Women of Courage Page 10

  ‘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.

  ‘That’s what I like to see.’ The smile on Rankin’s face widened as he saw her lips twitch. She allowed herself to laugh with him, and felt enriched.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not much of a fine princess for you,’ she said. ‘With a torn skirt, grimy hands and a sprained knee. But I can offer you my thanks, if nothing else.’

  ‘Sure and that’s all I want, for now. In a way I saw you more as a sort of female pied piper, come to take ragged children to your country home. Is that the great plan?’

  ‘Yes. Why not?’

  He frowned and said: ‘I don’t know. Sounds a bit like the bountiful lady of the manor, to me. I hope the little chiselurs are properly grateful to you. Will you be teaching them to doff their caps and drop a curtsey before they come home?’

  ‘Of course not!’ She glared at him, offended. ‘What do you think I am? I want to help these children, make them happy. Put a little good food in their bellies for a week or two. Is that something to sneer at?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ he said slowly. ‘Though they may not be as grateful as you’d think, that’s all I’m saying. And you’d best watch out for the Catholic priests. Splitting up families, they’ll call it. Taking the little beggars away from their loving homes to a world of sin.’

  ‘The more fool them. My house, a world of sin?’

  He smiled at that, and sent a boy across the city on a bicycle with a message for Annie Haines. But by the time Annie arrived the knee was so stiff that Deborah could not bend it at all. They called a doctor who advised bed rest with no movement. So the two women decided it was best if Annie and the others went on north with the children, and Deborah followed when her knee was strong enough for her to be of some use.

  Mrs McCafferty gave her a comfortable bedroom with a sitting room overlooking the square, and ministered kindly to her needs, so in the end she stayed for a week, that first time. Rankin was frenetically busy, out early doing what he could for the strikers and their families, and meeting committees late into the night downstairs, but nonetheless he contrived to spend an hour or two with her every day. In that time she told him, gradually, the story of her life.

  For that was what it became. She did not stop when she had explained her presence in Dublin. She went on to talk about her childhood in London, her holidays as a young girl in Ulster, her sister Sarah and the terrible year they had had when their father died, her time in India when Tom was born, her dislike of living as a soldier’s wife, her loneliness in her marriage, her desire to fill her big, empty house with noise and laughter and children. He seemed genuinely to want to learn about her.

  He sat on a chair beside her bed, sometimes flexing her knee with his big gentle hands to see how far it would bend, or letting her lean on his arm as she learned to hobble across the room. She was flattered. She was unused to talking about herself to anyone, and certainly not to a handsome, vibrant, powerful young man. All the time he watched her with his lean dark face and pale green twinkling eyes. Even when she was serious they seemed to sparkle with some inner amusement.

  ‘Are you laughing at me, James Rankin?’ she asked him once.

  ‘Me?’ He feigned surprise. ‘Not a thought of it, woman. There was never a more serious moment in all my life.’

  She didn’t know how to take that either, but she was aware that she was playing with fire. It was a most improper situation, especially for a married lady like herself, to have a young man, a working class trade union leader, sitting alone with her for hours on end.

  As he listened to her story, a tremor of excitement and fear went through her. I am in this man’s power, she thought. I do not have to tell him any of this but I want to. I have never had any man ever listen to me like this before — and I like him!

  Rankin laughed easily, an infectious chuckle resonating deep in his chest, and she liked to hear it so much that she was always searching through her childhood for amusing stories to tell him. When he laughed, she laughed too, and it was an enormous release to her, something she had not done so freely and openly for years. She longed for it like a medicine.

  She had forgotten life could be funny. She had not known a man could be a friend.

  When she could walk a few yards with a stick she said she ought to be going home to see how much of Glenfee the children had wrecked, and whether the week had given her butler grey hairs. That night Rankin asked if she would mind if Mrs McCafferty served them supper together, at the table in Deborah’s sitting room. It was to be a celebration, he said, to mark the end of a notable week in both of their lives.

  When Deborah agreed, she knew it was wrong. It was a quite improper, daring suggestion. But she knew that if she refused, she would regret it for the rest of her life.

  Whereas if she agreed . . .

  They went out for a walk together while Mrs McCafferty set the table. James had put on his best clothes — tweed jacket and waistcoat, flat cap, leather belt round his trousers, polished boots, a bright green silk scarf round his throat in place of a tie. He had three scarves like that. They were his one luxury — something that set him apart from the other trade union leaders. They made him instantly recognisable when he stood up to speak.

  Deborah limped beside him, leaning on his arm for support. Her knee was still stiff, so they moved slowly, to avoid further slips or damage. The square was not far from the Liffey, and they made their way carefully down to the quays. The sun was setting behind the tenements to the south of the river, and some seagulls were squabbling over some rubbish a boat had thrown in the water. There were barefoot children in flat caps and ragged oversize clothes trying to beg from passers-by, and on the far bank a boy of about twelve was scavenging in the mud by the river, looking for money or cans of food or scrap iron to sell.

  They sat on a bench and watched him. ‘He was here yesterday and the day before that,’ Rankin said. ‘He works hard at it. He mus
t find something, sometimes.’

  ‘It’s admirable,’ Deborah said. ‘But it’s a disgrace as well, that a child should have to do that to live.’

  ‘One day he won’t,’ said Rankin thoughtfully. ‘If we win this strike then we’ll have forced the transport owners to give us a decent wage, and that’ll make all the other bosses afraid as well.’

  ‘Do you think that’ll happen, really, James?’ They had had many discussions like this. She thought of the industrialists she had met at dinner parties in Belfast. Some of them determined, thick-necked, stubborn men with big bellies and loud voices. Others better bred, casual, lean, arrogant, intimidating as Charles was. But both groups equally certain that the world belonged to them. Not to ignorant, uneducated workers.

  James turned to look at her. They were sitting very close, and he had his arm casually along the back of the old wooden bench behind her. The setting sun tinged the dark skin of his face a rich rose colour. The pale green of his eyes reflected the darker green of his neck scarf, and as always, a lock of his dark hair flopped forward over his forehead. It’s the passion in him, his naive enthusiasm that makes him different, she thought. This is a man who wants to set people free, not control them. If he chose to write instead of speak he would be a poet.

  ‘Men may be born in the gutter but they needn’t die there,’ he said, passionately. ‘I have to believe that. Even if we don’t win this strike, we’ll win the next one. It’s going to happen, it’s got to. One day there’ll be justice and wealth for all. In our lifetimes. You wait and see.’

  ‘You speak as though it were a religion.’

  ‘It’s better than a religion for me. I’m talking about heaven on earth now, for all men — and women too. So we can have what we want and truly deserve.’

  He smiled at her and she felt, as so often before, the magnetism that flowed from him like an electric current. Her lips went dry with sudden terror, and she thought, with awful clarity: it does not matter really what he says or thinks. It is the man himself I want. And even to think that is a terrible, dreadful sin.

  Please God let him dare to ask me.

  Later, as they ate and drank in her room at Mrs McCafferty’s, the conversation drifted between them more quietly than before, as though they were both waiting for something which it was not time to mention yet. Mrs McCafferty came to clear away and bring them coffee, and they sat in the old armchairs on either side of a small crackling fire. They talked about the strike, the prayers suffragettes were offering in church for Sylvia Pankhurst in Holloway prison, the war in China, the parade of the Kaiser’s troops and the flight of a huge new Zeppelin airship in Germany. As they talked, the light gradually faded and the room grew dark, shadowy, mysterious. The lamplighter went past outside, rattling his pole. Rankin bent forward to light a spill from the fire and carried the flame to a small cigar. As he flicked away the spill and exhaled they looked at each other, silent for once, like two old friends sharing a secret joke.

  She said, only a little nervously: ‘I am glad we thought to celebrate our time together like this. You may not believe it, but I have never had a man as a friend before.’

  He smiled, his teeth flashing white in the semi-darkness. ‘Sure and isn’t a good man the best sort of friend to have, for an independent lady like yourself?’

  ‘Perhaps. But there are certain rules of propriety, you know, even in these modern days.’ It was after eleven o’clock. There was another long silence. Slowly, she stood up, listening to the sound of her dress rustle as she moved. It was her last attempt to resist what she knew was going to happen — and wanted. It was the sign that the evening was over and that he, as a gentleman, should leave.

  But he was not a gentleman. She had known that from the very beginning. He put down his cigar, stood up, and faced her. Please, she thought.

  He did not touch her. Instead, very quietly, he said: ‘I will go if you want me to, now.’

  So the choice was to be hers, after all. She knew very well what she ought to do; but she did not do it. It is my life, she thought. And for once, I do not care.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, very softly, like a sigh. ‘Don’t go.’

  She lifted her hand to his cheek, and she remembered, long after, how surprised she was at the roughness of it, where the bristles were. Then, only then, he kissed her. And although he was not rough he was so big, his chest and arms so strong from the years he had spent as a boy heaving bricks, that when they were naked in bed together she felt smothered and crushed by a giant. Without his clothes he was a bear of a man, with broad, powerful shoulders and a deep barrel chest covered with a cross of dark soft curly hair which went down in a thin pointed line across his hard flat stomach to where she was too shy at first to look. There was fine downy hair on the back of his neck too, and on his buttocks and thighs. His skin was much darker than hers. He was like a great woolly bear with soft dark hair, pale green eyes and bristly scratchy cheeks which he rubbed against her face and between her breasts — and he sucked her breasts too! No one had ever done that except her baby, Tom, for the first few desperate, disappointing days before she gave him to a wet nurse in India. Now, she gasped and then cried out because of the force with which Rankin did it and the pleasure it gave her. Charles had scarcely looked at her body and had ignored her breasts — this young giant wanted to kiss and rub her and stroke her all over, as though each and every part of her were soft and beautiful to him. At first she was shocked, then overwhelmed. His delight in her body made her feel beautiful. Waves of pleasure flowed through her, and as she looked down at his dark arms and legs entwined with hers, she thought: he is beautiful for me and I am soft and smooth and pale and beautiful for him too, and I have dared to do it and we are both here, alive, now.

  And then, as he moved gently inside her, something began to happen which had never happened with Charles and which she did not know could happen to a woman except secretly, alone, by herself. She wanted to resist but he was kissing her and inside her at the same time and it was so good — and then she gasped and cried out aloud and it was too late, far far too late to be ashamed now.

  Then to her dismay and amazement he rolled off her and lay beside her stroking her gently with his hand, there between the legs where she was still so damp and tender — something which she had thought no man could possibly know about, ever, but before she could push his hand away she came again, better than before. He laughed, lying next to her, kissing her breasts, and, after a while, he began again but this time she pushed his hand away and said: ‘No, please, I can’t!’ and snuggled up to him, amazed and exhausted and utterly, totally relaxed.

  It was cold in the bedroom. He rolled on to his back and she wrapped herself round him. She was overwhelmed with terror and joy and gratitude. All week she had secretly wanted him, but she had had no idea it would be like this. In bed with Charles she had always felt ashamed, confused, embarrassed. Sex was an animal function he wanted to get over quickly and have done. She had always known, secretly, that there was more pleasure to be got from her own hand, but had felt intensely guilty about it. Now — now she was in bed with a man who not only knew her secret, but laughed and loved her for it.

  She had her head on his shoulder, her leg with the stiff, bruised knee laid carefully over his, her breasts nudging softly against the smooth skin under his arms. Her fingers played with the curling hairs of his chest and she said, timidly: ‘I used to dream of men like you when my father read me fairy-tales, you know. The prince who would kiss me awake.’

  She felt the laughter resonating in his chest beneath her arm. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Well, now. I’ve been called many things in my life but never a prince before. I’m a barrel-lifter, that’s all, a worker with a big mouth who joined a union.’

  ‘What does that matter?’ She raised herself up on her elbow and looked down at him, smiling, her hair loose, drifting in his face. ‘I’m a lady. I know about these things. If I say you’re a prince you are a prin
ce to me!’

  His smile flashed up at her. ‘Sure it’s nice of you to say so then, ma’am. But a great ignorant lump like me mostly feels like one of them goat fellows in the classy pictures, a satyr, when he thinks about it. Though you ladies seem to like it.’

  You ladies.

  A thin cold needle of jealousy pierced her. She had come so far, risked so much. Don’t betray me now, please!

  ‘What ladies?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He frowned, and put on a deliberately broad accent to make a joke of it. ‘Sure I thought there was six of ye in here at least, with all the gasping and moaning you’re after doing.’

  It was meant as a joke, she saw that; but it was clumsy, it hurt. Not a prince after all but a peasant. Oh God, what have I done?

  ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘James, please, don’t laugh at me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He saw his mistake at last. As she tried to turn her head away, he held it between his hands, forced her to look at him. ‘There’s only one woman in this room and she’s the most beautiful I’ve seen in years. Deborah, believe me.’

  I want to believe you. I have to now, she thought. It’s too late for anything else.

  ‘But there have been other ladies?’

  Of course there have, she told herself. How could he possibly have known how to make love like that if I was the first? And didn’t I like it?

  His fingers stroked her face. ‘I never said there hadn’t, now did I? Though they weren’t all what you’d call ladies, exactly. But why talk of them? They’re all past and gone, over, finished with, done. We’re here, you and me, now. That’s all that matters, today.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled and kissed him, and the film of tears cleared from her eyes. She saw him clearly now. Not a prince after all. Just a big, beautiful man, who had charmed his way to her bed and blessed her, more than she had thought it was possible to be blessed. But a man who would leave her, one day, as he had left all the others.