‘How would you feel?’ I asked. Under any other circumstances, I would have deemed the remark wholly coquettish and beneath me, but holding my breath, I waited for his reply.
By the side of my bed now, he got down on his knees. ‘I’d be devastated,’ he said.
‘Is that what you say to all the women you’ve slept with?’
‘Must you always regard me so sceptically, Evelyn? Why not trust me, just once?’
‘Only once?’ I asked, gripped with the desire to slip my hands around his shoulders and pull him into bed with me.
Leaning in close, he ran a finger along the length of my jaw, then brushed it against my lips. Any restraint that had kept my longing for him in check now deserted me, and I raised myself up so that my mouth touched his. I kissed him in a way I had never kissed Kit, driven by a passion that left Max in no doubt that I wanted him to make love to me.
He must have known that he was my first lover, and he took me to him with a tenderness I would never have expected. Afterwards, and without a trace of shame, I slept in his arms. We both woke some hours later, and with still no shame in me, we made love again, this time he was less cautious.
We slept once more, and after the deepest of sleeps, I woke to the sound of birds singing. The innocence of that dawn chorus made me think of Kit and suddenly, as Max stirred beside me in the narrow bed, shame now made itself known.
Later that day, and mortified at what I had done, I sought out the powers that be at the Park and claimed ill-health as a result of Tally’s death. Rarely was such a request granted, there was a war on, after all, but I must have caught the administrative officer in charge in a sympathetic mood. My tearful entreaty was convincing enough for me to be granted a fortnight’s leave.
I left no word of explanation for Max, but packed my case and fled to Bletchley station to catch the first available train to Suffolk.
As luck would have it, Kit was home on leave and, taking me by surprise, he made it clear that he felt we had waited long enough to commit ourselves to each other. I’ll never know what made him decide this, but that night we made love in my old childhood bed at Meadow Lodge. (Thank God my mother was bedridden and her hearing had deteriorated to the extent it had!)
It was the first time I had seen him entirely unclothed and the sight of his badly scarred body filled me with a fiercely protective love for him. Full of remorse for my betrayal of him, I swore to myself there and then that I would be the best wife I could to this man I had known nearly all my life. I would never do anything to hurt him.
We were married within the month, which brought an end to my work at Bletchley Park, and my association with Max Blythe-Jones. I never saw or heard from him again.
Not until the night of the party twenty years later.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chelstead Cottage Hospital, Chelstead
December 1962
Hope
No matter how hard Hope tried to open her mouth to speak, not a muscle moved. In her head she was screaming at the top of her voice that she knew who was sending the anonymous letters – it was Arthur, she was sure! But not a word would come out. She was as inert as stone.
She had overheard enough from the whispered comments amongst the medical staff to know that the worst of her injuries was a bleed on the brain, and that while they knew her brain was showing signs of activity, it was if the wires had disconnected and it could no longer instruct her body to move.
She constantly willed her limbs to do her bidding; just an inch would be enough, or a flicker of an eyelid, but her body refused point blank to obey her. Sometimes she felt her body was deliberately mocking her, teasing her into believing she had succeeded in regaining mastery of it and that her hand or foot had moved.
Listening to Romily and Evelyn she had been so sure that she had managed to twitch her fingers in response to what they were saying, but when they hadn’t reacted, she was forced to accept that any movement she believed she was making was nothing more than wishful thinking.
There had been a moment when she had been lying in that ditch with only the wind and rain for company, that she had been certain she was about to meet her maker. With the acceptance that her life was over, she had felt herself slipping away, as though falling over the edge of a cliff. Down and down she fell. Weightless. Not a terrified scream-filled hurtle towards the end, but a slow descent, like a piece of delicate blossom caught on a spring breeze floating gracefully to the soft pillowy ground.
With that sensation came the relief that no more would she have to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. No more would she have the worry of Edmund no longer loving her. Of him loving another. Of him leaving her. She was leaving him. He would now be free to be with whomever he wanted. This, like the car with which she had surprised him, was her gift to Edmund. Her final gift.
In the endlessly long days she had been lying here in a state of purgatory – with a tube down her throat to help her breathe and a drip feeding God knows what into her – her mood had swung from one end of the pendulum to the other. To live or not to live. As if she had any choice in it!
Some days when Edmund was with her, when her mood was so low and she saw this permanent vegetative state as her future, she willed him to do the decent thing and put a pillow over her face. ‘Just do it!’ she longed to say. ‘Put us both out of our misery.’
Other times when he was with her and holding her hand, telling her how everyone was rooting for her to get better, she pictured his face. His caring compassionate face. And it made her want to weep and beg him to put his arms around her. He repeatedly apologised for arguing with her, that he wished he could turn back time and make everything right again.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a poor husband to you,’ he’d said, ‘that I don’t seem able to make you happy in the way I once did.’
She could have wept when he told her he loved her. But was that remorse in his voice she could hear? Remorse for also loving another? Evelyn had just said her brother would never have an affair behind Hope’s back. Was she right?
The silence in the room told her that she was now alone. The nurses had finished doing whatever they came to do and had gone. Where were Romily and Evelyn? Why hadn’t they returned? She wanted to hear more of what they had to say about the anonymous letters. She wanted somehow to point them towards Arthur. He was just the sort of person who would enjoy stirring up trouble for the sheer hell of it.
Tormenting people was what he did best. He had done it as a child when he’d pulled the wings off butterflies. Or the time one hot summer’s day during the school holidays when he trapped a field mouse under a jam jar and put it in the sun so he could watch the animal slowly die.
Beyond the quiet confines of her room, Hope could hear the sound of a trolley being pushed along the corridor. It was the trolley with the irritating wheel that needed oiling. Was she the only one who could hear it squeak, the only one to be annoyed by it?