A Mother's Love (10 page)

They were sitting together on the sofa. Sara had been laid down for the night in her cot in the bedroom, and they had the evening to themselves. Curtains undrawn, the gas as yet unlit, a smoke-laden sunset fading behind London’s brooding rooftops, the parlour was bathed by its soft madder glow. Below them, the muffled rumble of Hackney Road’s traffic continued unabated. Harriet had been snuggled in his arms, at peace with the world. Now she sat up, regarding him as though he had slid down several pegs in her estimation. Her eyes swam with bewilderment.

‘I can’t ask one without asking the other. You can’t start picking and choosing. Someone’ll always be offended. How can I turn round and say, we don’t want you because it’ll be
a quiet one
?’ The last three words, mimicking his Oxford accent, making him feel foolish, were spat out.

He was irked but didn’t show it. ‘I thought you’d prefer it quiet.’

‘Well, I don’t! Unless you’re frightened it’ll cost too much.’

‘It’s not that, Harriet, Just … I’d rather it not be too grand.’

To some extent she had hit the nail on the head, though she didn’t know it. His financial situation was indeed shaky. His father, true to his word, had withheld the support he had previously given, leaving the journal only just bumping along the ground. But Matthew knew he couldn’t explain the one without having to explain the other.

Hopeful of reconciliation, he had written to his father. There had been no reply and he felt hurt beyond measure, and angered. How dare they treat Harriet so! So what if she didn’t match up to their idea of polished manners, or if the breathless way words tumbled from her mouth outpaced their precisely measured tones? She was as respectable as any of them, certainly more sincere than a lot of his mother’s church-going associates with their backbiting, sanctimonious self-righteousness. The more he thought about it, the more it brought him out in a sweat of rage and made his heart pound until he felt quite sick. How could he tell Harriet any of this?

He vowed never to stoop to bothering them again. To hell with them! His father was right in one respect, though: the journal was too specialised; suffered poor circulation because of it. But pride would not let him alter its political voice now, even if he had wanted to. Trying to explain all that to Harriet was out of the question. She’d be so hurt. She was hurt enough now.

‘They’re my
family
, Matthew. I can’t offend them. I wouldn’t want to.’

‘I know, my love. But this being your second marriage …’

It was entirely the wrong thing to say. He knew it as soon as he said it, stopped short, but the tears had really started to flow now. She threw herself away from him.

‘What you really mean is that God doesn’t approve of brides who’ve had … who’ve been … soiled?’ The word dragged itself out. ‘I thought you loved me. How can you be so … so hypocri—hypocrit—’

‘I
do
love you.’ Moved to sympathy by her inability in her hurt pride to get round the word, he made an attempt to catch her to him, but she resisted and held herself away from him, her body rigid.

‘I didn’t mean it that way.’ He tried reasoning in desperation now. ‘How can He see you as anything but pure? As I see you. Oh, Harriet, my love, you’re good and wonderful and you deserve the best I can give you – my heart, my soul, every last thing I possess, my very life if you want it.’

She had relaxed only fractionally, unwilling to be won over. He tried to make a little joke. ‘But if I gave you my life, I’d not have the joy of you, would I?’ It fell flat. ‘It’s that I am not given to ostentation,’ he fought to explain. ‘I’d much prefer …’

‘That my family aren’t there,’ she finished, pouting. ‘Not good enough to meet the likes of yours from Winchester.’

‘It’s not that at all. I’m not considering inviting my own family either, Harriet.’ But she wasn’t to be mollified.

‘So I’m not to invite mine. Well, that’s just dandy, that is.’ Vehemence crept back into her voice, tears flowing afresh from the melodrama she was creating for herself. ‘I tell you what – let’s not bother about any of it! Let’s cancel everything. Go and find some genteel rich heiress in Winchester you’ll feel more comfortable with. I’m no good to you … not clever enough for you. I just get on your nerves. Why don’t you … Why don’t you just leave me and go … and … and …’ He put his hand firmly over her lips, stopping the hiccupping flow.

‘Now that’s enough. No more, my dearest.’ Removing the hand, he kissed her swiftly, then, as it melted some of her peevishness, let the kiss linger, a little surprised that she didn’t resist.

It was rare for her to allow him this much licence. The merest hint of anything more suggestive than a cuddle usually had an instant effect of frightening her off. This time it seemed that she was more terrified of the pictures she had created for herself of his taking her at her word and leaving her than of the reality of his ardour.

He felt his urge rising. His hand automatically sought the close row of tiny buttons on her blouse. Fingertips slipped the first, then the second. A third. Two more and there was room enough to slip his hand between the silky blouse and the cotton bodice. He could feel the firmness of her small breast beneath the harsh material, its warmth penetrating through the cloth and beckoning him to seek the smooth flesh itself. His breath was choking him. ‘Oh, my darling … my precious darling …’

It was his undoing to give a voice to this special moment: it seemed to freeze her. ‘Matthew – what are you doing?’

He felt her hands against his chest, pushing him away. He could feel her beginning to tremble. That unreasonable fear again.

‘I love you so much, my sweet …’

‘No, Matthew. Not before marriage. I mustn’t. Let me go!’ Her voice had risen to a shriek. From the bedroom came a thin cry. She leapt up. ‘That’s Sara – I must go to her.’

But no more sound came from the bedroom. Matthew sat trying to contain the disappointment of his shattered desire, but lost the struggle. ‘She must have been having a dream,’ he said defeatedly.

Harriet sat down in the armchair, out of reach, busying herself refastening the buttons. She didn’t speak, but looked so pathetically embarrassed that he could only say, ‘Forgive me, Harriet?’

Nodding, she continued fiddling with the buttons as though she feared they would come undone again. Matthew just sat bleakly watching her. After a while she got up and lit the gas jets on either side of the mantelpiece. This time, to his profound relief, she did not return to her seat but came and sat down again beside him with a look that intimated he must behave himself. Of course he would behave himself, his brief moment of passion flown.

After a moment she said in a small, shaky voice, ‘We can invite our families, can’t we, Matthew?’
Not mine
, he thought, but said nothing about that. Soon he would have to explain to her.

‘We can, can’t we?’ she urged again innocently.

He capitulated. It wasn’t much to ask, giving her what she seemed most to desire. A reception wasn’t going to break him. Especially as he had been secretly robbing the
Freewoman
’s tiny profits each week, putting aside a regular sum. It was a special secret – it was to take her to Paris for their honeymoon. He visualised, with hardly contained pleasure, her overwhelming joy when he finally revealed his secret. Harriet would, should, have the best he could afford. What if funds were a bit tight at the moment? He wasn’t exactly poverty-stricken. He would manage, somehow.

A few weeks before the wedding the journal received a lift: out of the blue its circulation went up. The reason was that Dr Pankhurst, whose wife was the radical Emmeline Pankhurst, became the Independent Labour Party candidate for Gorton, Manchester. Four months earlier Mrs Pankhurst herself had been elected as ILP candidate to the Chorlton Board of Poor Law Guardians. The ILP being the only political party to encourage women to play a central role in its affairs, this was something of a fillip to the type of woman who bought journals like the
Freewoman.

Matthew felt he could breathe again. If his journal continued its upward swing, he wouldn’t need his father’s handouts. It did indeed continue. His dream of taking Harriet to Paris became a reality and he told her of his plan just two weeks before the wedding. He thought he’d never seen her so overwhelmed, weeping and laughing both at the same time, throwing her arms about his neck, covering her face with her fingers in sheer excitement and disbelief, dancing like an elf around the room despite the impediment of her skirts.

He watched her antics with amusement and a good deal of relief. For some weeks he’d had to face her bewilderment and frustration at his reluctance to take her to meet his family. Hedging for a long time, he had finally come out with the truth – or part of the truth: that, like his brother and sister, he had been brought up by a nanny, had been packed off to boarding school at the age of seven, then to public school and, finally, Oxford.

‘So I’ve never been that close to them,’ he explained happily while she gaped in disbelief that children could be so carelessly sent away, herself having known no other school than the one round the corner from her home. Indeed, until her first marriage, she had never been away from home. ‘I had a wretched time at boarding school,’ he told her. ‘I’d never subject my children to that sort of upbringing.’

The remark prompted a speculative frown, but he gave it no thought as he went on to point out that as it was a long way to go to visit his parents, and as his mother was not a strong woman – which was why she wouldn’t be attending the wedding – it was best to leave it for a while.

She had seemed satisfied though concerned, imagining his mother hovering at death’s door. But he made light of it, saying that his mother was
given
to ailing, in fact had made an art of it over the years, which appeared to put Harriet’s mind at rest.

‘I’ll write to your mother,’ she said sombrely. ‘She’d like that.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ he’d hastened, cuddling her to him. ‘But I love you, darling, for your thoughtfulness, with all my heart.’

Love? That was far too mild a word for how he felt about Harriet. Adored was more the truth. Little Sara he loved. Harriet he adored.

Sara, very forward, had begun to walk amazingly early. She had taken her first step on her birthday and had progressed this last month until she could totter unaided across her mother’s parlour. A month from now she would be off like a steam train. He loved spending time with her. She was so charming, the blue eyes in the little round face so alert, she had quite taken his heart. How Harriet could be so unaffected by her winning ways, he couldn’t understand. She never doted on or praised her as some mothers would their first child. He did mention it once and had been taken aback by her reaction. The sweet Harriet he knew had been transformed into a virago, ending in floods of tears, accusing him of being unreasonable – him, unreasonable!

‘I do believe you think more of her than you do of me,’ she railed at him and he hadn’t dared to trespass again into that side of her nature, mostly because he couldn’t bear being the cause of her tears.

The church ceremony was brief. The reception would have done his own family credit; hearty though it was, it was conducted soberly and with propriety.

Each taking a turn, songs were sung – more the gusty music-hall type than the warbled gentility of so-called well-bred circles – poems and ballads recited, a story or two told. But no one got roaring drunk, no one stomped a raucous knees-up, no one started an argument or hit anyone – it was all a far cry from what his family had possibly imagined it would be; from what he himself had expected. Harriet’s people had that flat East London edge to their voices when they spoke, most certainly, but they were not raucous or loudly garrulous.

He’d grown used to the loud Cockney accent. Daily it was bellowed outside his printer’s shop, below the window of his now vacated digs in Teale Street; wherever he turned in the East End, there it was jarring his ear. Mrs Hardy’s voice was certainly loud enough, any conversation yelled as though her listener were fifty yards down Hackney Road. Mr Hardy, too: his expletives were ripe, to say the least, and delivered in a voice like a rusty nail. Yet hearing the conversations around him, Matthew had come to recognise a depth of fellow feeling that seemed to be shared by all who lived here, a brash, quick wit that helped a man face the grinding poverty that constantly threatened and often overwhelmed; not so much resigned as a head-on meeting, fists clenched, chin out. Life here was harsh, vibrant, aggressive, but always confronted with a grim smirk – from the drunk carted off to the clink in a police wheelbarrow to the woman cleaning her doorstep, her eyes dry, the day after the birth of her stillborn sixth or seventh, or the untimely death of a child or a sickly husband, or the knowledge that her days too were numbered.

Here was a pride Matthew felt would have done his family a power of good to have seen. He had once been like them, thought himself above the denizens of the East End. Today, he often felt humbled by their fierce self-esteem; had come to feel some of that pride even within himself.

Perhaps the wedding reception would heat up later to something more raucous, more typical of what he’d learned to expect of this area, but he wouldn’t know, with him and Harriet leaving within the hour to catch the boat train.

Harriet could hardly contain her excitement. Paris. She felt utterly opulent. No one she could think of had ever been abroad.

‘Lucky devil, that’s all I can say,’ her brother John laughed as he toasted the happy couple with a glass of pale ale, allowed him now he’d turned eighteen. ‘Might go meself one day.’

‘One day? Next year, me, I ’ope.’ His brother George nudged him, slopping the liquid over his wrist. John scowled and lifted the glass clear, wiping off the splashes with his free hand.

‘Watch it! An’ what makes you fink Dad’d let you go at seventeen, you ’alf-baked ’Arry!’

A look from their doughty Aunt Sarah shut them up. She didn’t abide arguing boys, even though both were grown nearly as big and thickset as their father; nor did she approve of the way they spoke. They might mix with their father’s employees – they did not have to talk like them.