Love Forbidden

Chapter 1 1953-2

The room was small and shabby. When her father had been alive, it had been the housekeeper’s room. Now it housed all that was left of their furniture.

Aria sat down at the table and poured herself out a cup of tea. There were cucumber sandwiches and a piece of homemade cake. She ate absentmindedly, her thoughts far away, until with almost a start she heard the sound of a car being started up.

Then she rose to her feet and went to the window that overlooked the front of the house.

She could see the grey Bentley just beginning to move. She had a fleeting glimpse of a sunburned face with high cheekbones and dark eyes. And then the car was past and was moving swiftly up the drive, seeming to flash by in the sunshine as if it was something from another world.

“Swiftly come, swiftly go!”

Aria whispered the words aloud and then wondered why she had said them.

The car was now out of sight. There was only the same peace and quiet that she had commented on a little earlier.

They were the richer by five shillings and yet Aria felt as if the man in the grey Bentley with his lovely amoretta had left disruption behind him. Or did that lie merely within her own heart?

The door behind her opened.

“They didn’t take long, did they, Nanny?” she said without turning her head.

“Who didn’t?” a man’s voice enquired.

She swung round.

“Charles! I wasn’t expecting you.”

Her brother walked across the room and sat down at the table.

“Have you a cup of tea for me?” he asked.

He was wearing dirty stained corduroys and an open-necked shirt.

“Of course,” she answered. “But what has happened? Why are you here at this time of the day?”

“I have a blade broken on the silage cutter,” he answered. “It’s a damned nuisance too. We would have cleared Greenacres tonight if we hadn’t been held up like this. I had to go into Hertford to get another.”

“How sickening for you,” Aria sympathised.

She fetched another cup from the cupboard in the dresser.

“Eat that sandwich,” she said, “and I’ll cut you another.”

“No, I don’t want anything to eat,” he answered. “I have to go back to the fields in a moment, although we cannot get on until Joe has fixed the new blade.”

“You look tired,” Aria remarked quietly. “Can’t you leave it until tomorrow and start fresh in the morning?”

“You know darned well I can’t,” he said sharply and then added quickly. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to snap at you, but it makes me so irritable these blasted things always breaking. It isn’t only the delay, it’s the fact that I can’t afford to pay for new ones.”

“Yes, I know, Charles. But you are driving yourself too hard. You are trying to do too much, too quickly.”

“Too quickly! Do you know what the overdraft is at the Bank? And by the way I have had a letter from the Manager this morning. He has asked me to go in and see him. You know what that means!”

“Oh, Charles! You don’t think he is going to be difficult and ask us to repay some of the loan?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. But I can’t do it, you know that, Aria. I just can’t.”

There was a sudden high, almost frightened note in her brother’s voice and quickly Aria put out her hand and laid it in his.

“No, I know you can’t, Charles. But don’t worry. Don’t cross the bridge until you come to it. It may be nothing – just a routine talk.”

“But if it isn’t, what am I to do?”

Again there was that note of panic in his voice.

“Charles, something will turn up. We have survived until now, haven’t we?”

“By the skin of our teeth.”

“Nevertheless they are still there!”

Aria tried to smile. It was not a very successful effort.

Charles beat both fists on the table.

“I won’t give this place up, I won’t, I tell you.”

“You are not going to,” Aria said soothingly. “Who has ever suggested such a thing? It’s yours, Charles. We are living here. We have managed so far – we will go on managing. You are not to doubt that.”

The passionate sincerity in her voice and the pressure of her hand seemed in some measure to bring reassurance. For one moment Charles was tense, fighting a rising panic and the next moment at Aria’s words he seemed to relax, the terror faded from his eyes.

“Drink your tea,” she said quietly. “And eat that sandwich, if nothing else. I insist on it.”

He obeyed her without further argument and once he had started to eat she went into the kitchen and brought back a loaf and a pat of butter.

“Did you have any lunch?” she asked casually.

“Of course – ” he began and then stopped and looked at her guiltily. “I – think I did.”

“That means you didn’t,” Aria said. “Charles, how ridiculous you are! You’ll kill yourself if you work like this. No one can work from dawn till dusk without food. Now don’t you dare move, I am going to fry you a couple of eggs and you will eat them and like them.”

Her brother looked at his watch.

“I have to get back.”

“You will stay where you are until you have something inside you,” Aria insisted firmly.

She hurried into the kitchen and, while she was frying the eggs on a small gas stove, which stood beside the great useless range with its spit and huge bread ovens that had been there in her grandfather’s time, she thought almost despairingly of Charles’s face when he told her that the Bank Manager had asked to see him.

She knew this meant that he would not sleep until the interview was over and she knew too that he would drive himself to work, even harder than he was working already, forcing himself to do the work of ten men and to have an almost superhuman strength.

‘Poor Charles! Poor, poor Charles!’

The soft hiss of the gas seemed to echo the words that moved Aria’s lips. She thought suddenly that it was difficult now to remember the time when she had not had to worry about her brother and be sorry for him.

She had seen so little of him when she was small as he had been at boarding school. She had been with her father, often abroad when the holidays came round, so that Charles had gone to relatives and brother and sister had not even met. During the war Aria had seen Charles only twice.

And then, when the hostilities in Europe were over, Charles had volunteered first for Korea and then for Malaya.

He had been in Malaya only a week when he was captured by the terrorists. They tortured and ill-treated him until, when he was finally rescued, he was little more than a corpse. He had come back to England a nervous and physical wreck – to face disaster in his own family life.

Charles’ and Aria’s father, Sir Gladstone Milborne, had died in 1953 when Aria was eighteen and Charles was twenty-four. It was only after his death that they discovered how he had managed to live for so many years in luxury and comfort.

Everything had been spent – there was nothing left.

Even the money that should have been in Trust had somehow been used up by methods that would certainly not have stood a legal investigation had there been any point in having one.

Worse still than the fact that there was no money was the discovery that he had stripped Queen’s Folly in his desire to finance his enjoyment of what he termed ‘a gentleman’s way of life’.

He had gone abroad immediately after the war taking Aria with him. They had stayed in Italy, in Paris and had gone to Egypt in the winter.

They always stayed at the best hotels but, while Sir Gladstone amused himself with beautiful women, luxurious food and the nightlife of the Cities they visited, Aria was strictly chaperoned by an elderly Governess, who never ceased to express, not in words but by her manner, her disapproval of her employer.

Why her father wished to have a girl still in her teens with him, Aria afterwards could never understand. Perhaps it gave him, in his own way, a sense of security, a feeling of homeliness although no one who knew him could have suspected him of wanting anything so alien to his character.

There was no doubt at all that, as he grew older, Sir Gladstone became more dissolute. There were ever-recurring scandals, scenes, recriminations and often violence, which meant that they packed their possessions hastily and moved on to another gay City, another part of the globe. Rome, Madrid, New York, Buenos Aires – Aria knew them all, but only through the pane-glass of a hotel window.

The fact that his home had been sacked and the family treasures sold had been a worse torture to Charles than anything he had experienced from the terrorists. Knowing her brother so little, Aria had not at first understood his passionate and almost fanatical devotion to his home.

“It is mine! Mine! Do you understand?” he had shouted at her once. “Queen’s Folly has belonged to a Milborne since Queen Elizabeth’s day, father to son, father to son, and now it’s mine and I’ll never give it up. I will die first, die on the threshold and be buried in the soil that belonged to my ancestors and now belongs to me.”

His voice had risen shrilly to what was almost a scream. He was shaking, his hands were icy cold and yet the beads of perspiration were running down his forehead.

“Only time can heal his nerves,” the doctor had told Aria. “Try not to let him upset himself, try to make him take up his ordinary everyday life as easily and smoothly as possible. It’s not going to be easy, I know that. Those devils have jerked him out of gear, so to speak. We have to get him back into the rhythm of living. Do you understand?”

Aria had not understood at the time, but as the years went by she began to understand a little of what Charles was suffering and to learn how to handle him. Sometimes she must be soft and tender and sympathetic, but at other times she must be firm, hard and cold and must even bully him a little.

Sometimes she must cling to him and at others she must be a rock of strength itself.

There were nights when she wept into her pillow and felt that she was being a failure and days when she thought that Charles was mad and that nothing could save him from the asylum.

These were the occasions when she hated Queen’s Folly because it must mean so much to the man who loved it as though it was his mother, wife and mistress.

She hurried from the kitchen now, back into the sitting room and to her relief Charles was still sitting at the table.

“Here are your eggs,” she announced. “And if you go without your lunch again, I shall instruct Joe to force it down your throat, however much you abuse him for doing so.”

“I won’t forget it another time,” Charles said with a sudden good humour. “It’s been a hell of a day today. Everything has gone wrong. The fox took six of our pullets last night.”

“Oh, not again!” Aria exclaimed. “How did he manage it?”

“Bit a hole in the hen house. You know we want some new ones. The wood is rotten and, as soon as I repair one hole, two or three others appear.”

Aria sighed. The hen houses were like everything else, falling to pieces for want of money. And what could they do about it? She pondered for a moment, her eyes on her brother’s face as he ate his eggs and then she said quietly,

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time Charles. I have come to a decision, a rather important one.”

“What about?” he asked, not looking up and she knew he was not really attending to her, but thinking of his problems on the farm.

“Listen to me, Charles,” she said urgently. “This is important. I have decided to go away, to see if I can find a job.”

“A job! Whatever for?” Charles had raised his eyes to her now and she saw for once that she was really holding his attention.

“To make money, of course. I have been talking it over with Nanny. There are so few visitors that she can manage them and the house. We thought at first that we should have crowds here, but hardly anyone comes until the afternoon and if they do we can always put a notice on the door for them to ring the bell. Nanny can sit in the hall in the afternoon and, if things really get busy, it only means that your supper may be a bit later than usual.”