Love Child by Sheila Kohler

Author:Sheila Kohler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

1935

SHE WAS ONLY ABLE TO DISTRACT HELEN FROM HER SORROWS briefly, and as the days went by, a hot, still December settled down upon them.

“If I could just keep moving, moving all the time,” Helen would suddenly say, sitting beside her in the back of the Chevrolet. When the chauffeur drove them into town, she would put her hands to her head and exclaim, “Such an awful buzzing in my head. If you only knew!”

One morning, Bill strode into her bedroom without knocking, her keys jangling importantly at her waist. This time Helen gave her an impatient glance, adding, “You might knock, you know. Am I not allowed any privacy?” She sat before her dressing table with her arms crossed and complained that she was no longer mistress in her own house; she was bereft of any importance; the servants were laughing at her.

Bill went over to her and sat down on the long stool beside her, taking her hand. “Why would they laugh at you?” Helen lifted her drooping head and looked her in the eye, saying, “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. What has my husband told you?” Bill looked down guiltily as Helen fingered the keys at her waist. What right had she to them? Why did she have to be in constant attendance?

Helen looked at her more narrowly and seemed to be considering. She said, “He’s impossible, you know. I knew it from the first moment I met him.”

“How did you meet him?” Bill asked.

She related how old friends, worried about her, had introduced them. She told her what sounded at first like the whole story, though afterward it was clear she had left out the most important parts.

She had been desperately in love with her first husband, a lanky blond Englishman, a talented artist. One morning he had told her he couldn’t think of the word for the thing you push a baby in. “You mean a pram?” she had said, staring at him. He was dead of a brain tumor within three months. He left her with nothing but her little boy and a mountain of debt. He had not even paid the rent for the charming thatch-roofed cottage where they had lived in someone else’s garden, nor the poor servant who had helped her with her little boy.

As a child she had been a musical prodigy but was never good enough to become a professional. She had started writing and even published a story in a women’s magazine. But she needed security. She could not work, even as a secretary. She was not a good typist. Teaching did not pay enough.

Her friends had invited her to dinner and placed her on the right of this tall, balding, good looking, elegantly dressed, somewhat older man. From the start he had admonished her to eat up and not to drink so much wine. He insisted on driving her home, and when he got her there, of course, he wanted to come in “for a nightcap.

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