‘No.’
The midwife, one of Hannah’s stalwarts, tutted, handed the child to Hannah who stood near by, and busied herself about Charlotte’s battered, uncaring body.
Hannah, in some awe, laid the child very carefully in the crib beside the bed. ‘I’ll fetch Ben.’ The words had a faint questioning intonation. She eyed Charlotte, waiting for some answer, some reaction even, and received none. Charlotte’s thin face was utterly withdrawn, her eyes remote. She lay like a doll beneath the brisk, ministering hands, distancing herself from the brutal realities of pain and blood and an unwanted child as she had to the best of her ability distanced herself over the past months from the knowledge that her marriage was a disaster, her life, in her own eyes, a ruin. Once, in the days before she had enclosed herself in this merciful, docile shell she had shrieked at Ben, using a street language she would not have credited herself with knowing, saying the most dreadful, the most unforgivable things in an attempt to break through her husband’s relentless good manners, his merciless and meticulous care of her to the man beneath. The man who had saved her. The man who, surely, must despise her. The man of whom she had discovered she knew nothing. The man who had married her to protect her and his family from scandal and his father from pain, who had given her the shelter of his name and absolutely nothing else. And who did not understand to what despairing depths such well-meaning imprisonment could condemn a tender soul. ‘Don’t worry,’ she had screamed, ‘with any bloody luck at all I’ll die like Henrietta did and save you all no end of trouble!’ the words a final and fatal blow to a marriage that had been a disaster for them both from the beginning.
‘Lively enough little thing,’ the midwife said now, busying herself with the child, ‘and pretty as a picture. I must say – small she may be, but she certainly looks healthy enough. Especially for a premature child—’ She glanced slyly at Charlotte.
Charlotte, with very little effort, ignored her. From outside the door came the murmur of voices. She shut her eyes. Go away. Please. All of you. Go away. Leave me alone.
‘Charlotte?’ Ben’s voice was quiet.
She tried to keep her eyes closed, tried to retreat into darkness.
‘Charlotte.’
Very reluctantly she opened her eyes. He loomed above her, enormous, craggy, unsmiling. He laid professional fingers to her wrist. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Sore.’
He nodded. ‘It will pass. It was a hard birth. You were very brave.’
She said nothing.
Hannah stood beside him, the swathed bundle of the child in her arms. ‘Your daughter,’ she smiled. ‘Charlotte, she’s truly lovely, just look at those eyes—’
Ben took the baby. Charlotte looked away. The room was hot and stuffy. Airless. Charlotte thought – hoped – that the struggle to breathe might at any minute defeat her.
Hannah was making absurdly aunt-like clucking noises, her long skinny finger playing with the tiny curled hands. ‘Oh, Ben – isn’t she lovely?’
‘Yes. She is.’
That brought Charlotte’s head round. She looked at her husband. He was watching the child, his dark, slate-grey eyes intent upon the small face. ‘Yes. She is,’ he said again, very softly.
‘Let Mother have the baby now, Doctor Patten,’ the midwife was brisk. It wasn’t often she had the opportunity to order Ben Patten around, and she was making the most of the chance. ‘We must get the little mite feeding.’
Charlotte clenched her teeth. She couldn’t. She could not.
Ben leaned to her with the child. With rigid care she accepted the small, warm bundle. But as the midwife began to fumble with the buttons and ribbons of her nightdress she pulled away with a sudden snap of surprising strength. ‘No! I’ll do it myself. In a moment.’
Ben’s smile faded. He straightened. ‘Best if we go, perhaps. Father would like to visit with you later, and Ralph. Will that be all right?’
‘Of course.’
‘After you’ve slept.’
She nodded. They might have been strangers exchanging pleasantries on a railway station. The baby coughed a little, mewed faintly. Charlotte, despite her every effort felt her mouth tighten in distaste; and knew that, before he turned away, Ben had seen it.
‘Now, Mother,’ the midwife said, ominously crisp, ‘let’s give baby her first feed, shall we?’
Charlotte fumbled with the buttons of her nightdress. She wanted nothing so much as to sleep; to turn her back on the world, on this monstrous thing that had happened to her, on this child she did not want, and sleep. The child nuzzled her breast. Charlotte stiffened, jaw rigid with revulsion. The small mouth opened. Charlotte shrank back into the pillows.
‘No, no—!’ The nurse leaned forward, taking the small head in her remorselessly capable hand, forcing the little, wet mouth to the nipple. ‘There. That’s better.’
Blinded by tears, her lower lip clamped painfully between her teeth Charlotte endured the suckling, hating it. Like a limpet the child clung. Like a leech. ‘I can’t!’ Charlotte said suddenly, ‘I can’t!’ She jerked the nipple from the greedy mouth, gasping at the pain of it. Tears ran down her thin face. ‘Please – I can’t—’
The midwife, unmarried and childless, had faced – and outfaced – such tantrums before in young mothers. ‘Don’t be a silly girl now. Of course you can. You’ll get used to it. Here. Try again.’
Charlotte was crying uncontrollably. In two days of labour she had not shed a tear, had in fact even at the worst times barely made a sound at all. But now the dam had burst, and she could not stop herself. The child, deprived of the nipple and sensing her mother’s distress screamed shrilly, repetitively, wailing on each short, newly taken breath. Charlotte was trembling, near hysteria. ‘Take her away! I can’t! I won’t! Take her away!’
‘Oh, come now – what a fuss!’ Very firmly and with no feeling whatsoever the other woman thrust the baby’s face back to the breast. The small mouth fastened again upon the dug. A thin, hot wire of intolerable pain skewered the most private depths of Charlotte’s body, defiling her. Her womb contracted agonizingly as she tensed against it. The rhythmic suckling of the child disgusted her. Milky liquid ran down the child’s chin, drenching Charlotte’s nightdress. The midwife’s hand was still firmly upon the baby’s head, forcing it to the breast. Charlotte clenched her eyes tight shut, wanting to struggle, to scream, to break free from this nightmare; instead she sobbed brokenly, like a child herself, overwrought, overtired, desperately unhappy.
‘There you are, you see? Of course you can do it. Now – try the other side – just for a moment or two.’
* * *
The room was dark when Charlotte woke. Her body felt bruised; she ached as if she had been beaten. A small fire glowed in the hearth and a lamp burned low beside the bed. In the dark well of the cradle the child slept, sniffling. Charlotte’s head ached and so, intolerably, did her engorged breasts. Her eyes were swollen and sore. She lay for a moment, apathetic and disorientated, until a faint movement in the quiet told her that she was not, as she had thought, alone. ‘Who’s that?’
There was the slightest moment of hesitation. ‘It’s me, ma’am.’ The voice was cool, neutral and instantly recognizable.
‘Sally?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
With an effort, Charlotte turned her head tiredly upon the pillow. She could see now the outline of the other girl’s head, limned by fireglow, the mass of brown hair piled and coiled neatly, the long slender neck and sharp profile very still. Through all the months of Charlotte’s pregnancy these two in unspoken and reluctant conspiracy had avoided each other, each made uncomfortable, and worse than uncomfortable, by a bitter shared memory, an unwanted knowledge, an irredeemable debt that bound each to the other in a strange, unwelcome but unavoidable sisterhood. ‘What time is it?’ Charlotte asked.
‘Nearly eight. Miss Brown’s gone down to supper. She wanted someone to sit with you.’ Over the past months Sally’s speech, under th
e tutelage of Hannah and Ralph had become clearer and more carefully enunciated. ‘She said you wouldn’t wake for hours yet.’
Some small, wry spark of humour stirred. Charlotte smiled wearily. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have offered?’
She saw in the darkness the faint glimmer of a smile. ‘Oh, I didn’t offer. I was told. Our Miss Brown doesn’t take kindly to “no” for an answer. Can I get you anything?’
‘Thank you. I’m very thirsty. Perhaps a glass of water?’
Sally turned up the lamp, poured the water, helped Charlotte to struggle to a sitting position, propping her with pillows. She had, despite herself, been shocked at the sight of the thin, haggard face on the pillow. Even with the ordeal of childbirth safely over Charlotte looked ill, her skin sickly pale, her eyes sunk deep into shadows. She gave Charlotte the glass, then turned to look at the sleeping child. ‘The little one’s lovely,’ she found herself saying, ‘everyone’s saying what a beauty she’ll be.’
There was a long, stony silence. ‘I don’t care.’ Charlotte’s voice was flat, entirely without expression. And then, ‘It would have been better if she’d died. And me with her.’
Sally’s head moved sharply round at that. In the world she still thought of as hers death came too often and too easily to speak so. ‘That’s a wicked thing to say,’ she said very quietly.
‘I suppose it is. But I don’t care. It’s true. You and I know it.’ A small, pale hand played restlessly with the fringe of the bedspread. ‘You, I and my husband.’ The words were barely audible.
Sally shook her head sharply. ‘That isn’t so. It’s funny—’ she hesitated for a moment.
‘What?’
‘It – well – it seems to me he’s pleased as punch. He can’t leave her be.’
Charlotte did not reply, but her head moved on the pillow, a tired negative.
Sally moved away from the bed, sat, straight backed and a little awkward, in the low nursing chair by the fire.
‘Sally?’ The word broke an openly difficult silence.
Sally turned a wary head. Ever since that day that she and Toby had slipped back into the Bear unchallenged and apparently unnoticed, her position in the house had been an odd one. She was servant certainly – she willingly fetched and carried, scrubbed and polished, took care of the children in the home, and she was paid for it. But Ralph, simply and undisguisedly delighted at her change of heart, was teaching her, with Toby, to read and to write and Hannah, sensing a deep-seated if wary interest in those things about which she herself felt so passionately, had sought her out in growing and enthusiastic friendship, had spent painstaking and rewarding hours in discussion and explanation. And always Ben Patten’s unspoken, somewhat distant but none the less quite open patronage had set her apart from the other serving-girls – a fact that she knew had in no way endeared her to the spiteful Kate. But yet, with all but Hannah and Doctor Will she was uncomfortable. Ralph for all his kindness she still eyed with some distrust when Toby’s bright head was between them. Of Charlotte’s and Ben’s marriage, knowing its roots, she guessed too much, and was uncomfortable with them both. Peter’s cavalier friendliness baffled her entirely. Like a young animal set loose in a jungle not its own she watched always for threat or danger despite the apparent good will that undoubtedly surrounded her. Even Doctor Will’s unfailingly good-tempered benevolence and Hannah’s friendship she sometimes eyed with caustic caution. They were not her people. And to Ben and Charlotte she must, knowing what she knew, constitute a threat. Why should they offer her the hand of friendship? How long before gratitude wore thin and she found herself jobless and back in the tenements? And – worm of a thought, hardly ever leaving her – without Toby? It was in self defence that she had avoided Charlotte for all these past months; indeed had she not been assured that she slept and should continue to sleep, not even Miss Brown’s forceful ways would have persuaded her into the room this evening. The last thing she wanted or was prepared for was a personal conversation.
‘Sally?’ Charlotte asked again, unable to see the other girl’s expression in the gloom.
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me – are you happy here?’ Exactly what prompted the question even Charlotte was not certain. Each glimpse of Sally’s face over these past months, each sight of the sharp features and the long-lashed narrow eyes, each sound of that distinctive voice had, just as Sally had suspected, brought back with brutal force the memory of fear, of pain and of shameful humiliation. Ben’s apparently heartless determination to keep the girl with them had been a constant cause of conflict in a marriage that had been unstable from the start. She had begged him to settle Sally elsewhere, to give her money, offer her a ticket to America – anything – but to put her where Charlotte would not be subject to the constant reminder of her presence. She flinched still when she remembered the chill anger that her pleading had aroused. ‘Are you so completely self-centred?’ Ben had asked with ill-concealed distaste. ‘Do you have no thought for anyone but yourself? The girl risked her life to save you – she knew that if you didn’t. She nearly died for it. And you’d turn her and the child who’s probably the only thing in the world she’s ever loved into the streets with a few pounds and a promise? Charlotte, for God’s sake, do you know what you’re suggesting? Do you know what would inevitably happen to her, to the child, if we abandon them now? And for what? For your comfort?’
She had watched him, cowed to silence by his anger, only the voice in her head arguing – pleading – but Ben, what of me? What of us? What of the child she knows is a bastard? What if she’s spiteful? Think of the harm she could do. Why do you take her part against me, your wife?
Yet waiting now for the answer to her question she had to admit that Ben had been right in his estimate of the girl’s character. It could not be said that by word or by deed Sally had ever given her cause for worry. On the contrary it was quite obvious that the girl was as awkward in her company as was Charlotte in hers. She sat now, a small straight line of thought between her eyes, considering the question she had been asked.
‘Yes,’ she said at last slowly. ‘Happier than I expected. Everyone’s very kind. An’ Toby loves it.’
‘Ralph says he’s very clever?’
Sally’s face tightened almost imperceptibly. ‘Seems so, yes. He’s jumped a class in school, so they tell me.’
‘He’ll be going in for the scholarship in a couple of years’ time I daresay?’
Sally said nothing.
Some compulsion of curiosity pushed Charlotte to probe further despite the other girl’s obvious reluctance. At least talking took her mind from the child who snuffled and murmured in the crib between them. ‘And you? Hannah told me you’d been going to some meetings with her?’
Sally nodded, a faint movement in the darkness. The baby stirred in the cot. Charlotte turned her head away. ‘I could never see the point of it all,’ she admitted. ‘I went a couple of times – to meetings with that friend of Hannah’s – what’s her name? Sylvia something?’
‘Pankhurst. Sylvia Pankhurst.’ Nothing in Sally’s quiet voice revealed the intensity of feeling the name evoked. When Sylvia Pankhurst spoke, she spoke directly to the hearts and minds not of the educated middle-class women so dear to her campaigning mother and sister, founders and leaders of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, but of the women who knew what it was to work a shift as long as their menfolk’s and then to come home to the soulbreaking battle of running a home in a crumbling tenement, of feeding too many mouths on too little income, of fighting dirt and the disease and death that so often struck at the children. She spoke to the likes of Sally Smith. And her words made a compelling sense.
‘Oh, yes. That’s right. Pankhurst.’
The baby moved again, caught her breath a little as if preparing to cry. Charlotte discovered that her hands were tensely clenched upon the counterpane, clenched so tightly that they ached with the effort. With infinite care she forced them to relax, uncurling her fing
ers and flexing them gently. ‘Did you go with them to any of the demonstrations at the Houses of Parliament last year?’
‘No. But I went on the march in February.’ The demonstrations at the House of Commons had been during the previous year; Sally had resisted all Hannah’s blandishments until Christmas, had indeed with the rest of the servant household been mildly amused at Miss Hannah’s antics with her disreputable friends. Not until, with wary misgiving, she had at last allowed herself to be persuaded one winter’s night to accompany Hannah to a small meeting in a local church hall – a meeting at which Sylvia Pankhurst had spoken with her passionate, simple and flawless conviction of the righting of wrongs, the lighting of darkness, of the radical transformation of an imbalanced society – had she even begun to understand Hannah’s commitment to her cause: but the conversion, once brought about, had been of the order of that of Paul on the road to Damascus. That there might be any possibility of creating a world where women ceased to be the chattels of their menfolk, had rights and freedoms of their own, had never so much as crossed Sally’s mind before. To hear Sylvia’s level yet passionate logic, to understand that she, Sally Smith, was being called to make some contribution of her own, would be valued as an ally and a friend by those who were working to this astounding end had amazed and excited her. She had attended more meetings, asked more questions, and had discovered that the answers and ideas she heard made a wonderful sense. With Hannah she had marched proudly behind the banners through dreadful February weather – that had given the parade the nickname of the Mud March – from Hyde Park to Exeter Hall in the Strand. There she had listened enthralled to Mr Keir Hardie – already a hero of hers through the devotion of the not easily-impressed Dickson men. This dedicated Labour leader had made history fifteen years before when he had proudly, in cloth cap and tweed jacket, taken his place as the first representative of the working man in the people’s Parliament at Westminster. The more fiery Mr Israel Zangwill had also spoken and with his unashamed exhortations to militancy had brought the women to their feet in a rapturous storm of applause. ‘A majority in Parliament have promised to vote for women’s suffrage. But whom have they promised? Women! And women have no votes. Therefore the MPs do not take them seriously. You see the vicious circle? In order for women to get votes they must have votes already. And so the men will bemock and befool them from session to session. Who can wonder if, tired of these gay deceivers, they begin to take the law into their own hands? And public opinion – I warn the Government – public opinion is with the women.’ Sally had cheered with the rest, grinning at her nearest neighbour, waving her home-made white flag with blithe vigour. The talk of tactics, of by-elections, of constituencies being the arena of battle had passed her by, but Zangwill’s oratory had to her own surprise brought an emotional burning to her eyes when he had touched on matters closer to her own experience. ‘And so to these myriads of tired women who rise in the raw dawn and troop to their cheerless factories and who, when twilight falls, return not to rest but to the labours of a squalid household, to these the thought of women’s suffrage, which comes as a sneer to the man about town, comes as a hope and as a prayer.’ Hannah’s grip on Sally’s arm had been unconsciously fierce with excitement, her plain face had been lit with dedicated enthusiasm, ‘Today’s woman cries “I fight for justice! – And I shall have it!”’
Tomorrow, Jerusalem Page 15