Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  ‘We’ve checked,’ then after exchanging another glance with her mother, held out the telegram.

  ‘I know it might seem like noseying, but we found this.’

  ‘And after . . .’ Clara’s eye flickered. ‘After what her father did, and with her well, having that other trouble in the summer, and now looking so poorly we thought we ought to read it.’

  With obvious reluctance, Kit took the telegram from the envelope and read it. Then, with hands that had been stiff with cold, and were now suddenly clammy, he muttered. ‘And you thought she might have come to tell me?’

  ‘With you having been friendly like,’ Clara said, and was nudged into silence by her mother.

  ‘So we sent Arnie.’

  When the front door opened and closed, the three faces turned eagerly towards it.

  Arnie held the hat in front of him.

  ‘I found this,’ he announced.

  ‘Oh, that poor child.’ Mrs Hobkirk took it from him and handed it to Clara. ‘See, the pin’s still in it.’

  ‘As though it had been snatched from her hand.’ Clara stared at it, her mouth working with emotion.

  ‘Where did you find it? Where, Mr Preston?’ Kit picked it up and turning it round and round in his hands, walked over to the window.

  Out there, in the dark and rain, over there was the canal. He turned swiftly and threw the hat down on the table so that it covered the telegram completely. His teeth dug into his bottom lip.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ he asked again. Curse the man. Did he have to think before he could answer even a straight question like that?

  ‘Lying in the gutter. At the top of the street,’ Arnie told him, moving his head in that direction.

  Kit nodded to them.

  ‘Try to get the fire going. And put the kettle on,’ he ordered, then leaving them standing there, an open-mouthed trio, gazing helplessly at the bedraggled hat, he ran from the house. Banging the front door behind him so that the little house shook to its very foundations.

  Maggie had no thought in her feverish mind of walking to her death when she left Foundry Street behind her. No melodramatic desire to end it all. Just a feeling of need. A terrible hurting need to be back in the country once again, to get away from the dirt and the meanness of the streets, from the terraced houses that grew in rows like a regiment lined up on parade. To forget that she ever knew Joe Barton – just to be back in the lanes where the hedges grew, where cottages were fronted by gardens overgrown with moon-daisies, marigolds, and night-scented stock. Where fields were thickly carpeted with yellow buttercups, and her brothers ran in from the pump, their brown hair flattened and wet against their heads.

  If only her chest did not hurt so much, she could walk more quickly. And she needed to hurry because Hannah, her mother, was waiting for the jug of blue milk from the farm to make into a pudding stiff with rice.

  And oh she loved going to the farm, in spite of the wild cats that sometimes streaked across her path from the barn. There were great hams curing in the rafters, and inside the dairy it was cool with its scrubbed stone table with the groove in the middle filled with water. There were milk dishes and wooden pails neatly arranged in rows, and everything smelt clean and sweet.

  She had to go slowly now in case the milk spilt, but one day she had put it down carefully on the grass to lie on her stomach as she watched an army of ants going methodically about their daily task. And Benjamin had come up quietly on tiptoe behind her, and tickled her neck with a piece of grass so that she had jumped up and knocked the jug over.

  No, this was not the right place. Even the sky was wrong. This sky was dark and heavy, and there were puddles in the road with the gas lamps reflected in them. She must hurry, and yet she could not hurry, and in spite of her slowness there was a trickle of sweat running down her face, and down her back. She was panting as though she had been running for a long long time.

  Her hair had come loose when she wrenched her hat off. It hung in heavy wet strands down over her shoulders into her eyes, and it was a basket she was carrying, not a jug of milk.

  She put it down because it was heavy and the heaviness was making the pain burn harder in her chest, so she left the basket there and tried to cough the pain away.

  She stopped trying to run after that. She just put one foot in front of the other and stumbled and fell, then picked herself up and stumbled on again. She turned into yet another street filled with the darkened windows of unused front parlours, and for a moment she knew who she was and why she was out there in the dark, wandering aimlessly in the rain.

  A door opened and a woman stood on the step, straining her eyes into the blackness, her body etched against the dim light coming from the back room. A child clung to her skirts, and two more children clustered behind her.

  ‘Is me dad coming yet, then?’

  ‘Nay I can’t see no sign of him yet.’

  ‘Can I have a sugar butty, Mam?’

  ‘You can have nowt if you don’t stop that moithering.’

  Maggie stood quite still in the shadow of the wall, her coat and the darkness of the night rendering her invisible. Then the woman went inside the house, pulling the children after her and closing the door with a slam. For a moment they were silhouetted there in the dividing doorway, then that too was closed, and the house fell into darkness again.

  Maggie remembered how her mother had always kept the lamp burning in the front window of the School House, sending out rays of welcome to whoever walked up the path. A sob caught up in her throat, then more sobs crept up, till her whole body was shaking, then she was crying with her mouth wide open, the tears pouring down and mingling with the rain on her face.

  She was crying, not because she was lost and could not find the School House. She knew now that it was miles away with someone else living in it.

  What she was crying for was the fact that it had come to her that she was alone, entirely alone in the world, the only one left, without even the right to think of the boys marching down a foreign road, climbing a foreign hill, or sailing on a foreign sea.

  For the space of a terrible second, she saw with vivid clarity a towering wave carrying Jonathan away; she saw his face as he cried for help, and she saw Benjamin trying to reach him, stretching out a hand before they disappeared for ever.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she moaned, feeling her way along the wall because her legs no longer seemed able to support her. She turned into a back alleyway, and sliding slowly to the ground, closed her eyes.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ she muttered. ‘I’ve managed before on me own, and even if I’d had the baby I would have found a way. It’s just that I feel so ill, and I daren’t be ill. I can’t afford to be ill.’

  She craved a drink. More than anything else in the world she wanted a drink. Her throat was parched and burning, and if she lay there with the rain-wet cobblestones underneath her, she knew she would die.

  And she did not want to die. In spite of everything she did not want to lie here and die. . . .

  Painfully, slowly, working herself up the wall with hands gripping the sooty uneven stones, she managed to stand upright, and now her mind was clear. She had to get into the warm. She had to get where it was dry.

  With the unerring instinct of a sick animal she stumbled forward in search of warmth and shelter, and help.

  The street lamps were out now, but all at once she knew where she was. She recognized the tall houses on her left, each with its own little paved front garden. Here the better-off lived, the men with a trade in their fingers, and two streets further along was the street where Kit Carmichael lived with his mother.

  Maggie made herself go on, fighting for every breath now, her hair hanging loose and her coat stained with mud.

  Every single house was in darkness, and she felt a recurring wave of panic. Oh, dear God, what was she doing out in the streets, in the dark, in the rain at this time of night?

  Was she going to be like her father with his black depressions, his
slipping mind? She put out a hand to steady herself against a window bottom before moving painfully on.

  No, it was not that. There was blackness in her mind, it was true, but now she could see the substance in the darkness. She was ill. Ill in her body, not her mind. And yet if that were so, how did she come to be out here, walking when she had no strength to walk, burning hot and shivering with cold at one and the same time?

  She would never get to the bottom of Kit’s street. Never cross over the wider one, never make her way along the flat to Foundry Street. She lifted her head and saw, through the mist before her eyes, that she was directly opposite to Kit’s house, and through the black square of window she saw the soft glow of lamp-light shining through from the back room.

  Kit . . . kind, considerate Kit Carmichael.

  He was there, only a few steps across the street, and behind that closed front door would be warmth, and a drink, a hot soothing drink to hush the pain burning her breathing away.

  The door was not locked.

  Feverishly Maggie’s mind registered surprise at this. The town people always locked their doors at night. But it was too late to wonder. Too late even to bang the heavy knocker against the door in case she woke the street up.

  All she wanted was help and warmth, and a drink. . . .

  She was inside, groping with outstretched hands to the light, going towards it, stumbling, falling through the dividing door, and seeing the old woman with black picking eyes and the skin of a wrinkled crab apple, staring at her from the high-piled nest of white pillows. . . .

  The rain had stopped, and the sky was slowly changing from black to a sombre grey when Kit decided there was no point in searching the surrounding streets any further. No point in standing on the canal bank and once rather foolishly calling Maggie’s name, his eyes narrowed as he tried to identify the floating debris in the murky water moving sluggishly against the canal banks.

  Clara had kept a solitary vigil back at the bottom house, dozing in the rocking-chair, and going through into the parlour every now and again to stare through the window at the glistening cobblestones and the sleeping houses across the street.

  ‘There’s nowt else you can do, Mr Carmichael,’ she told Kit when he came in defeated and wet to the bone. ‘You’ve let the constables know, and they’ll send word if owt turns up.’ Her left nostril twitched upwards in a resigned sniff. ‘They always let the families know first.’

  He glanced towards the table where Maggie’s sodden hat still covered the telegram, and a great knot of sadness tightened itself round his heart.

  ‘But Maggie has no family, Mrs Preston. She hasn’t got anybody, and it’s killing me to think she had nobody to turn to.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘Oh, I know there was you, and there was me, but she didn’t come to us, either of us, did she? Not even when she was – you know.’ He gave her a piteous glance which pleaded for understanding. ‘I stopped seeing her, Mrs Preston, because I thought she never wanted to see me again. I’m not much of a catch, Mrs Preston. I’ve always been torn, you see. I’ve not wanted to upset my mother, and then I’ve ended up upsetting everybody. For as long as I can remember there have been terrible rows and scenes if I tried to get friendly with anybody. She’s always been delicate, you see. . . .’

  He had been up all night without sleep; he was wet through, muddy and anguished, and his exhaustion led him to admit something he had never admitted before.

  ‘I’ve always been a bit afraid of her, my mother, you see. Not physically afraid, not when I could pick her up with one hand, but afraid of the “bother” she makes.’ He rubbed a hand over his curly hair in an apologetic gesture. ‘My mother can make bother quicker than anyone else I know, but it’s only natural when she had my father to put up with. I used to hear her shouting at him when he came in the worse for drink, and I got frightened. He hit her once.’

  Clara nodded. Maggie had been right about this man. He had a heart as big as a football – a great soft football at that. He’d be like a piece of putty in the hands of a woman like old Mrs Carmichael, old witch that she was.

  Leaning forward, she raked the slack over the flames, and pulled the guard round the fire. When she looked at him the dough-like features of her flat face were softened into compassion.

  ‘You’re tired out, lad. Go back home and get some rest, and see to your mother. She’ll be wondering what’s been going on. I’m going in to see to me husband’s breakfast, but me mother will take over here. There’s got to be somebody here when Maggie comes back.’

  ‘You’re very kind, Mrs Preston.’

  Kit put out a hand and laid it gently on her shoulder, almost as if he would draw her to him, and Clara was only mildly surprised to find that she had no instinctive urge to flinch away from his touch. This was no man with wandering hands. Kit Carmichael’s touch was the touch of a woman comforting another woman in their mutual distress. She would tell her mother that Mr Carmichael was a gentleman. A proper gentleman.

  ‘Get off with you, then,’ she said, and her voice held a gentleness Arnie had never heard.

  When old Mrs Carmichael opened her eyes and saw Maggie come through the door, the jealous hatred smouldering in her mind enveloped her in a flame of white-hot rage. She would never have believed that Kit could leave her all alone and neglected to go off with that peculiar little man from down Foundry Street.

  It was as though Maggie Craig had appeared like a vision in direct answer to the evil dwelling of her thoughts. It was as though she had managed to conjure her up herself out of a filthy cloud of ectoplasm.

  So overwhelming was her uncontrolled rage that it failed to register on her mind for the first minute that the girl swaying on her feet, clutching now at the bedpost to keep herself upright, was ill.

  And when the anger blotting Maggie’s features out from her sight cleared a little, she saw the straggling wet hair, the fever-flushed cheeks, the chest that heaved and rasped with the effort of breathing.

  ‘You’re drunk, you little dirty whore,’ she said, and even as she said it she convinced herself that she could smell the drink on Maggie.

  Raising herself in bed with an ease that would have astonished her son, had he been there to witness it, she pointed a finger, jabbing it into the air.

  ‘How dare you come into my house at this time of night? How dare you, without even as much as knocking at the door? This is a decent house. Get out! Get out back on the streets where you belong. Get out!’

  There was a chair over by the window, and Maggie saw it through a mist of pain. If she could just manage to get there, she could sit down, and she would be warm, and Kit would come. He would come downstairs from his room the way he’d done before, that other time. She could almost hear his footsteps on the stairs. Light, tripping footsteps for so big a man.

  Yes, it had all happened before, just like this.

  The old woman had been shouting at her, just as she was shouting now, and Kit had come . . . as he would come now.

  Holding a hand straight out in front of her, like a sleepwalker, Maggie took one step, then another towards the chair. She felt for the arms with her hands, and lowered herself into it.

  It was a hard chair, and the arms were wooden, but she laid her head back and closed her eyes with thankful relief.

  Now there was no more rain on her face, no tearing wind chilling her very bones. She was warm and safe in Kit’s house, and she could sleep, and when she slept she would be better. ‘Sleep is her salvation,’ someone had said once, a long long time ago.

  ‘Kit?’ she whispered before she drifted into unconsciousness. ‘Kit?’

  The old woman pushed at the bedclothes, pushed at them with scrabbling hands so that she could swing her feet slowly round and place them on the floor. She stared at her feet for a moment, at the bent toes, the ridged yellow toenails, then raised her eyes to stare at the girl lying back in the chair.

  Even with her hair hanging in wet rat-tails round her face, Maggie Craig was bea
utiful. She was beautiful, and Mrs Carmichael was ugly and old. Sonny had left her all alone, with the heavy rain beating down and bouncing off the corrugated roof of the shed outside. He had left her to go after that girl, but she would show him. She would show him . . . and her. . . .

  She advanced towards the chair, and stretched out her hands.

  ‘I’ll do for you,’ she muttered. ‘You’ll not get him. I know your sort. I’ll kill you with me own bare hands before I’ll let you get him!’

  But even as she reached out for Maggie’s throat, her hands were stayed as her wandering mind registered the fact that this girl was ill, not drunk. She was running a fever so high that the heat from her face could be felt even before she had touched her.

  Maggie Craig’s lips were dry, and she was mumbling something, turning her head from side to side, her breath coming up from her chest as if it was being forced through a bag of rusty nails.

  ‘Kit . . .’ she was saying. ‘Kit. . . .’

  Mrs Carmichael stepped back a pace, her own breathing, in spite of her agitation, as free and easy as that of a healthy child.

  She knew what she had to do now, and it was going to be so simple she had to chuckle at her own cleverness.

  It was a struggle unfastening the catch on the sash window, then sliding the window up from the bottom, but she managed it.

  The rain and the wind rushed in, and a pile of papers on the dresser fluttered to the floor. The old woman grunted her satisfaction, but Maggie did not move.

  She never thought she would have had the strength, but it seemed as if something outside of her was pouring strength into her, giving her the feeling that she could have put the flat of her hand on the wall, and given no more than a little push for it to have crumbled away.

  Even the pan of water poured on the fire, sending a cloud of smoke out into the room, failed to make her cough. True she was shivering when she climbed into her bed, and pulled the blankets up over her head, but the shivering was with excitement and not with cold.

  It was like a cocoon of comforting warmth inside the bed, and the feather mattress seemed to come up and wrap her round. She reached to the bottom for the copper hot water bottle, and it was still hot. With a sigh of contentment, Mrs Carmichael placed her feet on it.