Molly rubbed eyes strained by the failing light, pressed her fingers hard into them to ease their ache. In the book laid before her on the table long columns of figures danced and blurred. Through the open scullery door – not for the first time that afternoon – came the sound of the children’s voices raised in one of those monotonous wrangles that tempt any adult within earshot to put a stop to them with a slap.
‘They were!”
‘They weren’t!”
‘They were!”
‘They couldn’t have been.”
“Big as your head.”
“I don’t believe you. And Kitty doesn’t, either, do you, Kit?”
“Well, I—”
“Oh, of course you don’t. He’s telling lies again.” This in Meghan’s clear, flat little voice brought about a short and ominous silence. Molly drew a breath, debating the possibility of putting her fingers in her ears and ignoring her contentious offspring. Meghan was an impossible child; at four and a half years old she looked like a fairy, had a will of steel and a mind as sharp as a new-honed razor.
“I am not!” Without being able to see him Molly knew exactly the look on her son’s face at that moment: the thin, fair skin brick-red with temper, the cherub’s mouth pouted and furious.
“You are!”
“I’m not, I tell you.”
“Yes you are.”
Danny knew that in a battle of sheer persistence with his sister he could only come off second best. He tried a new tack.
“You’re just jealous. ’Cause I went hop picking with Aunt Annie and Uncle Charley and you didn’t. I was having the best time anyone ever had and you were stuck here. Serves you right. Who’d want you? They took me because I’m grown up. And – you’re – a – baby.” These last words a slow, calculated insult, said in the tone of a man very sure of his ground.
“I’m not!” Meg’s voice rose to a shriek.
“You are!”
“I’m not!”
“Oh, yes you are. Baby, Baby Bunting – Baby, Baby Benton—”
Molly, thunder in her face, straightened her aching back and threw down her pen. The chanting in the scullery broke off in a scuffle and a sharp yell.
Kitty’s small, distressed voice – “Danny! Oh, Meg—” was almost entirely lost in the sounds of battle.
In two angry steps, Molly was at the door. The two children were rolling under the scrubbed pine table – the scullery was so tiny that there was no other floor space clear enough for such activity. Katherine, known to them all as Kitty, twin to Meghan in birth, yet astonishingly opposite in looks, temperament and manner, stood saucer-eyed. When Molly appeared, Nemesis personified in the doorway, Kitty shrank back for all the world as if she had been personally responsible for the fracas under the table.
“Meghan! Danny! What in heaven’s name – stop it, at once! At once, do you hear me?” Molly reached under the table and none too gently hauled the two children out and onto their feet. “What an exhibition! What on earth is it all about?”
“He was telling lies,” said Meghan with an uncompromising stubbornness that Molly could only recognize and regret. “He said that when they were hop picking they had apples as big as my head. And then he called me a baby.”
“So you decided to show him what a perfect little lady you were by rolling under the table punching and kicking like a guttersnipe?” asked her mother tartly. “I’m not stupid. Nor deaf. You’re as bad as he is. Worse. Now then, you—” she caught tall Danny by the ear and marched him to the chair at one end of the table, “sit there. And you—” she picked up Meghan, feather-light, and swung her onto the opposite chair, “there. And don’t move. Either of you. Until the clock chimes quarter past. That’s ten minutes. If I hear one sound –one sound – before that, it’s straight to bed with no supper and no waiting up for Daddy. Do you understand?”
Meghan, scowling down at her still-pudgy baby hands, nodded. Danny sat rigid and glared at his sister. Kitty, in the absence of specific orders, climbed upon a chair halfway between them both, her gaze fixed upon her mother’s face. For a moment Molly’s hand rested upon the fine, mousy hair and she came closer to smiling than she had all afternoon. Meghan bestowed one disgusted look upon her twin then looked back at her hands.
Molly, her concentration shredded, went back to her books. She added the same column three times, unsurprised to discover that she achieved a different answer each time, before with an exasperated sigh she laid down her pen again. The strained silence in the scullery had given way to small, scuffling sounds, smothered explosions of laughter. Molly visualized the wildly swinging feet and ferociously pulled faces. At least it was quieter than the earlier roughhouse. She rested her chin on her hands and looked gloomily around her. In such poky surroundings who could blame lively, strong-willed children for getting on each other’s nerves? She understood only too well how they felt – she was sometimes tempted to a good scream herself. The little room in which she sat, the only one downstairs apart from the scullery, was cluttered with furniture, badly lit, too hot with the fire burning and too cold without it A rabbit hutch, she thought bad-temperedly. She and Jack had lived in this house since the day they had married. At that time it had not seemed so bad; it had been convenient and cheap at a moment when their resources had not been great. It was just around the corner from Sarah, and not far from the small grocer’s shop that Annie and Charley had taken with the money subscribed for Charley by his workmates in the docks after the explosion on board the Carlotta. But it had never crossed Molly’s mind, either then or later, to regard it as their permanent home. Yet here they still were. It was impossible. More, it was ridiculous. Although work lately was not easily come by Jack was rarely idle, and anyway with the money she was earning from the agency they could easily afford to move somewhere more spacious. Somewhere like The Larches. She would have to speak to Jack soon. John Marsden was waiting for her answer. Why had she left it so long? She took a deep breath and dropped her face into her cupped hands, screwing up her tired eyes. Because logic and sense were useless weapons against a man’s pride, she answered herself. But tonight she would try.
In the kitchen the clock struck the quarter hour. Seconds later she felt a touch on her skirt and opened her eyes to find Kitty standing beside her, her quiet, brown-flecked eyes fixed upon her, her hand resting lightly on her knee. In the doorway stood the other two – handsome, difficult, self-willed – yet in both their faces a vulnerability and trust that would have melted a heart stonier than Molly’s. With one arm she encircled Kitty, the other she lifted in invitation to Meghan. The little girl flew to her, nestled to her side. Over the two heads Molly smiled quietly at her son, who came and leaned on her chair beside her.
“Look at that,” she said, nodding down at the girls, “two little apple-heads.”
Meghan giggled into Molly’s lap. Danny laughed. “They really were ever so big, the apples we had. You ask Aunt Annie. Some of them you couldn’t hold in your hand, honest you couldn’t. Aunt Annie cooked them in a lovely pudding, in a pot over an open fire like the gypsies. And we slept on straw. And I picked hops into a big umbrella, and Aunt Annie gave me a shilling. Did you know that when you pick hops your fingers go all black and funny-tasting? Sort of bitter. Nice, though—”
“How old do you be to go hop picking?” Meg asked ungrammatically. “When can I go?”
Molly shook her head. “Oh, well, I really don’t—”
“Girls wouldn’t be any good at it,” Danny interrupted scornfully, conveniently ignoring the fact that half the children in the hop gardens had been just that. “There’s spiders and beetles and great big green caterpillars that you don’t see until you’ve squashed them in your fingers…”
Kitty, within the circle of her mother’s arm, flinched.
“Aunt Annie goes,” Meghan said firmly. “She told me she’d been every single year since she was a baby. And she was a girl.”
“Aunt Annie’s different,” Danny retorted.
“Aunt Annie,” said a new voice from the doorway, “is very pleased to hear it. Some’d probably mean it less flattering. Hello, young Danny. Recovered, have you?” She grinned down at the boy who had run to her, tousled his hair with her long, bony hand. “You’ve got a real worker here, you know, Moll. Fingers to the bone stuff.” She winked down at Danny, who flushed hotly. Aunt Annie’s one and only defect was her tendency to sarcasm.
“I found one or two things of Danny’s packed in with ours,” she said, dumping a paper parcel onto the table. “Thought I might as well bring them round straight away. Didn’t actually expect to find you here, though. I thought it was your day at the office. Isn’t Nancy supposed to be here on Mondays?”
“Yes it is. And yes, she is,” Molly said a little shortly. “But our Nancy had other things to do today. The sooner I can get something sorted out the better—” She gestured at the open books on the table.
“You haven’t mentioned it to Jack, then yet?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to, you know, sooner or later. You never know, he might jump at the idea: nice, big house in Plaistow.”
“He’ll say we can’t afford it”
“And can you?”
“With the money the agency’s earning, yes.”
“Ah.” Annie flopped into a chair. “I see the problem. And where’s Nancy? Marching up and down with a banner somewhere?”
“Something like that. Gone to listen to one of the Pankhursts, I think.”
Annie arched fine-drawn eyebrows. “She’s really been bitten by the bug, hasn’t she?”
“To the exclusion of almost everything else, I sometimes think. I expected her ages ago. With her away I’m stuck with this—” she flicked at the page she had been working on “—and the children as well. I feel like writing a nice polite little note to the prime minister asking him please to give women the vote so that I can have my assistant back!”
Annie, smiling her wide smile, drew Kitty up onto her knee. “All seems like a lot of hot air to me. Votes for women? That’ll be the day. The old world’s run by men for men, isn’t it, Danny boy?” She poked the boy in the ribs. “They’re not about to give any of it up just for the askin’, are they? Stands to reason. Waste of time, all this talkin’.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that.” Molly leaned back in her chair, one hand absently fondling Meghan’s mass of hair. “I agree with them. I hope they win, though I don’t think it’ll happen until the majority of men have the vote. I just wish that Nancy hadn’t joined the Cause quite so wholeheartedly. I’ve a business to run, and with John Marsden retiring it’s going to get worse. I need more help, not less.”
Annie looked closer at the tired face, the harassed eyes, then asked, indicating the paper strewn on the table, “You trying to work now?”
“I am. Some hopes.”
“Right.” Briskly Annie clapped her hands. “Come on, kids, get your things. You can come and give your Aunt Annie a hand in the shop. How’d you like that?”
The girls’ faces lit with pleasure. “Yes, please!” said Danny.
Molly shook her head, protested half-heartedly, “Oh, no, Annie. I couldn’t let you do that.”
“Rubbish,” Annie said cheerfully. “We’d love to have them.”
“Well, if you’re sure?”
“’Course I’m sure. Go on, Danny love, get the girls’ coats.”
“I haven’t even made you a cup of tea.”
Annie stood up. “Couldn’t have stopped anyway. Charley’s all right on his own for a little while, but I don’t like to leave him for too long.”
“It’s incredible how he manages.” Molly buttoned the impatient Meghan into her sailor-collared coat; Kitty stood quietly holding hers, waiting her turn.
“He’s a game lad, my Charley,” Annie said softly, her eyes upon the bright faces of the children.
“Are you certain he won’t mind this lot descending on him like a plague on Egypt?”
“No. He won’t mind.”
Molly did not miss the undertone of sadness in the simple words. The fact that Annie and Charley had no children was not, she knew, of their own choosing. “Well, there they are,” she said. “If you’re sure?”
“Right. They can stay to tea. What time’s Jack due?”
“I’m not sure. These last weeks they’ve had to go downriver for work – Tilbury, Northfleet. He’s back at all times.”
“Well, at least you’ll get some peace and quiet Come on, troops, quick march—”
Molly watched them down the street. Only Kitty turned to wave. The other two danced around Annie, laughing and shouting as they hurried through the autumn rain.
The tiny house, as she shut the door, sang with blessed quiet. The tick of the clock was clearly audible in the silence. Peace. For a few hours at least.
With a breathed prayer of thanks to Aunt and Guardian Angel Annie, Molly went back to her books.
It was almost three hours later and close to the time when Jack might reasonably be expected home that Molly heard the back door open and close quietly. She leaned back in her chair, stretching cramped muscles, guiltily aware that in her absorption she had not finished the preparations for supper.
“Is that you, Jack?”
“No. It’s me.” Nancy’s voice. Molly breathed a small, relieved sigh. She got up and walked to the door of the scullery.
“Where on earth have you been? I thought—” she stopped, her eyes wide. “In God’s name, Nancy, what’s happened to you?”
Nancy half-leaned, half-sat upon the kitchen table. She was soaking wet; in her hand she held a shoe, the heel of which was missing. Her coat was muddy, her hat gone, her hair, obviously very hastily re-pinned, was tumbling untidily around her coat collar. The thin face was flushed, the dark eyes bright as candles in the dim-lit room.
“It’s started, Molly, started at last They won’t stop us now.”
Molly stared. “Nancy, what are you talking about? Where have you been? What have you been doing? You look as if you’ve been in a fight—”
“I have. I did this,” she said, brandishing the broken shoe, “on a policeman’s helmet. They’re harder than you’d think, those helmets.”
“A policeman’s – you’ve been fighting with a policeman?”
“A squad of them. An army of them. Oh, Molly, you should have been there. It was wonderful! We got into the Central Lobby of the House of Commons, and Mrs Pankhurst and a couple of others jumped up onto a settee and started to speak. That was when the police came, and tried to throw us out.”
“Oh, my God.” Molly sat down hard on a painted kitchen chair.
“They wouldn’t allow us to speak. They evicted us by force, carried us out. But we didn’t go easily, I can tell you. Ten women were arrested. They should have arrested us all! I’ve a mind to—”
“Nancy!”
Nancy seemed for the first time to register that Molly’s reaction to her story was not one of wholehearted admiration.
Molly stood up. “I’m expecting Jack at any minute,” she said, “I’ve been working all afternoon and I haven’t got supper ready. The children aren’t home from Annie’s yet and are going to be late for bed. Jack isn’t going to like any of those things. And tonight I have to talk to him. About John’s retirement. The house. The business. Oh, Nancy, how could you?”
“You haven’t asked him yet?”
Molly shook her head. “It has to be tonight. I’ve put it off too long already. John Marsden needs to know if we’ll take the house, or if he has to give notice to the landlord to find someone else. And if Jack walks through that door and finds you in this state, and guesses where you’ve been – I suppose the story’s all over London by now?”
“I should think so.”
“—then there will be hell to pay, and me to pay it. I’m sorry, but you know it’s so. God knows what he’d say if he saw you like this. You’ll have to leave before he comes.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I know Jack doesn’t approve of the cause. To be honest with you, I just popped in to ask if – well, if I could just tidy up a bit before I went home? I don’t really want Mam to see me looking like this.” She had the grace to look a little shamefaced, and Molly, relenting, laughed and pushed her towards the door which led to the stairs.
“I should think so too. You look like something the cat dragged in. Upstairs. Our bedroom, in the front. But do, please, be quick.”
She was peeling potatoes with ink-stained fingers over the big, chipped sink when Nancy reappeared much tidier and with most of the more obvious damage either hidden or repaired. Nancy dropped an impulsive kiss on her sister-in-law’s cheek.
“Thanks, Molly. Sorry to have bothered you. Good luck with Jack.” She lifted a gentle finger to Molly’s black hair and wound a silky tendril around her finger. “Not that you need luck. Not with our Jack. He’s still as soft on you as the day you married. A bit of Irish blarney and we’ll all be living in that nice house before you can say ‘knife’.”
Molly lifted cold, water-roughened hands. “I wish I could be so sure.”
The austere, boyish face broke into a smile, but Nancy said no more. She pulled her shabby coat round a frame that had thinned to gauntness; the garment hung loose as she buttoned it. Nancy could never be persuaded to spend the money she earned on herself.
Molly dropped a potato into a pot that was now, thankfully, almost full. “See you tomorrow then.”
“Yes. Oh, by the way—” halfway to the door Nancy stopped, “I almost forgot. Mam said that a gentleman was down home looking for you the other day. That lawyer. I’ve forgotten his name. The one who dealt with Sam’s will?”
“Mr Ambler.”
“That’s it.”
“What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t say. Anyway, Mam gave him this address, so I expect you’ll be hearing from him. Do you think Ellen’s found a way round the will after all this time?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. It would please her spite. Well, she’s welcome if she has. I can afford it if they want me to give it back. I wouldn’t mind at all. It would be as if Sam had lent me the money to get started and now I was paying it back, and that would be the end of that. I almost hope she has.”
From the front of the house came the sound of a key in the lock. Molly hastily flung salt into the potatoes and swung the heavy pot onto the stove. Nancy, finger to lips, slipped through the back door and shut it quietly behind her.
Molly untied her grubby apron and patted her hair, which had grown long now and coiled demurely and fashionably at the nape of her neck, though the wild curls still refused to behave entirely properly, wisping around her face and neck no matter how hard she combed and pinned them. Then with lifted chin and bright smile she prepared for battle.
The small, smoky room was quiet. The only sound was the rhythmic ticking of the clock, the only movement that of the pendulum and the leaping flames in the hearth. Jack sat, pipe in hand, in the big chair opposite her on the other side of the tiny fireplace. Neither had spoken for several minutes. Silence shrouded the room, yet it seemed to Molly that she could still hear the passionate echoes of her own voice, arguing, reasoning, pleading. Jack had brought against her every single argument that she had expected and prepared for, and a couple that she had not.
Now, with no more to be said, she waited.
Jack stirred. In the restless light of the fire his hair and moustache gleamed gold. His eyes, shadowed deep in their sockets, she could not see.
“It’s a lot of brass, lass,” he said quietly, “to be found, week in, week out.”
“I know it.” How many times had she heard it this evening?
At least he hadn’t yet said an outright no. Molly leaned eagerly forward. “But we wouldn’t be paying for this place, remember. And if The Larches goes to someone else, Nancy and I would have to find other premises for the agency, pay rent on them—” or give it up. She would not say it, would not think it “And if Nancy takes the attic rooms I told you about – the housekeeper’s rooms – then she’d pay her bit. Oh, Jack, think how convenient it would be: Nancy and me under one roof, the house, the business, the children – everything. It would be so much easier. We wouldn’t be far from your Mam, or Charley—” She had been determined not to start again, but she could not stop. “Just look at this place! ’Tis the size of a tea caddy! Isn’t it just stupid to stay here when we could afford something better? Even if it’s a bit of a struggle at first? We’d have a parlour, a proper one, and a dining room, and a kitchen that’s bigger than this room and the scullery put together! The children could have a bedroom each. And the office and typing pool are completely separate. You wouldn’t be bothered by it. If we don’t take the house – if someone else does—” The thought of what might happen then had been scurrying around her head like a caged mouse ever since John Marsden had finally made the definite announcement of his retirement. Not that his plan to leave the business and join his sister in Southend had been any great surprise; he was no longer young, and the work as the Venture Employment Bureau had grown beyond all expectations was demanding. It had been one of those inevitables that had been pigeonholed in a busy life to be thought about tomorrow; and now tomorrow was upon her. Only Jack’s agreement stood between her and the fulfilment of an ambition that had been born on the day that John Marsden had shown her to her first box-room of an office. She had long outgrown that room.
Now, she shared the big office with John, was only a step away from making it her own entirely.
Jack leaned forward and tapped his pipe out into the fire. He sat for a moment, elbows on knees, frowning thoughtfully into the blaze. “It’s a lot of brass,” he said again, “a lot.”
“I know it is!” Frustration and anxiety curdled to anger. She tried, only partly successfully, to keep the wild impatience from her voice. “But we can afford it, Jack. It isn’t as if John were asking me to buy him out of the business – that would be more difficult. But he isn’t. All we have to do is to take the tenancy of the house and pay him an agreed percentage of the agency’s profits each year. And it’s such a lovely house. I know we’d be happy there.” She stopped. Jack had turned his head and was watching her intently, the sharp blue eyes roaming her face, studying it, feature by feature. Red light flickered and danced on the deep scar that ran from cheekbone to jaw on the left side of his face. She could not fathom the thoughts behind that suddenly intense gaze, yet some hope, some small excitement lifted. “Please, Jack,” she said.
He looked at her for one long moment longer, then said heavily, “I can’t pretend I like the idea of using your money.”
She could have cried. “Our money. Our money. What does it matter who earns it? I don’t think you realize just how well the agency is doing.”
“Oh, I realize it all right. I’m not daft, nor blind. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m proud of it. Proud of you.”
She could not believe her ears. “Jack—”
“And I suppose that if John Marsden’s posh house in Plaistow’s what you want, and the chance to run the whole shooting match on your own, then by God we’ll have to see if we can manage it.”
“Jack!” Molly launched herself across the space between them, wound her arms about his neck, kissed his eyes, his nose, his scarred cheek.
“Hey up! Wait a bit, wait a bit. There’s a condition.”
“Condition?” Her head came up sharply. “What condition?”
“You’ll have to give me your sworn word that you’ll keep our Nancy and her half-witted suffragist friends away from me.”
She laughed. “I will.”
“Then we’ll try it.”
She was on his lap, curled into the big chair on top of him; she buried her hands in his thick hair and kissed him, long and slow, felt the ripples of it through his body.
“Thank you,” she said. And as she tried to lift her head his arms went around her, forcing her to him, his mouth hard on hers. His fingers were at the pins that held her hair, then, more impatiently, at the tiny buttons of her bodice. His big hands took her shoulders, held her a little way from him so that he could look at her in the firelight. She shook her head sharply and her hair fell about her naked shoulders. She was trembling; the hard skin of his hands was rough on her smooth, warm body. She slipped from his lap and down to the floor in front of the fire. He towered above her, the bulk of him dark, highlights of bone and muscle lit by the dying flames.
She held up her arms, smiling.
Later, in bed, she remembered Nancy’s news about Mr Ambler, the lawyer, but listening to Jack’s deep, even breathing beside her it did not seem necessary to disturb him. Whatever the man wanted it could wait till the morning.
Jack stirred, moved closer to her. She snuggled to him.
“Moll?”
“Hmm?”
“Downstairs, just now—”
She smiled in the darkness. “Yes?”
“You didn’t—” he paused, “you didn’t – do anything. Anything to—’’ he stopped.
“I didn’t have to,” she said. “It’s the time of the month when it’s all right.”
Something in his silence warned her. She forced herself not to stiffen, not to move away from him.
“If we had a bigger house,” he said after a moment, “do you think that you might change your mind?”
No! No, no, no. “Is that another condition?” her voice was very quiet.
“Of course not, lass. I just—”
“We agreed. Both of us. After the twins. Remember?” Remember the pain? Remember the agonizing time it took? Remember the solemn, sombre faces of midwife and doctor? Remember the exhausting struggle against death?
“Yes, I know we did. I just wondered – well, if perhaps in a couple of years or so you might feel differently?”
“No.”
Silence lay between them in the dark like an iron bar. “We have two daughters,” she said at last, and then with greater emphasis, “and we have a son. Isn’t that enough?”
He took a long breath. “Aye,” he said, “of course.” And he turned from her to settle down to sleep.