Penny Jordan - The Hidden Years

Lizzie was aching inside. Soon they would be going their separate ways, and she doubted that she would ever see him again, despite what he had said. A tearing, sharp pain splintered inside her, making her catch her breath and lose her colour.

‘I think you’d better drop me off here,’ she told him as they approached the gate. The matron had very strict views about the girls keeping their distance both from the men and from their visitors.

‘Fraternisation forbidden, is it?’ he guessed, understanding at once and stopping the car.

Lizzie couldn’t open the door and she watched breathlessly as he leapt over his own and came round to help her out, not opening the door for her as she had expected, but instead leaning down inside the car to lift her out bodily, so that for a brief, dazzling moment of time she was held against him, body to body, looking down into those teasing blue eyes, feeling her chest tighten and her muscles coil in heady excitement as he slowly lowered her to her feet, holding her tantalisingly and dangerously just off the ground, while he looked at her mouth and whispered to her.

‘Tiny little thing, aren’t you, just made to fit into a man’s arms, with a mouth just made for a man to kiss? Has anyone kissed you before, sweetheart, or have you been saving yourself for me?’

Her heart was pounding so heavily, so noisily that she could barely hear what he was saying. She felt both light-headed and yet at the same time as though everything around her had somehow become dazzlingly clear and sharp, as though she was seeing the whole world with new eyes.

‘You know what’s happening to us, don’t you?’ he pressed. ‘You know that you and I…’ He broke off, his face suddenly tense and fierce, his hands gripping her so tightly that it almost hurt. ‘I’ve got to see you again,’ he told her with an urgency that thrilled her. ‘When will you be free?’

Free… She struggled to hold on to her sanity, to reason, but they had both been swept away and were no longer of any force in her life.

This was what mattered, this sweet sharp bliss, this delirious sensation of floating above the ground, of suddenly living life to the full, of knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had met the man who embodied every single facet of all her yearning daydreams, that she had in fact fallen headily and instantly in love.

‘I…after lunch,’ she heard herself telling him in a thick, unfamiliar voice. ‘I was going to write to my aunt. I write to her every week. She has arthritis and so she can’t always write back…’

‘I’ll pick you up here at half-past two,’ he told her softly, ignoring her flurried, strangled words.

And then, as he lowered her to the ground, his lips brushed lightly against her own, the merest touch—a touch which another and more aware girl would have recognised as deliberate provocation, but which to Lizzie appeared to be a gesture of the deepest reverence and respect, the most chaste kind of embrace, as though he hardly dared to do more than merely allow his lips to touch hers. So, in her reading, had the heroes hardly dared to sully their adored ones with the male carnality of their desires, cherishing their purity, even while they ached to possess it.

Lizzie knew nothing of the real world of real emotions, of the careless urgency with which men like Kit Danvers physically possessed her sex, claiming their compliance as their right as men who daily, hourly faced death.

‘And, sweetheart…’

As she looked up at him, mute and adoring, he touched her braided hair and said, ‘Wear this loose, and something pretty. I like my girls to look pretty…’

Just for a moment a cloud seemed to obscure the sun, chilling her skin. His girls , he had said… She frowned, her dizzying, bemusing dream suddenly darkened with reality, but then he touched her face, tracing the delicacy of its bone-structure, and the clouds were burned away in the intensity of the heat that shook her…

As she waited for him to unstrap her bike, Lizzie found herself wishing that it were already half-past two, that there were no long, tense hours to wait before she could see him again…hours which would be shadowed with fears that he might change his mind…that he might meet some prettier, more appealing girl whom he might favour with his smiles instead of her, and already, though she didn’t know it, she had taken her first step into a dangerous and unfamiliar new world.

She found Edward ready and waiting for her, his face set and tense.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she apologised. Some instinct that was beginning to grow with her own maturity gave her an insight into the feelings of others which she often wished she did not have. It was hardly less painful to be so receptive to the emotional pain of others at second hand than it was for them to experience it themselves. Today she was particularly receptive to Edward’s pain, her own emotional nerve-endings curling back in sensitive reaction to his anxiety.

‘I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind. You shouldn’t be spending your free time with me… Pretty girl like you should be out having fun.’

That was the second time in one morning a man had described her as pretty, but this time she felt none of the soaring joy she had experienced when he had described her thus, only a sharp anguished knowledge of Edward’s own awareness that, while a woman might feel compassion for him, she could never feel desire.

As she wheeled him outside, she saw him lift his face towards the warmth of the sun. His skin had a grey, sickly undertone, the bones slightly shrunken under his flesh. He had lost weight in the long months he had been with them and her heart ached compassionately for him, as she contrasted him again with him .

The rhododendrons were set on a sloping bank just outside the formal gardens, and Lizzie, who had genuinely wanted to foster the tiny spark of interest she had seen in Edward’s eyes the last time she had taken him there, had discovered that they had originally been planted by an owner of the house who had travelled extensively in China before the Boxer uprising. A keen botanist, he had collected various specimens in the wild and created this special area for them.

Where the formal gardens of the house had now gone to make way for vegetable plots, the rhododendrons had been allowed to remain.

Lizzie was slightly out of breath by the time she had pushed the wheelchair up the overgrown path that led to them, but her efforts were well rewarded when she turned a corner and stopped the wheelchair so that Edward could take in the full glory of the scene in front of them.

She heard him catch his breath, and, when she quickly kneeled down to look at him, she discovered that there were tears running down his face.

‘They’re beautiful,’ he told her quietly. ‘So very much like those at Cottingdean… My grandmother adored her garden.’

‘Who lives there now?’ Lizzie asked him, more because she sensed his need to talk about the house he obviously loved so much than out of any real curiosity.

‘No one. It was requisitioned during the early part of the war, but it’s empty now. It’s too remote to be of any real use—on the edge of a tiny village tucked away in the Wiltshire hills. Ultimately, I suppose, it belongs now to my cousin. His father was the elder son, mine the younger. Sometimes during the night I dream that I’m back there…’ A bitter smile twisted his face. ‘Pure escapism. If I do go back, it won’t be as a boy free to run around but as a useless cripple…’

Lizzie bit her lip, wondering if she had done the right thing in bringing him out here…wondering if she had perhaps not been kind in stirring up memories of his childhood.

Without saying a word, she turned the wheelchair round. She knew from experience that when these moods of deep despair came down on him it was best to simply let Edward speak. Rather like letting poison drain out of a wound, only for his particular wound there could never be any total cleansing and healing.