Elizabeth Edmondson - The Art of Love

‘It’s a shocking way to behave, and her husband a war hero…’

Cynthia remembered the woman’s name. Gardner, that was it. Rosemary Gardner. Dreadful woman. She turned her head and smiled at the little party. ‘Good evening, Mrs Gardner, isn’t it? Won’t you come and join me?’

Without replying, the woman gave Cynthia a furious look and hustled her girls away, her husband following, after pausing briefly to give Cynthia a wry and apologetic smile.

The cut direct, Cynthia said to herself, as she settled back in her seat. Was that what she could expect when she was back in England? In which case it wouldn’t be pleasant, either for her or for Harriet.

Her mind floated back to thoughts of her wedding dress. How different her wedding to Walter would be from her first one. With Walter it would be the Ritz, no doubt, with lavish refreshments, and guests summoned from his parliamentary colleagues and those who had too much to gain from his acquaintance to snub him on account of his marrying a rather notorious divorcée. The fuss would die down soon enough, Cynthia was old and wise enough in the ways of society to know that. The faint stigma would remain, but as the wife of an immensely rich and successful man she need care little for that.

As she looked out through the glass to the dark seas beyond, her mind took her back to the tiny, cold church, where she and Ronnie had plighted their troth. They had been married by special licence. She had scraped together the money for it from her Post Office savings, and told Ronnie how to set about getting the licence. He had no money at all, there was no question of a reception at the Ritz or Savoy or anywhere else. No guests to cheer the young couple — the very young couple, for they were both only sixteen — on their way to their new life. The witnesses were a friend of Ronnie’s, a tongue-tied lad, a fellow soldier, ill at ease in his boots, who looked horrified at the whole affair, and, since the other witness who had promised to come never turned up, an obliging passer-by, who had consented to act as witness for the princely sum of half a crown.

‘I had to tell such lies to get the licence,’ Ronnie said as they came out of the church, the priest’s unconvinced-sounding blessing ringing in their ears. No church bells, no kisses and congratulations, just a street with indifferent passers-by, never a glance for the newlyweds. Ronnie was in uniform, she had worn a grey woollen frock; she couldn’t risk wearing anything less ordinary or she would have attracted the attention of her mother or her older sister.

They had gone straight back to Ronnie’s digs. An attic room, where they had fallen into bed, hungry again for each other’s bodies, lips, arms, hands legs entwining, desperate to lose themselves in one another.

What had brought all this back to mind? It wasn’t just the thought of the wedding that lay ahead of her, no, there was more to it than that. These were memories that had been locked away in her mind, memories from half her lifetime ago. Why should they surface now?

It was that man going up the gangway. The tourist-class gangway. He was hatless, and halfway up, he had pushed his hair away from his forehead with the back of his hand, a gesture that brought back with extraordinary resonance the young Ronnie, who used to smooth his hair back in exactly that way. This man was rather like Ronnie, come to think of it, very much the same type. What a wonderful body Ronnie had had. Unscarred by the battles he was going off so blithely to face.

‘I wouldn’t have signed up if I’d known I was going to meet you,’ he’d said. He lied about his age at the recruiting office, just as he had lied to obtain the special licence. But by that stage in the war, with a desperate need for men, and with Ronnie being big and tall and looking older than he was, no questions had been asked.

‘If you hadn’t been a soldier, we would never have met.’

Cynthia had been helping Helen, her much older sister, with her voluntary work, making and serving tea to the troops. Cynthia had poured out a mug of hot strong tea, stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar and handed it down to the handsome young soldier who’d told her that he liked his tea strong and very sweet.

Cynthia looked into a pair of the most astonishingly blue eyes, and was transfixed. The whole of her being vibrated with entirely unfamiliar sensations, and then the spell was broken, Helen sharply telling her to stop daydreaming, and another soldier jostling the blue-eyed man aside and demandingly holding out his hand for his mug of tea.

The blue-eyed soldier was waiting for her when she had finished for the day. Helen had wanted her to wait, she was only going to be another half hour or so, seeing everything was put away, and then they could go home together. But Cynthia, who was usually the most obedient of girls, had demurred. ‘I want to get home,’ she said. ‘I’ve things to do. I can go on the Underground by myself, I’ll be perfectly all right.’

A woman came up with news of a malfunctioning tea urn, distracting Helen’s attention, and Cynthia had slipped away.

They walked to the Underground together, and he got on the train and sat beside her. They didn’t speak much, but laughed together as a child in the seat opposite, cuddling a shabby toy rabbit, pulled faces at them.

Cynthia knew the minute he opened his mouth that Ronnie came from quite another world to hers. His was a London accent. ‘Cockney, born and bred,’ he told her. Common, her mother would have said, with infinite, dismissive scorn, but Cynthia liked it. Just as she liked everything about Ronnie.

She sat back in the wicker chair and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted into the air. His young body. When they first went to bed together, she had been amazed by his lithe beauty. He was pale and smooth, with long limbs; she loved the small of his back, just above his muscular buttocks, and those, too, once she had got over her initial astonishment at seeing a man naked, she loved, holding them tightly to her after they had made love, lying her hands on them, soft and drowsy with pleasure. The weight and hardness of his penis had filled her with a kind of awe, such an astonishing thing, a man’s penis, she had no idea, she said, brushing it with her lips. No idea at all.

She hadn’t been Ronnie’s first girl. He told her that, and she felt a stab of jealousy; who was this Ruby to roll under the hedge with Ronnie, the times he was staying on a Shropshire farm with his auntie’s family?

He felt nothing for Ruby, it had been lust and curiosity, he told her, raising himself on one elbow so that he could kiss her.

He had run away from home two years earlier, scraping a living for himself in a hostile city. He signed up because he wanted to do his bit, and because you got three meals a day, he told her. His mother sounded, to Cynthia’s innocent ears, a terrible woman, but Ronnie seemed to take the clouts and blows she and his less forceful father dealt out to him as just part of life.

‘When I come back from the war, I’m going to make something of myself,’ he had told her. ‘You’ll see. And we’re going to have four kids at least, and be the happiest married couple in England.’

The steward was back, all attention. ‘Are you warm enough, madam? Would you like me to bring you a rug?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Cynthia. ‘I shall be going in shortly.’

He went away on light, silent feet. Cynthia slid back the door that led on to the open deck, and the bitter cold of a winter’s night in the Atlantic hit her in the face. She tossed her cigarette over the side, the glowing tip almost immediately extinguished by the wind and rain. Then, shivering, she retreated back inside to the never-never land of soft lights and thick carpets and columns and gay chatter, shutting out the stormy weather.