The Menagerie

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll wait for you on top then, and mind,’ he added with a faint return of his jocularity, ‘don’t go in for a beauty treatment or I won’t see the match the day.’

  Willie screwed round, and Larry paused and watched him. He had for a moment glimpsed the side he had liked about Willie, the quiet, tentative side. He had been mostly like that before the war, but not since. Sometimes he thought that the bullet that had passed through the surface of his neck had left its real mark in his brain. Well—he turned to the prop again—whatever was to be said couldn’t be important, not when it was Willie who was saying it.

  The morning passed rapidly. The road was driven forward; the mothergate trunk conveyor belt brought up; the deputy made his second round of inspection; then the call came, ‘Ride, lads.’

  Larry, with Willie behind him, clambered over the stationary belts and hurried with the rest, like a colony of hunchbacks, up the mother gate to the loading station, where, stooping still further, they crawled through the low doorways, past the winding machines and into the main roadway. Here with comparative ease and managing to walk part of the way two abreast (there being no wagons to give them an illegal ride today) they moved swiftly towards the cage.

  The rush for the cage was greater than usual, for was it not Saturday and the match on? The buzz of talk centred on nothing else. Every man had something to say as regards the outcome of the game, except Willie—so whatever was on his mind must be of some import after all, thought Larry, for it was an unheard-of occurrence for Willie to keep his mouth shut when football was the topic.

  Once above ground, their tallies and lamps given in, and in the bathhouse, Willie, by way of a reminder, said, ‘You won’t be long?’

  ‘Give me ten or fifteen minutes,’ said Larry.

  ‘OK.’

  As good as his word, he was washed and changed and in the pit yard within fifteen minutes, and there was Willie waiting for him. Neither spoke as they made their way to the main gates, but on the pavement outside which flanked the main road they paused.

  ‘Well,’ said Larry, half smiling, ‘get it off your chest.’

  Willie did not immediately begin, but after a moment of staring at his feet he raised his eyes and looked sheepishly at Larry. Then he opened his mouth, closed it again, and gnawed at his lower lip.

  Larry laughed…it was a patronising laugh. ‘Come on, man,’ he said; ‘Joe will be here in a minute with the bike, and Joe’s not the fellow to hang about.’

  Willie rubbed his hand tightly across his mouth. Then said quickly, ‘It’s about Jessie. Jessie Honeysett.’

  A slow, dull, red creeping up from Larry’s collar darkened further still the stubble that lay heavily on his cheeks and chin. His body stiffened and stretched. ‘What about her?’ His voice was gruff with reticence.

  ‘I want to try me chance.’

  ‘You want to—’ Blank amazement showed on Larry’s face. This was the last thing in the world he had expected to hear. It was fantastic.

  ‘I wouldn’t butt in afore. You see, I thought after the other business…well, you might go back to her. I waited.’

  The tautness went out of Larry’s limbs and he gave a laughing ‘Huh!’ Then said, ‘Why, man, I didn’t know it was like that with you.’

  Willie’s head drooped and he looked at his feet again. ‘Always has been, Larry, but she wouldn’t look at any bloke with you in the offing.’

  Larry stared at his friend, whom had he been describing in writing he would have labelled ‘nondescript’. Here he had been for years now, looking down on this man, calling him soft because of his devotion to football and his dog, and yet in a matter of seconds this daft attitude had shown itself as merely a façade. He had been standing aside, as always, to make way for himself.

  This knowledge of Willie’s selflessness should have wiped the trying years of peace away and thrown him immediately back into the once happy state of friendship, but it didn’t. Instead it brought up a feeling of uncomfortableness, of being put in the wrong. His inner self, which had no connection with his six foot one and which had suffered depletion badly these past four months, shrivelled still further, and for a moment he hated this smooth-faced, slap-happy individual who had caused a further shrinkage of his ego. And he had the grace to feel something of a hypocrite as he thrust out his hand and gripped Willie’s arm, saying, ‘Why, man, you’re daft. Go ahead and good luck. And mind, I’m telling you this’—with his other hand he punched Willie’s chest—‘if you get her, you’ll be getting a damn fine girl. And I should know. I’m a fool, but that’s how it is—go on.’ He gave him a push, and Willie, laughing now, said, ‘Oh man, the relief. It’s got between me and me sleep; it’s even affected me football.’

  They both laughed, loud, hearty laughter. ‘You’re a blasted fool, always were,’ said Larry. Then pointing down the road to where a motorcycle was weaving recklessly in and out of the traffic, he cried with forced heartiness, ‘Here’s Joe. Get going, and come back whole.’

  Willie said no more, but with a look that had in it more than his vocabulary could express, he ran across the road to where the motorcycle had come to a pulsing standstill.

  Walking slowly now towards home, Larry thought, Well I’ll be damned. It was unbelievable. Who would have guessed him wanting Jessie? He couldn’t take it in. Anyway it was a relief…if she’d have Willie, he’d get her off his mind. And it should stop the innuendoes and the pushing too. His mother and them would give up now, surely. Yet would their reactions matter anyway? He’d be gone soon. He paused in his walk and blinked into the sun. He couldn’t really take it in…Willie sweet on Jessie and keeping it dark all these years.

  The unselfishness, of which he would have been incapable, brought up a feeling of resentment against Willie. The fellow was daft. He couldn’t see himself willingly standing aside and letting someone else go in and walk off with a girl if he wanted her. He had wanted Jessie at one time, and he had seen he had got her. He could recall the day he had first noticed her. It was Maundy Thursday, Easter week, nineteen thirty-nine. He was singing in the choir—they were doing Stainer’s ‘Crucifixion’—and Mr Lombard had given him the solo, ‘The Majesty of the Divine Humiliation,’ for tenor. His mother and their Gracie and Florence were in the front row, and next to his mother sat Jessie. She was fifteen—he had known her since she was nine, from the time they themselves moved into the new council house. It was in the last row of the new estate and faced a lone block of pit cottages, twelve in all. The Honeysetts lived in number seven and right opposite to them, and in number ten, lived the Macintyres: Willie, Joe, and their widowed mother. Willie and he had become pals right away, and although his mother had always referred to Jessie Honeysett as ‘that poor little bairn’, he had not noticed her until he stood in the back choir stalls and faced the congregation as he sang. She was staring at him with her lips apart and her eyes wide, and her face was full of light. It was a kind of light that the minister achieved when he placed electric bulbs just above the shoulder of the Virgin Mary in the crib scene at Christmas, and the light on Jessie’s face was for him. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did, and it was that that made him see her, as if for the first time. She was tall and already her bust was high, and her dark brown hair was tied back, and he knew it would be in three long curls. He had pulled her hair once, a long time ago. He became aware, as he automatically sang:

  ‘Here in abasement; Crownless, poor, disrobed, and bleeding:

  There in glory interceding, Thou art the King, Thou art the King.

  There in glory interceding, there in glory interceding,

  Thou art the King, Thou art the King, Thou art the King!’

  that there was nothing about Jessie Honeysett that he didn’t know, for his mother had for years kept the whole house informed of her growing. He also knew in that moment that he wanted her for his girl, and that he’d get her. And he had. It had been easy, no effort on his part, no
coyness or come-hither tactics from her. She wasn’t like the other girls about the place. You never saw her walk along the main road on a Sunday night after church. Of course, there was an easy explanation for that: she had always to go straight back home and look after her mother. Her mother! If ever he hated any living being it was Mrs Honeysett. Right from the first she had tried to put her spoke in. She’d said Jessie wasn’t to go to church—it was wrong, as she had been brought up chapel. Then she had come into the open and said plainly she didn’t want Jessie to take up with a pitman. If he’d had anything in him, she’d said, he would have stayed at the grammar school when he’d got the chance and not left when he was fifteen. She herself had married a pitman, and look where it had got her—nowhere. Worry, and worry alone, faced a pitman’s wife, and that wasn’t going to be for Jessie. He never knew how he had stopped himself from telling her what everybody knew, that it was the unpaid skivvy and nurse she was afraid of losing.

  When he had been demobbed in 1947 he had been determined to marry Jessie in spite of her mother, but it would just happen that her father died and for once it looked as if Mrs Honeysett wasn’t shamming and was really ill. Jessie was working, as she had been since leaving school, in Barrington’s Flower Shop, and when she was finished there the remainder of her time was spent, as most of her life had been spent, cleaning and looking after the invalid, for now Mrs Honeysett became completely bedridden…and bedridden in an upstairs room, too. How many hours had he sat in that kitchen when his shifts allowed and watched Jessie, tired after a day of standing, trudging up and down the stairs in answer to the querulous calls. To him Mrs Honeysett was like a witch. If he went in without making a sound she knew of his presence. Perhaps, he had surmised, she gauged it from Jessie’s eyes, for Jessie had never been able to hide her love. Recalling this now made him hot and shamefaced. God, what she must have gone through two years ago. Look what he himself had gone through since. It had been just retribution all right. If she had wanted her own back she had got it, with a vengeance.

  His tread now was heavy and slow. He looked along the main road that cut straight through Fellburn and over to the right to where, in the far distance, towered the shaft of the Phoenix pit. Its accompanying pit heap had become the focal point of his hate lately. Each time he left his own pit, the Venus, he was faced by this one. Wherever you moved in this town you were confronted by the evidence of a pit, and wedged between the two were straight rows of small houses—even the new estate had been pressed into the valley, leaving only Brampton Hill to escape and perch itself on the fells. Everywhere you looked in this town and everyone you looked at had pit written all over them. Well, he wouldn’t be confronted by any of it for much longer. His shoulders went back and he pulled his cap closer onto his head. The quicker he got home and got it over the better. His pace quickened and then almost abruptly halted. In the distance and walking with her back towards him was Jessie Honeysett. There were others on the road but he could have picked out Jessie’s walk in a million, not that she carried herself straight any longer, she didn’t. Quickly he turned off left into Maple Avenue, round by Tomlinson’s Garage and the new cinema, cutting through short streets of houses, some of which still retained half-section stable-type doors, and out again into the main road ahead of her, and right opposite the Turnbulls’ shop. In his effort to avoid Jessie he had forgotten to avoid this part of the road. His face set, he crossed over, passing the big car standing near the kerb, and round the back onto the spare ground.

  His teeth were set, and bitterness like alum was in his mouth…flashy cars, big businessmen. He knew what he’d like to do with all big businessmen…strangle them, the swine.

  As he entered the scullery his mother came out of the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, lad,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  He pulled a wet vest from his mackintosh pocket and threw it on top of the gas copper, and without having looked at her he said quietly, ‘How much have I got in the store, Mother?’

  When she didn’t answer he turned and faced her. She was staring at him. ‘About a hundred and fifty-six pounds, I think.’ Then she added softly, ‘Do you know, lad?’

  ‘Know what?’

  She saw that he didn’t know, and she wetted her lips to ease the words off them. But they refused to come; she couldn’t bear to see the look on his face when she should say, ‘Pam Turnbull’s back’—she had seen enough of that look when Pam Turnbull had gone away.

  ‘Hello, Larry.’

  Lottie came into the scullery, and Jinny’s voice took on the form of a request, which was an unusual thing when speaking to her sister. ‘Take the plates in,’ she said. But habit told, and she cautioned sharply, ‘And mind, don’t drop them.’

  ‘No, Jinny.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Larry.

  ‘It can wait. Come and get your dinner. We’re all in. Florence has been, she wouldn’t stay. Sidney wants to see Harry tomorrow. I wonder what’s afoot in that quarter?’

  Chatting as she would have done on any other day when the tension on her son’s face needed easing, she went into the kitchen, where her sweeping glance and quick shake of the head told the others to follow her lead.

  ‘Sit up then, all of you,’ she commanded; ‘do you want to get this when it’s clay cold?’

  ‘Hello, there,’ said Jack. ‘Finished another?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Goin’ to the match the day?’ asked his father.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I bet Willie’s gone.’

  ‘Yes, he went off with Joe Fowler.’

  ‘Trust Willie. By the way, speaking of Joe Fowler, I met old man Fowler this morning on the way back from Grace’s. He was on about you again. He says you’re a fool, you could become a delegate, like that.’ Frank snapped his bony fingers together. ‘It’s chaps like you they want. Pat Bingham is cocking his eye to that vacancy and he can hardly write his own name. He can talk all right, but that’s not enough. Fowler says you could go along and have a word with him the night if you liked.’

  Larry pulled his chair to the table and his head and shoulders moved impatiently. ‘It’s no good. I’ve told you, Dad. There’s enough making a mess of the unions without me starting.’

  ‘But they want fellows with head pieces,’ put in Frank deferentially.

  ‘There’s plenty of them now, they’ve all got head pieces; that’s the trouble, if you ask me. And I told you last night, Dad, you’ve got to believe in a thing before you can fight for it.’

  ‘Unless you’re called up,’ said Jack, laughing.

  ‘Aye.’ Larry nodded and half smiled at his brother. ‘Unless you’re called up.’

  ‘Never mind talking of calling up, sit up. Here, take that, Dad. Come on.’ Jinny hustled her husband, and he, taking the plate from her hand, on which was heaped a huge section of meat pudding, enough for three normal helpings, said, ‘Look at it! Are we on rations agen? You’re not half gettin’ stingy wi’ the meat, lass. Look at that, our Lot.’ He pushed the plate towards his sister-in-law. ‘Not enough for a sparra, is it?’

  ‘Eeh, Frank, you’re awful. That would do me a week. Eeh, Frank.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Jinny, ‘and get your dinners. All of you. Lena, will you serve the taties?’

  As soon as they all started eating a silence fell on the room, making the clatter of the cutlery sound like a percussion band. The silence was not lost on Larry. It was as if they knew. And his father getting on about the union again. But they couldn’t know. Not one of them would dream that he could leave home—the pit, yes, but never home. Had not his one cry for six years been to get back to it? What had his mother been going to tell him? He lifted his head to look at her, and his eyes were held by Lena’s. And what he saw in them disturbed him. The half smile on her face told him she was amused by something, and when Lena was amused someone was nearly sure to be in trouble. He was in no doubt as to her feeling towards him—he knew he had asked for it, bu
t he just couldn’t stand her. He didn’t know if she was more repulsive to him when she appeared happy or when she was indulging in one of her high-powered tempers to get her own way with Jack. What, in the name of God, had Jack been thinking about to take up with a great, fat, sexy piece like that…He wondered whose bairn she was carrying. Not Jack’s, if the truth were told—she had rushed him too much. She had scarcely known him a couple of months before she had hooked him—a hole-in-corner affair in a register office by special licence. Their Jack must have been mad, stone mad. The house had never been the same since she came into it.

  The look in her eyes deepened and her smile became a leer, and, challenging her, he asked her pointedly, ‘What’s on your mind, Lena?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘You’re not amused about nothing.’

  ‘Oh. Come on, all of you, if you’re finished,’ cried Jinny, getting up from the table. ‘I want to clear away. Haven’t you finished your afters yet, our Lot?’ Then turning to Larry, and in an entirely different tone, she said, ‘All your clean things are out. Are you going to change, or are you going to have a lie-down first?’

  ‘I’ll be going out shortly,’ he said. He looked across the table towards Lena again, and after one straight hard stare he rose and went from the room. And as his steps were heard ascending the stairs Frank said quietly, ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Why didn’t you try it yourself,’ said Jinny, ‘’stead of talking about union?’

  ‘Aye.’ Frank, gripping his lips between his fingers, pulled them, first one way and then the other. ‘Aye,’ he said again.

  ‘Well, he’s got to know,’ said Jack. ‘And he’d far better be told from inside the house than out. Somebody’s got to tell him.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you go up and break it?’ said Frank.

  Jack said nothing for a moment, then muttered, ‘It’s going to be difficult. If he hadn’t been so crazy on her…it wasn’t ordinary.’