Cat and Mouse (12 page)

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.

‘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.