Hope - Lesley Pearse [159]
Anne turned and fled back to the house.
During the next three or four days she berated herself constantly for showing Albert her guilt by running away from him. What was she to do? Now that she’d threatened him with the police, he might tell William just to spite her.
She couldn’t eat, sleep or sit still, her heart seemed to be beating too fast, and when William did come home, she had to make out she had a headache so she could shut herself away in her room.
The following morning she saw William talking to Albert out in the garden, and she waited, expecting that at any moment her husband would come running in angrily because he knew.
But that didn’t happen. William was quite jovial when he came in, and all he wanted to talk to her about later that day was the possibility they might have to sell some of their more valuable pieces of furniture to raise some cash. But in the days that followed, each time Albert walked close to the windows, he would look in at her, smirk, and wave a piece of notepaper which could only be Angus’s letter.
The strain of it, along with not eating or sleeping, made her shaky and clumsy. She knocked an ornament off the mantelpiece, twice she knocked over a teacup, then finally she caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her dress while coming down the stairs, tumbling right to the bottom.
She had banged her head and arm, and William called the doctor, assuming she was in terrible pain because she couldn’t stop weeping.
The doctor told her that she would be fine, that she was only shaken up. But she knew he’d said something more to William, for as soon as the doctor had left, William came back to her room and sat on her bed.
‘Tell me what’s really troubling you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been nervy ever since I came back from London. Baines told me you haven’t been eating.’
It was ironic that he’d chosen to revert to being the gentle, kind-hearted man she’d married, purely out of anxiety for her, and that made her cry even more. He stroked her hair back from her face and told her he knew he was responsible for her distress.
‘We used to be such close friends,’ he reminded her. ‘Remember how we used to laugh so much together? We told each other everything. Can’t we try to be like that again?’
She so much wished for that too, but she couldn’t tell him the truth however much she wanted to, for it would hurt him too badly.
Days went past and still she lay in bed, wrapped in misery. But William didn’t turn back to drink; he brought her meals to the bedroom and even fed her tenderly. Again and again he apologized for his drinking and losing their money and even admitted that he’d been nasty to her and her sisters when her father died.
He did owe her apologies for all these things, but her own wrongdoing was burning away inside her, and because she still couldn’t bring herself to admit that, she attacked him.
‘You’ve never been a real husband to me,’ she sobbed. ‘We’ve been married for nearly twenty-seven years but you’ve laid with me fewer than six times. Do you know how that makes me feel? It makes me feel ugly and undesirable.’
William’s face crumpled and he began to cry. She felt sorry then and enfolded him in her arms to comfort him, shocked that he had taken it so hard.
As he continued to sob, Anne felt obliged to tone down her accusation. She said that it was almost certainly her fault, that maybe he thought she didn’t welcome his advances. She wasn’t even thinking about what she was saying; all she wanted was for him to stop crying.
‘Don’t make excuses for me,’ he blurted out eventually. ‘The fault is all mine and I wish more than anything else in the world that I wasn’t the way I am. Don’t you understand what it is, Anne? I have no desire for any woman. Only other men.’
For a few brief moments she thought she’d misunderstood what he said. But when he looked up at her like a little boy caught with his fingers in the jam, she suddenly realized it was true.
‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘That can’t be right. Not you!’
She was beyond shock, beyond even horror. It was too outrageous to take in.