A Mother's Love (38 page)

Grandmother was sitting on an upright chair, unable to cope with lower easy chairs since her stroke had made it hard to rise without assistance. She smiled tremulously at her granddaughter, her voice hoarse with pride. ‘I think you have done remarkably, Sara, being even taken on – a woman. So brave. But with all those men, are you sure you know what you’re doing, dear?’

‘It’s what I wanted.’ Sara sat near the window and stared down into the sunlit street. She was exhausted. The newsroom had been like a madhouse, with everyone talking at once – not like the sedate offices of the
Freewoman.
And that man watching her – it had made her uneasy in case she made a fool of herself. Arrogant man, he hadn’t even acknowledged her when she looked straight at him. Why should she have been first to smile, submissively? She’d need to be on her toes at all times to prove herself, if only to him. Then she wondered why she cared.

‘Well, I’m glad they thought you good enough,’ Great-Aunt Sarah was saying in her sharp way. ‘Perhaps it’ll make your mother feel a little better about it all – more able to face the world again.’

‘Where is she?’

‘In her room, having a little sleep,’ Mary said quietly.

‘But it’s mid-morning. I thought she would be down here.’

Sarah gave a humph sound, but Mary’s smooth, stroke-warped face twisted even more in a maternal smile. ‘Your poor dear mother. It will take her years to get over her loss – double loss – losing her husband and then everything he had. She was never a strong girl.’

‘She hasn’t been …’ Sara wanted to ask if her mother had been drinking, but thought better of it.

It had become steadily worse these last months. Ellen – who had stayed on a tiny wage long after the other staff had been dismissed until finally she had to go, she too needing to live – would come down from Mother’s room, her plain face as long as a horse’s, to say, ‘Madam’s not feeling herself,’ meaning that Mother had probably drunk half a bottle of brandy and was lying supine on her bed. To try and manoeuvre her to a more comfortable position was like handling a rag doll, her body worse than limp. The smell of alcohol had come to associate itself in Sara’s mind with all that was unhealthy, and these days made her nauseous even when not connected with her mother. She had come to dread coming home, especially after Ellen left, tearfully promising to keep in touch, and she had to manage Mother alone.

There were times when her mother, in a drunken stupor, would thrash out at her, arms weaving as she spat hatred; but at other times she would throw them about her neck, hardly knowing who she was, tears streaming down her face as she called Matthew’s name, begging Sara to lie down beside her, keep her company until she fell asleep. Sara would steel herself to lie beside the drunken heap, after a while edging herself off the bed to creep away. Sometimes her mother would feel her move and cling convulsively to her in her sleep, preventing her from leaving until much later. Overwhelmed by the brandy fumes, Sara would fight to control her heaving stomach, counting the minutes until she could finally extricate herself.

At times like these, she would stand at the door looking back at her mother and wonder how such a lovely woman could have come to this. Love and pity would flow over her for the wreck life had made, and she would vow to do all she could to bring her mother back to her old self.

Now she looked bleakly at Great-Aunt Sarah, whose stiff face told all.

‘I’ll pay for whatever she’s had put on your account out of my first week’s wage,’ was all she could say, and received a curt nod.

Working on the
Graphic
was indeed not at all like working on the
Freewoman.
There, in secure and orderly surroundings, Sara had been under Matthew’s gentle eye, with him ready to show, guide, back her up.

The eye of Jonathan Ward was neither gentle nor guiding. If he was not ignoring her, he was finding fault. Yet she couldn’t understand why. She had always been bright, quick at picking things up. Matthew had found joy in complimenting her on how quickly she fell into anything that was explained to her, and it hadn’t just been because he’d been her father – or rather her stepfather. It hadn’t been because they’d been so close, two people in need of a loving relationship. She had really been quick to learn. She was still quick to learn.

Even so, her first six months were spent doing nothing more than running about the office, making tea and taking messages. Allowed to do a little filing at the end of that time, she did it without mistakes, neatly and efficiently. She would often become aware of Jonathan Ward – Mr Ward, as she was expected to call him, for all he was only a few years older than her – of his eyes following her as she moved about her duties. Should she turn suddenly to meet his look, he’d glance quickly away and pretend to be doing something else.

It wasn’t shyness, that she had already deduced. Jonathan Ward was far from a shy person; was in fact very certain of himself, only too aware of his good looks in her estimation.

She had to admit he was very good-looking: a little taller than herself, relatively broad-shouldered, and narrow-waisted with slender hips that gave him an easy grace as he moved. Graceful movements, yet there was masculinity in his dark, lean visage, in the strong jaw and firm mouth that hinted at a purposefulness of will. A man to turn women’s heads, she thought but as she suspected that he knew it, she wasn’t prepared to have her head turned by him. Too good-looking for his own good, Great Aunt Sarah would have said. So she spent her time being as formal with him as she could, trying to be as polite as possible without demeaning herself when he found fault, obviously not disposed to having a woman on the
Graphic
, even in her humble capacity.

As time went on, she was occasionally expected to do copying on the great cumbersome typewriter, often from illegible notes the reporters flung at her, everything to be got out at top speed to catch some deadline. She made few mistakes, but when she did, fell under the stinging sarcasm of the News Editor. She came to hate that voice for all its attractive resonant quality; came also to a stubborn resolve to prove herself, to stand up to him no matter what.

She was sure that it was through this determination not to put a foot wrong that she came to the attention of Mr Mackenzie himself. A little short of a year after commencing on the
Graphic
, she found herself standing before the great man’s desk in his large, heavily furnished office.

Fred Mackenzie presented a daunting figure. Large-featured, huge-nosed, jut-chinned, with the stature of an elephant and a voice that enveloped the whole office, he sat behind his spacious desk, glared at the slender girl standing there and bellowed, ‘Always thought it was a mistake employing a woman. Sit down! I’ve something to say.’

Five minutes later, Sara emerged somewhat punch-drunk from the interview, Mackenzie’s voice still ringing in her ears. Somehow she got herself back to her typewriter and sat down, staring at the ungainly machine. She smiled grimly at the thing. After the effort she’d put in – a year proving herself as good as the men around her …

She became aware of someone standing behind her, and swung round to face the slim but well-proportioned figure of Jonathan Ward. His hazel eyes probing, Sara met them challengingly, no longer overawed by him after her meeting with the great Fred Mackenzie.

‘No thanks to you,’ she said evenly, ‘I’ve been promoted.’

‘I knew you’d be,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve seen it coming for a long time.’

She stared in disbelief. ‘You mean you knew? You approve?’

‘No, I don’t approve. I think women serve better in the home, not muscling in on a man’s world. Like those daft suffragettes who think that getting noticed by causing riots’ll get ’em what they want, even though they’ve called a truce.’

In the autumn of 1910, following Black Friday, the eighteenth of November, when there had been a bloody battle between the police and three hundred women, with more than a hundred and fifty women beaten up, in some cases sexually assaulted, a truce had been called. Now everyone was waiting to see what the government came up with.

Sara looked up at Jonathan with an arid stare, ready to defend her sex.

‘Mr Mackenzie told me he has me in mind for something more than just playing little woman,’ she said coldly. ‘He mentioned sending me out on assignment to see how I do. And I shan’t disappoint him.’

Jonathan nodded, exploring his back teeth with his tongue behind closed lips, an action betraying derision.

‘Out there,’ he said slowly, ‘it’s another world. A man’s world. A newspaperman’s world. It’s not kind to pretentious young women.’

‘I shall manage,’ Sara said haughtily, busying herself tidying a stack of foolscap.

She felt rather than saw him grin. ‘You’re not a suffragette, you know. They’ve got each other to cling to when it comes to the dirty bits. You’ll be on your own. Among men who don’t pull their punches. Then, my dear, I can see this young lady dissolving in a flood of indignant female tears. That won’t get you anywhere either.’

Sara stopped tidying and turned squarely to face him, head up, blue eyes dry as the Sahara, cold as Siberia.

‘I’ve never cried in my life.’

‘Never?’ The grin hadn’t changed.

‘The father I loved with all my heart … I didn’t cry at his graveside. I can’t cry.’

There were no tears even now at the thought of that beloved, gentle man, lost to her forever. Her throat clenching up strangled any tear there might have been. ‘I shall never cry as long as I live.’

For a moment, Jonathan looked as though he was about to make some acid retort, but instead he frowned, then walked away, leaving her staring narrowly after him, unbowed by Jonathan Ward’s opinion of women.

In fact she suspected him of being secretly cowed by them. For all his pretended arrogance, watching him in his more unguarded moments, she was sure it was more pretence than anything.

There were times when, lost in thought over something he was writing, those tight cynical lips softening a little, he promoted in her a tiny ripple of tenderness, a sensation she immediately thrust away as she remembered Matthew, his love, his gentleness towards her, all women. Jonathan was never gentle, outwardly. Yet there were times …

It was December. She had been with the paper for eighteen months, and felt now that she belonged. In just over four months she would be eighteen, a young women in possession of herself, knowing from the way her male colleagues glanced at her that she could turn the head of every one of them if she so wished, but at the same time could take care of herself with a look should any of them overstep the boundary.

Mackenzie now treated her like some novelty prize; Jonathan still with a deal of scepticism, though she was sure he’d been instrumental in getting her promotion – perhaps if only to see how she would cope, even to watch her squirm. She had scotched his cynicism by coping very well these last six months, without a single noticeable wriggle for his satisfaction. Inside she squirmed a great deal, often thinking she must have been mad to want to tackle a man’s world head on.

Last July she had again stood in Mackenzie’s office, trying not to show how she quaked in her shoes, to hear him demand if she was ready to put her money where her mouth was.

‘You’ve been harping enough about showing us what you can do.’ His words thundering at her had made her blink, wondering how her most secret wish had got to his ears. ‘So I’m giving you a chance to prove it. I’m sending you out on an assignment. Let’s see how you cope.’

It was a challenge – not a show of faith in her as an asset to the paper, more a gauntlet thrown down for her to pick up. The gleam in Mackenzie’s large faded blue eyes seemed to imply that he knew she would never dare to rise to it.

The same sentiment had been mirrored in Jonathan’s narrow hazel eyes as he stood beside her later, making her suspect that he and Mackenzie had been in cahoots with each other. She had felt angry, and vowed never to let herself down as she went off on that very first assignment.

Fortunately it was a gentle one – they had spared her that much – covering a small charity garden fete given near St Pancras by a female group of Women’s Enfranchise sympathisers. Perhaps Mackenzie and Jonathan had thought it was going too far to throw her in the deep end, though she’d felt no gratitude for that, only a fierce determination to win her spurs. She’d give them gauntlet!

And she had; bringing back a well-constructed, lively story that made Mackenzie smile, though she didn’t know that, since he did it behind the closed door of his office. She only knew that he began regularly to send her to cover similar gentle and feminine stories. In this way, her taste for reporting had grown, and her ambitions along with it.

Jonathan often eyed her with a look she couldn’t quite define. Admiration? Frustration? She couldn’t tell from those eyes of his, though the lips, twisting slightly as his tongue explored his strong molars in that familiar cynical habit of his, betrayed his thoughts on the woman who dared to consider herself on a par with the men she worked with. Yet lately she had felt that he was planning something for her.

She found out just what he was planning five days after her eighteenth birthday. Her six months of successfully covering one story after another, proving that women weren’t such a liability as men imagined, had encouraged her employers to take on two more women, one for mundane filing, the other for general running about after the male staff. Sara felt sorry for them; inwardly seethed that they should be looked upon as not bright enough for anything better; felt humiliated on their behalf; yet could not voice her feelings lest her own – for a female – exalted position be put at risk. She seethed even more when coming in at seven that Monday morning, she found a note on her desk.

‘Sara. Liverpool Street station. Fast. Everyone here otherwise occupied. Take a cab. Ron Duffy too for photos. Someone’s just reported trouble there. Knives used. Be quick. See what you can get.’

The note was in Jonathan’s scrawled handwriting, though there was no sign of the man himself. Her first thought was of a joke on her. To throw her into the bear pit – a woman of tender years asked to jostle with seasoned male reporters – it had to be a joke. But she could not prove it, so she snatched up the note and found Duffy, a small, wiry man who took nothing as a joke, who grabbed for his camera and paraphernalia and ran out to find a taxi.