A Mother's Love (44 page)

He had obviously defined her mood. As she made to leave, he leaned forward and lightly kissed her cheek. Taken off guard, she forgot to draw back and, heartened by what he saw as a willingness to be kissed more intimately, he drew her to him, his mouth on hers.

Through the kiss, she heard him say, ‘Marry me,’ the champagne and brandy they had drunk in celebration of her birthday faintly sweet on his breath.

It was the words that broke the spell. Pulling back, she looked at him from arm’s length.

‘What?’ It was as sharply said as if she had been insulted. She hadn’t meant it to sound that sharp.

Jonathan’s face went bleak. His words came weighted, challenging.

‘I said, marry me.’

‘I can’t do that.’ How could she have said that when it was all she wanted in the world at this moment?

‘Why not?’ The sharpness of the question made her start.

‘You’ve never proposed to me before.’

‘I’m proposing now.’ He made an attempt to draw her back to him, but her body had grown taut, the defences she no longer understood already up, fear already raising its ugly head – fear and guilt. All these years she had known him she had never once seen him unsure, but here he was, gauche, clumsy, his words far too rapid.

‘I love you, Sara. You’ve known that for years. But you’re always so frigid … I’m wary to get too near you lest I frighten you off. I know you love me. I know it. Why do you hide it? Sara, I know you’re not happy. If you marry me, I promise I’ll make you happy.’

It was like listening to a melodrama being played out on a stage. It all sounded so unreal.

‘I can’t, Jonathan.’

She needed time. It was true she did love him, yet what if … The old barrier formed before her eyes. What if she gave her soul to this man, as she’d once done to Matthew, only to see it ripped apart as once before it had been ripped apart, leaving her naked and ashamed? That fear would never go, no matter how long he gave her. That invisible barrier, that old fear, that ache of love dismissed, the look of revulsion on someone’s face … No, she couldn’t suffer that again.

‘I can’t. You don’t understand.’

His hazel eyes had darkened. ‘What don’t I understand? Drop me a clue, Sara, as to what I’m supposed to understand. I’m not given to pleading, even on a thing like this. I never thought I’d be asking any woman to marry me. Now I
am
asking you to be my wife. Tell me, what is it I am expected not to understand about that?’

‘What about my job?’

It sounded so silly. But it was the only means of escape – a way out of the real reason behind her refusal.

‘What about your
job
?’ The question held a note of incredulity.

‘Married women can’t work on newspapers. I shall be dismissed.’

‘You’ll be married to me. You won’t need to work.’

‘It’s my life …’ In the front the cab driver was beginning to look impatient at this delay to receiving his fare, the engine already switched off.

‘Your
life?
’ Jonathan’s lean face darkened with incomprehension.

‘It’s …’

‘
I
shall be your life, Sara.’

‘Is that what you’ll be – my life? What about me?’ Something inside her was crying,
Matthew was your life. He destroyed it, left you to go on loving him, vowing no other man would take his place. What of that vow now?

‘I’ve a career …’

‘Damn your career! Just be a woman, for God’s sake! Just be mine – my wife …’

She was angry, glad to be angry. ‘How dare you! How dare you take away my choice to be myself – what you as a man take for granted!’

It was a lie, this anger. It was an excuse. Did she really want to be angry, to have this being inside her taking everything away from her just as her heart needed to go out to someone?

Oh, Matthew, let me go
, cried that anger.
What allegiance do you still expect of me after all this time? I so loved you but it was so long ago.
Anger was the only means of justifying that thing binding her to an old dead vow. How could she explain it to Jonathan when she couldn’t explain it to herself?

She saw him slump a little. The next second he was himself again, his reaction typical, full of cynicism, his words searing into her brain.

‘I’m sorry, Sara. Sorry I bothered you. No, you go on with your career, my dear – see if it brings you happiness. I hope it does, for your sake. But there’ll come a time … What is it, we reap what we sow? Something like that.’ He gave a hard little laugh. ‘You should buy yourself a cat, Sara – to keep you warm in your old age.’

Before she knew what was happening, he had leaned across her and opened the taxicab door. The next thing she knew, she was standing on the pavement, watching the cab drive off with Jonathan sitting back in his seat. He didn’t look round.

On Monday, Sara went into his office to find him not there. Someone – she was so stunned, she couldn’t recall who it was, but she thought it was Duffy – said that he had enlisted that morning and wouldn’t be back. The last three words rang like a dire prophesy. She heard them as if from a great distance, forced a shrug for the benefit of those with whom she worked, and went to her desk to resume her morning tasks. He hadn’t even said goodbye.

Mackenzie had been brought out of retirement. Taking up his place behind the desk Jonathan had used for so short a time, he looked upon Sara with a speculative eye.

Those the war had left behind to carry on were either approaching his sixty-five years, were sickly or mere youths. Sara, although a woman, filled the gap and, for the first time ever, was proving of extreme value in the absence of good men.

At last Sara knew her own worth. Gone were the sidelong smirks from male staff, the pretence of putting up with her in their midst, her ideas looked upon as interference in the decisions of men; at best being ignored, at worst, being treated as an interloper into their domain.

With so many men conscripted, and the death toll mounting daily (though the government request to keep down the numbers reported had been honoured to some extent by all newspapers – for the good of morale), women were needed in every workplace. This necessity was still largely expressed in the same vein as the idea that a woman was needed at home by her man, which was the way Sara saw Mackenzie’s acceptance of her worth: patronising, his welcome too exaggerated. It irked. But there were now women in every sort of job: at munitions factories doing the work of men; working as ticket collectors on trams and buses and as guards on railway stations; driving lorries and ambulances; sweeping the streets. Many were even becoming journalists and reporters like herself. One London paper had a woman sub-editor. And they were still able to look after their children and homes when their work was done – something no man had ever been capable of.

For her part, Sara threw herself into her work, if only to fill the emptiness of Jonathan’s leaving. It felt like losing Matthew all over again. Yet in a way it was not. This time there was not the sense of finality, only the
fear
of finality; a formless fear, unreal yet real – she didn’t know what to call it except that it was there – all the time. And love … she was sure it was love, but now it was too late for anything to be done about it.

Yet could something be done? There was a need to compensate for the guilt building inside her that she had sent him away. If she could be nearer to those who had gone off to fight, maybe to share some of the burden Jonathan had taken up, the guilt might lessen a little.

On the strength of this, Sara went to Mackenzie, looked into those tired, rheumy eyes, and requested – no, insisted – she be allowed to cover the stories of those wounded being brought home from France. In some part this would help assuage the guilt.

‘I could bring you the human angle,’ she argued. ‘A woman’s view of what they’re going through and how they are bearing up.’

‘Not a sight for a woman,’ Mackenzie said wearily. He didn’t want to be hassled. He had been enjoying his retirement, what there had been of it, even though he’d missed the comradeship, the special bond with his colleagues in newspapers. When the Managing Director had begged practically on his knees for him to fill the gap, what could he say? He liked being back in the swim, but it was telling on him, particularly the long hours, which any younger man would hardly have noticed. Added to that was the knowledge that he had been retired as too old to continue, then, like an old horse, had been put back into harness because the young colt had kicked over the traces.

‘Nurses see sights like that every day,’ Sara said obdurately.

Mackenzie sighed. ‘They’re trained for it. You’re not.’

‘Why should you worry? You’ll get a better story out of me than from the old men we have working for us, or these brash youngsters.’ She used the ‘us’ with conviction. Her years on the
Graphic
had made her feel as though it was almost hers.

Mackenzie was well aware of the pitiful state of his staff. He gave in as Sara continued to badger him; gave in because he had no fight left in him.

He had come to respect this headstrong young woman. He would still shake his head at her, however, when she came crying back, shocked by sights no lady should see, nurse or otherwise. But then he had never once seen her cry. This fact was known throughout the
Graphic.
Its female journalist never cried no matter how angry, no matter how frustrated, how put upon – she never did.

Perhaps this might be the one time she would, after her first time looking upon severed arms and legs, shell-blasted bodies, mutilated faces and sightless eyes – the fruits of war. It might do her good, make her more humble. He hoped so. But there was no denying it – she was a damned good reporter.

Why had she done it? Why had she been so stubbornly insistent on coming here? For what purpose other than to cleanse herself or maybe torture herself? She was a penitent. She had been the cause of Jonathan’s leaving. If harm came to him, the blame would be on her. But what she was doing did nothing to vindicate the penitent.

She stood at London Docks breathing in the smell of oil, bilge water and a heavy, sickly-sweet stench she couldn’t define.

She watched the great, grey ship unload its gaunt, grey, human cargo: long lines of ragged forms, grey-faced, mud-stained, bloodstained, unwashed, blanket-shrouded, eye-bandaged; a hand shaking still from shell shock on the shoulder of the man in front, to be led shuffling hesitantly down the gangway by a nurse or an aid worker or a comrade who still had his sight.

Stretcher-bearers carefully manipulated their burdens out from the ship’s bowels on to firm soil; bundles immobile beneath blankets, red to hide blood, manhandled into waiting ambulances followed by trim blue-and-white-clad nurses. Veterans of the front limped past on crutches, a khaki trouser leg pinned at knee height, or at hip height. Others followed with one or other sleeve empty, many with bandages bound about foreheads, an eye, an ear; now and again a swathe of bandages hiding and holding together shattered facial bones. The odd lucky one with a few fingers missing would still have some semblance of order to his life.

On the dockside, lady charity workers stood ready, faces stiff to express nothing, certainly not pity. They doled out their chocolate and comfort, led the walking wounded away, or took the hand held up limply from a stretcher in the need to feel the clean stability of a female’s touch after an aeon with entrenched comrades in arms.

Sara thought of Jonathan, these men bringing a stark message of what lay out there for him. Her eyes as arid as ever but wide with the knowledge of what she had sent him to, she longed uselessly for yesterday to be lived again when, wiser, she could have given him a kindly word, her silly childish vow put behind her, and taken him in Matthew’s place. But yesterday could not be regained, and she must stare at the horror her dry wide eyes conjured up. Oh, dear God, please let me cry! But tears were a forgotten luxury. So long ago vowed never to be shed, they refused to come at her bidding, as though punishing her for her unnatural suppression of them, an unwashed suffering, bereft of their soothing panacea.

Long years of holding back had left her as invisibly maimed as these poor wretches were visibly, her soul alone left to weep unseen. Tears had been for her mother, never for her.

Sara turned away, walked towards the nearest presentable soldier and, as gently as she could, began to probe – how did he feel now he was out of it? But what was gentle when the man’s eyes turning to hers were hollow with visions, abject with relief to be back in Blighty, for a fraction of a second resenting her intrusion?

She got her story. She got several. Brought them back to present to Mackenzie.

Many of the men had held her hand, gripping convulsively as they spoke haltingly, hoarsely, the words staccato.

Others had turned away, told her to bugger off, to mind her own bloody business. One man burst into tears and gave her no words, but the tears told the story.

A soldier who said his name was Jack Crabtree, and who spoke with a Lancashire accent, had looked at her and the horror in his eyes had faded as though wiped away. He had even smiled up from his stretcher.

‘By goom, but you’re a beauty, miss – a sight for sore eyes right enoof. Would you give a brave soldier a kiss?’

She had laughed at the feeble joke, had allowed the kiss, had bent close to the grey face. The bandaged shoulder and arm wafted a faint odour and she knew then what the sickly-sweet smell was that she had first noticed in the air mixed with oil and bilge water. It was the smell of stale blood and gas gangrene.

Sickness flooding over her, she had moved away hurriedly to hide her hideous reaction to a man who had been dying even as she kissed him.

But she had been humbled enough to know she would be there again when the next Blighty ship docked, whether Mackenzie liked it or not. And it wouldn’t all be to get stories.

Dared she hope Jonathan might one day be among these men coming home, walking down that gangway? It would mean he would be out of it, safe from the ultimate price – lying dead upon the field of battle. Yet even some of these men were destined to die, many more to be maimed for life if they lived, forever useless, dependent upon others. Was that what she wished for him? No, she couldn’t wish him among any of these just to satisfy her own self-indulgent peace of mind. That was not love, that was selfishness.