He turned round as if he were being caught in some unpleasant action.
‘What’s wrong?’
Slowly he walked towards the lamp and looked up at Maggie. He gave a little nervous laugh before saying, ‘I slipped into a pool of something round there. I was taking a short cut.’
Her eyes roamed over him; at his coat and then his feet; and she said, ‘They should leave a light on that building…the place is a byway.’
The retort seemed characteristic of her; and he said, ‘Aye. What they do and what they ought to do are two different things. Well, I’ll be making me way home. And the sooner I get there the better, I think.’ Again he gave the nervous laugh. He expected her to move on, but she didn’t; instead, after an awkward pause, she said, ‘Won’t you come in and get cleaned up? My…my place is just round the bottom of the street.’
‘Well, thanks. Thanks all the same, but I’m in such a mess, I’d better…’
‘You can hardly go through the town like that, the stuff’s dripping off you.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And it isn’t likely they’ll welcome you on the bus.’
He gave her a long, scrutinising look. What had she done to herself? She was different somehow. It wasn’t in her manner—that still seemed to be the same, short and abrupt. He could see that she wanted him to go home with her, and he thought he knew why. She wanted to talk about the boy. Well, no-one could say she’d been unreasonable lately. It was only natural that she should want to hear about him. And if he went, he’d kill two birds with one stone, he would talk the other business over with her. She’d want to be free as much as he did; it would only be the custody of the child that would concern her.
He shivered, and she said, ‘It’s no use standing here with wet feet; the most sensible thing to do is to get them off.’
‘Yes; you’re right.’
Silently now, they walked down the street and turned the corner; and never had he felt so self-conscious as when he entered her gate and followed her round to the back of the house. Even in the dark he could feel the neat trimness of the place; and when she unlocked the back door and switched on the light in the little kitchen and he saw the blue-squared, shining linoleum, he exclaimed, ‘No, Maggie. No, I won’t come in. I’ll mess up everywhere.’
‘Don’t be silly; the floor’ll wash. And don’t stand there in the cold.’ She held the door back and he passed her, stepping with ludicrous steps to avoid as much as possible dirtying the floor.
The kitchen was soothingly warm, the heat coming from a stove in the corner. There was a row of cupboards, painted cream, and a small table with a porcelain top.
‘Sit down’—she pushed a stool towards him—‘and let me have your boots.’
‘Look, I…’
She made an impatient movement, and he sat down and took off his boots. His stockings too were wet, and she held out her hand for them, and added, ‘Let me have your coat, it’ll dry in no time on the boiler.’
He stripped himself of his coat, and there he stood, as he knew she hated to see him…in his braces!
In spite of all her own evident drawbacks, she always managed, he thought, to place him at a disadvantage.
He watched her open a cupboard and hang up his coat near the boiler, then passing into the next room, she said to him over her shoulder, ‘Come in here.’
For a moment he hesitated. Then, walking gingerly in his bare feet, he followed her; and immediately he forgot about the situation between them as his eyes took in the room. By, it looked comfortable. And a coal fire an’ all, not electric!
She saw him staring at the fire, and said, ‘It’s a new type; it stays in all night if you bank it down. It’s never been out for a fortnight.’
‘No?’
He continued to stare at the fire shining out of its tile surround, and she said, ‘Sit down.’
He took a seat by the side of the fire, and then she asked him, ‘Would you like something…tea, or a cup of coffee?’
‘I wouldn’t mind, Maggie.’
This was beyond him. As a rule there were no odd cups of tea in Maggie’s house.
As he listened to her moving about in the kitchen his eyes wandered round the room. There were still some of the pieces of furniture from the Hill…the little pieces, like that group of tables and the bookcase and the armchair in which he was sitting. But here they looked different somehow…homely.
His thoughts centred on her again. Something had come over her. But whatever it was, it seemed for the better. Perhaps she was finding life easier, living without him…He must have been a great source of irritation to her; he would be to any woman like her, more mind than body; in fact, he supposed, to any woman at all. Then why had he contemplated asking Ann to marry him when he should be free?…Oh well—he shook his head at himself—Ann had liked him…or he thought she had. But liking wasn’t loving. No, far from it. Well, that pipe dream was over. He could see now it had been nothing but an illusion brought over from his lonely youth, and because there had been no love in his life he had clung on to it.
Maggie came in with a tray which she placed on a side table, but she didn’t offer him a cup right away. Instead, she looked at his feet, then went out of the room; and he heard her footsteps in the room overhead. He looked down at his bare feet…white, flat, and ugly. They even offended his own gaze, and he tucked them as far from his sight under the chair as he could.
When Maggie returned, without directly looking at him, she dropped a pair of socks on to his lap, saying, ‘They were in the mending bag. I found them after.’
Slowly he picked up the socks and looked at her. She was now bending over the tea tray. She had kept and darned a pair of his old socks! And after he had done what he did…The memory of his hand hitting her mouth made him hot…What was it about her? She looked different…like folks did after they’d had a long illness. Well, no, not quite like that either. More like as if she had been through some process, or a furnace of some kind, and filed down. She was still Maggie…her manner, her voice…and yet she wasn’t.
‘I made tea.’ She handed him a big cup. Then taking her cup and sitting down at the opposite side of the hearth, she asked, ‘Did you get my letter?’
‘Aye…Yes, I got it.’
They both drank from their cups.
‘You wanted to see me about something?’
He took the spoon from his saucer and stirred his tea; and she said, ‘Is there not enough sugar?’
‘Yes. Yes, heaps.’
How did a fellow start saying, ‘I want a divorce’? If she would give him a lead…
‘Was it about Stephen?’
‘Well, partly.’
‘How is he?’ She looked into her cup. And he stared across the hearth at her bowed head, thinking: My God, but it must have been hell for her. And still is, if I know owt…But she’s not fighting any more, she’s spent. That was it; the look she had…the way she acted…she was spent. You could almost say she had died…she was dead while she still breathed. She was lonely and lost. Yes, he could see it now. She belonged to no-one, and no-one belonged to her.
He had to moisten his lips a number of times before he could say, ‘He’s all right. Well, a lot better. The doctor saw him last week and he said he was doing fine.’ He could not say to her what the doctor had actually said, that now a gentle curb must be applied to the boy; nor could he say that he himself knew this was necessary or that the boy’s grandmother was the last person who could apply it; but to his own amazement he found himself saying, ‘I’ll bring him round if you like, for an hour or two some time.’
Their eyes met across the distance. Then a surprising thing happened. Her hand shook until the cup rattled in the saucer, and her eyes, heavy with unshed tears, fell away from his, and she rose abruptly and went to the tray.
After a moment or so she asked, ‘Will you have another cup?’
‘No. No, thanks, Maggie.’ He felt embarrassed and at a complete loss. So he said,
‘I’ll be getting along…I’d better scrape those boots.’
‘There’s no need.’ Her voice was tight.
She passed behind his chair as she spoke and went to a cupboard to the side of the fireplace. He turned his head and watched her opening the door, and a painful sensation came into his throat. There, alone, but side by side on a shelf was a pair of his boots and a pair of Stephen’s shoes.
She picked up the boots, saying, ‘You forgot them,’ and she placed them at the side of his chair and went into the kitchen again.
His old boots…True, he had forgotten them. He had only once gone back to the Hill house, and he had been unable to find them and had concluded she had thrown them out. But she had kept them.
He picked them up. They had been polished, well polished. He’d always had to polish his own boots, even when they lived on the Hill.
He looked towards the kitchen door…What could be the meaning of it? His socks…and now his boots. And put away in a cupboard, together with Stephen’s. Surely, she…No. No, that would be fantastic. She’d never had any use for him; the boy was all she cared for; and yet…
Slowly he drew on the boots; and then went to the kitchen door. ‘Is the coat anywhere near dry, Maggie?’
She was standing with her back to him, doing something at the table.
‘I don’t think it’ll be yet.’
He took a further step into the kitchen, and then stood staring at the table. On it was a paper, and on the paper stood his boots. She was scraping the mud off them with a knife!
‘Here!’ he said. ‘What on earth you doing?’
‘They’ll be easier to carry,’ she said, ‘and will dry sooner.’
She did not lift her head, and he went behind her and took one of the boots from the table and placed it on the floor; and when he went to take the other from her his hand gripped her wrist, and they both became still.
The mud-caked boot branched from their joined hands like a gnarled stump. Their eyes focused on it, then slowly raised to each other. And again there were tears in hers. And at the sight of them a warmness came into Christopher’s body. Pity for her once again flowed back; but with a difference; the pity he had given her before he would have given freely to any maimed animal, but in this pity there was a tenderness, a private tenderness, for he saw that she had…cottoned on to him…she liked him. Well, he would call it by that name for the present; no woman of any sort had ever loved him, not even his mother; they had pitied and liked him, but that was as far as it had gone. But she, Maggie…Well, dear God!
Slowly he withdrew the boot from her hand, and, picking up the other one, he stood them in the corner by the stove; then turned and looked at her, saying, ‘They can stay there; I’ll be back for them.’
The End
Maggie Rowan Page 33
