A Mother's Gift (33 page)

As he got back in his car and drove along the Coundon road towards Bishop Auckland, he wondered at her. Mary Anne Hamilton was a wonderful woman, he decided. But he knew that already.

Robert drove to Winton Colliery and parked on the end of the rows as his stepfather had done a few times before him. A couple of boys were kicking a ball around on a piece of waste ground across the road from the houses. He walked over to them and they stopped playing and gazed at him.

‘Mr Benfield?’ he asked and held out half a crown. They stared at him and the money but didn’t take it.

‘Is that a Jaguar, Mister?’

‘Yes, it is. Do you know a Mr Benfield? Please.’

‘I might do,’ a boy conceded. ‘Can I have a ride in your motor?’

‘Yes, all right. But tell me where Mr Benfield lives.’

‘Can we have a ride first?’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Robert, exasperated. They whooped and climbed into the front passenger seat together. He drove them round the rows, through the old village and back to where they had started.

‘Thanks, Mister.’ They had the door open and one was already running away.

‘Hey!’ Robert shouted, and grabbed the other. ‘Mr Benfield? I won’t ask again, I’ll just take you to the police station.’

‘Aw, all right,’ the boy conceded. ‘My name is Benfield. We live up the street there, the house at the end.
Can
I have the half-crown?’

Robert gave him it and he ran off. Robert locked the car before leaving it. Better safe than sorry.

It was Willie who answered the door. He was wearing a clean shirt and old trousers with braces dangling. His feet were bare and his hair damp from a recent bath.

‘Mr Benfield. I’m Robert Richards. May I come in for a minute?’

Willie gazed at him then cast an apprehensive glance over his shoulder. ‘Come in then,’ he said and led the way into the kitchen where a tin bath was still standing before the fire. ‘I’ve just come off shift,’ he explained. ‘If you wait a minute I’ll see to the bath.’

Robert looked at the water in the bath which was scummy and glinting with particles of coal dust. ‘Don’t bother for me,’ he said. ‘I understand.’ As he spoke a woman came down the stairs; a woman of about Kate’s age.

‘This is the wife,’ said Willie.

‘How do you do, Mrs Benfield?’

‘Well, what do you want with us?’ demanded June, her chin high in the air and her tone brusque. ‘Slumming, are you?’

‘June!’

Willie was embarrassed and his face flushed. To hide it he sat down on his chair and began to put on his shoes.

‘Are you related to Kate Benfield?’ asked Robert, ignoring the woman’s rudeness.

‘She’s my sister,’ said Willie. June made a derisory sound.

‘The tart do you mean?’

Robert’s anger rose swiftly but Willie butted in.

‘June! Keep your mouth shut!’

June stared at him, her eyes glittering and her arms folded across her chest. She opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it. Then she turned without another word and went into the other room, banging the door behind her.

‘Kate is my sister, Mister,’ said Willie again. ‘What has happened?’

Robert explained about the accident and the death of Georgina and how Kate was still in a coma. ‘The doctors think if someone of her own came and spoke to her it might help,’ he sighed.

‘I tell you what Mr Richards,’ said Willie. ‘Why don’t you go over and see our Ethel? I think the two of them have got friendly, like. At least, Kate came to see her. West Row, it is, number five.’

‘Thanks, I will,’ said Robert. The two men moved to the door and Willie walked down the yard with him. At the gate Willie paused.

‘I would come but Ethel will be better. And the wife, her brother used to be Kate’s sweetheart, you know. He was killed in the pit and for some reason June hated Kate after that. Seemed to think she was treating the memory of their Billy badly going off with that gaffer.’

‘HOWAY MAN, KATIE,
pull yourself together,’ said Ethel. She could have sworn that beneath her closed eyelids, Kate’s eyes moved slightly. ‘Mind, how do you think I feel? I’ve come all this way to see you and you won’t talk to us.’

Ethel looked at the two men at the bottom of the bed, Mr Bedford the surgeon and Mr Richards, who evidently was one of the Hamiltons really. To be honest, she was a bit in awe of them both, especially the surgeon. He reminded her of the specialist who had looked in young Davey’s ears last month. Very la-di-da he’d been. But he had promised he could do something for the bairn. Thank. God for the new National Health Service. Davey would have gone deaf altogether without it. But the specialist said he could fix it with a small operation.

Mr Bedford smiled at her; an encouraging sort of smile. It made him seem almost human. ‘Go on,’ he whispered. ‘Just talk to her.’

‘What was that our grandma used to say? “When life
knocks
you down you just ’ave to pick yoursel’ up else it’ll walk you into the ground.” I remember her saying that. She meant it an’ all. Me mam said it was all right for her, she never was bad in her life so she could talk.’ Ethel paused and gazed at Kate’s face. The skin was white except for her eyelids that had a bluish tinge. By, she was sorry for her though. Losing the lass, it was a terrible thing to happen. Those blasted motorcars! She hoped to heaven young Davey never got one. Tears pricked the back of her eyes and she blinked them back.

‘Go on,’ said Mr Bedford and she began again.

‘Katie! Can you hear me, pet? Howay man!’ Suddenly Ethel lost her patience. ‘You don’t want them to put you in the loony bin at Sedgefield, do you? I tell you that’s what they’ll do. An’ another thing, they can’t bury your Georgina till you come round. Leastways, they don’t want to but they might have to. You don’t want her to go without you to see her off, do you?’

‘Mrs Canvey! Stop that at once!’

Mr Richards was shouting at her, he was angry. She looked up quickly, intimidated, her irritation dying as quickly as it had come.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘But you said she just didn’t want to come round. I was only telling—’

‘Yes, well that’s enough I think. Please wait outside if you don’t mind,’ Mr Bedford said smoothly.

Meekly Ethel stood up and walked to the door then she turned round defiantly. ‘I
am
her sister, you know. I reckon I must be her next-of-kin. Not that fella there,
me
!’

Robert looked at her. It was true of course. Kate’s sister had more right in here than he had.

‘Behave arguing, Betty! You’re always carrying on.’

In the short silence after Ethel spoke, they could all hear the weak, breathy voice from the bed and they forgot everything but the fact that Kate had come round. Mr Bedford’s plan had worked.

Ethel moved back to the bed and looked at Kate, her eyelids were still closed but her face had relaxed somehow.

‘It’s Ethel not Betty,’ she said. ‘Eeh, Kate, are you not going to look at me? I’m that sorry, pet, I am.’

A tear ran down Kate’s cheek; then another and another. Her eyes opened. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘My lovely, clever little lass is gone.’

‘Aye, pet, it’s true.’

Ethel put her arm around her sister and hugged her. From the bottom of the bed, Robert and Mr Bedford watched, unwilling to disturb them immediately. Then Mr Bedford stepped forward and Ethel, noticing, moved back.

‘How do you feel, Mrs Hamilton?’ he asked.

Kate wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand, the other was tied to a splint and had a drip into a vein feeding her a glucose and saline solution. How did she feel? She thought. It was a bloody stupid question. She wished she had died in the crash instead of Georgina. She felt absolute desolation. She felt like throwing herself out of the window of the side ward and ending everything. The future stretched ahead of her and it was barren, pointless.
She
didn’t think she could face it. She felt so bad she could never tell him it for it was beyond feeling.

‘Mrs Hamilton?’ he prompted.

‘My name is Benfield,’ she said. ‘Catherine Benfield. And I want to go home to Winton. But first I will bury my bairn.’

‘I reckon this must mean I’m the sole owner of Hamilton Ironworks,’ said Bertram. He was bursting with satisfaction to the extent that his expression turned Robert’s stomach. Well, on this at least he could prick the little squirt’s bubble.

‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, Bertie,’ he said. ‘Georgina’s holdings go to her next-of-kin and her next-of-kin is Kate. In other words, Kate is your new partner.’ That wiped the smile off Bertie’s face, he saw, holding back a grin himself.

‘But she can’t be! She was nothing but Father’s tart. A whore!’

‘Shut up, Bertram.’ Mary Anne had entered the room unnoticed by her son. ‘I don’t want to hear language like that from you ever again, do you hear me?’

‘But Mother—’

‘Never again, I said. Is that what it meant to you, losing your half-sister? I am ashamed of you, ashamed. I ask you again, do you hear me?’

Bertie gritted his teeth. ‘Yes Mother,’ he replied. Then he lifted his head and went on, ‘But did you hear what Robert said? The woman has half of the ironworks, it’s not fair, it just isn’t fair, Mother.’

‘Well, fair or not it’s a fact,’ said Robert. ‘She wants me to manage her share for her.’

Bertie gasped, he walked over to the window and stared out unseeingly. He had waited for years to get control of the business and now, just when he thought he had it in his grasp it had been snatched from him. Oh, he could bear with the bulk of it being nationalised, he had to, what else was there to do? When the Tories got in they would put things right, he was convinced of it. But this was different; this was letting his father’s tart win. He’d begun to get used to the fact that Georgina had a share, for after all she was his half-sister just as much as Maisie was. But this, it was gall and wormwood. All his efforts had been for nothing. Worse, they had worked against him. Why hadn’t he realised the tart would inherit? Now Robert, too-clever-by-half Robert who had patronised him all his life was in control.

‘Flaming hell!’ he said under his breath but Robert heard him.

‘Don’t swear in front of your mother,’ he snapped.

Much worse expletives were running through Bertie’s mind in a continuous stream but he hadn’t the nerve to come out with them here. Instead he rushed out of the room and out through the kitchens to the stable yard and beyond. Once over the fence and into the woods he picked up a stick and thrashed an inoffensive bush and shouted his frustration in the filthiest language he could think of and he had learned a lot of that from his particular cronies at Cambridge.

For a minute he wished himself back there, he could
have
forgotten it all in a pub-crawl. He could have got absolutely blotto.

There wasn’t much chance of going back though, none at all in fact. He had been sent down and all over a bit of fun he and his friends had had with a girl from the town. Maybe they had gone over the top but she had been asking for it, they all thought so.

Aw, to hell with it, he could still get plastered. Bertie threw the stick away and headed back to the house for his car. He would drive into Middlesbrough; he could do a bit of hell-raising there and probably as good as in Cambridge.

‘What do you mean to do?’ Mary Anne asked. She and Kate sat in the garden in the late summer sunshine. Kate had taken lately to popping over to see her once or twice a week and Mary Anne looked forward to seeing her. She rarely saw her sons for Robert was too busy with the business and Bertie – well, who knew what Bertie was up to. She only hoped it wasn’t something that would bring too much disgrace on to the family. And Maisie, well, Maisie spent most of her time in her room or wandering the woods at the back of the house, when she was there, that is.

‘I’m going to buy a house in Winton,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve been dithering about it I know but I have decided. My estate agent is seeing to it for me.’

‘Yes, but what are you going to do?’ Mary Anne persisted. ‘You are a young woman still Kate, only thirty-one or two aren’t you?’

‘Thirty-six, actually.’

‘All right, thirty-six. You are not an old woman; you can’t just sit at home and do nothing. Why don’t you go back to nursing?’

Kate look startled. Nursing? That was an old dream. It had belonged to the young Katie. She had been another person then. There had been the short time during the war when she had thought she could take it up again but that had come to nothing. Matthew objected to it.

‘It’s different for me,’ Mary Anne was saying. ‘I’m fifteen years older than you. Besides—’ She stopped, she had almost said she still had her family and she couldn’t believe she had had such a crass remark on the end of her tongue.

There was silence for a moment or two broken only by the twittering of starlings that were on the lawn looking hopefully for crumbs. Then Kate rose to her feet.

‘I must go now, I promised Dorothy I wouldn’t stay out after dark.’

‘Yes, of course.’

When Kate had gone Mary Anne walked slowly into the house. She shivered a little, the evenings were cutting in and were chilly after the sun went down behind the trees. She hoped Kate would do something with her life, she was a nice woman. Strangely, she had never resented Kate maybe because she didn’t even know about her until after Matthew’s death and by then it didn’t really matter to her. She even felt a vague gratitude to her for she must have been the reason why Matthew left herself alone these last years.