Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  Kit looked away from her and coughed gently.

  ‘Maggie, listen to me. I’m going to say this once, then never again, because it pains me. When we’re wed I never want to hear the name of a certain person mentioned again. What was done can’t be undone as you rightly say, but I want you to know that I have forgiven you from the bottom of my heart for . . . for what you did.’

  ‘With Joe?’ Maggie said quickly, her eyes widening with an expression that would have halted Kit’s fumbling flow of words had he seen it.

  He stared through the window. ‘You were . . . you are . . . not much more than a child. He knew he had to get away from the town or be sent to prison, and yet he had his way with you, even knowing he would never see you again. You were more sinned against than sinning; you must always try to remember that.’

  Maggie felt her face flame with anger. ‘Kit. Kit Carmichael. It takes two to do what we did, and I can’t, I won’t marry you with you thinking I was set on by a lust-crazed boy fleeing from justice.’ She went to Kit and put her hand on his sleeve. ‘We were unhappy, love. So very very unhappy. Me because of what Father had done to himself, and Joe . . . oh, Kit, I know you and your mother had to struggle, but have you any idea how some of the people in this town have to live?’

  She twisted him round, forcing him to look at her.

  ‘Like pigs, Kit Carmichael. His mother was a drunken whore, and don’t flinch away because you’re surprised I know what the word means. There was no money coming into that hovel but what Joe earned, and his mother spent that on drink most of the time. He tried to set her weekly payments out and she took against him for that, and his sister looked as if a puff of wind would blow her over. That house smelled, Kit! It smelled of other folk’s bugs in the walls, and I’ll tell you something else. There was a man there, a big man on leave from his ship, and he’d tried to touch Belle. Oh, Kit, there were rough men working the harvest where I came from, swearing sweating men, but they wouldn’t have laid a finger on a child. Because that’s all Joe’s sister is, even though she’s gone living-in now and left school.’

  Maggie felt the tears swim in her eyes. ‘Joe took that money because his mother had pinched what he’d saved for his sister’s caps and frocks and aprons. That was why he had to run.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And he’d nowhere to run to, Kit. So when he came here it wasn’t me and him being wicked. It was him and me putting our arms round each other and trying to make things right just for a bit. We were heartbroken, Kit, each in our own way, so we forgot ourselves and just comforted each other, that’s all.’

  She lifted her head high. ‘Is that what you’re so set on forgiving me for, Kit? Because if you can’t accept the truth, then there’s no chance for us, is there?’

  Every feature on Kit’s face seemed to be working with emotion. His Maggie was too honest. Couldn’t she see that he wanted to believe his own version of how she had been ravaged against her will by a brutal boy running from the police? Why did she have to make him face a truth he did not want to face? She was brave as well as honest, this bonny Maggie. Even though the long speech had drained her face of colour she was still strong. Like his mother had been strong.

  Kit lowered his head and kissed her tenderly on the forehead, leaning without knowing it, on the strength that came from this young brown-haired slip of a girl.

  ‘I’m sorry, lass,’ he said. ‘And we’ll not talk about it any more, I promise. It’s me what should be forgiven for upsetting you.’

  Maggie’s smile was tinged with irritation.

  ‘Now, there’s no need to go that far, Kit Carmichael.’

  He only saw the smile, so he smiled too. If Maggie was happy, then so was he. For Kit Carmichael it was as simple as that.

  They were married quietly one blustery Saturday morning, wearing black arm-bands round their coat sleeves. The Chapel was so cold that Maggie could actually feel her nose turning red, and behind her, Clara’s mother sobbed noisily into her handkerchief all through the simple ceremony.

  Clara and Arnie stood in for them, and after Mr Marsden had pronounced Maggie and Kit man and wife, he gave a quite uncalled-for little homily on the evils of drink, trusting they would enter their new life together in a state of sobriety and with due regard to the solemnity of their union.

  Kit had found a job as a grocer’s assistant in a flourishing little corner shop in an area crowded with back to back houses and pawn shops. It was no more than twenty minutes’ walk away from Foundry Street, and he was to be left in sole charge for most of the day.

  They had decided to live in Maggie’s house, not only because the rent was a shilling less a week than for the one he had shared with his mother, but because it had a bigger backyard, and fitted cupboards flanking the fireplace in the living-room.

  ‘Small details, but worthy of consideration,’ he had said, believing it was his idea and not Maggie’s.

  ‘I’m sure I’d have seen his mother bobbing out at me from every cupboard,’ Maggie had told Clara, ‘especially when I was on my own at nights.’

  ‘I wish we were going away to the seaside for a bit of a honeymoon,’ Kit said as they walked back to Foundry Street arm in arm after it was all over.

  Maggie gave his arm a little squeeze against her side, and told him it didn’t matter.

  ‘It was very good of Mr Yates at the shop to let you have the morning off, especially as you’ve only just started there.’

  ‘Yes, and Saturday is a busy day,’ Kit told her, ‘we get a lot of women coming in and stocking up a bit with food before their husbands can get their hands on what’s left of the money.’

  ‘Terrible,’ Maggie said, so automatically that Kit looked at her with concern. She was still so very pale, and her face, beneath the wide-brimmed hat, was all eyes and dark shadows, with little hollows where no hollows had been before.

  Without telling anyone, the week before starting his new job, Kit had paid a visit to the doctor’s surgery, to reassure himself that Maggie’s recovery was complete.

  ‘She still coughs a lot. Especially in the mornings, Doctor,’ he said, standing in front of the wide-topped desk, twisting his cap round and round in his hands.

  ‘Bringing up phelgm?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Streaked with blood at any time?’

  Kit flinched away from the inference, hating the doctor for putting it into words. Consumption was more a way of life than a disease in the network of streets with their sunless houses, but the doctor shocked him by voicing his own terrified suspicions and anguished fears.

  ‘No blood, but she is not getting any fatter, Doctor, and she always seems to be cold, even when I build the fire half-way up the chimney. She doesn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive, no matter what I tempt her appetite with.’

  The doctor stared hard at Kit. Then he got up from behind his desk and took up his stance by the window, hooking his thumbs into the lapels of his waistcoat, and watching Kit through narrowed eyes.

  Dammit, he might just as well have been listening to a worried mother talking about a sick daughter. He turned his back and stared out at the view of a brick wall pitted with holes. Dammit, the man was an old woman, if not an out and out homosexual, and no more cut out to be the new husband of a young and spirited girl like Maggie Craig than a boy child recently breached.

  The whole thing was obscene somehow. He tapped on the window with a short clean fingernail. At the moment the girl was weak, run right into the ground with the shock of all that had happened to her. How she had pulled through he would never know.

  But what would happen when she fully recovered and looked around her and saw the world was full of men who were real men, not soft flabby mother’s boys, like the man standing quietly and patiently behind him.

  Sighing he turned round and caught the look of anguished anxiety on Kit’s big face as he waited to hear what he had convinced himself must surely be bad news. News the doctor was steeling himself to give.

  ‘T
he poor bloke is looking for another mother,’ the doctor told himself silently, and shook his head sadly from side to side.

  ‘Miss Craig has been very ill,’ he reminded Kit. ‘But I am sure there is nothing that good food and rest won’t put right. She comes of fine country stock remember, and that will put her in good stead, but I would recommend that she stays away from the mill for a while.’

  He sighed and asked himself what was the use? They killed themselves, these working-class wives, running back to work before they were fit, having babies one after another, wearing themselves out before they were thirty years old. Oh, he knew poverty was to blame, and dirt, and apathy, and ignorance, and stupidity, but it was something else, something his training had not prepared him for.

  It was a grit these Lancashire women possessed, a determination that kept them going on and on, as if they never knew when to call it a day.

  ‘Miss Craig will not be going back into the mill, Doctor,’ Kit was saying, in that tiny voice so much at variance with his size. ‘I’ve got a job with long hours, but I’ll still have time to help round the house if I can see she’s not resting enough.’

  Then he asked a question quite simply, taking the doctor by surprise.

  ‘Shall I keep on with rubbing her chest with goose-grease every night? She says the smell makes her feel sick.’

  ‘Then stop doing it.’

  The doctor watched Kit leave his surgery, stepping as neatly as if he were avoiding the cracks in the oilcloth, then before he slammed the bell with the flat of his hand to summon the next patient, he leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands behind his neck, and addressed the ceiling:

  ‘Oh, my sainted aunt! Rubbing that little lass’s chest with goose-grease every night, and never, I’d stake my life on it, letting his hands stray as much as an inch. I thought I’d heard it all, but I was wrong. God help that bonny, funny, normal little lass. That bloke’s still married to his mother, and always will be.’

  And even though it was his wedding day Kit was there behind the counter of the corner shop until an hour before midnight. In the last two hours he had sold a dozen candles singly to the same number of customers, a paper of pins, and ajar of milk, remembering from his boyhood to tip the jar first so that the coin fell out.

  ‘Once I had to scrape a jarful of jam off a penny,’ his mother had said, and her warning came back to him so vividly that he could almost sense her presence. He could feel her standing there in the darkened shop, watching him, instructing him, praising him, devouring him with her smothering attention, so that in the end, all initiative wiped out, he would turn to her to ask how to do the simplest things.

  But now his mother had gone, and soon if she kept on refusing to eat, and throwing her food at the walls, she would die, and he would have to will himself to remember her as she used to be, not as she was now.

  Kit glanced at the round clock on the wall, longing for the time when he could put the shutters up outside, lock the door, and go home.

  There was no way he could have closed early, even if his conscience would have allowed him to, not with his boss, Mr Yates, living in the two upstairs rooms.

  Though you’d have thought he would have come down and stood in for me, just for tonight, Kit told himself, then immediately reminded himself how lucky he was to have a job at all.

  ‘What can I get you, love?’ he asked a spare little woman approaching the counter with her purse clutched tightly in her hand. ‘We’ve some nice bacon pieces going cheap. Make a tasty Sunday dinner if you boil them up with a handful of peas. . . .’

  It was a dark night, a night entirely without stars, when at last he stepped out into the street. It was the hour when the only people he would be likely to meet would be the tramps, the homeless, those without the twopence it would cost for a bed and a pot of tea in the dosshouse.

  Turning up the collar of his jacket, Kit increased his pace, and when he saw the candlelight flickering in the upstairs room at the front of the bottom house in Foundry Street, he knew that his bride was lying in bed waiting for him.

  Maggie had ironed her long calico nightdress frilled at the neck and round the cuffs, as carefully as if she was going to wear it for a walk in the park, and had brushed her hair till it stood out round her white face like a halo.

  ‘Hello, love.’ Kit put his curly head round the door. ‘Have you had your cocoa, or shall I bring some up? I know what you’re like for neglecting yourself when I’m not there to see to things.’

  Maggie smiled at him. He really was the kindest man she had ever known. Not a grumble about having to stand on his feet serving groceries on his wedding day, just a touching concern for her and her nightly mug of cocoa.

  He took off his jacket and hung it carefully over the chair-back, pulling the sleeves down and smoothing the lapels with his fingers. Then turning his back on her, he slipped first one brace, then the other off his shoulders, unbuttoned the front of his trousers, and dropped them round his ankles.

  Politely Maggie stared at the window, concentrating on the yellow blind, but when she felt the mattress move she shot a startled glance in his direction and saw that Kit was laying his trousers neatly underneath the mattress.

  ‘A habit of mine. Saves a lot of pressing,’ he explained, then, holding a fold of his shirt decently between his legs, he came round the bed, blew out the candle, and got in, causing the mattress to sag down heavily, and sliding Maggie straight into his arms.

  For a moment she panicked, holding herself stiffly against him, and moving her feet away from the hard hairiness of his legs. Then as she felt the familiar touch of his hand on her hair, and heard his whispering voice telling of his love, she relaxed against him, and buried her head in the warm smell of him, a smell tinged now with cheese and salt and scrubbing soap.

  ‘He’s a funny man that Mr Yates,’ Kit said. ‘Hardly human if you know what I mean, but he told me today he has three shops altogether. Three shops and he dresses like a tramp, and when I took the money upstairs he was sitting in a room with just the one candle and sacking tacked over the window.’

  ‘Do you see much of him?’ Maggie asked, wondering when what was going to happen would begin.

  Kit stroked the hair away from her face with an absent-minded gesture, then casually rubbed one foot up and down her leg.

  ‘No, I don’t see all that much of him, considering it is his shop, but if it was mine there are a lot of things I would change.’

  ‘Mmm?’ Maggie felt her eyelids droop, and quickly opened her eyes and stretched them wide.

  ‘Mmm?’ she said again as Kit moved her head a fraction to one side to ease his arm into a more comfortable position.

  ‘Well, for a start off I would be more lenient with tick. Mr Yates says I must not hand over even a penny paper of pins without catching hold of the money first. He says the previous owner of the shop went bankrupt through handing over food in exchange for clothes which customers promised to redeem the next week. But of course more often than not, they never did. It’s a poor district, Maggie, but the biggest part of them are God-fearing folks. So if a customer’s money runs out before Friday, and if she has been a good payer and keeps her word about paying back, well, I feel we would attract more customers by showing we have a bit of heart.’

  It was no good. Maggie was so warm, so relaxed, so comfortable, that Kit’s words were blurring into a maze of sounds, like a soft and lazy lullaby. Her eyelids drooped, her breath came softly and evenly, and Kit, realizing that she was dropping off to sleep, turned her over gently and fitted her on to his ample lap.

  ‘Spoons in a box, love,’ he whispered. ‘Sleep tight, and if I snore, just give me a nudge.’

  He tucked the bedclothes in carefully round her neck.

  ‘Good night, Mrs Carmichael,’ he said.

  Within seconds his leg jerked against her own, and perversely, the minute Kit fell asleep, Maggie was suddenly wide awake.

  This was her wedding day. The only wedding day she
would have, come to think of it. There had been no flowers, no music, no dressing-up even. She stared wide-eyed into the darkness.

  But that was how they had decided they wanted it, under the circumstances. She sighed, and instantly Kit’s hand clasped her own. There had been two rows of women at the back of the Chapel, two full rows, and every single woman come to gape, to gossip in the street after it was over. To pity Kit’s poor mother shut away in an asylum, and to pity her big son for being such a fool as to marry Maggie Craig, a girl who had gone tarnished to her own wedding.

  But Kit had forgiven her. He had said so, and she had shouted at him and defended herself, Maggie remembered with a touch of shame. She had told him how it had been with her and Joe, and she had seen the way his eyes had clouded over with pain. She squeezed Kit’s hand.

  This was the second time she had lain with her body stretched close to a man’s. She closed her eyes and remembered how Joe’s hands had caressed her, starting with her face, then tracing the outline of her mouth. How slow his movements had been, stirring her into an aching response. Then he had pushed her blouse from her shoulders, tearing at the buttons, and fastening his lips hungrily over her breast. . . .

  Maggie sat up suddenly, staring down at the humped shape that was Kit.

  In another minute she would have turned and covered his face with kisses, but it wouldn’t have been her husband she was thinking about, it would have been Joe Barton.

  Kit was sleeping so soundly, so exhausted, so kind, so good. Maggie bet he had never had a wicked thought in his mind, whilst she. . . . Carefully she lay down again, fitted herself back on to his lap, closed her eyes and willed a sleep that would not come. An hour later, with Kit snoring gently into the back of her neck she faced a bewildered truth.

  It was her wedding night and her husband was not going to make love to her.

  He did not want to, and nor was he going to. He had acted as if they had been married for years and years and were past it.

  ‘I’d think it was funny if I didn’t know it wasn’t,’ Maggie told herself, then she slid quietly out of bed.