Time of Grace by Gabriella West

Author:Gabriella West
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Ireland, GLBT, Fiction, Romance, Adult, Historical, Lesbian
Published: 2013-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

London was different. I had only been gone for half a year and was not sure at first what had changed, or whether the change was merely in me. It was grimmer. The newspaper headlines jumped out at me every day as I walked past the shops in the shabby, half-deserted streets of Camden Town. Wounded soldiers limped past; men who had stayed behind had a furtive look. Some nights there were air raids. I stayed in the house in the evenings, reading by the light of a single lamp with the shutters closed. I felt as I was in prison. The peaceful, sunny London of my youth was just a memory.

During those dark days I sorted through my mother’s clothes, jewelry, and letters, not with any great objective, but with a need to look at and touch her things. Much of it she had already given away, it seemed; the lovely dresses I remembered her wearing when I was a child were gone. I read through a stack of love letters to her from my father in the 1890s. They seemed unbearably innocent, from a time when settling down in a little house with one’s beloved was the idea of bliss. My father teased her about the children they would have—this was after they were engaged, of course. He thought that they would have a brainy boy and a beautiful, sentimental daughter. “We shall sit around the fire in the long winter evenings and drink cocoa and read Dickens,” my father proposed. When I came to phrases like “my shy, sweet rose” and “my adored one” I began to understand how a girl who had been starved of love and approval—as my mother implied she had been by her high-Victorian mother, who had given birth to fifteen children, eleven of whom survived—could drown in a love like this, could believe that if she centered her life around this one man, her luck and her future could change. No wonder she had spent so much of my childhood at the piano, singing sad, sentimental songs while my father looked on benignly from his armchair. That had been her model of domestic bliss—to draw love in from an admiring onlooker. And, of course, the prettier, gentler, and purer one was, the more love would be elicited.

It made more sense to me now why my mother had been so deeply saddened and disapproving when I became interested in the women’s suffrage movement at the age of sixteen—the age when she was learning to be a lady and demurely lower her eyes under men’s approving looks. How could she have identified with women marching near the government buildings in the streets of London in 1912, shouting, “Votes for women”? My mother had never marched, never shouted in her life. She had seemed to draw quietly away from me in those years, to turn even more of her love on Ralph, who was not the perfect son by any means, but whose boyish charm sweetened her days.

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