The Sleeping Sword (52 page)

Mrs. O'Flynn had eleven children in her two rooms and four lodgers in her cellar. She kept a pig in her yard, which, she cheerfully admitted, did not please all her neighbours. She had been brought over from Ireland as a girl because the potato crop had failed and people were starving. They had been set ashore at Liverpool and had walked to Cullingford in slow stages, her parents and their six children pushing everything they possessed on a hand-cart, obliged to keep moving in order to avoid being picked up for vagrancy and shipped back to Ireland again. But her parents, being country-bred, had been unable to withstand the impact of the city. Cullingford's foul air and smoky skies had withered them quicker than the famine, their children being saved from the workhouse by the intervention of several large-hearted neighbours who had absorbed a child apiece into their own families on the principle that there is always room for one more. But these kind neighbours had long since moved away, taking Mrs. O'Flynn's brothers and sisters with them, she didn't know where, and would be unlikely to recognize them now in any case. She had given birth to her first child at fourteen or thereabouts—younger rather than older—and, like Sally Grimshaw's mother, had been pregnant more or less ever since. Her fertility was a nuisance, of course—certainly she could not comprehend how anyone could call it a blessing—but although she did not understand it, she accepted it, like menstruation, as one of the drawbacks of womanhood. She had kept her family decent because she was hard-handed and foul-mouthed when she had to be. Any man who molested a daughter of hers would have the mother to deal with and she had dragged her husband out of the ale-house by the scruff of his neck on many a Thursday night. She worked in the weaving-sheds at Law Cross and so did her girls as soon as they were ten years old. The only one among them to have lost her job had not dared face her mother and had run away from home. She had one son who had lost the use of his legs in an explosion at the local ironworks and yes, her husband was ‘chesty', so were all men, what of it? Women had babies, men who had worked in the mines or the mills and who smoked cheap tobacco coughed in the winter and were short winded in the summer time. The future? What did we mean by that? If she could get herself from Monday morning to Friday night and back again without coming a cropper, then she wouldn't complain.

‘Four houses,' Camille said, when we had interviewed a bustling, cheerful Mrs. Clough, eighteen years old and two years married, her husband holding down a steady job, only one child in her cradle, her manner briskly assuring us that none of the misfortunes of these old women—her neighbours—could possibly happen to her.

‘Four houses. Thirty-six more to go. Thank heavens Liam picked a short street!'

I accompanied her every day for a week after that, uncomfortable at first at being in the vicinity of Low Cross where I might possibly encounter my father-in-law, who would certainly enquire the nature of my business in this rough locality. But both the work and Camille's reaction to it absorbed me. No, she was not shocked by what she saw in St. Mark's Fold. It was not vice to blame, after all, but hardship, just people adapting themselves to poverty's rules as I had adapted to affluence. When there was no work and no hope of work the result was always the same. The boys stole and the girls took to street-walking. Her aunt in London had calculated years ago, when Camille herself had been a child, that there were upwards of six thousand brothels in the city alone and easily eighty thousand prostitutes, girls, in many cases, who were not so much wayward as extremely hungry. Naturally, even at her aunt's London shelter she had met girls who found nothing distasteful in offering their bodies for whatever such a body might fetch, finding the work less arduous and rather more profitable than the sweatshops of the tailoring trade. But mainly, she had found, a girl went on the streets because her choices were between that, the workhouse or starvation. And what, she wondered, in those circumstances would I myself have done?

Camille had encountered none of the great stars of the profession. Doubtless there were women who received pearls and diamonds and racehorses for their favours. In fact she knew quite well that there were. But they had never required the comforts of her aunt's soup and bread, nor her protection from an outraged, short-changed pimp. Camille's experience had been confined to girls like the daughters of Mrs. Ryan who, having grown up sharing a bed with several brothers, found promiscuity a natural extension of their family life; or the little fifteen-year-old mothers one could find ten a penny in Gower Street and who had to feed their babies somehow.

Doubtless there
were
brothels furnished with silk draperies and couches of rich velvet, at least she hoped so for the sake of one's friends who had had recourse to them. But she had seen nothing of the kind. The brothels she had visited had been dreary establishments, not much better than the house of Mrs. O'Flynn, where an old bawd offered for sale her own and her neighbours' daughters.

She had luncheon at my house the following Sunday, her glossy hair still dressed in its single massive coil which made her neck seem very supple and very long, her gown of light, forget-me-not blue with its high frilled collar bringing out the wonderful amethyst of her eyes. She had pinned flowers on her shoulder again, having no jewels, and her manner was easy and cheerful, her appreciation of my house and my possessions without envy. She was not, she confessed, cast in the domestic mould herself, tended to get her own cupboards and drawers in a frightful muddle, but how comfortable all this was, how enjoyable. We relaxed, became easy, almost frivolous, and were giggling like schoolgirls when the doorbell rang and my father-in-law appeared.

‘Camille,' I told her, feeling oddly flustered, ‘this is Mr. Nicholas Barforth. Mr. Barforth—Mrs. Inman.'

‘How do you do,' she said and knowing of no reason why she should be intimidated by him she continued to chat of one thing and another, receiving from him the most monosyllabic replies. She smiled, talked on. He became quite forbidding, I thought, very much the master of the Barforth mills, a man of his class and his time who would instantly have assessed the cost per yard of the pretty but inexpensive fabric of her dress, the reason for that spray of tiny yellow flowers on her shoulder, the unusual freedom of her conversation, and would have judged her by that.

‘I must be going,' she said as the teacups were removed, shaking her head and making light of the distance when I offered to send her in my carriage. She would just put on her hat and could be safely at her own door by the time they had got out the horses. She was used to walking. There was no need to make a fuss. She was pleasant, amused, determined to have her way.

‘How far?' snapped my father-in-law.

‘Prince Albert Road, just down the hill.'

‘Yes—and across the centre of town and up the other side, on a Sunday when the streets are full of mill-hands drinking their wages. It won't do, you know.'

‘I beg your pardon.'

‘Now look here, young lady,' he said, very exasperated, ‘you'll either take Grace's carriage or you'll take mine. In fact you'd better take mine, since its standing there ready and it's time I was off. I'll set you down on my way.'

For a moment her eyes met his in a level stare and then her lovely oval face dimpled with mischievous laughter, her magnificent body bent itself forward into a swift, parlourmaid's curtsey.

‘Certainly, Mr. Barforth, sir,' she said.

‘Good,' he told her, smiling grimly but broadly. ‘Then you'd better put on your hat.'

I encountered a world I had never suspected but which had been there all the time, running parallel with mine, Camille Inman's world of tolerance and good humour, of undemonstrative, unsentimental caring, of sound common sense; an atmosphere in which Venetia would have blossomed and flourished. I had started life as Miss Agbrigg, heiress of Fieldhead. I had become Mrs. Gervase Barforth of Tarn Edge. The Cullingford I knew now regarded me not as a divorced woman but as
the
divorced woman, since Cullingford had no other. Camille and her acquaintances saw me as Grace who helped at the
Star
, an entirely new and separate person to be assessed on her own merits or lack of them, not on the bank balance of husband or father, nor the immaculate condition of her linen cupboards and her reputation.

She took me, one evening, to the house of a Dr. and Mrs. Stone, the younger of the two physicians, as it turned out, who had attended Venetia. He did not remember me. I did not remind him, being content to drink his wine, a rough, red vintage in heavy glasses, and enjoy the conversation of a man who saw no reason to treat me like a half-witted child. When Dr. Stone found it necessary to refer to pregnancy he referred to it, no vague suggestions of being ‘in an interesting condition' or ‘in the family way' but pregnant—just that—an expression which had not endeared him to Mrs. Rawnsley and her like who had great admiration for those women who, rather than expose their naked bodies to a male eye, preferred to suffer and eventually die in chaste silence. If Dr. Stone felt obliged to mention legs or breasts or buttocks he mentioned them, and consequently was rarely consulted by those ladies—and we knew many—who did not acknowledge possession of such things.

He was a square-shouldered, blunt-spoken man who had been something of a radical in his younger days and—as he freely admitted with a twinkle in his eye—had made himself very unpopular in his first practice by advocating the use of such contraceptive methods as were then available, among patients in a rough labouring area of Liverpool who had an abundance of nothing but children. He had seen, as one saw in St. Mark's Fold, the squalid overcrowding, the grinding poverty, the inability to feed even the mouths one already had, and he had thought, in his innocence, that the knowledge of how not to increase those mouths must be welcome. He had reckoned without the virtuous, the narrow-minded and, very often, the sterile, who saw these large, undernourished families as proof of the lustfulness and general inferiority of the poor. The remedy, for such people, was extremely simple. The sexual act was intended only for the procreation of children. A decent man fathered the number of children he could afford, and, when his limit had been reached, abandoned the act for ever. A couple who mistook its purpose and indulged in it for pleasure must accept the consequences of their over-breeding, must wallow in the mire they had themselves created. Dr. Stone, who by this time had made the acquaintance of a young school-teacher and fallen deeply in love with her, had not agreed and had aroused so much ill-feeling by his recommendation of the contraceptive sheath—this device being normally used by gentlemen in their dealings with whores, not to protect the woman from maternity but themselves from venereal disease—that he had been obliged to leave Liverpool, taking his schoolteacher, now Mrs. Anna Stone, with him.

They had lived in London for a while, in the notorious Seven Dials district where they had first met Camille and her crusading aunt, and had come north some years ago, first to the fashionable spa town of Harrogate, where Dr. Stone's brusque manner had not succeeded, then to Cullingford to join Dr. Blackwood, who had been impressed by the younger man's qualifications and unaware until too late of his opinions. Dr. Blackwood, the senior and considerably more popular partner, lived in some elegance at the top of Blenheim Lane, where, despite the grubby out-thrusting of our growing town, it remained leafy, hushed, exclusive. Dr. Stone's house stood at its lower end, a yard or to from the point where residential Blenheim Lane deteriorated into commercial Millergate, bustling with shoppers, idlers, urchins, carts and carriages, clattering down the cobbles to Market Square, the raucous, often indecorous centre of our town.

Dr. Blackwood was a member of our town council, chaired several charitable committees, dined out a great deal. Dr. Stone had no time for committees and was suspicious of both organized charity and those who dispensed it. He had been asked to leave meetings many a time in his Liverpool days because of his impatience with those who expected a St. Mark's Fold mother to send her children to chapel every Sunday in starched white pinafores and expressed self-righteous disappointment when she did not. He had derided the maxim ‘cleanliness is next to godliness'in circumstances where soap was a luxury and hot water rarely available. He had suggested that the children of the ragged poor so rarely came to Sunday School because the children of the prosperous had been trained not to sit beside them, for fear of catching fleas; and he had fallen foul of the congregation. Now he tended to keep his own counsel or dispense it discreetly, and I had been a regular visitor for several weeks before Mrs. Stone showed me the hut in their back garden and explained its purpose.

Anna Stone was as quiet as her husband was explosive, a face as smooth as Camille's although it lacked Camille's beauty, having nothing remarkable about it but a pair of steady grey eyes. She was a competent woman who would stand firm, I thought, in a crisis, accustomed to the panic that often accompanies sickness, to hysterical men and women pounding at her door at midnight in search of medicines or miracles, or simply needing to be told that everything would be all right. She was assured, patient, gave herself slowly, and like Camille had never learned to rely on male protection, having been brought up by an older sister who, through two happy marriages and two widowhoods, had taken an active part in matters of education, woman suffrage and the ‘rescue', whenever possible, of girls from the city streets.

This ‘rescue'work was not uncommon, such notables as the very serious and very high-minded Liberal leader, Mr. Gladstone, having participated in it, somewhat to the disgust of Queen Victoria, it was said, who, disliking Mr. Gladstone personally, was inclined to think the worst. But the provision by Dr. and Mrs. Stone of a shelter in their garden, four narrow beds, an old table, a wash-stand with a metal jug, a mirror on a nail above it, pretty chintz curtains and a vase of garden flowers, seemed to me a sensible way of doing good.