‘That’s canny. What does she say?’ Millie asked immediately.
‘She’s back in the area, teaching. Her mother died earlier in the year.’ Maggie scanned the letter. ‘She heard about our marriage, John,’ Maggie smiled at her husband.
‘Is that why she’s written?’ Millie snorted. ‘Cos now you’re respectable?’
‘No,’ Maggie laughed. ‘She’s heard about the appeal for the home and wants to help. It says here that her uncle left her a small legacy, so she’s got a bit extra put by.’
‘That’s very generous of her, Maggie,’ John commented.
‘Isn’t it,’ Maggie agreed. ‘Eeh, it’d be grand to see Rose again after all these years. I thought that much of her when I was younger - she had a great influence on me, John. It was wrong of me to let things come between us like they did ...’
She fell silent, thinking back to her militant days when she had set up home with George. It was the breach of morals that had most offended and upset her friend, and Rose’s condemnation had hurt Maggie deeply. But that was all in the past and she was thankful that she was to be allowed the opportunity of being reconciled with her former teacher.
They were pouring out a celebratory drink of the mild fragrant punch when there was an urgent knocking on the front door.
Maggie’s delight at seeing Alice appear on Christmas Eve evaporated as she quickly took in the woman’s agitated gestures and distraught face. Alice came swiftly to the point and told Maggie of the awful confrontation with her brother and his refusal to allow Maggie to see Christabel again.
‘I’m afraid I was so angry at his threats to jeopardise the home and stop the children from seeing me that I told him everything about Christabel,’ Alice admitted. ‘I really thought he was going to hit me, he was so outraged.’
Maggie sat down stunned. ‘He knows I’m Christabel’s mother?’ she gasped.
Alice looked at her helplessly and nodded. ‘And that George is the father,’ Alice added hoarsely.
Maggie looked at John’s pained face and said in a hard, dull voice, ‘Then he’ll never allow me to see her again. After all this struggle, I’ll never see Christabel again, will I?’
No one contradicted her. There was a heavy silence in the cosy room.
‘I’m so very sorry, Maggie. I’ve ruined everything for you,’ Alice said in agitation.
‘At least you stood up to your brother over the home for unmarried mothers,’ John said, trying to salvage some hope from the devastating news. ‘That is something to strive for, isn’t it, my dear?’ He looked pleadingly at Maggie but knew that at that moment it was no comfort to his wife. Her figure seemed to have shrunk under the weight of the news, her face was desolate. It frightened him to think that the main joy in Maggie’s life, to see her daughter, had been stolen from her.
Maggie felt a creeping cold numbness in her stomach. ‘I can’t think about the home just now,’ she said in a colourless voice. ‘I can’t think of anything.’ She stood and walked swiftly from the room, unable to bear their helpless pity.
John went out after her. ‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ he began.
‘No, don’t touch me!’ Maggie shrank from his reach. ‘Nothing you can say can make me feel any better, so don’t try. I just want to be left alone.’
Pulling her shawl over her head, she rushed from the house and ran blindly through the ill-lit icy streets.
At times she slipped and fell, but she just picked herself up and kept on walking, nowhere in particular just away, as if she could escape the horrible truth that the Pearsons had finally denied her the one happiness that gave her life meaning. How cruel, to have her daughter snatched away just as she was getting to know her properly and as the girl was growing to love her in return.
Maggie found herself in the centre of town, the large bulk of the cathedral looming before her in the dark. The bells rang joyously. For a moment she was tempted to go in and seek refuge, but the thought of weakening made her angry.
‘Where are you?’ she cried, looking up at the crowned dome of the church. ‘Why do you allow such things to happen?’
She stumbled on as people stopped to stare at her ranting. The streets were full of revellers going between the pubs or returning home. Their cheery, flushed faces and jocular calls made her feel all the more alone and miserable. Tears streamed down her face as she walked aimlessly towards the quayside.
Suddenly, her arm was grabbed by a passer-by. Maggie tried to shake off the man’s hold, but he clung on. ‘Maggie?’ he demanded. ‘Is it you, Maggie?’
She would never have recognised the becapped, thin-faced man who accosted her, but she knew his voice at once.
‘George?’ she queried.
‘Aye, it’s me. What the hell are you doing down here on your own the night?’
When she did not answer, he peered closer and saw her pinched, tear-stained face and noticed that her frail body was shaking. Seeing her so close, he could see how she had aged around her dark eyes. Were they lines of laughter or pain? he wondered suddenly and the anger that had been welling up inside him at the sight of his former lover dissolved at once. He held on to her arm and steered her off the street and into the snug of a nearby pub.
It was fuggy with smoke and the smell of warm bodies, but Maggie did not protest as George pushed her gently into a corner seat, ordering a rum and ginger from the barmaid. An elderly man smoking a clay pipe and belching contentedly nearby reminded her of her Uncle Barny, but she noticed no one else, so panic-stricken was she by the abrupt meeting with George. They did not speak until the drink arrived.
‘Get that down you,’ he ordered gruffly.
She sipped at the strong-tasting drink, feeling it burn its way down her throat and warm her numbed body. She stared at him, taking in the gaunt face and the prematurely greying hair and the lines of suffering around his mouth and eyes. He looked so much older, yet the warm brown eyes were those of the man she had loved and the sound of his familiar voice sent warm shivers through her.
He sat and watched her, waiting for her to explain.
There was so much to say, Maggie thought desperately, how could she possibly begin? ‘I came to see you months ago,’ she croaked at last, ‘but your sister wouldn’t tell me where you were.’
‘I’ve been away, looking for work, wandering about,’ George answered. ‘I don’t stop in the same place for long - can’t stop.’ He looked at her with a mixture of desire and impatience. ‘God, Maggie, I’ve hated you this past year. When I heard you’d got wed to that preacher ... Why couldn’t you have waited?’
‘I thought you were dead, George!’ Maggie replied in agitation. ‘Dead! Do you know what I’ve been through since I’ve heard you were alive? The guilt, the longing ...’ Maggie broke off, bowing her head, unable to meet his accusing look.
‘I could never have looked at another woman after you, Maggie,’ George said harshly, ‘but you can’t have grieved for long. And Heslop of all men! You, Maggie - the one who called marriage being in chains. Look at you now, living like the ladies you once despised in your grand house on the other side of town, doing charity work. Oh, I’ve walked along your street, just to catch a glimpse of you in your posh clothes with your posh house with servants and the like. I tried to call, just the once, but that daft Millie Dobson wouldn’t let me over the doorstep.’
‘Millie never said anything,’ Maggie gasped, wondering if she would have acted any differently this past year if she had known.
‘No, she wouldn’t,’ George growled. ‘Said I was to leave you be, that you were happily married. Are you happily married, Mrs Heslop?’
Maggie winced at his savage tone, but she knew that it disguised a deep pain. ‘I’ve had times of happiness - well, contentment, at least,’ she replied awkwardly.
‘Contentment!’ George scoffed. ‘By! I never thought you could’ve changed so much from the fighting lass I used to love. What happened to all those principles?’
Maggie drank her rum
and glared at him in sudden fury. ‘Don’t you preach at me in your high and mighty way, George Gordon. You know nothing of what I’ve been through these past years - what I’ve been through because of you! You weren’t the only prisoner of war. There are different ways of being in hell and captivity and, by heck, I’ve been there too!’
‘You didn’t have to marry Heslop,’ George was scathing. ‘You chose to.’
‘I’m not talking about me marriage! I’m talking about being pregnant with your bairn and destitute and having to gan into St Chad’s and being treated like scum and having the bairn taken off us. That’s the hell I’m talking about, Geordie!’ Maggie was shaking violently. She saw George’s stunned look, as if he could not grasp what she was telling him. ‘Aye, George, a bairn! That’s why I married John Heslop,’ she said, breathing fast, ‘because I thought I’d stand a better chance of getting our daughter Christabel back if I was respectably married. That’s what happened to me principles. When it came down to it I wanted that bairn more than anything in the world. Anything.’
George’s look was harrowed. ‘A daughter? We’ve a lass, Maggie?’ As she nodded she thought he was going to cry.
‘I wrote to tell you but the letter came back with your things when they thought you’d been killed. It was unopened, so I burned it.’
‘Why did no one tell me?’ George rasped.
‘None of your family knew, I was that ashamed. So you can’t blame them. No one knew except Millie Dobson in the workhouse. She helped bring the bairn into this world. And then I told John when he rescued me from St Chad’s.’ Maggie coloured. ‘He knew why I married him, yet he was prepared to have me even though I didn’t love him.’
‘Didn’t?’ George questioned.
Maggie met his searching eyes and answered with difficulty. ‘He’s a good man, Geordie. I couldn’t have got through the past years without him. I can’t deny I’ve grown fond of John.’
George flinched and gripped the table top. ‘What of the bairn?’ he demanded.
‘Christabel? She was taken to an orphanage.’ Maggie felt her eyes sting as she relived that terrible visit to Hebron Children’s Home. ‘But by the time we’d discovered where she was, she’d been adopted by - by another family.’ Something prevented Maggie from telling George that it was Herbert Pearson who had charge of their child. She saw how he suffered from the shock of discovering he had a daughter, yet how much worse it would be for him to discover she belonged to the hated Pearsons.
Maggie stretched out her hand and touched his. ‘But I’ve seen her several times. She’s a bonny lass, Geordie, and trying to talk nineteen to the dozen. She’s that interested in the world around her.’
George’s eyes filled up with tears. ‘Can I see her too, do you think? Just see her for a minute?’
Maggie swallowed and shook her head. ‘That’s why I was in such a state when you found me in the street. Miss— a friend came and told me I wouldn’t be allowed to see the lass again. Her new parents don’t want me interfering. She doesn’t live in the town.’
For a moment they gazed at each other, aware of the other’s deep hurt. Then they reached out and Maggie felt his arms go about her, seeking and giving comfort. She clung to him and wept into his shoulder and felt the wetness of his tears on her hair. If people stared at them in curiosity they did not notice or care. All that mattered was that they had each other, nothing else in the world counted. Maggie had waited so long to feel his warm embrace, fearing never to see or touch him again. Yet here he was, alive and forgiving in her arms as if the past terrible years of separation had never been.
She needed little persuasion to follow George back to his lodgings on the quayside where he picked up odd labouring jobs. He rented a room in a squalid tenement, yet he had managed to make it almost homely with a fire in the small grate and candles on the mantelpiece whose flickering light showed that the bare room was strewn with books and newspapers as their past homes had been. Maggie found herself in tears once more at the thought of what they had missed.
George steered her into the solitary chair by the fire and encouraged her to talk. He held her hand as they quietly recounted their stories of separation, of the years apart. She learned something of the horrors George had witnessed, of the times he had been on burial duty, digging pits for mass graves, of finding trenches with human remains buried into their walls from previous battles.
‘Those fields in Flanders are thick with the bones of Europe’s dead,’ he told her bleakly. ‘They sent so many over the top, you can’t imagine how many. Will there ever be a time when we’re in charge of our own destiny, Maggie? Ordinary folk like you and me?’
Maggie shivered. ‘We can strive for it,’ she answered. ‘We can hope and pray for it.’
‘Pray?’ George echoed suspiciously. ‘Don’t tell me Heslop’s converted you into a little missionary, lass?’
‘I’m no Bible-thumper, but there’ve been times when I’ve prayed as if me life depended on it - those times in prison, in the workhouse, in labour.’
George put his arms round her. ‘Maggie,’ he whispered, ‘I’m that sorry. If only I’d been there to help you, I can’t bear to think what you’ve gone through for me.’
‘I’ve missed you so much, Geordie,’ Maggie cried. ‘I was that hurt when you wanted nothing to do with me. I so wanted to explain.’
George stroked her hair and kissed her brow gently. ‘I was sick when I came home, lass,’ he murmured. ‘Sick in me mind as well as me body. I’d lost so many friends. Bob Stanners and half the rowing club are dead ... Hearing you were wed - well, it finished me. I went off on me wanders. I was so angry I couldn’t stop still because everywhere reminded me of you. But I couldn’t settle anywhere either. I kept coming back hoping I’d hear that Heslop had died and you were free again. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I wished him dead.’
Maggie pulled away at the mention of her husband. He would be worrying about her and here she was with George as if she had no responsibility to anyone else. Her guilt made her answer sharply.
‘Don’t say that, George!’ Yet had she not entertained the very same thoughts? she accused herself. ‘I ought to go,’ she said restlessly and stood up.
George gripped her shoulders and made her look at him. ‘I need you more than he does, Maggie. I love you more than he does. Stay with me. Leave Heslop. You said you only married him to get our lass back but that hasn’t worked. It feels right you being here with me again. You can’t go back to him now, Maggie.’
Maggie looked at him, experiencing both fear and excitement at his words. ‘You mean leave John, for good?’
‘Aye,’ George urged. ‘You were mine long before you married him. You know I would have wed you years ago, Maggie, if you’d wanted. We could go away together and start somewhere new like we used to plan when you were a suffragette in hiding.’
Maggie thought again of the intimate times they had spent in their small rooms in Arthur’s Hill, ridiculously happy with just each other’s company, sharing their dreams of escape.
‘Where would we go?’ she asked, daring to let herself think the impossible.
‘I’ve been thinking of going abroad for some time,’ George told her eagerly, taking her hands in his. ‘To Canada.’
‘Canada!’ Maggie exclaimed.
‘I met this Canadian near the end of the war - another prisoner. He never stopped talking about the rich farmlands and the forests,’ George enthused. ‘His family emigrated from Scotland when he was a bairn. It’s a new country, Maggie, where ordinary people graft for themselves and not for a pittance. No more bosses telling us what to do. Imagine it. Ever since I was a nipper playing around Hibbs’ Farm, I’ve always wanted to work the land, Maggie.’
Maggie began to feel carried away with his vision. Was this really what her life had been leading up to? she wondered headily. Had all the pain and striving and hardship been to bring her here, to this new future with the man she loved, bringing energy and h
ope and justice into a new world?
‘And the rivers, Maggie, they’re all crystal clear and full of fish. Not like the filthy Tyne, killed off with the badness from the factories and the yards.’
The River Tyne, Maggie thought, her mind jerking back to the present at its mention. That dirty, powerful river was the only one she had ever known. She had lived by its banks all her life, she thought with a shiver.
‘But what about here? What about England?’ she pressed him. ‘You always wanted to change things here.’
George snorted. ‘A land fit for heroes? That’s a load of bollocks! England’s never going to change. The bosses will always be promising us something better around the corner while working us into the ground for fewer wages and longer hours. They’re laying men off at the yards and pits already. It’s nearly nineteen twenty, Maggie, and they’ve already forgotten what they promised the lads who won the war for them. Who gives a toss about the poor beggars ganin’ round the doors wearing their medals trying to sell stuff no one has the money to buy? Pearson’s will never employ me again, Maggie, and I’ll not spend the rest of me life humping cargo on and off boats on the quayside.’
Maggie sighed, sharing George’s disillusionment with their post-war world. There had been so much expectation at the end of the Kaiser’s war that things would be better, yet had anything really changed?
‘I must go,’ she said quietly, ‘before they call the police out for me.’
‘I’ll walk you back across town,’ George insisted, seeing that she would stay no longer.
They walked together through the wintry streets as the last of the revellers wove their way out of the closing pubs. ‘You will think on what I’ve said, Maggie?’ George urged. ‘I want you with me - always.’
Maggie felt a desperate thrill at his words but quite torn as to what to do. ‘And what if I decide to stay?’ she murmured from within the folds of her shawl.
George stopped and pulled her round to face him. His look was determined. ‘Then I’ll go anyway, even if you won’t come with me. I’ll not stay in this town and watch you live with another man - a man twice your age.’ Then he bent and kissed her with a desperate passion, as if he could will her to choose him.
THE GREAT WAR SAGAS: Box set of 2 passionate and inspiring stories: A Crimson Dawn and No Greater Love Page 85
