The melancholy that gripped Lizzie after she heard about Davie’s death could only be routed by work. Because of her concentration on detail – for there was not a thing about her business that she did not know – Green Tree Mill was the most efficient in Dundee. The jute it produced was famous for its quality and when Mrs Kinge gave a delivery date, it was always kept.
At home she worried about Charlie and mourned for her half brother but as soon as she drove through her mill gates, she was caught up in the world of commerce. Her mind was fully engaged and she did not spare a moment to think about anything except jute.
To cope with the huge volume of business she increased her work force and decided to send out a trio of enthusiastic young men to Calcutta to deal direct with hemp growers on her behalf.
Her work schedule was punishing and she could never have sustained it without the devoted attention of Maggy and the servants in Tay Lodge. Maggy was so worried about the demands that Lizzie was making on herself that she even insisted on kneeling on the floor and buttoning her boots for her. Sometimes, as she did this, she saw a sceptical look in Lexie’s eye but ignored it and hoped that the girl would not tell Rosie.
On the evening of Lexie’s fourteenth birthday, the sisters met in the hall of Tay Lodge and Lexie asked, ‘Can I speak to you please? It’s important.’
Lizzie, who was pale after a day at the mill, heard urgency in the girl’s voice. She leaned on the handle of the drawing room door and said, ‘Of course. Let’s sit in here. I’m very tired.’
The girl seemed ill at ease. It was obviously difficult for her to start. ‘It’s – er – it’s my birthday today. I’m fourteen.’
Lizzie nodded. ‘I know.’ In fact she had forgotten and was wondering about a suitable gift. I’ll give her five sovereigns, she thought.
Lexie flushed. ‘It’s not that. I’m hot hinting. It’s just – I want to leave school.’
The last words came out in a torrent.
Lizzie laughed. ‘Of course you don’t. You’re feeling grown-up all of a sudden. I felt the same when I was fourteen.’
‘When did you leave school?’
‘As a matter of fact I wasn’t much older than you are now, but I wasn’t a scholar like you. It was my ambition to work in a hat shop.’
She laughed again and Lexie’s eyes showed her surprise at this confidence from the business-obsessed Lizzie. She pressed on with her plea, however. ‘No, it’s true. I want to leave school. It costs you a lot of money every year for the fees.’
Lizzie closed her eyes. ‘The fees are nothing. I want you to go to university and be a credit to me.’
The girl was adamant, however. ‘I don’t want to go to university. I want to leave school. Please, Lizzie.’
This was serious. ‘What have you in mind? Is there something else you want to do?’
Lexie rose and walked to the window. Her voice sounded remote as it came over her shoulder: ‘I want to get a job in the mill with Bertha.’
There was shock and amazement in Lizzie’s voice. ‘Work in a mill? Which one?’
‘Bertha’s in Brunton’s Mill. I could get in there. The wages are good because of the war, and they’re needing people. I could start training as a weaver.’
There was a return of the old Lizzie now. Tiredness forgotten, she rapped out, ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. I’m not having my sister working in anybody’s mill. Not even in my own. You don’t need to work if you don’t want to but if you must, you should choose something ladylike.’
‘Like a hat shop?’ asked Lexie, turning to stare with hostility at her sister.
‘Yes, like a hat shop if that’s what you want, though you could do better. Why a weaver? Why a mill girl? What would people say?’
‘I won’t say who I am. I’ll use a different name. They needn’t know I’m your sister.’
‘Everyone knows that already. That hair of yours doesn’t go unnoticed. What are you trying to do to me?’
Lexie’s face was determined. ‘I want to be free. I want to be my own mistress. I don’t want to be Lizzie Kinge’s little sister all my life. I want to be with my own people. Smart society doesn’t suit me. Some people live off the labour of people like Bertha and Rosie, and it makes me very angry.’
Lizzie was angry too. ‘It’s Rosie Davidson that’s behind this, isn’t it? She’s been filling your head with rubbish. First the suffragettes and now this. Don’t believe all she tells you. I’m only too eager to help George’s family. She and Bertha don’t need to work in the mills but she won’t take a penny from me. I’ve offered and it’s been thrown back at me.’
This was no surprise to Lexie. ‘Rosie won’t take anybody’s money. Her brother Johnny in America keeps asking her and Bertha to go out there to him but she won’t. He owns a great big chain of newspapers and he’s very rich but Rosie says she’d rather stay in Dundee and work in the mill like she’s always done. She’s afraid that Johnny’s wife would patronize her and she certainly thinks you do that, so she won’t take any help from you either.’
‘I don’t patronize Rosie. I’ve never done that. You don’t think I do, surely?’
There was a pause while Lexie looked away. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie. I think you would if you had the chance. I want to live my own life. You might not like the way I do that. It would be better if we didn’t live together any longer.’
The argument was becoming acrimonious now and Lizzie decided the time had come to call a halt to it. She stood up abruptly and said, ‘And where will you go? If you think I’d allow you to go to live in the slums you’re very much mistaken. My brother died of consumption because he lived in the Vaults. You’re just a child and you’re legally in my care till you’re sixteen, so you’ll stay here and go to school whether you like it or not.’
That night she lay awake and worried about Lexie. Had she been too hard on the girl? Was she resentful because Lexie was a walking reminder of the daughter who was never born to Sam and herself?
If you’d lived, Sam, I’d have had more children. We’d have moved to a larger house and I’d have baked cakes and given tea parties, she addressed his memory in her mind.
Instead of being a contented wife, however, fate had made her the only woman mill owner in Dundee, a huge success in business and rich, richer than she had ever imagined in her wildest dreams. Her personal fortune was so big that she could buy anything she wanted – anything, it seemed, but peace of mind, because her private worries waited to step on to centre stage as soon as she left the mill.
She lay open-eyed as the thought struck her that perhaps leading a domestic life might not have been very interesting. If she was honest she had to admit that widowhood had given her an opportunity to prove herself in a way that she could never have done if Sam had stayed alive.
The widowed Mrs Kinge had found out how much respect money could buy. People turned to stare after her in the street; floorwalkers broke into a run, so keen were they to welcome her when she stepped into their stores. Charitable societies and associations wrote to her every day requesting a donation or the privilege of being able to put her name on their list of patrons. Gilt-edged invitations to all manner of social events were lined along her drawing room mantelpiece but she did not go out very much these days. Alex was married and she disliked being part of a threesome – the odd one out was not a role she enjoyed.
Finally she fell asleep thinking about Charlie, and when she woke his name came first into her mind. All worries about Lexie were driven away because on her tea tray was a letter from Hastings.
When he first went into hospital his letters were dictated to a nurse or hospital worker and were of necessity short, but within the past few weeks he had improved. His life was not in danger. There was no fear of amputation, blindness, lung damage or any of the other spectres that haunted her midnight thoughts.
The letter she held in her hand that bright morning was the first he had addressed himself and her heart rose, but when she tore it open the words contained nothing of his voice. It was a different Charlie who wrote to her. In spite of the official reassurances she had been given, she knew that something was seriously wrong with her son.
She was re-reading the unsettling note in her office when Goldie Johanson paid her a visit later that day.
Looking up, she frowned and said impulsively, ‘I’m so worried about Charlie.’
‘What’s he said in that letter?’
‘Nothing, really. That’s what’s wrong. It’s a lot of meaningless words. He’s well. The weather is dull. He says nothing. I’m sure he’s hiding something from me. Oh, if only I could see him!’
‘Won’t they give him convalescent leave yet?’ asked Goldie.
‘No. I asked about that. They say he’s not able to travel but this letter says his wounds have healed and he talks about going for walks along the beach. If he can walk on the beach, surely he can come home.’
‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry for him to get better. As soon as they’re able to carry a rifle, they’re being sent back to France,’ warned Goldie.
‘I know. I’m terrified of that. Oh, what if they send him back without me seeing him?’ She shuddered at the thought that her son might not be so lucky the next time he went to Flanders and her anxiety made her burst out, ‘Oh, Goldie, he’s been away so long. He left the year before the war started. He was just a little boy! When I’m driving along the street, I sometimes catch sight of a young man who reminds me of him and my heart leaps because I think it’s Charlie. I’ve no idea what he looks like now. My own son!’
Goldie’s eyes were sympathetic. ‘This isn’t like you. You’re upsetting yourself. If anyone can fix this, we can. We’ve enough influence between us to organize visits for the parents of a whole regiment. Why don’t you go to Hastings and demand to see him?’
‘I was thinking of it,’ she agreed. Then she fell silent because she felt it would be stupid to tell him that she’d never been out of Scotland. Gourock was the farthest of her travels. Some woman of the world I am, afraid to go to London on my own, she thought!
It was as if he could read her mind. ‘I’m going south next week. I’m sailing down in one of my own ships. You can travel with me if you like,’ he offered.
She did not hesitate a moment before accepting.
Goldie’s ship had an owner’s suite of two magnificent staterooms with adjacent bathrooms. They were sumptuously furnished with deep-buttoned sofas, luxurious beds and louvred wooden shutters that closed across brass-bound portholes. Everything sparkled and shone, even the decks gleamed.
When Lizzie boarded the ship and saw the cabin that had been assigned to her, she clasped her hands in delight. Ahead of her stretched three whole days away from the world, away from letters, newspapers and the din of her mill. She’d not had so many days off for years. It never struck her that it was highly unconventional to travel with Goldie without a chaperon, for she was so used to him as a business associate and friend that the question of propriety never arose.
He was standing by her side, intently watching her face as she looked around.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked like a little boy presenting a gift.
‘Like it! I love it. I’ve never seen anything so luxurious. You really treat yourself well, don’t you, Mr Johanson?’
He chuckled, shrugging his broad shoulders. ‘Why not? Life’s for living, I always say.’
She was surprised. That was her father’s philosophy, but not something she had ever consciously considered for. She’d been too busy working. I’ll enjoy this trip, she promised herself.
Goldie warned her that they might be in danger from enemy ships which were blockading the British coast but they never saw anything to cause them disquiet.
The weather was kind too for there was a spell of warm sunshine that sometimes comes with early spring. The sailing was smooth, every day the sea was like glass. On the second morning she and Goldie sat companionably together on the deck in long white-painted chairs and he persuaded her to sip champagne.
‘Forget your troubles for a bit. You’re far too solemn about everything,’ he told her.
They didn’t talk much. She closed her eyes and drifted in and out of sleep, only waking to eat another meal or stand at the deck rail watching the distant coast slip by. Goldie pointed out landmarks to her, naming places that she’d heard of in school geography lessons – Newcastle on Tyne, the Hull estuary, the coast of the Fens. She strained her eyes and gazed where he pointed, delighted with this interlude in her life.
On their last afternoon, as they were steaming up the Thames towards Wapping Stairs, the sun was brilliant and the heat so reassuring that she loosened the high, tight neck of her blouse and took out the long pins that skewered her thick rope of hair to the top of her head. It fell around her shoulders in a thick curtain and when she pushed it back, she noticed a strange look on Goldie’s face. Before she could make out what he was thinking, he deliberately lifted his newspaper and hid himself behind it.
Goldie’s agent at Wapping was a woman. She was waiting on the quay for his ship to tie up and rushed towards him, hands extended and a bright beam on her red-cheeked face. Neither of them were small and they collided like a pair of tug boats as the woman kissed Goldie on the cheek and slapped his back, crying, ‘Good to see you again, old fellow. You’re looking good, an’t you?’
She spoke with a strange accent that Lizzie found difficult to follow at first. Later she was to hear all the dockers and cab men talking the same way and realized she was listening to pure Cockney.
The agent was introduced as Elizabeth Austen.
‘You two should like each other,’ Goldie told Mrs Austen. ‘You’re both formidable women. Lizzie Kinge here’s a mill owner and a thorn in the flesh of the mill-men in Dundee…’
To Lizzie he said, ‘Meet my friend Mrs Austen, the only woman shipping agent in London. You should hear her swear. No longshoreman has a better vocabulary.’
Mrs Austen slapped his shoulder again and cackled, ‘You’re an old bugger, an’t you, Goldie?’ And to Lizzie she said, ‘Glad to meet you, ducks. Any friend of Goldie’s a friend of mine. Know what I mean?’ And she crinkled up her face in a huge, meaningful wink.
Lizzie’s sense of propriety was shaken but she couldn’t help liking the woman, who smelt of lavender water mixed with brandy and whose clothes were very fine in spite of the fact that she was working on a dockside. Her dress was of expensive striped silk with large puffed sleeves and she wore a rakishly tipped straw boater decorated at the back with three silk cabbage roses. In this get-up she was a very impressive sight standing among her crew of dockers, who were stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat.
‘I’ve got a great cargo for you this time,’ she told Goldie with a nudge.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Gold bars.’
‘Come off it, don’t joke. What is it?’
‘I’m serious, gold bars. The Government’s sending them to Scotland to be stored in a safe place. Even I don’t know where they’ll end up but I’ve to send them to Leith. They’ve to go at once. Can your ship turn round today?’
Goldie looked unsure. ‘The ship could. It’s only carrying baled sacking. It could be unloaded by midnight, but Mrs Kinge’s going to Hastings and she needs a few days in the south before she goes back.’
‘God luv us, she can wait for the next trip north, can’t she? It’ll be back in a week, won’t it?’ said Mrs Austen.
Goldie looked at Lizzie and for the first time she realized that the trip south had been undertaken solely on her behalf. He didn’t really have any business in London at all.
‘Of course you must take the gold north,’ she told him. ‘I’ll manage perfectly well on my own.’
‘They can sail without me,’ Goldie told her. ‘I’ll escort you anywhere you want – if you’d like me to, that is. But do you want to spend a week down here?’
‘There’s not much point coming all this way if I’m going to turn round and go straight back,’ said Lizzie.
They took a hackney cab into Mayfair and alighted at the portico of the Ritz Hotel. It was evening by the time they arrived, and the lights along Piccadilly were only tiny flickers like glow-worms, because of the black-out. Goldie kept saying, ‘I wish you could see London as it used to be, a magnificent sight…’
‘I’ll see it all in daylight tomorrow. Don’t worry. Anyway I didn’t come down to go sight-seeing.’
The hotel was furnished in much the same style as she remembered Goldie’s home in Broughty Ferry, with gilt chairs and masses of potted plants. A few elegantly dressed women and some officers in khaki were sitting in the foyer, sipping drinks and talking.
The hotel porters knew Goldie and bustled about showing them into two suites which proved to be as sumptuous as the accommodation on his ship. When the last of the porters went away, Lizzie looked at her escort in admiration and asked, ‘Do you always live like this?’
‘When I can,’ he said, and laughed infectiously.
They dined in a crowded dining room. They drank champagne and he touched the edge of her glass with his as he said, ‘Here’s to Charlie. Tomorrow you’re setting out to find him, aren’t you?’
She nodded, solemnity returning. ‘How far is it to Hastings?’
‘About two hours on a train. Do you want to go alone?’
‘Yes, I think so. I hope you don’t mind. You’ve organized this for me and I know that you didn’t need to come to London at all – but I’d like to see Charlie on my own.’
He nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll tell the hotel to reserve the suite for you indefinitely. Just come back when you’re ready.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I can always find something to do in London, and if you’re not back in a couple of days I’ll go home. Mrs Austen will help you fix up a passage back to Dundee. I’ll leave her address. All you need do is send her a message.’
She nodded but she was not ready to think so far ahead. Her mind was concentrated on finding Charlie.
Next morning Goldie saw her on to the train for Hastings and stood waving on the platform as her train drew away.
The cab driver at Hastings station looked sympathetically at her when she told him that her son was a patient in the hospital for wounded soldiers.
‘Which one?’ he asked, eyeing her expensive clothes. ‘He’s an officer, is he?’
‘No, he’s a corporal. He was wounded at the Somme.’
The man nodded. ‘A squaddie. Is he in the surgical hospital or the loony bin? I mean the asylum…’
She looked put out. ‘He was shot through the chest. He’s in the surgical hospital, of course.’
‘This town’s full of those poor devils,’ said the cabbie. ‘As soon as they have them walking again, they’re back on the boats to France. Makes you sad it does to see them.’
Lizzie did not want to talk and sat with her back stiff against the high seat staring out at the town as they drove through it. Hastings was a drab town with nothing to recommend it as far as she could see. Streets of little houses straggled up a hill towards a large bleak building where eventually the cab horse came to a stop at a pillared doorway.
‘We’re here, mum,’ called the cabbie. ‘Do you want me to wait?’
‘Yes, for a little till I make sure this is where he is,’ said Lizzie as she stepped down.
In the hospital office there was no Charles Kinge on the patient list. ‘But I know he’s in Hastings. He was shot in the chest in July and brought here at the beginning of August. Please look again,’ she pleaded.
A brisk young woman in a VAD’s stiffly starched uniform checked again and eventually found Charlie’s name. ‘Oh, yes, he was here. They sent him over the hill to the other hospital. It’s called Spring Hill. You’d better try there, Mrs Kinge.’
When the cabbie heard that Lizzie wanted to go to Spring Hill, he nodded in a knowing way but only said, ‘Lots of them end up there. Can’t blame them really.’
Spring Hill was badly named because it was a hideously institutional building of red and yellow bricks with an immense chimney rising at the back. If it hadn’t been for the gardens, it might have been a jute mill. With a chill in her heart Lizzie saw that the upper windows were barred. A man greeted her in the hall. He wore a white coat and had a stethoscope round his neck.
She asked if there was a Charles Kinge in the hospital and the man immediately nodded. ‘Yes, he’s here.’
‘I’m his mother.’
The doctor looked doubtful. ‘Were you sent for, Mrs Kinge?’
‘No, I came because I want to see my son.’
‘Visiting’s not really allowed for certain cases. Charlie’s very depressed. I’ll have to find out if it’s suitable.’
Lizzie flashed her green stare at him. ‘My dear man, I’ve come all the way from Dundee to see my son and I won’t go away until I do. Take me to him, please.’
For weeks and months she had wondered what Charlie looked like now that he was grown up and had been matured by war. Before he went to Canada he had favoured her side of the family, with the same build and colouring but with Sam’s great nose and clefted chin. He was always very cheeky-looking – a cocky little lad, people used to call him.
In fact she walked straight past him. Surely that person sitting alone in a basket chair in a long glass-roofed room was not her gregarious Charlie.
He looked up as she swept by, however, and said in an astonished voice, ‘Mother! What are you doing here?’
She turned, pivoting on her parasol, and stared at the speaker. Charlie was very thin and his face was grey but the worst thing about him was his eyes – haunted eyes. He looked to her like a terrified man.
Oblivious of the stares of other patients, she ran towards him and knelt to embrace him. ‘Oh, Charlie, what’s happened to you? What’s wrong?’ She gently stroked his hair back from his temples and looked into his face. He seemed far older than his nineteen years. He looked like a man who had come through hell.
The doctor was behind her, attempting to pull her to her feet. ‘Youir son’s suffering from shell shock, Mrs Kinge. Don’t make too much of a fuss or you’ll upset him. He’s improving very much.’
‘Is this improving?’ she asked, sweeping her arm towards Charlie. ‘He looks awful. What’s happened to him?’
‘We do our best,’ said the doctor in a hopeless sort of way. ‘If you want to speak to him privately, I’ll let you use my office.’
Once they were alone, to her relief Charlie started to talk.
‘They think I’m shamming. They think I’m just dodging going back, but that’s not true. I want to go back. I should have died there like all the others. I want to go back. It’s like desertion to leave them.’
His eyes were full of horror and she held his hands in hers, all her love and pity flowing out to him. She willed her own strength into her son’s body. ‘I’ll stay with you for a while, Charlie,’ she told him.
She stayed in Hastings for three days and spent every hour she could in the hospital. They walked together in the grounds and Charlie was able to clear his mind of some of the spectres that had stalked it since he was brought back on a stretcher from France.
He talked of friends being killed in front of him, he talked of the graveyard humour of the trenches, he talked about William Pennie and Roaring Wind. He told her about how they all shook hands before his friends were killed.
‘I should be dead too,’ he said again and again. ‘I should have died out there. I don’t know why I didn’t. A rat in the shell hole thought I’d died. It started to eat my ear. Maybe I am dead, Mother. Maybe this is hell.’
She tried to console him but he kept saying, ‘I’m a traitor. All my friends are dead. I should be dead as well.’
In anguish she tried to steer him away from this obsession. When she talked of Maggy or Lexie, he listened for a little while but always his mind returned to the trenches.
By the fourth day she had made up her mind that Charlie needed more help than she or the hospital was able to provide.
‘What’s likely to happen to my son?’ she asked his doctor.
The man looked hopeless. ‘Some of them recover. They rest for a bit, their wounds heal, their minds heal too. Then we send them back.’
‘Only some?’
‘Others break down completely. But your son’s not in that category, I think. He’ll recover if he’s given time.’
‘You don’t think he’s pretending, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. He’s just terribly shocked. It’s the boys who’ve led easy lives before who react worst. They can’t believe it, really. But they come to their senses in the end.’ It was a bleak prescription.
‘And when he is better?’ she asked.
‘Then he returns to the front. He says he wants to go back now, but of course that can’t happen yet. In the shape he is at the moment, he’d be very bad for morale. He has to stay here till he’s better, only time is going to cure him.’
She returned to London and went straight to Harley Street. Eventually, after knocking at door after door, she found a doctor who specialized in cases of shell shock. He listened to her story and nodded when she mentioned Spring Hill.
‘I know it,’ he said.
‘I want someone else to have a look at my son. I don’t care how much it costs. I want you to go down to Hastings and look at my son.’
The grey-haired doctor was grim. ‘You realize that if your son recovers he’ll go back to the fighting, Mrs Kinge? Do you want that for him? Perhaps he’s safer where he is.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve thought about that, but he’s enduring such suffering. He’s so unlike himself. If you could only realize the agony he’s going through. I’m afraid that if he’s left fighting this on his own, he might do something dreadful – kill himself, I mean.’
‘It’s a difficult situation,’ said the doctor.
‘I want you to help him. This war can’t last for ever and my son’s only nineteen. With luck he has a whole life in front of him,’ said Lizzie.
Though she was determined to find help for Charlie, she was well aware of the dangers of helping him to recover. Was she only making it possible for him to have to go through it all again?
Her mind in turmoil, she made her way back to the Ritz in the gathering darkness.
She had forgotten to send the hotel a telegram but her suite was still vacant.
‘Mr Johanson said to keep it for at least a week,’ said the reception clerk.
The room looked like a haven when she stepped through the door. The lamps were lit and there were flowers beside the window. Suddenly she felt very tired and very unhappy. Grateful for Goldie’s thoughtfulness, she threw herself down on the sumptuous bed and allowed herself the luxury of tears, but soon exhaustion overtook her and she drifted into sleep before she had even taken off the jacket of her suit. She had no idea what time it was when she was wakened by a knock at the door.
Thinking it was a chambermaid, she called out, ‘It’s not locked. Come in.’
The door opened a little and a face looked round. She gazed at it for a second without recognition and then cried out, ‘Oh, Goldie, I thought you’d gone home. Oh, Goldie, I thought I was alone and it’s been so terrible!’
Face tear streaked, hair in disarray and clothes rumpled from travel and sleep, she jumped from the bed and ran towards him. He stepped through the door and leaned against it as she rushed up, throwing her arms round his neck and burying her face in his chest. He gave a gasp and put his arms around her, laying his cheek on her hair.
‘Oh, Lizzie, dear Lizzie,’ he groaned, and then he kissed her.
It was the first time she’d been kissed since Sam died and she felt the tension drain from her at the touch of his lips. Without thinking what she was doing she parted her own lips and kissed him back.
The passion inside Lizzie was best expressed physically. Just as she was capable of violent rage, so could she experience turbulent feelings of love. As she felt her lips against Goldie’s, her heart seemed to turn in her chest and all the inhibitions built up over her years of widowhood melted away.
She drew back slightly and looked up at him from under heavy eyelids. Then she put up a hand and gently stroked his cheek while the other hand pulled his head down towards her again. She brushed his mouth with lips that fluttered like captive butterflies.
All cautious thoughts, all fears, all memories and inhibitions slipped away from her like abandoned armour. She closed her eyes and in the velvety blackness behind her lids gave herself up to loving him.
They kissed each other for what seemed a very long time without speaking till Lizzie sighed and said, ‘Dear Goldie, I do love you.’
His voice sounded soft against her ear as he whispered, ‘And I adore you.’
She gave herself up to him completely. That night of lovemaking had an ease and liberation such as she had never before experienced. She felt safe and cherished beside his compact body, enclosed in his strong arms. All that night they took pleasure in each other on the huge bed as if nothing existed outside it. Their universe was encompassed in the space of the darkened room.
When morning came and light slanted through a gap in the curtains, she drifted out of sleep feeling light-hearted for an unaccountable reason. Then she saw her lover’s head on the pillow beside her.
What have we done? was her first thought. She remembered Goldie’s wife. She remembered Sam, her own widowhood and grieving. She thought of the gossip that would fly around Dundee if anyone ever found out about Goldie Johanson and Lizzie Kinge. She remembered her own rectitude in matters of morality and how righteous she had been over other people who had strayed from the path of strict morality – even her own father and her brother George.
But as she looked at the sleeping Goldie, her qualms disappeared. It didn’t matter because she loved him. Making love with him had unlocked the chains that bound her heart, she had broken out of her isolation and knew once again the exhilaration of passion. She and Goldie loved each other, and had loved each other for a very long time. They needed each other. What was surprising was how long it had taken them to do anything about it.
She leaned over his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, playing with her finger in the tight curls of his hair. As he opened one eye and gazed at her, she saw a certain timidity there. He was not sure about her reaction now that daylight was upon them. She laughed and cuddled against him. ‘Wake up, big bear, I want you to make love to me again,’ she whispered.
Later, with the memory of the distracted Russian woman in her mind, Lizzie asked him, ‘What about your wife? How is she now?’
Goldie shook his head. ‘She’s no better. She’ll never be any better. She still knows me and the girls but she can’t remember anything else from one moment to the next.’
‘You mustn’t hurt her,’ warned Lizzie.
‘I don’t want to. And I don’t want to hurt the girls. They’re so devoted to their mother.’
They were like children in their delight. Dressed in their best, they sallied out arm in arm to the teeming streets of Mayfair. They looked so confident and opulent that passers-by stared at them, convinced they must be people of importance.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ Goldie assured Lizzie. ‘We’ll collect that doctor chap and take him down to Hastings. He can have a look at Charlie and tell you what he thinks. You must do it, Lizzie. You can’t leave the laddie mouldering away in an asylum if anything can be done to get him out of it.’
Goldie’s confidence, his assurance that her instincts were correct, bolstered Lizzie and they retraced her journey to Hastings with the Harley Street specialist in tow.
After two hours with Charlie, he returned to the hotel where he’d left Goldie and Lizzie and told them, ‘He’s going to recover in time, so don’t worry. Part of the problem is that his wound’s not properly healed yet and his entire system is weak. I’ve left instructions about what medication to give him and I’ll return to see him every week until he’s entirely cured.’
Lizzie clasped his hands in gratitude and said, ‘It doesn’t matter what it costs. He’s to have everything he needs.’
The doctor was cordial. ‘I can tell you one thing, he has something on his side that no doctor can provide – he’s incredibly lucky. When I examined his wound I was amazed the shot didn’t kill him. It missed his heart by one inch. Your son must lead a blessed life, Mrs Kinge.’
When all the arrangements were made for Charlie, the time had come to return home. Goldie was sailing back on his ship but Lizzie refused to go with him.
Mindful of his care for his wife and daughters, she said, ‘We must keep what’s happened between us secret. It can’t get out. If we return together, people’ll talk. You know what they’re like.’
‘I think they’ll probably talk anyway when they see us together. How we feel must show,’ said Goldie, but he agreed to travel separately because he had no wish to injure his family.
‘We’ll go on as we’ve always done,’ said Lizzie.
‘With one exception, I hope,’ said Goldie, kissing her. ‘I hope we’ll be able to make love again.’
‘Oh yes,’ she agreed, ‘as often as we can. But in secret.’ The train journey north was tedious but her mind was full of memories that put a smile on her lips as she sat with closed eyes in the corner of her compartment. It was only when the train steamed into Dundee station and pulled up with a great snort that she realized she had actually crossed the Tay Bridge and never given it a thought.