Women of Courage (21 page)

Without that man, Charles thought, we would be lost; and without guns, we can do nothing.

And if the Union is lost, the heart of the British Empire will be destroyed.

He thought back to the argument he had had with Deborah earlier that day, and realised that she would be on the ferry now, crossing the Irish Sea. It was unusual for her to be so determined — her sister’s imprisonment must have affected her more than he had thought.

It was even more unusual for her to defy him openly. She was usually so quiet, compliant. Unlike her termagant sister.

As the horse picked its way past the windows of the great house and lengthened its stride towards the stables, Deborah’s words came back to him clearly.

I don’t give a fig for your Union
.

Whatever could have possessed the woman?

The freshening wind drove Deborah in from the deck at last, but she couldn’t sleep. Her cabin was small, comfortable, intimate; the rocking and creaking of the walls exciting. It was like being in a treehouse, she thought, as a child — or under the canvas awning of a small boat they had had once, on holiday. Places you could hide in, while voices searched for you, far away. Places that were safe for secrets.

She didn’t want to go to bed. She sat in a chair in her cabin, enjoying the ship’s motion. She watched the oil lamp overhead sway to and fro. The yellow light from the lamp moved on the wall opposite. Up and down, up . . . and down. It was pleasant, restful, dreamlike.

For a while she tried to think about Sarah, alone in her prison cell. Deborah had never been in a prison, but she imagined that, even there, Sarah would make her presence felt. Deborah had great respect for Sarah’s forceful, impulsive character. Often it could solve problems, though equally often it could create them. As children, Sarah would always shout and try to bully their parents into giving her something because it was her right; whereas Deborah would smile and snuggle up to their father and try to wheedle things out of him because he loved her.

Which has got me into even worse trouble than her, Deborah thought. If only people knew, they might pity me, instead of always talking about my virago of a sister.

No, they wouldn’t. They’d despise me as a whore.

She took a letter out of her bag.

Sarah was a poor correspondent, but Jonathan, her husband, wrote to Deborah several times a year. In part this was due to the increasing interest of the political events which both were on the fringes of, in their different ways, either side of the Irish Sea; but it was also, sadly, to do with a loneliness they had both come to feel. Deborah’s husband was frequently abroad; Jonathan, it seemed, had a wife in whom it was sometimes hard to confide. So he wrote to her sister instead.

The letter had been written several weeks ago, long before Sarah had been arrested again. Part of it was about a debate Jonathan had attended in Parliament after the debacle of the Curragh Mutiny. Deborah only remembered those events vaguely. Charles had just returned home, and she had been at the height of her misery about Rankin. The British Army had been ordered to move into Ulster in force, occupying all major barracks and public buildings, in an attempt to overawe the UVF. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had sent ships of the channel fleet steaming north to Belfast to support the soldiers and the government was rumoured to have signed warrants for the arrest of 200 leading members of the UVF — Charles undoubtedly among them.

The operation had been meant to be secret, but Sir Edward Carson had learnt of it somehow. After denouncing the government in the Commons, he had hurried to Belfast, where Charles had been among those detailed to meet him at the docks and escort him to Craigavon. For three days Charles had been away, and Deborah had been almost sure he would be arrested. Then the news had broken that the British Army officers in the Curragh, near Dublin, had refused to obey orders, and offered to resign rather than act against the UVF. The Minister of War and several senior generals had resigned, and the operation had blown up in the government’s face.

Charles had returned home, triumphant, and Deborah had scarcely known whether to laugh or cry. Of course she was glad that Charles was safe, but she took no joy in the UVF’s triumph. Neither, it seemed, did Jonathan.

My dear Debbie,

What in the world has your husband been up to? You will not be surprised to hear that the UVF has been the talk of the town these past few days, the more so since Churchill’s speech in Bradford when he called Carson and the UVF ‘treacherous conspirators’. There was uproar in the House after that, as you can imagine — I couldn’t hear a word that was said, sometimes for five minutes at a go! But all the time, Debbie, I was thinking of what all this must have been like for you. Alarums in the night, no doubt, and no knowing when Charles would be home at all, or indeed I f. . .

That was true enough, Deborah thought. But she had cared little about it. She had been glad, in fact, that Charles was so busy. She skimmed down the letter, seeking the paragraphs she had found most interesting. The letter had been written after Sarah had been released from her second term in prison, and was supposedly convalescing at home, under constant danger of rearrest under the Cat and Mouse Act.

Like you I seem to be saddled with a marriage partner who is obsessed with something higher than her duty towards me. Your sister has talked and thought of nothing else, I believe, but the women’s suffrage movement this past two years. If she is not actually in prison, starving herself, there are always meetings to attend, newspapers to sell, garlands and ribbons to adorn their stalls— the Good Lord alone knows what she does with her time! She is constantly with these women who seem to take a delight in excluding men. I know I can say this to you, but there is no contact any longer, none at all!

Of course you will say I encouraged her in this, in the early days. She and I used to share so much of our work together in the East End, producing surveys to show the squalor and poverty the poor wretched people lived in. I thought her so fine then, such a noble young woman taking on these great matters by my side, and I was proud to be a supporter of a Liberal government which was actually doing something about these things. But now she has abandoned all that for a single issue — and one that, if it does succeed, is likely to give the vote to women of property only — most of whom will vote Tory and bring back a Conservative government who will oppress the poor worse than ever, even! But she cannot see that. She even talks, God help me, of the nobility of smashing windows and setting fire to pillar-boxes — as if that will do anything but harm! If you had seen ladies, Deborah, as I have done — respectable women like yourself and Sarah — screaming and prodding at the Home Secretary outside Downing Street — one even kicked him! Can you believe that? To tell you the truth, Debbie, it filled me with laughter at first, but then anger and a terrible grief, mixed.

It is absurd, frightening, to know that my own wife has now twice been arrested for taking part in such a degrading pantomime. And then, when she is arrested, to find her starving herself until she looks gaunt and bony like the skeleton of the woman I once loved. She is at home just now, with a passable nurse — a Mrs Watson, a raging suffragette herself, I regret to say — and I have done a deal with the Home Secretary, McKenna, which I hope will keep her out of prison if she behaves herself, but there are no guarantees.

So you see, Deborah, when I sit alone and write to you like this I realise a little of what life must be like for you. The difference is that when Charles’s UVF defy Parliament, it is seen by all the world as manly, respectable, dignified. He is threatening to plunge the nation into civil war — and why? To retain his hereditary right to oppress the poor Catholic Irish peasant! But if he is arrested, society won’t make you feel ashamed, whereas with Sarah . . . Lord, Debbie, you are so lucky to have Tom. If only Sarah had not lost those babies, we should be a family like you, instead of two individuals who scarcely speak to each other for days on end. And if she had children she would surely never dare risk herself as she does. It is so sad. But perhaps when she is recovered . . .

The ship, meeting a freak wave, gave an unusual lurch, and Deborah stretched out a hand automatically, to catch a glass of water before it slid off the table. She let Jonathan’s letter fall into her lap. Now it has happened, she thought. Sarah has done something worse than even he feared. He will be destroyed by it.

But we are all destroying ourselves. If he knew about my child . . .

She stared at the pool of lamplight swaying across the opposite wall, lost in thought. I suppose I could have predicted this, she thought. Years ago when they got married . . .

When Jonathan first appeared in their house Deborah met him at the door. She was seventeen, he was twenty-seven. She saw a tall young man, rather gawky, with a short dark beard. He wore a blazer, straw boater, white trousers and shoes. He looked at her intensely with eyes that were a pleasant brown, alight with interest. Then he took off his hat, and smiled. The smile was quite dazzling. She felt her cheeks flush with the warmth of it. He said: ‘You must be the younger sister.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘I’m Debbie. Have you come to see . . .?’

‘Sarah? Yes. We’re going boating on the river. Why don’t you come too?’

‘Well, I’m not sure. I . . .’

‘It’s all right. We’re not going to spoon or anything like that. We won’t embarrass you.’

And so it was settled, quite simply, with a charm that Deborah found enchanting. The three of them spent the whole afternoon on the river, taking it in turns to row, and trail their hands in the water, tying the boat up at a little island to eat their picnic out of the hamper. He talked at times intently of the social conditions of the poor, and how he was studying to become a lawyer to help them remedy it. Then, when he saw Deborah was becoming bored, he laughed and recited comic poetry instead. They came home tired and happy in the late June evening to reassure their worried and hypochondriac mother that they had not drowned. It had been one of the finest summer days that Deborah could remember.

There had been other days like that, but not many. Deborah had made the mistake of speaking to Sarah about her enchantment with the young man, and Sarah had said she should not get silly ideas, she was just a child, he was only being polite to her because they needed a chaperone, that was all. Jonathan was a rising young lawyer from a good family, with aspirations to go into politics. Often he had taken Sarah out to political meetings, where people talked about trade unions and income tax, and Deborah had only been allowed to a few of those. But then there had been other excursions — walks or visits to concerts or bicycle rides — when Deborah was allowed to come along. Sarah tended to monopolise the conversation with Jonathan, but Deborah enjoyed the excursions nevertheless, even though the others often left her for an hour at a time to pack up the hamper or read by herself. Jonathan was always charming and full of fun when they returned, Sarah flushed and rather quiet.

Deborah could still remember the unusual embarrassment of one particular afternoon. They had found a picnic spot by the river, and she had been left to guard the bicycles while the other two went off to walk or spoon or recite poetry or whatever it was that young couples did. On the way out Jonathan had been unusually charming, and Deborah, lying on the grass by herself, had been trying to imagine what it would be like to be kissed by him. It must be strange to be kissed by a man with a beard, she thought. Perhaps it would scratch, you might get bits of moustache in your mouth. But perhaps it would be nice. Other young men’s faces looked a little rough in the afternoon, she had noticed, like sandpaper with the bristles coming through. She began to experiment with a tuft of horsehair from her bicycle saddle, stroking her own cheeks with it gently. It was nice. She closed her eyes. ‘My sweet darling,’ she murmured, ‘my sweet love.’ Then suddenly she heard a giggle, and the crack of a stick.

She had opened her eyes, and to her horror, Sarah and Jonathan had been staring down at her.

Sarah asked: ‘Debbie? What on earth are you doing?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just reciting a poem I learnt at school. It’s nothing really.’ She felt her cheeks flush hot, but luckily Sarah was too full of her own news to be very interested.

‘How strange. Well?’

‘Well what?’ If Deborah hadn’t been so embarrassed she would have noticed that her sister, too, was blushing. She dropped the horsehair surreptitiously on the grass.

‘Aren’t you going to ask why we’ve been so long? Weren’t you worried?’

‘No. Should I have been?’ Deborah’s daydream had been so intense, she had no idea how long the others had been gone.

Jonathan smiled — that radiant smile he had in those days which somehow warmed her all through. ‘Debbie was too engrossed in her poetry to think about us, my dear,’ he said. ‘But I think . . .’

‘No, let me tell her, Jonathan,’ Sarah said, in her impulsive, forceful way. ‘She’s
my
little sister, not yours. What he is trying to tell you, Deborah dear, is that Jonathan and I are going to get married. And we would like you to be our bridesmaid.’

Deborah could never remember the rest of that afternoon. She knew that she had burst into tears, and that Sarah had looked shocked and a little angry, but whether she had recovered herself and congratulated them, she was not sure. Presumably she had, since her next memory was of following Sarah down the aisle. She had been holding Sarah’s train, and feeling utterly hollow and desolate inside. When Jonathan had put the ring on Sarah’s finger, Deborah drove her nails into the skin of her own ring finger so hard that the marks were still there the next day.

But that was all the fantasy of a girl of seventeen. Two years later, Deborah had a husband of her own, a handsome army officer whom she had known since she was twelve — just the kind of man Jonathan liked least. Jonathan had become a successful barrister and a Liberal Member of Parliament. The year after that Sarah had her first miscarriage, and Deborah gave birth to a son, in India. Even when she returned home, they lived on opposite sides of the Irish Sea, meeting once or twice a year at most. They were responsible married people.