Free Beyond a Misty Shore by Lyn Andrews

Harebell Street, his school friends and his time in the Navy, but the party was nearly upon them before she finally plucked up courage to ask him about Nora.
    He frowned, thrusting his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket. He’d known that sooner or later she would ask. Any other girl would have questioned him long before now,he thought, but that was not Sophie’s way. She had more tact and sensitivity.
    ‘I was young and stupid. I fell for her in a big way, even though I’d grown up with her and knew the kind of family she came from. One day I looked at her and she . . . she just seemed
different
. Oh, Mam was furious and so was Da, but I was pig-headed and stubborn, I wouldn’t listen – at least, not at first. But then things . . . things started to change. I still don’t know why I changed my mind about her but I did. I suddenly began to notice how . . . coarse and brassy she looked and how loud and bad mannered she was. She’d bleached her hair and wore too much make-up and she drowned herself in cheap scent.’ He paused. It was painful and humiliating but no doubt she’d heard both his mother’s and Lizzie’s version of events. ‘I wasn’t even sure if she was being truthful when she swore she loved me and only me. There had been a couple of rumours but I’d refused to believe them. When war was declared, I joined the Navy. I thought that it would all sort of . . . fizzle out, but then I found it was too late. I had to pay for my mistakes. She said she was expecting so I did the decent thing and married her, even though I then found that . . .’
    Sophie listened in silence to his words but she realised how much it was costing him to tell her all this. She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Frank, you don’t have to go on. Everything . . . else . . . is between you and Nora. I got the general idea of the whole terrible situation from Aunty Lizzie.’
    He nodded, but he was determined to tell her everything.‘I bet you did, but you may not know that Nora told me a pack of lies to trap me into marrying her. She said she’d made a mistake; that she’d honestly believed she was and had panicked, and only discovered she wasn’t pregnant after the wedding. I didn’t believe her and after that things just got worse between us, and while I was away she—’
    ‘I know all about that too and I’m so sorry,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there really nothing at all that you can do? Life must be—’
    ‘Pure hell!’ he cut in bitterly. ‘I made a mistake, Sophie. A big mistake, but I’ll just have to live with it.’
    ‘I really am so sorry, Frank,’ she said, and she meant it.
    ‘I suppose you think I’m a fool?’
    She shook her head vehemently. ‘No. You did make a mistake, but no one goes through life without doing that. You were lied to, trapped into marriage, betrayed and . . . and haven’t much of a future now, but I think it takes a great deal of courage to go on paying for that mistake to spare your parents more shame.’
    He turned his head away so she wouldn’t see the tears that sprang to his eyes. She was the first person who had tried to understand. She didn’t condemn him or think any the worse of him; she’d even praised his courage – and it
did
take courage to go on day after day, month after month living a life that was so completely hateful to him. In that moment he knew that what he felt for Sophie Teare was the love and deep affection he’d thought he felt for Nora, and he was tied for ever to Nora. Nora who was everything Sophie Teare was not. He prayed that he could find the courage to live with the reality now.
    It hadn’t gone unnoticed that Sophie and Frank were becoming increasingly friendly. Lizzie had been informed of the fact that they walked home together each night by Mary Seddon when she had been in Maggie Dodd’s shop and the news hadn’t pleased her one bit. She’d passed the information on to Jim who had cautioned her not to say too much on the