No Greater Love (49 page)

Susan grew animated for the first time, showing a glimpse of her old bustling self.

‘If I can just manage till the end of this war, then Tich’ll be home and able to help bring in some money.’

Maggie’s heart lurched. ‘Do you hear from Jimmy?’ she asked excitedly.

‘Aye, once in a blue moon, but he has written. They’re optimistic that this time they’re going to push the Boches back to Germany.’

‘Did he ever mention about George?’ Maggie asked hoarsely.

Susan glanced away. ‘Just that he’d seen him shortly before the Somme. He said there were that many of them killed they never found all the bodies, just buried them in mass graves. Likely that’s what happened to George.’

Maggie shuddered and got up, handing Bella quickly back to Susan.

‘I’m sorry,’ Susan said, ‘but you did ask.’

‘Aye,’ Maggie nodded. ‘I wish I could put it all from me mind but sometimes he comes back to me that strongly.’ Maggie stopped herself. She must finally forget George if she was to have peace of mind in a future with John Heslop. She was thankful to have known love with a man and not abuse and fear like Susan, but now it was time to stop grieving for George Gordon and to look ahead.

Susan stood looking warily at Maggie, with Bella straddling her hip once more.

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to George,’ Susan apologised quietly.

‘Aye, well,’ Maggie sighed, ‘we’d all do things differently if we had our time again, no doubt. Anyways,’ she smiled, ‘you bring the bairns over to Sandyford the next time you’re collecting clothes and leave them with me.’

‘Ta, Maggie,’ Susan smiled back. ‘Maybe I’ll see you at chapel one of these days,’ she suggested with a touch of her old brusqueness.

Maggie laughed at the veiled reproof. ‘Maybes you will,’ she answered and left smiling. There had been too much heartache among her family for too long and she was glad that she had made her peace with Susan. They at least could try to make amends for their past quarrels.

As Maggie walked back through the streets of Elswick, she realised that it was John Heslop who had urged her to go and see Susan. He was a perceptive man, Maggie admitted with a blush. She began to feel uneasy about returning to the house at Sandyford. Recalling the way she had fled from the house, crying that she did not love him, she doubted whether John would have her back, let alone agree to marry her.

Arriving in trepidation, she found the house empty. She prepared a cold supper for them in the kitchen and then sat, waiting for John or Millie to return.

It was nearly dark by the time she heard the front door open and close. John’s footsteps went first to the drawing room, then the dining room and then approached the kitchen. Maggie stood to meet him.

The blinds were drawn, but Maggie had not lit the lamp, and the only light was from the flickering fire.

‘Where have you been?’ John asked, his voice curt, his face hidden in shadow.

‘To see Susan,’ Maggie answered quietly. ‘I said I’d try and help her.’

‘I see,’ he replied. ‘So what will you do? Go and live with your sister?’

Maggie raised her chin. ‘I would like to accept your proposal of marriage,’ she said, ‘if it still stands after the way I ran off this afternoon like a deserter.’

John heard the self-mockery in her voice and smiled in relief.

‘Of course it still stands,’ he said and walked eagerly towards her. ‘Maggie, I’m so happy—’

‘There’s just one thing,’ Maggie said, stopping his advance. ‘I’ve always been one for plain speaking, so I might as well say it now.’

‘What is it?’ John asked anxiously.

‘The doctor at St Chad’s,’ Maggie explained, her throat drying as she spoke. ‘He said I couldn’t - I wouldn’t be able to have another baby. I’m too damaged, you see.
^’
Maggie found her eyes swelling with tears as she admitted aloud the bitter truth. ‘He blamed it on my times in prison, said the force-feeding had weakened me and it was all my fault. It was nothing to do with the way he butchered me with his instruments, of course!’ Suddenly Maggie was convulsed in sobs, her whole fragile body shaking with the disappointment. She had never repeated any of this to anyone, not even to Millie, for she had wanted to deny it.

Immediately, John had his arms round her and was pulling her towards him. His old-fashioned jacket smelt comfortingly of mothballs.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he insisted. ‘I wouldn’t put you through childbirth again. I couldn’t risk losing you. If you want you can have your own bedroom.’

Maggie peered up at him in the wavering firelight.

‘Why are you so understanding?’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘Don’t you want a child of your own?’

She felt him tense; he spoke very low.

‘Twenty years ago, before I moved to Benwell, I was married. My wife was dark and spirited like you, but she wasn’t strong in body. She died giving birth.’ His voice broke as the long buried pain resurfaced. ‘The baby died too. I lost them both.’

‘Oh, John,’ she spoke his Christian name for the first time. ‘I’m that sorry. I never knew.’

‘That’s why I moved - sold my old business in Howdon and came to West Newcastle. I never liked to talk about it. It’s the first time I’ve spoken of them for years. I felt such a sense of failure, you see, of being responsible.’

‘You poor man,’ Maggie said softly and reached up to touch his face. ‘Was it a girl or a boy?’

‘A girl. I named her Emily after her mother.’

Their eyes met in deep understanding and Maggie felt closer to him than she could ever have imagined.

‘I know you don’t love me, Maggie, and I can only guess why you’re marrying me,’ he said quietly. ‘But for me, it’s different. God is giving me a second chance of happiness. Emily was taken away so soon, but now I’ve been given the gift of caring for you, at an age when other men are thinking of retirement. You don’t know how young that makes me feel! And perhaps in time you’ll grow a little fonder of me.’

Maggie’s eyes pricked at his hopeful words and she felt a stab of guilt at her self-seeking reasons for becoming his wife. Yet he knew how she felt and still wanted her and had confided in her his great and painful secret about his dead wife and child. How heavy had been his burden of guilt all these years for being the cause of his wife’s pregnancy and death, Maggie thought in pity. The least she could do was comfort him.

‘You’ll not lose me so easily,’ she promised him gently and reached up to brush his cheek with a kiss.

It was only then that she felt the wetness of tears that had spilled down his face in the dark.

John’s arms went round her more tightly in a hug of gratitude and they stood holding each other comfortingly, until they heard Millie stamping down the basement steps and bang in at the back door.

Maggie and John were married in a quiet ceremony at the chapel on Alison Terrace at the end of September. Susan and her children and Aunt Violet attended, along with their old neighbour Mary Smith who still cleaned the butcher’s shop. Millie had bought a flamboyant hat covered in mock birds for the occasion, which to Maggie’s amusement gave her Aunt Violet something to criticise.

Apart from a handful of chapel members who came to watch - those who did not disapprove of the match between the lay preacher and his young bride - no one else attended.

Maggie, with Susan’s help, had altered a purple dress from the clothes stall and embellished it with white beaded lace at the collar and cuffs.

‘It’s the colour of mourning,’ Susan complained with disapproval when Maggie rejected the pink satin dress that she had wanted her to wear.

‘I’ve never worn pink,’ Maggie protested. ‘Purple’s my colour.’

‘I thought all that suffragette carry-on was over now women have got the vote,’ Susan huffed.

‘Only women over thirty,’ Maggie had reminded her. ‘We still can’t vote. Besides, there’re plenty other causes need taking up. Women can’t stand for Parliament yet, and there’s so much inequality in the workplace, barring married women from good occupations. And women like you should have more rights for yourself and your bairns, like child allowances—’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, stop your speeches!’ Susan groaned. ‘It’s two preachers we’ll have in the family, not one!’

But Maggie knew that Susan approved of her marriage to John, for she had always respected the lay preacher. Her sister had been unable to hide her astonishment at John Heslop’s wish to many Maggie but she had welcomed the idea with enthusiasm. It was a contrast to the disapproval that Susan had shown on hearing of Maggie’s illegitimate child. She had told Maggie she should forget about the search for George’s child and be thankful that John Heslop was prepared to take care of her. Maggie had been hurt that Susan did not understand her yearning for Christabel, but she was not going to let their differences come between them this time. Susan, after all, had suffered enough herself.

As she pinned on the lace, ordering Maggie to stop fidgeting, Susan said, ‘I’m not surprised at you marrying a much older man.’

‘Oh?’ Maggie queried. ‘It surprised me.’

‘No,’ Susan shook her head and took another pin from the padded cushion on the floor. ‘You’ve never had much time for younger lads. I remember you once saying that lads were all like spoilt bairns who never grew up.’

‘Well, aren’t they?’ Maggie answered with a grin.

‘Aye, maybes,’ Susan laughed.

There was a silence while Susan finished, then she looked at her sister reflectively. ‘I know you loved George Gordon but you never married him. It’s as if you’ve been waiting for a man you could respect. A man like ...’ Susan broke off and looked away.

‘Like who?’ Maggie demanded

‘No one.’ Susan began to bustle about, clearing the discarded clothes. ‘It was just a daft thought.’

‘Tell me,’ Maggie insisted. ‘Haway, Susan, it’s not every day of the week you get philosophical.’

‘A man like our dad,’ Susan said quietly.

They stared at each other, Susan adding hoarsely, ‘After he died, you never seemed to care much for men. You’ve never really got over his dying, have you?’

Maggie felt her heart stop at the suggestion, shocked to hear the truth spoken by her sister whom she had always regarded as too unimaginative to guess how she had felt all those years ago.

Quite overwhelmed, Maggie rushed from Violet’s parlour and out into the back yard. In the back lane she stopped, her chest heaving for breath as if she had run a mile.

Was Susan right? Maggie wondered, her eyes smarting. Had she bottled up her grief for her father all these years, denying her sense of betrayal at being left behind to fend in a cold unjust world? It was true that all her childhood memories were bathed in a distant sunlight that never seemed to return after his abrupt death. As a ten-year-old, she had been hurt, bewildered and angry at his sudden desertion. Had she turned this anger against the world around her, a world she saw as dominated and ruled by men? Maggie searched for the truth.

Well, if that was so, she thought, then it had been put to good cause in the fight for justice for women. Brushing back the tears that brimmed in her eyes, Maggie determined there and then that whether Susan was right or not, she would carry on fighting the injustice that she saw, believing that her father would have approved. After all, he had been made homeless as a child in the Highlands and was brought up by the strong-minded Agnes Beaton to care about his people. And Alec Beaton had passed on to her, Maggie realised, a deep feeling for fairness and justice.

And although she did not love John Heslop, could never love any man as she had loved George Gordon, Maggie realised that she was content to be marrying him. He offered her companionship, intellectually and emotionally, and he would tolerate her causes. And once they were married, she felt sure he would redouble his efforts to find Christabel.

At the marriage ceremony Maggie promised herself to John Heslop without regret and would have been almost joyous in mood had she not caught sight of Irene Gordon standing in the street afterwards, watching. There was a pack of small children waiting around the door, greeting them with shouts of, ‘Hoy oot your silver, mister!’

While John good-naturedly obliged by scattering a shower of coins into the road for the children to scramble after, Maggie stared at the dark woman across the street. She found the brutal reminder that George would never be the man at her side upsetting. She cursed the wretched Irene for turning up to spoil her wedding day, just as she had come to blight her life with the news of George’s death all that time ago.

Maggie determined to push the incident from her mind and enjoy the rest of the day and it was a small but jovial party who returned to the house in Sandyford. Though rationing reduced the fare to potted meat sandwiches, John had commissioned a wedding cake at great cost, decorated with silver horseshoes, which was eagerly consumed with the tea.

Mary Smith talked nonstop about her son Tommy in the Royal Navy and her hopes that he would soon be home. There was an air of optimism about the war. There had been no airship attacks on London for weeks and Tyneside no longer experienced the scream of the Zeppelins upriver or the vibrations from anti-aircraft guns. Bulgaria was suing for peace with the Allies and it seemed only a matter of time before the Kaiser would do the same.

For their honeymoon John had arranged a visit to a farmhouse up the Tyne valley for a few days, as it was difficult to travel far. The farmer was a fellow lay preacher and his wife had agreed to take them as guests. Rationing, it appeared, was not as severe as in the towns, and Maggie relished the freedom to walk the hills and fill her lungs with fresh country air. Her progress was slow as her limp still gave her trouble, but John seemed content to walk at her halting pace.

One day they borrowed a horse and trap from the farmer and went on an expedition further up the valley. Stopping to devour their picnic of cheese and pickles and homemade bread that tasted like real bread, Maggie spotted a large mansion hidden in a dense spread of trees and bushes below their viewpoint on the moor.

‘That’s a canny-sized house,’ she commented.