by Marie Joseph
She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew that if the baby was meant to be then no harm would come to it, but she knew equally that the sign she had been given was going to be interpreted by her as a definite nudge.
Every pore in her body was pouring sweat when she had finished the front room floor. Her hair was sticking to her head, ends wisping down her neck, and when she held the candle up to the mirror, it was the face of a woman well into middle-age staring back at her.
When she crawled into bed again she knew she was not going to keep the baby, so she faced the truth fair and square.
One part of her had wanted Joe’s baby, oh yes, no doubt about that. There were moments when she had put her hand over her stomach and imagined how it would be when the baby started to kick. She had wondered whether it would be a boy or a girl, and she had imagined Joe coming back and marrying her, and the three of them living together in the house. She would keep on with her sewing and Joe would learn to weave, and she would set a good dinner before him every single day.
But life wasn’t like that. Life did not tie up knots neatly and manufacture happy endings. Joe had gone, and she would have had the baby all alone, with the Chapel folk looking down their noses at her, and the neighbours eyeing her up when she went out with her stomach all sticking out.
Where would the money have come from when she had to stop work at the mill? She would have had to put the baby out to mind, and its milk would come out of a two-penny tin, and she wouldn’t have liked to see her baby bowed with rickets or catching the cough because it wasn’t nourished enough.
No, her baby wasn’t going to be bearing the stigma of illegitimacy for the whole of its life . . . not now. Thank God, not now.
‘Oh, Joe. . . .’ Maggie felt the anger drain from her, and at last knew the relief of tears. When the knocker-up came down the street she was moaning to herself, turned on her side with her legs drawn up.
But when he came the morning after, she got up, washed herself all over, dressed herself, and went to the mill.
6
WHEN THE TELEGRAM came from the War Office Maggie folded it neatly back into its envelope, placed it behind the clock on the mantelpiece and told no one.
The official wording informed her with deep regret that the troopship Himalaya had left Cape Town for Natal with drafts of the York and Lancaster Regiment, and had run into heavy weather. The captain had hove to with the intention of dropping anchor in Durban, when Private Jonathan Craig had been swept overboard. Private Benjamin Craig, his brother, had immediately gone to his rescue and had perished when a life-line thrown to them had snapped in two.
A week now since it came and Maggie had come home from the mill, gone upstairs without bothering about the fire, and was sitting on the edge of her bed studying her face intently in the swing mirror atop her chest of drawers.
It was strange, but her face looked just the same as ever. A bit peaky since she lost the baby, and still pale, but that was all. Now that the nights were drawing in she went to work in the dark then came home in the dark, so pale cheeks were only to be expected. No, the trouble was in trying not to think, trying not to realize.
So if she went on mapping out each day, planning every hour in detail, it was possible that the time would go on till the pain in her chest would dissolve away. At least she slept . . . oh God, how she slept!
‘Sleep has always been Maggie’s salvation when she’s ill,’ Hannah used to say, but oh no, she must not think about her mother, or her father, or Joe, or the night she lost the baby, or the message from the War Office. She must not think of anything. She had to go to the mill and she had to buy enough food to keep her from starving, and she had to remember to order enough coal to keep the lean-to shed in the yard filled. Apart from this there was nothing else she needed to do.
And today in particular she must ignore the stabbing pain in her chest and the way her head throbbed, because it was all in her imagination.
But what were the boys doing sailing out to Natal? She had thought they were safe from the war over in Canada. How could they go to fight in a war and never even let her know?
‘Now they are dead,’ Maggie told her reflection, ‘and you must go up to the shops before they close. You know that, don’t you?’ So, quietly and thoughtfully she went downstairs and put on her coat and hat.
Clara always wore a shawl when she bobbed out to the shops, but she wasn’t Clara Preston. She was Maggie Craig, and her father was the schoolmaster at the village school. Her mother wore a blue dress with the sleeves rolled up, and she baked apple-pies with shiny brown crusts, and fatty-cakes, stiff with currants, and oatcakes she laid over the rack to dry.
Miss Hepinstall was cross, but she wasn’t afraid of her. Little Maggie Craig was not afraid of anything. Of owt, as Clara would say. Her hat was slipping, so lifting her arms up with difficulty – what was wrong with them? – she pinned it on more firmly, then whimpered as a strand of hair refused to be tucked back out of sight.
Then with back erect, and head held high, she set off up the street, and as she walked the cobbles seemed to blur together and become one.
She was not ill. She could not afford the time to be ill. There was no buzzing in her ears, and the little hammer tapping away in her skull was all in her imagination. No, she was just a bit dizzy, that was all.
What she had to concentrate on was how lucky she was to have the house with the rent book all paid up to date. No hiding in the stairs when the rent man came on Friday nights like some of the women in the street.
‘Never spend a penny unless you can cover it with another,’ her father had always said.
No, she would never get into debt. Never.
See, she was doing all right telling herself about the good things and not dwelling on the bad. It was just a matter of concentrating.
Conditions at the mill were good compared to what they were at some of the others. Yes, that was something to be glad about. Why, only a while ago she had read one of Thomas’s books telling what it was like in some of the Manchester mills. She had never been there, but the book told of workers living in narrow alleys, in one up and one down houses, with next to no sanitation. Irish workers in the main, and it was no good Clara telling her that they had been brought up like pigs, and lived like pigs, blaspheming with every other sentence. Owing allegiance to the Pope, and using Jesus and his mother Mary as swear words.
Clara’s horizons were indeed set no further than her own front doorstep. Dear Clara. Kind Clara. Salt of the earth Clara.
I love her, Maggie thought. In spite of the fact she couldn’t keep a secret longer than two minutes. She is my one true friend.
It was funny how heavy her basket was, especially as there was nothing in it yet.
No, that book had been written by a writer who had never experienced the aching grind of poverty, never slept ten to a room, never sent his children out to play bare-bottomed, to paddle in their own dirt. He was reporting, not identifying.
Maggie opened the door of the shop, and the pinging of the bell set the hammering up behind her eyes again.
She could not think what it was she had come for, so she asked for some sugar, and watched through a swirling mist as it was weighed into a three-cornered poke. Then she asked for some Monkey Brand for the simple reason that she could see it there on the shelf. She pointed to the tall butter-pat with a design of a girl in a summer dress stroking a cow on it, and finished off by asking for a slice of cheese. She swayed as the shopkeeper pulled a piece of wire through it and thought how clever he was.
When she came out of the shop, it had started to rain, heavy drenching rain. Nothing like the rain she remembered from her childhood. Surely the rain then had been sweet and gentle, falling like a soft mist, not bouncing up like this from the cobbles and blinding her when she turned her face up to the sky?
Here was where she turned to go back down Foundry Street. There was where she lived, right at the bottom, in the house exactly like all the oth
ers, and inside it was cold because she had forgotten to bring the coal in from the yard.
She stopped, puzzled, and put a hand up to her forehead, and was even more puzzled to feel that her skin was dry and burning as if on fire.
No, she had been quite wrong. She could not possibly live down that mean little street, with the tall mill chimneys standing sentinel over it. She was little Maggie Craig, and she lived in the School House, and there were fields, and hedgerows thick with hawthorn, and her father was the schoolmaster. She had three brothers, and they teased her and pulled off her beret, and threw it over the low stone wall, and she climbed over to get it back, showing her bloomers.
It had landed in a cow-clap, and she had taken it into the house, holding it at arm’s length, holding her nose. Her mother had rinsed it out, then washed it, but it had never again been quite the right shape. Maggie put up a hand to her head and was surprised to find a hat pinned to the slippery bulk of her hair.
What was she doing wearing a hat? Oh, yes, now she remembered. She had been dressing up in her mother’s clothes, and she had walked to the gate to meet her father with her mother’s weekday coat trailing behind her, and her mother’s shopping hat balanced on top of her cloud of unruly hair.
Her father had carried her inside perched on his shoulders, and her mother had only pretended to be cross when she saw the mud-trimmed hem of her coat.
‘Maggie Craig, you’ll be the death of me!’ she’d said, and when her father had kissed her, Maggie had put her arms round them both and squeezed and squeezed, and they had all finished up laughing . . . and laughing.
Oh, no, she did not live down there, not down there. Maggie put the basket down, and lifting her aching arms, unpinned the hat, then dropped it into the streaming gutter.
‘I’m coming!’ she cried, then picking up the basket again, she turned her back on Foundry Street, and walked away with little stumbling steps, in the opposite direction.
When Arnie knocked at the door of Kit Carmichael’s house and saw the big man standing there on the step, waiting patiently to hear what he had to say, the breath caught in his throat, and he had to swallow twice before he could get the words out.
The fact that the bloke was wearing an apron over his trousers did nothing to help either.
‘Oh, my God, what are we coming to?’ Arnie thought.
It was all very well Clara and her mother making him come out in the pouring rain on what he was sure was a fool’s errand. He knew this was the last place Maggie would be. Full of pride Maggie was, and anyroad Clara would have been the first to know if she had taken it into her head to call on Kit Carmichael. Wasn’t Clara capable of wheedling the truth out of anybody? Aye, she were that. There were no secrets kept from Clara.
‘Why, Mr Preston!’ Kit’s voice was higher than usual with surprise. He smiled and whipped off the apron. ‘I was just setting things to rights before I locked up for the night. There’s a lot to do with having to leave my mother alone during the day.’ He looked up at the dark sky. ‘And what a night it is! Come in . . . come in.’
‘I’d rather not.’
Arnie’s diffidence was like torture to him at times, and now the enormity of what he was doing overwhelmed him. He stepped back a pace.
‘It’s Clara. Mrs Preston. You know? Me wife. She and her mother went next door to Miss Craig’s house – she’s been locking herself in lately, and sitting in the dark they think, and well, she hasn’t been looking well you see, so they went to try to persuade her to go to the doctor’s. The last few nights we’ve heard her coughing through the wall.’ Arnie coughed himself, and stuck his hands deeper into his pockets.
‘Maggie’s ill?’
Kit asked the question quietly, but his words rang out like a pistol shot. He opened the door wide. ‘Come in, Mr Preston. I’ll get my coat, right this minute. Come on in.’
‘No, it’s more than that. At least she is ill we think, but . . .’
Arnie gave up, and remembering to pull his dripping flat cap from his head, stepped inside, and guided by the light from the back room, followed Kit with reluctance, telling himself that once again Clara and her mother had stuck their noses in where they’d no business to.
To further his acute embarrassment, there was a bed in the small and cluttered room, and in it an old woman with the face of a tired monkey. Arnie held his cap in front of him, twisting it round and round in his hands.
Eyes as black as two lumps of shiny coal looked from him to Kit, then back again.
‘Mother.’ Kit’s voice held the kindly tolerance Arnie felt would have been more in keeping when speaking to a backward child.
‘Mother, this is Mr Preston from down Foundry Street, and I am going out with him for a little while.’ He raised his voice. ‘Miss Craig has been taken ill and I am going to see if there is anything I can do. I will leave the lamp turned up like this, so you will be all right, and I’ll get back as soon as I can.’
The old woman plucked at the bedclothes, eyeing Arnie with narrowed eyes.
‘I know who he is. You don’t need to tell me who he is. He’s married to that stout woman what skens, the one who sometimes comes to the Meetings. Wears a brown coat and a hat like a chamber-pot, and sings out of tune.’
‘Mother!’ Kit looked across at Arnie apologetically, then as he took his coat down from a peg behind the door, Mrs Carmichael put a hand to her throat and began to cough.
Kit hesitated, but only for a moment. Giving Arnie a little push he followed him out of the room, calling out as he went.
‘You’ll be all right, Mother, as long as you stop in bed.’
Then before Arnie knew what was happening they were out in the street with the front door pulled to behind them.
‘It may have seemed cruel,’ Kit explained, starting off down the street with such long strides that Arnie had to take little running skips to keep up with him. ‘But my mother just did not want me to come out. You could see that. She plays on me, Mr Preston. Oh, she is very sick, I grant you that, and of late her mind wanders, and her memory is shocking, but if I had not got you out quick she would have seen to it that I never got away.’
He slackened his pace a little. ‘I am so grateful that you thought to come to me, Mr Preston. But I must ask you this. Is it Maggie herself who has asked to see me, or is it your wife’s idea? You see the last time I saw Maggie she gave me the impression that she did not want to see me again. Not that I blame her, mind. Not with things as they were then.’
Then, without waiting for an answer, he set off again.
Arnie tried to talk and to run at the same time, without much success.
‘Mr Carmichael! I never said she was ill in bed or anything. It was you what jumped to that conclusion. Nay, the missus sent me to see if Maggie was at your house, because they went in and she wasn’t there. In her own house, I mean. There’s no fire or nothing, and not much food . . . Mr Carmichael! You’ll get yourself locked up for running like that at this time of night.’
Arnie gave up trying to keep up with Kit’s flying, lumbering figure. It was no good anyroad. He dug his fingers further down into his coat pockets, and bent his head against the sweeping driving rain.
He still felt guilty whenever he remembered that summer afternoon when he had tried it on with Maggie. He had scared the living daylights out of her, and to the day he died he would never know what had come over him. He trudged on. But he wasn’t responsible for this carry-on. Not by a long chalk he wasn’t. And it were more than likely that Maggie would be there when he got back, and they would feel right fools then. . . .
He turned into Foundry Street and saw something lying in the gutter, and bending over it, recognized Maggie’s hat because of the way she had tied the black ribbon in a whacking great bow at the back.
‘Cheers it up a bit,’ she’d said.
‘Oh, my sainted aunt!’
Arnie picked it up, his slow mind working out the possibilities, each one more terrifying than the last.
/>
She had been set upon and carried off. She had gone to drown herself in the canal. She had taken after her father. Clara always said that sort of thing ran in families. . . .
Bearing the ruined hat aloft like a morbid trophy, Arnie lifted the latch of his own house and walked through into the living-room. To see his father-in-law sitting by the fire, in his chair, drinking tea out of his favourite pot.
‘They’ve gone in next door, lad,’ Mr Hobkirk said, jerking his head towards the dividing wall. ‘By the gum, but tha’s wet. It’s a nasty neet all right.’
‘How long has she been missing?’ Kit stood on the rag rug in front of the grate with its heap of dead ashes, and asked the question calmly, only the urgency in his high voice betraying his distress.
‘We don’t know but what she is missing, Mr Carmichael,’ Clara said, exchanging a significant glance with her mother. ‘It’s just that I didn’t hear her moving about since she came home from the mill tonight. You know, raking the fire out or anything. So I came in to see if she was all right.
‘She doesn’t look herself,’ Clara added. ‘And she doesn’t do enough cooking for herself. When her father was alive she was always taking something tasty out of the oven to tempt his appetite, finicky fella that he was.’
‘Never a smile for nobody he hadn’t,’ Mrs Hobkirk said.
Feeling nervously impatient, but too polite to show it, Kit said:
‘Have you been upstairs, Mrs Preston?’ He coughed discreetly. ‘And out to the back? She might have gone out there then been taken ill.’
