Read Online The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton by Elizabeth Gill - Free Book Online

grieving.
    ‘The day before she was to be sent to such a place she … she ran away.’
    Joe stood. It was all he could do. He had been so busy sorting things out in France, envisaging how they would be together, and all that time she was going through something which a single woman should never have to.
    ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that that might happen?’ she asked, her eyes like hard jewels.
    She held his gaze while Joe fought to comprehend the gravity of what he had done, the results of his folly.
    ‘It was one weekend,’ he said finally as the waves of horror threw themselves over him.
    She was glaring at him now. Joe felt smaller, as if he had shrivelled. He found his breathing all over the place. The room was turning black around him. He fought it, won, and the room slowly righted itself.
    ‘Why don’t you get out?’ she said.
    ‘But where is she? Where would she go?’
    ‘None of us knows. What Toddy told you was a fabrication. She ran. We have done everything we could to find her; we were so concerned, so worried about her. She thought you were dead and then she disappeared. She couldn’t stand the idea that you cared more for indulging yourself in her body than you cared for her reputation, her happiness or her well-being. Toddy went to all our friends and relatives but nobody has seen or heard anything of her and now we don’teven know if she is alive. You caused this. So now you know what it has been like for all of us and most especially for her – having a child in some awful kind of poverty because you risked everything, and for what? Perhaps she’s even dying. Is that love?’
    At that moment – it couldn’t have been worse timed, Joe thought – the doors opened and Toddy’s parents were ushered into the room. They had obviously been alerted that he was here. sir Felix Toddington glared at Joe. He was a big man; when they had been children Toddy and Angela had both been afraid of him. Joe’s father had put up with him because their families were friends. Lady Toddington was tall and stately and always reminded Joe of a ship in full sail. She adored her children and now when she saw Joe her blue eyes were the brighter for the tears in them.
    ‘So she ran away from you?’ Joe accused sir Felix.
    ‘It was your doing,’ the man roared back, his thin face mottled.
    ‘Couldn’t you have helped her?’
    ‘We did everything we could. We wanted to do the right thing but she wouldn’t have it. You had poisoned her mind against her family.’
    Joe shook his head. ‘The right thing? To send her to such a place where they would make her give up our baby? Couldn’t you have forgiven us and looked after her? You knew I was coming home.’
    ‘Thousands of better men than you died in France. We didn’t know that you would come back.’
    ‘The war was over,’ Joe said, and his voice broke. ‘Couldn’t you have written to me, couldn’t you have helped?’
    ‘I didn’t want my daughter married to you after you treated her so badly and after the way your father was behaving,’ her father said. ‘I would rather she had died than marry into such a family.’
    There wasn’t a lot left to say after that, Joe thought. Lady Toddington stood as if she were stuffed. She didn’t cry or turn away or say anything which might have helped, and Joe was a little surprised at that. She had always liked him, had supported them, had been glad that they were engaged. She had even liked Joe’s father, had tried to help him during the years after Joe’s mother had died. He could remember her very often being there for him, but she offered him nothing now and he understood. She blamed him for everything; they all did.
    Joe felt scorched, worthless and, even worse than that, he imagined Angela lost and alone and in despair. Perhaps like his father, she had even taken her own life because she could bear no more. Did she hate him now? If she didn’t then she would surely have followed him to France,