There Is But One

by Patricia Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Gina and Charles Martin are young and passionately in love. Their marriage is perfect until Gina learns that she cannot have children. Her husband's failure to understand the effect this has on her causes her need for a baby to grow into an obsession. Gradually the young couple's relationship deteriorates until they are little more than strangers and their intense love little more than a memory. Gina hopes first to adopt a baby, then to foster a child, before in desperation seeking a solution outside the law... A compelling classic romance from the inimitable Patricia Robins, first published in 1965 and now available for the first time in eBook.

Release date: April 9, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

IT WAS raining hard. Mrs. Oliver was in the kitchen making the Christmas puddings. The three children were playing in the front room—or they had been playing. Now, as usual, the two daughters were quarrelling.

‘Gina, getting over-excited again!’ thought her mother disapprovingly. Gina was red haired and had a temper to match. Myra, three years her senior, was placid but a bit inclined of late to be bossy.

‘I’m not going to be the child—I want to be the mother!’

Gina’s six-year-old voice was piercingly sharp.

‘Well, you just can’t. You’re the smallest, isn’t she, Mark?’ Myra’s tones were deeper and maddeningly superior.

But even as she spoke, Myra knew she had made a mistake appealing to the boy. At nine, Mark always tried his hardest to avoid being dragged into the sisters’ quarrels, but when put on a spot, he invariably sided with Gina. Myra didn’t understand why and when she stopped to think about it, thought it grossly unfair. However, her mother nearly always sided with her so it was about even in the long run.

‘Well, it is her turn to be Mother!’

Mark’s voice was hesitant but sufficient for Gina, who flung her arms round him and grinned at him happily, then stuck out her tongue to her older sister.

‘There! It’s my turn. If you don’t want to be the child, you can be the nurse. Lots of rich children have nurses. We’ll use one of my dolls for a baby.’

Myra scowled and put her head on one side considering. She might appeal to Mother—but Mother when she was busy cooking, often refused to sort out squabbles. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to be a silly old nurse.

‘I’m not going to play!’ she announced, tossing her dark hair back from her round, rosy face. ‘I think it’s a silly game, anyway. It’s—it’s babyish!’

Gina’s face was a mask of fury. She stamped her foot and glared at Myra, wishing she dared hit her.

‘It’s not silly and it’s not babyish. How, stupid, can it be a baby game when it’s playing at grown-ups? It isn’t silly, is it, Mark?’

Mark shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. He adored Gina with a nine-year-old’s first uncritical love. But he wished she wouldn’t get so worked up about things. Myra was bossy. He wouldn’t have come over to their house to play nearly so often if there’d only been Myra—but there was never any peace with Gina—or certainly not for long and sometimes he felt instinctively a very masculine desire for what his father called ‘a bit of peace and quiet’.

‘Mark ’n me’ll jolly well play without you!’ Gina was shouting. ‘We don’t need you in the game anyway.’

She turned to Mark and the angry expression left her face; she looked sparkling and excited. He was ready to fall in now with whatever she suggested.

‘You’re the father!’ she told him. ‘And you’re coming home from the office and you’re very surprised when you open the front door and see me standing there with a baby in my arms. And you say: “Goodness me, is that our new baby!” and I say, “Yes” and you ask if it’s a boy or a girl…’

Myra, who had pulled out a painting book and was pretending to be busy painting, said scornfully:

‘Don’t be silly, Gina. If you have a baby, you have to go to hospital!’

‘You don’t!’ Gina retorted automatically. But she wasn’t sure and her tone of voice gave her sister a momentary advantage.

‘Yes, you do. I saw a film about it and you didn’t—you weren’t allowed to go. It was the little film which came after “Snow White” and the mother went to a hospital to have her baby, so there.’

Gina bit her lip angrily. She wanted the make-believe game to be real—it was her favourite game and she played it with endless permutations, alone, if Myra or Mark or one of her little friends were not there to play with her. She was doll-mad, her mother said, but then her mother didn’t know that it wasn’t really dolls she liked—it was just the nearest she could get until she was grown-up to having a real live baby. She was very maternal.

Suddenly she remembered their neighbour; not Mark’s mother who lived on their right, but Mrs. Green, on their left.

‘What about her!’ she shouted triumphantly. ‘She had a baby at home. Mother took us in to see it. You didn’t go because you were in quarantine for measles. So there!’

She turned back to Mark and told him:

‘Go on, Mark. Mind you look very surprised because I’ve been keeping it a secret ’cos it’s your birthday…’

‘Stupid!’ Myra’s voice interrupted Gina again. ‘You can’t keep babies a surprise.’

‘Why not?’ Curiosity had overcome irritation.

‘I’m not going to tell you!’ Myra said, making the most of her superior knowledge. ‘You’ll have to ask Mother.’

Gina swung round to Mark.

‘You tell me!’ she commanded. ‘Go on, Mark, tell me!’

But the fact was, Mark did not know. Neither his mother nor Gina’s were sufficiently modern enough in outlook to approve of young children being given the facts of life too young. Myra had not, in fact, been told anything by her mother but by a school friend who happened to be Mrs. Green’s older daughter.

‘Mum’s huge!’ Sylvia had confided. ‘And she’ll go on getting huger until the baby’s born.’

Not even Myra had realized why. Privately she had made up her mind not to be greedy like Mrs. Green and other mothers when she had a baby. She certainly had no intention of getting so fat.

‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me?’ Gina was insisting.

‘I—I don’t know!’ Mark protested feebly. ‘Can’t we play something else, Gina?’

Instinct warned her not to push Mark too far. Experience had already taught her that if Mark began to get bored with Mothers and Fathers, there was a next-best game he’d always play.

‘All right!’ she agreed. ‘We’ll play Brides and Grooms!’

Mark enjoyed this game. Gina would put a white curtain net over her red gold curls and on top, a silver paper crown. Then she would hold his hand and Myra would thump out on the piano what they all supposed was the wedding march before putting on a white overall back to front and one of her father’s collars round her neck and read the marriage service out of the prayer book.

One day, Mark knew, he would be grown up and Gina would really marry him. Then he would take her away to live in a castle and they would keep hundreds of pet animals and, if Gina still wanted them so much, hundreds of babies. They would all have red hair and grey eyes like Gina—but without her quick temper.

For a little while the new game kept the three of them quiet. Then Gina broke into the middle of the marriage service, much to Myra’s annoyance, to say:

‘I ought to have a bridesmaid. I’ll get Lucy—she’s my prettiest doll. We can prop her up against the chair and put the end of my veil in her hands so it looks as if she’s holding it…’

But Myra refused to go on with the game if there was to be an interruption and while he was waiting for the two of them to fight it out, Mark heard his mother calling him back to tea.

The girls broke off the quarrel to watch him put on his mac and gumboots and disappear into the rain. Gina, more than Myra, felt suddenly deeply depressed. There would be no more Brides and Grooms and no more Mothers and Fathers today—not without Mark. You had to have a real boy to be Father—girls never looked real. To hide her depression, she said to Myra:

‘Mark likes me better than he likes you!’

‘I don’t care!’

‘He’s going to marry me when I’m big enough.’

Myra shrugged. She wasn’t very interested in Mark. She preferred the company of her two school friends, Jane and Esther. Most of all, she preferred to be with her mother in the kitchen, helping to cook. She loved cooking and knew that her mother approved of her being what she called ‘so domesticated’. Mother didn’t approve nearly so much of Gina’s passion in life—dolls. It was all right when Gina was just playing with dolls but somehow, her young daughter didn’t seem able to keep imagination and reality apart. She would lose herself in some imaginary situation and, as she did with everything else, carry it to extremes.

Last week there’d been the doll Lucy episode. Gina had pretended she was ill. That was all right until teatime, when Gina had flatly refused to move from the doll’s cot.

‘I mustn’t leave her. I’m her mother!’

‘Come along this minute, Gina!’ Her mother had been cross.

‘But I can’t. She might die while I’m having tea. She’s very, very ill. The doctor said she mustn’t be left for a moment. Her temperature is two hundred and eight.’

‘Gina!’

‘But, Mother, Lucy’s ill…’

Ill or not, Gina had been sent up to her bedroom where she had sobbed her heart out. Myra, a little uneasily, heard her screams and wasn’t sure with whom her sympathy lay. Of course, Gina ought to be obedient to Mother and yet—well, you could tell from Gina’s crying that she really believed Lucy was going to die!

Myra was very practical. She accepted that Gina was different from herself and in a way, was fond of her younger sister. She would have been a deal fonder if Gina had been a little less strong-willed and easier to boss. Myra liked telling people what to do. But she genuinely admired Gina who was inventive and amusing and she wasn’t in the least jealous of her young sister’s vivacious charm and good looks which invariably brought forth compliments from neighbours and relatives who didn’t know what a passionate, one-track-minded child she could be.

The friendship between the sisters and the boy next door continued into their teens. Both families took it for granted that one day Gina and Mark would marry. It was only Myra who doubted it. Herself engaged at nineteen to a stock-broker, she said to her sister:

‘I suppose any day now Mark will propose to you, Gina. You aren’t going to say “yes”, are you?’

Gina looked up at her elder sister with mischievous grey eyes.

‘I might! Why, what have you got against Mark?’

Myra shrugged her shoulders.

‘I’ve nothing at all against Mark—except that he is far too weak with you. You need someone to manage you, Gina—someone to sweep you off your feet. I think you take advantage of Mark’s adoration but that you don’t return it.’

Gina’s face turned a shade pinker. For once, her sister Myra was very near the truth. She loved Mark but she wasn’t ‘in love’ with him—not in the way heroines were ‘in love’ in the novels she now read avidly. There was no excitement in going out with Mark—just a quiet pleasant understanding and, as Myra had so shrewdly guessed, a sop to her vanity because Mark did so adore her.

Sometimes, at night, she would dream of a handsome unknown stranger who would hold out his arms and she, with absolute certainty, would float, wraith-like, into his embrace. It was never that way with Mark. He would kiss her good night after a dance or if they had been to the cinema, holding her close but carefully, as if she might break. She liked his kisses which were gentle and controlled, but they never stirred her as she was stirred in her dreams by the unknown stranger.

Because she was a romantic, she was disappointed in Myra’s choice of a husband. Malcolm was nice enough but without a shred of glamour. Gina could not see what her sister found so marvellous about him. But then, she and Myra had seldom agreed about anything except that they both wanted to get married and have large families. Myra saw herself as a housewife, efficient manager and utterly content in her domestic setting. Gina saw herself as a combination of lover to her husband and mother to her large family of babies. She was a strange mixture of the romantic and the maternal.

Myra, having obtained a domestic science degree at school, was now teaching domestic science. Gina worked in a nearby large suburban store as a salesgirl. She quite enjoyed the company of the other girls and the contact with the public with whom she got on well. One day, she was sure, the stranger of her dreams would come into the shop and that is how they would meet. She spent a lot of time day-dreaming, imagining why a young attractive bachelor might come into the soft-furnishing department where she worked.

But strangely enough, it was through the plump, placid Malcolm that she and Charles first met. Charles Martin was one of the ushers at Malcolm’s wedding.

Gina had recognized him at once as the man in her dreams. He, too, seemed to recognize her for he came over to her as soon as he could at the reception and asked if they had not met somewhere before. From then on, she had forgotten poor Mark, waiting patiently in the background for her to finish her conversation with Charles and go and talk to him. It was with Charles she had finished up the evening—not Mark. Mark kept in the background and never tried to interfere in the friendship that developed and progressed so swiftly as the evening wore on.

For Gina, the party that followed Myra’s wedding was like one of her dreams come true. As the only bridesmaid she should, of course, have had the first dance with the best man, but Charles had swept her on to the floor before the best man had finished eating. He had monopolized her with a strong determination that had excited Gina. By the end of the evening, she knew that for the first time in her life, she was really in love.

Mark must have known it, too, for he kept away from the house the following weeks. But Gina was too happy, too much in love, even to notice his absence. It wasn’t until three weeks later when Charles asked her to marry him that she remembered poor Mark and went first to tell him the news.

‘I’m so sorry, Mark. I—know when we were children we sort of promised each other that one day we… well, that it was understood that you and I…’

‘Forget it, Gina. I think I always knew that you would never marry me. I quite understand. I can understand why you’re in love with Charles—he’s a nice fellow. You don’t have to explain anything to me.’

‘But we’ll stay friends, won’t we, Mark?’

‘Of course, if that’s what you want. When are you getting married,. . .