“Help me put the food on the table for the evening meal now, Kate,” Alice said shortly, just as if she had never been away. “There’s nothing like keeping the hands occupied to take away the worry in the brain.”
It was ironic that everyone would think she was still pining over Walter, when she wasn’t, thought Kate. It struck her that they were the ones who were going to keep his image alive, not her. All she wanted was to forget; but in their various ways, they would keep reminding her of him.
Alice dumped a huge dish of boiled potatoes in the middle of the table, and began shovelling them onto plates, signalling her disapproval of the whole affair.
“I don’t have any worry in the brain, Mother,” Kate felt obliged to say. “I’m perfectly well, and if you’d seen me in Bournemouth, you’d have seen how I held my head up high like the rest of the swells.”
Alice paused in her potato shovelling, her eyes angry.
“That’s no way to be talking, either. We all have our place in this world, and we should be content with it.”
“But Kate’s right, Mother,” Donal said, putting in his piece while the small girls fell silent. “You can’t go to a posh place without acting a bit posh, or you’d soon be put upon by the gentry.”
Kate flashed him a look of gratitude, but her mother wasn’t done with her yet.
“Nobody’s better than the next person, and you’d all do well to remember it. The good Lord gave us our places, and we should stay in them, otherwise we go against His wishes. Isn’t that right, Brogan?” she glared at her so-called God-fearing husband.
“Oh aye, missus,” he said hastily, his mind wandering as always when the argument didn’t centre on him.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with that,” Kate heard herself say.
Alice slapped a piece of bacon on her plate, and her eyes were as cold as charity. After all the whispering she’d had to face in the village, and now this. Kate had changed out of all recognition in one short week.
“And what gives you the right to question God’s will, miss? I’m thinking Father Mulheeny might call it blasphemy to hear you talk so.”
It was ludicrous, thought Kate. Her mother only ever reverted to the piousness of Father Mulheeny’s teachings when it suited her. She could see her father grinning broadly and she could guess at the way his thoughts were going – Life had been duller without his Katie around to give it some spice, and a good rip-roaring argument was what had been missing in the house of late, with them all pussy-footing around and not knowing what to say to one another. And it always tickled him to death to hear his no-nonsense wife being suddenly so supportive of the priest’s teachings. It wouldn’t last, of course.
“I’m not being blasphemous, Mother,” Kate said hotly. “All I’m saying is that we all have a right to make the best of ourselves. We don’t always have to settle for what we’re given if we’re offered the chance of something different.”
She knew she was beginning to flounder, and if she wasn’t careful, her mother would suspect there was something behind all this. But Donal took the heat out of it all.
“Stop getting in a stew over nothing, the pair of you. It’s Kate’s first night home, for pity’s sake, and just because she’s seen a bit of life in Bournemouth, it don’t mean she’s planning to move down there, does it, our Kate?”
“Of course not. I never meant any such thing, and nor did I mean to upset anybody.”
But somebody had told her she had a mind and a will of her own, and it was a waste of God’s gifts not to use them. Anyway, it wasn’t the thought of moving to Bournemouth that Luke Halliday had dangled so enticingly towards her.
“What was it like being on a train, our Kate?” Aileen said suddenly, unable to keep quiet a minute longer.
She turned to the child with relief.
“It was a great monster of a thing, sweetheart, with an engine pulling a long line of carriages behind it. The engine blew great gusts of smoke and steam into the air, then it sparked and hissed so much before it started moving that you thought it was about to explode!”
“I’m never going on a train then,” the more timid Maura said with a shiver.
“Well, I am,” Aileen said importantly. “Our Maura’s always too scared to try anything new, but I bet it was exciting. Our Kate always has all the fun.”
All the adults avoided Kate’s eyes as the child prattled innocently on. Kate felt sorry for them all, because their embarrassment wasn’t necessary. Once she’d recovered from her hurt pride and begun to play the part of the mystery woman, she hadn’t even cared that Walter wasn’t in Bournemouth with her. She took a deep breath, and spoke quickly to cover the uneasy silence.
“I’d be glad if you’d stop treating me as if I’m made of glass. I’ve faced up to everything that happened and put it behind me,” she said, mentally crossing her fingers in the hope that it was really true. “Walter made a bad mistake in courting me, but he’d have made a worse one if he’d married me, so let’s all be thankful for that.”
Donal’s face had darkened as she spoke, and she saw how his hands clenched.
“Well, I’m buggered if I know how you can be so bloody saintly about it, Kate. If I ever get my hands on Radcliffe, I’ll throttle him. I blame myself for ever knowing the bastard, and I don’t intend to forget what he did to you!”
“Donal, please! I won’t have such language in this house,” Alice said, outraged at such talk at the dinner table, the small girls all agog. But brother and sister ignored her as they glared at one another.
“If I want to forget it ever happened – and I do,” Kate said passionately, “I wish you would all do the same. It was my life he almost ruined, and I’m the one who has to pick up the pieces and start again. We can’t pretend it never happened, but it will do nobody any good if you constantly go on about throttling him either!”
“It would do me some bloody good,” Donal muttered.
Brogan added his piece, having been silent for too long. “What your brother means, me darlin’, is that no self-respecting Irishman would let the scum get away with it if he had the chance to retaliate, no matter how much your mother wants us to turn the other cheek.”
“Donal’s no more Irish than I am,” Kate snapped. “And since you left the place as fast as you could, Dada, I don’t know why you go on harping about its glories.”
“That’s enough of that talk, girl. Ireland’s still me home, and she’s still in me heart, so she is.”
“Leave it, Kate,” Alice said, knowing that when her man got that certain glint in his eyes he’d be going on for ever more about the old country and its virtues.
Kate stabbed her fork into a potato, and found herself wishing for one moment that she was sticking it into Walter Radcliffe’s black heart.
There was no real difference between herself and her brother when it came to dark deeds, she thought. And they were all Brogan’s children, with the same passions and weaknesses. Even to becoming seduced by the drink on occasions.
“Are you going to play the fiddle for us later, Dada, as a welcome home?” she asked, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
“I might. If you’re sure it’s not beneath you to listen to such a humble instrument after all your fine hotel entertainments.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you if I’d thought that,” she said, not taking the bait.
Returning to Granby’s Garments sweatshop on Monday was her next ordeal. The news was obviously hot on everybody’s mind. Some of the girls avoided her altogether as if she had leprosy, and the rest were avidly curious and wanting to know about it all. Above the clatter of the machines, Kate found her nerves being stretched again as the most persistent of them wouldn’t leave the subject alone.
“You did right to take the bastard’s money, Kate,” Vi snapped. “Take him for all you can get.”
“I really don’t want to talk about it, Vi.”
“Well, you won’t stop the gossip, my duck. And what the blu
e blazes did you do in Bournemouth all on your own? My old fellow saw your dad down at the pub, so we knew that’s what you’d done. Was it awful?”
“No,” Kate said, poker-faced, with a sudden vivid image of swaying in Luke Halliday’s arms to a seductive waltz tune.
“Oh well, I can see by your face that it was,” Vi said, a touch of irritation mixed with the sympathy. “Never mind. I daresay you’ll tell us when you’re ready. And remember, Kate, there’s plenty more fish in the sea. Just because you got one rotter don’t mean they’re all bastards.”
“I know,” Kate said, wondering how long this was going to go on. The thread in her sewing machine snapped, and she rethreaded her spool with vicious movements, stabbing her finger with the needle in the process.
“Oh, come on, Kate, tell us,” one of the other girls said. “We heard rumours that he was already wed and got cold feet at the last minute. Is that the truth of it?”
“If it is, then bloody good riddance to him,” another girl said. “You don’t want no truck with bigamists, Kate, and you can just be thankful he didn’t put you in the family way.”
Her heart leapt sickly for a minute, but she heard Vi coming to her rescue. Vi, who knew all about the miscarriage…
“Kate’s not that kind of a girl, Aggie Pond, so you just leave her alone and get on with your work before old Jenkins catches you idling.”
The girl flounced off, and Kate mouthed a silent “thank you” at Vi. But before their machines began their whirring once more, the supervisor called for her, She went into his little cubby-hole-cum-office apprehensively, wondering what she had done wrong now.
She wiped her clammy hands on her work overall and heard the others whispering behind her. They would all have been playing guessing games this past week as the stories about her got wilder and wilder, and old Jenkins would have heard them too. She didn’t like him, and never had. He was all too familiar with his favourites, and down on the rest of them like a ton of manure.
“Now then, Kate,” he said, when he’d told her to close the door. “How are you bearing up to your troubles?”
“I’m perfectly all right, thank you.”
“Good. Good.” His narrow little eyes seemed to pierce their way right through her clothes, and she shifted her feet uncomfortably.
“I understand the wedding didn’t take place after all.”
“That’s right.”
“But you still took the week’s holiday.”
“I was entitled. You know I was.”
“Did I say you weren’t? And I heard you went to Bournemouth to stay in some fancy hotel. Quite an adventure for a girl like you, Kate. But I always suspected you’d be an adventurous girl, given the chance.”
His voice had become thicker and he moved around the front of his desk and sat on the edge and assessed her more thoroughly. His gaze moved slowly over her taut body, and in her nervousness Kate knew her nipples were sticking out in a way that she hated. Jenkins knew it too, and ran his tongue around his fleshy lips.
“How would you like to earn a few extra shillings, Kate? I could put some evening work your way if you’ve a mind to stay behind now and then. You’d find me very generous to an adventurous girl like yourself.”
Kate’s heart thudded in her chest as the implications became all too obvious. Jenkins clearly saw her as a bit of a flighty piece more than ready to jump into a new affair while she recovered from the old one. She burned with humiliation.
“I say no!” she snapped. “I don’t want any evening work, thank you.”
He was very agile for a portly man. Somehow he had pinned her against the door, and she could feel the hardness of his erection inside his trousers as he gently squirmed against her. It sickened her.
“Don’t decide too hastily, sweet thing. I’m sure your family could do with the extra money. Let’s say you’ve got a week to think about it. After that – well, we must review the situation. You’re a good worker, but there’s been some fabrics missing lately, and a girl who was preparing for her wedding would have found good use for them…”
“I was given the offcuts!” Kate gasped. “You know I was!”
“But maybe it wasn’t only offcuts. Who’s to argue if I say differently?” he said smoothly. “And I couldn’t keep a thief in my employ, now could I?”
His smile was oily, and Kate felt sickened by what she saw in his face. This was sexual blackmail, and from past rumours about other girls who had suddenly been fired, she knew he’d do exactly as he said. He was a bastard of the first order.
“Anyway, you go away and think about it, girlie. I’m very good to those who please me.”
He slid his arm around her back and squeezed her buttocks. Somehow she wrenched open the door and fled back to her machine.
“What did he want?” said Vi suspiciously.
“What he’s not going to get,” she snapped, too shaken and humiliated to say anything more, and refusing to speak to anybody for the rest of the day.
She wasn’t going to last out the week, not with Jenkins ogling her every time he went through the sweatshop. By the following Monday he’d expect her answer, and he was ruthless enough to spread the dirt about her the minute she refused. She would be disgraced in the village and her family would be disgraced too.
And apart from all that, she couldn’t stand the varying reactions on her non-married state from her family and her workmates any longer. She wished she could get away from everybody, but young women in her class didn’t set up establishments on their own, nor could they afford to do so. Most of the men she knew, even in this small village, were already alarmed that the war had given women too much independence. Young as she had been, she had observed enough to see the emergence of timid women into strong ones, coping with things unheared of in peacetime, while their men were away fighting at the Front.
There was one place she could go, of course. In the short time since her week in Bournemouth, Luke’s image hadn’t dimmed in her mind, nor had the sound of his voice, nor the warm, unspoken sympathy she had seen in his eyes, for his mystery lady.
Excitement and danger were always mingled whenever she thought of him, but there was also a strange inevitability to it all. Otherwise, why would she have gone to Bournemouth alone when her heart should have been breaking? Why that particular week, when he too, was taking a brief holiday? Why should their paths have met at all, in what she was beginning to see as a crossroads in her life.
As the idea grew on her, the only thing she balked about was telling her parents and Donal. She knew that the thought of her going to London would horrify them. London was the wicked city, where a vulnerable young woman could fall prey to any number of vices.
Maybe she should leave a letter explaining everything, and then they couldn’t stop her. The irony of leaving a letter wasn’t lost on her, but the more she thought about it, the more she knew it was the only solution.
It took some time to compose a letter in a way that wouldn’t alarm them any more than was necessary.
Please understand, all of you, I feel the shame of what happened more as each day passes. I can’t forget it while I’m here, where everyone knows about it, and I have to get right away, for a while at least.
I met a very respectable person in Bournemouth who will help me to get work and proper lodgings in London. Please don’t worry about me, or think badly of me for leaving in this way. I’ll write to you the minute I’m settled.
Your loving daughter, Kate.
Once her father had gone to work on Saturday morning and her mother had left to collect some of her endless dirty washing, and Donal had taken the girls fishing, it was easy enough to leave the house with a large bag filled with her clothes. She left the note on her pillow where her mother would be sure to find it sometime later in the day, and then she took the bus to Temple Meads railway station.
Once there, she bought a one-way ticket to London. And since there was an hour to wait before the next train was due to leave,
she asked if there was a telephone she could use.
She heard herself, sounding so grand, and asking to use a telephone, but her enforced confidence seemed to be working, and she was shown to the Station Master’s office and told she could make her call from there. She wilted for a minute as she took Luke’s card from her pocket, then took a deep breath, and gave the operator his number.
Would he even remember her, she wondered, as the endless seconds ticked by before she was connected. Or had she been no more than a diversion? Then at last she heard his voice, as close as if he were standing beside her.
“Luke Halliday,” it said, efficient and professional.
And Kate’s voice simply stuck in her throat, so that she couldn’t speak at all.
Chapter Six
“Who is this?” he said impatiently as the empty seconds ticked by.
“Luke,” Kate finally managed to croak. “It’s me. Kate. Kate – Radcliffe,” she added just in time.
“Good God, Kate!” The voice changed tone, becoming as rich and warm as she remembered it, but with more than a hint of surprise in it. “How marvellous to hear your voice. Where are you calling from?”
“I’m at the railway station in Bristol, and I’ve bought a ticket to London on the one o’clock train.”
She stopped abruptly, struck with awful doubts. She sounded so idiotic, speaking in such a rush and in such a high-pitched voice. Supposing he didn’t want her? Supposing he had meant none of the things he’d said? There might even be another girl in London … and supposing she was just making an almighty fool of herself, and the biggest mistake since Walter?
“I’ll meet the train, Kate, so don’t worry about a thing. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear your voice.”
“You don’t know when I’ll be arriving,” she said weakly, since naturally she hadn’t thought to do anything so clever as to enquire the time of the train’s arrival.
“That’s no problem. I’ll call Paddington Station and find out. All you have to do is get on the train, Katie, and you can leave the rest to me. I assume you’ll be wanting somewhere to stay for the time being?”
A Different Kind of Love Page 8
