The Love of a Lifetime Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Fitzgerald

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About The Love of a Lifetime (previously published as Richard Wilde)

  Richard Wilde is 90 when he is told he has only months to live. Tormented by the past, he feels compelled to write his life story before he dies.

  It’s a story of love, pain and the terrible burden of secrets that he has carried for more years than he can remember. From his life on a peaceful Shropshire farm, to his years as a soldier and his desperate, secret love for his brother’s wife, a woman who loved him and left him, but never let him go.

  Interwoven throughout is the story of the young woman who cares for him as he dies, whose life is forever changed by knowing him.

  About the Author

  Mary Fitzgerald was born and brought up in Chester. At eighteen she left home to start nursing training. She ended up as an operating theatre sister in a large London hospital and there met her husband. Ten years and four children later the family settled for a while in Canada and later the USA. For several years they lived in West Wales, northern Scotland and finally southern Ireland until they settled again near Chester. Mary had long given up nursing and gone into business, first a children’s clothes shop, then a book shop and finally an internet clothes enterprise.

  Mary now lives in a small village in north Shropshire close to the Montgomery canal and with a view of both the Welsh and the Shropshire hills.

  Also available by Mary Fitzgerald

  When I was Young (previously titled The Imperfect Tense)

  Mist

  Knight on the Potomac

  Traitor’s Gate

  The Fishing Pool

  The Love of a Lifetime

  Mary Fitzgerald

  Chapter 1

  I’ve just come from the doctor’s surgery where my death sentence has been read out. The intervening time between judgement and last breath might be longer than the judicial three weeks that a murderer used to get, but I know that there is no chance of an appeal.

  “You’ve had a good innings, Mr Wilde,” said the doctor, folding up the letter from the hospital and putting it away in its small, brown envelope.

  “I know,” I growled. Of course I know. I’m old and sick. And I’d been the one insistent that he tell me the truth. But I didn’t want to hear it. Who would?

  “We can arrange help for you. At home or perhaps…” Here he paused. “You might consider residential care?”

  I didn’t waste any time on that. “No.” I got up from the uncomfortable plastic chair and headed for the door. “Good afternoon, Doctor.”

  Sitting in the back of the taxi on the way home while the winter rain rattled against the windscreen, I thought about the short time that I have left. How to use it, how to fill the two or three months before I become hopelessly dependent and have to be hospitalised.

  My first thought was to get away. I could return to India. Live out my last days in a country I have loved almost better than my own.

  To die in India wouldn’t be so bad. It would be a quiet death. Without fuss. And after, my body could lay on a wooden bier, garlanded in pale blue smoke as a simple fire crackled beneath. Perhaps my soul would fly away across some holy river to a new life. No bother or commotion, I would be merely another old man who has lived beyond his allotted time.

  It’s tempting.

  But I know it cannot be. I have one last duty to perform, a duty that through reticence and cowardice I have baulked from fulfilling. I have to explain what happened. Tell all the dreadful secrets that have festered in my heart and in my head for so many years. They’ve lessened me, I know that, when I could have been so different.

  But, fair play, those secrets were not mine to tell. I kept them for the family. For our respectability, even when the best of us and the worst, had gone. And soon, I’ll be gone too and the Wildes of Manor Farm will become a fading memory and I can’t allow that. Not without telling how things were and how they should never have been.

  I have more paper than this piece of blue writing pad. On the table in front of me is a pile of unused desk diaries, gifts from a feed company I ceased to patronise years ago. They’ll do; a wealth of unused pages ready for me to fill. What does it matter if I scribble over the dates? I can fill them with my memories.

  Outside, the rain has changed to snow, muffling all sound and I am alone in my kitchen in the early twilight. My kitchen; this dear room where once, long ago, I fell in love with a girl in a ragged blue dress.

  I was born in the snowy week before Christmas in the year of 1905, the youngest child of three. Marian, who was then eleven, always said that particular Christmas was the most memorable of her life. She never went so far as to say that her witness of my birth put her off child-bearing, but maybe so. Albert Baker hinted more than once, always jokingly, that she’d been turned against men by her brothers and one in particular. I assumed that he meant me.

  I sometimes wondered about the gap between Marian and us boys but I found out later that there had been three other babies who’d died. At first I only knew about the twins but then, from family gossip, I heard about another one. It seems that a baby boy, who’d been baptised Philip, had been born the year before my sister, but lived for only a week. Granny whispered that he’d been sickly from the second he drew his first shallow breath and that it was a blessing that he’d been taken. Mother never said anything about him but she did talk about the twins, Maude and Leticia, who had lived into their third year. Diphtheria took them quite suddenly, one after the other on a February weekend when the doctor was busy with the dying babies in the slums by the abattoir. Their little clothes had been burnt and their rag dollies too, in case of germs, so there was nothing left to say that they’d been alive, except for the photograph of two solemn looking little girls which Mother kept in a silver frame adorned with a black velvet bow, on her dressing table.

  My father was a farmer. The best in the district we always believed, and probably rightly so, for our milk and our cattle were the most sought after at the local market. Mother and Father worked hard, he in the fields and she in the dairy. Manor Farm butter and cheeses had a good reputation and Mother was always determined to keep it.

  In the early days, they had little help, only Herbert Lowe, an old soldier who had been on the farm before Father had taken the tenancy and Eddie Hyde who was about fifteen years old when I was born. He lived with us because his mother was in the asylum and hadn’t been able to care for him since he’d been a baby. To Mother’s surprise, Father had taken him on straight from the orphanage, on his thirteenth birthday. Who his father was, no bugger knew, certainly not Eddie, because even if his mother had ever known, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him.

  “He’s strong and will work hard,” Father had said and Mother had agreed altho
ugh I don’t think she liked Eddie much. Whenever people asked about him she would merely shake her head and talk about his poor mother.

  “Some men can be that wicked,” she would say, “taking advantage of a simple soul like Agnes Hyde.”

  On the day I was born, Father had bought a new horse. It was a gelding, a big raw-boned creature, ugly as sin, but a gentleman in his way. Father had bought him cheap from the Major, our local aristocrat, after the latter had been yet again embarrassed at cards and short of the readies. My father had no time for the Major. In Father’s opinion and in that of most of the village, the man was a wastrel and a disgrace to the family name.

  But the horse, Peter, was a good ’un. In later years, as a teenager, I rode him often and didn’t have a moment’s trouble and I was never the brave one with horses. Not like our Billy. He would get up on anything.

  “See the horsey!” two year old Billy had roared when Father brought the gelding into the yard and Mother, heavily pregnant with me, had carried my brother out to see the newest purchase.

  “Stroke nose!” was the next demand but, reaching forward, Mother slipped on the icy cobbles and fell.

  What a to do. Mother had broken her leg and gone into labour and, according to Marian, Billy was screaming the place down because he’d bumped his head.

  Father sent to the village for Dr Guthrie and Granny, but the snow had turned heavy and was sweeping through the valley and it took the doctor more than two hours to reach our farm. By that time, I’d arrived, assisted into the world by Father and Marian, so apart from putting a splint on Mother’s leg, old Guthrie didn’t have much to do and cleared off home as soon as he was able. Granny sent word saying that she’d leave it till the morning when it would be daylight and perhaps a thaw would have set in.

  The thaw didn’t set in for another five days and it took that long for Granny to move her bones half a mile up the road to visit her new grandson. That, of course, was Christmas Day and she wasn’t going to miss her gift. I don’t think much love was lost between Mother and Granny, who was Father’s mother.

  “I had to drag you out of Mother when you were born,” said Marian, her mouth curling in disgust, “and you were all covered in blood and slime. It was horrible.”

  “Tell us, tell us more,” Billy and I would plead, inquisitive and repulsed at the same time like schoolboys always are when talking about sex things. But she would never say and even though I witnessed many calvings and farrowings and even helped my dog to deliver her pups when I was a lad of about twelve, I could never think of a woman, particularly Mother, having parts like that.

  The next morning Father had trudged through the snow to the village to tell Granny about my arrival and Mother’s accident but she wouldn’t come and help.

  ‘“The eldest Parry girl needs a job,” she’d said. “She’ll do as a farm servant for a few months until Mary Constance can get about properly again.”’

  “You were a puny thing, long and weedy, a real runt with an ugly red face and even uglier red hair,” Marian continued. “The doctor said you’d better be named pretty quick in case you died, so when Father went to tell Granny, he brought the Vicar back with him as well as Mabel Parry.

  “Mother lifted you out of the crib and stared at you. ‘He’s to be called Richard,’ she said, which surprised Father, because there hadn’t been a Richard in the family before.

  “‘After my younger brother,’ she added, ‘the one that died in the war. He had red hair.’

  “‘Well,’ said Father, ‘I’m glad some bugger we know had red hair, because there’s never been any on my side. All dark we are. Mother will take a fit when she sees him.’

  “‘I dare say,’ said Mother, ‘but she’d take a fit if the cat had kittens.’

  “‘Richard,’ repeated Father, ‘Richard Wilde, not bad, I reckon.’”

  The end of the story about my birth was quite sad. Although I was supposed to be weakly and likely to die, I thrived and Mother recovered from the birth and the broken leg very well, although she did walk with a slight limp when the weather was cold. But Mabel Parry was got in the family way within a year of being at the farm and was sent away in disgrace. The father wasn’t known, at least she wouldn’t say and Father had to pay her mother some money, because it had happened while she was living here. Poor Mabel died giving birth, but the baby survived, a little girl, Jane, who was in the class below me at school. I remember her well.

  Chapter 2

  This old place hasn’t changed much over the years. Improved, certainly, for it had been standing longer than two centuries when Father took over and must have needed renovation, which he did, after a fashion. Billy was keen to keep it well maintained and when he was in charge, made sure that the buildings were always in tip top shape. I did my share in later years, putting in more bathrooms and central heating. But the land has mostly gone now, only a few dozen acres left, the home field and the remains of Mother’s orchard.

  In Father’s time, our farm extended to over three hundred and fifty acres of Shropshire border land and Billy bought up the Major’s bit of land, which extended the acreage by another hundred or so. The Major’s land was actually the best on the farm. It wasn’t clay like ours and always drained well. Billy grew vegetables there, potatoes, cabbage and the like and they sold well. The Major’s cottage, Gate House Lodge, was left vacant for years but later on let out and brought in a decent rent.

  Our house nestles into the lea of the hill and is sheltered from all but the worse gales which sometimes blow in. Five miles away is Wales and when you climb to the top of our hill and look west you can see the craggy shapes of the Cambrian range. In the winter time those mountain tops glitter with ice and snow and hint of a magic land, strange to ordinary people like us. In summer, they loom, purple and shimmering out of a clear sky, and the feeling is intensified. I always loved looking at them and imagining what lay beyond. But I’ve been to Wales many times and the people are just like us. Well, nearly like us.

  The river runs through our valley, blue, fast running water which tumbles out of the Welsh mountains and winds itself through the flatter, calmer lands towards the Midlands. At the bottom of our farm, the fields border the river and we have bright green water meadows which are the best grazing land around. In the summer, the cows used to stand under the willows flicking their tails and contentedly chewing their cud. I always thought that’s why our cattle grew sleek and gave out such wonderful milk. We used to swim in the river.

  A mile below us is the village. At its most populated, during the twenties when the mine was sunk, it only had a population of about four hundred and then, when the pit closed, people moved away. They’re coming back now. People from the town who want a bit of peace and the chance to live in a fat green valley where they can wake up to the sound of birds singing in the May trees and walk out into the fresh morning air to breathe in the heady scent of blossom and young wheat.

  Father had taken over the tenancy of the farm in 1892 when he was a young man of twenty-two years. Previously he had worked as a farm labourer but when the tenant of Manor Farm died and had no son to follow on, Father applied to Sir John Cleeton, the Major’s father, for the tenancy. No-one thought he would get it, but Sir John had a lot of time for him, and gave him the chance.

  Mother used to tell us about the day she went with Father to the Hall. They had been shown into the big library and sat on leather chairs in front of a broad wooden desk. Mother particularly noticed the hundreds of books and the ladder that ran on brass rails around the room. “It was for reaching the books,” she said shaking her head and smiling, “I never saw anything like it.”

  “I’m sure you won’t let me down, Wilde,” Sir John had said as he handed Father the tenancy agreement.

  Father took a deep breath before standing up and shaking Sir John’s hand firmly. “You can trust me, sir,” he’d said. It was a big step but he was up to it and the farm was never out of profit for all the years he ran it.


  In 1913, just before the First World War, Sir John died and the estate was broken up. The widow, Lady Gwendoline, offered Father first refusal and he was determined to buy. With a letter of recommendation from Lady Gwendoline, he went to the bank to arrange a loan to buy the farm outright. We were sitting at the kitchen table when Father came home. Mother stood up and went to greet him.

  “Well, Thomas,” she said laying her hand on his arm and looking into his face, “am I cooking in my own kitchen?”

  I had never seen Mother and Father display their affection before. He wasn’t the demonstrative sort and she, although loving with us children, didn’t fawn and kiss as some women did. Looking back, I think their marriage must have had some rocky times in the early years because Mother had come from more refined stock than Father and his and Granny’s lack of gentility must have been hard to bear. She kept the house and dairy as well or better than any farmer’s wife in the district but maybe she yearned for a more educated husband. I don’t know. I don’t know why she made that choice to leave her own father’s comfortable rectory to marry Father all those years before I was born. I do know she couldn’t have had a straighter, more loyal man than Father.

  But on the day he bought the farm, he put his hands about her waist and twirled her round as easily as if she had been one of Marian’s dollies before planting a kiss on her lips. “We’re on our own land, Mary Constance,” he said, the words choking in his throat and tears coming into his brown eyes. “Our farm, our home.”

  We children sat big-eyed at that. Marian got up and kissed Father on the cheek, which was a surprise because she was normally reticent in that way. Lately she had been walking out with Albert Baker and perhaps that had made her act differently or maybe it was simply the excitement of the occasion. Billy and I did nothing but I listened intently. I knew it was an important occasion and I stared at Father and Mother and now Marian, all joined in an embrace. Suddenly, Father broke away and looked down at us, his two sons.