Once is Enough

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Sylvia Penhurst is forced to bear the burden of her unhappy marriage, her ardent temperament subdued by her husband's cold unfeeling behaviour. Then suddenly to her yearning, caged heart comes love, love of the kind her husband cannot or will not give. The temptation to surrender to her passionate nature is too much but her happiness is short lived. For Sylvia has a small daughter and she realizes too late that in reaching out for a moment's happiness she has destroyed a child's world. A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1953, and available now for the first time in eBook.

Release date: August 14, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 208

Sample

It was the man who was scared.

The girls was eager and excited, and so much in love that she had lost her head. She never had had very much ‘head’ when it came to a matter of that. And the man who was just about to accept all that she offered served up on a platter was well aware of it. And still more aware, as he had been the whole evening, of her body. It was a particularly beautiful body and tonight he could see rather more of it than usual. The yellow satin evening dress fitted her like a glove, and her throat and shoulders were naked, cool as ivory. Stretched tightly under the satin her breasts looked small and pointed.

A South American band played hot insidious music, and the night was hot with a full white moon glittering in the muddy waters of the Nile. Middle East mud—typical, Carling thought—a glamorous façade with dirt and disease and corruption behind it.

Tonight it had all been rather exotic; too hot for Hugh Carling. Sylvia was crazy about dancing, and he did not want to disappoint her. After all he had taken her out to dine and dance, and tonight particularly he did want to please her. A quarter of the way through the evening his collar was a rag. He had other plans since he had learned her husband was away. Ronald Penruthen was an ex-Major—in R.E.M.E. during the last war. He had been a prisoner in Burma. He was now Middle East representative of the Anchor Oil Co. He was considered clever at his job. In Carling’s estimation, Penruthen left most of his intelligence behind him in his office. He brought none of it into his home. He was a complete fool with and about his wife. But then, it appeared that so many fellows Carling came across were fools about their wives.

And Penruthen gave Sylvia a foolish amount of rope.

Here she was just about to ‘hang herself’. Well, Hugh was all set to dangle with her. She offered a very pretty piece of rope. And little devil though she was, she had a freshness and charm which appealed to his jaded senses. At thirty-two she still had a perfect figure—on the petite side, which he favoured; slender but not too thin. Wonderful texture of skin, warmed yet not spoiled by the sun after two years out here. The Middle East, which affected some women badly, seemed to agree with Sylvia. She was healthy, played a lot of tennis, swam and rode and did not drink too much. She was amusing and laughed a lot, and Carling liked women who laughed. Nothing bored him more than the over-sentimental type. Sylvia was excellent company. She was not a classic beauty. Her nostrils were too broad and retroussé, but her eyes were lovely, almond-shaped and a brilliant blue, and she had rich red-brown hair which he found most attractive; short cut with a curly fringe. Her mouth was the most voluptuous he had ever seen. Big and wide, showing glistening white teeth when she smiled. It was that mouth and her smile which had first attracted him when they met in the house of Apadakis, a well-known Greek who lived out here, and whose English wife was a friend of Sylvia’s.

It had been almost too easy a conquest. Sylvia was so ripe for a love affair. Carling knew the ropes, and he was the perfect lover. Nothing escaped him. Within a few days he was conversant with the fact that Sylvia had a little girl of nearly nine at an English boarding-school; knew the name of Sylvia’s particular perfume, her favourite flowers, and the kind of books she liked to read. Presents of each arrived in turn to add the much-needed touch of glamour to her life. The Penruthens occupied a rather dreary flat in Zamalek. Carling knew that he had transformed it for Sylvia.

But so far she had been loth to be what she called ‘unfaithful’ to her husband.

Half-amused and half-irritated, Carling once quoted Marvell to her and talked about her ‘quaint honour’ which would soon be turned to dust.

“‘And into ashes all my lust’,” he had ended mournfully as she drew herself out of his embrace, obviously afraid and yet pitifully eager to do as he wished.

Now that the big moment had come and Sylvia had made up her mind to abandon all pretext at fidelity to her husband, it was her lover who worried about it.

It was not because Hugh had any qualms about leading little Sylvia off the path of her heavily defended virtue. It was merely—as usual with him—a horror of being found out and turned into a co-respondent. Not only did he shrink from the thought of matrimony but he could not afford to be a co-respondent. Damages and costs—much too high a price to pay even for lovely Sylvia. Besides, he was never permanently in love; only temporarily attracted.

But as they walked out of the Semiramis tonight arm-in-arm—it was Hugh’s idea that they should walk a way before hailing a taxi—several little warning voices whispered in Hugh Carling’s ear.

Was it quite safe for him to go back to her flat? Would that suffraggi chap, Mohammed, wake up and hear, and serve as a witness in the future? Would Penruthen come back unexpectedly and surprise them? It would be so confoundedly awkward and embarrassing to be caught, flagrante delicto, so to speak.

Hugh Carling had never yet been caught. He had no intention of playing that ignoble part. He gave a little thoughtful whistle.

“Quite sure this is O.K., Sylvia?”

“In what way ‘O.K.’?”

“No chance of Ron coming back?”

“Absolutely none.”

“How do you know?”

“But of course I know. He drove down to Ismailia with Bill Verry, his assistant, this afternoon. They’re to go on to Suez and will be away for two days.”

Hugh raised his brows.

“No chance of any of your Cairo friends calling on you?”

Sylvia Penruthen gave a laugh.

“Don’t be ridiculous. People don’t call on you after midnight.”

“And Mohammed?”

“His quarters are in quite another part of the flat. He won’t even hear us go in.”

Then she stopped walking and stood looking up at him. Her eyes were misty with feeling.

“Are you afraid?”

“Aren’t you?” he parried.

“You mean of Ron finding out?”

“Yes.”

It was her turn to sidestep.

“Would you mind all that much if he did? Don’t you love me? If such an awful thing happened, wouldn’t you want to stand by me? I thought you loved me.”

“So I do darling. Terrifically. Crazy about you. I think you are the sweetest thing I have ever known. But I’ve been quite honest with you about my way of life. Being a confirmed bachelor and all that! Haven’t I?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Besides, you don’t want a divorce any more than I do. You wouldn’t want to lose your child.”

Now the brightness left Sylvia’s eyes. Her head sank. She winced as though he had struck her a physical blow. She lost some of the dizzy happiness which had been hers a few moments ago. She said, sadly:

“No, I couldn’t lose Lexie. I couldn’t bear to. And I would not really want to hurt poor old Ron. Oh, why are we discussing that? You have said all the way along that I was not to be serious, and that we were just to be happy together while we could.”

Carling cheered up.

“Well spoken. That’s exactly how I want things, darling—don’t you?”

She bit her lip.

“I suppose so.”

“It isn’t wrong to love each other,” said the man. waters than one can swim. We have fallen in love with each other and you’ve had a rotten time and I’m going to make up to you for it. But there is no need for either of us to ruin our lives, is there?”

Now she spoke in a whisper.

“No, I mustn’t let it ruin mine. For Lexie’s sake I mustn’t. But I do love you so very much. As I have told you all the way along, I have had heaps of stupid little surface affairs but never anything big and real like this. You are everything I have ever dreamed about in a man.”

He squeezed her arm again and they walked on. She certainly made him feel good, he thought. Dear little Sylvia. He felt quite chivalrous.

“You darling!” he murmured, “I want you to be happy. You deserve a break.”

“I don’t want you to come back to the flat, if you don’t want to,” she said in a very low voice.

“Don’t say things like that, Sylvia. You know how much I want to.”

“It was you who suggested it,” she reminded him.

“Yes, and I don’t know why I have let myself get a ‘thing’ about it. Silly of me. We’ll get a taxi and go home and stop all this talking. It spoils things. All I want to do is to hold you in my arms.”

She gave a sharp sigh. Nuzzled her head against his shoulder.

“I am a little scared, I suppose, but since I made up my mind to do this I haven’t really thought of backing out. It means too much to me. I have never known what it is to love a man as much as I love you. I was so young when I married Ron. It was all like an experiment. Just hopeless. Ron doesn’t attract me that way. Oh, I know you have got to leave me. I have accepted that. Besides, I can’t quit Ron and Lexie. But I want tonight to be ours. I want it so terribly that I am willing to do what I know is wrong.”

“It isn’t wrong to love each other,” said the man.

He spoke lightly. She answered with seriousness.

“I try to believe that. Because we do really love each other, don’t we?”

Her sincerity made him feel awkward. He avoided any kind of reply, by hailing a cruising taxi. Sylvia climbed into it, holding up her satin skirt and showing the slim ankles and pretty feet which attracted him.

Once in the taxi (the Egyptian drove quickly—blowing on the horn in the manner of Cairo taxi-drivers), Hugh put an arm round Sylvia. The shabby fur cape—which he disliked—slipped off, and once again he saw the beauty of the slender neck and a tantalizing curve of breast. Moved to real passion, he kissed her upturned mouth, closing his eyes as he did so. She shuddered and surrendered herself to that long sensual kiss. It continued while they wheeled in and out of the traffic.

Her arms strained him against her.

“Oh, Hugh, Hugh!” she whispered.

By the time they reached the block of flats in which the Penruthens had a furnished flat, Sylvia and Hugh were being carried on the fast-flowing tide of an ungovernable passion, and beyond saving. But in the hallowed precincts of her own home, her conscience awoke. This was the home which her husband provided for her; full of their combined belongings. There on the mantelpiece stood the large photo of Lexie on her pony, taken beside the Sphinx on Christmas Day—a good snap enlarged by her father. She began to feel ashamed of what she was about to do.

Slowly she took off her cape, and stared, hollow-eyed, at Hugh. He did not return the look. He was eyeing the whisky bottle which stood with a syphon and two glasses on a tray on top of the bookcase. Suddenly, Sylvia gave a smothered cry and turned and ran out of the room.

She closed the bedroom door behind her, her heart beating fast. Why had everything fallen flat? Why did she feel this miserable sense of sin and danger? There was nothing to be afraid about. Mohammed was soundly sleeping in his quarters and she was otherwise alone in the flat with Hugh.

Windows and shutters were wide open. Sylvia drew in a deep breath and shut her eyes. She felt intolerably hot. She never should have put on the yellow satin dress; it wasn’t suitable for the hot season. But it suited her so well—sheer vanity had made her wear it for this evening out with Hugh.

Her eyes darkened now as though with anger. Suddenly she hated herself. She hated Ronald, too. She blamed him for her present predicament and her unhappiness. She began to tear off the satin dress, bathed in perspiration.

Why had she ever married Ron?

It had been her mother’s fault, of course. Everything was all right while her father was alive. She had adored him. Not a very clever man but a sweet one. A Civil Servant who had gradually climbed to the head of his department in the Food Office.

When Sylvia was a little girl they had all lived in a house in Birmingham. A dark, depressing city. But she had been all right then. Her mother had been better-tempered—or at least had seemed so. Sylvia and her sister had had a reasonable happy childhood. Little Sylvia was the apple of her father’s eye. And there had always been Joan, her sister, two years older than herself, to keep her company. Never pretty, but good-humoured and placid, Joan used to take Sylvia’s part when there was a row at home.

Then the father’s job was changed and he was sent to work in London. That was a few years before the war. Sylvia and Joan had both left school. Joan took a job in her father’s office. They all lived in a flat near Victoria. Not a very smart flat or locality, but they were lucky to get there, because it had all the modern amenities and was big enough so long as Joan and Sylvia shared a bedroom.

While Sylvia’s father, Robert Thomson, was alive, life had been quite normal in the household, and Sylvia had her share of fun. The girls were allowed to entertain their boy friends in the bosom of the family and to go out, within reason, Sylvia, who was exceedingly pretty, had a good many admirers by the time she was eighteen. She was crazy about clothes, and her father had offered to pay for her to take a special course in dressmaking and millinery.

And then a great deal happened to change the course of life and make things very much less pleasant for Sylvia.

First of all Joan got married. Dear old Joan who had a snub nose and straight hair that had to be permed, and a lumpy figure—certainly none of Sylvia’s fascination—was actually the first to get herself a husband. A very nice boy named Leslie Finch fell in love with her, fully appreciative of her sterling character. He was a rising architect and looked like being a successful one.

For Sylvia, although she now had the old bedroom to herself, it was a sad change. She missed her sister, and her mother seemed to grow more difficult and exacting. Mrs. Thomson always had poor health which affected her whole nature. And, as Sylvia bitterly complained at the time, no man would ever want to come to her home. Mrs. Thomson ‘put them off’ by being so unsociable—even rude at times to her daughter’s boy friends.

It was, as they found out afterwards, the beginning of a long, painful illness which eventually stilled Mrs. Thomson’s sharp tongue for ever. But she antagonized everybody before she died.

Unfortunately for Sylvia, it was her father who died first—he had a stroke and never recovered from it. Sylvia mourned him deeply. Once he was buried and gone, life alone in the flat with her mother became unbearable.

Yes, that was why she had married Ronald Penruthen. To get away from the sickening depression of her home and the knowledge that she might have to take an uncongenial office job which would chain her down and allow her no life, no fun at all. Her mother was having to live on a small pension and could not carry out Mr. Thomson’s promise to let Sylvia train for haute couture.

The war came and saved Sylvia. During the Christmas of 1939, she met Ronnie at one of Joan and Leslie’s cocktail parties. Ronald, in a blaze of patriotism, had immediately joined up and eventually got a commission in R.E.M.E. He was about to be promoted to Captain when he came across Sylvia.

Tonight with some irony she recollected that her first impression of him had been that he was ‘a bore’. That was what she had told her sister, Joan. Nice-looking, yes; although a bit on the thin side for so tall a man and with a long cadaverous face. But he had large blue eyes with long lashes and, at that time, plenty of fair, curly hair. The Ronald of today was baldish, and, in losing his hair, had lost one of his chief charms. He also wore horn-rimmed spectacles now because his sight had deteriorated while he was in a prison camp. But the young captain whom Sylvia had singled out for a flirtation at that party had been physically attracted to Sylvia. He had also seemed sympathetic and she had obviously ‘knocked him for six’, which was his own way of putting it. He never left her side while that party lasted, and took her out for a tête-à-tête meal afterwards.

One amongst a thousand other ‘war brides’, Sylvia rushed into marriage, and became Mrs. Ronald Penruthen.

With mixed feelings, she looked back on it all. How excited and full of hope she had been—how eager for her marriage. What a disappointment the honeymoon had proved, and what a clumsy lover Ron had proved to be, poor old thing. Clumsy. That was the word that described him best in everything he did. He had done his best and she had tried to respond, supposing that she asked far too much, that it was her fault rather than his. But they had never really made a go of it. In his arms, she had felt the hot tide of her enthusiasm cool and recede—a little more so each time, until gradually she went dead cold about the sex side of her marriage. At the end of the first year she knew that she could not love Ronald as she had meant to love her husband. She felt affection and tolerance because he was kind and so obviously wished to please her. And life with him was better than it used to be with her mother where she was nagged at from morning to night.

The exigencies of the war continually separated Sylvia and Ronald. Ronald went on one or two courses where she could not follow him. They met again for hectic ‘leaves’ in which Ronald seemed to liven up and she felt a semblance of her old passion for him. But such moments were few and far between, and finally the flame flickered out altogether.

It was the advent of Lexie that saved the situation—otherwise Sylvia might well have walked out of her marriage in those early days. But Lexie—christened Alexandra after Ron’s grandmother—made all the difference to Sylvia. She was naturally fond of children and good with them. Once her baby was born, she stopped worrying and fretting about her marriage and devoted herself entirely to her child. Over this, Ronald was able for once to share her enthusiasm. He doted on the little girl.

Some of the happiest days that Sylvia could remember were those which the three of them spent together.

When Ronald was reported ‘missing’ Sylvia suffered genuine grief. She forgot how miserable she had been with him and remembered only his good points. She thought that he was dead. Poor old Ron; not lucky enough to have got through like the rest of them, in Burma. She took the baby and went down to stay with her mother-in-law. For a few weeks the two women who were fundamentally opposed became knit by a common bond of sorrow and sympathy.

Then came a card from a prison camp. They were overjoyed to learn that Ron was alive and unhurt—merely condemned to the boredom and privations of his imprisonment.

After that, the relationship between the elder Mrs. Penruthen and the younger rapidly deteriorated. Mrs. Penruthen wanted Sylvia to live with her at Wood Hill House—Ron’s old home—until he came back. But the ennui of that for Sylvia was too great to be endured. She insisted upon going up to town. She found a nice young girl to look after Lexie under the grandmother’s vigilant eye, and stayed there herself only at week-ends.

Joan and Leslie put her up in their flat during the week. Leslie, who had been at an R.A.F. station in Cornwall, was posted to Stanmore and so Joan was able to live in her own home again. The two sisters both found a job in a big club which had opened up in the West End for convalescent officers.

Until Ronald’s release at the close of the war, Sylvia found herself having to play the difficult role of any attractive sensual young woman who meets with continual temptation and wishes to resist it. She was naturally decent and moral. She did not want to be unfaithful to her husband. But as the long months went by, she found it more and more difficult to keep in touch—really in touch—with Ronald. He wrote dull, unimaginative letters. He rarely complained and she had to admit that he was plucky and patient. But, as she put it to herself during this trying period, he ‘gave her nothing to fasten her teeth upon’. Nothing that could absorb some of the warm, bubbling emotionalism deep down inside her which so sorely needed an outlet. And his letters began to develop a deeper religious strain. He seemed to have ‘turned to religion’, which was faintly embarrassing to Sylvia. After a bit, every note she received resembled a tract. He began to sermonize. She felt nervous about his mental state and began to dread his return; to wonder how they would ever readjust themselves to the old life of matrimonial intimacy.

One or two minor love affairs came her way. Bound to happen, as she met every type of officer in her work. But it was always the same with all of them—she allowed the affairs to go so far and no farther. Then an awful sense of deflation—anti-climax—when it all ended.

Back she would go to Wood Hill House and her small daughter. Once again Lexie would become the core of her existence. The only thing she had to love and who really loved her. Lexie was fast growing into a sweet, affectionate little girl.

Then Ronald came back.

They had gone away for a week to a ‘country pub’, where the food was good and they could both relax. But after the first forty-eight hours, Sylvia had known that it wasn’t going to be any good with Ron. It never had been and it never would be. He could not begin to conjure forth the emotional response which she longed to make to his feeble overtures of love. She tried to make excuses for him because imprisonment and semi-starvation had made a physical wreck of him. But patience and tenderness gradually gave way in her to acute irritation and resentment. Especially when he began to ‘plug’ religion into her; to drag her to church—not only on Sundays—but during the week. She counted herself an average good Christian. But Ron these days had become a fanatic; worse than his fanatical mother.

Sylvia, not yet thirty, was asked to settle down to married life with a husband who was utterly unsatisfactory both as a companion and as a lover. Night after night while Ronald slept, she lay awake wondering bitterly how many years of that sort of thing she was going to stand. How long it would be before the vital sap within her dried up and she could become as indifferent to normal passion and romance as Ronald himself.

She turned more and more to her child. But a child cannot take the place of a lover in a normal woman’s life. And being with Ronald had become like living with a brother who only occasionally remembered that he was a husband, and then seemed ashamed of his natural appetites.

This, then, was Sylvia’s present background. This was the vulnerable, restless and dissatisfied creature doomed to meet an attractive and experienced man like Hugh Carling.

She had realized, the very first time he took her in his arms, that she was lost; and that she was fast losing her old deep reluctance to remain virtuous.

When Ronald went away this morning she had fully made up her mind to give herself to Hugh Carling. She must know once if never again the excitement of loving and being loved, which she had never experienced with the man she had married.

Sylvia heard a tap on the door. She swung round on the stool, her heart beating violently.

Hugh walked in—a half-filled glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He gave her a questioning smile.

“Anything wrong, sweet? You’ve been so long.”

She shook her head. She did not know what to say but two absurd tears gathered in her eyes and began to trickle down her cheeks. He saw them and his heart sank. He did not like tears. Speedily he put down both glass and cigarette and hurried towards her.

“Sylvia—precious—what’s the matter? Why are you upset?”

She gave something like a moan and collapsed in his arms, weeping, as he had feared she was going to do.

“Oh, Hugh, Hugh!”

He began to caress her. He was conscious now of the fact that she had removed her dress. She was really very lovely and alluring in those gossamer cami-knickers. He held her very tightly, kissing the cool, smooth shoulders and the nape of her neck.

“Don’t cry, darling. There’s nothing to be afraid of; you’ve said so yourself. Look here, do you want me to go away? Shall we call it off, is that the answer? Because if you’ve changed your mind, you have only to say so.”

He was being patient and gentle. Her heart went out to him as it would not have done had he been rapacious or hasty in that moment. He was warm and strong and his kisses suddenly became more exciting. His hand cupped her warm breast—slid down her smooth back. She was blindly in love with him. During the whole evening, she had felt a feverish desire. And now suddenly her tears dried up and her doubts vanished. She must stop brooding about Ron and Lexie. She had been good far too long and missed everything life had offered. She reached up both bare arms and wound them around Hugh’s neck. Her eyes shut as his lips closed over her mouth.

“Love me, love me!” she said in a mad whisper.

Still holding her with one arm, he reached out a hand and switched out the lamp which was alight on the dressing-table.

And now for Sylvia there was no turning back.

Later, Sylvia woke up from a disturbed and feverish sleep, to realize that she was lying beside Hugh Carling. One of his arms pinioned her breast. She awoke completely and began to breathe fast with a certain amount of agitation and excitement. So this was what had happened! She had actually burnt her boats. She was sleeping here, not with Ronnie, her husband, but with Hugh, her lover. It seemed incredible—mad fantasy rather than fact. She stared at Hugh. The strong Egyptian moonlight made the contours of his face look extremely harsh. It was strange because Ronnie always looked younger when he was asleep, and rather pathetic. But Hugh slept with his mouth slightly open and teeth set and bared—giving him a curiously forbidding expression. One clenched fist lay under his chin. He was unattractive—aggressive in sleep. He almost frightened her. But as a lover he had been clever—wonderful. She felt replete and fulfilled and utterly satisfied with him. She felt, also, a certain pride in herself because she had been so daring. One was not always a coward to do a thing like this. It took courage to do wrong, she had told herself.

She loved this man with a terribl. . .