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By Root 884 0

and she had said at the time how lovely she had thought it was, with its black and white buildings and its sense of being a world away from the war. Although they were too far away to see the faces of the occupants clearly, she could hear the laughter coming from the rowing boats on the lake and the splash of the oars of the amateur oarsmen, most of them young men rowing their girls. This was an English summer at its best, surely, with the smell of grass, and the lazy hum of worker bees filling the air around them. Ellesmere was undoubtedly a place for lovers, just as summer was a time for lovers, but she must not think about that, no matter how ironic and painful it was that Lee had brought her here. If only she were free simply to relax and enjoy everything that Ellesmere and its lake had to offer, but sadly she was not. Her arms wrapped tightly round her knees, she was looking straight ahead, but she wasn’t really seeing the view. Instead her thoughts were focused on what she knew she had to do.

‘We can’t do this. We mustn’t do this, Lee. We…we can’t be together,’ she burst out miserably.

‘Why not?’

‘How can you ask me that? You know why not. You’re married.’

‘My marriage is over, and that’s not just some line I’m shooting you, Di. It’s the truth. Look, I didn’t want this to happen to us any more than you did. In fact, I swore I wasn’t going to let it happen. Hell, I damn near busted a gut fighting not to let it happen, but since it has…surely you can see that we’d be fools not to take what we’ve been given? Be honest with me. How many people get to feel like this?’

‘Plenty of them, from what I’ve heard.’ Diane’s voice was metallic and thin with pain, as she struggled not to let Lee see just what his words were doing to her.

‘No, not plenty of them,’ he corrected her. ‘Very few, I would guess. This for us has come against all the odds – you know that as well as I do.’ He reached for her hand.

Diane tried to snatch it away but he wouldn’t let her.

‘Don’t try to tell me that you don’t feel the same way I do.’

‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Can’t you see how wrong it would be?’ she protested with despair. ‘No matter what you say about your marriage, you are married.’

‘And you’re still in love with a guy who dumped you.’

Diane drew in her breath as she tried to stop the pain gripping her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, after she had finally exhaled, ‘yes, I am.’

‘But you still want me…’

She wanted to refute what he was saying so badly that it hurt, but she knew that her own honesty wouldn’t let her.

‘You love him but you want me,’ he persisted. ‘You know what I think? I think you’re afraid to admit that you might have stopped loving him because you’re afraid of admitting that you could have started to love me.’

‘No, that isn’t true.’

She sprang up, shaking her head in angry denial, oblivious to the curious looks she was attracting from the other couples who had come to this lake on the outskirts of a Cheshire village, with its tranquillity and the privacy it afforded eager lovers.

‘This can’t happen, Lee. It mustn’t.’ She was perilously close to breaking point. ‘We both know all about the temptations for a married man going off to war, when he’s far from home, and we both know too what happens to the women who are foolish enough to get involved with them: wartime “wives” who are no such thing. And what if you are lying to me? What if your wife really does love you? Do you think I could live with myself if I thought I’d been responsible for causing that kind of pain to another woman; a woman who has the right to…to everything?’

‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’

When she didn’t make any response, the major continued thickly, ‘With every word you’re saying you’re making me fall deeper in love with you, Di.’

‘Well, you mustn’t. You mustn’t. All we can ever be is…is two people fighting together to win this war. Nothing more than that. Nothing!’

The starkness of the silence between them strained her nerves, the echoes of her emotional words dying slowly on the air as though to reproach her for what she was destroying.