Cat and Mouse (13 page)

They sat on a bench and watched him. ‘He was here yesterday and the day before that,’ Rankin said. ‘He works hard at it. He must find something, sometimes.’

‘It's admirable,’ Deborah said. ‘But it's a disgrace as well, that a child should have to do that to live.’

‘One day he won't,’ said Rankin thoughtfully. ‘If we win this strike then we'll have forced the transport owners to give us a decent wage, and that'll make all the other bosses afraid as well.’

‘Do you think that'll happen, really, James?’ They had had many discussions like this. She thought of the industrialists she had met at dinner parties in Belfast. Some of them determined, thick-necked, stubborn men with big bellies and loud voices. Others better bred, casual, lean, arrogant, intimidating as Charles was. But both groups equally certain that the world belonged to them. Not to ignorant, uneducated workers.

James turned to look at her. They were sitting very close, and he had his arm casually along the back of the old wooden bench behind her. The setting sun tinged the dark skin of his face a rich rose colour. The pale green of his eyes reflected the darker green of his neck scarf, and as always, a lock of his dark hair flopped forward over his forehead. It's the passion in him, his naive enthusiasm that makes him different, she thought. This is a man who wants to set people free, not control them. If he chose to write instead of speak he would be a poet.

‘Men may be born in the gutter but they needn't die there,’ he said, passionately. ‘I
have
to believe that. Even if we don't win this strike, we'll win the next one. It's going to happen, it's got to. One day there'll be justice and wealth for all. In our lifetimes. You wait and see.’

‘You speak as though it were a religion.’

‘It's better than a religion for me. I'm talking about heaven on earth now, for all men — and women too. So we can have what we want and truly deserve.’

He smiled at her and she felt, as so often before, the magnetism that flowed from him like an electric current. Her lips went dry with sudden terror, and she thought, with awful clarity: it does not matter really what he says or thinks. It is the man himself I want. And even to think that is a terrible, dreadful sin.

Please God let him dare to ask me
.

Later, as they ate and drank in her room at Mrs McCafferty's, the conversation drifted between them more quietly than before, as though they were both waiting for something which it was not time to mention yet. Mrs McCafferty came to clear away and bring them coffee, and they sat in the old armchairs on either side of a small crackling fire. They talked about the strike, the prayers suffragettes were offering in church for Sylvia Pankhurst in Holloway prison, the war in China, the parade of the Kaiser's troops and the flight of a huge new Zeppelin airship in Germany. As they talked, the light gradually faded and the room grew dark, shadowy, mysterious. The lamplighter went past outside, rattling his pole. Rankin bent forward to light a spill from the fire and carried the flame to a small cigar. As he flicked away the spill and exhaled they looked at each other, silent for once, like two old friends sharing a secret joke.

She said, only a little nervously: ‘I am glad we thought to celebrate our time together like this. You may not believe it, but I have never had a man as a friend before.’

He smiled, his teeth flashing white in the semi-darkness. ‘Sure and isn't a good man the best sort of friend to have, for an independent lady like yourself?’

‘Perhaps. But there are certain rules of propriety, you know, even in these modern days.’ It was after eleven o'clock. There was another long silence. Slowly, she stood up, listening to the sound of her dress rustle as she moved. It was her last attempt to resist what she knew was going to happen — and wanted. It was the sign that the evening was over and that he, as a gentleman, should leave.

But he was not a gentleman. She had known that from the very beginning. He put down his cigar, stood up, and faced her.
Please,
she thought.

He did not touch her. Instead, very quietly, he said: ‘I will go if you want me to, now.’

So the choice was to be hers, after all. She knew very well what she ought to do; but she did not do it. It is my life, she thought. And for once, I do not care.

‘No,’ she whispered, very softly, like a sigh. ‘Don't go.’

She lifted her hand to his cheek, and she remembered, long after, how surprised she was at the roughness of it, where the bristles were. Then, only then, he kissed her. And although he was not rough he was so big, his chest and arms so strong from the years he had spent as a boy heaving bricks, that when they were naked in bed together she felt smothered and crushed by a giant. Without his clothes he was a bear of a man, with broad, powerful shoulders and a deep barrel chest covered with a cross of dark soft curly hair which went down in a thin pointed line across his hard flat stomach to where she was too shy at first to look. There was fine downy hair on the back of his neck too, and on his buttocks and thighs. His skin was much darker than hers. He was like a great woolly bear with soft dark hair, pale green eyes and bristly scratchy cheeks which he rubbed against her face and between her breasts — and he sucked her breasts too! No one had ever done that except her baby, Tom, for the first few desperate, disappointing days before she gave him to a wet nurse in India. Now, she gasped and then cried out because of the force with which Rankin did it and the pleasure it gave her. Charles had scarcely looked at her body and had ignored her breasts — this young giant wanted to kiss and rub her and stroke her all over, as though each and every part of her were soft and beautiful to him. At first she was shocked, then overwhelmed. His delight in her body made her feel beautiful. Waves of pleasure flowed through her, and as she looked down at his dark arms and legs entwined with hers, she thought: he is beautiful for me and I am soft and smooth and pale and beautiful for him too, and I have dared to do it and we are both here,
alive, now
.

And then, as he moved gently inside her, something began to happen which had never happened with Charles and which she did not know
could
happen to a woman except secretly, alone, by herself. She wanted to resist but he was kissing her and inside her at the same time and it was so
good
— and then she gasped and cried out aloud and it was too late, far far too late to be ashamed now.

Then to her dismay and amazement he rolled off her and lay beside her stroking her gently with his hand, there between the legs where she was still so damp and tender — something which she had thought no man could possibly know about, ever, but before she could push his hand away she came again, better than before. He laughed, lying next to her, kissing her breasts, and, after a while, he began again but this time she pushed his hand away and said: ‘No, please, I can't!’ and snuggled up to him, amazed and exhausted and utterly, totally relaxed.

It was cold in the bedroom. He rolled on to his back and she wrapped herself round him. She was overwhelmed with terror and joy and gratitude. All week she had secretly wanted him, but she had had no idea it would be like this. In bed with Charles she had always felt ashamed, confused, embarrassed. Sex was an animal function he wanted to get over quickly and have done. She had always known, secretly, that there was more pleasure to be got from her own hand, but had felt intensely guilty about it. Now — now she was in bed with a man who not only knew her secret, but laughed and loved her for it.

She had her head on his shoulder, her leg with the stiff, bruised knee laid carefully over his, her breasts nudging softly against the smooth skin under his arms. Her fingers played with the curling hairs of his chest and she said, timidly: ‘I used to dream of men like you when my father read me fairy-tales, you know. The prince who would kiss me awake.’

She felt the laughter resonating in his chest beneath her arm. ‘What's so funny?’

‘Well, now. I've been called many things in my life but never a prince before. I'm a barrel-lifter, that's all, a worker with a big mouth who joined a union.’

‘What does that matter?’ She raised herself up on her elbow and looked down at him, smiling, her hair loose, drifting in his face. ‘I'm a lady. I know about these things. If I say you're a prince you
are
a prince to me!’

His smile flashed up at her. ‘Sure it's nice of you to say so then, ma'am. But a great ignorant lump like me mostly feels like one of them goat fellows in the classy pictures, a satyr, when he thinks about it. Though you ladies seem to like it.’

You ladies.

A thin cold needle of jealousy pierced her. She had come so far, risked so much. Don't betray me now, please!

‘What ladies?’

‘Oh . . .’ He frowned, and put on a deliberately broad accent to make a joke of it. ‘Sure I thought there was six of ye in here at least, with all the gasping and moaning you're after doing.’

It was meant as a joke, she saw that; but it was clumsy, it hurt. Not a prince after all but a peasant.
Oh God, what have I done?

‘Don't!’ she said. ‘James, please, don't laugh at me.’

‘I'm sorry.’ He saw his mistake at last. As she tried to turn her head away, he held it between his hands, forced her to look at him. ‘There's only one woman in this room and she's the most beautiful I've seen in years. Deborah, believe me.’

I want to believe you. I have to now, she thought. It's too late for anything else.

‘But there have been other ladies?’

Of course there have, she told herself. How could he possibly have known how to make love like that if I was the first? And didn't I like it?

His fingers stroked her face. ‘I never said there hadn't, now did I? Though they weren't all what you'd call ladies, exactly. But why talk of them? They're all past and gone, over, finished with, done. We're here, you and me, now. That's all that matters, today.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled and kissed him, and the film of tears cleared from her eyes. She saw him clearly now. Not a prince after all. Just a big, beautiful man, who had charmed his way to her bed and blessed her, more than she had thought it was possible to be blessed. But a man who would leave her, one day, as he had left all the others.

Over, finished with, done
.

After all, who was she to be jealous, a married woman who had invited him to her bed of her own free will? Whether she had been right or wrong it had been a blessed gift, this night. She would not wish it undone if she could. Whatever the future might bring, it had changed her, changed her utterly. She would never be the same woman again . . .

Deborah returned to Glenfee and saw the slum children in her husband's house. Her servants looked scandalised and exhausted, Annie and her other women friends triumphant but harrassed. Six windows had been broken, five chickens and two ducks killed, and there were muddy paths all over Charles's carefully planted lawns and through the vegetable gardens. But the children themselves had filled out. Their faces were flushed, excited — and some, at least, had made valiant efforts to mend the things they had broken.

The next few days were filled with large, disorganised games of cricket, drives to the beach in the dogcart, huge noisy meals on trestle tables in the main dining room, and stories in the evening in the library, when thirty children sat round her on the floor, their eyes glittering in the candlelight, while nightjars shrieked in the dusk outside and bats flittered across the lawns. And then the last, exhausting struggle to pack them all off to bed and plan more activities for tomorrow.

At the end of that fortnight she returned with the children to Dublin. Annie and her helpers had decided they could not keep the holidays going non-stop, it was too exhausting. They would allow themselves a week's grace in between each group, to tidy up and prepare for the next.

And so Deborah was able to see Rankin again. For three blessed days of that week she returned to Mrs McCafferty's. Days full of guilt, passion, and laughter.

Passion made her bloom. As the weeks went by she returned a third time, and a fourth. Their bodies became accustomed to each other, the pleasure greater, more protracted. Afterwards she lay in his arms, relaxed, purring like a cat. She walked along the streets singing to herself, she looked in the mirror and saw her skin smoother, softer than before. Almost as soon as she left him she began to ache, and when she had been home in Glenfee for a few days her skin became tender all over and she longed for his touch. And that was part of the pleasure, too.

Best of all was the laughter. From the first day she had seen him, James had laced the passion of his political speeches with wicked mockery of his opponents. It was one of the things that made audiences love him. Now she found herself saving up little anecdotes about the children to tell him, so that he would reward her with that deep-chested laugh she so loved. He was not embarrassed by anything they did, not the sex or the secrecy. He was liable to find any of it amusing at the most inappropriate time, so that more than once she found herself naked in bed and laughing helplessly on top of him.

And then the laughter would fade and they would come together seriously, the more relaxed because of the previous release of tension.

She had not thought she could ever be so happy.

In November the Catholic priests brought an end to the children's holidays at Glenfee. As Rankin had predicted, they saw such things as sinful, dangerous, a threat to the family. Poor families were afraid of the Church and refused to send their children any more. Deborah was furious.

‘If there is one part of society more than another dominated by men,’ she said, ‘it is the Roman Catholic Church. The priests pray to the Virgin Mary and have no idea, none, what it means to be a poor young mother with a starving family.’

‘No more have you,’ said Rankin quizzically, watching her through his cigar smoke as she paced up and down her sitting room in Mrs McCafferty's boarding house. ‘Not really now, have you? With your big house and fine clothes and rich husband.’