by Marie Joseph
‘His mother looks like something what’s dropped off a flitting.’
Maggie lowered her head over the blouse she was feather-stitching without smiling, and Clara sat forward.
‘You feel all right, don’t you, love? You’ve been acting different lately. Are you sweet on him?’
Maggie wished Clara would just get up and go. She could not talk naturally, it was no good. Oh, dear God. . . . Apart from the one thing there were no signs. No being sick in the mornings, nothing. Oh if only Clara would go back next door. . . . She was better left alone, like they were leaving her alone at the mill now. She merely stood at her looms, willed herself into a state of numbness, even as her fingers busied themselves with the cotton threads and the intricate machinery. She ran home when the hooter went and half the time did not even bother to make herself any tea. She made herself go to Chapel because there in God’s house she could pray to Him with all her heart and mind not to let it be true. She was anaemic, she was imagining the worst, and one day, perhaps tomorrow, it would come right and this terrible anguish would all be over.
‘Are you sweet on Kit Carmichael, love? He walked you home from Chapel again, didn’t he?’
Maggie pricked her finger and sucked at it furiously.
‘If you don’t mind, Clara, I think I’ll go upstairs and have a bit of a lie down. I keep having these headaches coming on.’
‘Doctor Williams’s pink pills,’ Clara said at once, but getting up and going just the same.
The room where the sick woman lay was smaller than Maggie remembered; smaller and more oppressive, with the inevitable coal fire burning high in the grate.
‘Do I look all right?’ she had asked Kit nervously when he called for her, and he had nodded without really looking at her, muttering that they must hurry.
‘Mother is having one of her off days,’ he explained. ‘I ought not to have left her alone, but I knew you would be waiting for me.’
Maggie sighed. She had willed herself to make the effort, even told herself that getting out a bit might take the worry off for a while, but it was still there, tightening her chest, smudging dark shadows underneath her eyes, and pinching her face into lines.
‘It might be better if we waited for another time then?’
Kit licked his lips. ‘No. She says she wants you to come. She’s like that, is Mother. One minute you would think she was dying, but she never gives in. I could hear her panting for breath when I was upstairs getting ready.’
And hating me with every panting breath, Maggie thought, as after a silent walk through the streets, silent because she was feeling the worry starting up again, and because Kit was urging her on so quickly there would not have been breath to talk anyway.
‘We’re here, Mother!’ he called out the minute the door was open, and for the second time Maggie stood to attention at the foot of Mrs Carmichael’s bed.
The old woman lay, propped high with pillows, dark eyes sending out shafts of stabbing dislike, busy fingers smoothing and pleating the turned-down sheet.
‘I’ll take your hat and coat,’ Kit told her, and as Maggie obediently unpinned her hat, divested now of its daisies, and unbuttoned the long coat, she was conscious of the unwinking stare from the bed.
‘Take them upstairs, Kit. I don’t like the front room being untidy. Then stop up in your room for a bit. I want to have a few words with Miss Craig on my own.’
He hesitated, but only for a moment, then with an apologetic glance at Maggie, he did exactly as he was told.
Mrs Carmichael pointed to a chair. ‘Sit down, Miss Craig.’
Her beady eyes were on Maggie’s blouse, and perching on the very edge of the chair Maggie wondered for a wild moment if she had guessed something was wrong and was looking to see if her shape was any different.
She told herself not to be so silly and glanced surreptitiously round the room when Mrs Carmichael closed her eyes.
Hardly a touch of colour brightened the drabness of the heavy, suffocating furnishings. Brown fringed mantel-border, maroon bobbled tablecloth, oilcloth the colour of beef tea, covered with two rag rugs pegged from pieces of black cloth. Sepia pictures framed in black, two ebonized vases each corner of the mantelpiece, and a marbled clock dead centre. Flat iron resting on the range and a dark mahogany chest of drawers covered with a brown runner, and overall the powerful smell of camphor.
Maggie noticed a tray set on top of the chest, with three flowered cups and saucers, a milk jug covered with a net weighted down with beads, and a plate covered with a tea cloth.
Everywhere signs of a woman’s touch, and yet she realized that the thin spare little woman in the bed had had no part in it. Her heart warmed to the gentle man waiting upstairs.
The minutes grew and lengthened.
Mrs Carmichael took note of the way this girl sat with her back ramrod straight and her head held high. The black eyes narrowed into calculating slits. No milk-pobs mill girl this. Not one she could send packing with a flea in her ear.
A beauty too, with a complexion that looked as if her cheeks had been newly scrubbed, and heavily fringed eyes that met hers with unwavering frankness. Just for a fleeting moment the old woman was back in time, seeing herself as she had once been. A young woman, with cloudy dark hair, breasts high and proud. Entirely without volition she put a claw-like hand over her own wasted, stringy breasts, and felt a stab of jealousy so acute it felt as if a dagger had been thrust into her chest.
‘Kit tells me you live on your own,’ she said suddenly in a hoarse growl of a voice, startling Maggie into a nervous betrayal of her feelings by the quivering of her long eyelashes.
‘Yes, that’s right, Mrs Carmichael.’
The dagger in her chest gave an extra twist as the old woman pushed herself higher on her pillows. This girl had a refinement in her speech that had never been learnt down Foundry Street. The flat vowels were there all right, but there was breeding there somewhere, she would swear to it.
‘How old did you say you were?’
‘Just seventeen, Mrs Carmichael.’
So this young madam thought she was going to give as good as she got, did she? Well, she would see about that.
‘Have you nobody of your own? No family?’
‘Two brothers. Twins. They joined the army years ago. I don’t hear from them often.’
Mrs Carmichael digested this for a moment, then she pulled at the high neck-frill of her calico nightdress before saying:
‘And your father cut his own throat?’
Maggie’s head drooped. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘What drove him to that, do you suppose?’
‘Nothing drove him to it, Mrs Carmichael. He was ill. He had been ill ever since my mother died of the diphtheria years ago. He wasn’t himself when he did it.’
‘Not himself? Do you mean he was mental?’
Maggie’s eyes met her own with a directness that would have made a lesser woman flinch, but the old woman was fighting for what she considered to be her very existence, and only the constant pleating and re-pleating of the turned-down sheet betrayed her agitation.
‘My father had a stroke, then he developed an illness of the nerves that affected his brain. The doctor explained it to me. It was a kind of depression he had no control over.’
‘Doctors know nothing.’
‘No, Mrs Carmichael.’
This was getting them nowhere fast, and any minute Kit would be coming back down the stairs, and brewing the tea, and passing round the potted-meat sandwiches he’d taken such a time over, slicing off the crusts and cutting them into triangles, just as if the Queen herself was coming for her tea.
‘And you think you’re going to get my son, do you, Miss Craig?’
Maggie drew in a sharp breath.
‘I don’t think nothing of the sort, Mrs Carmichael. But Kit is a good and kind man. I’ve never met a kinder man in the whole of my life. You must feel very lucky to have a son like that.’
With an ab
ruptness that brought Maggie swiftly to her feet, the old woman slumped back on to her pillows, her eyes wide open, her fingers clutching the air as she gasped for breath. It was like the time of the prayer meeting, but worse. There was a loud rasping sound as Mrs Carmichael fought for breath. Her face turned blue, and the deep-set eyes seemed to fall back in their sockets, rolling right back with the whites gleaming like milk jelly.
‘Kit. . . .’
The cry was a strangled groan, and even as Maggie moved, she heard his running footsteps down the stairs.
Pushing her to one side, he lifted his mother, held her hands, reached for a piece of cloth and sprinkled something on it.
Even in the middle of her distress Maggie found she was reading the lable on the bottle with complete detachment.
‘Mr Himrod’s cure for even the most distressing cases of asthma.’
Kit held the cloth to her nose. ‘It’s all right, Mother. I’m here.’
She pushed the cloth away, and pointed an accusing finger at Maggie.
‘She . . . she. . . .’
Horrified, Maggie stepped back a pace, then another, her eyes wide and startled. ‘I didn’t say anything,’ she gasped. ‘I said nothing to upset her, Kit. Nothing.’ She felt the blood drain from her face, as for the first time in weeks she forgot her own frantic worrying.
Mrs Carmichael was dying; she was going to peg out right there before her eyes, and it would be all her fault.
She ought not to have stood up to her and said that about her being lucky to have Kit. She was too outspoken and always had been. Anxious to make amends she forced herself to approach the bed again, but even as she stretched out a hand Mrs Carmichael knocked it away with a slicing motion of her own.
‘Go through there, Maggie,’ Kit whispered, jerking his head towards the dividing door, and willing to do anything that might help, Maggie walked through into the parlour, and stood trembling by the net-shrouded window, looking on to the quiet afternoon street, placing her hand over the pin-tucks to still the fluttering of her heart.
There was an aspidistra plant in a pot standing on a bamboo table in the window, and without knowing what she was doing, Maggie stroked a shiny dark green leaf, then drew her hand back as its coldness gave her no comfort.
The room was very damp and smelt of chilled soot and beeswax polish, and as the laboured breathing coming from the living-room showed no signs of easing, she faced the truth.
Kit would never marry her nor anyone whilst his mother was alive. He was more than a son to his mother; he was the husband who had deserted her, the daughter she had never had, the lover she needed to ease her sense of rejection. It was dreadful and it was also terrible, but it was true. . . .
Maggie rubbed her arms and shivered as the minutes ticked by. She wondered if she dare creep upstairs and retrieve her hat and coat, and quietly let herself out of the front door? It would be the best thing all round, she thought, with resignation.
When at last, Kit came to her, closing the door behind him, she looked at his face and saw that there was a man who could take no more.
Not a weak man, nor even a dominated man, but a man bowed down with responsibility, with a kindness and a compassion he could not and never would deny.
He came straight to her, and put his arms round her, holding her up against him, so that she felt the warmth and the gentleness of him, the softness of his undeclared love for her.
‘I’ve got her off to sleep,’ he said. ‘Oh, Maggie. I’m that sorry. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am.’
His hand was on her neck, beneath the heavy weight of her hair, stroking gently, caressing. . . .
‘Oh, Maggie, what am I going to do? Tell me what I ought to do?’
Because she pulled away from him at that moment and saw the suffering in his eyes, the words she had meant to say were stilled.
What she had wanted to say was:
‘Stand up to her, Kit. Make her see that she can’t have an attack just when it suits her. Harden yourself! Tell her if you want to go out with me then you will go out with me. . . .’
But it was no good, and she knew it. The ailing woman in the next room had bound the big kindly son to her as surely as if she had tied him to her with steel ropes. And he was too kind to do anything about it. . . .
Wearily Maggie put up her hand and tucked in a stray wisp of hair.
‘Fetch my things from upstairs, love. I’m going home, and I’m going on my own, because I know now that your mother needs you far more than I could ever do.’ She half smiled. ‘And it might be better if you stopped coming down to see me, Kit. After all, it’s not as if we were courting seriously or anything, is it? Anyway, you don’t know me, not really.’ Her voice rose as she fought for self-control. ‘One of these days you might be ashamed of me. You might wish you’d never walked me home from Chapel, or brought me to see your mother.’
‘Oh, Maggie,’ he whispered, not understanding. ‘Oh, Maggie. . . .’
And the cry that came from him was more like a groan, and it was a sound that filled Maggie with anguish and exasperation. In her own agony she was not sure which. . . . At the end of three months Maggie gave up hope and gave up looking every day for a letter from Joe. Although she wasn’t sick in the mornings, there were signs now that she was definitely pregnant. Her breasts were rounder and fuller, and she had to lace her stays tighter to hide her slowly thickening waistline. Her cheeks were so pale that she had to pinch and pinch at them to make them glow rosy again, but the warm colour faded in a matter of minutes.
Even as she stared at herself in the mirror it went, leaving her as pale as a little frightened ghost.
Clara came in one day, without knocking as usual, and after watching Maggie drag herself listlessly from her chair to swing the heavy kettle on its stand over the coals, she said straight out:
‘There is summat up, isn’t there, Maggie?’
The tone of her voice was kind and caring, but there was something in the way Clara’s left eye glided into its socket that told Maggie she knew.
‘There’s nothing wrong! Nothing!’
She was shouting without meaning to, and it felt as if her heart had moved up from her chest and was beating wildly in her throat.
‘I’m tired, that’s all, Clara,’ she said more softly. ‘It’s been that warm lately I’ve been off me food, and since Father went I haven’t felt like cooking much, not for one, it doesn’t seem worth it.’
Clara wasn’t listening. What she said next proved that.
‘What about that black-haired boy who was always hanging about at the top of the street? Standing there whistling with his hands in his pockets? I was always seeing you running up to meet him at one time.’
Maggie was sure now that Clara would be able to hear her heart beating, or even see it pounding away, boom, boom in her ears, rushing and thumping as if it would burst her head wide open.
‘He’s gone away. He went away a while ago. To get a job, a better job. I thought I had told you.’
Clara leaned forward, podgy hands on podgy knees.
‘You told me nowt. But you’re going to tell me now, aren’t you, lass? That Joe’s gone away because he did something dirty to you, and he’s not going to stand by you. I’m right, aren’t I?’
Maggie jumped up so quickly that her chair fell over with a clatter. Standing sideways on to Clara, twisting her hands she presented a perfect view of her gently swelling stomach, no bigger than the soft curve of a throat but enough to convince her of the truth.
‘You’re going to have a baby, Maggie Craig.’
‘No, it’s not true!’ Maggie’s cry of anguish was torn from her trembling lips. ‘Yes it is true, but Joe went away because if he’d stopped the police would have been on to him. He doesn’t know . . . oh, Clara, he doesn’t even know.’
And just for a moment, a wild impossible moment, it seemed to Maggie that it was her mother sitting there in the rocking chair. Hannah was holding out her arms, and enfolding
Maggie in them, telling her to have a good cry and get it over with.
‘There, there, l’al lass,’ she was saying in her Cumberland accent, as soft as the water trickling down from the hills. ‘It will be right, you’ll see.’
Maggie bowed her head and let the tears roll down her cheeks, feeling the salt taste of them as they trickled into the corners of her open mouth.
‘Don’t tell anyone, Clara,’ she sobbed. ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone. Joe will come back any day now. He said he was coming back when he got a good job, and we’ll get married and then it won’t matter. Promise me, Clara.’
‘As if I would tell,’ Clara said, ‘I can’t think of what to say. I’m flabbergasted, that’s what I am.’ She got up heavily from the chair and nodded towards the kettle. ‘I won’t stop for a cup of tea, now, love, but I’ll tell you something for nothing. If I got my hands on that Joe I’d throttle him till his tonsils burst out of his collar stud. Nay, I can’t credit it, no way I can’t. As if you didn’t have enough trouble, but then they say trouble always comes in a three, so you’ve one more to go yet.’
Her flat plain face working with an emotion and a sympathy quite genuine, Clara walked splay-footed to the front door, closing it quietly, almost reverently, behind her.
Passing her own door without a glance, she went into her mother’s house, walked through the front parlour and into the living-room.
Ignoring her father she spoke directly to Mrs Hobkirk.
‘Aye, it’s true, Mam, but I’ve promised not to tell, so think on you keep your mouth shut at the Sewing Class tonight.’
‘As if I would tell. That poor little lass. That’s what comes of having no mother to guide her.’
Mrs Hobkirk was already pinning her hat on to her wiry hair, her mouth a grim line of satisfaction at having her suspicions verified.
‘But that’s one secret no woman can keep for long, and to think Maggie Craig looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Thank God her father is no longer alive to see his daughter’s shame.’
‘Think on what I said,’ Clara reminded her.
Mrs Hobkirk sniffed, then meeting one of the sewing ladies on her way to the meeting she had the pleasure of passing on the news without even having had to wait till she got there.
