‘Don’t come and waste my time – I don’t mind about yours,’ he said to them after the very first session. The boys took it seriously, worked hard, and now were divided into two teams who played each other, and winning a game was a prize worthy of exaltation. Tom’s next ambition was to form a school team and set up a competition between other primary schools; this happened at secondary-school level, but not enough at primary, and he was trying to convince governors and masters from other schools in the district. It wasn’t easy, but he was making progress and a couple of fixtures were set towards the end of term.
He had expanded the role of a school governor into being the lover of the deputy headmistress. This had proved easier than setting up the football league. Laura was one of the new breed of women; a couple of decades earlier, she would have been a suffragette. As well as belonging to the Labour Party, she was heavily involved in the local branch of the Cooperative Women’s Guild (motto ‘Of a whole heart cometh hope’) and held passionate views on female equality. She believed that women had the right not only to equal opportunities and equal pay, but equal lives; and that, in her view, meant taking sexual pleasure for themselves should they desire it while refusing to cooperate on demand with their husbands. Men should give the time and attention to wooing their wives in bed each and every time they wanted them, being sensitive to their needs and generally behaving in a way to which they were not accustomed, or even prepared to be accustomed.
Tom had not had the opportunity before to behave either sensitively or insensitively in bed and was an enthusiastic pupil, which meant doing exactly what she wanted – at first, anyway.
It had been a complete shock the first time she had made clear her availability to him; nice girls, he had always been told – primarily by Angela, but also his parents, by implication, and by the joshing confidences shared with his friends – didn’t go to bed with men until they had rings on their fingers. Not only was it hugely dangerous, in that they might become pregnant; it also meant they were cheap, their most precious possession given away to be talked, boasted and even sniggered about by the recipient, the right to a respectable life, a white wedding, an honourable husband gone for ever.
So it was that sitting by the fire one night, quite early on in their relationship – which had moved swiftly from the purely professional to the personal, cool friendship, to warm interest, to attraction, and thence to a mutual desire – and after an excellent supper cooked by Laura, in the tiny flat she rented, she suddenly removed his hand from her thigh (a new development) and proposed that they might actually go next door to her bedroom and into her bed. Tom was fairly shocked, completely terrified and absolutely overwhelmed.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘come along. Or don’t you want to?’
‘Yes, of course I do!’ he said.
‘Well, then. We don’t want to go off the boil, do we?’
‘No. No, we don’t. But—’
‘Oh, I know you haven’t done it before,’ she said, standing up, plumping the cushions and carrying the coffee cups over to the sink, for all the world as if he would now kiss her goodnight and start on the long cycle ride home. ‘Never mind, I have. And don’t worry about getting me in the family way either, I can deal with that. Oh, come on, Tom Knelston,’ she added impatiently. ‘You’re the most gorgeous man I’ve ever set eyes on and I can’t quite believe my luck, so you can’t let me down now.’
And he didn’t.
Laura was like no one he had ever known. She and her younger sister, Babs, had been brought up virtually single-handed by their mother, a formidable woman, also a teacher. Her husband was unable to work after losing a leg in the First World War, depression overtaking him entirely, his pension pitifully inadequate. She worked all the hours God sent her, putting Laura in charge of the household from the age of eight, when Mr Leonard’s feeble efforts at caring for it and the girls failed altogether and he took to his bed for the remaining five years of his life. She never gave up on him; she had an understanding of mental illness that was decades before her time and brought the girls up to be of the same persuasion. Babs married young and already had two children, but Laura was her mother reborn, tough, determined and idealistic, with an equal capacity for hard work. Nothing fazed her; she drove through obstacles scarcely acknowledging them. She had risen from junior teacher to deputy headmistress in three years, seizing opportunities when they arose and then doing whatever was necessary to capitalise on them. Her pupils loved her, for she inspired as well as taught them; she had already inaugurated an annual storytelling prize among all the schools in the area, against the wishes of many of the headmasters, who said it would be too much work. She looked at them witheringly and told them she was prepared to do whatever was necessary herself if they were not. She was pretty, charming – and very sexy. If Tom had been asked to create his perfect woman, it would have been Laura Leonard who stood before him, holding out her hand and inviting him into her bed.
But it wasn’t just the sex; their interests and passions – mostly political – bound them as closely. Deeply socialist, horrified by the long years of unemployment endured by the working class during the dreadful recession of the thirties, they listened in an agony of disbelief to Laura’s little wireless breaking the news that the Tory candidate, one Quintin Hogg, had won the first by-election after Munich.
Tom, largely as a result of a talk held at one of the Labour Party meetings, was becoming fiercely and angrily focused on the lack of medical provision for the poor and the constant dread of illness in the millions of families who simply could not afford a doctor. He told Laura of a dreadful night when his little brother Arthur had developed a temperature of a hundred and four. Scarlet fever was feared, with its inevitable hospitalisation and high death rate; the family weren’t on the panel of the local GP (whereby a small weekly fee ensured treatment if genuinely required) and were afraid to call him. Many long hours of spongeing down and homespun medicines saw him through; but it had been a night that had burrowed deep into Tom’s soul.
All these things and more bound him and Laura together in fierce and crusading zeal; they would see things put right, they told one another, they would work for justice and equality and rights for all. They weren’t sure how, except via the somewhat unsatisfactory aegis of the local Labour Party – although the Women’s Guild provided a more satisfactory outlet for Laura’s energies and ideals – but they were absolutely united in the clear vision of what should be done. It was a strong tie.
Ending the relationship with Angela had been awful; she had cried and cried. Tom had done the honourable thing, and not let things drag on.
‘But I don’t see what I’ve done wrong,’ she kept saying. ‘We’re always so happy together.’