Sophy thought Patience must have been a formidable nurse.
The second week, Sophy was allowed out of bed in the afternoons and she was surprised how this tired her. It was then she began to realise how physically exhausted she had been, and that Patience had been right to dispatch Sadie to the theatre the morning after her collapse with a note informing the manager that Mrs Shawe wouldn’t be well enough to return to work for at least a month, possibly two.
The third week, Kane was permitted to call, and a few days later, Dolly and Jim. It touched Sophy that Patience hovered like an anxious hen with one chick the whole time, and by the fifth week Sophy was feeling better than she had in a long, long time.
The day before William was due to take Patience and Tilly home,
the four women spent a delightful afternoon shopping for the bassinet Sophy wanted to buy for the baby, along with so many other items, Patience was forced to protest. ‘Please let me,’ Sophy said quietly, when Patience demurred at the number of tiny outfits in Sophy’s arms. ‘I feel I am part of the family, doing this.’ Patience said no more after that.
The day of departure was bitter-sweet for Sophy. She had known her cousin couldn’t stay for ever, and with Patience’s baby due in just over a month, it was high time her cousin returned home and prepared for the birth. Also, in the last few days, she had begun to look forward to returning to the theatre and letting life resume its normal pattern. It would signify the beginning of a new chapter in her life. Whereas, just weeks ago, this would have filled her with foreboding, now she found she could look to the future if not with optimism, at least with a clear idea of what she was going to do.
She and Patience had had many long talks over the time they were together. They had talked about Cat and the manner of her death, the danger young women in the theatres and music halls could find themselves in from unwanted admirers and men like Forester-Smythe, the inequality which existed in the world between the sexes and how the Vote for Women would be the first stage of addressing this to some extent. Sophy had told her cousin how Cat and other actresses, dissatisfied with a male-dominated theatre and the manipulation of women, had entered the fight for the vote, sometimes at the cost of their career. And as they had talked, and argued on occasion as Patience did not support the militant tone the Women’s Suffrage movement had taken of late, Sophy found her own opinions and views solidifying. Because Cat had cared so passionately about the vote she had gone along with supporting it without really thinking deeply for herself. Her work, the struggle of trying to make her failing marriage succeed, had taken centre stage. But now she
was
thinking for herself and she was angry. And yes, when Patience had gently suggested it, Sophy had agreed she was embittered too. What was more, she didn’t intend to apologise for it.
As she stood on the doorstep in the late-summer sunshine waving Patience off, Sophy squared her shoulders. Never again would she let any man reduce her to the state she had been in when Patience had arrived. But that time was gone now: she was better, she wanted to live again. Her life had to have some purpose to it other than entertaining people in the theatre; she not only owed that to herself, she owed it to Cat. She would make a difference. She wasn’t quite sure how yet, but that would come.
She had made a great mistake when she had married Toby. She had let love make a fool of her, and in a way she had perpetuated that mistake by trying to be a trusting wife, by supporting him and standing by him when in truth she should have left him years ago. But it was no good looking back. She had learned by her mistake and she wouldn’t make the same one twice. She was successful in her own right, she didn’t need a man to support her and she certainly didn’t need one in her home or in her bed.
The cab disappeared round a corner and Sadie, who was standing just behind her, said, ‘Well, ma’am, it’s just the two of us again.’
Thank God for Sadie. And that’s what she had to do. Count her blessings and get on with life. Turning, she smiled. ‘As you say, Sadie, it’s just the two of us.’
On the last day of September, Patience’s baby arrived a few days early. The birth had been a difficult one and the labour exhausting, but as soon as Patience saw her son the previous thirty-six hours were swept away in the rush of love she felt for her tiny little boy. Although he was small at six pounds, the baby was perfect and had a fine pair of lungs on him, which he used whenever he wanted feeding or changing. As William remarked after a week, he’d had no idea one so tiny could so quickly have a whole household dancing to his tune.
When Sophy heard the news she would have loved to have been able to make a trip to Sunderland then and there, but having only recently returned to the theatre she felt she couldn’t justify such an indulgence. She had to content herself with sending Patience armfuls of flowers and a promise that she would try and travel up to see little Peter William in the New Year.
There had been one or two changes in Sophy’s work-life, the main one being Kane taking on the role of her agent. He had recently sold his partnerships in several theatres, along with his travelling company, to take on the new venture as theatrical agent, and it was already proving hugely successful. He had many contacts within the entertainment industry and was extremely well thought
of, and within three months his books were full. When asked what had prompted such a move, Kane was non-committal, airily passing off such enquiries by saying he’d felt the need for a change for some time and fresh stimulus. Not even to Ralph would he admit that the prime motive had been a wish to inveigle himself more firmly into Sophy’s life.
Sophy had decided to go back to her roots in the theatre. As an established and firm favourite of the West End, she could command a role in any of the major theatres and they would have been delighted to have her, but she felt she wanted to return to the smaller companies which dealt with the taboo subjects such as divorce, sex, women’s rights and prostitution, by little-known playwrights as well as established dramatists like Shaw, Ibsen and Barrie. Kane warned her it was something of a risk. Fans could be fickle and there was no guarantee they would follow her on the strength of her name, but she was determined that when her present contract finished at the end of the year, she would consider her next part very carefully and do something meaningful.
She had also taken up Cat’s baton with regard to the Vote for Women cause, not just because of her friend or the events of the last months, but because the gross inequality women faced in all walks of life had begun to stir her fighting spirit more and more.
So it was, on a cold mid-December afternoon, she attended the first public meeting of the Actresses’ Franchise League which was held at the Criterion Restaurant, a prestigious establishment in the heart of London. Stars of the West End stage arrived dressed to the nines and surrounded by hordes of fans, male and female. It was a truly glittering occasion, and inside the restaurant, four hundred actresses, actors and dramatists listened to numerous telegrams of support from influential men and women of the decade.
The two speakers were both women, but despite the exclusively female membership of the League, the chair was taken by the efficacious actor-manager, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was a firm supporter of women’s rights. As would be expected at a meeting made up of a good number of men and women from the entertainment industry, including Shakespearean actresses like Ellen
Terry, the darling of the Lyceum Theatre, and comediennes of the calibre of Mrs Kendal, both in their sixties, the speeches were given with flair and a certain amount of facetiousness. However, no one present, including the cynical newspaper reporters, could doubt the genuine passion and determination of those involved.
Sophy had been asked to give a short word of support and she kept it light and amusing – but with a sting in the tail when she asked why the actress’s life was a paradox: off stage she could marry and divorce, even take lovers if she was so inclined, but on stage she was expected to play a dutiful wife and daughter or a ‘scarlet woman’, conventional roles in a predictable mould.
She sat down to a standing ovation, and even Kane – who had escorted her to the event whilst expressing his doubts about Sophy getting too involved in the organisation – had stood to his feet. Sophy enjoyed every minute of the meeting and afterwards, when Kane took her out for a meal before her evening performance at the theatre, had waxed lyrical about her new crusade.
The next day the newspapers had been full with the names of the West End stars who had publicly demanded the vote, and when the manager of the theatre Sophy was presently working at tried to put pressure on her to withdraw from the League, she told him she was going to get more involved, if anything. She wasn’t surprised when her contract wasn’t renewed, neither was she concerned. Kane had negotiated an excellent part for her as the leading lady in one of the smaller but well-respected theatres, and the part – which kept clear of specific Suffrage party politics and concentrated on the generalised sexual inequalities of Edwardian society – was one she felt she could get her teeth into.
There was a two-week interval between finishing at the present theatre and taking up her part at the General, so on 2 January, the day after thousands of Britons over seventy years of age went to the Post Office to draw their first weekly pension of five shillings, Sophy set off for the north-east with Sadie at her side to keep her promise to Patience. She found she was immensely grateful for Sadie’s company; she hadn’t expected to feel so nervous about returning home. No, not home, she corrected herself for the
umpteenth time as the train steamed its way through the bitterly cold countryside. London was her home now. Southwick was merely the place where she had been born and lived the first sixteen years of her life.
It got colder the further north they travelled, and it had just begun to snow and the darkening sky looked full of it as the train chuffed its way into Central Station. Sophy had been able to eat little on the journey, her stomach tied up in knots. She had left this town thirteen years ago, heartsore and determined never to return, and yet here she was.
She glanced at herself in the train window, her fingers nervously stroking the little silver ballerina brooch Miss Bainbridge had given her and which she wore always. Her grey suit was both expensive and tasteful, and with her fur coat, muff and hat, she looked every inch the wealthy gentlewoman, but that was just on the outside. Inside she felt like the bewildered, frightened young girl who had fled these shores. This, returning home – she didn’t check the word this time – was harder than she had expected it to be. She wished now she had accepted Kane’s suggestion that he accompany her. His solid support would have been a comfort.
She didn’t ask herself why she had refused his offer, she knew that only too well. There could be a chance – remote, maybe, but still a possibility nonetheless – that he might find out about her mother, her beginnings. And she wouldn’t be able to bear it if he looked at her differently. She now accepted that something had happened the morning she had gone unannounced to Kane’s house. It was then that she had been forced to think of him as a man, rather than her friend and one-time benefactor. She had felt disturbed at the time but she’d pushed her feelings to the back of her mind, having more – as she had put it to herself – important things to think about.
She had never asked him about his private life and would rather die than do so, but at the oddest moments since that morning she found herself imagining him with a woman – any woman – and when she did so, her feelings were plunged into a turmoil of which she was ashamed. Kane had always been so good to her, fatherly
even, and she was sure he thought of her as something between a daughter or a fond niece – and a friend, of course. And she was further mortified that this had become increasingly irritating to her. She didn’t want any involvement with anyone on a romantic level, she was sure about that after the years of being trapped in a marriage that had been a mockery from the start, so why did it matter how Kane regarded her? It didn’t. Of course it didn’t. She was being ridiculous and perverse.
She’d imagined she would be able to see him in the way she once had when she’d agreed to his proposal that he become her agent. It would set their relationship on more of a business footing, she had argued to herself, and she had been thinking about employing an agent for some time. Some of the actresses she worked with had agents and some did not, but there was no doubt that a good agent was of considerable benefit to an actress’s career. And so she had been all for his suggestion. But it hadn’t helped. To be fair to Kane, he was still the kind, benevolent gentleman he’d always been, somewhat patriarchal and protective but he had been well brought up and was that way with all women. At times she sensed a reserve about him, but that had probably been there since she’d known him. Cat had called him enigmatic once, and she had been right. And yet when Patience had stayed with her and Kane had visited, he had seemed more relaxed with her cousin than he ever was with her. To her great chagrin, she had found she was jealous, jealous of dear Patience, and it was then she had told herself enough was enough.
‘There’s Dr Aldridge, ma’am.’ Sadie was peering out of the train window. ‘And he’s buttonholed one of the porters.’
The next few minutes were hectic but eventually the luggage was loaded on top of the cab William had waiting and the horse was clip-clopping its way through the now fast-falling snow. Sophy looked out at familiar landmarks. She had gone to see Dolly and Jim at Christmas, her arms full of presents, and had confided in the motherly Dolly her apprehension about the visit back to her roots. Dolly’s advice had been the usual mixture of homespun commonsense and optimism. ‘Blood’s thicker than water, lovey, and
to my mind it’s a blessing you came across your cousin that day. I don’t know what you were running away from when you left the north and I don’t need to know, but you’re your own woman now. It won’t do no harm to lay a few ghosts in the long run, even if you’re a bit jittery. You go and have a nice time and see that little one. That’ll cheer you up.’