by Marie Joseph
‘Better luck next time, old pal,’ he grinned, scooping the kitty of halfpennies from the bedcover.
‘Nice of you to come,’ he told Belle and Will, then he escorted them over to his own bed and indicated two hard little chairs already hopefully set into position.
‘Have a chair. I can come home next Tuesday.’
The word ‘home’ had been a mistake, and Joe knew it at once by the way Belle flinched, and the way that pint-sized husband of hers shot her a warning glance.
Will at the same time was wondering if he could give Belle a warning kick without letting it show? He and this so-called brother-in-law could never share the same roof and he was astute enough to realize it. It was time Belle knew it too.
Working with gunpowder had not been exactly a bean-feast, but not to be considered of course with charging about in France with a fixed bayonet. Joe was obviously far from well, you only had to see the nerve jumping at the side of his scarred face to see that. And it wouldn’t be no bloody picnic having a bloody war hero sitting opposite to him on the other side of his own fireplace, wincing every time he struck a bloody match, and jumping a mile when a lump of coal back-fired. He stared anywhere but at Joe and said a deliberate nothing.
‘That’s right good news,’ Belle said after far too long a delay, and when they had gone, back home to their neat little cottage and their Sunday tea of cold ham and tomatoes, followed by a treat of a tin of pineapple chunks swimming in a sea of Bird’s custard, Joe lay back on his bed, remembering the sudden exhilaration he had felt when he had seen Maggie again.
Exhaustion, Maggie knew, was something you learned to live with after a time. Lack of sleep was another.
Not able to take more than a few ounces of cows’ milk at a time, the baby woke regularly every two hours, crying with a thin wail, and jerking Maggie out of a twitching sleep on the hard and slippery sofa.
Sometimes she heard it when the baby was fast asleep, she told Clara.
‘You look shocking,’ Clara said kindly.
So tired was Maggie that she was sure she nodded off for odd minutes, even when she was putting the nappies through the mangle in the yard, or even queueing up in the Fish Market as she was now, leaving Clara to keep an eye on the baby.
The main thing was that Rosie was thriving. She still cried a lot, still sicked up a goodly part of her bottle, but now she would stare up into Maggie’s face with a sort of cross-eyed resignation. And Clara she seemed to adore, a feeling that Maggie knew was mutual.
There was something strangely soothing about the long nights dozing fitfully on the sofa downstairs, the firelight softening the contours of the dark furniture as the fire struck sparks from the burnished steel fender. Maggie drifted in and out of dreams. . . . Once, half awake and half asleep, she imagined that Rose was standing by the dresser smiling at her.
Moving up in the queue Maggie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and made up her mind not to faint. She was not going to faint in a fish queue, not her. . . .
All the same, it was good to get out into the open again, away from the overpowering smell, out on to the cobblestones of the market-place. She glanced up at the round clock set high in the market house tower, and saw that it was almost time for the baby’s next feed.
She would have to hurry. . . .
‘It’s all right, she hasn’t moved a muscle,’ Clara said the minute she walked in, then her eye slid down into its corner.
‘There’s a man been. A tall fella with a walking stick, and no hat on. I told him you’d gone out, and he said he would come again.’ She sniffed her disgust at the caller going away without stating his business and saying who he was. ‘I can’t think who it might be, love. I knew it weren’t the Insurance man or the Doctor’s man with it not being a Friday, but he asked for you by name so he must have come for summat.’
Maggie was taking the parcels of fish from her basket and handing one to Clara.
‘Pay me later,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that your mother knocking on the wall?’ She smiled. ‘Thank you for letting me get out a bit. I really enjoyed it, there’s a lovely fresh wind.’
‘It’s time you had a bit of life,’ Clara said kindly, then raising her voice and startling Maggie she walked over to the dividing wall and banged on it with a clenched fist.
‘I’m coming as fast as I can!’
Her voice dropped two octaves. ‘I never thought the day would come when I would admit it, but me mother’s really getting on me wick.’ She glanced at the baby. ‘Oh, I’ve wakened her up,’ she said in a surprised tone. ‘She’s a light sleeper, isn’t she?’
Before she took off her coat, Maggie set the milk to warm, smiling to herself. Yes, she had enjoyed being out on her own in the fresh air even though the wind had been a bit parky. She puffed up the front of her hair with her fingers. And the baby was gaining weight, and the sewing orders were coming in, and even if Kit was laid off from the shop they would manage somehow.
With secret pride Maggie had, for the first time in her life, opened a bank account.
‘One of these fine days we’ll move,’ she’d told Kit. ‘We’ll have a garden with a swing in it, an’ when I hang the washing out it won’t bang against a sooty wall. An’ Rosie will run to school down a leafy lane. . . .’
She stirred sugar into the milk and began to fill the bottle, then started as the knocker banged three times, making her spill some of the milk over the table.
Telling the baby to be quiet for a minute, Maggie walked through the parlour to the front door.
She could not believe it . . . this man, this thin pale man with the dark hair that flopped down over his forehead had been in her heart and her mind for so long, and yet she could not bring herself to believe that he was standing there.
‘Joe! Oh, Joe.’ She held out both hands towards him, and he hooked the stick over his arm and took them, and they gazed into each other’s eyes, all attempt at pretence forgotten.
‘Joe . . . I never thought to see you again. I never . . .’
Joe was the first to recover. ‘Well then, Maggie love. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ He glanced up and down the street. ‘There’s eyes boring in me back. I can feel them. Dozens of them.’
Maggie stood aside, held out a hand to help as she saw the awkward way he negotiated the step, then drew it back when she saw the expression on Joe’s face. Then she led the way through the parlour into the living-room, to where Rose’s baby slept peacefully, tired after her crying spell, in the clothes basket to the side of the black fireplace.
‘My daughter’s baby,’ Maggie said, overwhelmed now by an unexpected shyness which she tried to hide by bending over and tucking the blankets in more firmly. A hairpin loosened itself and fell with a tinkle to the floor as it bounced off the fender.
‘My hair’s a mess,’ she said stupidly, putting up a hand and trying to secure the straying wisps.
‘Maggie, lass. . . .’ Joe came up behind her, stooped down to lay a gentle finger on the baby’s head, and saw the floor coming up to hit him smack between his eyes.
Taking a deep breath he straightened up, feeling the sweat break out on his forehead as the entire room swam round and round. Groping behind him he felt for the edge of the table.
‘I think mebbe I walked a bit too far,’ he said, and his voice was a shaky echo, as if it came from a far-off place.
Then somehow, he never knew quite how, he was sitting in a chair, and his head was being held down between his knees, and from the same far-away place a sympathetic voice was saying:
‘You’ll be all right in a minute . . . oh, Joe, love . . . take a few deep breaths . . . that’s right. Now just sit there quietly and I’ll make a pot of tea. I’ve got some tea you’ll like. It’s special for nowadays.’
Joe fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, only to be handed one, neatly folded and ironed into a triangle.
‘Now slip your coat off. This room’s too hot, but it has to be for the baby. It must be a day
for dizzy spells,’ Maggie went on, talking quickly and not looking at him, giving him a chance to recover. ‘I thought I was going off meself in the fish market earlier on, so I know how you feel.’
He put his head back and found that the room had stopped whirling round, then he watched her as she lifted the black kettle from the fire and poured the boiling water into the tea-pot standing in the hearth.
‘Here you are then,’ she said a few minutes later as she handed him a cup of tea, sweet and hot. ‘Now then, tell me where you’ve walked from, and where you’ve been. . . .’ She sat down opposite to him, and saw him sitting in Kit’s chair, and it was as if there were no years in between; as if nothing of importance had happened since he went away. It was uncanny, but it was true.
‘I’ve walked from Steep Brow,’ he told her, answering a question she had already forgotten she had asked. ‘It was hard on the knee coming downhill.’ He leaned forward, putting the cup of tea on the table. ‘Maggie, lass. I know a lot you think I don’t. I know about your girl dying, and I know that baby very well.’ He nodded towards the basket. ‘I saw that baby before you did. I’ve been in the Infirmary a long time because some compassionate sod of a captain saw it was my home-town, and sent me here to be near my kith and kin.’
He gave a twisted smile. ‘And I saw you taking the little nipper out, but I couldn’t make you hear when I shouted after you.’
Suddenly he raised his voice, startling Maggie out of her dream-like state.
‘An’ the first thing I’ve done is to come and find you, Mrs Carmichael. Why did you never answer my letters, Mrs Carmichael?’
Maggie’s eyes widened with shock.
‘Letters. I got no letters, Joe.’
‘One of them came back with NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS written on it,’ he said more quietly. ‘So somebody was getting them, weren’t they?’
Maggie flared up then. ‘But you took your time in writing, didn’t you, Joe? It was just after you’d gone, for weeks after you’d gone, that I needed a letter bad. I’ll tell you how bad, Joe Barton.’
She was hating him and she was loving him. She could not take her eyes from his face, from the fading scar on his cheek, from the nose, more hawk-like than she remembered it, from the gaunt expression he never had before.
He had been through hell, she could see that and she could not bear it. He had suffered and she had not been there to smooth the hurt away. . . .
Maggie, quite without volition, got up from her chair, knelt down by Joe’s chair, laid her head on his lap until she felt the touch of his hand on her hair, and cried without restraint. She was crying the years away, but she did not know it; this was happiness if she had recognized it, and Joe’s broken words were like healing balm to her ears.
‘Don’t cry, little love,’ he murmured. ‘It was my fault, all my fault. I sent for you when I was beginning to be somebody, when I’d started putting a bit by. . . .’ His hand, stroking the hair away from her forehead, was suddenly still.
‘Oh, Maggie Craig . . . why did you have to go and get married?’
For a moment Maggie too was quite still, then she raised a tear-washed face.
‘I’ll tell you why I got married, Joe Barton. I married a man who was probably the only man in this town who would have me, knowing that before my own father was cold in his grave I had started to have a baby.’ Her gaze was steady. ‘Our baby, Joe. An’ I lost it upstairs in this house, crying for you. For a letter that never came, and when you did write, Joe, it was too late, and though I never would have thought Kit could do such a thing, I can’t find it in my heart to blame him. Not at this moment I can’t blame him. One day I might, but now. . . .’
She could hear the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. The baby made a snuffling sound, then was quiet again.
‘Oh, God!’ Joe’s voice was ragged, filled with hurt. ‘Oh, God . . . what a mess. What a terrible bloody wasted mess.’ He gave the arm of the chair a derisory slap with the flat of his hand. ‘I never thought . . . I never once thought . . . Maggie. I was nineteen!’
‘I know.’ Maggie sighed. ‘We were both there, Joe, but it’s all over a long time ago. I’ve got my life now, and you’ve got yours, and maybe it is all God’s will.’
Joe jerked her shoulders so that she was staring into his blazing eyes.
‘It’s not bloody God’s will, Maggie, it’s not! I doubt if there even is a God, and don’t look at me like that. I’ve had the chance to wonder these past few years out there in France. I’m living with Belle till I’m fit enough to go away again, and she goes on about God’s will all the time. What’s happened to me and you is me not writing early on. You can’t blame God for that. For once I’m sticking up for Him!’
‘I’m saying nothing, Joe,’ Maggie said wearily, ‘but all I know is that if I hadn’t had a God to turn to at times I shudder to think what might have happened.’ She stood up, small and dignified, smoothing down her unruly hair, and moving so that she stood well away from him.
‘It’s Wednesday, Joe, and Kit’s half-day. I don’t want you here when he comes in for his dinner. He’ll know who you are straight away, and I can’t face that.’
Her face crumpled.
‘When they came to tell me that Rose had died, do you know what I did? I went out into the yard and banged my head against the wall till the blood came. Then I came in and started to get Kit’s breakfast. So you see I do know how to carry on . . . and, Joe, I’m glad to have seen you again, and I’m so very happy that you came through the war alive, but now you must go.’
Joe got up from the chair with difficulty and came towards Maggie, but she held up a warning hand.
‘Now this minute, before Kit. I’m not in no fit state to make polite introductions and neither are you.’ The glance she gave the clock on the mantelpiece was full of wild entreaty, and even Joe could see that her control was ready to snap.
‘I’ve never stopped loving you, Maggie Craig,’ he said clearly, then turning his back on her he limped towards the door, raised a hand in a mock salute, and was gone.
When Kit came into the house, exactly four minutes after Joe had left it, he went straight to his chair, slumped down into it, wrenched off his tie, and unbuttoning his high starched collar, threw it on to the table as if it had been choking the life out of him.
If Maggie had looked at him properly she would have seen the utter desolation on his round face, the dejection in the droop of his shoulders. But she was rushing around, pulling a white cloth over the red chenille, setting out knives and forks, nervous at the way Kit had just missed seeing Joe, and hearing Joe’s last words to her, hearing him say them over and over again.
‘I’ve never stopped loving you, Maggie Craig . . . never . . . never . . . never.’
Bending down to the fire-oven she took out a dish of well-browned hot-pot, and set it on a mat.
‘It’s ready,’ she said, crimson-faced, knowing she would be quite unable to touch a mouthful.
Obediently Kit took his place, then sat with head bowed as Maggie spooned the food on to his plate.
‘Aye . . .’ he said, then again, ‘aye.’
‘Kit! What’s the matter?’
Maggie saw him for the first time. ‘What’s wrong?’
Wearily Kit pushed the untouched plate of food away.
‘I’ve been given the sack,’ he said in a low voice. Even as he spoke his hands were outstretched to his wife for comfort, just as he had stretched them out to his mother when things went wrong.
Maggie did not fail him, she never had, but this time her pity was tinged with despair. Standing behind his chair she tangled her fingers in his curly hair whilst he leaned against her, his eyes closed.
Then she was angry, so angry that for a moment no words would come.
‘You mean that old skinflint has done what he’s been threatening to do for years? Taken on someone younger for lower wages? Kit, he can’t have! He wouldn’t! Not after you keeping that shop open all hours, w
orking out the rations and doing most of the buying? I won’t let him!’
She gave Kit’s shoulders an exasperated push.
‘I could kill him, that’s what I could do. The old goat, the mean, spiteful, miserable old goat.’
Kit shook his head from side to side.
‘Nay, love. It’s not what you think. He’s selling up, lock, stock and barrel, and going to live down south. He’s seventy years old, Maggie, and he’s made his pile. He says he’s earned his place in the sun . . . those were his exact words.’
‘And what about your place in the sun then?’
Maggie faced him now, hands on hips. ‘Does he not think about all the years you’ve been late home, after slaving behind that counter to help him make his pile? The times before the Act came in and you were working from six in the morning till the last customer came in, and then sometimes for no more than a candle?’ Her voice rose. ‘And what did you say to him when he told you, Kit? Did you just listen and say nothing at all? Nothing at all?’
Kit spread his hands wide.
‘Don’t take on so, love. I did let him see that I was cut up about it, of course I did. I even asked him if the new owner might keep me on to manage the shop. I reminded him that I knew where every last matchbox was kept, and that I knew all my customers inside out, and I told him I knew who could be trusted to have a bit of tick. But he said he was sorry.’
‘Sorry? I should just think he was sorry. An’ that’s all he was, just sorry?’
‘He told me he was selling it to a man who wanted to set his son up in business.’ Kit looked away from her. ‘He wants me to keep on for a few weeks, to show this lad the ropes . . . just till he gets used to it, you know?’
Maggie felt the injustice of it deep inside her, but what she felt she could not even begin to stomach was Kit’s attitude. This time he had gone too far. She felt physically sick.
