A Mother's Love (15 page)

‘Oh, bother! Now that’s tiresome of her.’

‘What is?’

‘Alice – she says she has decided to visit her mother. She left just half an hour ago. She could have warned me.’

‘Will she be gone long?’

‘Returning tomorrow, it says here. Her mother lives in Stretford, and it is a long way for a woman to travel on her own during the evening.’

In the midst of his dismay, Matthew gave her a quizzical look. It was an odd thing for a woman of her expressed opinions to say, he thought, and saw through the chink she had unwittingly opened for him. She was clearly a woman to whom the old values still clung, who still felt vulnerable before the ruling of men, despite all she had said.

‘I’ll go,’ he said inadequately. He didn’t want to now, but knew he must.

She turned to him, a resolute look on her face as though she too realised the chink she had revealed in her armour and was ashamed of it, ‘No, now you’re here, you might as well stay. There are two lamb chops in the larder. Alice will not want one now. I’ll cook them for us. Sit down. There’s the Sunday paper for you to read while I’m busy.’ It was an order: Constance was once more in control of herself.

He did as he was told, watching her bustling about in the tiny kitchen off the main room. He took note of the room itself: age-darkened square-patterned wallpaper; a few photographs – her parents, perhaps – on an oak chest of drawers; two leatherette easy chairs that had seen better days; a luxurious potted fern in a tall green and slightly chipped jardiniere – at least the fern was well looked after; a small drop-leafed table; three upright chairs with badly worn and sunken leatherette seats; a thin rug with most of its pattern worn away by the shoes of a succession of previous tenants.

She came in, lifted a leaf of the table so that it would be large enough for the two of them and spread a cloth, disdaining his offer of help. After setting table mats, a condiment set and knives and forks on the table, she hurried out, then came in again with two steaming plates, each hand protected by a tea cloth.

They ate in silence – chops, mashed potatoes, cabbage that Matthew suspected had been warmed up from a previous meal, but covered with Simpson’s gravy – it all proved surprisingly appetising. It was the silence that was not enjoyable – oddly strained, not like the ease he had felt in the teashop. He was almost glad when he had finished, almost wished he hadn’t accepted her invitation.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said abruptly as he laid his knife and fork down on his empty plate. ‘I’m sorry there’s no pudding.’

She stood up and leaned over to take his plate. On impulse, he reached out and took a gentle hold of her wrist. It felt unexpectedly fragile.

‘There’s no need to hurry.’

It was all far too nervously hurried, and he wanted not to feel nervous, for her to feel at ease as she had been in the teashop. He wanted to say, ‘Let’s just sit and talk for a while,’ but she had already sat down again, his hand still on her wrist preventing her from moving any further back from him. And what he had said hadn’t come out as he had meant it; it sounded vaguely suggestive.

She was still so near – so near that if he leaned forward just a fraction their lips would have met. Something told him that if they did, she would not draw away. The green of her eyes was the colour of the ocean, seemed to be drowning him like an ocean. But he would swim … swim in her … He felt suddenly excited, reckless, his heart going like a steam hammer. He felt stifled by the sensation, but inside he was trembling.

Suddenly that fraction of space between them was no longer there. And she didn’t draw away. Her lips were warm, much softer than he’d imagined. He felt their warmth drive through his whole being, settle in his lower regions, and he knew she was as hungry for comfort as he was. The perfume from her fair frizzy hair was driving him almost beyond the edge of reason. He couldn’t think any more.

Together they rose and moved from the table, gripped by the embrace, the breath from her nostrils hot on his cheeks. He could hear it rasping in and out, and in between kisses, her hungry whispers: ‘I’ve never … Matthew … I’ve never …’

It didn’t matter. He wanted her. If this was her first time, it would be his too. He was a virgin. Nearly two years married and still a virgin. A kind of anger gripped him as he took her with him to the door he assumed was her bedroom. He had to have her, and to prove himself. And he knew she needed to prove herself too, that life was passing her by, and she needed to have something to make her human for a while.

If he was brutal in taking her, careless of her first cry of pain, she accepted it with voracious sighs, panting cries that mounted ever higher, until he wondered how they could both live through it to the end. Never had he known such ecstasy, such sensations. Then it was over.

Lying spent and breathless beside her, he heard her sigh, then her breathing began to slow down. He thought she slept as he too drifted into his exhausted sleep. When he awoke it was in the small hours to realise where he was, instantly ashamed of what he had done. He’d have to creep away from this iniquity. He began easing away, but his moving disturbed her.

‘Oh, Matthew,’ she sighed. ‘Oh, Matthew, my dearest.’

In an instant she was in his arms, her lips on his, her naked body pressed against his. Her breasts were so hard, brushing his chest with a life of their own. And he, may he burn in hell, felt himself again rising to her, was pressing himself into her, taking her with as much urgency as before, hearing her joyous cries – of pain and pleasure. And when it was over, they slept again, utterly spent.

The eleventh of July outside Strangeways Prison saw a huge gathering, which Matthew was later able to report numbered ten thousand, cramming the streets to welcome the release of Mr Hall. It ought to have been the most exhilarating moment Matthew would remember: the cheering, the thousands of women and not a few men booing authority, the pack, the swaying squash of the crowd, the released man being congratulated on his stance against authority, the knowledge that Mrs Pankhurst herself had been prepared to go to prison but that authority would have had its nose put out of joint imprisoning a woman of her middle-class calibre.

But it was not the most exhilarating of moments, for he’d already experienced that, and, God forgive him, now wished he hadn’t. He thought of Harriet. He had betrayed her and he could never tell her.

Constance had had plans. They would buy an engagement ring, make plans for their wedding day. This was on the day after her friend Alice had gone to visit her mother. They had eaten breakfast that morning, Constance with all the contentment of a woman assured of her future, he with a heart so sick he couldn’t touch a thing. She had been with him the whole of the next two days, but there was no more lovemaking now that Alice had returned, and he wouldn’t allow her to demean herself, he told her, by coming to his hotel room like a common kept woman.

He caught a train home without telling her, and all the way back to London he squirmed at what he had done to a woman professing to be so hardened, championing the rights of women to be equal to men, yet in a moment willing to give herself with such servility, no matter that she thought she’d been on the same footing as he in her decision. But she had still imagined it leading to marriage, to security, and he now felt a criminal to have treated her so. What would she do now? Worse, would she try to trace him? She knew the name of his journal. Harriet would find out. All for an irresponsible moment of desire. He had felt like a god; now he merely felt scared, juggling with questions and half-formed answers. What proof did she have? But then, what if he had got her with child? She would seek him out with that proof. He could deny it as his. But as the saying went, there is never smoke without fire. God, what a fool he had been! Why had he done it? But he knew why. Harriet, cold Harriet, had pushed him to it. Harriet … not cold, he hastily changed the thought, just not ready. He realised that he did love her, wondered how he’d cope if she found out. How could he have hurt her so?

He fought to dismiss it, tried to think instead of all the ideas he had gathered in Manchester for his journal before he had met Constance Milne-Pitford. The journal was obviously about to grow in stature. For the rest of the journey he frantically trained his thoughts on making plans for expanding it. There was a lot to do. By the time he reached home, he had begun to feel just a little better. Manchester was a long way from London. He’d been on the train four hours already with still a good couple of hours to go. Would a woman travel so far on her own? He remembered again the chink in Miss Milne-Pitford’s armour and began to feel a little safer. Manchester was behind him.

He’d make it up to Harriet. Perhaps one day she might overcome her fears, melt into his arms as Constance had done. There, at the very least, he had proved himself a man.

He wasn’t disappointed about the journal. For the rest of the year his office buzzed with burgeoning numbers of subscribers clamouring for copies that gave them far more information than any newspaper would. His two printing presses were working overtime, and he and Harriet hardly had time to stop for meals. Up at five-thirty each morning, paying Mrs Hardy overtime to look after Sara, they worked until late at night, Harriet at the compositor’s bench, her fingers permanently black, he working the presses, his arms aching and at times feeling ready to drop off; she collating, he stapling, stacking, arranging the distribution – and still the orders poured in.

To a large publisher, it would have been small beer, but to a one-man business, it was overwhelming. Harriet was his right hand, a tower of strength. He couldn’t ask more of her.

‘I must look for an assistant,’ he announced in October. ‘At least until the excitement subsides.’ That would not be for a long while yet, he hoped.

He found a young man named Leonard Hallet, spindly, bespectacled and fresh out of university, but with dreams of one day having his own journal or newspaper – he hadn’t decided yet, he said grandly. In the meantime he was happy to knuckle down with a will that spoke of a huge and abiding ambition.

The small shop area had a job to accommodate the three of them and the piles of journals awaiting despatch which lay stacked against the walls in the hallway. Harriet had to pick her way around them to get upstairs, and even the parlour housed parcels of paper for printing.

Matthew began to harbour thoughts of moving to larger premises – for the journal’s sake, he told himself – but in truth he was tired of the narrow streets, the boxlike room above the cramped printer’s shop, the smells of the East End: a mixture of soot, beer, stale cabbage water and sewage. It hung on one’s clothes, was carried about everywhere one went.

He was restless. Where he’d once revelled in seeking out the downtrodden wives of the East End, now the same old stories were becoming tedious; he had grown inured to it, like an experienced old soldier to dead and mutilated bodies. The family starving whilst its man drank away his wages; the pregnant young wife lifting a weight of scalding water in a tub, her baby due the next day; the hollow-eyed mother trying to protect her young from the nailing fists of her drunken husband; the girl forced on to the streets to keep herself alive; the elderly widow taken into the workhouse – all seemed commonplace. It had, he was ashamed to say, become boring.

He needed not only to expand but to seek new fields, to interview the women who really mattered: the middle-class champions of women’s enfranchisement who railed Parliament for non-action, made speeches to crowds in parks and wrote pamphlets on it all. He thought about Constance Milne-Pitford. He tried not to, but that was the sort of woman he admired, one with a latent strength of character within her. He had not fallen in love with Constance, but he certainly admired her greatly.

‘This place is too small for all this,’ he said as he relaxed one evening by the parlour fire lit early this year, October having come in quite chilly. ‘I’m wasting my time here.’ As Harriet’s grey eyes widened with fear, he laughed. ‘I mean, my sweet,
we
are wasting our time here. Sara’s two and a half. We will soon need a larger place anyway.’

‘But she’s in the other bedroom now, next to ours. It’s small, I know, but there’s still plenty of room. If we moved away, Mrs Hardy wouldn’t be around to keep an eye on her. I couldn’t help you.’

‘And what if the family grows larger?’ he queried. He still hoped that one day Harriet might overcome her incredible fear of the sexual side of marriage. One day they would – must – have more children. He yearned for that as much as anything. ‘I’d like to have a son or daughter of my own, for all I dearly love little Sara as if she were mine.’

He leaned forward in his chair to fondle the dark curly head bent over the doll in a crib that he’d bought her that week. Sara lifted her head and smiled in response, but lost her grip on the little doll so that it fell on to the rug. In a huff she turned and swept it up, then shook it with mock annoyance, glaring at it.

‘Oh, doddit! Dod-oo, naughty gel!’

Matthew smiled indulgently. He loved hearing her talk, stringing whole sentences together now. It was no longer Gan-gan for Grandma or Gan-gar for Grandpa, but the whole word, though she still had some trouble pronouncing ‘s’, which lent a certain appeal to her efforts.

‘Nec’ time me ’mack you ’ard!’ She threatened the doll, holding it close to her face to emphasise the scolding. ‘In dere, dilly cah!’ With this, she plonked the doll down into its crib.

Matthew’s amused smile turned to a frown. He’d heard her say this sort of thing before. A language of her own, he’d thought. Now the truth began to dawn on him.

‘Did you hear that, Harriet?’

She looked up from darning socks. Now that the business was doing well, a woman came in to clean and cook, but mending was still left to her to fit in when she could. ‘Hear what?’

‘What this child is saying.’

‘I take no notice of what she says. It’s just prattle.’

‘It’s not prattle – she’s swearing.’ He leaned forward and took a gentle hold of Sara’s shoulder, compelling her to turn to look at him. Picking the doll out of its crib, he held it up. ‘Sara, what is she?’