The Menagerie

by Catherine Cookson

  This new picture did not soften Larry’s hate or lessen his fears; in fact his jealousy took to itself a new aspect—he felt resentful towards her for not having prepared him; he felt that she had done him a double wrong in marrying someone as presentable as the man who was staring at him.

  ‘We…ll.’ The word was slow, drawn out, and soft, and his own voice when it barked back, ‘Well!’ sounded loud and uncouth in comparison.

  The man took off his soft hat and dashed the rain from it. Then, looking at Pam, with only a touch of reproach in his voice, he said, ‘This could have been avoided, you know…if you had done as I asked this afternoon. I gave you the chance to tell me.’ He could have been censuring her for some slight misdemeanour.

  Biting on her lip, in a childish manner of distress, Pam shook her head twice before saying, ‘I couldn’t, Ron. I didn’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘Hurt me!’ The man made a sound in his throat. ‘I don’t think that would have troubled you very much. However’—he sighed, and once again dashed the water from his hat—’now that I’m here we’ll have this out. You’ll have to make your choice.’

  ‘She’s made it.’ Larry’s voice was deep and guttural.

  The two men confronted each other, and in the older man’s eyes there seemed reflected now some of that hate that was pouring from Larry’s.

  ‘She’s got to tell me herself. She happens to be my wife.’

  ‘She should never have been your wife, and you know it. She was mine. You got her with your money and your showy car, that’s how you got her.’

  The man’s nostrils widened, and it was some seconds before he answered, ‘If I thought that was all that made her my wife I wouldn’t be here now, and if you think she can be bought so lightly, why do you want her? I may tell you, sir’—his voice rested on the title—‘that I didn’t know of your existence until her father wrote last week and informed me of the whole affair.’

  Larry’s eyes flickered towards Pam, but her head was turned from him. ‘Well, you know now,’ he said.

  The man turned away and said softly, ‘Pam.’

  Slowly, she turned towards him, and Larry, watching her face, which to him was so beautiful that to look upon it brought a sort of pain, saw it now showing distress. Her eyes were full of sadness, her cheeks without colour, and her lips trembling.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ron.’

  They were the words she had spoken to him the day she had come back to him, and she was saying them in the same way now…She can’t do it! The cry was loud in his head. She can’t do it! She’s mine.

  ‘I believe you,’ said the man; ‘but why didn’t you tell me before? I would have understood. At least, I would have tried. It would have made it easier for you and prevented all this.’

  ‘I…couldn’t hurt you.’

  ‘But you have hurt me.’

  ‘I know.’

  The fact that they were talking as if he wasn’t there made Larry rear. He wanted to lash out at the man, see him grovelling in the mud, but in spite of himself he was forced to stand aside and listen. ‘You know what it will mean if you make this decision, don’t you?’

  Pam said nothing, but continued to look at her husband with a troubled stare.

  ‘I could make you happy. I know I could. You may not think so now, but I could. You haven’t given us half a chance.’

  It was too much. ‘Look here.’ Larry almost sprang forward, and the man, without looking at him, said, ‘Will you be quiet for a moment? I am talking to my wife. Your turn will come, and by what I can gather you have lost no opportunity lately. Pam’—complete master of the situation and speaking with evidently controlled quietness, he brought her distracted attention to himself again—‘look at me. I can give you so much that you need…not only in material things—and you are not unappreciative of those, are you?’ He paused a moment before continuing, ‘But socially and intellectually, and the last, although you may not be fully aware of it yet, is a need that you will miss if you are deprived of the opportunity to develop it.’

  The man’s slow polished tone added weight to the inferred slight. But Larry’s hot retort was checked by Pam’s voice, full of regret, as she said, ‘I know, Ron, I know. And I don’t want to do this, not to you, but I can’t help it. I should never have married you. I’m to blame for it all. I do care for you, really I do, but not in the way I care for…Larry. I don’t want to do this to you; you have been so good…Oh, I’m so sorry, Ron.’

  The last words ended on a broken cry, and the man stood quite still for another moment or two, then dashing his hat once again, he said, ‘There’s little more to be said then.’

  Relief and joy should have been racing through Larry, but her decision had left him strangely numb. She was coming to him, yet in some odd way he felt she was sorry she had to, as if she were being forced against her will.

  ‘You understand that I will take the car?’

  There was no reply from Pam to this.

  ‘And about the jewellery.’

  Larry watched her tongue flick over her lips as she said, ‘You gave them to me.’

  ‘I gave them to my wife. My mother had worn them, and her mother, and her mother…they belong to the family. The fob’—he made a small gesture towards the breast pocket of her suit, above which showed a gold pin, and then to her right hand, where, on the middle finger, was set a ring similar in appearance to costume jewellery, insomuch as it was ornate, but bearing, instead of the usual bright-coloured stone, three half hoops of glittering diamonds—‘they could never be replaced, not with money. And the others, Pam.’

  She was silent while she twisted the ring on her finger.

  ‘I am starting for London tonight. I would like to take them with me. You brought them all over?’

  There was a question, and a touch of censure, here. ‘Perhaps you would let me have the key to the box, and that of the car?’

  Her lids were drooped and her head lowered as she pulled off the ring and unloosened the fob and handed them to him. And when she fumbled in her bag for the key, her whole body slumped.

  There was a shame about her that Larry could not bear to witness. He silenced the voice which was telling him that she knew she was going to leave him, but nevertheless had brought his jewellery, and stepping to her side, his lip curling back until his mouth looked ugly, he said, ‘And you say you didn’t buy her! Well, you’ve got your money back…and now we’re all square!’

  The blow was so swift and so unexpected that it caught Larry completely off his guard and sent him reeling and dizzy against the black timbers of the barn. It had been delivered straight between the eyes. For a full moment he did not know where he was, but when his vision cleared he saw the man before him and Pam clinging to him, beseeching him to go.

  Like an enraged animal he sprang towards her, crying at her, ‘Out of the way!’

  ‘No, no! You mustn’t. Ron, Ron, go. Please—oh, please!’

  He gripped her arm, trying to tear her from the man, but swiftly she turned and clung to him now, holding him with a strength that was phenomenal. ‘You mustn’t! You mustn’t! Let him go. Please, do this for me, do this for me.’

  ‘Get out of the way!’ It was the man’s voice speaking to Pam, cuttingly cold now. ‘Do not deprive him of this satisfaction. He’ll need to remember something with satisfaction before life has finished with him. His hell will start when it is borne through his thick skull that he is depriving you of a way of life to which your education has fitted you. If he were a man he wouldn’t be doing it, but he is a boy…immature.’

  He seemed bent now on getting Larry from her struggling hold, and his taunting became even more pointed. ‘Yes, you can go black in the face. What does it matter what your years are, or how long you’ve worked? I’ve had dealings with your kind. You’re like children: deprive you of something and you scream and yell and hit out.’

  ‘Ron, Ron, stop it. For God’s sake, go.’

  With a great effort, Larry tried to
fling her from him. Inside, he was screaming and yelling and hitting out; he was battering the self-assurance and the cultured poise which he both hated and envied out of the man. He knew he had hated this man before he’d set eyes on him, but he had never imagined that the sound, more than the sight of him, would fill him with a rage that almost amounted to madness.

  Pam, still clutching at him like a frantic octopus, was sobbing wildly. Short of swinging about and hurling her against the wall he could not rid himself of her. The man looked at her and listened to her cries for a moment longer, then, with a final flick of his wet hat, he settled it carefully as if its angle was of importance, turned slowly on his heel, and went out.

  The rain must have stopped, for apart from a gentle sizzling there was no sound now but Pam’s sobbing. And still clinging to Larry, she continued to cry until, from the distance, she heard the sound of the car starting. Then, and then only, did she relax her hold, and almost in a state of collapse she gave way to greater sobbing still.

  Although his arms were about her and he knew she was his, he had no feeling of victory. Instead, he felt humiliated and beaten. He put up his hand and touched his swelling nose. The pain was shooting through his head like a knife.

  She moved her head against him. And he forced himself to ask, ‘You’re not sorry?’

  Her head moved again, and he growled, ‘You’ll get a car and jewellery.’

  She murmured something, but he could not catch her words, and when he lifted her chin and looked on her tear-stained face, he said bitterly, ‘I believe you are sorry.’

  ‘No’—she gave a series of short gasps—‘no, I’m not. But he was good, and I hated to hurt him, that’s all.’

  As she gasped again, he said, ‘Don’t say that!’ The words seemed squeezed through his teeth. ‘I can’t bear it. You didn’t feel like that about me.’

  ‘I did…I did.’

  ‘Oh, God Almighty!’ He pushed her from him. ‘Do you want us both?’

  Silently she stood before him, the tears running down her face. She couldn’t truthfully give an answer to that question, for it would have been Yes.

  Chapter Nine: The Proposal

  Before leaving the house Jessie made it her business to wait until she saw some woman dressed for ‘out’ leave her gate and come down the street. She watched from the side of the curtains, and when she saw Mrs Gourlay resplendent in her new summer coat and hat sailing towards the house she opened the front door, and making a to-do about the latch she closed it just as Mrs Gourlay came abreast of her.

  ‘It’s a nice evening after the rain.’

  Mrs Gourlay nodded. ‘Yes, it is, Jessie. By, it was a day yesterday. Talk about June. Pity anybody on their holidays. Still it’s few who’ll be on holiday with the rail strike and that. Strikes, strikes, nothing but strikes…dockers, railwaymen, sailors. Did you ever! Well, let them get on with it, as long as our men keep in…we’ve had enough strikes to last our lifetime.’

  Jessie did not say the mines wouldn’t keep working very long if there was no way of sending off the coal—her personal worries far overshadowed those of the nation at the present moment. So all she said was, ‘Yes; you’re right.’

  After traversing a short way in silence, Mrs Gourlay, glancing sideways at Jessie, said, ‘Off for a walk some place, Jessie?’

  ‘Well, not for a walk exactly. I’m just going to Mrs Boucher’s.’

  ‘Mrs Boucher’s?’ Mrs Gourlay’s eyebrows moved slightly upwards, and her head inclined to one side with polite enquiry.

  ‘She’s drawing a club the night.’

  ‘Oh, is she? And you’re having a draw?’

  ‘Yes, a few to get some things.’

  ‘Is it a money draw or the store?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Well’—Mrs Gourlay moved her bright leather handbag from one arm to the other—‘I’d be careful about dealing with Emma Boucher if I was you, Jessie. Of course, it’s not my business, but once you get into her clutches you’re there for life. If you wanted a club or two, why didn’t you try Mrs Hanley’s? She’d have been only too happy to oblige. You know where you are with her. A shilling a pound for the draw, and the store dividend, that’s all she asks, not a backhander when you get your ticket. Why, Mrs Tollet had to pay Emma Boucher five shillings down for a five-pound money club, and when she got her draw and only gave her half a crown back, she had something to say. And she was in hot water a few years back, you know, for moneylending. Tuppence a week for the loan of a bob she was charging. Jessie’—Mrs Gourlay shook her head slowly—‘you want to look out with her. Are you short?’

  ‘Well…yes. I’ve been buying things, you see.’

  Again Mrs Gourlay’s head went to one side, and Jessie could almost hear her turning over in her mind this new construction on how of late she had come by her money.

  Mrs Gourlay’s manner became more motherly, and at the market place she left Jessie with a final warning: ‘Mind, Jessie, don’t say I didn’t put you wise.’

  Jessie had few prejudices, but clubs were one of them…likely because she had been clothed by them all her life. But out of desperation the idea came to her that if it was known she was drawing big clubs, her new affluence would be put down to their benevolence. Mrs Boucher was a well-known figure in the town and had lived all her life by her clubs and moneylending. The latter had installed her in a new house at the far end of the town, and it was the distance from her own immediate quarter which suggested to Jessie the likelihood of her little plan working. That it would eventually make her out to be a liar she didn’t mind.

  The events of the past few days had in a way been more upsetting than the effects of Larry’s rejection, which had hurt only herself; but now Willie and the minister were involved. Willie, she knew, was bewildered. She had no proof that she could show him of her mother’s hoard; not even the sovereigns, for these, together with what money she had left, she had placed in the bank. She had done this on the advice of Miss Barrington—the only person in whom she had confided. Although at times she still stood in awe of her she had always proved a sympathetic and good employer. But what, after all, was the good of Miss Barrington’s trust—she lived in another world. It was her own world she had to convince, and if Willie couldn’t believe her it was going to be difficult to convince others. And then there was the minister. She hadn’t seen him since Saturday night. She had been unable to face him on Sunday, so had stayed away from the service; and twice during the past week, when a knock had come on the front door during the evening she hadn’t gone to open it but instead had bolted the back door and gone upstairs. But sooner or later, she knew, she would have to face him.

  For the past two years, life had been, to say the least, painful, worrying and nerve-racking. It was still painful, but it had also become difficult, for she was facing an undreamed-of issue, the defence of her morality. As much as she wanted people to be in no doubt as to her moral integrity, she wanted, nevertheless, first and foremost, all suspicion wiped away from the unsuspecting minister. She knew her own kind too well to try to convince them by talk alone—with them, seeing was believing. So Mrs Boucher had come to her mind in the nature of a brainwave.

  In Mrs Boucher’s front room she sat with nine other women, and in the course of time drew out five lots from the hat. Only one of the women present was from her own neighbourhood, a Mrs Patty, but one was enough. Jessie, after handing Mrs Boucher five shillings and ignoring the shrewd questioning in the older woman’s eyes, waited deliberately for Mrs Patty, determined on the way home to give her something in the way of information to carry back to the street. But the parrying remarks about the weather and the numerous strikes had hardly begun, when her whole evening’s effort was wiped away by a voice which came from behind them saying, ‘Hello there, Jessie. This is a coincidence. I was just on my way to see you.’

  Jessie stood still as the minister moved to her side. She looked at him for a moment, and pressed back the urge to cry at him, ‘Oh, go
away. For God’s sake, go away.’

  Mrs Patty, too, stopped, her eyes brightly darting from one to the other.

  ‘Isn’t it a glorious evening! And they say you don’t get good weather in the north. Oh yes, I know all about last night.’ He flapped his hands at them both. ‘But let me tell you, you don’t get evenings like this in the south…slow, warm twilights.’

  Of one accord, they moved on, the minister walking between them. ‘You’re Mrs Patty, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Janet’s mother. She’s a fine child, and quick.’

  Mrs Patty was gratified and went into a detailed account of Janet’s virtues which filled the time until they reached the street. Jessie did not once open her mouth, but her thoughts were racing. She’d have to tell him; that was the only thing to do. If he went on blindly like this, like as not he would be reported to—well, whoever they reported Baptist ministers to. It was a shame…Oh, why were people so bad-minded? He was the nicest man she had ever met—yes, Larry Broadhurst included. Larry Broadhurst could never be nice in the way this man was nice. There was a natural gayness about him, and a quick sympathetic tenderness. And it came to her that it was strange he should be a Baptist minister, or a minister at all for that matter.

  It would also happen that after the heavy downpour of rain almost everyone seemed to have turned out to do their front gardens, and three times the minister called out a greeting to a weeder. Then, just as they reached the Macintyres’ house, the door opened and Willie came out.

  ‘Oh, hello there.’ The minister half stopped.