Husband By Necessity

CHAPTER NINE

ANGIE awoke at first light, still warm and luxuriously full of his loving. But when she stretched out her arms the bed was empty. Bernardo was sitting by the window looking down into the valley as it emerged silently from the grey mists. She slipped out of bed, pulled on a wrap and went to him. He didn’t look at her, but his arms went about her at once, drawing her tightly against him.

‘What are you looking at down there?’ she whispered.

His reply surprised her. ‘Ghosts.’

‘Are there many?’

‘Too many.’

‘Your parents?’

‘Yes, but not only them. There’s one other who haunts and torments me-’ He stopped and she felt the tremor go through him.

‘Come back to bed, my love,’ she said, although she knew it wasn’t cold that had made him shiver. She wanted to get him away from that window and whatever troubling visions it revealed to him.

He let her lead him back to bed, and when they were under the covers they clung together. She held him with a kind of tender triumph, confident that she’d won him at last, and from now on the future would be what they made it together. His hold on her was different, for in him need was as great as love. She sensed that and made love to him with profound tenderness, trying to tell him that she could be all he needed.

Once she saw him regarding her face with a look almost of desperation. She smiled to reassure him, and when he laid his head against her neck she wrapped her arms about him in a gesture of reassurance. She thought she felt him relax, and smiled to herself. It had been hard but she had found the way at last.

Afterwards she snuggled contentedly against him. He’d half pulled himself up against the bedhead and sat staring abstractedly into space. Once arm was about her, drawing her against his bare chest, but she sensed that he was engrossed in thoughts that shut her out. She was too deeply in love with him to accept that without protest.

‘Hey,’ she murmured gently.

He smiled quickly and she had the feeling that she’d brought him back from some polar region.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘Nothing much.’

‘Is it nothing much that makes you frown like that? Tell me.’

When he didn’t answer she asked, ‘Are the ghosts there still?’

‘They are always there.’

‘Even now?’

‘Now more than ever. They cry loudest when they tell me that I have no right to be happy.’

‘But why should they say that?’

He didn’t answer and suddenly she was frightened. She’d thought that all problems between them were solved, and now she found herself confronted with something she didn’t understand, and that he wouldn’t explain.

‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

‘I can’t.’

She fell back on the age-old plea. ‘Then you don’t love me. If you did you wouldn’t shut me out.’

Suddenly the happy contentment she’d seen in him before vanished, and his face was distraught. ‘Angie, don’t do this, I beg you.’

‘Why not? You’ve shut me out for so long and I’m tired of being shut out. How much do you think I can take? Tell me what’s troubling you.’

Again she saw his look of desperation, as though the joy they had brought each other was only a mirage. Suddenly she couldn’t cope. A moment ago she’d thought that she’d won, but now it was all slipping through her fingers and she didn’t know why.

‘Where were you these last few hours?’ she demanded frantically. ‘I thought we were making love-’

‘We were-’

‘No, you were somewhere else-with your ghosts.’

She felt him flinch. ‘No woman has ever meant to me what you do. Let that be enough, for pity’s sake!’

His refusal to open up to her was like a blow. She pulled away and stared at him, hostile and now as withdrawn as he.

‘How can it be enough?’ she asked at last, trying to speak calmly through the hurt. ‘We make love, but I feel I’m nothing to you because you’re hiding from me.’

He ran his hands distractedly through his hair. ‘And what will be enough? When you’ve forced me to tell you things that I can’t bear to look at myself? Will that be enough?’

‘If I’m no use to you-’

‘Use? I don’t want you to be a doctor for me. I want you to love me.’

‘I do love you-’

‘Oh, yes, but it must be on your terms. You have to own a man’s soul as well as his heart. I was right to be wary of you.’

Silence fell between them. It was an ugly, mistrustful silence and she felt as if she were dying inside.

‘Don’t look like that,’ he begged.

‘I don’t know how I look,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I don’t know what to say to you any more. I think perhaps what happened between us last night-shouldn’t have happened.’

He paled. ‘Do you really mean that?’

‘I don’t know.’

He took her face between his hands. ‘Don’t, my love,’ he implored. ‘Don’t let a shadow fall between us. It’s nothing-nothing-’

‘How can it be nothing when it makes you look like that, and turn away from me? I don’t think it’s nothing. I think it’s the thing that drives you. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do.’

‘Then I think you must be a witch to know so much.’

‘So much?’ she echoed bitterly. ‘I don’t really know much, do I? You won’t let me. You talk about love on my terms, but what about yours? You want to give just so much of yourself, and no more. That isn’t love.’

‘Darling-please-please-’

‘Tell me,’ she cried in anguish. ‘Who is the third ghost?’

He sighed as though too weary to fight any longer. After a long moment he said, ‘The third ghost is a boy of twelve, who lives alone with his mother. Sometimes his father visits them, but he isn’t married to his mother, and he has another family at a big house by the sea. They are his legal family, they are acknowledged, they bear his name.

‘The boy bears only his mother’s name, and secretly he is ashamed. He is ashamed even of his shame, for she is a good mother and loves him. She tells him how scared she is of the legal wife who lives in the big house because she knows the wife hates her for taking the man’s love.

‘The boy tries to be everything she wants, but secretly he longs to visit the great house and see his father’s family. And so one day he slips away and goes down the mountain alone. Nobody sees him, and nobody knows where he’s gone. He’s away many hours, but he doesn’t reach his destination. It gets dark and there is too far to travel, so he turns back. When he gets home the house is dark. He goes in and waits for his mother to return, but the hours pass and she doesn’t come home.

‘Then somebody comes to the house to tell him that both his parents are dead. The father came to see his mother that day. They were worried by his absence and went out in the car to search for the boy. But the car turned over on the mountain, and they both died.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Angie whispered, but Bernardo didn’t seem to hear her. He’d slipped away into the nightmare that he never really escaped.

‘He never told anyone why he’d gone away,’ he said, ‘but in his heart he knew that he’d killed them. To his mother, especially, he’d been disloyal. And then a few days later the wife came to see him. She was the woman whose hatred his mother had feared, but she spoke to him kindly, and told him that he was to live in his father’s house and bear his father’s name, like his other sons.

‘And so he gained everything he’d wanted-at the price of two lives. He should have told her honestly that he’d killed her husband. Then she would have turned against him and sent him away to an institution, where he belonged. But he couldn’t bear to tell the truth. He was a coward, you see.’

‘No,’ she said urgently. ‘He was a child.’

‘He isn’t a child now. He’s kept silent all these years because by not speaking out then he made it impossible to speak out at all. And so he’s met all her attempts at kindness with churlish suspicion, always wondering how much she secretly hates him-’

‘That’s not fair to Baptista,’ Angie said quickly. ‘She doesn’t hate you.’

‘Perhaps. But what would she say if she knew the truth?’

‘I don’t know. But I don’t think she’d blame you-a child of twelve.’

‘I didn’t feel like a child. I felt like a man. Whenever he left us, my father would say, “Remember to care for your mother. That is a man’s duty.” But instead of caring for her I-’ A shudder racked him. ‘Dear God!’

Her instinct had been right, she thought. This was the thing that drove him, but now he’d trusted her enough to reveal it they could cope with it together, and all would be well. She put her arms about his shaking body, holding him close in a passion of tenderness and love.

‘It’s all right, my darling,’ she murmured. ‘Hold onto me. I’m here. We can make everything right.’

‘It’ll never be right,’ he groaned.

‘It will, it will-if we love each other-’

As she spoke she was seducing him with her hands, touching and caressing him everywhere, trying to draw him back to her. Little by little she felt his physical resistance to her slacken, until he yielded, with a groan, to their mutual desire.

His lovemaking was different now, less tender, more driven, as though there was something that he desperately wanted from her. She gave him everything she had to give, revelling in his need of her. She felt strong and triumphant that night, and when she looked into his face, and saw its tenderness replaced by a look of haunting fear, it was easy to tell herself that she was mistaken.

She was awoken by the sound of Ginetta moving about in the kitchen. The room was filled with light and she guessed the sun must be high. It wasn’t like her to oversleep, but the night had been so full-she smiled at the memory-that she’d needed an extra sleep.

The other side of the bed was empty, and after the first disappointment she realised that Bernardo’s sense of propriety had made him slip away before Ginetta could find him there.

Never mind, she thought happily. Soon they would be ready to tell the world. She knew now that he loved her as much as she loved him.

Once Baptista had said to her, ‘When he trusts you with his deepest secret, you will know he truly loves you.’

Last night he’d trusted her like that, enough to tell of the one fury above all others that tortured him, his feelings of guilt that he had inadvertently caused the death of his parents. And from that everything followed, including his refusal to be part of the family, or to accept more from them than the bare minimum. He felt he had no right.

But now they could confront the horrors together. She might even manage to show him that a child’s feeling of guilt should be put in the past, and not allowed to haunt the man.

She stretched luxuriously, feeling every inch of her body enjoy the sensation of being newly alive. Such love! And it was hers to enjoy for the rest of her life in ever deepening happiness.

She checked quickly to see if he’d left her a note on the pillow, but he hadn’t. It wouldn’t have been like him, she thought. No frills, just an honest man.

She bounded out of bed and got quickly under the shower, emerging bright eyed and refreshed, and hurried into the kitchen. And it was there that she saw the note, leaning against the kettle.

It said simply,

My dear, I came closer to you than to anyone in my life before, but perhaps, for me, that was too close.

I’m not fit to love and be loved. I only know how to give pain.

Forgive me and, for both our sakes, go back to England.

Bernardo.

She had to read it again and again to take it in. The sheer brutal simplicity of the short message was like being pounded by hammers. The man who’d loved her with such passion and tenderness in the night had fled her in the dawn, like an evil thing that he must escape to survive.

And now she heard what she’d blotted out before, Bernardo’s anguished voice begging her not to force the unbearable truth from him.

‘It was my own fault,’ she whispered. ‘I made him tell me. He wasn’t ready, but I forced it out of him. I had everything, and I threw it away. Oh God, how could I be so stupid?’

Suddenly the pride that had sustained her broke. Until this moment she’d won every round, and done so with such deceptive ease that she’d thought that was all there was to it. Now she saw how she’d thrown it all away, and she must stop that happening, no matter what she had to do.

She huddled on some clothes and ran out into the street. Stumbling, slipping, grasping the wall, she made her way blindly up the street to Bernardo’s house near the top. There was the little alley between the shops that led to his door. Gasping, she made her way along it, blinking in the poor light and finding the door by feel.

‘Bernardo!’ she screamed. ‘Bernardo!’

The door was opened at once. Stella stood there in tears.

‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘An hour ago.’ She looked at Angie with sympathy. She had always understood the position, and been rooting for them.

‘Didn’t he say where?’ Angie begged.

‘Sometimes he goes away like this. He never says where.’

‘But when will he come back?’

Stella’s shrug was eloquent. ‘He’ll come back when he comes back.’

‘No, wait-’ Angie was trying to pull herself together, inwardly saying keep calm, don’t panic. ‘This place is snowed in.’

‘He spoke of his car,’ Stella said unhappily.

Angie counted every step down to the great gate that led out of Montedoro. Once there she could see the marks left in the snow. There were her own footsteps from when she’d gone down to fetch Bernardo, then two sets of steps overlapping, when they’d climbed back up together.

And there was another set, firmly heading down the hill, leaving sharp, emphatic imprints in the brilliant morning light. Angie strained her eyes against that cruel light, looking for any sign of the steps turning to come back.

But they went on down until they vanished into the mist.