A Mother's Gift

by Maggie Hope

  Mr Bedford smiled at her; an encouraging sort of smile. It made him seem almost human. ‘Go on,’ he whispered. ‘Just talk to her.’

  ‘What was that our grandma used to say? “When life knocks you down you just ’ave to pick yoursel’ up else it’ll walk you into the ground.” I remember her saying that. She meant it an’ all. Me mam said it was all right for her, she never was bad in her life so she could talk.’ Ethel paused and gazed at Kate’s face. The skin was white except for her eyelids that had a bluish tinge. By, she was sorry for her though. Losing the lass, it was a terrible thing to happen. Those blasted motorcars! She hoped to heaven young Davey never got one. Tears pricked the back of her eyes and she blinked them back.

  ‘Go on,’ said Mr Bedford and she began again.

  ‘Katie! Can you hear me, pet? Howay man!’ Suddenly Ethel lost her patience. ‘You don’t want them to put you in the loony bin at Sedgefield, do you? I tell you that’s what they’ll do. An’ another thing, they can’t bury your Georgina till you come round. Leastways, they don’t want to but they might have to. You don’t want her to go without you to see her off, do you?’

  ‘Mrs Canvey! Stop that at once!’

  Mr Richards was shouting at her, he was angry. She looked up quickly, intimidated, her irritation dying as quickly as it had come.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘But you said she just didn’t want to come round. I was only telling—’

  ‘Yes, well that’s enough I think. Please wait outside if you don’t mind,’ Mr Bedford said smoothly.

  Meekly Ethel stood up and walked to the door then she turned round defiantly. ‘I am her sister, you know. I reckon I must be her next-of-kin. Not that fella there, me!’

  Robert looked at her. It was true of course. Kate’s sister had more right in here than he had.

  ‘Behave arguing, Betty! You’re always carrying on.’

  In the short silence after Ethel spoke, they could all hear the weak, breathy voice from the bed and they forgot everything but the fact that Kate had come round. Mr Bedford’s plan had worked.

  Ethel moved back to the bed and looked at Kate, her eyelids were still closed but her face had relaxed somehow.

  ‘It’s Ethel not Betty,’ she said. ‘Eeh, Kate, are you not going to look at me? I’m that sorry, pet, I am.’

  A tear ran down Kate’s cheek; then another and another. Her eyes opened. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘My lovely, clever little lass is gone.’

  ‘Aye, pet, it’s true.’

  Ethel put her arm around her sister and hugged her. From the bottom of the bed, Robert and Mr Bedford watched, unwilling to disturb them immediately. Then Mr Bedford stepped forward and Ethel, noticing, moved back.

  ‘How do you feel, Mrs Hamilton?’ he asked.

  Kate wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand, the other was tied to a splint and had a drip into a vein feeding her a glucose and saline solution. How did she feel? She thought. It was a bloody stupid question. She wished she had died in the crash instead of Georgina. She felt absolute desolation. She felt like throwing herself out of the window of the side ward and ending everything. The future stretched ahead of her and it was barren, pointless. She didn’t think she could face it. She felt so bad she could never tell him it for it was beyond feeling.

  ‘Mrs Hamilton?’ he prompted.

  ‘My name is Benfield,’ she said. ‘Catherine Benfield. And I want to go home to Winton. But first I will bury my bairn.’

  ‘I reckon this must mean I’m the sole owner of Hamilton Ironworks,’ said Bertram. He was bursting with satisfaction to the extent that his expression turned Robert’s stomach. Well, on this at least he could prick the little squirt’s bubble.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, Bertie,’ he said. ‘Georgina’s holdings go to her next-of-kin and her next-of-kin is Kate. In other words, Kate is your new partner.’ That wiped the smile off Bertie’s face, he saw, holding back a grin himself.

  ‘But she can’t be! She was nothing but Father’s tart. A whore!’

  ‘Shut up, Bertram.’ Mary Anne had entered the room unnoticed by her son. ‘I don’t want to hear language like that from you ever again, do you hear me?’

  ‘But Mother—’

  ‘Never again, I said. Is that what it meant to you, losing your half-sister? I am ashamed of you, ashamed. I ask you again, do you hear me?’

  Bertie gritted his teeth. ‘Yes Mother,’ he replied. Then he lifted his head and went on, ‘But did you hear what Robert said? The woman has half of the ironworks, it’s not fair, it just isn’t fair, Mother.’

  ‘Well, fair or not it’s a fact,’ said Robert. ‘She wants me to manage her share for her.’

  Bertie gasped, he walked over to the window and stared out unseeingly. He had waited for years to get control of the business and now, just when he thought he had it in his grasp it had been snatched from him. Oh, he could bear with the bulk of it being nationalised, he had to, what else was there to do? When the Tories got in they would put things right, he was convinced of it. But this was different; this was letting his father’s tart win. He’d begun to get used to the fact that Georgina had a share, for after all she was his half-sister just as much as Maisie was. But this, it was gall and wormwood. All his efforts had been for nothing. Worse, they had worked against him. Why hadn’t he realised the tart would inherit? Now Robert, too-clever-by-half Robert who had patronised him all his life was in control.

  ‘Flaming hell!’ he said under his breath but Robert heard him.

  ‘Don’t swear in front of your mother,’ he snapped.

  Much worse expletives were running through Bertie’s mind in a continuous stream but he hadn’t the nerve to come out with them here. Instead he rushed out of the room and out through the kitchens to the stable yard and beyond. Once over the fence and into the woods he picked up a stick and thrashed an inoffensive bush and shouted his frustration in the filthiest language he could think of and he had learned a lot of that from his particular cronies at Cambridge.

  For a minute he wished himself back there, he could have forgotten it all in a pub-crawl. He could have got absolutely blotto.

  There wasn’t much chance of going back though, none at all in fact. He had been sent down and all over a bit of fun he and his friends had had with a girl from the town. Maybe they had gone over the top but she had been asking for it, they all thought so.

  Aw, to hell with it, he could still get plastered. Bertie threw the stick away and headed back to the house for his car. He would drive into Middlesbrough; he could do a bit of hell-raising there and probably as good as in Cambridge.

  ‘What do you mean to do?’ Mary Anne asked. She and Kate sat in the garden in the late summer sunshine. Kate had taken lately to popping over to see her once or twice a week and Mary Anne looked forward to seeing her. She rarely saw her sons for Robert was too busy with the business and Bertie – well, who knew what Bertie was up to. She only hoped it wasn’t something that would bring too much disgrace on to the family. And Maisie, well, Maisie spent most of her time in her room or wandering the woods at the back of the house, when she was there, that is.

  ‘I’m going to buy a house in Winton,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve been dithering about it I know but I have decided. My estate agent is seeing to it for me.’

  ‘Yes, but what are you going to do?’ Mary Anne persisted. ‘You are a young woman still Kate, only thirty-one or two aren’t you?’

  ‘Thirty-six, actually.’

  ‘All right, thirty-six. You are not an old woman; you can’t just sit at home and do nothing. Why don’t you go back to nursing?’

  Kate look startled. Nursing? That was an old dream. It had belonged to the young Katie. She had been another person then. There had been the short time during the war when she had thought she could take it up again but that had come to nothing. Matthew objected to it.

  ‘It’s different for me,’ Mary Anne was saying. ‘I’m fifteen years older than you. Besides—’
She stopped, she had almost said she still had her family and she couldn’t believe she had had such a crass remark on the end of her tongue.

  There was silence for a moment or two broken only by the twittering of starlings that were on the lawn looking hopefully for crumbs. Then Kate rose to her feet.

  ‘I must go now, I promised Dorothy I wouldn’t stay out after dark.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  When Kate had gone Mary Anne walked slowly into the house. She shivered a little, the evenings were cutting in and were chilly after the sun went down behind the trees. She hoped Kate would do something with her life, she was a nice woman. Strangely, she had never resented Kate maybe because she didn’t even know about her until after Matthew’s death and by then it didn’t really matter to her. She even felt a vague gratitude to her for she must have been the reason why Matthew left herself alone these last years.

  Mary Anne had thought it was a prostitute in the town and dreaded him picking up some awful disease. But she had been thankful that he stopped coming to her room. She wondered briefly how Kate could have stood for Matthew’s crude methods of lovemaking. Perhaps he had been different with Kate.

  Mary Anne dismissed the subject from her mind as she switched on the wireless and settled down before the fire in the small sitting-room. It was time for the news. Robert had said something about footwear rationing coming to an end and she wanted to know if it was true.

  Kate was driving along the road from Hamilton Hall to the bridge over the Tees where she turned off for Fern Moor. She stared fixedly at the road ahead and her fingers gripped the steering wheel tightly. Realising it, she began to breathe deeply, evenly, and forced her hands to relax.

  She had thought she would never get into a car again and certainly not to drive one. It had been Robert who had persuaded her.

  ‘It’s like falling off a horse, you must get straight back on,’ he had said. She had given him a hard stare.

  ‘The crash was not like falling off a horse,’ she had said. And he had looked stricken.

  ‘I’m sorry, it was a stupid analogy,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, I know you meant nothing by it,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think I can ever drive again.’

  ‘You will,’ he insisted.

  Kate didn’t tell him of the nightmares she had every night and always she was in the car and the threat of what was going to happen hung over her, the terror engulfing her. Nor of the times she dreamed Georgina was alive and she never questioned the fact that Billy was there too, they were happy, eating a picnic up by the bunny banks at Winton. Then she would wake up and try to hold on to the dream but it would fade and reality came down on her like a heavy weight and there was no one there but herself.

  ‘Come on,’ Robert said now. ‘I will take you out for a drive. The fresh air will do you good. I have to go to Whitworth Hall, I’ll bring you back in good time for Dorothy coming home.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll go.’

  For Dorothy had gone to Hartlepool where she had some second cousins and the house would be very quiet when Robert went away. Still it took a great effort of will. She had to fight down her panic, keep a tight control of it in order to get in the car, even to stay in the car.

  ‘I just have to pick up something;’ he said as they drove up to the house. It was a lovely old house, not at all pretentious like Hamilton Hall. It looked like a family home, she thought and should have children running about on the lawns or playing on the swings that hung from an old oak tree to the side. She looked at him, he was in his early thirties she surmised. He had time to marry yet.

  ‘Will you come in for a minute or two?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’ she cried then realised how emphatic she sounded. ‘I mean, I’ll just stay in the car if you don’t mind. You said you just had to pick something up?’

  If she got out of the car she might not be able to get back in. For a few seconds, looking at the old house she had almost forgotten where she was sitting and her rigid posture had relaxed very slightly. But now she stiffened, her back straight, not even resting on the back of the seat.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said swiftly. ‘Just sit there, I will be back in a jiffy.’ And he was. That was one thing she had discovered about Robert Richards, if he said he would do a thing he did.

  Over the next few weeks he had coaxed her and bullied her until in the end she had got in the driver’s seat and driven. And she was grateful to him, of course she was. She needed to be able to get about, especially living on the moor as she did. But now she was leaving the moor and she couldn’t wait for the day. Every day there reminded her of what she had lost. The place was thick with memories of Georgina, her lovely, clever girl.

  Coming back from Hamilton Hall as the late sun slanted across the moor, picking out patches of heather with the purple fading fast by now and turning to brown, Kate felt so alone, despite that fact that Dorothy was home; she had lit the electric light in the hall and in the kitchen of Fern Moor Cottage. The light shone out in the gathering gloom.

  Dorothy loved the electricity that Kate had had brought across the moor. She could hardly believe what it could do, the toaster and the electric oven, the small refrigerator and washing machine Kate had had installed only a year ago. A year ago, thought Kate. When it was another world from the grey, hopeless world she inhabited now.

  She pulled up in front of the house and got out of the car, still with that feeling of relief and easing of tension she had every time. Inside the house there was a delicious smell of cooking. Dorothy must have called in at the butchers in Roseley and brought the meat ration back with her, it smelled like a beef casserole was in the oven. The smell even made Kate feel a little hungry – she might eat some of it without having to choke it down to please Dorothy. But no doubt that was Dorothy’s intention in cooking it.

  ‘I’m home, Dorothy!’ she called and, slinging her coat on to a hook on the hallstand, went into the kitchen, pinning on a smile as she went.

  Chapter Thirty

  KATE DECIDED ON a house neither in Winton Old Village nor in Winton Colliery. It was built round about the 1880s when the first shaft was sunk and the Main seam found to be workable and had originally been the manager’s house. It was about half a mile up the road from Winton Colliery, far enough to escape the most noxious of the gases from the pit and coke works, not to mention any fevers which at that time were prevalent in colliery villages due to the absence of clean water and sanitation.

  Kate had always liked the house. When she was a child she would come with the Sunday School choir to sing carols on Christmas Eve and be given sweet mince pies to eat and ginger wine to drink.

  The house was called Four Winds and stood on the brow of a hill facing over the valley with a medium-size garden surrounding and a stand of trees behind and to the north to protect it from the worst of the wind; a solid house, but not over large. The wind soughed through the trees, creating a singing sound and she found it soothing somehow. On the moors the wind had sung too, but it was not the same, there weren’t the trees there for one thing.

  The house had been modernised of course and one of its five bedrooms had been converted into a bathroom and there was a cloakroom with toilet and washbasin on the ground floor, both decorated with trailing leaves of bright green ivy.

  ‘Do you think it’s a bit grand for me?’ Kate asked Dorothy the day they moved in.

  ‘Indeed it is not!’ she replied. ‘And just look at the kitchen, with all the cupboards and a gas cooker and everything. Mind, I don’t want any of those new-fangled kitchen cabinets, these will do me nicely.’

  Kate had had the walls painted a sunshine yellow for the windows faced north. As she looked around now, Robert walked into the kitchen.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, the door was open and so I walked in,’ he said.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Kate. But what was he doing here? she wondered to herself. He had got into the habit of arriving to see her unannounced, sometimes once
or twice a week in spite of his busy schedule. And she was determined that she was not going to get to rely on him. She was not even going to get to be glad to see him. He was, after all, the stepson of her lover and the son of Mary Anne and she had wronged Mary Anne Hamilton, hadn’t she? So why was it that her heart lifted when she saw him? She had no feelings for him, of course she hadn’t. Anyway, she had sworn to herself that she would have nothing to do with any man ever again, at least not in that sense. What sense? For goodness sake, she told herself now, he was just being helpful that was all. If he thought she had read any more into it he would run a mile and who could blame him?

  ‘Did you want something in particular?’ she asked coolly. ‘Only I am rather busy …’

  Robert still wore a smile but not in his eyes. ‘Sorry if I’m in the way,’ he said. ‘However I needed your signature on a few documents.’

  There then, Kate told herself. He’s only here for business reasons, of course he is. He took papers out of his briefcase and showed her where to sign.

  ‘You should read them, perhaps,’ he said formally.

  ‘No, I’m sure it’ll be all right if you say so. I haven’t time in any case, I must get on.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He had been going to suggest that they have lunch together, maybe at the attractive-looking pub he had seen just up the road from here. Now he felt he couldn’t. He gathered the papers together and replaced them in the case.

  ‘I’ll be off then, I am busy too,’ he said brusquely. ‘Goodbye.’ He held out his hand and she shook it. ‘Please don’t bother to see me to the door.’

  ‘Goodbye then.’

  He went out to his car feeling very flat indeed for he had woken up that morning in pleased anticipation of seeing her again. But she had been so cool to him; made him feel a nuisance even.