Maggie Craig
Page 26
He took his cigarettes from the bedside table and lit one before he went on:
‘Tell me now about how he has never been a proper husband to you, Maggie. Tell me how he worships you with his body, because that is what it says in the marriage service.’
His voice rose. ‘With my body I thee worship . . . How often has he fulfilled that side of the bargain? And while we are at it, how ever did you come to have Rose? Was it another immaculate conception or something?’
For a moment Maggie felt the awkward fumbling flabbiness that had been Kit. She shuddered.
‘There’s more to life than that, Joe. More to a marriage. That is only a small part of it.’
‘But it’s not!’ Joe exploded, stubbing out the cigarette and reaching for her. ‘It’s a need, Maggie my own love. It is this and this and this . . .’
And this time his loving was brutal and selfish so that she cried out, but when he slept at last it was to sink into one of his fighting screaming nightmares.
He was drowning in a sea of mud. He was crossing no man’s land, his bayonet at the ready. There were shells bursting all around him, and the staccato putter of machine gun fire was in his ears. The air was silvery green with the glow from Very lights, and his sergeant had dropped dead at his feet with a bullet through his head.
Maggie held him, whispered to him, smoothed the hair back from his sweat-soaked forehead. Then when he slept again she crept from the bed and went through into the vast marble bathroom with its gleaming taps.
She sat there on the edge of the white bath and faced up to her own particular hell.
Never in a million years could she leave this man. He needed her just as Kit needed her, and oh God, there was no way she could split herself in two.
She shivered as the cold marbled floor struck icy cold into her legs and feet, and she rubbed at the tops of her arms as though the chill had reached up to there.
She could go back to Lancashire, and she could bring Rosie back with her. She could live with Joe, and Rosie would be brought up as a Londoner. Joe would make more money, she knew that. Joe was on the up and up, she could sense that when he talked about what he had planned to do.
There would be no more sewing at turning sheets and replacing frayed cuffs on shirts, no more counting every penny. They would walk in the London parks, and Rosie would learn to talk differently, and Joe would be the father she would never have known.
They would be happy. Without certain knowledge of that, Maggie knew this would be so. Joe Barton was her man. If things had been different he would have been the only man in her life. Like her mother with her father, they would live out their lives together, not without tiffs sometimes, because loving somebody did not mean, in Maggie’s code, that you always had to agree with them.
But Kit was there. Gentle, kind, affectionate Kit, who without her would be a nothing . . . a great soft nothing.
Slowly Maggie walked back into the bedroom. She got into bed and Joe’s arms immediately closed round her, straining her close to him, even in sleep.
She felt the strength of his arms, and knew that where Kit would give up without her by his side, Joe Barton would not.
Oh, Joe loved her, she knew that. He loved her desperately, and he would grieve for a while; he would be angry and lost for a while, but he would survive.
And survival seemed to be what it was all about.
Joe bought a shawl for Rosie the next day. It was a whisper of a shawl, worked in cobweb scallops, and Maggie knew that the baby’s tiny fingers would soon be caught up in it, but she said nothing.
She was living on borrowed time now, every hour and every minute ticking away, and that night, their last night together, Joe took her to a music hall.
‘You won’t need your muff, lass,’ he told her, but she could not bear to part with it. She sat with it on her lap in the hot smoky atmosphere of the little theatre, stealing glances at Joe now and again as if she would remember every line of his thin face.
The music was loud, and a big woman with tightly curled hair sang at the top of a powerful voice, while the audience stamped and cheered her on.
A tall man in a red lined cloak made a woman disappear into thin air, and when she appeared from the wings everyone stood up and yelled aloud their delight.
They drank stout, and when it was all over they decided it wasn’t much of a walk back to the hotel.
‘It’s a bonny night,’ Joe said, and Maggie took his arm as they strolled back along the wide pavements.
‘Just look at those stars,’ she said.
‘Aye, it’s a bonny night,’ Joe said again.
It seemed there was nothing left to say, or at least nothing they dared to say, and Joe ordered whisky to be sent to their room, and for the first time in her life Maggie tasted the fiery liquid, feeling it run smoothly down her throat and warm the place where her heart seemed to have frozen itself solid.
‘You are really going back then?’ Joe said when he had drained his glass twice. His voice was slightly slurred and his eyelids drooped, concealing the expression in his dark eyes.
‘Methodists don’t drink,’ Maggie said, holding out her glass for more. ‘Drink is the scourge of mankind.’
‘And the source of all evil,’ agreed Joe, holding his own glass high.
When they got ready for bed Maggie laughed at Joe in his long underpants, army issue. She had seen them before, but now with the drink warm inside her everything seemed silly and funny.
Joe laughed at her when she tripped over the hem of her long white nightdress.
‘Whoops a daisy!’
‘No, whoops a Maggie!’
They made love to mingled laughter, and then fell asleep with the suddenness of a stone flung down the well of Maggie’s childhood.
Breakfast was a solemn occasion, with Maggie settling for toast and tea, and Joe pushing his poached haddock to the side of his plate and leaving it there.
Back in their room Maggie unfolded the brown paper she had laid neatly in a drawer, and wrapping her few belongings in it, tied it with the same piece of string.
‘My mother used to have a box with all different lengths of string stored away, some too short to be used for anything at all,’ she told Joe, trying not to look at the empty coat hangers swinging in the dark recesses of the huge wardrobe.
He looked at her without a smile.
‘Oh, aye?’
And the last thing she did was to go into the bathroom and look around. She ran a hand over the marble surround of the wash-stand, and she turned on the hot tap and let the water trickle over her fingers.
She looked up at the dark green patterned wallpaper stretching away to the high ceiling, and she picked up one of the big white towels and reminded herself that somebody else would be washing them. They wouldn’t fill a living-room with steam as they dried over a clothes horse round the fire.
‘I am not going to kiss you goodbye,’ Joe told her, taking his stick and his case and somehow managing to open the door for her.
Maggie tried to keep her mind on the towels.
‘That’s all right,’ she said.
Joe paid the bill, then out in the wide sweep of the forecourt he hailed a taxi-cab, and helped Maggie inside.
‘It would have to be raining,’ he said.
He sat back, his head sunk deep on his chest, and his hands resting on the curved handle of the hospital issue walking stick. Then at the station he booked a single ticket for Maggie, and walked her towards the barrier.
‘If you want me, I have written Belle’s address down here,’ he told her, giving her a slip of paper which she concealed in the fur muff. ‘I won’t be settled in a place for a while. I have a lot of things to see to first.’
Maggie nodded. Politeness, it seemed, was all that was left, all they had to cling to.
‘Thank you, Joe. Thank you for giving me the best, the very best time of my life,’ she whispered. Then her face crumpled. ‘Oh, Joe, what can I say?’
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��Nowt!’ he said sharply, lapsing into dialect as he always did when troubled. ‘There’s nowt at all to say now, is there, lass?’
‘God bless you, Joe,’ Maggie whispered before she turned and walked away, handing her ticket to the man at the gate, having it punched, putting it away safely in the pocket her muff, then walking away down the long slope to the train.
She dare not turn round. If she turned round and saw him standing there, the dark hair falling forward over his forehead . . . if she saw him she would have to run back.
And there could be no running back. . . .
When the guard blew his whistle and waved his green flag, the train moved forward slowly, out of the station, past the tall grey lodging houses shrouded in a mist of fine rain.
Putting her head back Maggie closed her eyes.
She had done what she had done, and when Kit came home that night she would be there, waiting for him, no doubt with his tea warming in the fire-oven, and little Rosie asleep in her basket.
Kit would cry, oh he would most certainly cry, and she would comfort him, and talk to him, and he would try to understand.
God forgive him, but he would already be trying to understand.
Then when a few weeks had gone by he would tell her he had forgiven her, and she would accept his forgiveness, and in his simple loving way he would never know the truth.
The truth being that she would have preferred him to rant and rave at her, to call her all the names she deserved, and even land out at her and clout her one.
But Kit was Kit, just as Joe was Joe.
The two men, so different . . . the only men she had ever known.
‘Oh, Joe . . .’ she whispered as the train gathered speed.
‘Oh, Joe, my love, my dear, dear love.’
‘Mammy, that lady’s crying,’ a small boy sitting on the opposite seat said in a loud voice. ‘Why is she crying?’
His mother put a finger to her lips and shook her head.
‘It’s rude to stare,’ she told him.
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Epub ISBN: 9781448107841
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First published in Arrow in 1993
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Copyright © Marie Joseph 1979
The right of Marie Joseph to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by
Hutchinson
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ISBN 9780099253907