What Once Was True (Robinswood #1)

by Jean Grainger

I’m going to travel the world and have adventures and give scandal wherever I go by keeping bad company and drinking gin.’

Violet found being a widow really was trying, and to find herself a penniless widow, well, that was really the final straw.

And when she’d told her husband they needed to employ a gardener, Austin had laughed and suggested if she was so interested in gardening she could go out with a hoe and a rake herself. She had flounced out in indignation. He really was an infuriating man, in life and in death.

Her mother was like a terrier, their father often said, once she got an inkling of something, she would not let it go until she’d found out the truth.

‘All any mother wants in a partner for their child is someone who will love them, be kind to them, and treat them with respect,’ she said.

Violet had tried to point out that no nice English man she might meet in the future with a view to marriage would like to think of his girl having had previous interactions with any type of foreigner, let alone an American.

Samuel was perfectly polite to them when he was at home, she was sure, but the idea that they would impose upon him while he was defending his country was simply intolerable.

‘You’re going to be my wife; your problems are mine now.’ He kissed her cheek and gave her a squeeze.

The nuns had warned them often enough about avoiding any such situations, as men could not be trusted to control their carnal desires,

but they never said how difficult that would be when the man was someone you loved and found so attractive.

One always got the impression they were secretly sneering at those they should consider their betters.

The government say it’s confidential, but sure, nothing is confidential in this place. A secret is something you tell one person at a time.’

So my advice is this: Stay loyal to each other, keep talking, and when you fall out, as you will, remember he is your home and you’re his.

We talk, even when it’s hard to do it, and at night in bed, we share everything. All our joys and fears and anger—everything. I wish for you, not riches or a comfortable life, though I hope it happens, but I wish that you and Jack enjoy a marriage like we have.

As they took their seats, Violet tried to steady herself. The Murphy girl was a servant, who had no business whatsoever in a place like this, but apart from that, what on earth was going on with her and Samuel to say he brought her to Afternoon Tea at the Ritz?

Violet felt the stain of red indignation creep up her neck into her face. The cheek of the girl, addressing her as if they were equals.

Perhaps she and Samuel were playing an elaborate joke on her? A negro NCO lounging in her home, a servant sipping tea with her son in the Ritz—it was all a prank. It must be!

she saw her daughter for what she truly was: a grasping alcoholic of dubious morals, who mistakenly thought her dear departed papa had made provision for her to continue in the vacuous life she had adopted for herself.

Honestly, the woman was ridiculous! She behaved like she was fourteen, not twenty-five. She should have been married by now, and somebody else’s problem.

The idea that Kate and Samuel Kenefick, well, Lord Kenefick, if he were to have his proper title, would get together would have been inconceivable if the war hadn’t happened and everyone was still at Robinswood.

and we’ll be an old pair shuffling along the road when we’re eighty, still in love.

Jack would want you to live. He loved you with all his heart, I know he did, and he would want you to live. To go on without him, and make a life for yourself. It’s not going to be easy, it is going to be torture for the first while, and every day will feel like hell on earth. But it will get easier, and you will never forget him, never stop loving him, that won’t change, but you’ll find a way to go on without him, and please God, you’ll meet him again, when it’s your turn to go to heaven.’

For now, don’t think about the future, just manage each minute, each hour.

They were being very foolish if they thought for one second that Hitler would make good on his promises in return for help attacking Britain from Ireland.

The old adage of my enemy’s enemy is my friend seems to be fueling the thought processes in republican quarters. That’s the gossip around town, anyway, that the IRA are in bed with the Germans. But, in wartime, rumours and counter-rumours abound.’

Men are weak and think with a part of their anatomy not designed for rational

reasoning.

But a servant! Violet could not imagine how on earth it would work. It was like breeding two different species of creature.

Our class don’t want to know us, Mother, because we are in that most appalling of conditions: poor.

Violet stood, stunned. She hated this new world, where nobody knew their place.

But it wasn’t the future Violet had envisaged for either Samuel or herself. Houses, cars, staff were normal things that normal people like them needed.

She hated the mornings the most because for a brief few seconds before she woke, Jack wasn’t dead, he was beside her.

What once was true is no longer the case. When we were young, everything was so clear-cut, black and white, right and wrong. But as you get older, things become a little greyer, until, I am sure, by the time you become an old man, everything is grey.

They realised, in that instant, that they had more in common than divided them. A day previously, the idea that they would have been thrown together would have been an appalling prospect for both of them, but now there seemed to be an understanding

I raised two children, and I realise now I was preparing them for a world that no longer exists.