#peter barden

She learns, after Peter is gone, that her marriage was always a puzzle missing some pieces.

–

Peter, his fingers deftly undoing the buttons of her wedding dress, whispering in her ear. “The most beautiful bride in all of Great Paxford…”

Sarah, fumbling to unzip the dress she’d worn to celebrate another wedding—Spencer and Claire’s—Spencer, who’d been the one to find Peter. “Keep Mrs. Barden away!”

Mrs. Barden. Is she Mrs. Barden anymore, when Mr. Barden is no longer?

“Frances.”

Sarah’s voice, soft, softer than Peter’s had been. Sadder. She’d finally managed to get the zipper undone with trembling hands. “Frances, come. Get out of these clothes and into the bath.”

The air is cold. She’d thought the same on her wedding night—how funny it was that the air was cold and yet she didn’t feel it, because there’d been so much to warm her. Peter’s breath on her neck, stirring her hair, raising goosebumps. Peter’s hands running over her skin, the first time she’d ever truly been touched by a man.

There are no hands now but Sarah’s, grasping her shoulders and turning her to face her. “Frances, please…”

–

“It’s odd,” was her reply to the question he’d asked, finally, and Peter laughed.

“What every husband wants to hear the first night in the marriage bed.”

“I didn’t mean—” She’d thought, as a married woman, she’d be above blushing, but maybe that took some time. “I mean I’ve only ever shared a bed with Sarah. Never like this.”

Sarah has always been an ideal vicar’s wife. Certainly none of them had ever thought she would be—a self-professed agnostic since before that first Armistice Day, it had been quite a shock when she’d taken up with Adam Collingborne. Always a good listener, always steady in times of crisis as small as not knowing which flowers to plant or as earth-shattering as the unexpected death of a parishioner in childbed—or in a car accident.

Those happen. Apparently.

She isn’t sure any longer in what capacity Sarah is serving as her bedfellow. Is she the vicar’s wife, offering whatever comfort is possible to a woman shattered by grief? Hasn’t she been offering the same lately to Kate Heaton, to Miriam Brindsley, to the other women of Great Paxford whose carefully ordered lives have been disrupted by telegrams and visits from officials?

Is she her sister, her own husband held prisoner God knows where, Frances’ awaiting burial in the kirkyard not a day hence?

There is an empty space in both their beds now, and Frances wonders if Sarah is finding her as poor a replacement as she finds Sarah.

–

But then, hadn’t Peter been missing from their bed more nights than she had wanted to admit?

–

“It’s a shame Mr. Barden couldn’t make it home in time.”

Claire, wishing her a happy anniversary as she’d sat alone before a plate that had long since gone cold of Peter’s favorite meal, made special by Cook.

“Are you sure you’re not overcompensating for Peter’s absence?”

Sarah, her question cutting, fueling the anger within her she’d needed to hit the target.

–

A box, same as dozens of others, she’s sure. A label, typed, not handwritten, as impersonal as could be despite that the box is of Peter’s personal effects.

His watch, she strokes the face of. A tenth anniversary gift, one she’d watched him put on countless times of a morning. His wallet, containing a photo of her she’d tried to resist having taken, only for him to coax her into it.

“Please. Those interminable business trips. Having a reminder of you waiting for me at home would make them bearable.”

A thin black box, thin enough to contain jewelry, which baffles her. Their anniversary is—was—some months off, and they’ve long since passed the age where unexpected gifts hold charm.

She opens it, finds a note, and wishes she hadn’t. 

To my darling Helen Yours always P. x

–

“Helen has a son as old as their affair.”

The words stumble from her lips easily in Sarah’s presence—past the catch in her throat, past the wall in her head preventing her from processing it all.

Peter had fathered a son after all. He simply hadn’t fathered one with her.

–

“You’re not a mother, Frances, so you wouldn’t understand.”

Miriam Brindsley’s accusation had cut to the heart of it all—the centre of, she sometimes suspected, Peter’s sporadic absences from their bed, the growing lack of emphasis on their anniversary as the years pile up.

Month after month, for three years, had come the telltale reminder that she had failed. She had admitted defeat first to Will Campbell, then to the Harley Street physician he’d referred her to.

Will had been given the courtesy of breaking the diagnosis, she supposed because it was thought to be easier to hear from someone she knew. His expression had been an uneasy mix of sympathy and pity, his tone uncertain, not used to giving serious diagnoses in such a sleepy town as Great Paxford. An awkward offer of condolences and a careful suggestion that Mrs. Collingborne might wish to be examined as well had ended their appointment.

“Frances? Is there anything you need?” Erica had asked, as she’d left Will’s office, and a quick glance at Erica—a swaddled Laura in her arms—had only reinforced the knowledge that there wasn’t anything she needed but Peter.

Not that she could give him anything in return.

–

“I’m glad we met him.”

She can’t always claim to understand Sarah—sisters or not, there are certain things about each other that are ineffable. Her sister’s fixation on Noah Lakin is beyond her.

“How can you say that?” is her response, her mind reeling, and Sarah wastes no time in firing back.

“Weren’t you curious to see what the last fragment of Peter on this earth looked like?”

No.

“Weren’t you stunned to see he’s the spit of his father?”

Of course.

“He’s inherited all of Peter’s mannerisms, the way he looks at you—!”

It’s quite enough, and something she can’t think on after such a wretched day, and she breaks in, unable to stand it—the knowledge that her marriage is so many shards of broken glass, never to be pieced back together quite the same way. “And in twenty years, no doubt, his capacity to lie and deceive.”

The indignation on Sarah’s face—there is the vicar’s wife, outraged at any unjust accusation—is cutting. “That is a terrible thing to say. You cannot visit the sins of the father upon his child.”

“Why not? God would.”

“Well, not Adam’s God! And if I ever did believe in one, his would be the one I’d choose!”

She finds herself trailing after her younger sister, in the throes of the worst fight they’ve had in several years. Indeed, she isn’t sure what to say even an hour later, as Sarah clatters about with the tea service, obviously frustrated.

Sarah sits heavily on the couch and brings her cup to her lips before the tea has properly cooled, and Frances finds herself doing what she rarely needs to—apologizing. “I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t me you owe an apology to. Not really.”

“I can hardly apologize to a child for something he doesn’t know a thing about—”

“No, but you can stop talking of him as though he’s a leper.”

“He is the illegitimate child of my husband and his secretary—”

“Who you liked! For heaven’s sake, Frances, revising the past isn’t going to help you now! I understand what you must be feeling—”

“Do you really? I wasn’t aware Adam had a child tucked away somewhere—”

“Frances, for once, will you shut up.”

She can’t remember ever having heard Sarah so furious. Maybe it’s that that makes her do as her sister asked, in time to watch Sarah setting her cup and saucer down with trembling hands.

“Perhaps,” Sarah begins after a moment, “I said it incorrectly. What I mean to say is that—you know—why I understand how hard this is for you. Why you’re feeling as you are. I would feel the same, were I in your shoes, which—you’ve been so kind to remind me I’m not.

“Frances, no matter Peter’s errors, you know what he meant to you. You know what having a child with him would have meant to you. And for—so many reasons, that was impossible, but if you want to stand any chance at getting past this, perhaps stop looking at Noah as some sort of albatross. I won’t go so far as to say he’s a gift from God, but—Peter is gone, and Noah isn’t, however much you might wish he were.”

“I wouldn’t think that of a child.”

“There’s plenty of things I hope you wouldn’t think of a child, and I can’t say I’m sure you aren’t.” Sarah tugs at her skirt and stands. “Think about what I’ve said, Frances. For your own sake, if not his.”

–

There are things she can’t bring herself to do, things she’d once longed to do with a child of Peter’s—a child of Peter’s Noah may be, but a child of her own he is not.

Sarah and Claire take to caring for Noah as a duck to water, it’s hard for her to miss. It is Sarah who smiles and offers a hand to Noah when he ends up on her doorstep, Sarah who had fielded the call that had brought him there in the first place.

It’s Sarah who knows how to engage a child, Claire who happily reads bedtime stories, Noah who gets down on his knees and plays with the toy soldiers Joyce brings round.

She isn’t sure she knows how to do anything at all.

In her quietest moments she thinks, ceaselessly, of Sarah’s words—Sarah’s words over several weeks now, her exhortation not to treat Noah as a leper, not to call him the boy… her insistence Peter must have loved Noah.

“I’ve trawled through every moment Peter and I had together.”

“And, honestly?”

“I can’t locate one false note… unless Peter was utterly mad… I’m compelled to believe he loved me, yet from the necklace found with him in the car… he loved Helen, too.”

“And, presumably, their son.”

Keeping herself away from Noah is easy; keeping away from memories of Peter as she still lives in their house, sleeps in their bed, is not.

And yet, there is a day when she finds she can’t keep herself away, when concern overwhelms her when he is nowhere to be found—when, finally, she comes upon him sleeping in the shelter.

Sorrow claws at her heart even harder than it had the day of the accident. Really looking at Noah for the first time shows her Sarah is, as she always is, right—he’s so obviously Peter’s son, so much the way she’d hoped their own child would look, back when hope had been all she’d had.

In the end, all it takes is a quiet moment, him seated between her and Sarah on a hard church pew, probably bored out of his head by the adult world and all the ceaseless rituals it entails. A wedding is no place for a child itching to move, to play, to be free.

She reaches into her coat pocket and grasps one of the toy soldiers, her fingers closing around it hesitantly. She has battled with herself whether or not to extend such an olive branch. She no longer knows how much of herself she has left to give when so much of her has crumbled away—Peter, the WI, the factory…

“You cannot visit the sins of the father upon his child.”

She supposes a church is as good a place as any to finally begin accepting it.

She holds out the soldier, grateful, suddenly, when small fingers close around it and touch her own.

–

“Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t, Frances. You shouldn’t worry.”

Peter’s fingers brush hers as he presses the champagne flute into her hand. “Come. Let’s not dwell on what hasn’t happened and think about what has. One year ago today you were saying yes to marrying me. Have you any regrets?”

There is one, the one she was dwelling on moments before, but with Peter at her side she finds it’s harder and harder to remember that anything feels wrong.

With Peter, nothing feels anything but right.

“Only one,” she finally says, after draining the champagne flute and standing, holding out a hand. “That we haven’t danced since then.”

A dance without music, warm arms around her waist, slow breaths between kisses.