A Mother's Love (29 page)

Harriet was nervy these days, easily upset. Constantly in the care of Dr Horder, she had never really got over losing her son in childbirth. After all these years she still harped on it whenever things weren’t going her way. ‘I feel so deprived … I feel so guilty … I should have given you another son … What did I ever do wrong to deserve that?’ and so on and so on. Undoubtedly, Harriet’s health did not equip her to be a welcoming hostess.

Matthew dismissed the excuse from his mind, coming back to his father’s question. ‘My accountant is good enough for my purposes.’

‘Good enough’s not good enough, son,’ Henry rumbled. ‘If you want to go big with that journal of yours, you’ve got to have the
best
.’

‘He’s as good as I can afford at the moment.’

Henry Craig shook his head. ‘You must do better than that. You need the best, not as good as. A good accountant is an asset to you as you expand. And another thing – if you can see your way clear at some future stage to buying that house of yours, do it! It never was any good paying rent. Doesn’t get you anywhere. But you can’t go wrong with a house in the bank. Once it’s yours, you’ve got collateral – people will back you with houses in the bank. Take my advice. And something else …’ He took a large swig of his brandy. ‘That journal of yours. Wouldn’t hurt to go public. Have a few shareholders financing it. Best way.’

Matthew’s smile was faintly derisive. His father was full of advice, but there was never so much as a hint of offering any help should things go wrong. Even now, as he spoke so grandly of shareholders, and going public, there was no suggestion of himself investing in it for a head start. Matthew bore him no grudge, but he sometimes wished …

‘I’ll think about it.’ Non-committal, he drained his brandy glass. ‘Fancy another one?’

‘No. Think I’m ready to retire. Early start back tomorrow. Sunday trains to the coast are the very devil. Can take hours.’

He rose and shook hands as Matthew got up, again reminding him to think over what he’d said, which Matthew promised he would.

In fact, there seemed to be little thinking to be done. Things couldn’t have looked more rosy for him. The suffragettes, a word coined by the newspapers and now becoming standard to describe the militant women who aimed stones through MPs’ windows and caused disruption at every one of their meetings, had admittedly made small headway, except to get themselves notorious for their violence. What these women did, however, made lesser women proud to be female, and it was these who bought the
Freewoman
and any other such journal they could lay their hands on.

Matthew was beginning seriously to consider moving into the City to be more accessible to news. He wallowed in visions of offices off Fleet Street, a team of reporters, a flock of office staff, his old premises retained solely for printing. There was no limit to what could be done – if one had the money. And who knew, as time went on, his father might be persuaded to invest. Meanwhile, another visit to the bank would do no harm. He was having no difficulty at all in paying back his earlier loan, proving he was a safe bet. He had every confidence that they would advance him enough for a more centrally situated office, perhaps in a year’s time.

The earlier panic over Jack Wilson’s heart had been another false alarm. The family had at that time once more found him sitting up in bed, to some extent recovered. With his usual bluff outlook on life, he’d laughed away their concern and days later was up on his feet, although most of his time was spent taking things easy in an armchair by an especially built fire to keep him warm, despite the October weather being unseasonably mild.

The summons six weeks later, however, was no false alarm. This time he did not laugh it off, or even smile. He lay inert and unseeing as they crept into his room in twos and threes so as not to create too great a strain on him. It didn’t matter; Jack Wilson was beyond caring about strain. He was on the verge of not caring any more about this world.

Hastily brought into the room to try to communicate with him one last time before he left them forever, they gathered about him in a ring of hushed sorrow, Sara included now that she was twelve.

Beside him, her grandmother sat holding his hand. Beside her stood Aunt Clara, her round face creased in anguish. On the other side sat her mother, who had managed, Sara noticed, to get in first, leaving Aunt Annie to stand behind her. The circumstances were too grave for Annie to start making a fuss, which she would normally have done.

Sara stood nearer the foot of the bed, holding tightly on to Great-Aunt Sarah’s hand. It was the first time she had witnessed death. She’d witnessed the results of it, of course, the weeping, the stoic words of comfort, the vicar in church echoing his beliefs in life everlasting. But this life was not ever-lasting, as Sara could see. She was old enough now to understand a lot more, and it tore at her heart to see the grandfather who used to throw her up in the air when she’d been smaller, and lumber around chasing her through his house, now so still but for the shallow breathing – so shallow that it hardly seemed enough to keep him alive, decreasing as the moments ticked by until it seemed only to be going out in small puffs with nothing at all coming in.

So quiet he lay that she didn’t know he had gone until her grandmother gave a tiny, hardly audible, ‘No.’ Her uncles John and George moved hastily to comfort her while their wives stood back quietly to leave the way clear for the more immediate members of the family to show their grief with a kiss upon the cooling cheeks.

Her aunts had handkerchiefs clamped to their faces to smother the sounds of weeping, and even their husbands sniffed back tears for a man who’d been most respected and a friend to everyone.

Sara felt she too should be crying, if only as a mark of her own love, but she couldn’t. She had loved her grandfather dearly. Still did. Yet tears refused to come. There was just an empty feeling: the same emptiness she’d felt so many times since the day her mother had turned on her with her cruel truths. Though this time the bitter feeling that usually went with it didn’t accompany the emptiness, and she supposed that was because of love and not hurt.

Her mother was crying for all she was worth, her head buried in Matthew’s shoulder. Sara glanced at him. A thin rivulet had travelled down each cheek and into his moustache, though he didn’t appear to be crying as such. He and Grandfather had grown close. Sara guessed he missed him. She turned away and looked again on the heavy features of her grandfather, now serene in death. She wanted so much to cry but though the tears reached her throat they refused to go any further. All it did was to make her throat ache.

‘Come, child.’ Great-Aunt Sarah took her shoulders and gently moved her away. ‘This is no place for you.’

Unresisting, Sara let her guide her out of the room, the house already seeming empty. She wondered what her grandmother would do with no one but her staff here. Uncle George, the last to leave home, had married two years ago; he and his wife Irene now had a baby girl named Lucy.

Sara thought of her grandmother. ‘She’ll be so lonely in this big house,’ she said, but her great-aunt smiled.

‘I’ll be coming to live with her,’ she said quietly as they went downstairs to the parlour. Outside, November was all bleak.

The house echoed to sounds of unrestrained sobbing. Below stairs, the staff kept out of the way. In the old nursery, Sara, thirteen the week before, on the fourteenth of April, put a protective arm about a tearful James as they listened to the argument from her mother’s bedroom below. Matthew, who seldom raised his voice, raised it now above the sound of weeping.

‘He is not your
baby
! The boy’s nine years old!’

Harriet’s voice was pleading. ‘But he’s not strong. You only have to look at him to see that.’

‘He’s strong enough. Dr Horder can find nothing wrong with him. Admittedly he’s thin, fair-skinned. In that he is like me. I am strong enough, and so is he. He’ll have a wonderful time there.’

‘You can’t send him away! You can’t!’

‘If he’s to be prepared for public school, we must. It isn’t so far away. He’ll be home at weekends. For his own sake he must have an education worthy of him.’

‘But you hated public school. You told me yourself how you were treated there. You don’t want that for Jamie, do you?’

‘Not all public schools are like the one I went to. I shall choose carefully when the time comes. Meanwhile … You can’t have him clinging to your skirts forever. You’ll have him here with you until September.’

Her mother’s voice was high-pitched with desperation. ‘If you send him away, I’ll have no one to love. No one.’

‘You have me.’ The tone moderated with an effort. ‘You have Sara.’

‘I don’t want
her
! I want Jamie. Oh, please, Matthew.’

‘Sara’s almost a young lady. She’ll be a friend to you.’

‘
Friend!
’ In her room, Sara cringed from the loathing in the tone. ‘I don’t want
her.
I’ve never wanted …’

Here it came, the hatred that after all these years Sara was still unable to truly understand. But Matthew cut the vituperation short.

‘There’s no point your going on this way, Harriet. James goes to Forest Hall in September. I’ve been delaying because you had such a traumatic time over your father’s death. But it has been five months now, and James’s education cannot be delayed much longer.’

The woman’s voice had become petulant. ‘Anyway, how can he go? You have to have his name down for years for decent prep schools like that.’

‘It’s been down since we moved here.’

‘You never told me.’ She sounded aghast, but Matthew’s tone came as firm as ever.

‘It was mentioned, but I never considered it an issue. I assumed you’d be glad for him to have the best education our money could buy when the time came. Surely you want him as decently educated as others of our standing?’

‘But you never told me! How could you not tell me?’

‘I’ve spoken about it often enough, but you’ve always shied away – clinging to him. Of course it’ll be something of a wrench to you. It would be unnatural if it wasn’t. I therefore thought it better not to refer to it too often until absolutely necessary. But it’s now becoming absolutely necessary. I know it distresses you, Harriet. I know how strong is a mother’s love, but you must be practical. We have to give James a chance to enjoy a first-class education.’

The argument was proving useless, her mother’s wails sounding as loud as ever.

‘You’re breaking my heart. If you send him away, I’ll die!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Harriet.’ The irritation in Matthew’s voice resounded in Sara’s straining ears but her mother seemed deaf to it.

‘I couldn’t live without him. I shall die of a broken heart!’

‘Now you’re being bloody melodramatic’

His voice was loud with anger. In her room, Sara hugged Jamie to her to quiet his whimpering as Matthew continued.

‘There’s no point discussing this with you, Harriet. There’s seldom much point discussing
anything
with you. When you’re not drinking this stuff …’ Sara heard the loud thump of a tumbler being slammed down, which she imagined he had snatched from her mother’s hand. ‘… you’re too distraught to be reasoned with. When you are drinking it, you have no idea what anyone is saying to you. You’re in no fit state to make decisions of any sort. That’s the reason I haven’t consulted you before now, Harriet. But I am telling you. After the summer break, James will not be going back to that common or garden school around the corner. As of September he will be properly educated with boys of his own class, and with the journal doing so well, I for one shall not baulk at the fee.’

Her mother’s cry rose, frantic and distraught. ‘I won’t have you do this to me, Matthew. I won’t have it!’

‘It’s done. And there’s an end to it. Now dry your eyes and try to accept the fact that James is no longer a baby. That he will begin to learn to grow up. And try to leave that stuff alone!’

Sara heard the door open, then slam. Matthew’s swift footsteps pounded on the carpet runner of the passage below and on down the stairs to the hall. She heard him calling for Seaforth. Moments later came the distant slam of the front door. All that could be heard was her mother’s muffled weeping, destined to go on forever by its sound.

It was left to her to soothe Jamie as he whimpered that he wasn’t so sure he wanted to go away to school after all.

‘Daddy did at your age,’ she told him, compelling herself to refer to the name she had long ago lost pleasure in using as she tried to coax him to believe he would grow to like being away from home.

She knew that the main reason behind his father’s decision was to prevent the boy being smothered by his mother. She wondered, though, if it wasn’t perhaps nearer the truth that Jamie had taken much of Matthew’s place in his mother’s heart; that Matthew shared with her the bitter conviction of having been locked out. If that was so, he at least had the remedy of sending Jamie away. But what remedy did she have?

It had become unbearable at home. Now that Jamie had gone, Sara wished she too was at boarding school, but girls were not considered so important, unless perhaps in really upper-class families, and hers was far from upper-class, for all that Matthew’s journal provided them with luxuries.

She dreaded coming home after school. Her mother hardly left her room these days, and Matthew spent his time at home brooding in his study or in the drawing room. Meals were taken in silence, with only him and herself at the table, he trying to be jolly, she not knowing these days what to say to him. At thirteen she had reached an age where she felt she had nothing in common with adults. And yet at times her mind already harboured adult thoughts.

It wasn’t only her mind maturing, but her body too. The budding breasts of which she had become aware this summer had become more than buds. As her waist had slimmed, her hips had widened, and often she’d catch sight of Matthew’s gentle brown eyes wandering over her.

If he saw her noticing, he would look away quickly. But it wasn’t his regard, or the hastily averted eyes, so much as the way the fair skin of his cheeks would flush. It embarrassed her, yet at the same time made her feel, in a way, loved. Above all else, Sara wanted so to be loved, and yet … she felt uncomfortable under his glances.