No Greater Love

by Janet MacLeod Trotter

  If it were true, Alice thought, she felt deeply sorry for Maggie but was reluctant to become involved in a battle with her brother over the girl. Since Herbert had become an MP, Alice had grown steadily apart from him, disillusioned by his broken promises of allowing her more involvement in the family business. After her father had died her visits north had become short and infrequent - a token few days to see her ailing mother whose memory was shrivelling as fast as her once beautiful face and figure.

  ‘It seems rather farfetched, Maggie,’ Alice blustered. ‘Have you any proof that my niece Georgina is your daughter?’

  ‘A photograph from the home,’ Maggie said eagerly, reaching into an inner coat pocket. ‘The housemother let me keep it though she gave away no confidences. But John and I recognised Oxford Hall behind her.’

  She handed the photograph of Christabel to Alice and saw the look of recognition on the older woman’s face.

  ‘You took that picture, didn’t you, Miss Alice?’ she asked quietly. ‘Is it the girl you know as Georgina?’

  Alice nodded slowly.

  Maggie felt her throat water. ‘Please, help me to see her,’ she pleaded.

  Alice looked at her drawn, vulnerable face and saw how she suffered. For a moment she wondered who the father was, but knew she would not ask.

  She sighed. ‘I’ll be visiting my mother at Christmas. Perhaps I could arrange to take the children out for the day.’

  ‘Aye!’ Maggie responded quickly. ‘That would be a grand idea. You could bring them to our house for dinner.’

  Alice cleared her throat uncomfortably. ‘I think it might draw less comment if I was to bring them to Hebron House and you could come over and meet them. I could pretend you were ...’ Alice floundered for an explanation.

  ‘An old colleague from the suffrage movement,’ Maggie said swiftly. She was not going to be passed off as some former nurserymaid or servant.

  ‘Yes, very well,’ Alice agreed. She finished her tea.

  ‘That’s very good of you, Miss Alice,’ John thanked her and pulled out a visiting card with their Sandyford address. ‘Perhaps you could send us a note with the arrangements.’

  Alice took the card and prepared to leave.

  ‘Would it be possible to visit your studio while we’re in London?’ Maggie asked unexpectedly.

  Alice was surprised but pleased at her interest in her work. ‘Of course,’ she agreed and told them the address.

  They arranged to call a couple of days later, before taking the train north again.

  Maggie’s spirits were quite lifted by the encounter and she simmered with energy and optimism. John was delighted to see her more like her old self but feared that her expectations were too high.

  ‘If this meeting with Christabel takes place,’ he warned her, ‘you will be cautious, won’t you? You can’t go telling the child you’re her mother or any such wildness.’

  ‘I know that,’ Maggie answered impatiently. ‘I just want to see her.’

  John kissed her head in a gesture of affection that told her he knew how she felt. These past two weeks with Maggie in London had been the happiest he could recall. He had revelled in having her to himself, sharing experiences and conversations that they normally had no time for in their busy lives at home. And to crown it all, not only had they shared the same room at the boarding house but also the same bed.

  After a week of lying together, Maggie had reached for him one night in the darkness and asked for intimacy. They had been shy and fumblingly inexperienced with each other at first, but finally they had managed a gentle, tentative lovemaking and held each other for a long time afterwards. John had felt the dampness of Maggie’s tears on his nightshirt and wondered what thoughts were going through her head, but he had not dared ask in case she was full of longing for George Gordon.

  Still, they had made love the following night and the night after that, so that he began to hope that Maggie’s affection for him might be growing. Yet she said nothing, as if these intimate episodes in the night never took place, and John was left feeling fearful and full of doubt.

  Now, their visit to London almost at an end, they made their way to Alice Pearson’s Chelsea studio.

  It was down in a basement yet her workroom was surprisingly light, with French windows at the far end opening onto a small garden and electric lighting at different points around the room. The walls were lined with photographs - stark landscapes of bomb-blasted fields and scorched trees, groups of soldiers preparing for action or resting behind the trenches.

  Maggie walked around slowly, gazing at the faces. They captured the very spirit of the people, she thought, as if, were she to stretch out and touch them, she would feel warm flesh. The faces seemed so young, anxious and furrowed before battle, relaxed and grinning over a game of cards when off duty. There was one of a Red Cross nurse pushing an amputee in a wheelchair, the expressions on both faces resigned, enigmatic. The photographs brought the war so vividly alive that Maggie could only pass from one to the next in a state of awe at what these people had suffered and sacrificed. No newspaper reports or lists of the dead had come close to making her realise the scale of the tragedy. Each soldier here had been loved and worried over by family and friends and neighbours, just as each loss had been felt as keenly as her own by countless others.

  ‘This will interest you,’ Alice said, breaking into her absorption. ‘I quite forgot about it the other day, with my mind being taken up with Georgina - Christabel, I mean.’ She searched in a folder.

  Maggie turned. ‘Your work is so powerful,’ she said ‘You deserve your success, Miss Alice.’

  Alice smiled and went on rummaging. ‘You remember that friend of yours - I used to meet him at the mission.’

  Maggie exchanged looks with John.

  ‘Gordon, I think his name was.’

  Maggie felt her heart stop. ‘George Gordon?’ she asked, her throat tight.

  ‘Yes, that’s the man,’ Alice said, pulling out a photograph.

  Maggie stared at her, ‘You have a picture of George?’ she gasped.

  ‘Here.’ Alice held it out to her.

  Maggie took it with trembling hands. She looked. Three men sat smoking on a bench, while a fourth stood leaning against the wall behind. She recognised none of them. Then staring harder at the aloof one, she began to see a resemblance to George in the dark ringed eyes, the set of the mouth. Yet this man was gaunt, his hair cropped and upper lip shaven. He was a shadow of the broad-shouldered, square-faced George she had last seen alive.

  ‘Are you sure it’s him?’ Maggie asked. ‘Perhaps the memory plays tricks, but he can’t have changed that much in the short time between leaving for France and being killed at the Somme.’

  John moved towards her. ‘Let me see,’ he said quietly.

  Alice seemed puzzled. ‘The Somme?’ she queried. Then her jaw dropped open as realisation dawned. ‘Oh no, my dear, it’s you who must be mistaken. I took that photograph a month ago - they’re prisoners released from behind the German lines. These men were used on the land.’

  Maggie met John’s incredulous look. ‘Prisoners?’ she whispered.

  John turned to Alice. ‘Are you saying that George Gordon has been a prisoner all this time?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alice was definite. ‘He recognised me and made himself known when I asked if I could photograph them. He seemed rather dazed by his release, but it was Gordon all right.’

  Maggie felt her knees buckling from the shock. ‘George is alive,’ she croaked. She flopped into a chair and leant forward to ward off a surging faintness. Covering her face with her hands, she dissolved into tears.

  John hesitated, then went to put his arms about her shaking shoulders.

  Alice stared at them in bewilderment. ‘But I thought it would be good news.’

  John regarded her with pained, sad eyes. ‘George Gordon is Christabel’s father,’ he explained simply. ‘Everyone thought he’d died over two years ago. That’s the reason
Maggie agreed to marry me.’

  Alice looked at the wretched couple and cursed herself for producing the photograph, for she trembled to think what unhappiness she had just unleashed.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The journey back to Newcastle was subdued and tense. Both Maggie and John were thankful that their carriage was full and they did not have to speak of what lay ahead. Platforms seemed to swarm with men in khaki and John was aware of Maggie scanning their faces while she sat mutely with hands gripped in her lap.

  Reaching their home in Sandyford at last, John gave Millie a curt account of what they had learned and left swiftly for the shop. But there his worst fears were confirmed, for all the gossip was of how the miner’s son George Gordon had come back from the dead, to the joy of his brothers and sister and elderly father.

  ‘Arrived home while you were away, Mr Heslop,’ Daniel told him. ‘Caused quite a stir around Benwell. They had a street party for him. Mind, he looks like he could do with feeding up - nowt but a skeleton he is.’

  After closing the shop, John decided on impulse to go and see Susan. He found her busy at her aunt’s house preparing tea, while a young man sprawled on the floor playing with her children.

  ‘It’s young Jimmy, isn’t it?’ John gasped in delight ‘You’re back!’

  Susan’s brother leapt up and greeted his new brother-in-law with a bashful shake of the hand. He had filled out and grown a thin moustache.

  ‘I’m glad you’re safely home,’ John smiled. ‘Maggie will be so pleased to see you.’ Then he stopped, remembering his reason for coming. But Susan had already guessed.

  ‘Aye,’ she said with a sympathetic look, ‘likely you’ve heard of George Gordon’s return. Jimmy’s been up to see him. George already knew about Maggie getting wed to you - his sister Irene was quick to tell him.’

  John looked at Jimmy.

  ‘Aye,’ Jimmy confirmed. ‘He’s taken it badly. I think - well, that thinking of Maggie kept him going, like.’

  John shuddered. ‘Yes, it would,’ he murmured.

  ‘Well, he’ll just have to accept the situation, Mr Heslop,’ Susan said brusquely. ‘She’s married to you now and that’s an end to it.’

  John wished silently that it could be that simple, but knew that George’s return might mean the break-up of his marriage. How Maggie must resent being his wife! he thought bleakly. Only he stood in the way of her finding happiness at last with the only man she had ever truly loved. If he was honest with himself he wished that Gordon had died at the Somme and he despised himself for such thoughts.

  He stayed for a cup of tea and listened to Jimmy’s breathless accounts of life in the trenches, marvelling at how the immature and irresponsible boy that he remembered had coped with such experiences. If old Mabel Beaton could hear her son now, John thought ruefully, she would no longer be calling him the runt of the family. Here was a son she could have been proud of at last.

  Susan saw him to the door. John lowered his voice and briefly described their encounters with Alice Pearson and asked if she would come and see Maggie. ‘She’s in turmoil,’ he said. ‘I know she’s frightened and nervous at the thought of meeting Christabel after all this time. And now with this news about George Gordon - it seems to have paralysed her. I’m really at a loss as to what to do. She won’t speak to me about anything. You will come and spend Christmas with us, won’t you? Jimmy and your aunt as well.’

  Susan put a reassuring hand on his arm, touched by his concern. ‘That would be canny,’ she smiled. ‘And I’ll do all I can to make Maggie realise where her loyalties lie.’

  ‘No,’ John answered swiftly, ‘you mustn’t be hard on Maggie. I’ll not have her forced to do anything. I just want you to be there to support her.’

  Susan sighed. ‘Whatever you think’s for the best. I haven’t told Jimmy about Maggie’s daughter yet, or George being the father. No one else knows.’

  ‘Good. Keep it that way, Susan,’ John replied. ‘I want her protected from any harmful scandal.’

  ***

  Maggie tried to occupy her waking hours with preparations for Christmas. She paced the house being critical of Millie and interfering in the kitchen, upsetting the new cook. Millie finally banished her to the parlour and told her, ‘Mind you stay at that desk of yours, or I’ll hoy you oot to the park. But don’t you go telling the rest of us what to do!’

  Maggie seized her coat and hat and escaped to Jesmond Dene. She walked restlessly along the Ouseburn, gazing into its sluggish brown water, its banks blackened with piles of dead wet leaves.

  She was so confused. Her first thought on hearing that George was alive was relief - a strangled, choking relief. All the way home from London she had been itchy with impatience to see him, to hear his teasing voice again, to hold him and know beyond all doubt that he was real. She would explain to him about everything, how she had written to tell him of their baby, how she had misguidedly married John because she had thought he was dead and believed it the only way of gaining their beloved daughter back again … The speeches had spun in her head to the sound of the clanking train on the railway line. Yet, once home, she had done nothing. She had deliberately kept away from the west of Newcastle, fearful of seeing George, as if by not seeing him she could pretend that life was as it was before his reappearance. What did she want? she demanded of herself savagely. Her indecision, her cowardly unwillingness to face up to his return made her angry with herself.

  So it was with some relief that on her return from her walk she heard the sound of Alfred and Beattie playing on the stairs and found Susan waiting for her.

  ‘There’s someone with her an’ all,’ Millie winked as she took Maggie’s coat and pushed her towards the drawing room.

  A figure loomed round the door as she entered.

  Tich!’ she screamed as her brother swept her off the floor and twirled her around. ‘By, they must feed you well in the army - look at the size of you!’

  He plonked her down again. Bella toddled up and grabbed Maggie’s skirt possessively. Maggie ruffled her niece’s hair affectionately and heaved her into her arms.

  ‘Aye,’ Jimmy grinned, ‘it was a canny bit better than eating me sisters’ scraps, I can tell you!’

  ‘Eeh, and you’re growing hair on your face,’ Maggie gazed at him in delight. ‘You’ll be courtin’ next!’ She gave him a playful push with Bella.

  ‘Jimmy’s already been offered a job at Milligan’s,’ Susan told her proudly.

  ‘The laundry?’ Maggie asked in surprise, putting Bella onto the sofa beside her.

  ‘Aye, well,’ Jimmy blushed, ‘it’s not in the laundry, it’s in charge of the deliveries. It’s a start, but.’

  ‘A canny start,’ Maggie encouraged.

  ‘We’re going to look around to rent somewhere bigger,’ Susan went on, her eyes shining with excitement. ‘Aunt Violet will come with us, of course.’

  ‘Aye,’ Jimmy grinned. ‘And when I’m in partnership with Milligan, we’ll have ourselves a place on Sarah Crescent, eh, Susan?’

  Susan giggled like a girl.

  ‘And then your mam will think she’s died and gone to heaven,’ Maggie told Bella with a teasing look at Susan.

  Bella clapped, not understanding what they were talking about but aware of the warm atmosphere between her mother and special aunt.

  No one mentioned George but his unspoken presence hung in the air and Maggie could not resist asking Jimmy about him as he left.

  ‘You’d get a shock to see him,’ her brother warned, ‘he’s that thin. His sister Irene is trying to feed him up a bit and his brother Joshua drags him out for a pint but he says he’s lost the taste. Spends his time wandering about like a stray dog. Says he can’t get used to being allowed to go where he likes.’

  Maggie gulped. ‘How did they make the mistake of thinking he was dead?’ she asked angrily. ‘They sent his things back. They should be shot for making such a mistake!’

  Jimmy put an awkward hand
on her thin shoulder. ‘Thousands of men died on the Somme, Maggie. Whole battalions were wiped out. It was impossible for them to find and identify everyone. It seems they found his jacket later on a dead German, so they thought he must’ve been killed and robbed. The word was the Hun weren’t taking prisoners, so no one suspected he’d been captured and kept alive.’

  Maggie groaned at the chain of misfortune. ‘Then they should’ve listed him as still missing in action if they didn’t find his body. They shouldn’t have said he was dead.’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ Jimmy said sadly, dropping his hand, ‘But they probably thought it kinder to let the family get on with their grieving than wait for years not knowing.’

  Maggie hung her head. All she knew was that if they had held out the slightest hope that George might still be alive she would never have gone into St Chad’s. If she’d had to beg or steal or go on the streets she would have kept her daughter with her and waited for his return. And she would never have entertained the idea of marrying John Heslop.

  Christmas came and Maggie determined to put on a brave face, keeping her spirits up with the thought that she would soon see Christabel. To her surprise she found herself enjoying the family party, making a fuss over Susan’s children and gathering round John’s piano while he played carols. Later, emboldened by the sherry, Millie took to the piano and played more raucous songs with Jimmy joining in enthusiastically. Even strait-laced Aunt Violet, mellowed by the feeling of good will, added her voice to a rendering of ‘The Blaydon Races’.