Love Letters From the Grave(45)
‘I’m so sorry, Molly. I didn’t want to upset you. But I mean it – it doesn’t change how I feel about you.’
Molly shook her head. ‘But it changes how I feel about you.’
‘No, please don’t tell me that,’ he said, trying to pull her toward him.
She shook herself out of his embrace. ‘Please take me back to the factory,’ she said stiffly. ‘And once we’re there, I think it will be better if we don’t see each other again.’
They drove back in silence, Charlie’s jaw set in a grim right angle as Molly tried to drown out the sound of her own heart splitting into little pieces. It was not to be. It could never have been. What had she been thinking?
Chapter 14
* * *
Never a Gambling Man
* * *
You have got to help me keep a level head. I love you so much, but I know I have a responsibility and you have a greater one than I … Honey, you have got to stay and raise those children up or until they are
old enough to understand what we have.
Molly’s letter to Charlie
Charlie was devastated that his honesty had put Molly off so completely. He’d known that he had to tell her the truth, or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, but he hadn’t anticipated her reaction.
For days, he didn’t see her, and she refused to respond to any requests to see him, via note or Annette and any other way he could think of. However, he knew she would have to come to the store room at some point, so he wrote his next note in advance of her arrival, and placed it under a pad on his workstation ready to slide across to her.
Sure enough, one day she turned up at the store room door, trying not to catch his eye. Danny stood up to deal with her request, and Molly looked almost grateful that she wouldn’t have to talk to Charlie.
She was just about to depart, her arms loaded with goods, when Charlie slipped across to her. On top of her pile of stationery, he added a book of order forms with his note cushioned between its pages. ‘I think you forgot this,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, sorry – did I leave something off your list?’ Danny was about to walk over and inspect the order form again.
‘No, that’s fine,’ said Molly, retreating quickly into the corridor.
Charlie’s heart leapt. She wasn’t rejecting his note – not at this point, anyway. ‘It’s just that thing I forgot last time,’ he said with a smile, trying to look business-like.
‘Of course.’
She was gone again before Charlie could say any more.
Danny had watched the exchange with a raised eyebrow. Now he just nodded to Charlie, hiding a faint smile, and tucked his pencil back behind his ear. ‘Just a friend, huh?’
‘Maybe not even that,’ Charlie replied. ‘But maybe more. Much more.’
The note that Molly was (hopefully) about to read was full of apologies for upsetting her, and then went on to suggest that Molly and her husband, George, came to his home on Saturday to play cards with himself and Muriel.
“If I can’t have you to myself,’ the note explained, ‘then I have to find some way to be with you as friends. There is something special between us, Molly, and even if that is just friendship, then I’d like to preserve that. It will just be two old married couples, doing what old married couples do.’
To his great relief and excitement, Molly agreed, and so that Saturday Molly arrived with her husband at his home.
Charlie shook George’s hand with a feeling of trepidation. This was the husband of the woman he loved, coming into his home to play cards with Charlie and the woman he was meant to be in love with. It didn’t make sense, but somehow Charlie really liked George. He was older than Molly, more fatherly than he’d expected. Molly was greeting Muriel with equal pleasantness, and he could see that she, too, was startled to be confronted with the age difference between himself and Muriel.
‘This is so nice!’ cried Muriel, clapping her hands excitedly. ‘I’m so fond of cards, so imagine my delight when Charlie told me that you’d chatted about your favorite games at the factory.’
‘She almost forced me to ask you over,’ said Charlie, barely able to take his eyes off Molly, strikingly dressed as she was in a brocade dress which highlighted her tall, slender figure. He forced himself to look at George. ‘And Molly told me you’re quite the canasta king.’
George smiled pleasantly. ‘Well, we’ve had the good fortune to play cards in some of the finest casinos in the world, haven’t we, Molly?’
Molly appeared embarrassed, and after a quick, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she concentrated on talking to Betty, who was looking after the children while the card games went on.
‘Monaco, Paris, we’ve been to so many it’s hard to recall,’ continued George.
Muriel squealed. ‘Oh, Paris! I can’t believe you’ve visited all these amazing places. Was the fashion simply the most?’
‘The most what?’ said George, genuinely puzzled.
Charlie tried not to laugh. It was like a grandpa talking to his young granddaughter, and here were Molly and himself, both in their late thirties, stuck in the middle with everything in common and no way to express it.