A Mother's Love (30 page)

To escape the baffling feeling, she spent much of her time with her grandmother and Great-Aunt Sarah, who was now an established part of the house in Approach Road. Sometimes her uncles John and George would be. there, the cabinet-making business having gone to them.

There was still a lot of trouble, she understood, following her grandfather’s death. Something about a will being contested, and Aunt Annie saying that everyone should have had a share in the business. Sara had heard her mother talking along the same lines to Matthew, stamping her feet and getting excited as she did so easily, saying that what her father had left her wouldn’t keep a mouse in shoe leather, which did sound silly. The squabbles of grownups were beyond Sara, but she did so miss Grandfather. His presence lingered, by the fire in the bay-windowed front parlour overlooking the road, on the stairs, along the narrow passage; all with him no longer being there. She knew just by looking at her that Grandmother missed him even more than she did.

Robert Emmerson, sitting with Annie in the solicitor’s office for the umpteenth time this year, had heard enough this morning of her and the man arguing. Now he stepped in, reddening to his receding hairline.

‘As far as I can see, we’re doing nothing but pay out for your fees on this blessed will business. It’s been going on a whole blessed year. Once and for all, is there any point in carrying on contesting it?’

Mr Greave leaned his long thin frame back in his leather swivel chair, swinging it a little to left and right, his narrow fingers linked together like one in prayer. ‘We mustn’t give up, Mr Emmerson, Mrs Emmerson. I know of cases like this that have gone on for years and at the end of it seen amazing results. Amazing results.’

‘We need to see amazing results
now
, Mr Greave. We’re not prepared to go on paying out our blessed hard-earned cash for ever.’

‘Robert!’ Annie rounded on him, her thin mouth – so much like her unknown grandmother’s, seen only from a photographic portrait of poor quality on her mother’s parlour wall – growing even thinner. ‘It’s not the money, it’s the principle. How could Dad give it all to the youngest of his children and leave us older girls out?’

‘We got a little something out of it,’ Robert soothed, but Annie wasn’t to be appeased by that.

‘A hundred pounds! John and George must be laughing their heads off!’

Robert looked worried. ‘There is your mother, Annie. She needs to be kept for the rest of her life on what he left.’

‘Granted.’ Annie’s lips relaxed a little, then tightened again. ‘I don’t begrudge her. But I would have thought the business should have been put into her name. Then in time we’d all have had a share in it, when she … Well, you know. This way, it all goes to the boys and their wives after them, and their children. We don’t get a look-in. That’s why we should go on contesting Dad’s will. That’s why it’s worth spending out, no matter how long it takes.’ She turned abruptly to Mr Greave. ‘And you can be sure that in the end we could win?’

The solicitor sat forward. ‘As sure as anyone can be,’ he hedged happily.
He
was assured whatever the outcome. No solicitor could be sued for a matter not coming to fruition. At the same time, he was being paid his fees, and if these silly, greedy, unfeeling people chose to spend their money on chasing moonbeams, it was not his place to tell them otherwise.

‘I think the same as Annie does,’ Harriet said obdurately from her dressing table. ‘I think Dad’s will should have been divided better.’

Matthew smiled. Harriet had always thought what others told her to think, happily deeming them to be her own thoughts. He loved her for it … had loved her. What she had possessed when he’d first met her – sweetness, daintiness, a tendency towards being led and an endearing fear of the great wide world – had made him want to shield and protect her. He had loved her for her adorable weaknesses.

Where had that love gone? She was still petite, beautiful. Her beauty tugged at his heart. She could still be sweet at times, so in fear of the world at large. But something had gone. Perhaps it had never been there in the first place and he had only imagined it to be there. What it was that had gone he couldn’t say. His feelings for her were the same as ever, wanting to shield her, guard her – these days against herself. It was now a different kind of love, an aching love with nothing to fulfil it. Something had been lost, long ago, and he was only now beginning to realise it was lost for good.

He had always hoped it would blossom again, as it had the first time after that ridiculous affair with that Milne-Pitford woman. He had finally established contact with Harriet. James had been the result. The loving contact had lingered until that last baby, when she had thrust him from her as though it was his fault. That was when it had all changed.

They lived separate lives now, separate but for his constant fight to cure her of her reliance on her ‘medicine’, as she termed that regular supply of brandy coming into the house. It was a battle he was losing, as he had lost the battle for her love.

But he was only human. Thirty-seven, still virile – he still dreamed in his sleep of making love. There
were
places a man could go to relieve himself. There were women … He knew a few colleagues who frequented those places, engaged the services of those women, came to no harm. But after that escapade in Manchester, never again would he be caught up that way. Not that he felt loyal to Harriet – she had ruined that – but he couldn’t have faced the scandal should he be found out, as he had so nearly been found out all those years ago after the Manchester affair.

‘And what would you have done with your father’s business?’ He posed the question quietly. It didn’t do to fall into the trap of raising one’s voice and thus turn her into a veritable uncapped fountain.

She looked bewildered. ‘We could have all run it.’

‘All of us?’ Her naivety made him grin.

‘You, Robert, Fred, and the boys, my brothers,’ she enlarged.

‘And share the profits between us, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

‘And your mother? There wouldn’t be a great deal left for her.’

‘She’s got the house. We could have looked after her.’

It was Annie speaking. He’d had enough of this foolishness.

‘I prefer to run my journal, Harriet. And I expect Fred and Robert have no wish to give up their good jobs to tussle with a five-way share of one small business. Apart from John and George, none of us knows a thing about cabinet-making, and I for one am not prepared to start learning.’

Harriet got up unsteadily from her dressing table, balancing herself sufficiently to stamp her foot. ‘Don’t patronise me!’

‘I’m merely stating a fact. It wouldn’t work. Your brothers run it very well and your mother has a better share of the profit than if we all had a hand in it. It was, after all, your father’s wish.’

‘You think I’m being greedy.’ Her eyes were growing dangerously moist. ‘I’m only saying what Annie said, that’s all. I don’t want Dad’s money. You wouldn’t allow me to have it if I did. If you can take Jamie away from me, you’d be capable of anything. You don’t care how I feel. You don’t care. No one cares. You all hate me!’

He left her quickly, closing the door on her sobs, and went downstairs into the drawing room. It was growing dark. The winter evenings were drawing in quicker than they realised, and Ellen hadn’t yet drawn the curtains.

He could just discern a faint glow from the fire, which Ellen had banked up should the family wish to spend their evening there later. It hadn’t yet begun to burn through and in the darkness he judged his way towards his armchair. It was even too much effort to reach up for the thin chain of the ornate crystal and brass gas lamp above him, which Harriet in her taste for the expensive had recently had installed. The cut-off gas pipes to the old curved lamps over the mantelpiece were still there, each like the stump of a severed limb.

Matthew sank down into his chair, but a tiny sound from a corner of the room brought him upright; he turned sharply in that direction.

‘Who’s there?’ It was like a small animal, sighing.

Alert, he jumped up, and reaching blindly for the light, tugged quickly. The twin gas mantles popped one after the other. Through the bright crystal bowl, light spread across the room.

From a small cushioned footstool in the corner, Sara was looking up at him. She had been hunched over her arms and he thought she must have been crying. It was her sigh he had heard. He was beside her in a second, lifting her to her feet.

‘What on earth is the matter, Sara?’

She pulled herself up to her full height, obviously embarrassed at being discovered. He noticed how tall she had grown in only a little while – nearly as tall as him, just a few inches in it, and already showing signs of becoming a shapely young woman. It was rather pleasant his being on a level with her rather than having to glance down as he did with Harriet. At this level and in this light, her eyes shone all the bluer. Such a dark, searching blue.

It was hard to credit that she was hardly yet fourteen. She looked much older, out of drab school uniform and in a white appliqué blouse and plaid skirt. Her dark hair curled down her back; in a few years it would be piled on top of her head. And in a few years, she’d be restricting those lovely natural curves with fashioned corset and whalebone.

He could feel the warmth of her skin beneath the sleeves of her blouse and thought of Harriet, how warm her arms used to feel. Oh, God, how he longed to hold Harriet and not have her stiffen against his embrace. He hadn’t held her for years. Now he was holding her daughter. Not his daughter –
her
daughter.

‘Sara.’ A feeling had arisen in him that made him draw in a sharp breath. It was an abomination, disgraceful, what he was feeling. He fought to push it aside to make his voice sound normal.

‘Sara, what’s happened to upset you?’

For an answer, she fell gently towards him until her head rested against his shoulder, her face turned away. He could feel her slim body trembling. Her voice croaked as though she were crying.

‘It’s Grandad. I remembered when we used to play. I miss him so much. I wish he was with us again.’

‘Of course you do,’ he soothed. Her dark hair under his smoothing fingers was so silky to the touch – as Harriet’s had once been, but so much darker, heavier in texture, vibrant with the health of the young. He wanted to bury his face in it, but he didn’t.

‘You mustn’t cry. The time has gone by, and you mustn’t cry.’

‘I’m not crying,’ she whispered. ‘I want to cry, though – so much. I felt so alone when I was at Grandma’s today. Grandma and Great-Aunt Sarah were talking, and Uncle John and Uncle George came in, and they began talking to Grandma, and I felt … not wanted. Everyone was talking to each other and nobody spoke to me.’

‘They have a lot on their minds at present,’ he soothed. ‘And it may be that you’re feeling a little low yourself at the moment.’

‘I feel miserable. I’ve had a pain in my stomach all day, a low, slow, drawing pain I’ve never had before, and I feel so miserable.’

‘Oh dear God.’ He sighed the words to himself and held her away from him. It wasn’t his help she needed. It was a woman’s. Things were happening to her that he could have no part in.

Her mother should speak to her, but her mother was in no fit state to speak to anyone; needed a shoulder to cling to rather than being able to provide one.

Who else was there who could explain the facts of life to this child, soon to become a woman? If his guess was right, tomorrow might be too late and this innocent girl, rigid with pain and distress, would be shocked into thinking some terrible, dire thing was happening to her.

There was Mrs Downey, she’d be the one to help. A motherly soul, their cook had been with them since they’d first come here, was like a member of the family. She preferred to keep her place, but she was a kindly sort. She would be able to explain things to this child. It must be made to appear that Harriet was sleeping off a headache. Matthew made up his mind.

‘Listen, Sara, I want you to go downstairs. Tell Mrs Downey how you feel. Your mother isn’t well at present. Don’t argue …’ He placed a finger to her lips as she began to protest. ‘Go downstairs to Mrs Downey.’

The kiss he dropped on her cheek stirred him again and he stepped quickly away.

‘Go on,’ he ordered tersely.

Annie, at her wits’ end, perched like a vulture on the edge of her chair in Mr Greave’s dusty office, her thin breast heaving.

‘We’re paying you, Mr Greave, to handle this business. As far as I can see, it’s been dragging on long enough. Eighteen months. We’ve got nowhere. Have we?’

For confirmation, she glanced at her husband, then at Clara and Clara’s husband. Both men nodded obediently, but Clara remained deeply interested in the cream kid gloves she wore.

Clara, taking after her father, had put on considerable weight these last few years, but being so much shorter than he had been, looked plumper than she really was.

‘I think it’s time,’ Annie went on, her tone sharp, ‘we did more about it. Perhaps if you wrote to our mother explaining how we feel about things.’

‘You must understand, Mrs Emmerson,’ Mr Greave put in, unruffled by the woman’s harangue. ‘Contesting a will can take an inordinate length of time, depending upon circumstances. Legal wheels …’

‘Blast legal wheels, Mr Greave! None of us has the money to sit and watch your legal wheels turning, your fees mounting, and nothing to show for it.’

Her lips compressed, her grey eyes revealed her feelings not only towards the solicitor, but towards Harriet, who had professed to not being well enough to attend this meeting, and Matthew, who had downright refused. At least he was honest enough to state reasons of disinterest, a fact she had to concede to, if without grace. It was all very well for him with his money and wealthy parents … Even if he didn’t need to worry about Harriet getting a share of the will, he could have supported her family, seeing how he had married into it.

‘We’ve come to a conclusion, Mr Greave,’ she continued, having appointed herself spokeswoman over the menfolk, ‘that you ought to write our mother a letter, setting out exactly what we had expected of that will.’