by Marie Joseph
‘And you agreed? You actually agreed to that?’
She wrenched a chair from underneath the table and sat down, not trusting her legs to support her. ‘You mean you let Mr Yates persuade you to do that? Oh, Kit, where’s your pride? Do you know what I would have done? I’d have told your miserly Mr Yates exactly what I thought about him, then I’d have marched outside and thrown a flamin’ stone through his flamin’ window . . . that’s what I’d have done!’
Kit got up, leaving his meal on the table. ‘Then I would have got myself arrested, wouldn’t I? No, there was nothing I could do, and I’m hurting no one but myself if I refuse to help the new lad coming in. I’ll find meself another job somehow. Things are sometimes for the best.’
Maggie stared at him. He was so kind, so good, so weak, so much less than a man that she wanted to cry. No, not cry, but beat her fists against his chest, scream at him and kick him for being as he was, for putting her into this position of being the stronger. For making her responsible for him. She stared at him, her hand over her mouth, seeing the defeated droop of Kit’s head, seeing too in her mind’s eye, the cheeky, almost arrogant lift of Joe Barton’s head as he had left her not half an hour ago.
Joe would have stood his ground. Joe had come through experiences which Kit could never even have imagined, and he was still a fighter. . . .
Maggie made up her mind the way she always did, quick and swift, before she had time to change it:
‘How much is Mr Yates asking for the shop?’
Kit mumbled his reply. ‘A hundred pounds. He told me he considered it a fair price, with the two rooms above and the one at the back, even though it is used mainly as a store room. He said that . . .’
But Maggie was not interested in what else Mr Yates had said. She was doing quick sums in her mind, and any minute now she would regret it and it would be too late.
Going over to the dresser drawer, she rummaged beneath a pile of tea towels and took out her bank book. She flicked over the entries, one pound, three pounds, and once when she had sewed for five weeks on the linen of the hotel near the station, an unbelievable six.
She held out the book to Kit.
‘A hundred and ten pounds, six shillings and fourpence. Do you think Mr Yates would change his mind for ten pounds, six shillings and fourpence?’
As though he had suffered a sudden stroke, Kit sat without moving a muscle, staring at the bank book.
‘Open it, Kit!’ Maggie was shouting, forgetting about the still sleeping baby. ‘Open it and see for yourself. It’s all down there, every single saving. Look at it if you don’t believe me!’
He stared at the closely figured pages as if in a trance, running a finger over the column, shaking his head, then when he spoke at last it was to say something that made Maggie want to pick up a knife from the table and stick it in his chest.
Shaking his head in infuriating bewilderment, he said:
‘But it would be a dirty trick, lass. What about the man who wants to buy the shop for his son?’
Maggie clenched and unclenched her hands, feeling the nails bite deep into her palms.
‘Has anything been signed?’ She marvelled at the calmness of her voice.
‘No. Mr Yates said it was just a gentlemen’s agreement as yet.’
‘Then as Mr Yates is no gentleman, there’s no problem, is there? That shop is yours, Kit. Without this money it is yours the way you’ve worked it up, and you know it.’
Still he argued. ‘Maggie, love. I can’t take this. I’d no idea you had saved so much, but I know what you were saving for. You hate the town, you’ve hated it all these years. Anyway, there’s the baby now. It’s no fit place for a baby apart from the fact that it would take more than one pair of hands to make that place decent enough to live in. The back is just a store room, and upstairs there is damp running down the walls, and the floorboards are giving. There’s mice and cockroaches . . . oh, Maggie, it’s a terrible place. This house is a little palace compared.’
Maggie’s eyes flashed.
‘Do you want the shop, Kit Carmichael, or don’t you? I know what it’s like, and I know it’s no place for a baby, but Clara will take little Rosie for a while. She’ll jump at the chance. So just for once, will you be decisive and tell me what you really want to do?’
He did not need to tell her, one look at his face was enough. Slowly despair was being replaced by hope, and more than hope, a wonder in his wife’s capability, a marvelling at the way she could always be relied on to bring order out of chaos. Defending him, shielding him from trouble, the way his mother had always done. . . .
And almost killed Maggie at one time, his conscience was reminding him, but Kit had long ago put the memory of that night from his mind. He’d had to in order to replace his mother on her pedestal.
‘It’s not as nice a district as this,’ he said again, his hand over the bank book as if he had already transferred it into his own keeping.
‘Do you really think Clara will have the baby to mind? There’s sacking over the windows, love, and plaster peeling from the walls, and I won’t be able to help much if I’m in the shop and doing the buying and everything.’
‘If I warm your dinner up, do you think you could eat it?’ She was too tired to talk about it any more. It was done, and that was that. As he ate she sat straight in a corner of the sofa, watching the years fall away from his face as he waved his fork about to emphasize a point, to illustrate what they would do to make the upper rooms habitable.
Maggie knew that the rest of her life was being mapped out for her, because she knew that the post-war boom would be over almost before it began. There would be unemployment, and when the house was clean there would be days, months and years of standing behind the counter, selling a poke of sugar here, and a bundle of firewood there.
Kit wasn’t getting any younger, and there was Rosie to bring up. . . . Maggie sighed. Oh, yes, she could read all the signs. Most of the town’s mills needed new methods and new machinery. India’s import of cottons had begun to fall off, and she had read that the Japanese weavers were willing to work even longer hours and for far less pay.
Her dream of moving to the country might never materialize, and little Rosie would have to grow up with the street for her playground, and the dirt and the grime as her heritage. . . .
That night Maggie went to Kit and whispered that she would like him to sleep with her.
‘I have a great need of you, a greater need than you know,’ she said.
He stared, shocked by what he considered to be her unwomanly behaviour, then he turned his head. ‘You’d never sleep a wink with my snoring, lass,’ he said.
Maggie felt her face sting as if he had slapped her. ‘Good night, Kit,’ she said quietly.
17
THE CLIMB UP Steep Brow was easier than walking down. Seeing Maggie again had, Joe felt, done more for him than all the weeks and months he’d spent in hospital.
When Will Hargreaves came home from his milk round Joe was sitting by the fire, whistling and looking pleased with himself. He had gone through a bad few moments when he thought about Maggie going through what she had been through and all his fault, but that was done and past and what mattered now was their future together.
For they were going to have a future together. He had made up his mind about that.
‘You happy or something?’ Will asked, peeved because Wednesday was baking day at the Armitages’ neat little semi-detached, and that meant Belle would not be home till later.
‘Mrs Armitage likes her kitchen left clean and the oven done. She’s very proud of that oven,’ Belle had told him, smiling.
‘Silly faggot,’ Will had said, hating Wednesdays from then on.
Joe put down the paper he had been skimming through, and grinned, not unaware that his brother-in-law was regarding him with something akin to loathing.
‘Not been a bad sort of day, has it?’ he remarked for something to say.
‘Not for some it hasn’t,’ Will
said pointedly.
Joe merely laughed. Then he lit a cigarette and flicked the spent match into the fire, where it struck the bars of the grate then fell into the hearth.
‘Pick it up.’
Will’s tone was even, but frustration was rising thick in his throat. ‘You wouldn’t be smoking down here if Belle was at home,’ he said, small eyes narrowing with dislike.
Joe did as he was told, still grinning.
‘Oh, come on now, Will. You’re not past having a crafty fag yourself now and again.’ He held out the packet. ‘Come on. Have one. We can waft the smell out before she comes home.’
‘No, thanks.’
Will felt at that moment as if he could sell his soul for a smoke, but he was in no mood to be patronized by the man sitting opposite to him, the man so obviously chuffed about something.
He unbuttoned his waistcoat one button at a time, slowly and deliberately.
‘Feeling up to getting back to London, and all them mucky carpets yet, Joe? You’ll not earn much brass sitting on tha backside.’
Joe shook his head. ‘All in good time, Will. I know it’s not right me being here with you and Belle, but I try to keep out of your way as much as I can.’
‘And I more than pay my way,’ he added silently to himself.
He clenched his hands, dismayed to find that the palms had grown clammy. The little pulse at the side of his head had begun to throb again. ‘It’s not easy settling after all this time.’
His brother-in-law unfastened the top button of his trousers, and sighed with relief, as if their tightness had been straining over a billowing paunch.
‘So we’re back where we started then, are we?’
‘What do you mean, back where we started, Will?’
The small eyes narrowed. So he had managed to ruffle the tall self-satisfied bloody hero, had he? Good! It was time Joe Barton realized he couldn’t just walk into his house and behave as if he belonged. He belonged nowhere, this arrogant thin-faced so-and-so, with the twitching scar on his face, and his assumption that he had the right to get his big feet under their table.
From what Belle had told him, Joe Barton had cleared off pronto when he had found things getting too hot for him, and if he had found somewhere to go then, he could find somewhere to go now. Him and his big talk of a flat in London and his own firm, what did he know about having to get up at four o’clock of a morning and work for a boss who wouldn’t give the skin of his rice pudding to his starving grandma?
Aye, Joe was ruffled all right. He’d wiped that grin off his face, that he had.
‘Just how long are you reckoning on stopping here?’ he asked, then before Joe could answer he got up and went out to the back, leaving him to think that one over.
Slipping his braces down as he went into the yard, Will felt mightily pleased with himself. He’d put his spoke in, and he knew Joe would not repeat what he had said to Belle. Just for a split second he felt a stab of shame when he thought what Belle would say if she knew he had been getting at her precious brother.
‘He’s all I’ve got, Will. The only family in the world,’ she would say.
Still it had needed saying. Will lifted the latch of the privy, then jumped away as a thin grey cat streaked past him to disappear over the wall into the next yard with the speed of light.
‘Thought I saw a rat out there,’ he said, when he went back into the house, his humour partly restored, and quite prepared to say no more.
What he wasn’t prepared for was the swift reaction to what he considered to be an innocent remark. . . .
Immediately Joe sprang to his feet, the colour draining from his cheeks, leaving him grey and shaking, with his eyes starting from his head.
‘A rat? Did you say a rat?’
Will studied him intently, realizing he had at last found a way to ruffle his brother-in-law’s composure.
‘Aye,’ he said distinctly. ‘We did have some at one time. They come from the tip over the field. Great big rats, as big as cats. What’s the matter?’ he asked in mock innocence. ‘You frightened of them or something?’
Joe felt for the chair and sat down, sweat standing out on his forehead like glistening globules of rain.
It was Ypres again – the first, second, and the third battle, and Passchendaele, and Verdun, and there was a rat nibbling away at the dead hand of a soldier lying across his feet. And he could not move . . . he could not bloody move. . . .
Will pressed home his advantage, a faint niggling guilt at what he was doing spurring him on.
‘You’re all the same, you lot,’ he said. ‘Making out that your nerves are shot just to get some sympathy.’ He sat down again, dismayed in spite of himself at Joe’s pallor, but stung into bravado.
‘It weren’t no joke for me either, I can tell you, working with TNT. And there weren’t no ruddy medals given out either.’ He stabbed a finger in Joe’s direction. ‘I’m not like some who yell out in the night, but I could tell you things, aye that I could. There were times when me chest was so tight I was coughing up yellow phelgm, and me skin was yellower than a ruddy canary’s.’
He raised his voice. ‘Aye, and there weren’t no leaves tickling up French tarts, not even after one of the buildings filled with nitro-glycerine blew up in a ruddy sheet of flame.’
Joe tore at his collar, finding it as hard to breathe as if his lungs were being filled with poison gas. He was no longer in the cosy living-room of Belle’s cottage, with the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and the rugs laid out in a neat pattern on the floor. He was picking his terrified way along a duck-board over a stinking mud-flat, his equipment weighing a ton across his sagging shoulders. He was seeing the man in front of him slip from the track and die gasping for breath as the mud filled his mouth and eyes.
He was on his way struggling towards the front line, and the trenches where rats . . . he reached out for Will, lifting him out of his chair, and holding him suspended, his tiny feet swinging clear of the floor.
‘Oh, I’m sorry for you, Will Hargreaves,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Heart sorry I am for you that your face turned yellow. Have you ever been so frightened that you shit yourself, Will?’
From his undignified position Will stared straight into Joe’s eyes, and the glimmer of tears he saw there restored his bravado.
‘It was only a cat, you filthy devil,’ he said clearly, and staggered to recover his balance as Joe let him go.
Yet somehow he had won. He was not quite sure how, but he knew that he had won. Now he and Joe Barton could never live under the same roof again, and he was glad. And Belle would be glad, though she would never admit it.
Joe backed towards the curtain at the foot of the stairs, his limp more noticeable than ever. Then he drew the curtain back and stumbled up to his room, his shaking terror and his anger evaporating, leaving him weak and filled with self-loathing.
He ought not to have said that. He could scarcely believe he had said what he had. Sitting down on the edge of his bed, he dropped his head into his hands.
Tomorrow he would go back to London. When his hands had stopped their shame-making trembling he would start packing his few things, then he would be off. Sister Fletcher might have said that he wasn’t fit to be on his own yet awhile, but even old po-face didn’t know everything.
And he would take Maggie with him. And the baby. She wasn’t happy in her marriage, he knew that, even if she hadn’t said so. They belonged to him, the both of them, because why else had that baby been put in his bed if it hadn’t been a sign?
A sign from the God Maggie believed in. The God he himself wasn’t all that sure about.
‘It’s folks what make happiness, not God,’ Joe told himself, levering himself up from the bed and starting to pack.
When Joe went downstairs again Belle had come home, pale and tired from the Armitages’.
He found her in the scullery peeling potatoes ready to drop them into the stew she had prepared the day before.
‘Wi
ll’s told me you’re going, Joe,’ she said, too tired to pretend that she did not know it was for the best.
‘That’s right, love, and I appreciate what you’ve done for me. It’s just that, well . . . you know me.’
She nodded. ‘It would have been nice if you could have stayed somewhere near. It would have been nice to have a bit of family living near.’ She dug at an eye in a mis-shaped potato, taking out her feelings on it so that Joe would not see how upset she was feeling.
‘Not enough folks with carpets, nor the money to have them cleaned,’ Joe said, then he lowered his voice.
‘Besides, love, Will is your family now, and you’ll be having babies some day when you get a bit put by.’
Her face flamed and she averted her face as she answered him with quiet resignation.
‘I don’t think so Joe. They would have come afore now if God had meant me to have any.’ She moved to the slopstone. ‘You see, I’m not quite like other women in a certain way. The doctor told me it was because I was not fed well enough when I was a child. It’s a sort of anaemia, if you know what I mean?’
‘Oh, Belle. . . .’ Joe picked up the knife and jabbed it into the potato peelings. ‘Why must you always be so uncomplaining? You make me feel ashamed. Surely something can be done? Maybe if you went to one of them specialists in Manchester? You know, one what deals with women’s complaints? I’d give you the money, love.’
Her cheeks glowed red again.
‘It wouldn’t do no good, our Joe, and anyway Will doesn’t want no children,’ she said simply, and bowed her head, resigned quite passively to the inevitable.
‘Then I’ll be off in the morning,’ Joe said, and they stared at each other, each wishing there was more they could say, but knowing equally that there was nothing.
18
IN THE LONG wakeful stretch of the night, propped with a pillow against the bed-end, Joe smoked one cigarette after another, remembering the way Maggie had looked when she had opened the door to him.
There was something about her, something he couldn’t put a finger on. She had seemed as untouched as when he had laughed with her as a young girl, as vulnerable and trusting as a young lass in love for the first time.
