Maggie Rowan

by Catherine Cookson

‘Yes.’

  ‘But this is Monday; there’s only five days!’

  She had looked away from his startled eyes, saying, ‘The sooner the better! I saw Mr Fraser yesterday, and it can be done by special licence on Saturday.’

  He had wanted to exclaim, ‘Special licence!’ and ask, ‘But why the rush now?’ Yet all he said was, ‘You’re bent on Mr Fraser doing it?’

  And she had replied in a voice that brooked no persuasion, ‘I’ll not be married in the Catholic church.’

  And as she moved off she had said, ‘The Seymours are leaving on Friday; we can settle up things with them on Thursday night. And, Christopher—’ She had stopped and turned towards him again. It was the first time she had used his name, and it sounded clipped and strange on her lips. And she paused after saying it, as if in surprise at its having slipped out. Then she went on, ‘Don’t say anything to anybody.’

  ‘Not Davie?’

  ‘No. He’ll tell her, and she’ll tell me father. I don’t want him…or anybody to know.’

  There was an odd and unusual note of pleading in her voice, but he said, ‘I’ll have to tell Davie. He’s been decent, and I’d like him to be there. Have you told your mother?’

  ‘Yes, she knows, but she’ll say nothing.’

  ‘Well, Davie won’t either.’

  ‘He’ll tell her, he’s bound to.’ She sucked her lips in between her teeth.

  ‘I’ll ask him not to. I’ve got to have somebody of me own there.’

  She breathed deeply, and dropped her gaze to the ground. And it seemed to him she had suddenly become tired, as if, having been fighting someone or something, the uselessness of the struggle was now becoming apparent to her. But as he watched her walking away along the allotment path, the straightness of her back and the briskness of her step betrayed no faltering, and he thought: Even if she was tired or beaten she’d go on; if she wanted something badly enough, she would get it. And he wondered why he had been blind to the strength of her all these years.

  He was on his way now to see David, the only one besides Mrs Rowan who still had a decent word for either him or Maggie. But what would David say when he was told they were to be married on Saturday morning on the quiet? And in the Methodist church, at that! This had seemed, even to him, the last straw.

  As he knocked on David’s back door, David’s face appeared at the kitchen window, and he cried, ‘Why, come on in, man. What you knocking there for?’

  Christopher walked through the scullery, skirting the tin bath standing at the foot of the wash-house boiler, and entered the kitchen. Ann turned from the fire where she was splashing eggs with boiling fat, her face rosy and happy, and she said, ‘Hallo, Chris. Come and sit down. I’ll pour you out a cup of tea in a minute. Would you like something to eat?’

  ‘Thanks all the same, Ann, but I’ve just had me breakfast.’ He sat down and looked towards David who, with knees bent to bring his height down to the level of the mirror, was endeavouring to brush his wet hair flat across his head.

  ‘Ever see anything like this?’ David spoke to Christopher through the mirror. ‘She’s fixed this so as she can see in it.’

  Ann turned from the fire and smiled at Christopher, and he smiled back; and David said, ‘Aye, you can laugh. And what d’you think of me having to wash in the scullery, Chris? We never did that at home, did we? And no pit clothes allowed in the kitchen either, mind. Can you imagine me standing for it?’

  ‘It’s about time you were taken in hand, anyway,’ said Christopher, nodding conspiratorially towards Ann.

  ‘Oh, is it? Well, what d’you think of the latest? You know what she did on Saturday?’

  ‘Oh, David, be quiet, and come and have your breakfast.’

  Ann lifted three eggs from the frying pan and placed them on a dinner plate by the side of a thick slice of ham and two fat sausages.

  And David said, ‘She doesn’t want me to tell you, she’s ashamed. By, if me mother only knew, she’d go mad.’ He winked at his brother and pulled up a chair to the table; and lifting his knife and fork, one in each fist, he thumped their handles on the table in added emphasis to each word: ‘She bought a loaf of bread! What d’you think of that?’

  ‘And it won’t be the last!’ Ann placed the plate before him and turned to Christopher: ‘He eats so much. I baked twice last week. He seems to forget I’m not me mother, or his mother; it’s nineteen thirty-six not nineteen hundred and six.’

  ‘And she burnt two loaves and forgot to put the yeast in the teacakes.’ David continued his teasing. ‘That’s what comes of working in a shop instead of going into service and learning how to look after a man. And now she’s demanding a gas stove…with a fine modern range like that there!’ He jerked his fork in the direction of the stove and nodded gravely at Christopher.

  Christopher looked from one to the other. They were laughing at each other now; they looked close and entwined, they looked married, they sounded married. And he had never heard David talk so much—his happiness oozed out of him.

  Christopher felt an ache within him for this comradeship that would never be his; for no matter on what plane his life with Maggie fell, he could never see himself teasing or chaffing her.

  Ann left the kitchen to answer the front door, and he leant across the table and whispered to David, ‘Can I have a word with you?’

  ‘Now?’ David raised his eyes from his plate. ‘I’m just off to bed, man.’

  ‘Couldn’t you come as far as the gate with me?’

  ‘Aye, I suppose I could.’

  There fell on them now a constrained silence, and when Ann returned the light-hearted chaffing was not resumed.

  Christopher stood up saying, ‘I’d best be off; Cora’s about due.’

  ‘Oh, is she?’ cried Ann, her face lighting up. ‘Oh, I hope it’s a big litter.’

  ‘Aye, I hope so,’ Christopher replied. But he knew he did not care whether it was or not, for this was the last of Cora’s prolificities he would attend, and like his mother on any occasion for thanksgiving he added, but mutely, ‘Thanks be to God.’

  Ann watched the brothers walking down the narrow strip of garden to the gate. As David moved his shirt was drawn tight against the muscles of his back, and his height was emphasised by its relative contrast with Christopher’s; and alongside the ever-present feeling of pride in her man there was renewed in her a deepened sympathy for Christopher. Poor Christopher. She watched him now talking rapidly and urgently; then she saw David’s head jerk upwards and shake emphatically, and she wondered what it was Christopher could be asking. Likely something connected with this other business. She referred to the proposed marriage as the other business; she would not refer to it as a wedding, for the thought of it shocked her; she was heartily in sympathy with the Taggarts’ reaction to it. Her mother’s sympathetic attitude she could understand up to a point, for perhaps underlying the desire to see Maggie married lay the fact that her mother would be glad to be rid of her. But David’s attitude she couldn’t understand at all, because he liked Chris and he knew what Maggie was; yet, practically from the very first, he was in favour of her marrying Chris. She couldn’t understand it.

  But now she could see by his motions that he was refusing Chris something. She turned from the window in case they should think she was spying on them, and set about clearing the table. Her small, pointed face dropped into thoughtful lines, and she wondered why such happiness as was hers could not obliterate all the unpleasant things in life.

  Marriage, she was finding, changed one completely. It was as if it released a mature self and life was met through this new being; and life was brighter and yet at the same time darker; darker for her, because the possibility of something happening to David down the pit was fast turning into a nightmare; she had been unable to erase from her mind the memory of the accident that had broken up her wedding party. She had been assured by her mother that this feeling would fade with time but she doubted it, for her fear of the pit was bottomle
ss.

  When David returned to the kitchen, he went to the mantelpiece and picked up his pipe before remarking, ‘It’s a grand mornin’; I wish I hadn’t to go to bed.’

  Ann did not reply, but pushed up the kitchen window to let the smell of the cooking out and the fresh warm air in. Now, because he made no reference to Chris’ visit, she was certain something was afoot, and, too, that he had no intention of telling her what it was; and she was piqued into asking:

  ‘What did Chris want at this time of morning? He’s never been round so early before.’

  David’s immediate reaction was to scrape the inside of his pipe with his knife. This startled her and she thrust her fingers into her ears and cried, ‘Oh, don’t!’

  And he laughed and said apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, lass. I keep forgetting…You know, it’s funny, but me ma liked to hear the scraping of a knife inside a pipe.’

  ‘Well, I don’t; it goes to my very heart.’ She flung her head from side to side.

  He laid the pipe down and pulled her to him, and held her close in his arms, and she forgot about Chris and the pipe, and almost everything else for the moment. His lips moved in her hair, and she shivered as he traced them down to her ear.

  ‘Wish you were single again?’

  ‘No—never. Do you?’

  ‘Mm-mm!’

  ‘What?’

  The laughter rumbled in his chest. ‘Love me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ He pressed her closer. ‘Love me?’

  She rubbed her nose through the opening of his shirt and on to his chest; and she nipped at the thick layer of curly fair hair, and he jumped, crying, ‘You little devil!’ He whipped her off the ground as if she was a child; and she struggled in his arms and pulled at his hair, very much as a child would have done. Then he lowered her gently down, and as if by common consent, they both stopped their playing and became still. And he said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve got you.’

  She pressed her head against him and whispered, ‘Well, you have.’

  Then out of the stillness that enclosed them she asked: ‘What did Chris want?’

  He reached out with one hand for his pipe again. ‘He didn’t want anything.’

  She tweaked his nose, saying, ‘Well, what did he want you to do?’

  He held the pipe in his joined hands behind her back, and moved his finger inside the bowl: ‘Do? Nothing.’

  ‘Oh don’t be so close!’ She sounded impatient. ‘I know he wanted something. It’s to do with our Maggie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why, were you listening?’

  ‘David!’

  ‘Well, what makes you think it was to do with Maggie?’

  ‘Because that’s all it could do with.’

  He flicked the pipe on to the table; and taking her by the shoulders held her away from him, and with his head a little to one side he surveyed her as if at that moment she had been thrust into his life and he was trying to fathom the complexities of her. ‘You’re so gentle and sweet and tender, and you’re so soft-hearted you won’t even trap a mouse; yet’—his head shook slowly—‘yet you carry this bitterness against Maggie. I can never understand that in you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t! I don’t!’ She pulled herself away from him. ‘You know I don’t. I just don’t want Chris to be hurt. I’ve told you over and over again that you can’t imagine what our Maggie’s like to live with.’

  ‘But with Chris it’d likely be different; he’s so easygoin’.’

  ‘Meaning I’m not?’

  ‘Now, now. Anyway, who knows why she wants to marry? It might be she wants bairns or something.’

  ‘Bairns!’ Ann’s eyes opened wide and her hand went to her cheek. ‘Our Maggie wanting bairns!’ She gave a derisive laugh and poked her head forward at him: ‘Can you imagine her with a bairn?’

  He too laughed. ‘No, when I come to think of it. No’—he shook his head—‘no, I can’t see her having a bairn.’

  ‘No, nor can anybody else. The top and bottom of it is that she’s odd. And it’s this oddness that’s made her make up to Chris.’

  ‘Oh no, Ann, I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Well, I would. She’s always been queer…Oh, you don’t know what she’s like! You’d have to live with her.’

  ‘Aye’—David rubbed the bottom of his nose, his prelude to humour, and his grey eyes almost disappeared between his narrowed lids—‘aye, I would.’ Then he moved one leg against the other in the attitude of a shy youngster and asked, ‘And if I did, would you mind me giving her one of the ten bairns that you’ve booked up?’

  ‘Oh, David Taggart!’ She fell on him, and he caught her up, and again they were lost in laughter, until he said, ‘Come on.’

  He picked up his baccy tin, matches and pipe, and she murmured, ‘Let me bolt the back door, then.’

  He watched her go to the kitchen door, and he too started when, on opening it, she let out a piercing squeal. In two strides he was standing behind her looking down at the twins lying in a heap at her feet.

  ‘What the…!’ David was on them before they could scramble up and make their retreat. Simultaneously he lifted them by the collars of their coats. ‘What the devil are you at now?’

  ‘We weren’t listening; we weren’t keeking—we fell; didn’t we, Peter? We knocked on the back door afore we come in didn’t we, Peter?’

  ‘Aye, we did…Aw! Our Davie—stop it! You’re choking us!’

  ‘For two pins I’d take your pants down and skelp your backsides! Why aren’t you at school, eh? Just wait till your da knows about this.’

  Each word was accompanied by a shake, and with each shake the twins jerked out, ‘Oh, our Davie, give ower!’

  Ann stood looking at them, her hand pressed to her mouth. ‘Leave them be,’ she said.

  And David repeated, ‘Leave them be! Aye; but me da won’t leave them be when he hears of this…peeping through keyholes!’ He released his hold on them, and like greased lightning they were off, just missing tumbling into the bath of dirty water in their scrambling exit.

  This last incident brought a laugh from David, and he shot the bolt and went back into the kitchen, saying, ‘They’re the devil’s own spawn, those two. I bet you what you like they’re playing the nick from school, and they came round here for some grub to take into the country.’ He threw back his head and laughed loudly. ‘Oh, the times I’ve played the nick!…You ever play the nick? No, of course you didn’t…Come on.’ He put his arm about her and drew her out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

  But she could not laugh with him; nor could she, when she lay in his arms, respond wholeheartedly to him; for her mind was racing about trying to piece together what they had been saying about Maggie.

  If the twins had been there all the time, then it wouldn’t be long before they began to pantomime what they had seen and heard. They could pantomime what they liked about her and David, but suppose they repeated what she had said about Maggie. She became sick with the thought; and it came to her that she was afraid of Maggie, that she always had been afraid of her; for Maggie was powerful, and she was afraid of this power being directed against her. Suddenly she shivered and David’s arms tightened about her, and to his utter astonishment, she burst into tears.

  ‘Fifty pounds!’ exclaimed Kitty Taggart. ‘Do you mean to say himself is going to lend fifty pounds?’

  ‘Not out of his own pocket—he hasn’t got fifty pence. But he’s seen the club committee and put it to them that it’d be a sound investment. And they’re goin’ to do it. That’s what he said.’

  ‘Thanks be to God.’ Kitty turned from her husband and addressed herself to the picture of the sacred heart hanging above the mantelpiece. She blessed herself solemnly, and her three sons sitting about the table did not as usual chip her; but they too looked towards the picture as if inwardly voicing her sentiments.

  ‘What about the rest?’ Pat looked at his father, who was divesting himself of his pit clothes, preparatory to washin
g.

  ‘George is going to see a moneylender.’ Sep turned towards the fire as he gave this information and reached for the kettle.

  ‘A moneylender!’ Kitty and her sons ejaculated the words as by one voice.

  ‘Aye. It just happens he’s got an insurance due in two years’ time…it’s for twenty-five pounds…he might get an advance on it. And Chris could pay the interest just like he would if he was borrowing it hissel.’

  ‘Eeh! Not that insurance. Why strikes, death or disaster, Nellie’s gone without to keep them payments going. Even after George was off them ten weeks she paid every penny up…What if she gets to know?’

  Sep turned on his wife: ‘If you don’t tell her, she won’t know nowt. Least, not till she finds the policy gone. You keep your mouth shut, and everything’ll be all right.’

  Pat Taggart reached out for the sugar basin, and ladled four heaped teaspoons of sugar into his half-cup of tea. He shook his head during the operation and murmured, ‘’Tisn’t natural somehow to me.’ He pushed the sugar basin away from him with an impatient movement. ‘It’s damn funny, that’s what it is.’

  ‘What’s funny about what?’ his father enquired.

  ‘About old George,’ said Pat. ‘It’s understandable that we don’t want our Chris to marry Maggie, but what I can’t make out is all the trouble old Rowan’s goin’ to to stop her doing it. It’s as if he hated her guts; and no matter what she looks like, she’s his own flesh and blood after all.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it is understandable.’ Alec, who was two years younger than Christopher, spoke up. ‘I can see George’s point of view; our Chris isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, is he?’ His eyes ranged from one member of the family to another, expecting confirmation of his opinion. But when no-one answered him, he went on, ‘Perhaps it isn’t that George hates her at all, he just doesn’t want her to marry a bloke like our Chris.’

  ‘You look here.’ Pat leant across the table. ‘Our Chris might have a hump, but he’s worth something better than Maggie Rowan! And he’s your brother, don’t forget.’