Mistress of Green Tree Mill

by Mistress of Green Tree Mill (retail) (epub)

  Though she was determined to find help for Charlie, she was well aware of the dangers of helping him to recover. Was she only making it possible for him to have to go through it all again?

  Her mind in turmoil, she made her way back to the Ritz in the gathering darkness.

  She had forgotten to send the hotel a telegram but her suite was still vacant.

  ‘Mr Johanson said to keep it for at least a week,’ said the reception clerk.

  The room looked like a haven when she stepped through the door. The lamps were lit and there were flowers beside the window. Suddenly she felt very tired and very unhappy. Grateful for Goldie’s thoughtfulness, she threw herself down on the sumptuous bed and allowed herself the luxury of tears, but soon exhaustion overtook her and she drifted into sleep before she had even taken off the jacket of her suit. She had no idea what time it was when she was wakened by a knock at the door.

  Thinking it was a chambermaid, she called out, ‘It’s not locked. Come in.’

  The door opened a little and a face looked round. She gazed at it for a second without recognition and then cried out, ‘Oh, Goldie, I thought you’d gone home. Oh, Goldie, I thought I was alone and it’s been so terrible!’

  Face tear streaked, hair in disarray and clothes rumpled from travel and sleep, she jumped from the bed and ran towards him. He stepped through the door and leaned against it as she rushed up, throwing her arms round his neck and burying her face in his chest. He gave a gasp and put his arms around her, laying his cheek on her hair.

  ‘Oh, Lizzie, dear Lizzie,’ he groaned, and then he kissed her.

  It was the first time she’d been kissed since Sam died and she felt the tension drain from her at the touch of his lips. Without thinking what she was doing she parted her own lips and kissed him back.

  The passion inside Lizzie was best expressed physically. Just as she was capable of violent rage, so could she experience turbulent feelings of love. As she felt her lips against Goldie’s, her heart seemed to turn in her chest and all the inhibitions built up over her years of widowhood melted away.

  She drew back slightly and looked up at him from under heavy eyelids. Then she put up a hand and gently stroked his cheek while the other hand pulled his head down towards her again. She brushed his mouth with lips that fluttered like captive butterflies.

  All cautious thoughts, all fears, all memories and inhibitions slipped away from her like abandoned armour. She closed her eyes and in the velvety blackness behind her lids gave herself up to loving him.

  They kissed each other for what seemed a very long time without speaking till Lizzie sighed and said, ‘Dear Goldie, I do love you.’

  His voice sounded soft against her ear as he whispered, ‘And I adore you.’

  She gave herself up to him completely. That night of lovemaking had an ease and liberation such as she had never before experienced. She felt safe and cherished beside his compact body, enclosed in his strong arms. All that night they took pleasure in each other on the huge bed as if nothing existed outside it. Their universe was encompassed in the space of the darkened room.

  When morning came and light slanted through a gap in the curtains, she drifted out of sleep feeling light-hearted for an unaccountable reason. Then she saw her lover’s head on the pillow beside her.

  What have we done? was her first thought. She remembered Goldie’s wife. She remembered Sam, her own widowhood and grieving. She thought of the gossip that would fly around Dundee if anyone ever found out about Goldie Johanson and Lizzie Kinge. She remembered her own rectitude in matters of morality and how righteous she had been over other people who had strayed from the path of strict morality – even her own father and her brother George.

  But as she looked at the sleeping Goldie, her qualms disappeared. It didn’t matter because she loved him. Making love with him had unlocked the chains that bound her heart, she had broken out of her isolation and knew once again the exhilaration of passion. She and Goldie loved each other, and had loved each other for a very long time. They needed each other. What was surprising was how long it had taken them to do anything about it.

  She leaned over his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, playing with her finger in the tight curls of his hair. As he opened one eye and gazed at her, she saw a certain timidity there. He was not sure about her reaction now that daylight was upon them. She laughed and cuddled against him. ‘Wake up, big bear, I want you to make love to me again,’ she whispered.

  Later, with the memory of the distracted Russian woman in her mind, Lizzie asked him, ‘What about your wife? How is she now?’

  Goldie shook his head. ‘She’s no better. She’ll never be any better. She still knows me and the girls but she can’t remember anything else from one moment to the next.’

  ‘You mustn’t hurt her,’ warned Lizzie.

  ‘I don’t want to. And I don’t want to hurt the girls. They’re so devoted to their mother.’

  * * *

  They were like children in their delight. Dressed in their best, they sallied out arm in arm to the teeming streets of Mayfair. They looked so confident and opulent that passers-by stared at them, convinced they must be people of importance.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ Goldie assured Lizzie. ‘We’ll collect that doctor chap and take him down to Hastings. He can have a look at Charlie and tell you what he thinks. You must do it, Lizzie. You can’t leave the laddie mouldering away in an asylum if anything can be done to get him out of it.’

  Goldie’s confidence, his assurance that her instincts were correct, bolstered Lizzie and they retraced her journey to Hastings with the Harley Street specialist in tow.

  After two hours with Charlie, he returned to the hotel where he’d left Goldie and Lizzie and told them, ‘He’s going to recover in time, so don’t worry. Part of the problem is that his wound’s not properly healed yet and his entire system is weak. I’ve left instructions about what medication to give him and I’ll return to see him every week until he’s entirely cured.’

  Lizzie clasped his hands in gratitude and said, ‘It doesn’t matter what it costs. He’s to have everything he needs.’

  The doctor was cordial. ‘I can tell you one thing, he has something on his side that no doctor can provide – he’s incredibly lucky. When I examined his wound I was amazed the shot didn’t kill him. It missed his heart by one inch. Your son must lead a blessed life, Mrs Kinge.’

  When all the arrangements were made for Charlie, the time had come to return home. Goldie was sailing back on his ship but Lizzie refused to go with him.

  Mindful of his care for his wife and daughters, she said, ‘We must keep what’s happened between us secret. It can’t get out. If we return together, people’ll talk. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘I think they’ll probably talk anyway when they see us together. How we feel must show,’ said Goldie, but he agreed to travel separately because he had no wish to injure his family.

  ‘We’ll go on as we’ve always done,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘With one exception, I hope,’ said Goldie, kissing her. ‘I hope we’ll be able to make love again.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed, ‘as often as we can. But in secret.’ The train journey north was tedious but her mind was full of memories that put a smile on her lips as she sat with closed eyes in the corner of her compartment. It was only when the train steamed into Dundee station and pulled up with a great snort that she realized she had actually crossed the Tay Bridge and never given it a thought.

  Chapter 25

  Maggy was eager to hear the news of Charlie as soon as Lizzie stepped through the door of Tay Lodge. She did not even wait for Lizzie to take off her coat before she was bombarding her with questions.

  ‘Oh, the poor laddie – Oh, my God – Oh, I wish I could go down there and look after him…’ Her comments interrupted the recital. Eventually, after a second telling, some tears and many questions about specific points, she was satisfied. Then she said in a port
entous voice, ‘I’ve news for you as well. Lexie’s left.’

  ‘What do you mean, left?’

  ‘She’s gone away. She’s taken her things and left. She said you’ve not to try to bring her back or she’ll just run away again.’

  To Maggy’s surprise, Lizzie took this item of news a good deal more calmly than expected. In fact she seemed much happier than she had been for years.

  She made a hopeless gesture with her hands. ‘I give up. Where’s she gone? To Rosie and Bertha, I suppose. It seems that everybody who runs away from me goes straight to them.’

  Maggy gave a nod. ‘That’s where she is, but dinna go after her, Lizzie. The lassie’s all right. She’s taken a job at Brunton’s with Bertha.’

  ‘She’ll soon be tired of that,’ said Lizzie, ‘and then she’ll come back asking me to take her in again.’

  * * *

  It was only the knowledge that Lizzie was expecting her to go abjectly home that kept Lexie working at Brunton’s.

  Hearing Bertha’s tales of the jollity of the mill lassies, of the jokes they all enjoyed together and the things they could buy with their wages, did not prepare Lexie for the reality of rising at five every morning when the chapper-up knocked on the door and running to work in the bitter cold of dawn. Nor did Bertha’s tales prepare her for having her bright red hair shaved off or for the terrible illness that hit her after only a week in the weaving shed.

  ‘I feel awful,’ she moaned.

  But Rosie only said, ‘You’ve got mill fever.’

  ‘I feel as if I’m dying.’

  ‘Oh aye, that’s normal. But you’d better get up and go to work or you’ll no have a job to go to.’

  No one had prepared her, either, for the noise, for the back-breaking work or for the cuffs and shouts of the overseers, for the sudden panic that ran through the shed when a wicked little imp of fire was seen snaking along the water pipes above the heads of the workers – or for the horrific screams when a woman’s arm was trapped in a piece of moving machinery.

  Lexie Mudie grew up in the first few months she worked at Brunton’s, and she grew into an angry woman.

  It was one of the other women in the weaving shed who whispered to her one day, ‘Would you be interested in going to a meeting?’

  ‘What sort of meeting? I’m aye too tired to go out when I get home at night.’

  ‘Oh, this one’ll interest you all right. I’ve heard the things you say aboot the bosses. It’s a Red meeting.’

  She was fifteen years old and the passionate fury of the speakers delighted her. They made her want to leap to her feet and cry out in agreement: ‘Why should some people live like kings off the sweat of so many others? Why should bairns die of malnutrition when the bosses are drinking champagne? We should be like the Russians and rise in revolt. We should take to the streets.’

  Few people in Brunton’s knew that Lizzie Kinge and Lexie Mudie were half sisters and the more deeply she became involved in Communism, the more Lexie grew away from everything her sister held dear. It was as if they were living in different worlds although geographically they were little over a mile and a half apart.

  Lizzie was told by Maggy that Lexie had settled down to work, and after that her mind was occupied with Charlie’s progress, with the demands of her work and most of all by her growing love for Goldie.

  Regular letters came from the Harley Street doctor who was pursuing a regime of making Charlie talk about the war. By forcing him to relive the horrors that had driven him to near-suicidal despair, it was hoped to return him to stability. The process had been unwittingly started by Lizzie when she persuaded her son to tell her about what obsessed him, and the doctor’s apparently cruel regime opened the flood gates even more. Surprisingly this therapy worked.

  As Charlie talked, his mind cleared. He could see his predicament more clearly and he accepted the future with fatalism. His chest began healing and after a few more weeks the medical board at Spring Hill declared him fit enough to return to France.

  Before he was sent back again he was granted a week’s leave in Dundee. He did not go out much when he was there but stayed at home, where he was coddled by his mother and Maggy, who would hardly let him out of their sight. One evening however he did manage to escape to the Vaults where he listened with amusement to Lexie’s political theories.

  ‘If you must go back to Flanders, you should organize a rising in the trenches,’ she told him. ‘The soldiers are being used as cannon fodder. The Russians did the right thing. Put the word round when you get back to France, Charlie.’

  He thought of her as a child still and gave her a sovereign. When he took his leave of her, he promised to tell his friends what she said about the Russians, but privately he was wondering if there would be anyone left to tell when he got back to Flanders.

  His mother was almost frantic on his last night at home. Over and over again she asked him, ‘Should I have left you in that hospital, Charlie? It’s because of me that you’re going back to the trenches tomorrow.’

  ‘Mother,’ he told her, ‘before you came to see me I was in hell, really in hell. Every day was black. There was nothing to live for. You and the doctor brought me back to life. I don’t want to go back but there’s no alternative. I can’t run away. Not because it’s my patriotic duty to fight, or anything daft like that, but because it would be denying everything my friends fought for. I’m going back and if I survive this lot, I’ll start living for all of them – for Pennie and Roaring Wind and thousands of others.’ There was a wild look in his eye when he made this pledge.

  Lizzie was as determined as he was. ‘You’ll survive, I know you’ll survive. Don’t take any chances. When you come back I’ll buy you a car. I’ll give you anything in the world you want,’ she promised.

  In kilt and shining black boots Charlie boarded the train for London on an evening in mid April. His amazing luck was still with him because while he was recuperating at Hastings, his regiment had been fighting in the bloodbath of Ypres where the Allies lost 400,000 men in three weeks.

  As she took her farewell of her son Lizzie wished with all her heart that she had Goldie by her side to sustain her. Since their return from London they had continued meeting in her office but they were rarely alone and there was no opportunity for them to resume their affair. She wondered if it had only been a happy interlude that should now be forgotten.

  As she watched Charlie’s train steam across the Tay Bridge her restraint snapped. She wanted to weep like a baby, she wanted to talk about her feelings, she could bear her isolation and loneliness no longer. On an impulse, she ran out of the station and told her coachman to go to Goldie’s shipping company’s headquarters.

  Lights were sparkling in the windows of his office when she arrived there and she hoped that he was still at work, for he was the only person in the world who could console her.

  A male clerk met her in the outer office and said with surprise, ‘Mrs Kinge! Is anything wrong?’

  She looked confused. ‘No, I want to speak to Mr Johanson about an extra shipment.’

  ‘Mr Johanson’s in a meeting but I’m sure someone else could help you…’

  She shook her head. ‘I have to see Mr Johanson. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait.’

  After half an hour the glass door of Goldie’s office was thrown open and she heard his laugh. When he came striding out with a few other men and saw her, his face lost its jollity and a vulnerable expression like that of a child came over it. In that instant she knew with certainty that he loved her. She had been afraid that when they returned to Dundee, common sense and the demands of their everyday lives might part them, but that was obviously not the case.

  Laying one hand on her shoulder to tell her to wait for him, he saw the other men out and then came back to dismiss the staff.

  ‘It’s late, you’d better go off now,’ she heard him calling into the main office where only a couple of men still waited.

  One man said something a
nd Goldie’s voice rang out, ‘Nothing’s so important that it won’t wait till tomorrow.’

  When the men were gone, he came into the inner office and she rose at his approach. He took her hands and held them to his chest while he asked anxiously, ‘What’s wrong? You look so white and frightened.’

  ‘It’s Charlie. He went away tonight. I’m desperate, Goldie. What if I’ve sent him back to be killed?’

  He laid one finger on her lips and then kissed her lightly.

  ‘Oh Lizzie, I love you. I hate being apart from you. I lie in bed and think about you at night. I want to be with you and to help you through this. I’ll tell my family about us. This pretence is stupid.’

  Remembering his distraught wife and watchful daughters, she shook her head. ‘I love you too, Goldie, but you mustn’t tell them. I wouldn’t want to hurt them. We’ll have to manage the best way we can – but oh, Goldie, I need to be with you tonight.’

  He sent away her coachman, saying he would take Mrs Kinge home himself. After that he dismissed his own servant with the instruction, ‘Go to Monte Bello and tell my daughters I’m spending the night at my club.’

  Then he came back to Lizzie.

  ‘We’ll have to go to a hotel. It’s not ideal but there’s nowhere else. Cover your head and face as well as you can, and leave it to me.’

  The hotel clerk was more than a little surprised to see Mr Johanson and even more astonished when he realized that a double room was being booked. But Goldie was a power in the city and his requests were always granted. The mystery woman was slipped upstairs after liberal tips were distributed. People in the hotel, on hearing the gossip, pursed their lips and rolled their eyes in surprise. Such things happened with certain other businessmen in the city but Johanson had never been known to indulge in such carryings-on before. ‘There’s a first time for everything, I suppose,’ said the head receptionist.

  They comforted each other all night and in the morning did not want to resume their ordinary lives, so magical had been the time they spent together. Reality began to take over when Lizzie remembered that she must go home to a worried Maggy and concoct a story about spending the night with Alex and Alice. Goldie had to go to his office and they parted with reluctance, but within hours they discovered that snatched love only increased their appetite for each other. Neither wished to repeat the dangerous expedient of visiting a hotel because they were made ashamed by the curious eyes of the staff, and knew that though they had escaped discovery once, they might not be so lucky a second time.