Women of Courage (15 page)

Over, finished with, done.

Afterwards, they took off their clothes and got into bed and he lay with his head on her breast, asleep, while she listened to the rain rattling the windows outside and the crackle of flames from the coal fire. It was late afternoon; somewhere downstairs Mrs McCafferty was preparing the evening meal, and there was the murmur of talk from men in the bar.

When he awoke, they made love again, slowly, leisurely, unspeaking. Then he got up and began to wash in the basin in front of the fire. She lay back on the pillows, watching him. Sad, motherly, content. A lake of grief filled slowly inside her, with the thought of what she had to say.

She thought: I can’t do it. I’ve changed my mind, I won’t tell him. I’ll run away from home and stay with him forever.

The idea flooded through her like a revelation. It would be simple, terrible, permanent. It was a huge relief to her. The problem of how she would deal with Charles receded, became tiny, insignificant. A ship hull down on the horizon. This is where I belong, she told herself. Here, now, in this room with the only man who has ever loved me. How could I ever have thought of leaving him?

As he pulled his trousers on he stood quite still and looked at her. The skin of his deep, hairy chest glowed rosy in the firelight. His face was dark, lean, his jaw shadowed with the afternoon’s growth of stubble. His hair was still tousled by their lovemaking and the firelight flickered softly in his eyes. She thought: he is like a beautiful savage. A Celtic chief from long ago.

He said: ‘I shall always remember you like that.’

‘Me?’ She had not considered her own appearance. ‘Why?’

‘Warm and happy like that in bed.’

She smiled sadly. ‘And I you. Why do you talk of remembering, James?’

‘Ah well, you see. That’s because . . .’ He came and sat on the side of the bed, took her hand. For a moment he stroked it, thoughtfully.

Then he said: ‘I have to go away.’

Five words. Once when she was a little girl she had been bitten by a snake. It was a very small snake, an adder only eighteen inches long with fangs like tiny needles in a jaw no wider than a man’s thumb. Her arm had swollen like a balloon, her heart had thumped like a trip-hammer and she had been unable to move for hours. She had nearly died. Afterwards, her father had shown her the dead snake and she had thought: all that pain and paralysis came from a drip of venom half the size of a raindrop. She thought now: he means for ever.

‘Away? Where?’

‘To England. London, at first.’

‘Oh!’ Relief flooded through her. ‘Then I can come with you.’

‘No, Deborah.’

‘What do you mean, no? Why not?’

He bowed his head, stroked her hand in his. ‘It wouldn’t look right. There’s a big dispute blowing up in the docks there and I’m to help, if I can. Some of the boys in the union, they see affairs like ours as a — well, a diversion — but there are others with strict moral standards. The two of us coming would just create scandal. They would hold it against me and I’d never get started.’

She understood that. ‘I didn’t mean I’d get off the train on your arm, of course not. But soon, when you’ve found somewhere to stay.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ He paused and looked up. She felt her heart beat fast, as it had when the snake had bitten her. ‘Listen to me, Deborah. The Dear knows we’ve had a fine time together and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But I hope you’ve not imagined . . . it can’t last for ever, you know.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course you’re right.’ Her mouth was quite dry, the words did not come out as they should. She slipped her hand out of his and sat up straight in the bed. ‘James, I came here tonight to tell you the same thing.’

He stood quite still. ‘The same thing? What do you mean, woman?’

‘That we can’t go on. My husband is coming back and — it is foolishness what we’re doing, as you say. Only . . . I wasn’t going to say it, because . . .’ Tears overcame her. She shook her head for a moment to be rid of them. Then looked up and said: ‘Like you, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, my lover.’

There was a silence. Some workmen’s boots clattered on the cobbles outside and there was a laugh from downstairs in the bar. Deborah waited, her eyes blurred, smiling nonetheless.

He said: ‘You were going to leave me? To go back to your husband?’

She nodded. ‘Please don’t be angry, James.
But I can’t
.’

He picked up his vest and pulled it on, over his head. It was nothing, but the action seemed callous, unconcerned, as though she did not matter to him any more.

‘You have to accept it, Deborah. I know it’s hard at first but it’s . . . for the best in the end, believe me. You must have known. You’re a fine lady with a house to keep up and a husband coming home, and me — what have I got to offer? A series of rented, secret rooms, the chance of prison or being beaten up in a strike, a scandal in the end. It’s foolishness, Deborah! Plain foolishness, what we’re doing!’

‘And you have other women?’

‘No!’ His back was to the window so she couldn’t see his face clearly, and she was glad of that. She didn’t want to know what he looked like when he lied.

There was a silence. Deborah waited, her eyes quite dry, weeping. She felt like a woman turned to stone.

‘Well, yes, of course there are one or two.’ He shuffled, turned back on her, to stare out of the window. Then whirled round again, defiant. ‘We’re adult people, Deborah. I never made any promises, did I? We both knew what we were doing.’

‘Did we?’ Deborah spoke with an immense weariness, like one already dead.
And I would have given up everything for you,
she thought. Pointlessly, she asked: ‘What did you think you were doing, then, James?’

For answer, he came and sat down again on the bed. A faint trace of a smile crossed his face. Magnetic, gleaming, as before. Its insincerity terrified her. Under the covers, she moved her legs aside, to avoid any possible contact with him.

‘I thought I was making love to one of the most beautiful, generous women I had ever met.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ She flung the covers aside and got out of bed, naked. Took her coat off the hook behind the door and wrapped it around her.

Rankin continued, stubbornly. ‘A beautiful, generous, rich woman who needed an affair because her husband was away and unkind, but who knew what the rules were and would not make a fuss when it ended.’

‘Rules, James?’ She whirled round and glared at him. ‘You, a man who wants to turn society upside down, talk to me of rules? I thought you believed in the freedom of people to make their own choices in life, to become what they really want to be! Haven’t I heard you say that, ten or twelve times a day?’

‘Of course. But . . .’

‘But what? But you’ve changed your mind, you don’t like me any more, is that it?’ Even as she said it she thought: I sound hysterical. But it doesn’t matter, I don’t care, if he leaves me now there’s nothing left at all.

‘But I want to be free to go away to London, that’s what I’m saying. I want the freedom to go there without feeling obliged to you or any other woman. That’s the freedom I need in order to lead the workers properly. Don’t you understand? Deborah, I’m not a husband, I could never be that sort of man. For me the sort of freedom I was talking about means just that. Freedom from any permanent ties.’

Silence. A coal fell in the fire and Deborah noticed it was mostly smoke now, rather than flame. She shivered inside her coat.

‘And what about
my
freedom?’

He sighed. ‘That’s a matter for you. But the world’s not perfect, we both know that. Think what you have to lose — a husband, a son, money, a place in society. One day you may be grateful for what I’m saying now.’

It was true, she thought. The cruel truth she had come to tell him. But even more true if he didn’t want her. Numbly, she asked: ‘When do you go to London, James?’

‘Tomorrow. There’s a ferry to Holyhead at seven.’

She could still be hurt. ‘So you knew that all along and you still brought me here to bed before you told me. Is that it?’

‘So we had something good to remember from today. Yes. Why not?’

‘I see.’ There was a dressing table in the corner of the room, where she kept a hairbrush and a few items of makeup. She sat down on the stool in front of it and began to brush her hair, mechanically, like an automaton. As though her own face in the mirror was of paramount interest to her suddenly, and he was of no concern at all. If I concentrate on small things, now, I will not break down, I will get away with some surface pride, at least.

‘Look, James, I want to get dressed now. On my own. So if you don’t mind, I’d like you to put your clothes on, go downstairs and tell Mrs McCafferty I won’t be staying to dinner. Then send her boy out to call me a cab. I’ll be going straight back to the station tonight.’

Like a whore, she thought. That’s what they do, isn’t it? Go to an hotel with a man for an hour or two in the afternoon, then take a cab on to their next appointment. Only I have nowhere to go.

Nowhere in the world that matters, any more.

When he had gone she stared into the mirror hard. Defying her eyes to mist over, refusing to let the tears come.

Not in front of him, she thought.

Not in the cab, or on the train.

Not until I get home, to Glenfee.

8

O
N THE night she had left Rankin and come home to Glenfee Deborah had shut herself in her bedroom and cried herself to sleep. For the next few days she lay in bed until noon, staring at the ceiling, numb, unweeping. Then she got up and wandered through the grounds, or rode out on lonely bridleways by the lough.

It had been a wet spring, that year of 1914, and she had stayed out longest on those days when a cold east wind howled in across the sea from Scotland, chilling her to the bone and making the great elm trees roar above her head in the storm. When at last she came home, shivering and drenched to the skin, she sat up alone in her bedroom and drank, for the first time in her life, a whole small bottle of gin each night until the room swam around her and she could scarcely stagger to bed.

Perhaps her body had known why she was doing this, but her mind had not. Not then, not yet. She had just wanted to dull her mind of all thought, so that she would remember nothing, grieve for nothing. The third time she did it, she caught pneumonia, so that when Charles came home, brisk and bronzed and full of energy for his new post, he was confronted with a wife who shivered in an overheated room and stared at him like a stranger. Mercifully, he paid no attention to her feverish mutterings; once the doctor assured him she would live he ignored her, and got on with his work.

Not until Charles had been home for three weeks did Deborah first suspect she might be pregnant.

Even then, she could not be sure. She had been delirious for too long to be certain if she had had her last period or not, and she dared not ask her nursemaid. Only, she felt different: her breasts heavier, her skin, despite the fever, richer, smoother.

It must be an illusion, she thought. No foetus could survive an illness like that. I’ll find out in a few days, a week at most.

Then the morning sickness began.

If Charles had been the least bit interested in her he could not have failed to notice, and for two weeks she was convinced that he knew and was avoiding her for that reason. Then one evening he said: ‘You look blooming, my dear. It is good to see you fully recovered,’ and she realised he had noticed nothing, nothing at all. After all, they slept in separate rooms, and he was usually up before her in the mornings, off to his soldiering.

It was then she realised she had to seduce him.

At first the idea disgusted her. This is what it means to be an adulteress, she thought; to behave like a common whore, slinking from one man’s bed to another. From the man you love to — but she clenched her mind tight, shut Rankin out. After all, he had not loved her either, that was just a delusion. He had used her for a while and left her with this child — and it was the child, now, who had to be protected. It was her duty to find it a father.

But the only possible father, Charles, refused to be seduced.

She ordered tempting meals for him, and dressed attractively: he returned late, tired and dusty from soldiering, ate quickly and went straight to his bedroom. She tried talking to him about their early years, about his campaigns; he answered briefly, with impatience, as though forced to explain difficult things to a child. She walked into his room late one night in a silken nightdress and he asked her, irritably, to leave. She did not know what to do. They were out of the habit of making love; they had not done so more than a dozen times in the last six years. She had thought this was because he was abroad so much, but the truth was, he intimidated her. He was ten years older than her and had always been cold, distant, superior.

Now, when she needed him most and loved him least, he terrified her. Even to touch him set off an earthquake of fear.

Yesterday afternoon she had tried again, one last time. And failed, because Simon had interrupted them. That was my last chance, she thought bitterly. I don’t think I could bear him to touch me now even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. If it wasn’t for Tom I wouldn’t care.

Now it’s only a matter of time. The very fact that I can face breakfast today means that the morning sickness is passing. In a month or two my belly will start to show and then even Charles will realise. Almost certainly he will divorce me.

When he does it will be in all the papers.
Unionist Officer’s Wife Gives Birth to Trade Union Leader’s Bastard.
What will Tom think of that? How will he feel? Probably I won’t be allowed to see him again, anyway, to find out.

It’s Rankin’s baby but he won’t want it either. He almost told me so.
‘I want freedom from all permanent ties,
’ he said. It’s so easy for men. Just make love and walk away. Or in Charles’s case, just walk away.

None of her thoughts were new or helpful. They just went round and round in her mind endlessly, like flies trapped in a jar. She sipped her second cup of coffee and stared gloomily at the wall.