No Greater Love

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  ‘If the silly cow can’t be bothered to see her own sister married, then she’s not worth a farthing,’ he had snapped. Susan had firmly agreed, but she suspected her mother was drinking to forget about the wretched Maggie.

  ‘I’m right behind you, Mabel!’ Mary Smith cackled. ‘A hug in the snug!’ And she grabbed her son Tommy round the waist.

  ‘Gerroff, Mam!’ He wriggled out of her hold, embarrassed.

  Violet loudly disapproved of the idea and the party soon collapsed into argument as to whether they should continue celebrations in the pub. Finally Richard got his own way and left with the drinkers. Violet stayed to help Helen and Susan clear up. She huffed and sniffed continual condemnation of her sister-in-law, blaming Mabel for leading her husband and young nephew astray. Jimmy and Tommy were scolded for draining the dregs of stale beer and escaped downstairs.

  Helen sang and smiled infuriatingly as if nothing was wrong and Susan, on the edge of tears, announced that she was too tired to wait and would Aunt Violet please take her home? They left, carrying a small bag of clothes and possessions, with only a sleepy Granny Beaton and a smirking Helen to wish Susan goodbye. Trudging over the icy pavements, Susan could not help shedding tears of disappointment in the dark.

  ‘That’s men for you,’ Aunt Violet complained. ‘They think only of themselves and where the next beer’s coming from. I’ve put up with it for nearly forty years.’

  ‘Richard’s not like that normally,’ Susan sniffed, determined not to believe her aunt. ‘It’s just because it’s his wedding day - I’ve got to make allowances.’

  Violet snorted in disbelief. ‘Richard can charm the birds off the trees, but when it comes to taking a drink, he’s just like any other lad. Before he got that good job he was for ever borrowing off me and your Uncle Barny to go supping in the town.’

  Susan looked at her, disturbed. ‘You never said anything about his drinking,’ she accused.

  ‘I can’t be blamed if you don’t keep your eyes open, lass. You’ve known him as long as I have.’ Perhaps something in Susan’s dejected walk made her aunt feel a twinge of sympathy, because she added, ‘Never mind, that lad of yours is bringing in a good wage now and he’s generous when he’s got the money. You could have done a lot worse.’

  Susan sighed. ‘Why didn’t any of your and Richard’s family come up from London, Aunt Violet?’

  Her aunt shook her head and pursed her lips. ‘We’re not a close family, Susan. Haven’t been in touch with Richard’s mother for years. Me sister Ida’s moved about that much, so Richard says. I did write about the wedding, mind,’ Violet sniffed, ‘but Ida didn’t have the decency to reply. In fact she never even bothered to tell me Richard was coming to Newcastle last year - he just turned up on my doorstep all bright and breezy. But then Ida married into a bad lot - the Turveys.’

  Susan felt her spirits plunge at her aunt’s depressing revelations.

  Later, as she sat on the bed in the room she was to share with Richard, brushing out her fair hair, she told herself not to listen to Violet’s moaning. Her aunt never had a good word to say about anyone and seemed to thrive on other people’s misfortunes. She would just have to put up with living here for a short while until they could move into a house of their own.

  Susan must have dozed off with fatigue, because she was startled awake by the door banging open and Richard stumbling through it in the dark. The waft of stale whisky as he came to peer over her made her feel nauseous.

  ‘Susan, doll,’ he slurred and lunged down to plant a wet kiss on her face.

  ‘Richard, the door ...’ Susan sat up in a panic. ‘My uncle and aunt can hear.’

  ‘A bloody cannon going off wouldn’t wake your uncle,’ Richard laughed. ‘The old bastard’s well pissed.’

  ‘Please, Richard,’ Susan pleaded, affronted by his language, ‘shut the door.’

  ‘I can’t see you if I shut the door,’ Richard answered. Susan fumbled to light the candle at her bedside. As it flared, Richard staggered over and slammed the door shut.

  He turned round and ordered, ‘Take your nightdress off.’

  Susan sat rigid.

  ‘You’re my wife now, do as I bloody well say!’

  Shock seized her, paralysing her movements. Then he rushed at her, foul-mouthed and threatening. Susan, galvanised by fear, stood up and began to fumble with her nightgown. Richard watched her as he began to discard his wedding clothes about the floor.

  She stood shivering in the cold, a sob lodged in her throat. Once naked, he ordered her into the bed.

  The consummation was over quicker than a cup of tea, Susan thought in bewilderment. Seconds later, Richard rolled off her, slumped across the bolster and began to snore.

  Susan lay quite appalled at what had taken place. No one had warned her of the ordeal. She lay in pain, too shocked by the assault to cry. How could she possibly endure such a disgusting act again? She would never be able to enter this icy room without thinking of the humiliation and animal behaviour that sex with her husband appeared to demand. She saw the nights stretching ahead to eternity, dreading the darkness and fearing the touch of this man whom she thought she loved.

  Why was he so different in bed from the witty and charming man who had courted her? Then a worm of doubt wriggled in her mind. Perhaps he had not courted her at all; perhaps it was she who had done all the running and he had merely succumbed to pressure from the family to marry her as the eldest rather than the pretty but immature Helen. Maybe Richard had just been too lazy to resist, or perhaps he thought he could have them both . . . After what Violet had said about him, she wondered if she knew her husband at all.

  Susan lay, torturing herself with doubts and fears about Richard. But she refused to cry. Thousands of women before her must have endured as much without complaint. She would just have to become pregnant as quickly as possible and then she would be left alone. With that small shred of comfort, she turned her back on her unconscious husband and prayed for the delivery of sleep.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The early weeks of 1914 were the happiest Maggie could remember. She was an outcast from her old life in the teeming streets of West Newcastle, yet she was experiencing the greatest freedom of her life. It seemed to mark the dawning of a new age of optimism and progression. Ready to continue her campaign of militancy when instructed by headquarters, she felt increasingly that they were winning the fight for the vote. More and more politicians were speaking out on their behalf and the publicity given to the treatment of women prisoners was beginning to sicken citizens with a conscience. She had been told to lie low for several weeks, until the furore over the arson attack at Hebron House had died down.

  Yet she managed to meet other suffragettes in discreet tearooms in the east of the city, in parlours of sympathetic supporters. She frequently wondered what Alice Pearson thought of her now, but all she could learn about the magnate’s daughter was that she was touring on the Continent.

  Maggie continued to work part-time for the coal merchant and in the evenings she looked forward eagerly to George’s return from the shipyard.

  Sometimes she shook her head in amazement at how they had been thrown together in adversity. She had thought it impossible that she would find such a soul-mate in a man, least of all in a man like George Gordon, raised in a tough community that took men’s superiority over women for granted. But beneath his brawny, aggressive stance, George was as much an idealist as she was.

  At night they would curl up by the small fire and express aloud their dreams of how they would better the world together. Sometimes they went to the house of a friend of George’s, a Jewish musician called Isaac Samuel who attracted around him a small group of intellectuals. George had met him at the Pearson library and been amazed by the thin, bearded Russian who had fled persecution and arrived on a merchant vessel up the Tyne. He scraped a living by giving music lessons, while his sister Miriam took in sewing.

  Maggie enjoyed the cosy evenings in Isaac�
��s over-furnished rooms, sitting among chairs strewn with music and books, arguing with the others about religion and imperialism, capitalism and the new Bolshevism seeping out of Russia. She was the only woman who took part in the discussions; the enigmatic Miriam chose instead to read or embroider by the corner lamp, unperturbed by their arguing.

  ‘Lenin’s right,’ George announced one evening. ‘The workers need to organise more into a revolutionary force. Organise and protest - disrupt production if necessary. Not like our lot who allow the bosses to divide them into different classes, so each thinks they’re a step above the others.’

  ‘But your bosses,’ Isaac Samuel said with a wave of his long bony hands, ‘allow a great freedom of speech among the working classes. You have open-air meetings and say things that would get you shot in my Russia.’

  ‘There’s precious little freedom of speech for us lasses,’ Maggie interjected.

  ‘Ah, the lasses,’ Isaac nodded his bearded face. ‘In Russia they are respected once they are old and toothless.’

  Maggie laughed and shook her head.

  ‘But the working classes here have been bought off,’ George said, returning to what preoccupied him. ‘Every time we organise and push for more rights, they build us a park or an institute or a church to keep us quiet and grateful.’

  ‘Or a library to read in,’ Isaac mentioned with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘Or a rowing club to compete in,’ Maggie added, grinning at their host.

  George, realising they were teasing him, grunted. ‘All right, I’m just as easily bought as the next man. But reading and sport should be there for everyone, not dependent on the whim of some patron whose money was made by the sweat of the workers anyhow.’

  Miriam rose and poured them all tea from a huge hissing and steaming machine they called a samovar and the discussion changed to religion. George would have none of it in his workers’ Utopia, while Maggie and Isaac demanded complete freedom to worship without persecution.

  ‘The Sabbath was invented to occupy the working classes, so they wouldn’t cause trouble on their day off,’ George announced, playing devil’s advocate.

  ‘If it wasn’t for God and the Sabbath,’ Isaac parried with a smile, ‘the working classes would not have their day off.’

  ‘It’s hardly a day off for the women anyway,’ Maggie reminded them quickly. ‘They still have to dress the bairns in their Sunday best and slave over the stove making the Sunday dinner, then clear up while the men sleep it off.’

  ‘Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it, Isaac?’ George winked.

  Maggie gave him a playful push. Miriam promptly invited them to lunch on Sunday without glancing up from her sewing and Maggie realised that the quiet, grey-haired woman had been listening all along.

  Later, stamping through the raw, dimly lit streets, oblivious of the cold and energised by their debate, they hastened to bed and made love.

  At times Maggie felt utterly free and fulfilled by her new life, but at others she was overwhelmed by a desire to see her mother and family and return to the streets where she grew up. The wanting would start as a dull nagging, like mild toothache, then worsen into a sharp pain of needing that left her irritable and restless. As the winter wore on with no missions to undertake for the WSPU, Maggie felt her inaction and creeping guilt about neglecting her family grip her like a malaise. Worst of all, she found she could not talk to George of her mixed feelings towards her family. He bristled when she mentioned them and bad-mouthed them for rejecting her, so that it was better to keep her worries to herself.

  But every so often, George would catch her lifting the window blind and gazing out over the rooftops, preoccupied.

  ‘What’s wrong, pet?’ he asked one dark Saturday in late February. The sky was the colour of gun metal and had never grown more than half light all day.

  She let the blind drop and sighed.

  Her bouts of restlessness made George nervous, his greatest fear being that she would tire of her restricted life with him and return to her family. He wanted them always to be together, would have proposed marriage if she had not declared so forcefully that marriage was a form of enslavement for women that needed thorough reform in law before she would entertain it. They seemed to be of one mind on so much, George thought irritably, and yet he was aware of her holding back from him - not physically - but somewhere deep within her being.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she answered glumly.

  ‘It’s your mam, isn’t it?’ George said, a note of irritation creeping into his voice.

  ‘Aye,’ Maggie admitted abruptly. She was tired of pretending that nothing was wrong. ‘The last time I saw her she looked that poorly.’

  ‘We’d have heard if anything had happened.’

  ‘Geordie!’ Maggie was hurt. ‘Am I supposed to wait around until I hear she’s kicked the bucket? Wait for Mr Heslop to come creeping round like a ghoul with bad news?’

  ‘If that preacher sets foot near here again, I’ll kick his self-righteous backside into next week!’

  ‘You shouldn’t speak about him like that,’ Maggie said, crossing her arms in front of her. ‘Mr Heslop came here out of the best of reasons, to try and get me to gan to Susan’s wedding. And perhaps I should’ve - I feel that bad about it. I haven’t spoken to me sister or even sent her a gift - I’ve done nothing for her.’

  ‘And why should you?’ George replied indignantly, remembering how Susan had shown her disapproval of him. ‘She turned her back on you when you went to prison, remember,’ he said, his temper growing with his anxiety. ‘Why should you bother with her now?’

  Maggie was annoyed to be reminded of how her family had been quick to disown her over the launch episode. She realised suddenly how much their rejection hurt, not just her sisters’ open hostility but her mother’s seeming acceptance that she was no longer part of the family.

  ‘It’s not just Susan and me mam,’ Maggie answered crossly. ‘I want to see Granny - and Tich. I -I miss them.’

  ‘Am I not enough family for you then?’ George asked, at once hating his carping words.

  ‘That’s not fair, Geordie. You can go and see your family any day of the week. It’s not my fault if you’re not close to them and don’t visit from one month to the next.’

  George was stung with guilt and anger at her words. ‘The only reason I’ve stopped going regularly is to protect you! They don’t even know where to find me if me old man drops dead.’

  ‘They can fetch you from work,’ Maggie pointed out harshly. ‘But I might as well be dead for all my family know about me.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the way they want it,’ George said in a quiet, hard voice. ‘Then they can forget the shame you’ve brought them.’

  Maggie stared at her lover, wounded by his words and the awful realisation that they might be true. After all, none of her family had tried to contact her, only Heslop had come seeking her and been shocked by what he found.

  ‘Is that what you think?’ Maggie hissed. ‘That I’m someone to be ashamed of?’

  ‘That’s not what I said!’ George answered crossly.

  ‘But it’s what you mean!’ Maggie cried in panic. ‘It suits you to keep me cooped up here in secret, doesn’t it? I’m just a fancy bit that you don’t want your family or workmates to know about, is that it? My God, you’re just as conventional as the rest of them, George Gordon!’

  George was furious; furious at the accusations and furious that this row had blown up so unexpectedly and uncontrollably.

  ‘How could you even think that was all I wanted you for?’ George shouted. ‘Well, gan back to your precious family if you think they’ll have you! But don’t blame me if they turn you over to the coppers as soon as you get there.’ He stopped pacing about the tiny parlour and grabbed his jacket from the nail behind the door.

  ‘Where’re you going?’ Maggie demanded, not wanting him to leave but too upset to say so.

  ‘Out - anywhere. To see me old dad that you
say I’ve neglected and then maybes for a pint with Billy or Joshua. Aye, I feel like having a skinful. And what’s it matter to you if I do?’ he glared.

  ‘Matters nowt!’ Maggie shouted back at him. ‘That’s the way you lads always save the world, isn’t it? Over a bucket of beer!’

  George raised a menacing finger and stabbed the air. ‘And when has breaking windows ever benefited anyone except glaziers?’ he said full of scorn.

  ‘Aye, gan on and mock me!’ she cried, advancing on him. ‘But it’s the closest you’ll ever get to revolution, Geordie. You’re all talk and no action. You’re as conservative as they come.’

  George cursed and slammed the door in her face. She heard him running down the stairs away from her. Shaking, Maggie slumped to the cold bare floorboards, angry and hurt and bewildered by their sudden argument that had flared out of nothing.

  No, not nothing, she thought. It had been simmering for weeks. Ever since Heslop had burst into their haven and fuelled her guilt at abandoning her family.

  Maggie realised with a heavy heart that she could never escape her past and the messy tangle of obligations and emotions that bound her to her relations. No matter what lengths she went to erase her former life, she was still a Beaton.

  Shivering in the cold gloom of the room that suddenly seemed lifeless and depressing without George, Maggie yearned for the chaotic comfort of Gun Street. Picking herself up from the floor, she knew she had to go there. At that moment she wanted her mother’s solid arms about her more than anything in the world.

  It was late afternoon when Maggie reached Gun Street and to her bafflement and disappointment no one answered her knocking at the upstairs flat. As she hammered for a third time, Mary Smith popped her head out from the flat below.