Women of Courage (12 page)

He said, huskily: ‘We don’t talk of it.’

The sardonic smile had returned to Simon’s face. Tinged, too, Charles thought, with a hint of sadness.

‘No, not until now. But if you do send me away, you must know what you’re losing.’ He paused; an idea came into his mind. ‘I can’t help being what I am — I thought you loved me for it. But if it were a journalist, Charles, a foreign correspondent eager for things to tell his readers . . .’ The young man bent his beautiful, Grecian head to one side and tapped it gently with his finger. ‘There are a lot of things in here that I know now, because of you. I wouldn’t want to let them out, by mistake. It could have serious results, not just for you, but the UVF.’

Another silence.

Far away, Charles could hear the sound of the car, its engine throbbing outside the front door as the chauffeur brought it round. And the shouts of young Tom on the stairs; he had probably seen it.

He said, very softly: ‘Are you threatening me now, Simon?’

Simon stepped towards him. Suddenly, amazingly, the young man’s eyes were shining. Could that be tears in them, after such a statement? If they were he ignored them, met Charles’s gaze without blinking.

‘What I am saying, sir, is that I don’t want to go. I don’t want to end what we’ve had, I don’t want to be sent away. If I am sent away I don’t know what I’ll do. It could be anything. But there’s no need for it, no need to think of that. Is there?’

‘Yes, Simon.’

‘No, Charles! There is not! Please sir, think of me for a moment! I’m not just some guttersnipe you picked up in a bar — I need you, I like you, I admire you! I help you in your work, don’t I? I like being in the Ulster Volunteers, I feel proud! If I . . . if I said something wrong about your wife, I’m sorry, I apologise. I’ll never do it again. I was jealous, that’s all, I didn’t mean it!’

For the third time that day, someone knocked on Charles’s door. ‘Car’s ready, sir!’ It was the butler, Smythe. Charles heard his own voice saying: ‘All right, Smythe. Thank you. Be down in a jiffy!’

And then felt his own arms go out, to hold the young man by the shoulders. It was strange: when they were dressed, either in civilian or army clothes, they never touched. Perhaps because of fear of discovery, perhaps because there was no social convention for it. They didn’t know what to do.

But, as he felt Charles’s hands on his shoulders, Simon stepped forward, and for a moment the two embraced.

And Charles thought, he didn’t know why, of Christ and his apostles in the garden of Gethsemane. Simon Peter. Andrew.

And Judas . . .

7

O
N THE morning her son was to go back to school, Deborah Cavendish got up early. Young Tom was in the breakfast room before her, hurriedly bolting a slice of toast and gulping a glass of milk at the same time, under the indulgent eye of a housemaid. He had already been down to the stables to see his new pony fed. His fair hair stuck out sideways and there were several wisps of straw on the stained baggy trousers and riding jacket he was wearing. That high, narrow forehead, the hooked nose, the intense proud face: all those things are like Charles, she thought. But not the grey-green eyes, the unruly fair hair, the freckles — that’s me, my side of the family.

He looked at her apprehensively.

‘Please, Mother, don’t make a fuss. Father promised I could have one last ride on Bramble before we go — and there’s acres of time, really there is! I’ll just ride up through the woods past the ice house and then down to the three oaks. I promise!’

Deborah looked at her only son and sighed. It was a wonder to her how quickly the little baby who had smiled at her from his cot had grown into this gawky, tousle-headed ragamuffin. The older he got the more mess he made, the more energy he had. Only the smile was the same.

I wonder what the next one’s smile will look like?

Not today. Forget that now.

Above all, this morning, Deborah wanted to see her son smile and be happy. Even if that meant she had to deliver him to his school appallingly late, covered in dust and straw. So she sighed, touched his cheek with her fingers, and said: ‘All right. Just an hour now. Mind you keep your word, young soldier!’

‘Yes, Mother.’ The light of relief came into his eyes. He dodged away from her caress, embarrassed, and turned swiftly towards the door. But when he got there he glanced back, and she was rewarded with the smile she craved. ‘It might even be less than an hour, you know. Father says he’s the fastest pony he’s seen in the County Down.’

‘You just mind you stay on his back, now.’

‘Like a leech!’ He gave her a mock salute, and was gone. As he went out of the door she thought: If I lose him, I’ll lose part of myself.

She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat with it cupped between her hands, her elbows on the table, staring moodily into space. Thinking back over the past few months. About the man, James Rankin, who had made her pregnant . . .

Deborah first met James Rankin on the back of a cart in Dublin.

She was there to be thanked in Rankin’s speech. She had been asked to make a speech herself but she had declined because she was too shy. When she saw how many people had come to listen, she was glad she had refused.

The cart was parked in the middle of Sackville Street. It was surrounded by a sea of people, completely blocking the road. Faces and hats everywhere — workers in flat caps, young men in straw boaters, office clerks in bowlers, a line of officious policemen in the high pointed helmets of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. And women — mostly poor women in shawls with babies on their hips, but others in small round hats, wide straw hats with flowers on, some large ones with ribbons tied under the chin. And under the hats, faces, silent, hopeful, angry, desperate, puzzled, ecstatic, disapproving — listening intently to Rankin.

Beside him on the cart, Deborah listened too, rapt. She thought he was the most magnetic speaker she had ever heard.

He was a big man, young, with a huge powerful chest and a strand of long dark hair that fell forward over his forehead and which he flicked back constantly as he spoke. He had thick eyebrows and an unusually swarthy, lean, gypsy-like face. He wore a workman’s flannel shirt, hobnail boots, and trousers tied round his waist with a piece of rope. As he spoke, he radiated an electric animal energy. When she had been introduced to him a few minutes before, he had smiled cheerfully at her, and she had realised that his dark face had the most startlingly pale green eyes she had ever seen. A peculiar shudder had gone through her, and later, when he glanced her way once or twice during his speech, she had the odd feeling that the whole performance was for her and no one else.

It was in the early months of the Great Lockout in Dublin in autumn 1913. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union encouraged their members to call for decent wages, and the bosses locked them out. Rankin was speaking of the injustice of it, the low wages the workers had always been paid, the threat of starvation stalking the streets of Ireland’s capital city.

Deborah knew it was true. She had come to Dublin earlier that summer, as a delegate from South Down branch of the Irish Women’s Guild, to see what could be done for children in this dreadful situation. In Dublin she saw people crammed into the most appalling tenements — one, sometimes two families to a room, with no sanitation or running water. Barefoot children played in the streets, sometimes paddling in sewage. And yet often both parents were out at work, for ten, twelve hours a day. The father earned perhaps one or two pounds a week, a lot of which he spent on drink, to escape the awfulness of his condition. The mother earned a quarter of that.

With her own son away at boarding school and Charles abroad in Egypt, there was little to keep Deborah at home. So she offered her help to the women who were working in the Dublin slums. At first they were suspicious of her, because of her wealthy unionist background, but she rolled up her sleeves and overcame that. She helped to run soup kitchens and cheap medical dispensaries for the poor. She visited evening schools which tried to teach illiterate women and girls to read.

As the dispute went on, thousands of starving men, women and children began to roam the streets of Dublin. Boatloads of food came from trade unions in England, and Deborah herself spent large sums having food brought in from Glenfee. She helped cook it in the strike committee’s kitchens. But the bosses were adamant, and as the starvation worsened she conceived the idea of taking thirty poor children back to Glenfee for a fortnight’s holiday, where they could be fed and well treated and taken off their desperate parents’ hands. She imagined her great house filled with noise, laughter, children.

She brought her friend Annie Haines and three other members of the Women’s Guild down to Dublin with her. It was then that she met Rankin. The day before they were to collect the children, the union had asked her to share a platform with him, to explain what she was doing and where the children would go.

But before she was able to speak, the crowd was attacked by mounted police.

She had seen them gathering at one end of the street during Rankin’s speech. Suddenly, a trumpet blew, and people started to scream. The horsemen began to trot forwards determinedly into the crowd, and a second detachment appeared, too, at the opposite end of the street. Two, perhaps three thousand people were trapped between them. As Deborah stood up someone pushed her and she fell off the cart onto the road. A man trod on her — a heavy hob-nailed boot stamped on the side of her knee. She tried to get up but tripped on her long skirt and fell. Boots kicked and stumbled over her. Her elbow and neck were bruised, her right knee wouldn’t work. Then, as the hooves and batons were all around her, a man bent, put an arm round her shoulders, heaved her to her feet.

‘Are you hurt? Can you stand now?’

The pale green eyes, the dark floppy hair. Rankin. She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, no, I don’t think I can.’

He pulled her wrist forward, bent, swung an arm behind her knees, lifted her onto his shoulder. Then he pushed and shoved his way with the rest. They were in a maelstrom of hurrying feet and legs and hooves and screams and sticks. Deborah was terrified. Once a policeman grabbed her hair so that Rankin staggered backwards; but he swung round, punched the policeman in the mouth and kicked his shins until he let go. The crowd swirled them apart, and Rankin saw an alleyway and carried her down it, through a maze of sidestreets to a small square. There was a church in the square, and a couple of shops and a pub and a boarding house — and a blessed absence of noise. He lifted her down. She stumbled, and leaned against a wall.

‘Are you all right now?’

‘Yes, I think . . . thank you.’ She put her hand gently to her head and tottered sideways.

‘You’re not, though. You’re white as a sheet. Look, I’m staying in that boarding house over there. Come inside and have a sit down. Will I carry you across?’

‘No, it’s all right, I can . . . ‘

But he picked her up all the same. More gracefully this time, with one arm behind her back and the other behind her knees, so that she had no choice but to put her arm behind his back and look up into the dark face that was so close to hers. He looked tired, strained, with beads of sweat on his forehead and down his cheeks; but although he had already carried her half a mile he was not breathing heavily. His arms and chest were so strong, she felt like a child again. He smiled at her briefly as he pushed open the door with his foot.

‘Not how you go home usually,’is it?’

‘No.’ Charles had never picked her up once, in all their married life. Only her father, long, long ago, before he died. But she was not a little girl with a hoop now.

Rankin took her into a living room, set her down carefully on a sofa. ‘Now let me look at you. Where is it you hurt?’

‘It’s my knee, I think. I can’t let you see that.’

‘What? Modesty is it now? Stuff and nonsense! A knee is only bones and skin, we all have them, don’t we? Where do you keep yours now, let me take a look.’

Abashed, she lifted her skirt for him, and there was the bruise, red already and turning purple on the side of her right knee. She felt embarrassed and ashamed of it, but his fingers were surprisingly gentle for such a big man. He flexed it carefully to see if it would move.

‘You can bend it, that’s something, so I doubt it’s a break. But you’ll not be walking on that for a few days. Where are you staying?’

She told him. Annie and the other women were in a church hall away on the other side of town, past the streets they had just escaped from. They were due to collect the children there tomorrow morning and take them north by train later that day.

‘You’ll never get to them now, with the peelers all over the town and your knee wrenched like that,’ Rankin said. ‘You’d best stay the night here. Mrs McCafferty’ll find you a bed.’

‘Oh, but I can’t . . .’

‘You can’t do much else, as I see it. Or is this place too poor for a fine English lady like you? Is that it, now?’ He looked at her more carefully than before, and she felt he was seeing her for the first time. Hearing the upper-class twang of her accent, seeing that even the drab, everyday clothes she wore had been sewn by a skilled seamstress. Deborah blushed. It was the sort of implication she came up against often in her work with the poor; it was important to knock it on the head at once.

‘No — of course I’d be honoured to stay if Mrs McCafferty can have me. It’s just that I must get a message to my friends, and — I don’t want to cause any trouble.’

He laughed, his teeth gleaming unexpectedly bright against the dark skin of his face. ‘You have already. It’s not every day I pick up a pretty English lady in the street and carry her home. You’ll be breaking my heart next, Lord save me!’

And that, of course, was the moment when she should have crushed him. Turned a cold shoulder, shown that any kind of innuendo from a working man to a fine married lady like her could not possibly be tolerated. Only — she did not want to. His smile was so open, friendly; those pale green eyes twinkled in such a cheerful, mischievous way that she wanted to laugh instead. For a moment the laughter bubbled up inside her and she struggled to hold it down. But she was so unused to men flirting with her — or even paying her any attention at all of that sort since she had been married to Charles — that she did not know what to do. It seemed wonderful, a blessing.