Maggie Rowan

by Catherine Cookson

  But her father wasn’t in; he was away in Newcastle—at the moneylender’s.

  Like Chris, she did not waste any sentiment on her room; but just before leaving it she went to the window for one last look at Brampton Hill. But this was denied her, for the Hill was covered in sea fret, and she turned from the window abruptly and picking up her cases went down the stairs.

  Her mother was standing by the table, which was covered with the best crocheted cloth, on which stood a high glass cake-stand bearing a fruit loaf. And to the side was a tea tray. On Maggie’s entry, Nellie rearranged the cups, and asked quietly, ‘Won’t you ask Chris in for a cup of tea?’

  ‘No; I’ve told you I’m going straight round.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have a cup?’

  ‘All right.’

  Maggie took the cup from her mother but did not sit down, and as hot as the tea was, she drank it almost at once. As she placed the cup back on the table her mother said, ‘Are you sure I can’t give you a hand to get straight? I’m all done. It wouldn’t put me out.’

  ‘There isn’t much to do; the place is pretty clean, and the furniture won’t be here till this afternoon.’

  ‘Very well, then, lass; you know your own know best.’

  Nellie fiddled with the cups again; then turning sharply she went deliberately to Maggie and kissed her on the cheek, saying, ‘Remember I’m always here when you want me.’

  Maggie’s skin flushed to a dull purple. It was the first time she could remember being kissed; even the marriage ceremony had been bare of it. She could find nothing to say; and picking up the cases, she went to the door.

  Nellie passed her and opened the front door for her, and stood looking pityingly at her as she went out. But Maggie did not look at her mother, nor did she speak any word of thanks, and they parted in silence. As she crossed the road the touch of her mother’s lips still lingered on her cheek, and the feeling the gesture had aroused was pressing painfully into her chest, for although her mother was the only person who had ever shown her any kindness, she could not recollect ever having been kissed by her. The pain seemed to grow with each step. It was a softening pain, breaking into and breaking down the hard core of her being.

  She was hugging the pain to her as she turned round the top corner of Nicholson Street, but suddenly it was shipped away to join the other small tendernesses life had deprived her of by the sound of children’s voices coming from the chimney place of the gable end.

  This recess was a gathering-place for the children; it was used as headquarters for deady-one by the boys; and if the girls could get it on their own they mostly used its shelter to play shops, when the Co-operative store would do rare business, cheques of pieces of coloured paper being handed across the imaginary counter, to be collected and later returned by the recipients who would demand…their dividend! Their dividend! This game was made more realistic if somebody was minding a bairn, which somebody usually was, and the unfortunate creature would be loaned, to be pushed and pulled and sometimes lugged while the embryo mothers waited in the queue to receive their ‘divi’, which took the form of a number of pebbles of varying sizes.

  But today there was a mixed gathering of boys and girls, and the game was neither deady-one nor the Co-op, but one that pleased both sexes, for they were ‘at the pictures’, the actors being Peter and Alan Taggart. And the sound of their voices and the words they spoke had transfixed Maggie. She stood immobile like a breathing body embalmed in granite, unaffected by the weight of the cases as she listened to David Taggart’s voice saying, ‘Love me?’, and the answer coming as near Ann’s voice as to be her own: ‘Silly billy!…Oh, David, ducky, ducky!’

  The children roared at some pantomime that was hidden from Maggie and an iciness penetrated her apparent imperturbable poise as a voice demanded, ‘Do the other bit again. Do Maggie Rowan again. Go on Alan. Do that funny part.’

  ‘Aye…aye,’ came the chorus. ‘That part again, Alan.’

  The shouted demands and the concentrated interest of the children kept their faces turned from Maggie; and Ann’s voice came yet again to her, like a knife in her heart, saying, ‘Our Maggie couldn’t have a bairn—ha! ha! ha!—’cos she’s queer. Ha! ha! ha! And it would look like her if she did. Look, like this—’ Peter stretched his mouth wide with the first finger and thumb of one hand, at the same time pulling down his eyes by inserting two fingers of the other hand under the first.

  ‘And she’s awful to live with, ’cos she’s odd and barmy and up the pole. And she’s lanky, like this—’ This last came from Alan, who to the sound of hilarious laughter scrambled on to Peter’s shoulders.

  But almost instantly he slid down his brother’s back again, and a whisper ran through the little crowd; and they turned their faces, showing a mixture of fear, insolence and bravado, towards Maggie. Two small girls buried their faces into each other’s necks and giggled, while a bigger one admonished them, still with her eyes on Maggie, saying, ‘Shurrup! You’ll get wrong, mind.’

  The twins, adopting the ostrich attitude, sat down on their hunkers, and Maggie, her gaze fixed ahead, walked past the staring group. She went down Penelope Street, across the road and into Bush Street. She walked to the end of the street, past the shop, now closed, and around the corner to the back door. This she unlocked, and entered the yard. Blindly she walked through the jumble of derelict bicycles, for her eyes were almost sightless, so heavily were they misted with the effect of her rage. Mostly by feeling she unlocked the stairway door, and having locked this again she mounted the stairs to her new home.

  The stairs led directly into the scullery, and from here she went into the bare kitchen and dropped the cases to the floor. Then she stood near the fireplace, away from the window, and twisted her hands together until the rubbing of the skin became painful. And through her grinding teeth she brought forth words, spitting them like acid on to the empty air. ‘Talking about me like that! In front of bairns! My God! But I’ll show her! Odd…too odd to have a bairn. I’ll show her! I’ll have a bairn; by all the powers I’ll have a bairn! If not by him, then by somebody else. However I do it I’ll have one. And more than that, too. I’ll get things! I’ll make him work as he’s never dreamed of doing…Barmy, am I? Well, I’ll just show her how barmy. You’ve got to be different to rise, and I’ll rise…Too odd to have a bairn! Mental defectives can have bairns, but not me. My God!’ She held her head between her hands and rocked it slowly.

  It never occurred to her to doubt for one moment that the twins could have made up the remarks—too well she knew that they obtained their material from their elders—she would not even allow for any exaggeration; but what she did think was that if they had heard this, then there was a lot more they hadn’t heard.

  After a while she walked from one bare room to another—stalked would have been a better word—to see where she would put the furniture. But she seemed to be unable to decide, for she could think of nothing but Ann.

  Standing in the room that was to be the bedroom, so intense was her feeling that she said aloud, ‘She’s got everything, and she wouldn’t give me the chance even to be like other people.’ Her eyes hardened until they looked like pieces of dark-green glass, and she looked down the looming years. She would best her. If it took her lifetime she would best her. She did not know how it would be brought about, but her hate would guide her. And she knew that this hate was not just something that had grown during the last hour, but that it had been there from the day Ann was born.

  Slowly now, as if her thoughts were impeding her walk, she moved out on to the landing; taking off her best coat and hat she hung them on pegs on the wall, then went down the stairs that led into the back room of the shop, and at once started to sort and assess the jumble of small stock, the neglect of which, she guessed, had had a more adverse effect on the trade of the shop than the slump itself; but all the while Ann’s words were being burnt indelibly into her mind.

  As the time drew to half-past eleven, Chris forc
ed home the fact to himself that he could not go on working all night; sometime he would have to go upstairs. He was longing now, with an intensity that he had not imagined possible, to be able to undo the happenings of this day. As the day wore on so many things had combined to strengthen this feeling: first, there was the matter of meals. Saturday, although a scratch day at home, always saw a good midday meal, usually sausages and mash and fried onions, with a couple of mugs of tea and likely a fresh teacake afterwards; but Maggie presented him with a piece of blackjack and a pennyworth of chips. She had the same herself, and they had eaten it out of the paper. This latter did not trouble him in the least; it was the meagreness of the amount that both annoyed and worried him. It annoyed him because, not having paid for it, he felt in no position to complain; his worry was due to thoughts of the future. Apparently it wasn’t in Maggie’s plans that there was to be much cooking; she had already told him she would have her dinner out, and that he could close for an hour to see what he himself wanted; very definitely, too, she had no intention of ever baking, for already he had made a tea from bought bread and an order had gone in for a daily loaf. He could almost hear his mother’s lamentations over this alone, for although her house might not be any too spruce, there was always home-made bread; her cooking was good and plentiful. It had to be to satisfy the demands of her menfolk.

  The furniture Maggie had bought for the house startled him. Each piece was foreign to him. It might look all right in Raymond’s showrooms; but in those four rooms up the stairs it made him ill at ease. There was no bedroom suite, only what she called a tallboy, and the bed was a double divan—a great flat thing, with no anchorage at head or foot, and consequently there was nowhere to throw your clothes. In the kitchen there was a gateleg table and two chairs she called wheelbacks; no old saddle where you could put your feet up, and no chairs with the stuffing sticking out and springs that left rings on your skin. And in the front room she had a china cabinet, with thirteen panes of glass in each door, which seemed to make the thing important; and there was a little couch with spindle legs and covered with yellow cloth, so threadbare in parts that the white cotton wool of the packing showed through. There were two chairs to match this, and a group of senseless little tables that slid one under the other. That was all…except for a couple of thin rugs with fringes that were to be laid when the floor had been stained. One room she had left significantly unfurnished.

  But these irritations concerning the food and the furniture were mere pinpricks to his main trouble, and this was that Maggie seemed more than determined to have the bigger say in the shop. From the moment their so-called dinner was finished, except for the short time it took to direct the placing of the furniture, she had been down here. She had sorted and re-sorted the contents of boxes that had not been touched for years; she had torn labels off and stuck labels on; she had made up puncture outfits from a chaotic jumble of oddments; and above everything she had listed the stocks: hour following hour she had spent adding numbers to lists, each with its own heading, which when completed, she informed him, would be entered into a ledger. She was, he saw, merely following the system she used in the laundry, but her swift reckoning that would by tomorrow night have made an inventory of every article in the shop evoked no admiration from him, for he had seen himself joyfully, if laboriously, spending most of his days for some weeks ahead in doing what she was determined to accomplish in less than two days.

  Furthermore, she had already laid down laws: there was to be no tick! She was going to write out a card with the words: PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT AS REFUSAL OFTEN GIVES OFFENCE. The idea seemed to him suicidal. He had put it to her that no fellow these days could fork out thirty bob all at once for a second-hand bike, much less four pounds ten for one of the new ones she was aiming to stock. She had cut him short, saying, ‘If they want one badly enough they’ll pay. And it’ll be up to you to make them want one.’

  How in the name of God, he asked himself, could he make a fellow want a bike if he didn’t want one? He was realising that when he had dreamed of running the shop, it was in much the same happy-go-lucky way his mother or any other member of the family would have done.

  And on top of his irritation and worries there was the night to be faced. He sat down on a box and rested his head on his hands. The blind of the shop window and the door were drawn; there was no light except a weak gleam from the back room. It must be over an hour now since Maggie went upstairs. Was she in bed? Lord God! Why had he done it? He stood up and walked about the darkened shop…And there had been no need! They would have got him the money. She had really tricked him into it. Did ever a man feel like this, his loins weak and his stomach sick? He wouldn’t have felt like this had it been Ann. He sat down on the box again, and, putting his arms on the counter, he dropped his head on to them.

  For life! And he couldn’t say a word to her either, for until he made a go of the shop he would depend on her even for the bite he put into his mouth.

  ‘Thoo’s a bloody fool!’ His father’s words rang loudly in his ears. Yes, he was a bloody fool. Besides being weakly in body he was weakly in will; he had no gumption. Had he even a little spunk he would have stood up for himself when she was mapping out their future. But who could have stood up to Maggie? Even big fellows like their Davie or Pat wouldn’t have dared. She had a way with her that stifled a fellow. All day he had been checking retorts, sealing them down under his tongue.

  A singing voice from the street caused him to lift his head. He recognised the singer and the song…Roddy Jones, singing ‘Get the cans, on, John Michael.’

  He listened with a feeling of nostalgia as the voice drew nearer. For how many years had he lain in bed on a Saturday night and listened to that very same song? Roddy would approach his own door on the opposite side of the street, but before he entered he would finish his song. No admonition from his long-suffering wife or pushes from his pals would deter Roddy from carrying the song to its conclusion for perhaps the twentieth time that night. The respectable families in the street turned their noses up at Roddy, saying that he should live down Bog’s End if he couldn’t carry his drink better. But all the Taggart men liked Roddy, for he was a good mate and a reliable man down below, and if he liked his bust-up once a week, well, that was his business.

  The singing came to an abrupt ending outside the shop, and the footsteps stopped too, and Roddy’s voice came thick and fuddled to Chris: ‘Chris Taggart’s gotta bicycle shop now…Aye aye. Did yer hear? Aye, lad. But he’s got summat more’n a bicycle shop…he’s got Maggie Rowan!’

  ‘Sh, man! Sh! Come on hyem.’

  ‘Aye, man, be quiet! Folks is abed.’ His companions coaxed him in loud whispers. ‘Leave go!…D’ye wanna fight?’ Then Roddy’s aggressive note turned to laughter: ‘They’re gonna give him a month afore he’s back with his mother an’ the pigs! D’ye knaa Alec Taggart’s laid a bet? A quid if he’s back, hump an’ all, in a—’

  Christopher was on his feet glaring at the shop floor. He knew that a hand had been clapped over Roddy’s mouth, and the scuffling of feet indicated he was being dragged away. The last he heard was Roddy yelling, ‘It was a shabby weddin’. Aye, a bloody dry weddin’! Hoy a ha’penny oot!’

  Chris stood gripping the latch of the door. So they were betting on it, were they? He could see Alec, Pat and Bert down at the club. The talk of Fred’s dismissal would have worn itself out for the present, and Alec, always the one to bring a light note or a laugh into the proceedings, had betted on him being unable to stick to the bargain he had made.

  Anger, hot and searing, replaced the feeling of a moment ago. They would give him a month, would they! Then he’d be back with the pigs, would he! He’d show them. Perhaps there was something in Maggie’s businesslike ways after all. They thought, since he was one of them, that if he couldn’t make a go of anything with his hands there would be smaller chance with his head. But that was not all. What they were really betting on was Maggie herself, on the effect she would h
ave on him. They knew what they were betting on, did his brothers…

  He turned and leaned against the door…Yet, if he could give her what she wanted, life might be livable. And if she had a bairn it would be his, too; he would be a father, the last thing on God’s earth he ever thought of being. To be able to create a bairn! He had never looked at it like this before.

  He sat down again, and it was almost as if he was back in the hut on the allotment, dreaming; for in the gleam from the back shop a child appeared, and running towards him it clutched at his knees and laughed up into his face. And its face was very like his own, only better proportioned; round and fair-skinned, with fair curls bobbing on its forehead, and its body was straight. He sat on a long time with the child, and at last, shivering with the cold and not a little with an empty stomach, he mounted the stairs.

  The kitchen was in darkness, so resisting the desire to go in in the hope of finding something to eat, he made straight for the bedroom. At the door he knew he must not pause, and his mind seemed to lift his body into the room. There was no light but that from the lamp at the corner of the street. This sent a pale blur through the paper blind, and he could see the slight outline of Maggie on the far side of the bed. He did not expect her to speak, and he had no indication whether she was asleep or awake. With every movement an effort, he took off all his clothes except his long pants and vest, and in these he got into the bed.

  He knew that she was lying on her side, her face turned from him, and for the very life of him he could make no move to touch her. The minutes passed, ticked away by an alarm clock somewhere in the room. They mounted slowly to fifteen, and there had not been the slightest movement from Maggie, only the sound of her steady breathing. With a long-drawn sigh of relief, he told himself she was asleep. When five more minutes had passed, each filled with almost prayerful thankfulness, he turned gently on to his side and through weariness was soon asleep.