The Menagerie

by Catherine Cookson

  Jessie arrived home at half past seven, and on entering the cottage the neat brightness of its new dressings took on a brighter hue still. She wouldn’t have to leave it now; the little world that had been born out of her deep protest against the cramping and narrow existence would still be hers to enjoy. She hadn’t realised just how much she had come to love the home she had made out of her one-time prison, until this moment.

  She had with her a large bunch of flowers: roses, sweet peas and three carnations. The latter were forced and their life was ending, but they still held a radiant elegance in their scarlet fluted petals. Even before removing her hat and coat she went into the little scullery, and filling a vase with water, placed the three blooms in it, and having stood them on the corner of the book-case she stood back to admire them, thinking, ‘It’s as Miss Barrington says, you’ve got to love flowers.’

  She joined her hands together under her chin, closed her eyes tightly, and swung around. It was the action of a young girl, and one that Jessie had never been stimulated to indulge in. She brought herself to a stop and leaned her head against the mantelpiece. ‘Eeh! I’m silly, quite daft…like a lass. But who would have thought this would happen to me…partner in the shop…a share in it. I’ll be working for myself. It’s fantastic. It’s really too good to be true.’ She straightened up. ‘What have I done to deserve it?’ Her humility brought her to her knees, and leaning upon the couch, she buried her face in her hands and, without words, she prayed, giving thanks from her heart for this wonderful gift, for the kindness of Miss Barrington, and lastly, with her face pressed tightly into her hands, for the answer to her prayers, that she need not leave her home, that she need not leave this street, and that the pain that the presence of Larry Broadhurst created was still acutely with her.

  Soberly now she stood up. The young girl had fled, the woman was back, quiet and restrained. She took off her things, then went about the house opening the windows to let in the cool evening air. As she was pulling down the front window, she saw Lottie come out of the gate opposite. Lottie must have seen her but she gave no sign; instead she went up the street as if she were going into the town. And this unusual conduct from the effervescent Lottie caused Jessie to wonder, for it wasn’t the first time Lottie had done something similar in the past two weeks. And Lottie wouldn’t do anything like that unless she’d been told, and told repeatedly.

  She went into the scullery and put the kettle on, and she was setting the tray when the latch of the back door was gently rattled. On the door being unbolted, Lottie, the picture of furtiveness, sidled into the yard.

  ‘Are you in, Jessie?’ she whispered.

  Jessie smiled kindly. ‘Well, what do you think, Aunt Lot?’

  ‘I mean, are you by yourself, Jessie?’

  ‘Yes; come in.’

  ‘I won’t stay a minute, but I just wanted…’

  ‘Come in.’ Jessie marshalled her up the yard—the inside walls of the cottages might have straining ears, but the backyards were easy amplifiers of sound, and you could be almost sure, intentionally or otherwise, someone would be listening in.

  In the kitchen, she said, ‘I’ve just made a cup of tea, would you like one, Aunt Lot?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Jessie. Eeh, I always come when you’re making tea. Oh’—she pointed to the flowers—‘aren’t they lovely! I love flowers. Carnations. Our house used to be like this’—she moved her arm around the room—‘all bright, especially at the weekend. Jinny always bought herself some flowers; Larry used to give her the money. She spoke the day, Jessie, more than she’s done afore. She was upset, and she said some words right off.’

  ‘What does the doctor say?’ asked Jessie from the scullery.

  ‘Oh, he says she’s doin’ nicely, but he says Betty’s got to be sent away. Larry and him were talkin’. But I see to Betty. I do. I can see to her. I feed her and wash her face and hands. And Jinny doesn’t want her to be sent away. She got all worked up. She likes her on the bed—she lies and looks at her. But since Mrs Preston fell down and hurt her leg and Mrs Adams and Mrs Patty can only take turns at coming in, the doctor says something must be done.’

  ‘Have you had no news of Lena?’

  ‘No. Larry went to the police ’cause there’s money for her because of Jack, and he says she’s got to take Betty. But Mrs Adams says she won’t care a damn about the money, she’ll have likely gone to Charlie Burton. He was a dealer that went round, and Lena used to go about with him afore she met Jack. Mrs Adams says she’d be lying low somewhere, and there’s one thing sure, she won’t come back and look after Jinny and the house. Larry’s gone up to Durham to see if a woman will come and be housekeeper. He tried in the town but they’re all in the new factory. Jinny cried and tried to get up. The doctor says she’ll never get up if she worries. Can I have one of these biscuits, Jessie?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Help yourself.’ Jessie came into the kitchen, put down the teapot, and closed the kitchen window—Aunt Lot was talking as if she were at the other end of the street. As she poured out the tea, she said, ‘Have some bread and butter. And that’s strawberry jam. It’s home-made, from Dalton’s.’

  ‘Ooh! Dalton’s. Dalton’s sell nice stuff. I put Larry’s bait up with jam and he brought it back.’

  Lottie stopped eating, and the brightness left her face and sudden tears came into her eyes, turning their faded blue to an opaque jellyness. ‘I do try, Jessie, I do me best. And I’m not so sick now; but I feel tired and I don’t want to get up. But I do because I want to look after Larry. And the other day he went for me. Jinny was in a stew ’cause she couldn’t make me understand, and the bairn was crying, and she rarely cries, you know, Jessie. And oh, Jinny was upset, and Larry had to hold her, Jinny, I mean, and she kept crying and saying, a menagerie, a menagerie. What’s a menagerie, Jessie?’

  ‘I’ll give you some more tea,’ said Jessie, taking the cup from her hands.

  Lottie did not press for an explanation but went on, ‘It was then that I said “If Jessie…”’

  Her hand went swiftly to her face and covered her mouth, and her eyes looked over it, rounding themselves into circles.

  Jessie’s face became set, and there was pain in her voice as she asked, ‘Tell me what you said, Aunt Lot.’

  ‘Eeh, no. It’s as Larry said, if I come over I can’t help meself. He said if I came over here again he’d send me away when the bairn was born because I couldn’t keep me mouth shut. I tried. I did, didn’t I? I didn’t say anything.’

  The words came clipped and hard as Jessie said, ‘Go on, tell me why he said that. He won’t know; and he won’t know you’ve been if you don’t tell him.’

  ‘Oh no, I won’t tell him…that’s if…if it doesn’t slip out. All I said to him was, Jessie, should I come over for you when Mrs Preston took bad, ’cause you would clean up in a jiffy for us and make his bait and things, and he went for me. Eeh, he did go for me. Larry’s never gone for me like that, never. He yelled at me, Jessie, and pushed me out of the kitchen. It was nothing to say, was it, Jessie? ’Tisn’t as if…well, I told him you were going to marry the minister.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Mrs Preston; her Harry’s Ada goes to his church. You know Ada?’

  Jessie rose from the couch and taking the teapot went into the scullery to refill it. There was a deep sickness in her, and the bitterness that had been wiped away on the day Larry came back returned. She could see him, almost hear him raging in case she could come into his house, for it was his now. The desertion for the second time by Pam Turnbull had not, as one would have expected, shown herself up in favourable comparison, but had evoked a feeling that seemingly could be expressed by nothing but his rage. For a moment the temptation assailed her to take the opportunity that Alan Ramsey offered and marry him. She was never more aware than at this moment that never again would a man of Alan’s standard ask her for his wife. Other women could have the same chances repeated even again and again, but this opportunity
would be the one and only in her life, and she had an overpowering desire to show Larry Broadhurst that she was wanted, and by somebody of a class above himself. She had a swift mental picture of her wedding. It could be by special licence, next week or the week after: it would be from this house, and she would make a splash. By, that would be paying him back in his own coin, for he would have to witness it, at least some part of it, for he was tied to the house with even stronger chains than had ever tied herself. His mother, Lottie, the child, and another one coming. Why, with those tentacles binding him it must for him be almost like being buried alive.

  Jessie bowed her head over the stove. Her anger was being wiped away on a wave of pity, and she murmured down to the grid, ‘I would rather that he had gone off with her than he be saddled like this.’

  ‘I’d better go now.’ Lottie was at the scullery door. ‘It’s been lovely, Jessie. If I keep me mouth shut he won’t know nothing and I can come again…well, I’ve always come over, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘And there’s no harm in it, is there?’

  ‘No, no. Only you’d better try and not say anything. Don’t mention my name at all, Aunt Lot, that’s the safest way.’

  ‘All right, Jessie.’

  ‘I’ll let you out. And you’d better go back round the bottom corner, it won’t look then as if you’ve been here.’

  ‘All right, Jessie. Bye-bye. Oh—’ she paused. ‘You know what the morrow is…Durham gala day. Eeh, we used to all go, didn’t we? Eeh, we had some times. That’s why Jinny was so upset the day. Bye-bye, Jessie.’

  ‘Goodbye, Aunt Lot.’

  Lottie was gone, walking quietly down the lane as if Larry might hear her step, and Jessie, back in the house again, sat down on the couch. The thrill of her new position was gone. The fact that she could yet accept an offer of marriage was as nothing, because inside herself she was Jessie Honeysett, the scorned and unwanted woman with, she knew, nothing about her. He had raged at mention of her going into his house. He was going to give her no loophole through which to retrieve the past out of the chaos of the present. Even in extremity he would have none of her. She gripped her hands tightly between her knees and slowly rocked herself.

  Chapter Fourteen: The Menagerie

  Jinny lay staring ahead of her, her eyes gazing through the open door and across the passage into the kitchen. At her laboured request her bed had been moved from the wall and placed with its head to the fireplace. It was from here she could see more of what was going on…or what was not going on. The worry in her mind now, superseding even the pain of her loss, was the fact that there wasn’t enough going on in the house. Neighbours popped in, but they popped out again, and it hurt her more and more as the days went by to see her son, his face set in a fixed blankness, trying to cope with the routine of the house after having returned from the pit.

  Lottie’s efforts drove her almost into a frenzy. She wanted to scream at her; and she became frightened at the racing of her heart when she tried to make her understand. Sometimes her thinking would be clear, and at these times she would have an urge to get up. She even attempted to. She would get one leg over the side of the bed, but do what she might the other wouldn’t follow, and her efforts would make her exhausted and bring her to tears. Then her mind at times during the long days and longer nights would revert to her youth, with nostalgic longing, and she would keep repeating to herself, ‘If only we could know…if only we could know,’ and this trend would invariably recall her grandmother and the particular story of the menagerie, and she would mutter, ‘She didn’t tell me that story for nothing…she must have known…she had second sight; she must have known my house would become like a menagerie.’ This would be followed by a cry from her heart, ‘Oh Frank! Frank, come back!’

  Voices came to her now with startling suddenness from the scullery. It was Larry, going for Lottie again. He was trying to clean the place ready for the woman coming—a woman was coming to take charge of her house. She would open all the drawers and take out the good stuff and use it for every day; and help herself—they all helped themselves, and her good china and dinner ware would be broken and chipped.

  This thought spurred her to fresh effort, and she had moved her body to the side of the bed and was struggling to rise when Larry came into the room.

  ‘What you trying to do? There’s plenty of time for that.’ He lifted her up straight again, then said, ‘Come on; drink this.’

  His voice was kind but stiff, and as she took the cup of milk from him with her good hand and lay sipping it, she thought, I’ve made him into an old man; he’ll never be young again. And as Jessie had, so she said to herself, I’d rather have seen him gone with the other one. I would, I would. He’s tied for life, and he knows he is—it’s written all over him—and even if in time he forgot her and wanted any woman, who’d take him with this saddle on his back? Three helpless creatures and another coming! Oh, my God! What was to become of them? If he’d only married Jessie things would have been different, Jessie would have looked after them. But he had come to hate Jessie. She had seen it in his eyes and heard it in his voice when he went for Lot this morning when she gave herself away about being over the road. What if he carried out his threat and sent Lot away? Oh no, no. She could get angry with Lot, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her being sent away, even if it was just to be boarded somewhere. She had looked after Lot all these years. And she wasn’t daft or barmy, just silly, just silly. And yet not so silly…she had a big heart, had Lot. What had she done last night anyway?—only gone over to Jessie’s. And she’d always gone to Jessie’s.

  And in the kitchen this was just what Lottie was repeating between her bursts of weeping: ‘I’ve always gone to Jessie’s, Larry.’

  She was whimpering to herself now, as she sipped at her cocoa, and Larry turned on her, his voice low and rasping. ‘Shut up, will you, Aunt Lot? I won’t tell you again. I’ve warned you mind, what will happen. Go on into the room.’

  Lottie, still sniffing, obediently rose and went out, and Larry, dropping onto the stool she had vacated, rested his head in his hands.

  From whichever way he looked at it life was like a nightmare. He could see no end to the chaos. It did not really matter a great deal what he did, there was no longer a path along which he could direct his efforts. He went to work; he came back to the house—he did not even think of it as a home now—he saw to his own meals, for he had forbidden Lottie to make any more attempts at cooking, and he had also kindly but firmly refused to accept any more meals for himself from the neighbours, saying that he could manage. But he did not refuse them for his mother.

  His threats to send Lottie away were merely idle threats, for even if he could find a home for her, he knew his mother would resist any such move to a point that could easily cause her end. But about Lena’s child—he did not think of it as Jack’s—he had no such scruples. His mother would just have to put up with whatever could be done in that quarter. The child had cried a lot of late, which the doctor said was a good sign—a good sign of what? He was getting rid of it as soon as possible. No woman could be expected to put with it an’ all, for she’d have her hands full with his mother and Aunt Lot. And it caused him to wonder if the woman would come in any case now on Monday to look round; it wasn’t a very hopeful sign that she wouldn’t put off going to the Gala in order to call today.

  The Gala! All the years he had been at the pit he had never missed the Gala, although of late years he had harboured thoughts that certainly were not in unison with the mining community. While he had listened to speeches on the Labour Party’s policy he had thought, What is it all but a lot of hooey? Whatever they do for us they do a darn sight more for themselves. Public-spirited, me foot. The ones that are out of the pit are climbing on their knowledge. I don’t blame them for that, it’s all this talk about living to serve that makes me sick.

  But today he did not think along these lines, for in his imagination he was w
alking behind the Lodge banner, staring at the fluttering black crêpe that told of the men who had followed the band last year but who would follow it no more. He could see Jack, in particular, walking proudly, looking up at the hotel balcony on which the Labour speakers would be standing, accompanied this year by the visiting Russian delegates. Jack had liked such spectacles; he had liked the noise, the shouting, the drinking and the laughing; and today when the hundred thousand miners and their families swelled Durham to suffocation there would be all that.

  For himself he had liked to go to the service in the Cathedral. Jack had always chided him, saying, ‘Why, man, you’re a bit of a hypocrite, you never put your nose inside the church door but on Gala day.’ And, it was true, he didn’t, yet the Cathedral had always held an attraction for him. Although he hated the pit, he was proud in an odd kind of way that, as a miner, the Cathedral was his. And he had, over the years, made himself acquainted with its history, and when standing in a tightly packed throng the music and emotion would lift him out of his cynical self, and he would feel the impression of the centuries in the breathtaking, overpowering splendour of the stone pillars. And although likely he would be stuck right behind one, he knew from where each echo came. That one would be from the Chapel of the Nine Altars, where sat the Founder of Durham’s University, William Van Humbert, cast in his academic white marble; or he would see in his mind’s eye the galleried chapel with the altar of Our Lady of Pity and St Peter, crucified head downwards. Last year Pam had stood close pressed to him, and after the service was over he had walked her to the Miners’ Memorial, for she admitted that although she had been in the Cathedral she had never looked at it.