No Greater Love (37 page)

On a mild day in early May, with the young green foliage bursting on the trees around the prison, he collected Maggie Beaton in his van. She lay in the back on a makeshift bed of mattress and blankets while they jostled their way to Newcastle under police escort. Not that the prone, silent woman was in any condition to escape. Her eyes were dull and lacklustre, her hair thin and limp, her limbs like twigs. She found it difficult to speak and seemed to have lost her appetite for words as well as food.

George was aghast at her deterioration. She seemed bewildered by her surroundings as they helped her into the cottage and laid her on a bed in the corner of the room, next to a lit fire. Although it was May, there was still a chill in the air and the thick-walled cottage had not yet dried out from the spring squalls.

‘She needs coaxing to eat,’ Heslop said severely. ‘Simple things like milk and soup.’

‘I get milk from the farm,’ George told him, ‘and there’re plenty vegetables in the plot to make broth.’

‘I still think you should employ someone,’ Heslop fretted. ‘I could help pay–’

‘I can manage on me own,’ George replied stubbornly. ‘I’ve fended for mesel’ since I was little more than a nipper. Maggie’s all right wi’ me.’

Maggie watched them dumbly as they discussed her as if she were not there. But then that was how she felt; detached. She was drained to her very core, clinging on to life and sanity by her broken fingernails. She had no interest in her surroundings, only that she was out of that miserable cell and that George was with her. Yet the blackness of the past weeks was wrapped as firmly round her as ever, stifling her thoughts and actions. She was too weary to speak, too weak to cry. All she wanted to do was sleep and sleep …

Heslop left and the police withdrew, satisfied that their charge was in no state to attempt an escape. George went over to the bed and gazed at Maggie. She was sleeping, her body so frail it hardly made an impression under the covers. He stroked the dark hair away from her gaunt face and kissed her softly on the forehead. Her ragged breathing altered a fraction, but the strained set of her features remained.

If he had believed in a God, he would have given thanks for this second chance to care for Maggie, to make her whole again, for that was the task he set himself. But he did not believe, so he strode back outside and busied himself in the allotment.

***

Maggie’s recovery was uneven. After two weeks she was sitting up in bed drinking watery soup. At the end of the month she could sit in a chair in the doorway, sheltered from the wind that whipped around the hill, and watch George tending the garden after work. She had progressed to bread soaked in milk and mashed vegetables and stewed apples like a small child learning to eat. But there were still days when she took to her bed and lay paralysed by the blanket of blackness that lay over her, unseen but smothering.

George had again given up his rowing to look after her and she was amazed at his patience and resourcefulness. He cooked and washed up and took their clothes to the laundry, as well as tending the fire, feeding the hens that pecked around the house and harvesting the early rhubarb and runner beans. At haymaking, he lent a hand after work on Hibbs’ Farm and was paid in milk and cheese and butter.

And in the evenings, as the sun lay down below the western hills, he would settle Maggie by the fire and read to her by flickering candlelight. He did not seem to mind if she did not listen, or curled up on the bed in the grip of a black mood and cried at nothing. He neither chided not rebuked her; he did not storm off as he had once done, and his gentleness was a revelation.

Slowly, like one of his tenderly nurtured plants, Maggie emerged from the dark soil of her depression and stretched into the light. She was overwhelmed with gratitude for his loving care as she became aware of her surroundings and began to take an interest in life again.

June arrived and she delighted in the small dilapidated cottage that he had discovered on the lip of the farm, with its plum trees and ragged garden, burgeoning with George’s vegetables and the trespassing hens. From here she could see right down to the River Tyne and its cranes and factory chimneys and ranks of terraces, stacked up on its banks like dolls’ houses.

To the west she could gaze upriver to the rich green valley of the upper Tyne, beyond the grazing animals and peaceful fields of Farmer Hibbs. Late one tranquil summer evening, she sat contentedly in the garden and watched the sunset wavering like a banner in the sky while George read and talked and listened to the sounds of dusk.

‘Arcadia,’ Maggie nicknamed their new home.

‘Just wait till winter,’ George teased, ‘and see how much you like it then.’

‘I can wait,’ Maggie laughed.

And she revelled in the thought, because winter seemed an age away and it made her content to think they had all this time stretching ahead together. She tried to banish from her mind that her licence ran out at the end of July and that she must deliver herself back to prison by then and was only reminded of this by occasional visits from the police, checking on her whereabouts. This time she was not going to be forced into hiding.

So they kept up the pretence that they could make plans into the winter, each unable to contemplate what another stint in prison might do to Maggie’s health.

That evening, Maggie stood in the doorway as the half-dark crept over the garden, reluctant to go inside. She kept glancing beyond the gate and down the hill, her mind alert to something as yet unidentified. After months of malnutrition in prison she thought her ‘feelings’ about things had been numbed, cauterised by the trauma. But tonight they tingled down her spine and made her uneasy.

‘Come in, pet,’ George beckoned from inside their cottage.

Maggie sighed and shrugged to herself. Perhaps the ghost of her mother was passing? Then she saw it: a dark, darting shadow on the path below, skirting the hedgerow.

‘George,’ she called, ‘someone’s coming.’

He came to stand by her as the figure drew nearer, anxious to protect Maggie and constantly watchful that she should not be taken before her time expired.

‘He’s alone, whoever he is,’ Maggie murmured.

By now they could hear his panting as he ran the last stretch up the hill towards the cottage. A gangling figure appeared in the gloom by the garden gate. Maggie peered. She began to walk towards him.

‘Maggie!’ George cautioned, but she was quickening her pace.

‘Jimmy, is it you?’ she cried.

He burst through the gate and flung his arms round his sister in answer.

‘Will you tak’ us in?’ he gasped. ‘Please, Maggie, will you have me?’

‘Of course,’ Maggie answered without hesitation. ‘But what in the world brings you up here?’

‘Heslop told me where you were,’ Jimmy panted, still clinging to her. ‘I had to get away. It’s terrible at home. I cannot gan back. Never!’

‘You don’t have to gan back,’ Maggie assured him, deeply troubled. ‘Come inside.’

She glanced at George as she steered her brother round and her lover nodded his silent assent.

In the candlelight they saw the blood on his cheek and the swelling around his left eye.

‘Who the devil’s done this to you?’ Maggie demanded angrily, sitting him down on a chair.

‘Turvey,’ Jimmy spat out the name.

‘Richard?’ Maggie asked in astonishment. ‘Surely not.’

‘Aye, he did,’ Jimmy said, wincing at her probing fingers. ‘And I’m not the only one he’s raised his fists to an’ all. I could kill ’im for what he’s done to our family!’

Maggie and George exchanged worried looks.

Later that night, after hearing Jimmy’s disturbing story, they put the exhausted boy to bed on a mattress of hay in the loft. Then they went to bed, too troubled to talk of what they had learned, and held each other close. Maggie knew now that she would have to be strong for others as well as herself; her time of recuperation was over.

And so is Arcadia, Maggie thought with regret, as she burrowed further into George’s comforting arms.

***

Susan ducked as a shoe came flying at her head.

‘Do you call these polished?’ Richard shouted.

‘I did polish them,’ Susan answered fearfully.

‘Well do ’em again, you stupid cow!’ Richard hurled the other one at his wife.

Shaking, she bent down to pick them up, feeling a flutter inside. The baby, she told herself, I must protect the baby. For there was no doubt now that she was pregnant; her swelling womb was beginning to show and her breasts had enlarged, so that all the new dresses that Richard had bought her no longer fitted. But instead of being happy about becoming a father, he seemed to be annoyed that she no longer looked elegant and did not have the energy to accompany him to tea dances and theatres. Instead, he took Helen, dressing her up in Susan’s old clothes and flaunting her around the town. It had been the cause of a fearful row with her sister which had resulted in Richard punching Susan for accusing him of adultery with Helen.

‘Don’t ever talk to me like that again!’ he had shouted as she fell against the table from the force of his blow. She could smell the drink on his breath.

‘Just promise me you’ll not touch her,’ Susan had sobbed.

This had enraged him further and he had seized her by the arms and threatened, ‘Well, you better start acting like a dutiful wife in bed, doll, then I won’t have to go looking around, will I?’

Susan was left with a strange feeling of guilt. It must have been something she had done, or not done, that had turned Richard into the selfish, manipulating man who now bullied their household. She strove to please him, to placate his moods, avoid confrontations with Helen. But nothing she did seemed to be enough in her husband’s eyes. She yearned for his approval, for kind words and affection, but they grew rarer.

Susan bore the cuffs and the humiliation because she did not know what else she could do, and there was the baby to consider now. Respectable women did not leave their husbands, especially after six months of marriage, she thought miserably. Besides, she had nowhere else to go. She would have to put up with the insults and assaults and attempt to bring her unborn child safely into the world.

But what a world! Susan thought bitterly. A violent, unpredictable father and a pathetic, cowering mother, still living in lowly Gun Street. They could afford better, Susan knew, if only Richard did not squander all he earned on gambling and drinking and taking Helen to shows. They had argued about money. They had argued about Helen. Even skinny, ineffectual Jimmy had tried to stand up to him but had been kicked out of the house for his trouble.

Now she had no ally, Susan thought wretchedly. Aunt Violet had not spoken to them since her mother’s death, except when they passed in the street and she demanded the money that Richard owed her. But Susan was becoming immune to the daily humiliations. She would bear them for her baby, because that was the only thing in her world that was worth striving for.

Alone, she ran her mother’s old clothes stall while Helen went goodness knows where. The girl was beyond her control, obeying only Richard. Resisting Mary Smith’s temptations to go and drink with her downstairs as her mother had done, Susan relied on a frail and increasingly demented Granny Beaton for company. But her grandmother had become a burden to them all and her senile ways a constant irritation.

‘The old bag’s got to go,’ Richard had threatened after the elderly woman had nearly set fire to the flat trying to light the paraffin lamp. It was the night Jimmy had left.

‘Go where?’ Susan had muttered.

‘The workhouse,’ he had answered at once. ‘The old bat’s going to the workhouse if she singes any more of my furniture.’

Susan’s frayed nerves had caused her to snap back, ‘
Your
furniture? It was Mam’s best chair she burned. You’ve never spent a farthing on this place.’

He had slapped her hard for speaking her mind and Jimmy had finally intervened, sickened by the months of abuse. Richard had given him a black eye and thrown him down the back stairs. Susan had screamed after him in the dark to come back, but all she heard was his sobbing as he ran away up the back lane.

For three days now she had not gone out for fear of the neighbours gossiping about her bruised face and she did not want to miss Jimmy if he attempted to return. She was only thankful that her mother was dead and could not see in what hell she was living.

‘That feeble brother of yours been back yet?’ Richard demanded to know as he straightened his tie in the parlour mirror.

‘No,’ Susan answered wearily. ‘He’ll not be back in a hurry.’

‘Good,’ Richard grunted. ‘I don’t want him sneaking round here for food while I’m out, do you hear? He’s not getting any more of my charity, the little toe-rag.’

Susan did not reply as she reached mechanically for the shoe polish and brushes in a box by the hearth. She polished Richard’s shoes again, wondering where Jimmy had gone. No doubt she would hear soon enough through Tommy Smith, for the two lads could not be separated for long. All her life she had taken care of Jimmy and the pain she felt at his going was far worse than her aching face.

Richard came and stood over her. She put his shoes on for him and tied the laces. Then, in a flash of unpredictability, he leant over and stroked her cheek.

‘You look done in, doll,’ he smiled in concern. ‘You should go and lie down. Got to keep your strength up - think of our baby, eh?’

Susan smiled back in relief. Just when she was thinking evil thoughts about Richard, he surprised her with a tender remark and she felt wicked for having wanted to be rid of him. It filled her with hope that he would be a loving father once the baby came and everything would be all right again between them, like it was in their courting days. Perhaps she expected too much from him. She had been tired and short-tempered with him lately, so was it any wonder that he chose to stay out and drink until closing? And it was only in drink that he was cruel and uncaring.

Richard kissed her on the head. ‘Fetch me dut then, doll.’

Susan got to her feet and crossed to the dresser where Richard’s bowler hat sat in pompous state. She gave it a possessive brush with her hand and fixed it on his head. Without another word, Richard reached for his ebony walking cane and left by the front door, whistling.