A Different Kind of Love Read online

  “It’s wedding nerves,” Vi had told her positively when she’d said she was getting jittery. “Everybody gets ’em, duck, but at least you know what’s comin’ to you, if you get my meanin’,” she added with a sly chuckle.

  Oh yes, she thought weakly, Walter could still make her feel good – so good – there were still times when passion took them somewhere among the stars, in a manner of speaking.

  “But do I really love him?” she whispered into the dark. She’d been so sure, and now she wasn’t. And if she didn’t truly love him, then all tomorrow’s vows would be lies.

  With her nerves at fever pitch, and the recklessness of high melodrama colouring her thoughts, she wondered if she should solve all their problems by jumping into the fast-swirling tidal river nearby, or walk straight into the deep grey waters of the Bristol Channel. But sheer panic at the thought of that icy water enveloping her made her discard such stupid thoughts. And it would be even more of a sin to drown herself than to marry a man she didn’t love.

  Anyway, she didn’t want to die. She had prayed so often during the last year of the war for her brother Donal to survive his time in France, and her prayers had been answered. She’d heard enough about dying during those war years, and then had come the irony of the terrible influenza epidemic that followed, killing thousands more.

  No, thought Kate. I certainly don’t want to die! It was wicked to even think of it. She was almost twenty-one years old, and tomorrow she was going to be married to a good man. They had loved passionately once, and any lack of passion now was only a passing phase.

  In her innocence, Kate was sure that love would grow again once they were man and wife.

  She awoke to the sound of rain on her window pane. It wasn’t a good omen; the last few days had been cooler than usual for early May. But by the time she had washed in the cold water in her basin, the sky had begun to look brighter. With luck, it would have cleared by noon, and Kate’s heart began to lift.

  Alice and the girls were to walk ahead to church, with Kate and her father coming last. Donal would have already gone to meet Walter there. The small Catholic church was only a short distance away, so there was no need for transport, although Walter would arrive in his Rover, and he and his bride would travel back to the cottage in style.

  To his credit, he’d offered to pay for cars to take them all to church, but it was a tradition in Brogan’s family that the bridal party walked to church and back again afterwards. The tradition went back to his years in Ireland, and if Kate sometimes thought it odd that he should want to recall those apparently headstrong days in less than savoury surroundings, she never bothered to question it.

  Kate’s sisters bounded into her room in their nightgowns, chattering like a pair of excited magpies. Maura was as pale and fragile as ever, while Aileen was ruddier than usual.

  “When are we getting dressed, our Kate?”

  “Not for hours yet,” she told them. “Go down and have your breakfast and leave me some peace!”

  “Our Kate’s got the hump,” they chanted in unison. “Our Kate’s getting married to soppy old Walter…”

  They ducked as Kate hurled a pillow at them, and went giggling out of the room. Kate got up and put her arms through the sleeves of her old dressing gown. There was a nicer one for her honeymoon, but it wasn’t as exotic as she would have liked. Something that would make Walter’s eyes gleam … She smiled ruefully. He usually couldn’t wait to get her clothes off, so it hardly mattered what she wore.

  She’d been allowed some pretty offcuts from the sweatshop and, being deft with her needle, it had been enough to make herself a primrose-coloured nightgown and several new frocks that wouldn’t be out of place in a swish hotel. She’d begged the use of her machine in her five-minute breaks for the main seams, finishing off the rest at home.

  She went downstairs, feeling strangely unreal; this was the last time she would do so as an unmarried girl. The whole family was sitting around the table. Her father had his head in his hands, her brother was unshaven and haggard, and her mother’s silent disapproval at their drunken arrival home last night was punctuated by the banging down of the teapot making them both wince, and the relentless sawing of the bread-knife on the breakfast loaf.

  “Here comes my princess,” Brogan grunted, brightening a little as she appeared. “Will you please tell your mammie that it’s only once that a daughter gets married, and if a father can’t celebrate then, I don’t know when he can. For pity’s sake, Katie girl, tell her to have done with her shenanigans, for my head’s near to splitting with it.”

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself?” Kate said, not daring to laugh at the comical figure he made, all remorse and hang-dog, and obviously with a sizeable hangover. She guessed he’d already had plenty of tongue-pie that morning.

  “Sure and I’ve done me best,” Brogan said, sighing heavily. “But your mother’s a very unforgiving woman, Katie.”

  “Leave them be, Kate,” Donal advised with a weak grin. “This is your day, and you don’t want to be getting caught up in any family squabbles that are not of your making.”

  “Then I’ll just eat my breakfast instead, or my mother will be getting on at me too,” she said, neatly avoiding arguments.

  When would it ever be quite like this again, she wondered? The good-natured squabbles, the giggles, the roaring family arguments, the closeness, the good times and the bad times, and the frequently meagre times, that were all part and parcel of what the Sullivans were? All that would change when Walter Radcliffe moved into the cottage. They wouldn’t be the same unit any more. Everything would change, and here she was mourning it as if it was the passing of an era – a very bad thought to be having on her wedding day, Kate told herself in panic.

  “Are you all right, Kate?” her mother said sharply.

  “Of course I am.”

  “Well, you don’t look it. You’re as pasty as our Maura, and it’s no way to be looking on your wedding day.”

  “Leave the girl alone, missus,” Brogan said, lazily cheerful now that the attention was off himself. “She’ll just be having last-minute nerves like any decent girl would, goin’ to her nuptials.”

  The children giggled at this, not understanding the word, but finding the sound of it vaguely wicked, and one to be chewed over at the village school next week. Their mother turned on them at once.

  “Now then, get on with your bread and honey and stop looking so dippy, or I’ll box your ears for you. A fine pair you’ll look then, walking down the aisle behind our Kate with bruised heads.”

  Kate bit into her own hunk of home-baked bread, oozing with butter from Huggins’ farm, and the sweet wild honey Donal collected from the moors. She supposed they didn’t live too badly, considering … considering that Walter had all but sneered at the fact that two grown men didn’t have what he called regular jobs, and that Kate’s mother had to take in washing to make ends meet. Kate had smarted at that, hating the superiority on his handsome face, and springing to her family’s defence at once.

  She wished she hadn’t remembered that just now, when she was about to tie herself for life to this man whom she’d once wanted so wantonly. Yes, it must just be wedding-day nerves that was making her feel like this, she told herself desperately, trying to ignore how all her bones felt as though they were turning to water at her unbidden use of the past tense. She had loved him and she did love him. Of course she did.

  By the time it was decided that the girls could get dressed in their Sunday frocks without messing them, they were nearly bursting with excitement. They were now adorned with circlets of ribbon-threaded flowers in their hair, which Kate had made for them, matching the posies they carried. Donal had already gone marching off across the fields to the church, his army training still squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin in a way that charmed plenty of the local girls.

  Brogan had washed and shaved and was bellowing curses from his bedroom as he struggled with the unfamiliar necktie, and
Alice began to help Kate into the soft, creamy-white folds of her own wedding gown.

  “Such dreams went into this, Kate,” Alice said, with a rare note of softness in her voice as she stroked the silky fabric. “My own mother made it for me, and her skill is where you get your own flair for the dressmaking.”

  “Granny had the right idea. I’d sooner be stitching by hand for someone I love than slaving over that old machine for Granby’s Garments,” Kate said, not quite knowing what else to say, and feeling her hands as cold as her heart.

  “I doubt you’ll be doing that for much longer, once the babbies come along.”

  At Kate’s small intake of breath at the words, Alice looked at her sharply. “You’re not ailing today of all days, are you, our Kate?”

  It was Alice’s delicate way of referring to the monthly cramps, and Kate gave her a swift hug, feeling her eyes grow damp with the poignancy of her words. And if it was impossible for Alice to be more free with words or feelings, Kate herself had no such inhibitions.

  “No, Mother. I’m sure it’s just like me dad said – wedding-day nerves. I wouldn’t be a proper bride without them, would I?”

  But her fingers shook, knowing what would be expected of her on this night, and all the nights to come. If she couldn’t love Walter in the way that a wife should, then this would be her penance for letting lust get the better of her.

  For a moment she remembered a young girl in the village a few years ago who’d allowed her soldier boyfriend to have his way with her, and then found herself pregnant. There had been such a scandal, because the boy had been blown to bits in France, and the girl still bore the shame of it with her child, ostracised by people wherever she went. At least that wouldn’t be Kate Sullivan’s shame.

  They both heard a loud commotion downstairs, and Kate adjusted the veil over her shoulders as her mother tut-tutted.

  “That’ll be your dad getting into a fine old stew because he still can’t fasten that necktie. He’ll be at the cider bottle to give him courage, and if I don’t stop him right now he’ll be weaving his way to church. Will you be all right?”

  “Of course.”

  They looked at one another, not just mother and daughter then, but simply two women, following the same path in life. Marriage and children … continuing the great scheme of things, Kate thought, with another huge surge of emotion and affection for this care-worn woman who had never had the best of it, despite the love and loyalty she felt for her own man.

  Theirs was a real marriage, for all its ups and downs, and Kate felt her throat tighten, knowing that hers was going to fall so far short of perfection.

  “You’ll do, our Kate,” Alice said softly.

  Kate’s eyes prickled, knowing it was as fine a compliment as she would ever get from her mother, but it meant all the world to her. She gazed at the unfamiliar vision in the pitted looking-glass in her room, so beautiful and remote in her white gown, the heavy lace veil obscuring the bleakness in her lovely eyes. And the woman who looked back at her was a stranger who was about to live a lie.

  She gladly answered the sudden hammering on her door, before her own thoughts completely demoralised her when she must try to look cool and serene. It would be the girls, preparing to ooh and aah over the way she looked. She turned to the door, fixing a smile on her lips, and lifting her chin to a determined tilt.

  Donal came into the room, his good-looking face a furious, sickly white. In his hand he held a crumpled envelope. His Sunday boots, so recently blacked to a gleaming shine, were mud-stained and filthy now, as if he’d taken every short cut across the fields to get back here in double-quick time. He was breathing hard enough to bust a gut.

  “The bloody swine’s not coming, Kate,” he burst out harshly, completely unable to soften the words. “He sent a young lad to the church to tell the priest, and he left this letter for you. If I could get my hands around his throat right now, I swear I’d gladly kill the bastard!”

  Chapter Two

  For a few minutes, Kate was totally unable to believe what she had heard. She felt the way that the penny dreadful novels always told you a drowning person was supposed to feel at such shocking moments – dizzy, sick and choked for breath, and as if the entire span of her life was passing in front of her eyes.

  “Sit down, our Kate.”

  Donal’s voice seemed to come through a thick fog. He hovered in front of her in a ghostly mist, and for a few fragmented seconds she wondered if she was going blind. Then he lifted the wedding veil from her face, and she drew a deep, shuddering breath.

  Donal poured some water from the jug on her washstand into a glass, spilling it over the white dress, and pushing it against her lips. She drank automatically, feeling the icy chill of the water running down her throat.

  “Sweet Jesus, you look like death,” Donal said savagely. “I should never have have blurted it out like that, but I feel so God-awful guilty for bringing the bastard into the house in the first place. I wish the bugger had gone over the top and got blown to bits by the Kaiser’s shells instead of coming back here to break your heart. You sit still, Katie love, and I’ll get Mother up here before I send for the doctor.”

  She let out her breath in an explosive gasp. It felt as if she had been holding it for ever.

  “No! I don’t want anybody near me until I’ve read Walter’s letter. Give it to me, Donal.”

  She was startled by the sound of her own reedy voice. She already knew what the doctor would say. She was in a state of shock. Of course she was as any bride who had been jilted on her wedding day had a perfect right to be. Of course she looked terrible, and from the coldness spreading through her entire body, she knew she’d probably lost all her colour.

  But at the same time, deep down inside her there was a more private feeling that she couldn’t share with anyone, least of all her protective, defensive family. Deep inside her, there was an invasive sense of the most tremendous, guilty relief at knowing she didn’t have to marry Walter Radcliffe after all. She saw Donal move away as she slit open the flap of the envelope, keeping her eyes averted from his face.

  In any case, after all the private traumas she had gone through, this was probably no more than an involuntary defensive reaction, and the real pain of Walter’s betrayal was yet to come.

  “I’m still fetching Mother,” Donal said harshly. “I don’t like the look of you at all, our Kate. You should be weeping and wailing, and I don’t reckon you should be left alone…”

  She hardly heard him leave the room. There was a letter written on thick notepaper, and a smaller, bulky envelope inside the larger one. She unfolded the letter and saw the page covered in Walter’s small tight handwriting.

  Never trust a man with cramped handwriting, she’d once been advised by a dour fortune-teller at a local fair. It indicates a man with a small mean nature.

  Kate swallowed dryly as she began to read the letter. It was hard to focus on it properly, and she realised that tears had streaked her face without her even knowing it. No wonder Donal had been so alarmed … She concentrated on the letter.

  Nothing in its contents was going to suprise her now – or so she thought. But a searing shock ran through her as she read Walter’s words. For all his faults, she had never anticipated this. And she sensed that his words were carefully chosen, calculated not to make her think too badly of him – if that were possible, she thought bitterly.

  My dear Kate,

  By now you’ll be thinking the worst of me, but believe me, it would have been even worse if we’d gone through with the wedding. I know things have been strained between us these past weeks. It’s not because you mean any less to me than you ever did, but because I was torn between what I wanted to do and what I knew I should do.

  In the end, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. If I’d married you, lass, I risked a prison sentence. After that statement it seems ironic to tell you the reason is because I’m not free.

  By now Kate was breathing erratically, he
r chest so tight it hurt to breathe at all, her hands clenched over the edges of the letter.

  There’s no way to soften this, so I’ll say it outright. I already have a wife, Kate. She was my sweetheart before I volunteered for the army, but I never mentioned her to anybody while I was in France I thought it was bad luck to keep talking about home. Now I wish to God I’d told Donal about her, and then this rotten mess would never have happened.

  Kate’s mouth shook at the crass insensitivity of having their relationship described as a rotten mess. But she was reading more than the actual words in the letter now. She’d never thought of Walter as a supersitious man, and more cynical than of old, she could guess another reason why the dashing soldier hadn’t mentioned his girl back home, even to his pals. He’d be too busy playing Jack-the-lad with the French mam’selles whenever he got the chance…

  Dear Kate, I want you to know that I’m hellishly sorry for what’s happened, and for leaving you in the lurch like this. I just couldn’t see any other way out. You’ll be feeling hurt and angry now, and rightly so, but I want you to know that the week at the Charlton Hotel in Bournemouth is all paid for, and I enclose money for your train fare if you want to take the small holiday as planned. In fact, I beg you to do so, as it will give you time to think, and to get away from prying eyes at home.

  Kate felt her face burn with humiliation. Clearly, Walter expected her to fall apart, to be screaming out that she was pregnant, and that her menfolk must set the police after him at once for breach of promise. Just as clearly, Walter was desperate that she would do no such thing. It would be calamitous if his wife ever got to hear about all this. As always, Walter was only thinking of himself, despite all his protestations.

  As for the other matter, let me know when the time comes, and I’ll see you right, lass. I haven’t had time to do anything yet, but I’ll arrange a post office address where you can contact me any time, and I’ll send it to your home as soon as possible. I’m also enclosing the ring I got for you, in case you feel the need to wear it.