Doreen surfaced with one clear recollection of the ceremony. “I remember the vicar with that stupid sing-song voice,” she said, looking inquisitively at the faces surrounding her as if she was coming around from anaesthetic. “Major Rupert Wellington Dauntsey,” he said. “Do you take this woman – Doreen Mae Mason ...” Her voice and memory dimmed for a few seconds, then she seemed to bounce back to life. “Rupert said, ‘I do,’ but he never did,” she continued forlornly. Then she repeated, “He never did,” as if to remind herself.
Three pairs of eyes forged into hers, demanding an explanation, but she sank back into her own private darkness, leaving them to watch her changing expressions as she wove together images of the wedding night out of a thick blanket of fog: Rupert, an officer and, apparently, a gentleman, in full ceremonial uniform, pouring her yet another champagne; brushing his lips off her cheek; guiding her upstairs and leaving her to marvel at the wonders of an en-suite bathroom, at a time most people still crept to the outhouse in the middle of the night, and Hollywood agents dickered over bathroom clauses in film stars’ contracts.
“Mrs. Dauntsey ...” tried Bliss, concerned that time was running out, but she was already far away, her face warming to the dreamy memory of hot water gushing out of a polished brass tap – unlike her parent’s stinky gas geyser scaring the life out of her every time it belched into life, then pumping squirts of lukewarm water into a tin bath until the meter swallowed the last of the coins.
Doreen had found good reason to forget the wedding ceremony, even at the time, but the joy of instant unlimited hot water was so overwhelming she had lost track of time, turning the tap on and off until she could write her name on the bathroom mirror with her finger. Finally, with the important bits washed and powdered, she staggered into the bedroom and swayed, intoxicated as much by the sight of the richly carved four-poster bed, with heavily embroidered tester, as by the champagne.
With her eyes still closed she allowed herself a cautious smile at the memory of the silky sheets; the eiderdown pillows; the giant wall tapestry depicting a mythical battle, with near naked angels lifting the vanquished from the field – someone’s sanguine concept of a soldierly heaven; and the Chippendale dressing table laden with sweet smelling pomanders, and cut crystal bottles so delicate she was afraid to touch. Then her face clouded as the memory darkened and she saw herself swimming fuzzily against a tide of drowsiness, struggling into the satin nightgown, the one Daphne had hurriedly bought for her as a wedding present, then watching as the bed spun wildly away from her and she crashed, unconscious, to the floor.
“It was quite a honeymoon night,” she laughed drily, rising back to the surface, greedily slurping tea to wash away the rekindled taste of bile which had made her vomit all over the bed in the morning. “I think he put something in my drinks,” she added, recalling how she had struggled to pull herself awake through a porridgy sludge, testing her hooded eyes against the morning sunlight and unfamiliar surroundings, while distorted images of the previous day’s ceremony swam slowly into view. Understanding had came through the fog like the beam of a car’s headlights – a fuzzy glow that suddenly bursts into a blinding flash. “I’m married,” she screeched, and lurched upright in bed only to find her husband, the marriage certificate and his aide-de-camp all gone. In their place was a little man with a pneumatic drill trying to hammer his way out of her skull.
“Married,” she spat and opened her eyes to the realisation that those around her were holding their breath. “Rupert left me alone in that damn place,” she explained. “And I was so woozy in the morning I didn’t know if we had or not ... anyway, until my little visitor came a week later I was sure I was expecting.”
Daphne and Bliss exchanged glances – Daphne with a lopsided “told you Rupert wasn’t the father” smirk.
“Don’t ask,” mouthed Bliss, guessing she was itching to discover the true identity of Jonathon’s father; knowing that just a month or so after Dauntsey’s departure someone must have stood on guard in his place.
“He didn’t want a woman,” Doreen continued, head down in embarrassment, “he only wanted a wife.” Then she lost her composure, simpering in shame with the admission that her husband had preferred to sleep with another man on their wedding night.
Bliss checked his watch, anxiously glancing at the door, wondering who would be first through: the matron, Superintendent Donaldson or a masked man with a machine gun. Feeling a need to speed things up he pieced together what he knew, throwing in a few guesses to fill in the blanks for the benefit of Samantha and Daphne. Explaining how, after the massacre caused by Rupert Dauntsey’s stupidity, it seemed likely that Captain Tippen had carried his mortally wounded lover back from the front; that an exploding grenade had showered bits of body and uniform everywhere; that some medical orderly must have mixed up the dog tags and when the survivor, a lowly backstreet boy, found himself being treated as a major, he was more than happy to go along with the blunder.
“He’d seen the Dauntsey home and the Scottish estate,” explained Bliss. “They were a vast improvement on his own home so he obviously thought: Why go back to be a burden to my mother in a Guildstone hovel? Here I have a private nurse; private doctor; a major’s pension; a major’s family and a major’s inheritance. He knew more about Rupert Dauntsey than Doreen ever knew and, in his own mind, was entitled to the estate far more than she ever was.”
Doreen pulled herself together sufficiently to add. “It was difficult for him to talk, and his face was so ugly that nobody wanted to look closely, so it was quite easy for him to get away with it.”
Daphne stepped in, questioning, “But why go along with it? Why not just throw him out?” Then she gave Bliss a poisonous stare and spat, “Men!”
There had been so many reasons, so many conflicting persuasions and influences, that Doreen froze indecisively as she sounded out the most plausible and least humiliating in her mind.
“It was blackmail,” she said eventually, expecting sympathy, while inwardly debating who had blackmailed whom. “He knew Rupert and me had never consecrated the marriage.”
“Consummated,” suggested Samantha quietly, but Doreen wasn’t in the frame of mind to be corrected and carried on as if she had not heard. ‘As long as I’m alive you’ve nothing to fear,’ Tippen said, when I stuck the x-ray under what was left of his nose. ‘Doctor Fitzpatrick reckons there’s been a mistake,’ I told him. ‘He reckons you ought to have some sort of scar in your leg. Football, he told me. Broke your leg at school, he said. He reckons he set the bone himself, when you were ten, he remembers it like yesterday – said you bawled your eyes out the whole time.’”
But there had been no mistake and Tippen had superciliously rubbed in the hurt by explaining, in uncalled for detail, what fun he and his lover had in arranging the spurious wedding in order to stop tongues wagging in the regiment. “It made me sick,” said Doreen, without elaborating.
“I still don’t see why you didn’t chuck him out,” said Daphne. “Nobody would have believed anything he said, after what he’d done?”
“Tippen had worked that