Let Me Love

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1942, and available now for the first time in eBook.

Release date: June 26, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

IT SEEMED SAD and cynical that on the very day Pete and I had decided to consider ourselves engaged and which should have been the happiest time of my life – my mother and father made up their minds to be divorced. In fact I was standing by the window in my bedroom letting the light sparkle against the ring Pete had just put on my finger. Was it only yesterday that he had taken me in his arms and told me that he loved me better than anybody in the world? I had put my arms around his neck and we had hugged each other like two children, as well as two lovers, with so much warmth and yearning in our hearts. We had decided to have dinner together and because it was a warm June evening, I was going to wear my new rose-pink cotton dress which Pete had seen once and approved because he liked the V-shaped neck which showed my throat. He said I had the most attractive throat he’d even seen. And he liked the frill on the hem of my dress, too, and the white daisy-shaped earrings that I wore with the new dress. We were going to have such a marvellous time.

Then my mother came into the room and told me that she and Dad were parting.

“I know it’s a shock for you,” she said, “but for a long time your father and I have not been getting on and I for one can’t stand the constant bickering. I presume you’ve heard enough of it to realize why I can’t, or rather we can’t, carry on. It’s just a waste of time, and do remember we’re both still only in our early fifties. We can’t either of us continue leading this sort of life. You wouldn’t want us to, would you, darling?”

I felt quite frozen. I sat down hastily and put both hands to my ears as though I didn’t want to hear any more. It couldn’t be true, And I told my mother then and there that I’d never really noticed them bickering. “Of course all married people have their rows,” I said, “I realize that, and I did wonder why you had given up the double-bed and were sleeping in separate rooms.”

But deep down in me I believed (and I did after all that my mother said) that they did still love each other. I could not believe that hate had taken the place of that love.

“Oh, Mum,” I said, “tell me it isn’t true.”

Then my mother sat down and began to cry and I had to try and comfort her. It was only after a while that we were able to discuss the affair without both of us crying.

She reminded me that even if they had decided to go on living together it wouldn’t be a very good idea. Once married to my Pete, I was going back to England and so they wouldn’t see much of me anyhow. My father didn’t want to leave Switzerland.

“But what are you going to do?” I asked her plaintively, and thought how beautiful she was still in spite of the tear-stained face. She was obviously very upset and she usually looked happy and full of fun, too, when she was with me – like my father. They both enjoyed a joke. But nothing that I could say either to her or to Dad, to whom I talked later that night, would change their minds. Dad confirmed my belief that he intended to remain in Switzerland in our chalet which adjoined the small antique and book shop which he still wanted to keep running. He hadn’t reached retiring age yet.

Before I joined Pete for dinner and told him the news which had fallen on me like a thunderbolt, my parents informed me they had made their plans and nothing would alter them. Mum planned to live with an old school friend in Majorca (she had recently been widowed), and they might start a Boutique. They both loved clothes and had good taste. Yes, Mum had plenty of ideas, but, oh, I couldn’t bear the thought of divorce for these beloved parents.

Pete, when he did hear the news, was full of sympathy, but tried to cheer me up by reminding me that it wouldn’t be long before we would be able to get married, so it meant the old home would be breaking up anyhow.

During the week that followed I had to watch my mother turning out cupboards and chests-of-drawers and throwing away all the things she thought she wouldn’t want in her new life. I must say she looked utterly miserable while she was doing it, but when I kept insisting she was making a mistake, she suddenly turned from her work and gave me a strange look. Then she thrust some papers and two old diaries into my lap.

“Perhaps if you read those, darling,” she said, “you’ll understand why my marriage to Dad has never really worked out – for either of us! You’ll agree it’s best for me and for him if we get divorced.”

I shook my head. I was so upset I couldn’t think straight, nor accept the idea of the permanent break.

I derived a little comfort from the sweet way Pete kept ringing up and asking me if I was all right and wishing he could come and kiss my tears away, but as he said, he had to attend a special meeting with his solicitor in London and he just couldn’t back out of it.

When I talked to Dad I hoped to get some sense out of him and that he’d tell me it was all a nightmare, but alas, he only confirmed the news that Mum had given me.

“It’s best we put an end to this marriage, Cathy darling,” he said, “It’s never really worked out.”

“You must have loved one another ever to have got married,” I exclaimed, “Surely Mum would never have married you if she hadn’t loved you. She always seems to know her mind.”

My father who had been – like mother – sorting out his desk, gave a deep sigh. He was still a handsome man but he suddenly looked grey and old and very unhappy. It gave me a heartache.

“Oh, yes!” he said, and went to his desk and drew out a bundle of letters. “I had almost forgotten I had kept these, Cathy. I’m glad I didn’t throw them away. They are the letters that Roberta – your mother – wrote me during the war. I thought I had thrown them away. You can read them if you wish, then put them on the fire.”

I left him, feeling very little comforted and when I saw Pete again I told him I was sure Dad knew perfectly well that he hadn’t forgotten that he had kept Mum’s letters. He must have read them over many times. Surely I’d get right to the bottom of things – to the true facts – after reading some of these letters and papers that both my parents had handed to me.

But when next I saw Pete he put an arm around me and dropped a kiss on my hand, and said, “Think twice, darling, before you start delving too deep. You might find the truth very unpalatable.”

This, I argued, wasn’t possible. There couldn’t be anything terrible, although I knew I had been feeling very troubled ever since Mum told me that she and Dad were parting.

I had two whole months to fill in before my wedding, as Pete had to go off to Singapore on business. All the time I needed, to get to the bottom of the mystery, and surely there was a mystery somewhere.

Once Pete had gone I started to read Mum’s diaries. At first I felt embarrassed by the very idea of looking into her heart. It wasn’t like me to want to pry into somebody’s very private business. But Mum had told me to read them so I did, and I became engrossed, absorbed, too caught up in the past to want to leave it alone. I read Mum’s letters to my father, too, and those from him to her. I was trapped in an inescapable search for facts and clues that might prove me right, and that it wasn’t just marital rows and sudden hatreds that had blotted out all those years of love.

I wrote to Pete and told him I had decided to fly to England and see Mum’s war-time friend Debbie Stone, who worked with her as a V.A.D. Debbie would know a lot about them I was sure. I would also go and see my grandmother’s maid, Lizzie. And I would cable the man who featured so strongly in my parents’ past (so I was to discover) – a Canadian soldier, whose surname I could never remember, but they called him Vince.

First of all I went straight from London Airport to Dremshott where Debbie Stone still lived. She accepted the explanation of my arrival on her doorstep and gave me a warm welcome. She swept aside my half-hearted suggestion that I find an hotel. “Wonderful to see you. Growing so like your lovely mother at your age,” she said.

So began a visit that was to last many weeks, and quickly we fell into a routine. She set off every morning to her job as a doctor’s receptionist, and I sat down to write.

She had talked for nearly three hours that first evening and when eventually she stopped, I sat and looked at her in silence. I was saturated with dates, names, incidents. It was going to be hard to sort out facts from speculations, but Debbie snorted when I said so.

“You’d be a fool to try. If you have a problem, Cathy, write it down. It is remarkable how marshalling facts on paper helps to clear the mind. Write it all down and I’ll be here to see you don’t go too far astray.”

I decided to write it as if it were the story of two strangers – the love story of Roberta and Allan.

 

My first visit was to my grandfather. He lived in an Old People’s Home in Bournemouth. He was delighted to see me. Old though he was, his mind was perfectly clear and he was only too pleased to talk to me about my mother’s childhood, and what was more important, how and when she first met my father. So my story began to take shape … …

THERE HAD BEEN many times in her life when Roberta had wished passionately that her mother was still alive, but that wish had never been more prevalent in her mind than during the days which preceded her wedding to Allan Rivers.

It seemed to her little or no time at all elapsed between the day when their engagement was announced in the newspapers and the day of her marriage. Three months in all. A brief enough engagement, yet, as her father had cynically remarked, quite a lengthy one in these days when so many couples were rushing feverishly into marriage.

“You’ll be a war bride, my dear,” Mr. Farr had remarked with a sigh when Roberta had told him about Allan. “Like your mother before you.”

During those three spring months Roberta continued doing her job as a V.A.D. clerk at the Oxford Hospital at Dremshott. Allan was stationed in Dremshott, a subaltern with one ‘pip’ on his shoulder and an R.A. badge. One of the many Gunners whom she had met in the district, but one who stood out apart from the rest, and who, from the first moment they had been introduced at the Dremshott Club, she had loved. She had danced with him that night … danced her way straight into his heart and he had found a secure and permanent place in her own.

After the night of the dance, life had changed completely for Roberta. Up till the time of meeting Allan she had suffered from loneliness, despite the fact that she lived and worked in a crowd. She had real friends like Debbie Stone, the other V.A.D. who shared the flat with her, and the other clerks, both men and girls in the office at the hospital who were daily companions. There were also one or two young men – officers stationed in Dremshott – ready and willing to take her out. She was beautiful and she was popular – she never lacked a dance partner – but in herself she was lonely. No one had meant anything, or made any lasting impression on Roberta till Allan came.

Once her intense nature was roused, and she had awakened to all the passionate emotions that had lain dormant in her until Allan first held her in his arms, Roberta knew that she could never be lonely again. Life became full and exciting. Every evening they managed to meet … to drive about in Allan’s little car until he had no more petrol coupons … then to explore on foot the lovely wooded country-side which surrounded Dremshott town. Sometimes they met in London for dinner and a show and came back to Dremshott on the last train. Roberta was deliriously happy for the first time in her young life, conscious of a new fulfilment, and the knowledge that Allan was the ideal man for whom she had been waiting … hoping and believing that he had found his ideal in her. He had made it plain since their first meeting that he desired her companionship – as ardently as she desired his. It was first love between them … shy and glorious, developing with every conversation they held, and every look or touch they exchanged, into a deeper and more subtle emotion.

Those days of getting to know each other seemed to Roberta almost as perfect as the ones that followed their official engagement. For then at first it was their secret alone. When they looked at each other, when they held hands, when they shared some thrill at a dance or a play or a film, they, and they alone, were conscious of it. Afterwards everyone knew about it. Then, what could be more exciting and stimulating than all the discoveries which they kept making about each other?

It seemed as though at one moment they were strangers, unaware of each other, and then suddenly they were close … happy only in each other’s company, restless and discontented when apart. Now they knew everything about each other. During their many meetings they talked and talked, enquiring into each other’s minds and lives, inexhaustibly curious and interested. And still there always seemed something fresh to tell.

Roberta felt that her previous existence had been so dull and monotonous that it might bore Allan if she talked about herself. But in his gentle, persuasive way he got her to tell him all the little details that could only be of interest to the man who loved and meant to marry her.

He knew now what she had been like as a child. She had even found an old photograph to show him and make him laugh – Roberta the schoolgirl, with a chestnut mop of hair and wide wondering blue eyes; Roberta wearing a school blouse and tie, absurdly demure and, in her estimation, ‘awful.’ But it had made him laugh and feel very tender towards her, and he had asked if he could keep the picture.

He learned that her father and mother had been married in the final year of the last world war, and that Roberta was born three years later. She had had a happy childhood, a great deal of which was spent in Norwich. Her father had a job there in the Civil Service soon after he was demobilized. She had always been rather lonely even as a child, because she had neither brother nor sister. But her parents were devoted to her and she to them – especially to her mother. One day Roberta showed Allan a photograph of that darling dead mother and Allan had thought her very beautiful.

“Like you, Roberta,” he had said.

And Roberta had replied: “I could never be half as sweet or good. And she died so young … poor darling.”

She had been taken ill with pleurisy and pneumonia and died just before Roberta’s eighteenth birthday, and after that things hadn’t! been so good. Her father seemed to go to pieces once he lost the best wife in the world. Roberta had had a difficult time with him. Too difficult, in Allan’s estimation, for one so young. They had never had much money, so she had started a secretarial training as soon as she left school. For her there were to be no coming-out parties, no trips abroad, none of the things which her mother had planned for her.

And then came the second blow for Roberta. Her father married again. Roberta poured out her heart to Allan on the subject of her father’s second marriage.

“I didn’t want anybody put in Mummy’s place. I couldn’t bear it,” she said, “but I know that’s a selfish outlook, and I would have got over it and been glad that Daddy wasn’t lonely any more, if only he had married someone worthy to step into Mummy’s shoes.”

Roberta told Allan about Madge … a girl only three years older than herself … just a little shop girl whom Mr. Farr used to buy his cigarettes from. She was not a snob, and she would not mind or criticize Madge’s lack of birth and breeding, had she been a nice character. But she was just hard-boiled with long blonde hair and too much mascara and no heart. She was just intrigued by the thought that she had the chance to marry a ‘gentleman,’ step into a ready-made home full of very nice things and – even though Stephen Farr was far from well off – have more money and a more luxurious background than she had ever had in her life before.

Allan heard all about that wedding day and sympathized. He could imagine what a bitter pill it had been for the sensitive Roberta to swallow. Madge, triumphant and tactless, anxious only to show what influence she had over her elderly husband; Mr. Farr, although still deeply fond of his daughter, weak and incapable; perhaps unwilling to see things from her point of view. It had become apparent to Roberta as soon as her father and Madge returned from their honeymoon that her home was no longer her home, and that she was merely painfully in the way.

Then, perhaps somewhat mercifully for Roberta, came the war of 1939. The second war in Mr. Farr’s lifetime. The transfer of his office and Government job from Norwich to Bournemouth where he and Madge had taken a furnished flat. Roberta had no choice but to go with them, but she had speedily put herself into a position where she could leave. She joined the Red Cross and as soon as her training was finished, she was sent to the Oxford Hospital. There she had been ever since.

After hearing her story Roberta seemed to Allan all the more sweet and desirable. Before he had found out anything about her he had looked upon this beautiful, vivid creature as a gorgeous girl inaccessible as the stars … being much above the average with her quick wit, her flexible young mind, a thirst for knowledge, and an adoration for music and good books which equalled his own. But now he knew that she was just an ordinary human and rather pathetic girl … a Roberta who had known grief and disappointment when she was still a child … a hardworking little V.A.D. without a proper background, without a real home to welcome her when she was on leave.

This was the Roberta he really loved and wanted … somebody to whom he could offer himself and his love … somebody to whom he could give all his sympathy and understanding and for whom he could make a home. He knew that he loved her infinitely.

For Roberta, Allan ceased also to be a stranger and a mystery. He told her everything about himself. He, too, had only one parent living. His father, a retired colonel in the Army, had died while Allan was still up at Oxford. Until then he had, like Roberta, known a normal and happy childhood, although he had never been long in one home, because with a father in the Army they had made constant moves. Indeed, during his first years at Winchester, while Colonel Rivers was stationed in Gibraltar, Allan had all the fun of travelling out to Gib. for the long holidays, which had given him plenty of variety and experience.

He had no wish to enter his father’s profession and at Oxford had read history. He had never, he told Roberta, been a sporting type; far keener on books and, particularly, the piano which he played. And he played well, Roberta knew that, because she had heard him.

On leaving Oxford, and with the small income which his father had left him, he had gone into his uncle’s business – Rivers Radio – not because he cared for any form of business, but because he knew he must make a career for himself. Books and music could only be of secondary importance in the life of a man who had to earn his own living.

He had started quite well. But soon after his twenty-third birthday came the war. Rather against his mother’s wishes he joined up at once, had had six months as a private, then entered an O.C.T.U., whence he had been posted into the Gunners.

Roberta wanted to know all about his mother. She could see that he was a devoted son and she liked that in a man. He spoke with great affection of Mrs. Rivers. She was a dear, he said – and spoiled him terribly. Of course she was no longer young – she had been over thirty when Allan was born and unfortunately she was subject to nerves … could not stand these raids. Since he had joined up she had closed down their London home and gone to live in a hotel in a safe area.

“I’m afraid poor old mother never settles anywhere now,” Allan told Roberta with a laugh. “She has moved several times. Either she finds the food wrong or the beds hard or some snag. But I don’t blame her. It’s a bit hard, this war – on women of over fifty or sixty.

Roberta made no comment on that. Heart and soul in love with this young man, she was only too anxious to admire his mother, but in actual fact she and Debbie Stone had only been saying the other day that they despised the hundreds of luxury-loving, overfed, indolent women with private means who did no war work, but drifted from one hotel to another, grumbling at war conditions. However, she told herself loyally this would not apply to Allan’s mother, probably she was delicate and physically unfit to face up to a war.

And so Allan and Roberta learned to know each other, and it was only a matter of two or three weeks of their intensive friendship before they were in each other’s arms, confessing their love and their need to be together always.

It all seemed too wonderful for words to Roberta. … Whenever she looked back upon it – the end to unhappiness and discontent and the beginning of a new and thrilling adventure to be shared with him. She had run through all the normal emotional preliminaries … afraid that he might never love her as she loved him … terrified of wearing her heart on her sleeve and not being proud or aloof enough … petrified because he was so very good-looking and charming, and some other girl, more attractive than herself, might ensnare him.

But now all the misgivings and heart-burnings were over. They met in London on the first day of Roberta’s Easter leave and he bought her the ring, which in her estimation cost far too much but which he had insisted upon her having. It was a square sapphire. He said that it was the colour of her eyes and that it looked perfect on her long slim finger. They had lunch together at the Berkeley, and then he travelled with her down to Bournemouth to meet her father.

She wanted him to meet poor old Daddy, although she did not relish his having to come in contact with Madge. But even that meeting went off quite well. Madge behaved at her best. She was always amiable when there was a good-looking man about and she was particularly pleased with the thought that her pretty stepdaughter, w. . .