A Mother's Love (43 page)

Mostly it was frustration at attending lectures and swatting for exams at the end of an academic year when he could have been out in the world already proving himself. He detested the whole stuffy insularity of university. It wasn’t as if he had any interest in sports or an inclination to join discussion groups where no one saw him as anything special. Rag weeks were childish; the balls given on occasion were all very much of a muchness; lecturers were generally pompous, his fellow students generally boring, their talk incessantly of study, discussion groups, the next ball, girls. His lodgings were cold and uncomfortable, the lecture rooms, crowded, stifling and depressing, and he hated having to swat up during vacations.

To think that, with Grandfather’s backing, he might already have been on his way to becoming head of some department. Instead, here he was, still regarded as a lesser mortal, still looked down upon by his college peers, still like a little boy at school.

He had approached the old man, as he secretly called him, hoping he might sympathise and take him away from Oxford to find him some decent position in his estates business, of which he was still a partner, though retired from active participation. But while Henry Craig indulged his grandson in most things, this he wasn’t prepared to grant.

‘You’ll go further than I did, my boy,’ he said sagaciously. ‘I was, to some extent, a self-made man, on which account I am prepared to boast. It’s my ambition to see you go to the top, and Oxford will see to that. Stick at it, my boy, and who knows – politician, statesman – the world’s your oyster with an Oxford degree, James.’

James guessed that underlying his aging grandfather’s plans for him were the ones the old man’s son had thwarted, all that education flown out of the window on the wings of a foolhardy resolve to run a journal. The old boy couldn’t see that James himself had no interest in education beyond the wealth and prestige it could bring. Meanwhile he must suffer, spending years being subservient to others, before realising that wealth and prestige.

The war was now in its second year, and most young men of his age had joined up and gone off to see the world. Thoughts of following them came to him often. Though he was young at eighteen, Oxford would stand him in good stead to becoming an officer. None of your squaddy starts for an Oxford man. He could be something in the army. Then there was the gallantry, the romance of adventure, being in uniform with young women swooning to hang upon his arm. He wasn’t half bad looking – he’d cut a fine figure in officer’s full dress.

‘I’ve a good mind to join up,’ he announced grandly on one of his rare visits to his mother, ignoring his great-aunt’s disparaging glare across the Sunday tea table.

Sara eyed him with a look of not caring what he did. She’d become a beautiful young woman, he couldn’t deny, but so hoity-toity for one not much more than a working girl.

His mother, however, gave out with a small squeak of terror.

‘Jamie, don’t talk like that! I’ve lost so many I love. First your father. Then your grandmother. If anything happened to you, Jamie …’

‘Nothing’s going to happen to me,’ James mumbled, his mouth full. He wished she wouldn’t use that stupid childish name. ‘If I were to volunteer, I’d go straight in as an officer. University automatically makes me suitable material. I certainly don’t intend being one of the riff-raff.’

Harriet wasn’t listening, her lips trembling. ‘I couldn’t bear it if you should be killed. I should lose my mind.’

Her Aunt Sarah gave her a despairing look, half regretting the distinct lack of pity she felt. What a weak thing Harriet had turned out to be. Losing her mother had affected her more than the other members of the family, and for a time she had appeared to have lost all reason; had indeed become quite a burden.

Sarah, no longer strong herself, had felt considerably aged by the loss of Mary and for a long time after had found it difficult to cope with Harriet’s violent swings of mood. At times she had even feared for Harriet’s sanity, especially when she again turned to the bottle. It took all the go out of one of her years and at times she was left wondering just what she’d let herself in for.

Perhaps it was a mistake, but the house having gone to herself in Mary’s will, she’d vowed that Harriet would always have a roof over her head for as long as she needed it. Mary’s boys were content with that, having their own homes and families, the business their father had started continuing very well, even expanding under their guidance. Clara and Annie kept very quiet about things these days, but they did drop a hint that she could be making a rod for her own back. And perhaps they were right. She still wasn’t sure.

It had been hard, though it was the better solution for Harriet and Sara to continue on in the house – the place was too large for her anyway. With three flights of stairs to climb, she seldom made the upper floors and now had her bedroom at the back on the ground floor. Not that she wasn’t agile on the flat. She could still stroll in Victoria Park on a fine Sunday with the aid of a stick. But it was handy having them here – her great-niece’s salary more than helping to pay for things that were needed. As well as Mrs Thompson to do the cooking, they could afford a girl for the housework, and a woman who had some nursing skills, hired occasionally to see to Harriet in her more contrary moments.

Even Sara had remarked in her direct way, reminding her of herself once upon a time, that her mother was becoming more confused as the years went on. But it fluctuated. There were moments when Harriet could be lucid, quite logical, but others when one really did think the woman must be destined for the lunatic asylum.

Today, however, though she was on the verge of tears over James’s notion of going off to war, she was more or less herself.

‘Please – don’t do anything rash, Jamie,’ she was begging abjectly. ‘You have everything ahead of you at Oxford. Let someone else do the fighting.’

The news from the front was terrible. So many men were dying. The war, expected to end by Christmas, had been dragging on for eighteen months now, a bloody, deadly, to-and-fro tussle. A second Christmas had gone by and there was no sign of an end to the conflict.

‘You’re breaking my heart, surely you know that, Jamie?’

James gave a surreptitious glance at the clock on the mantelshelf. Perhaps in an hour he might extricate himself from these women, at least from his mother. His great-aunt looked peeved, his sister detached, as though both would be glad to see him take his leave.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said testily. ‘I can take care of myself. I know what I’m doing.’

But he had no idea what he was doing. He found that out soon after informing his tutors of his intention to ‘do his bit’, promising to resume his studies ‘when it is all over’. Glowing under acclaims of,
Well done!
and,
Go to it!
he packed and went off to enlist.

Officer’s college, however, proved to be as far from the freedom of university as a mole run from an eagle’s eyrie. James had had his sights set on gaining the dizzy heights of a crown on his shoulder, returning to civilian life eventually to be known to all as Major James Matthew Henry Craig, but now found those sights having to be set a good deal lower. Constantly bawled out, vociferously insulted, made to feel the lowest of the low, worse than the meanest private while being incongruously addressed as sir, there was certainly no sign on his horizon of the dizzy heights he had anticipated. And as for the crown on his shoulder, his final reward was two pips, no more.

He was given only minimal training, good men being needed urgently at the front. At the end of April 1916, James, now Lieutenant James Craig, came to say goodbye to his mother, his grip packed for France.

Harriet was inconsolable, her eyes haunted by visions of dead and rotting bodies in the mudholes of Flanders. That night, after she had clung to her Jamie with a grip strong enough almost to rip off his uniform as he said his farewells, refusing to let go of him until his great-aunt had to prise her palsied fingers loose, Harriet had to be physically restrained by her doctor from throwing herself out of the top-floor passage window to the concrete in the back garden below.

From the open window, her shrieks of protest rang out: ‘Let me die! I’ve nothing to live for! I want to die!’

The doctor’s advice was urgent but unwise. ‘You’ve your daughter. Think of her – how would she feel, left on her own without you?’

Back came the savage scream: ‘Her? I wish she was dead! I wish she’d died the day she was born.’

Looking on, Sara’s heart seemed to flicker out inside her, a black lump that she’d been foolish enough to think had a little spark still left in it, enough to light her way through life.

The black lump a weight in her breast, she turned her back on her mother. It was time to go her own way. And though she felt sorry to leave Great-Aunt Sarah, who obviously treasured her, perhaps needed her, she didn’t think she would bother to see her mother again.

For the first time in her life Sara felt free, able to breathe, be herself instead of forever walking on eggshells. Several times that week she went over that last scene, regretting the way in which she had walked out on her mother. Then she would recall the times over the years that she had been hurt by her, often for no obvious reason, often quite deliberately and with such hatred as to be almost unbelievable. Then her pricking conscience would smooth itself out as she gazed about her new flat, feeling immeasurably free.

Over the years she had saved little by little, being nowhere near as well paid as male reporters of the same standing. With her modest nest egg she found a small but nicely furnished two-room flat just off Holborn, only a stone’s throw from her office. Here she would be happy.

But if troubles were said never to come singly, heartaches most certainly came in pairs, for hardly had she adjusted to having dropped her bombshell on her mother than Jonathan dropped a bombshell on her.

Coming up behind her while she was busy at her desk to ask her how she was settling into her new home, he then remarked casually that on Friday she would be twenty-two. ‘Quite a woman now.’

Dumbfounded, she could only stare at him, so seldom did he come anywhere near her other than on a matter of work, and then with an uncomfortable atmosphere, present since that episode all of two years ago. She was even more surprised when he gave her an easy grin and suggested out of the blue that he might help her celebrate her birthday.

‘May be the last chance I’ll ever have,’ he had said meaningfully.

The ominous ring in that remark made her draw in a quick breath.

‘What are you saying?’ But she knew what he was saying. His narrow hazel eyes glinted.

‘They’re calling up all sorts these days.’

‘They’ve not …’

‘Not yet. But it is only a matter of time, I expect.’

‘You’re a newspaper editor. You’re valuable. They can’t …

‘Oh, they can. Though I might not wait for that. It depends.’

It was lightly said, with a shrug of the shoulders, and she couldn’t be sure whether it was meant just for effect, to amuse or anger her. On what did it depend?

‘Well?’ he prompted as she continued to stare up at him, unable to respond. ‘Are you going to let me help celebrate your birthday?’

‘I don’t …’ she began, confused, but he suddenly and unexpectedly put a finger to her lips. The thrill of the light touch, brief as it was, rippled through her, but even as she felt herself melt, she pulled herself together and said as calmly as she could, ‘Well, if it pleases you.’

‘It will please me very much,’ he said slowly, and with a slow smile, walked away, leaving her to seethe with conflicting emotions and uncertainties for the rest of the day, refusing to bow to the desire to go and confirm it with him all over again.

There was only the two of them. ‘My treat,’ he said as he helped her into the taxi. ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow …’ He broke off with a laugh, but she felt a prophetic shudder pass through her, and asked him not to say such things, at which he only laughed again.

The Café Royale was as opulent as ever it had been in peacetime. There were still evening top hats among the military scarlet and blue and bottle-green, the drab khaki of lesser ranks of course banished to pubs and cheap eating places. But for the abundance of uniforms, there might never have been a war going on, it was all so gay and carefree.

The brightness of the huge candelabras above the diners made the sheen of her lilac ankle-length dress glow softly, and brought auburn glints to the darkness of her hair, recently restyled in the new fashion, cut shorter at the sides, the rest caught into a soft chignon.

Amid the chatter, she and Jonathan enjoyed the best of the Café Royale’s offerings, which felt sinful when they knew ships were being blockaded to such an extent that shortages were rife, and rationing ineffectual.

She mentioned it as a small but beautifully decorated birthday cake was brought to the table on Jonathan’s orders. The way he looked at her made her glow for all she tried not to. She was unable to abandon herself to enjoyment of the moment, partly from reawakened wariness at the love glowing there in his eyes, partly because she heard again those words: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,’ seeing them reflected behind his regard, the sense of foreboding so strong that it took all her effort to shrug it off. She experienced such churned-up emotions that enjoying her cake, after it had been ceremoniously cut and served for her by a liveried waiter, was virtually impossible.

Despite it all, conversation did manage to flow between them for the first time in ages. Aware that he could be stolen away at any time by those conducting this war, she felt a need to take in both hands what was here while it lasted.

For once the compelling urge to deny the shiver of expectancy she felt as she looked across the table at him did not present itself. He had never looked so handsome. All else was forgotten; she might never have had a past. No thoughts of Matthew came to haunt her, that old love was dead and buried all so long ago. Sara could see only Jonathan, feel only the glow inside her. The glow lasted all the way through the meal, and continued all the way home, until the taxi drew up outside her flat.