Chapter 14 #3
“Are you serious? What about the mills?” he asked her. “You can’t just leave for a year. You’re the life force of the business.” Thor was shocked by what she’d said.
“You manage fine without me. I was gone for three weeks last month and you didn’t need me. There are managers for each mill. All you have to do is coordinate. Maybe I could go for a year, if they’d accept me. We could view it as a sabbatical.”
“Victoria, I can’t do this without you. You saw what it took today with the union to avoid a strike.”
“You handled it all yourself.”
“But you were there. It matters. Are you telling me you’ve made up your mind?”
“No, but it’s something that I’d like to do. It would mean a lot to me.”
“And it would mean a lot to me to have you here.”
“I could come home on weekends and go over everything with you. And I could always come home in a crisis.”
“I can’t believe this. Now you want to go to university at your age?”
“You went to university, I didn’t. I’m uneducated.”
“You already know more than they do. You could be teaching them.”
“That’s very sweet of you. But a year at Oxford and some kind of degree at the end of it would mean everything to me. Maybe I could go in September and collect my degree next year.”
“Studying what? Greek literature? How is that going to help you at the mills?”
“It would make me a bigger, better, smarter person,” she insisted, trying to convince him. But he was as stubborn as she was.
“You already are smarter.” Thor was exasperated, and he could see it was a battle he wasn’t going to win, if she made up her mind to do it, and he would be carrying the weight of their entire operation for a year on his own.
He was willing to do almost anything for her, but that was asking a lot.
He would miss her terribly. He knew how important it was to her to be free, to be educated and learned, but he wanted a life with her and it was always out of reach.
He came from another world, so far beneath her that he was sure she could never accept him as more than the administrator of her mills and her friend.
He felt lucky to have that much of her, but he wanted more.
She was hiding from life, buried in her work, running away to America to a conference that wasn’t real, now to Oxford for a year to get a degree she didn’t need.
He had survived the war and come back, and now she wanted to go to university for a year, if they would even let her do that.
And what would she have after that? A piece of paper that meant nothing and wouldn’t change her life.
She’d been incredibly brave with everything she’d done.
But going to Oxford was only symbolic. It wasn’t real, in his opinion.
But it woke him up to the fact that he was only her employee and would never be more than that.
It was a reminder to him that he was fooling himself and would never mean to her what she meant to him.
Thor lay awake and thought about it all night.
He knew what he had to do. It killed him to do it, but it was the right choice, for her, for the mills, and for him.
His love for her was entirely pointless and he couldn’t do this anymore.
He was living for a dream that could never be a reality she didn’t want.
* * *
Thor was waiting at the office when Victoria got there in the morning.
He waited half an hour, and then he went to see her.
She was sitting at her desk reading the managers’ reports from each mill from the day before, when she was in London.
She looked at him and smiled, and then saw the look in his eyes.
She knew something was happening, like a tidal wave she couldn’t stop.
“Is something wrong?” she asked him.
“Probably not. It’s something right. I have to tell you something, Victoria.
Two things actually. The first thing is that I love you.
It shouldn’t have happened but it did. It can never be a reality and I know it.
I didn’t want to tell you and spoil everything.
I already loved you when I left for the war.
I didn’t even know you, but I fell in love with you that night when you cut your arm at the strike.
The whole time I was in Europe, at the Somme, in the trenches, all I wanted was to come back to you.
I thought of you every minute I was there. You kept me alive.
“Then I came back, and I came to my senses. I knew it was impossible. You got cut off by everyone you knew for marrying Bert. One of the richest men in England, but because he was an industrialist, they shut you out. And what am I? I was a foreman in one of his factories. I wasn’t even an industrialist, I was just a factory worker.
I didn’t call you when I got back because I knew it was impossible.
Then you showed up at the hospital, looking all beautiful, and bringing me food, and dragging me back to life.
You elevated me. You gave me a job I could never have gotten on my own, and you believed in me.
I’m not an administrator. I’m just a man who loves you.
I’m nobody. I don’t belong in your life.
I loved being in it, and being part of it and working with you.
But you can do all of this without me, better than I can.
You don’t need me. You just think you do.
“I want a real life. I want to go to sleep with you at night and wake up in the morning with you. I want to make love with you. I want everything you had with Bert, and you don’t want with me.
You’re right. I’m not good enough. I was living in a shack when you found me.
I have nothing to give you except my life and my heart, a guy from nowhere, from the slums, a coal miner’s son.
How would that sit with your aristocratic friends, if Bert wasn’t good enough for them?
I just want you to know, before I go, that I’m leaving because I love you, not because I don’t.
” He had poured out everything he’d felt for her and hidden for years.
It came out all at once, and it was both a heartbreak and a relief. He had to say it.
“The second thing I want to tell you is that I am leaving because your going to Oxford is crazy. You have an empire to run, a world to manage here. You can’t leave it unless you sell the whole empire, lock, stock, and barrel.
If I stay, you’ll go to Oxford, which makes no sense.
You have a responsibility to these people, and to yourself, and to Bert, because he gave it to you.
“If I leave, you won’t be able to run away and try to be a young girl again and go to Oxford.
The only way to make you stay is for me to go.
So I’m leaving, for your sake and the sake of these mills you own and have a responsibility to.
If we made a life together, I would carry all the weight you want.
I loved doing all this with you and for you.
You are the most remarkable person I have ever known.
But I’m leaving so you don’t go. You can’t.
My leaving is the right thing to do, on both counts.
I can’t sit here anymore, loving you deeply, wanting and watching you, like some lovesick boy.
I’m forty-two years old and you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.
I didn’t even know what love was until I met you.
Now I know. You were lucky enough to find Bert.
He was a great man, and the right one for you, and it was rotten luck that you lost him.
I hope you find someone else you can love, who’ll make a good life with you.
Because all this, the mills, the houses, it’s not worth anything if you don’t have someone to love and who loves you.
“You can’t run away forever because you’re afraid that someone else will die.
Chances are they won’t, or not for a long time.
So go find that guy, Victoria. You deserve someone who loves you.
It’s worth taking a chance for. And run these people and factories just the way you do.
You’re doing a great job. Better than anyone I know, man or woman.
Bert knew what he was doing when he left it all to you.
Now take good care of it, and yourself.”
Victoria had listened to every word Thor said, tears running down her cheeks, and she didn’t make a sound.
She didn’t reach out to him, or tell him not to go.
She was too afraid of what would happen if she did, that he would die like Bert and her father, and she couldn’t go through that again.
He took a last look at her, and walked out the door. She didn’t stop him, or say a word.
She knew what he was doing was right. Her place was here, with the mills Bert had left her.
She had tried to run away because she was too afraid to love Thor.
She loved him too, and she knew it. So she made him her administrator, thinking that way he wouldn’t leave.
And he just had. She sat at her desk without moving.
Her whole body was shaking. She locked her office door and cried for an hour, because she was too afraid to go after him and love him back.
She left her office then, and drove home to the house Bert had left her.
She lay on her bed and thought about Thor, and how brave he was to love her.
They were worlds apart, and they weren’t far apart at all.
She didn’t care that he’d been a foreman and was a coal miner’s son.
None of that mattered to her. She didn’t want a baby because she was afraid she might die too.
All her life she had been running away from death, instead of running toward love, and it had found her anyway.