So it was that they spent an hour so like old times that Sally slipped into the discussion as if she had never been away, hearing the names she had grown up with in the back streets of these docklands – Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, Ben Tillet – and the arguments, and the injustices, were the same as well and it seemed to her, sadly, never likely to change for all the strikes and the endless talk of political change and revolution. They were good men, these three; but whoever, in this world of profit and loss, of employers and employed, of a political system geared for centuries to wealth and to ownership, would listen to them? She was pleased and touched when they agreed to attend the wedding. ‘Josie would have wanted it,’ Dan said calmly; and to that there was no answer.
And so the Dicksons were in the small, smoke-darkened stone church of St Mary-le-Grey to see Sally Smith wed Philippe van Damme: the bride – over her own halfhearted protests – gowned in ivory silk and cream lace; plain, beaming Hannah, endearingly homely in sprigged lavender her chief bridesmaid; and every little girl from the home – six of them no less – in pale pinks and blues, shining and garlanded, the best behaved train of bridesmaids ever to grace a wedding. There too were all of the Pattens and the Bedfords and several of Philippe’s relations including his mother and his sister, to both of whom, to Sally’s delight, she had taken on the instant of meeting, a compliment they seemed to have little trouble in returning.
‘But of course, my love!’ Philippe had said, laughing as always. ‘They are my family. You love me – of course you will love them! And I adore you – so of course they will too!’
‘Philippe, Philippe! If only life could really be so simple!’
‘But yes. It is.’ He spread expressive, comical hands. ‘Did you not know?’
He awaited her now, calmly and with a smile as, with nerves jumping like marionettes, she walked down the short aisle on Doctor Will’s arm, every face in the small congregation turned to her. She had spent the day in an absolute and ridiculous daze, joking with Bron, laughing with Hannah, letting them dress her in her absurd finery, the cost of which might in the old days have kept her and Toby for several weeks, letting them deck her with ribbons and lace and fresh, lovely flowers: and all with the odd distraction of a pleasant dream. It could not, of course, be real. This could not be Sally Smith – was that even her name? – dressed like a princess, perfumed and coiffed, walking in May sunshine to be married in a flower-filled church to a man whose home she had never seen and whose native language she could not speak. Such things simply did not happen, except in the stories she so loved to tell.
Yet at the moment that she stepped to his side, at the moment he turned to look at her, took her hand in his, all feelings of unreality fell away. This was reality. The only reality. And she had never known such happiness in all of her life.
II
She often thought, after the world had gone mad and such happiness seemed indeed the stuff of fairy tales, that for the duration of her marriage that feeling never left her: that in those thirty happy months of life with Philippe and his family she experienced more happiness, more contentment, more pure joy than do most people in a lifetime. And in that at least they were blessed. Until the time that the dreadful storm clouds of war that had been inexorably gathering on Europe’s horizon for so long finally rolled across their lives and engulfed them, they were simply, utterly and blissfully happy. The arrival of their daughter on a blustery February night in 1913 only served to complete the charmed circle.
‘She’s just the prettiest little thing you’ve ever seen,’
Sally wrote in one of her frequent and regular letters to Hannah. ‘And I’m not in the least bit biased, I promise you – Philippe and all the family think the same!’
Her correspondence with Hannah, and rather more sporadically with Toby, kept her well in touch with all that was happening in England and within the family. In the months before and after the birth of little Philippa – always and immediately known as Flip – Hannah wrote with blithe fervour of the escalation of militancy in the fight for the vote. To Sally, perhaps now distanced by rather more than the mere miles that lay between them, the resort to fire-raising and personal violence seemed rather more questionable than Hannah ever gave signs of thinking. Certainly she found herself wondering if such tactics might not prove counter-productive, losing rather more sympathy than they gained and simply supplying more ammunition to those who so loved to depict those women who were fighting for the right to vote as graceless and unnatural female hooligans; though she chuckled with real and appreciative amusement to hear how the flags on the royal Balmoral golf course had overnight mysteriously changed to white, purple and green, and had nothing but wholehearted admiration for the women who marched from Edinburgh to London to publicize the intolerable conditions suffered by women and children in the sweated industries of Britain’s great cities. Hannah herself was still active and twice in those months was arrested and sent to prison, each time using the perilous weapon of the hunger strike to secure an early release. She never in her letters to Sally dwelt upon the painful terrorization of forcible feeding and its equally intolerable painful aftermath; but Sally knew enough of the barbaric practice to wonder at Hannah’s courage in facing it not once but twice and in being ready in her obstinate dedication to her cause and her leaders, who themselves had suffered even more, to face it again. It was from an English newspaper and not from Hannah that she learned that a suffragette in the very week that Flip was born had nearly died from the savage treatment meted out to her whilst being forcibly fed, though in fact it was not until June of that year that in Emily Davison, who threw herself beneath the hooves of the King’s horse at Epsom, the cause found itself mourning its first martyr.
Toby’s letters were both less frequent and less intense. To Sally’s inestimable relief he seemed to have overcome his antagonism towards her marriage, though she could not help noticing that he rarely mentioned or asked about Philippe or the baby. He had so far declined to visit them, but always with grace and never without a good excuse. He was studying for examinations. He had ‘nabbed the lead’ in the school play. He was captaining the middle school eleven, leading his house rugby team. His letters were short, entertaining, often flippant and, Sally was not slow to realize, gave away very little. But they came, and they made her smile, and that was enough. She herself wrote as often as she thought he would want – not, in fact, nearly often enough for her – and, taking her lead from him, kept her own letters short and light-hearted. His absence was the only flaw in a life that was happier than she could have believed possible. In Philippe she had found a lover in every sense of the word, their life together full of laughter, their love-making rich and fulfilling for them both. There were times when a glance, the mischievous flicker of an eye, the smallest, provocative movement of a head could bring them, laughing like children, to their lovely, spacious, pine-panelled room in the attics of the tall house in the Groenerei. Often, half dressed and impatient for each other they would make love fiercely and at once, brought in moments by the almost unbearable excitement of their loving to a climax that would leave them sprawled, exhausted, limbs entangled upon the wide bed. But there were other, quieter times, times of gentle questing, of tender, wanton teasing, of sheer erotic enjoyment, long, long, languorous moments when for them time seemed to stand still and life stretched before them for ever.
They knew, of course, that in all likelihood, at least in its present undisturbed and delightful form, it did not. They knew, too well, the perilous world in which they lived; knew it as in 1013 in the Balkans Serbia, Greece, Rumania and an all but exhausted Turkey united against Bulgaria, and armies marched; knew it as relations between Britain and Germany deteriorated further, each eyeing the other’s possessions and claims with avid, grudging eyes, each watching the build up of the other’s seagoing forces with distrust. But they were young and they were happy and it was hard to take such things too seriously. For Sally those years were doubly precious – for in her marriage she had fou
nd not only a much-loved husband and an adored daughter, but the mother she had never really known and a sister for good measure. Alice, calm, loving, warm-natured would have found it difficult to resist any girl her Philippe loved so wholeheartedly; to discover beneath Sally’s self-sufficiency and composure a girl more than ready to be loved and mothered, almost heartbreakingly eager to become part of the family, was an unlooked-for pleasure. Annette too, as beguilingly uncomplicated as her brother, took to the newcomer as the sister she had never had. Flip’s birth put the seal on a warm family circle that Sally had never in her wildest dreams thought to be a part of; only Toby’s absence, the recollection of his bitterness at what he had plainly seen as her desertion of him, sometimes brought a shadow to the sunshine of her days.
Philippe, unerringly, knew it.
‘It is time,’ he said in the autumn of 1913, with Flip a little over six months old, ‘for a visit to London, I think.’ He picked up the plump, laughing baby and tossed her in the air, grinning at her shrieks of excited pleasure. ‘We should show my English cousins something of the monster they unleashed into this world when they introduced us, Sally my love. We should show them our so terrible daughter!’
Sally contemplated the visit with open and happy anticipation and more than a few private misgivings. She wanted very much to see Hannah, and Ralph, and Doctor Will and Bron, the children at the home. She wanted more than she could admit to herself to see and to talk to Toby, to explain as she had not been able to explain the year before why she had done what she had done, why she had been unable for this first and most important time to put him before all other things, as she had come to realize he had expected.
But she did not want to see or speak to Ben Patten. Perhaps surprisingly she did not want to flaunt her happiness, to prove how wrong he had been. She did not want to see him; and she did not want to analyse why she felt so strongly about it. She did not, in her happiness, want to face the nervy hostility his presence always wrought in her, the desire, almost, to hurt.
She did not have to. Almost the first information that was forthcoming upon their arrival at the Bear was that Ben Patten was not there. The visit had coincided with a conference in Brighton – ‘blood poisoning, or something equally gruesome’, Charlotte said casually, and Sally flinched – and he had felt himself unable to break the commitment.
Toby was as tall as she was.
She laughed delightedly to see him – tall, slender, fecklessly handsome, poised as a young prince, mischief and charm emanating from him in about equal measures. He responded to her hug with laughter, all strain apparently gone. It took all five days of the visit for her to realize that she had lost him. As, she reassured herself, she had been bound to lose him as he grew up, as she had virtually and knowingly assured herself of losing him when she had agreed to stay at the Bear, to let him follow a road down which she could not possibly follow. It had nothing to do with her marriage, nothing to do with her leaving him; he was altogether too intelligent, too flexible for that. He was growing into a young man anyone would delight in, and she was proud of him. That his mischief was perhaps a little harsher, his quick wit occasionally a little more sharply edged and hurtful, the wide blue eyes cooler and more calculating, was perfectly understandable under the circumstances. No one understood better than Sally Smith what it was to be an outsider.
It was the sight of Hannah that brought the real shock. Always raw-boned, now she was gaunt, her face like putty, her mouth sunken, the sockets of her eyes cavernous. Her clothes hung upon her like rags. There were sores about her nose and mouth, running and livid, brought about by the brutal application of forcible feeding tubes. Like other victims of the savage ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act, her nerves, no matter how she tried to control them, were raw.
‘Cat and Mouse?’ Sally asked faintly, hardly crediting what she saw.
Hannah smiled a little. ‘You have to hand it to them. It’s damn’ clever. They got tired of having to let us go, you see. Of seeing us make fools of them. So – now if we go on hunger strike they wait until our health is seriously at risk and then they let us go. On humanitarian grounds.’ She smiled again mirthlessly. ‘And then they watch us, and as soon as we show signs of improvement they re-arrest us to finish our sentence. Then, of course, we go on hunger strike again. Three months could take a year to serve. Perhaps more—’
‘But – that’s torture!’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what it is.’
Ralph sat and watched her, his anguished heart in his painfully short-sighted eyes; and Hannah, the exasperated Sally noted, still did not see it.
She visited the Dicksons, taking Flip with her, and her welcome, perhaps because of the child, was remarkably warm. They were in good heart and greatly encouraged by an Act of Parliament, recently passed, that restored the political rights of Unions, that had been taken from them in 1908.
‘Now we’ll see something,’ Walter declared. ‘With the Unions able to back Labour, now we’ll see some change at last!’
Sally smiled and sipped her tea, and did not comment.
‘You’re looking lovely, girl,’ Dan said as he bid her goodbye on the doorstep when Philippe came to pick her up in a motor car that had every urchin in the street gathered about it the moment it stopped. ‘No need to ask if you’re happy.’
‘No. No need.’ She lifted her face and kissed him gently, the baby’s warm, fuzzy head between them.
She remembered, long, long after that day, the warmth of his smile and the pressure of his big, hard hand.
* * *
She was not sorry to get back to Bruges; to lovely Bruges with its bell towers and its flowers, its canals and parks, its pretty step-gabled houses and steep, sloping roofs. In the short time she had lived there she had become enchanted by the place. It was her home, and nothing bad could happen there.
‘Shall we buy a phonograph like the one the Pattens have?’ Philippe asked her, smiling – for the whole of the length of their visit Charlotte had played, upon the machine that had taken the place of the music box, the ragtime records that Peter had brought home on his last leave until every tinny note had seemed etched into Sally’s eardrums.
She shook her head, pulled him to her so that he fell on to the bed on top of her. ‘When would we ever have time to play it?’
It was a few short months later, in the following June, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Bosnia and his wife were assassinated at Sarajevo, and the witches’ brew of Europe, simmering for so long, began to come to the boil. In England few people believed that an event so insignificant, so ridiculously foreign, could possibly concern them. In Belgium, knowing better the intricacies of European ambitions, alliances and ententes, knowing but perhaps not wanting to acknowledge the terrible vulnerability of a tiny, undefended state caught between two hostile powers, the citizens were not so sure; although certainly the more sanguine were loud in their opinion that war on a large scale in Europe had become an impossibility, that any conflict between the great powers would be so mutually destructive, would cost so much in terms of human and material assets, that the very thought was inconceivable.
Meanwhile Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in retaliation for the killings in Sarajevo; Russia – the third partner in the Triple Entente with France and Britain – mobilized her forces to come to Serbia’s aid; whereupon, at the beginning of August Germany – in support of her own ally, Austria-Hungary – declared war on Russia, and as a matter of course on Russia’s ally France; and in doing so served her own long-held intentions of gaining dominance in Europe.
And standing between France and the might of the German armies was tiny Belgium, her fragile neutrality guaranteed by the Treaty of London which had been signed in 1839; a treaty that, by the beginning of August 1914, it had become obvious the Central Powers had no intention of honouring.
III
‘You don’t have to go. Philippe – you don’t have to go! You’re a married man with a family. Please!’ Sally’s voice shook in h
er efforts to contain her fear, to prevent the rise of almost hysterical tears.
Philippe faced her, his long, dark face painfully set, no laughter now about that mobile mouth. ‘Sally, I have to. You know it.’
‘I know no such thing! But I’ll tell you what I do know – I know a hopeless situation when I see one! I know that a handful of ill-trained men with next to no weapons isn’t going to hold back the Germans!’
‘Liège is holding out—’
‘How long for? And then what? Philippe – the Belgian army can’t stand up against hundreds of thousands of well-armed, well-trained men! You must know it.’
‘We have to try. If we can hold them for long enough then Britain and France will come to our rescue. We can’t just sit on our hands and wait. We have to fight. We have to defend Antwerp and Brussels. We have to hold on until help arrives.’
She shook her head helplessly. ‘It’s not possible. The French have their own battles to fight – the Germans have already invaded French territory!’
‘But Britain is in the war now. Troops are landing, coming to help us.’ Gently he took her by the shoulders and drew her to him, laying his cheek upon her hair. She clenched her eyes against tears, clinging to him. ‘Sally, my love, I have to go. Belgium needs her men.’
‘We need you!’ She lifted her head fiercely, ‘Philippe, we need you! Supposing the Germans come? Supposing they come and you aren’t here? Oh—’ she saw him flinch from that, and hated herself for it, ‘—oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just – oh, Philippe, I can’t bear it. I can’t. If you were hurt – killed!’
He rocked her gently, his eyes sombre, saying nothing. Three days before, the German Minister to Brussels had formally asked for free passage of German troops through Belgium to the French borders. Grimly, knowing well what would follow, the Belgian King and his Government had firmly refused. Within two days the German army had marched upon Liège, where now, stubbornly, bravely, helplessly, the defenders still held out, though the end was in no doubt. The tiny Belgian army, ill-equipped, hopelessly outnumbered was falling back to the River Gette, in the hope of saving Antwerp and Brussels. Philippe van Damme was going to join them.
Tomorrow, Jerusalem Page 32
