Husband By Necessity

‘Your parents?’

‘Yes, but not only them. There’s one other who haunts and torments me-’ He stopped and she felt the tremor go through him.

‘Come back to bed, my love,’ she said, although she knew it wasn’t cold that had made him shiver. She wanted to get him away from that window and whatever troubling visions it revealed to him.

He let her lead him back to bed, and when they were under the covers they clung together. She held him with a kind of tender triumph, confident that she’d won him at last, and from now on the future would be what they made it together. His hold on her was different, for in him need was as great as love. She sensed that and made love to him with profound tenderness, trying to tell him that she could be all he needed.

Once she saw him regarding her face with a look almost of desperation. She smiled to reassure him, and when he laid his head against her neck she wrapped her arms about him in a gesture of reassurance. She thought she felt him relax, and smiled to herself. It had been hard but she had found the way at last.

Afterwards she snuggled contentedly against him. He’d half pulled himself up against the bedhead and sat staring abstractedly into space. Once arm was about her, drawing her against his bare chest, but she sensed that he was engrossed in thoughts that shut her out. She was too deeply in love with him to accept that without protest.

‘Hey,’ she murmured gently.

He smiled quickly and she had the feeling that she’d brought him back from some polar region.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘Nothing much.’

‘Is it nothing much that makes you frown like that? Tell me.’

When he didn’t answer she asked, ‘Are the ghosts there still?’

‘They are always there.’

‘Even now?’

‘Now more than ever. They cry loudest when they tell me that I have no right to be happy.’

‘But why should they say that?’

He didn’t answer and suddenly she was frightened. She’d thought that all problems between them were solved, and now she found herself confronted with something she didn’t understand, and that he wouldn’t explain.

‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

‘I can’t.’

She fell back on the age-old plea. ‘Then you don’t love me. If you did you wouldn’t shut me out.’

Suddenly the happy contentment she’d seen in him before vanished, and his face was distraught. ‘Angie, don’t do this, I beg you.’

‘Why not? You’ve shut me out for so long and I’m tired of being shut out. How much do you think I can take? Tell me what’s troubling you.’

Again she saw his look of desperation, as though the joy they had brought each other was only a mirage. Suddenly she couldn’t cope. A moment ago she’d thought that she’d won, but now it was all slipping through her fingers and she didn’t know why.

‘Where were you these last few hours?’ she demanded frantically. ‘I thought we were making love-’

‘We were-’

‘No, you were somewhere else-with your ghosts.’

She felt him flinch. ‘No woman has ever meant to me what you do. Let that be enough, for pity’s sake!’

His refusal to open up to her was like a blow. She pulled away and stared at him, hostile and now as withdrawn as he.

‘How can it be enough?’ she asked at last, trying to speak calmly through the hurt. ‘We make love, but I feel I’m nothing to you because you’re hiding from me.’

He ran his hands distractedly through his hair. ‘And what will be enough? When you’ve forced me to tell you things that I can’t bear to look at myself? Will that be enough?’

‘If I’m no use to you-’

‘Use? I don’t want you to be a doctor for me. I want you to love me.’

‘I do love you-’

‘Oh, yes, but it must be on your terms. You have to own a man’s soul as well as his heart. I was right to be wary of you.’

Silence fell between them. It was an ugly, mistrustful silence and she felt as if she were dying inside.

‘Don’t look like that,’ he begged.

‘I don’t know how I look,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I don’t know what to say to you any more. I think perhaps what happened between us last night-shouldn’t have happened.’

He paled. ‘Do you really mean that?’

‘I don’t know.’

He took her face between his hands. ‘Don’t, my love,’ he implored. ‘Don’t let a shadow fall between us. It’s nothing-nothing-’

‘How can it be nothing when it makes you look like that, and turn away from me? I don’t think it’s nothing. I think it’s the thing that drives you. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do.’

‘Then I think you must be a witch to know so much.’

‘So much?’ she echoed bitterly. ‘I don’t really know much, do I? You won’t let me. You talk about love on my terms, but what about yours? You want to give just so much of yourself, and no more. That isn’t love.’

‘Darling-please-please-’

‘Tell me,’ she cried in anguish. ‘Who is the third ghost?’

He sighed as though too weary to fight any longer. After a long moment he said, ‘The third ghost is a boy of twelve, who lives alone with his mother. Sometimes his father visits them, but he isn’t married to his mother, and he has another family at a big house by the sea. They are his legal family, they are acknowledged, they bear his name.

‘The boy bears only his mother’s name, and secretly he is ashamed. He is ashamed even of his shame, for she is a good mother and loves him. She tells him how scared she is of the legal wife who lives in the big house because she knows the wife hates her for taking the man’s love.

‘The boy tries to be everything she wants, but secretly he longs to visit the great house and see his father’s family. And so one day he slips away and goes down the mountain alone. Nobody sees him, and nobody knows where he’s gone. He’s away many hours, but he doesn’t reach his destination. It gets dark and there is too far to travel, so he turns back. When he gets home the house is dark. He goes in and waits for his mother to return, but the hours pass and she doesn’t come home.

‘Then somebody comes to the house to tell him that both his parents are dead. The father came to see his mother that day. They were worried by his absence and went out in the car to search for the boy. But the car turned over on the mountain, and they both died.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Angie whispered, but Bernardo didn’t seem to hear her. He’d slipped away into the nightmare that he never really escaped.

‘He never told anyone why he’d gone away,’ he said, ‘but in his heart he knew that he’d killed them. To his mother, especially, he’d been disloyal. And then a few days later the wife came to see him. She was the woman whose hatred his mother had feared, but she spoke to him kindly, and told him that he was to live in his father’s house and bear his father’s name, like his other sons.

‘And so he gained everything he’d wanted-at the price of two lives. He should have told her honestly that he’d killed her husband. Then she would have turned against him and sent him away to an institution, where he belonged. But he couldn’t bear to tell the truth. He was a coward, you see.’

‘No,’ she said urgently. ‘He was a child.’

‘He isn’t a child now. He’s kept silent all these years because by not speaking out then he made it impossible to speak out at all. And so he’s met all her attempts at kindness with churlish suspicion, always wondering how much she secretly hates him-’

‘That’s not fair to Baptista,’ Angie said quickly. ‘She doesn’t hate you.’

‘Perhaps. But what would she say if she knew the truth?’

‘I don’t know. But I don’t think she’d blame you-a child of twelve.’