wool of her swimming costume mix with the other smells of the house. Camphor and Brasso, boiled cabbage and the cloying scent of violets; all the old ladies loved the scent of violets. Libby felt sweat break out along her brow, her head grow thick and heavy so it was an effort to hold it up and then she couldn’t even do that, but sank to her knees.

‘Elizabeth! Elizabeth? What on earth is the matter?’

Libby bent so far forward that her forehead brushed against the horsehair rug that covered the tiles in the hall.

There was more rustling. Black skirts flapping about her like moths as the old ladies gathered around her.

‘Is she going to faint?’

‘I have my smelling salts!’

‘Such a to-do!’

The pounding in her head felt as if her brain was trying to break through her skull and she had such sharp pains in her side that it seemed to Libby as if she were back in Paris, with Freddy. That she was dying all over again.

‘Betwixt the stirrup to the ground, mercy I asked and mercy I found.’

She muttered the words out loud so if she did die, she really would be absolved.

Then she fainted.

 

Libby debated whether she could go to the doctors at all, but Beryl called around later that afternoon to see if all was well and she knew of a women’s health clinic in town. That sounded more simpatico than the glib doctor Libby had seen in Brighton, so Beryl rang up to make an appointment for the following week.

Of course, over the course of the week, Libby began to feel much better in that annoying way that always happened when you were about to throw away good money on seeing a doctor.

Still, she decided to keep the appointment, mostly because Beryl was adamant that she should and that she should accompany Libby, as if now that they were friends they had to do everything together.

The clinic was on Great Titchfield Street, around the corner from the flat Libby had shared before she got married. After a short wait Libby was called in to see a Dr Parkinson who looked as if she were no older than sixteen. She poked, prodded and palpated Libby. Asked all sorts of questions about her menses and the first pregnancy. Even about how frequently she enjoyed intimate relations with Mr Morton but flushed bright red when Libby said, without thinking, that Mr Morton had skipped out rather than enjoy intimate relations with her. ‘But then he came back,’ she lied. ‘And we resumed, er, marital intimacies… gosh, it would have been May. Early May.’

‘It’s the first week of August now so by my reckoning, you’re about twelve weeks along,’ the doctor said.

Libby couldn’t believe what she thought she’d just heard. ‘I beg your pardon. Do you mean… that I…?’ She gestured in the vicinity of her belly.

‘Yes. I’d say you were three months pregnant, give or take a week or so.’ Libby shook her head, set her mouth in a stubborn line, and the doctor smiled. ‘There is a test we could do to be certain but if I were you I’d keep the money and put it towards a pram. I suspect that you’re probably a little iron deficient too.’ She went on to talk about Libby’s diet, recommended the ubiquitous liver and a glass of milk stout every day, assured Libby that she could attend a clinic each month so they could keep an eye on her, even deliver the baby in the Hospital for Women in Soho Square, and all the while, Libby sat there in a daze.

She was absolutely befuddled. That against all odds, despite feeling that she was empty, a useless husk, there was a seed growing in her. A baby.

‘… I’m sure your husband will be delighted when you tell him the news, so I won’t keep you any longer.’

The doctor had come out from behind her desk to chivvy Libby along, to see her to the door, and she thought of Freddy. How cavalier he’d been when she’d told him he was going to be a father. Panicked. Evasive.

Then she thought about how Hugo might take the news. She hoped that his serious expression would lighten; that he’d look softly happy in the way he did when they were lying in each other’s arms.

It didn’t really matter what Hugo, or anyone else, thought about it. There was going to be a baby. Her child. Libby could feel a strange sensation in her chest as if her heart were already swelling, expanding, to make extra space for all the love welling up inside her. She was suddenly crying, laughing, an odd, strange, choked combination of the two so Beryl, who was sitting in the waiting room, jumped up from her chair.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a concerned voice. ‘Are you happy or sad? It’s impossible to tell.’

‘I’m happy. Happier than I’ve ever been.’ Libby shook her head. ‘I don’t even know what to do with so much happiness.’