Free A Bitter Truth by Charles Todd Page A

Sussex, didn’t you? She was terrified that you’d followed her to London. She even thought you’d asked the police to hunt her down. She was terrified that you’d be on our doorstep before she could face you again. And she wasn’t at all sure how that meeting would be, or even how you’d receive her. Instead you never really searched for her, did you? Even when you knew she must be somewhere in this wilderness, alone and cold and hurt—physically and emotionally. I wonder why.”
    “All right,” he said, goaded. “There was a man she met while I was in France. He lives not far from here. I found out about him quite by accident. He’s blind, you see, shrapnel fragments that scarred his face and took his sight. She went often to read to him. So I was told. It occurred to me that he was here, I was in France, and she was lonely.”
    I could have laughed. I hadn’t anticipated jealousy. “Have you met this man?”
    “Has she told you about him?” he countered.
    “No. Why should she? She came to London because she was afraid. Of you. Of the future. If there had been something between your wife and this man, she would have turned to him. Instead she came to me.”
    He digested that for a moment, his eyes on the road. “I shouldn’t have doubted her,” he said finally.
    “Did you think that the reason she wanted a child was to hide the fact that she was already pregnant?”
    “Yes. All right. It was the first thing that crossed my mind.” His voice was cold, harsh.
    “Then you don’t know your wife very well, do you? Or you’d recognize her need for what it is, her love for you.”
    “I don’t want children. Now or ever. I don’t want to watch them suffer and die. There’s no more helpless feeling, I can tell you. I watched as my own father walked out into the heath and killed himself because the child he loved best was dead. I don’t want to see my wife grieve for one dead child when she has three living children, as my mother did for many years. I see no reason to put myself or Lydia through that nightmare. I won’t.”
    Which explained a good deal about Roger Ellis. I wondered if he and Lydia had ever really discussed having children in a quiet and reasonable fashion, or if their feelings were too shut away for them to explain to each other just how they felt.
    I also found myself wondering if somewhere, sometime Roger Ellis had strayed, and if this was why he was so ready to believe his wife had been unfaithful.
    He answered one of my questions. “We were married in 1913. In the autumn. It was the happiest I’d been for longer than I could remember. Barely a year later the war started, and I enlisted at once. I couldn’t wait to get to France, fool that I was. Lydia begged me to wait and see whether it would last, but I promised her I’d be home again before she knew it. Instead I didn’t see her for three years. We wrote, of course, but it wasn’t the same. And I knew she was angry with me for lying to her. But I hadn’t, I’d really believed that the war would end before I saw any of the fighting. I wouldn’t have blamed her for looking elsewhere.”
    A silence fell between us, and then Roger Ellis said, “I never heard her mention your name before yesterday. Why hadn’t she said something to me in a letter about having seen you in London—or asked me if I’d had word of you in France? She asks often enough about our neighbors’ sons and brothers, you’d think she’d have been concerned about you as well. I asked Daisy, but she didn’t recall mail coming for my wife with your return address on it.”
    I knew the anxiety of waiting for news. I’d asked about mutual friends whenever I’d run into someone I knew.
    “What did you think? That she had made up our friendship, simply because you can’t find a letter from me in her desk? I expect you looked last night, didn’t you?” I said. “If you’re trying to convince yourself that there was a conspiracy of silence involved,