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  He didn’t understand her, but he still loved her every bit as much now as he had when they got married, the dreams he had then were all still intact. He intended to start his own building business in a few years and buy them a pretty little house out in the suburbs. Maybe when Anne was back where she belonged she’d start being glad about things again.

  Reg was one of eight children. His childhood and adolescence had been overshadowed by hunger, poverty and a drunken, violent father. Yet even as young as seven or eight, Reg sensed there had to be a way into a better world, and he spent his time looking for it. While his siblings were content to kick a tin can round the dirty streets or make mud pies on the banks of the creek, he used to take long walks up through Greenwich Park to look at the grand houses in Blackheath and admire their beautiful gardens.

  His mother seemed to understand how he felt, and when he was fourteen she persuaded a master builder to take him on as an apprentice, even though this would mean further hardship for her. While Reg’s old playmates were already moving into crime, he stuck tenaciously to his work. Even after a twelve-hour day humping bricks and mixing concrete, he still attended night school too. He wasn’t satisfied with learning mere brick-laying, but mastered plastering, carpentry and plumbing, and because of this he managed to keep in work right through the grim years of the Depression and support his by then widowed mother and the younger children.

  He was twenty-seven when he met Anne, and though there had been other women before her, he had never taken any of them seriously. Anne, with her sweet-smelling hair, dainty manners and posh voice, gave him the same feeling when as a child he’d looked at those beautiful houses up in Blackheath. He found himself blushing like a sixteen-year-old, his pulse raced, and he hung on every word she said. Yet it was the same for her too, she would jump on a train or bus to meet him anywhere, she sent him love letters when he worked away from London, she enveloped him in the kind of sweet romance that until then he’d thought only existed in fiction. He asked her to marry him after knowing her only a few weeks, before they even made love for the first time, for he believed they were made for each other.

  They’d had it tough, there was no getting away from that. The hostility from her parents, the separation during the war. Then Anne losing her mother, and all the unpleasant stuff with her father when she was trying to cope with two small children. But then all women had it hard during the war, she wasn’t unique, and it was over now, they had a decent place to live. The girls were bright and healthy. So what was it that made her stop caring?

  The milk was warm enough now, Reg poured it into two mugs, stirred a spoon of sugar in to each and carried it in to the girls. They were sitting up in bed waiting for him and he had to smile, they looked like a pair of angels with their just-brushed blonde hair all silky on the shoulders of their white nightdresses.

  ‘Prayers first,’ he said, then sat on the end of the bed watching as they said the Rosary. It made him smile again to see May peeping through half-closed eyes at her sister and trying to copy her. She could never remember the words, just moved her lips and muttered ‘Hail Mary’ now and again, but Dulcie was word perfect. It took him back to when he was her age – his ambition then had been to be an altar boy, for the church was his favourite place. He loved the serenity, the smell of incense, polish and flowers, he could remember praying hard for a miracle, that his father would stop drinking and beating his mother, and that they could move away from Deptford to somewhere beautiful. His prayers were ignored. He was seventeen before his father was found dead in a back alley where he’d had a heart attack while staggering back from the pub. There was no money to move away, the only solace for the children was in knowing they would never have to see their mother with black eyes again.

  As he watched Dulcie he wondered if she had a secret prayer too. She was a thinker, an observer, happy to stand on the side-lines and watch others take the centre court. Yet she had so many abilities, she was the best reader in her class, she could draw and paint, sew almost as well as her grandmother, and she had only to be told something once and she grasped it.

  May was very different. She wasn’t half so advanced as Dulcie was at the same age, but perhaps that was because her older sister did so much for her. May liked the limelight and she stole it effortlessly with her ability to chat and laugh. He felt that even if she never matched her sister’s intelligence, she would be the kind to grasp opportunities, for even now at only five she could be very determined.

  He loved them so much, and he was all too aware that the rot which had crept into his marriage had to be stopped before it damaged them.

  ‘God bless Granny,’ Dulcie said when she’d finished the Rosary. ‘And please make Mummy happy again.’

  A lump came up in Reg’s throat and his eyes prickled. He bent over the girls, kissed them and said goodnight, then quickly left the room. It took a child to hit the nail right on the head. Anne wasn’t happy, and perhaps he ought to try to find out the root cause of it.

  Reg had dozed off, but he woke when he heard Anne’s high heels tapping up the street. He got out of his seat and pulled back the curtains a crack to watch her. Even when she was tired after a long evening, she walked so elegantly, head held high, shoulders back. Her hair glimmered under the street lights, her figure was so curvy and desirable in the new dress. He didn’t really care now about the money she’d spent on it, all he wanted was for her to come in and hug him and tell him she loved him, the way she used to.

  He slipped out into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Maybe if he talked to her now they could sort things out and then go to bed and make love.

  The kettle was just coming to the boil as she came up the stairs. She looked more than just tired, completely drained and care-worn as she slung her handbag over the newel post on the landing, and his heart went out to her. ‘I’m just making some tea,’ he said before going back into the kitchen. ‘Go and put your feet up, I’ll bring it in.’

  She was slumped on the couch when he came in and she looked nervous as if expecting more harsh words.

  ‘I’m very sorry I hit you,’ he said, handing her the tea.

  ‘I provoked you,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What’s gone wrong with us?’ Reg asked, sitting down on the chair opposite her. ‘We’ve got to work out what it is because we can’t go on like this.’

  ‘It’s not you, Reg, it’s all me,’ she said wearily. ‘I’m no good for you. I can’t be what you want me to be.’

  ‘What do you think I want you to be?’ he asked gently.

  She didn’t reply for a moment, just frowned as if trying to get it sorted out in her mind. ‘You want a perfect wife and mother,’ she said eventually. ‘One who scrubs and cleans like your mother does, has the dinner on the table when you come in, and never sees beyond the four walls.’

  Reg laughed. ‘If I wanted that I could live with my mother,’ he said. ‘That’s not it at all. I can live with a bit of mess, and having to wait for my dinner. But I want to come home to a wife who’s pleased to see me, to a mother who talks and plays with her children, and I want a wife who shares my dreams for the future and doesn’t spend the money I’m trying to save for that.’

  ‘But that’s just it, Reg,’ she suddenly burst out. ‘It’s all in the future with you. Save money, be sensible, wait and wait. I can’t stand it, I want to live now.’

  ‘With me?’

  That question shot out, he wasn’t even aware of it forming in his mind. But once it was out he realized it was the crucial question. Did she or did she not want to live with him?

  She hesitated, and that in itself cut him to the quick. ‘You don’t want to live with me,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  She put her hands over her face. ‘Why did you ask that?’ she said through her hands. ‘It’s impossible to answer.’

  ‘It’s not. Just a yes or no will do.’

  ‘But it isn’t black or white,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’
He was surprised he could sound so calm.

  ‘Because sometimes I’m happy to be with you.’

  ‘And sometimes you aren’t?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, let’s talk about the times when you aren’t then,’ he said. ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘Like I’m trapped, like a mouse in a cage with only the wheel to go round and round on,’ she burst out.

  ‘Well, I could say the same myself.’ He shrugged. ‘I have to go to work every day, that’s like a treadmill. I’d rather be sitting at the seaside, or driving a motorbike down an empty country lane, or even getting drunk down in the pub, but I have to go to work or we’d all starve.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand,’ she said sullenly. ‘You always bring everything back to how hard you work for us.’

  ‘I don’t, I go to work willingly for the good of us all, and I dream of the time I might be able to buy that motorbike or lie in the sun in our own garden. My dreams are for all of us. What do you dream about?’

  ‘Being free!’

  Anne’s voice rose as she said that and Reg knew it came from the heart.

  ‘Free of me?’

  ‘Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, and promptly burst into tears.

  Reg allowed that to sink in for a moment. Instinct told him the first reply was the one she really meant, but she hadn’t the courage to go through with it.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you want a divorce?’ he said in little more than a whisper. ‘To end it all after nine years of marriage? Why, Anne? What about the children?’

  ‘Why did you have to start in on me again the moment I got in?’ she suddenly snarled at him. ‘I’m exhausted, I can’t think straight.’

  This, or something similar, was how she wriggled out of all confrontations. Reg usually let it be then, but tonight he had no intention of doing that.

  ‘But you can think straight,’ he insisted. ‘You know why you are unhappy, all you have to do is explain it to me, or how can I help you? Try looking back and thinking about when it all started.’

  She gave him a cold stare. ‘When Mummy was killed, I expect,’ she said. ‘Everything was fine until I was forced to come back to London and live with Daddy. From then on it was just one crisis after another, and you were never there.’

  ‘I couldn’t help that,’ he said evenly. ‘It was the same for everyone. I know it must have been tough with a baby, the rationing, the bombs and everything. I came home as often as I could.’

  ‘But it wasn’t enough,’ she blurted out. ‘I was scared and lonely, Dulcie was a little misery, Dad was always moaning, I never got a decent night’s sleep. I used to panic each night we went into the air-raid shelter that I’d be killed and there would be no one to look after Dulcie.’

  Anne brought up this period of the war every time they had words and Reg felt there was nothing new to be dragged out of it.

  ‘But things improved once you’d moved out to New Cross,’ he said. ‘You seemed much happier with those two girls downstairs for company.’

  ‘Those bitches,’ she said sharply.

  ‘You said you liked them!’ Reg exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘That was before I knew what they were really like,’ she said. ‘They were just tarts, they were laughing at me behind my back.’

  This was a new slant, Anne hadn’t said anything about the girls before.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I was always trying to make that place nice, and waiting for you. They jeered at the way I spoke and dressed, they kept saying all soldiers were unfaithful to their sweethearts and wives. They made me feel so childish.’

  Reg recalled that on that leave he had been a little worried that Anne had made friends with these two factory girls. They were in their mid-twenties and were fast types, who made crude jokes when he passed them on the stairs. He got the impression they had rather too many men in and out of their flat. Yet they did seem to have cheered Anne up. But now he came to think about it, by his next leave they’d moved out, and Anne had given up on trying to make the flat homely. Did something unpleasant occur in the interim period that she’d never spoken of?

  ‘Did something nasty happen then?’ he asked. ‘Maybe if you tell me it won’t bother you any more.’

  ‘It will bother you though,’ she replied darkly.

  ‘I don’t think I can work up much steam about an incident six or seven years ago,’ he said with a smirk.

  ‘Well, if you must know, they persuaded me to go out with them one evening,’ she blurted out. ‘When we got back there was a policewoman in the flat. A neighbour had reported I’d gone out and left Dulcie alone.’

  When she saw Reg’s shocked expression she began gabbling that she’d only been gone an hour, that she’d never done it before or again, that it was just the pressure from the two girls that made her do it.

  Reg guessed that it couldn’t have been the first and only time. It was very unlikely anyone would notice a mother going out and leaving a child, not unless they repeatedly heard the child crying. Yet while it was reprehensible that a mother should leave her child alone at a time when air raids were an almost nightly occurrence, there was no real point in ranting about it now, so many years later. What puzzled him was why she’d confess to it now.

  Reg was reminded of times he’d made a confession and spilled out one sin to the priest, while leaving out a far more grievous one. It was a way of exonerating himself of at least part of the guilt. Was this what she was doing?

  He watched as she took out a cigarette. Her hands were trembling so much she could barely strike the match, and clearly he had stirred up some painful old memories. He leaned over, took the matches from her and struck one for her. ‘Suppose you tell me the truth about what happened at that time?’

  ‘I just have,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘You’ve told me part of it,’ he said. ‘My guess is that there is a whole lot more, and you’re just afraid to tell me.’

  ‘Why do you always have to be so bloody righteous?’ she snapped at him. ‘You’re smug about not ending up like your brothers, for being a craftsman, for every bloody thing. It makes me sick.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ he said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Maybe you’d like it better if I got drunk every night and beat you up? Or if I was a dustman or a road-sweeper and you had to live in the East End?’

  She gave him the oddest look, her eyes were half closed, her mouth twisted in a sneer, and he knew immediately she was going to tell him something he wouldn’t like.

  ‘If you must know, I had an affair with an American airman. Now, how does that make you feel? Are you glad you got it out of me?’

  He felt as if he’d just been kicked in the stomach. Yet it wasn’t purely the content of what she’d said, it was the way she’d delivered it, coldly and deliberately with the intention of wounding him.

  Reg could only gawp at her. Her eyes were like blue ice, no fear or remorse in them.

  ‘Okay, so you had an affair,’ he said after a moment or two’s silence, his voice croaking with emotion. ‘But I’d like to know why you chose to tell me this now. Is it because you want me to hate you so you can be justified in leaving me?’

  ‘You asked what was wrong, I told you,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘If you can’t take the truth you shouldn’t have asked.’

  A picture formed in his mind of Anne swarming down the stairs of that seedy house in New Cross on an airman’s arm, with Dulcie lying upstairs alone in her cot. The picture then moved to Anne making love to this man while Dulcie sat watching, thumb in mouth. It was too much to bear.

  ‘You cold-hearted bitch,’ he hissed at her, getting up from his seat and walking across the room towards the window. He turned back to her, tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘I could stand knowing you’d been unfaithful if I thought you’d confessed to it because you were tormented by guilt and you knew the only way to save our marriage was by bringing it out into the open. But you
don’t want it helped, do you? You want to destroy it and me!’

  ‘Oh, poor, poor Reg,’ she taunted him. ‘You pounced on me the minute I came in the door intent on digging out something. Now I’m supposed to feel bad because I let you! I was twenty, for God’s sake, my mother had just been killed, my father had turned against me, I was struggling to cope with a two-year-old and my husband was away. I just turned to someone else for comfort, that’s all. It’s hardly a hanging offence.’

  Reg sank down on to a chair, resting his elbows on the table, his face in his hands. Part of his mind said she was right. He couldn’t even count the number of friends he had who’d found brief comfort in the arms of another woman during the war, there were so many. He’d been sorely tempted himself on many occasions.

  He looked at her through his fingers, hoping to see tears, some sign she was sorry. But she was yawning, twiddling a strand of hair. She clearly couldn’t care less.

  The truth came to him in a blinding flash.

  ‘You’re having it off with someone now! Aren’t you?’ he said, springing off the chair towards her. ‘You want to go to him?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, looking startled.

  He leaned over her, his hands on the back of the couch either side of her head, his face right up to hers. ‘I know I’m right. I may be slow but I always get there in the end. The new clothes, the hair-dos, the boredom with me and the children. That’s why you admitted to that affair in the war, not because it was really troubling your conscience, but because you hoped it would make me mad enough to throw you out. Admit it! You bitch!’