Chapter Eighty-Eight
La Vista, Palm Springs
January 1963
Romily
Throughout the long flight to Los Angeles, Romily had rehearsed what she planned to say to Red when he opened the door to her. But not a word of it sounded right to her ears; it was too scripted. She needed to relax and to stop worrying that she was making a big mistake.
It was because she had decided to be more like her younger self – her young spontaneous and impulsive self – that she was now in a taxi and on her way to surprise Red. She had deliberately not bought herself a return ticket. What did she have to rush back for anyway? Island House would always be there for her.
Closing her eyes, she gave in to the memory of lying in bed with Red at Island House and their making love. They brought out the passion in each other, he claimed, and it was true. She felt she could give more of herself to him than she ever imagined possible. What she had come to feel for Red was equal to, if not greater than, the very deep love she had experienced with Jack. She had waited a long time for that to happen.
The thought of once again sharing a bed with Red immediately heightened her anticipation of seeing him, giving her butterflies in her stomach. She felt clammy, too, from a combination of excitement and nervous energy, and from wearing the wrong clothes.
When she left London yesterday, the temperature was barely above freezing, and she had been glad of her mink coat and woollen skirt and jacket. But here, mid-afternoon, it was seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. She wished she hadn’t been so impatient to get out of the airport and grab a taxi; she should have changed into something lighter. Fanning her face with her hand, her eyes on the passing sun-baked desert landscape, she wound down the side window to let the rush of air cool the flush of her cheeks. In the front, the taxi driver fiddled with the car radio, switching from one station to another until, through the crackling static, he found something to his liking. When he settled on Nat King Cole singing ‘You Made me Love You’ and began humming along, Romily smiled to herself. Oh Red, she thought, you certainly did make me love you.
He had reluctantly left Island House in the new year. A prior engagement with a film studio in Hollywood forced him to return, although he had been tempted to tell the studio that he was snowed in and there were no flights leaving Heathrow airport. Neither of which was true, and as Romily pointed out to him, he had to leave some time. ‘Do I?’ he’d asked. ‘Are you sure I couldn’t just stick around for ever? I wouldn’t be any trouble.’
‘You’ve been more than enough trouble already,’ she’d teased him.
‘The right kind of trouble?’
‘Fishing again, Mr St Clair? What have I told you about that?’
She had gone with him to the airport to wave him off. Staying with him for as long as was possible in the departure area, sitting together at a table drinking coffee and suddenly finding it difficult to talk, she began to hope that a blizzard would prevent his flight from taking off. But not a flake of snow had fallen, and she had stood at the window watching his Pan Am DC-7C lumber along the cleared tarmac before soaring into the pewter-grey sky. Unable to face the train journey back to Suffolk that same day, she had stayed the night in London, already missing the man who had given her the best Christmas she could remember.
As eventful as Christmas had been, what with the extraordinary weather, Hope emerging from her coma, Ralph helping Julia to leave Arthur, and then Arthur suffering a stroke, Red had taken it all in his stride. He had fitted in perfectly, throwing himself into whatever needed doing without being asked – chopping logs for the fire and clearing snow, not just at Island House, but in the village with a small taskforce so that the elderly residents could get out to the shops. He had acted as an excellent barman whenever guests called and he had even charmed Mrs Collings, a feat Romily had believed could never be done.
Once he was back in Palm Springs, he and Romily slipped into a routine of telephoning each other almost daily. ‘I’m the wrong side of fifty yet I feel like a teenager again,’ he’d said during one call.
‘Me too,’ she’d laughed. ‘It’s absurd, isn’t it?’
‘Totally crazy. But I could talk to you all day, and then all night.’
‘You might not think that when your telephone bill lands on your doormat.’
‘I don’t give a damn about that; I just want to know when I’m going to see you next.’
‘Soon,’ she had told him. ‘Just as soon as life here has settled down again.’
‘That family of yours can manage without you, you know.’
‘I know that, it’s just that I need to be sure that they’re all right. So much has happened in the last few weeks, and their happiness is important to me.’
‘How about your own happiness? Who’s looking out for that? Apart from me, that is?’ he added.
His question made her think that he had a point. She had spent a very long time not thinking about her own happiness, of always considering the needs of others before her own. Had it become too much of a habit, an unconscious need on her part always to be at the centre of things? If so, it was time to break the habit.
It was that thought that had encouraged her to book a flight to Los Angeles, and without telling anyone, not even Red. Florence was the exception. Dear Florence, what a good friend and co-conspirator she was.
Before she left Island House, Romily had done what she should have done years ago: she had burned Matteo’s letters. It had not saddened her as she thought it might, watching the flickering flames devour the past; instead it had felt cathartic, a sense of letting go. Finally.
Back in 1944, and in the days after she had written to Matteo telling him it was over between them, that she would not be responsible for destroying his marriage, her emotions had ricocheted wildly, bouncing between heartbroken despair, self-pity and wild fury. In truth, her anger was mostly directed at herself for not being more careful. For allowing her reckless behaviour to get her into the mess she was.
Then one night, when she was alone in the cottage in Hamble, exhausted and feeling sorry for herself, she drowned her sorrows in a bottle of wine. By the time she had drained it to the last drop and made it upstairs to bed, she was consumed with drunken self-pity. Her last conscious thought before passing out was that she wished she could make the baby disappear from her life just as she had banished Matteo.
The next morning she woke with her stomach cramping painfully. Staggering to the bathroom, the pain causing her to cry out and double over, she realised that she was miscarrying: her wish had been granted.
She wept with guilt for hours afterwards. But she never told a soul. Not then, not since. She could never bring herself to admit the dreadful thing she had wanted to happen, that she had literally wished the baby’s life away. The rational part of her could reason there was a world of difference between wishing something and it actually happening. But shame and remorse would not allow such an easy get-out clause. She was convinced that drinking so much alcohol had caused her to lose the baby; that a part of her had done it deliberately. That child would be eighteen now.