All the Beggars Riding

by Lucy Caldwell

  She is going to tell her parents: she has to. But not about Patrick, not yet. She’ll just say that she is pregnant, an accident, and she doesn’t know the father. The morning she goes, bag already packed, an hour before the train, businesslike. She has rehearsed it in her head, over and over, until it’s almost like reading from someone else’s typewritten speech. The only thing she got wrong was underestimating how lonely it would feel being back here. Her cold, unlived-in bedroom, her parents, her sister. Christmas.

  How would she ever see him, if she did come back until things with his family were resolved? It takes four hours from London to Beverley, if you make the connections, and then on to Tickton – he couldn’t come to Routh, her parents wouldn’t have him in the house. Would she go to Beverley to meet him? Baby in tow? A night in a boarding house there, a dingy B&B? It wouldn’t work, it couldn’t. She’s always left alone, with these logistics, these worries and fears. When he’s there, he somehow sweeps or melts them away, or makes them seem irrelevant. They creep and scuttle back, like rats, the moment he goes, chittering at her in the uncertain darkness.

  The twist of sickness tightens inside her.

  Then suddenly Helen is there, red-cheeked, breathless, repeating some gossip she’s just heard. Helen is three years younger in calendar terms, light years away in worldliness. Helen drinks like a fish (brandy-and-Babycham, martini-and-lemonade), smokes menthol cigarettes, always has boyfriends on the go. She’s at teacher-training college in York but what she really wants to do is start up her own fashion line. Like Jane, she’s a dab hand on a sewing machine – their mother taught them both, and they both took to it – and she makes up all the Vogue patterns. Today, under her sensible coat and scarf, she’s in a scarlet shirtwaister with stiff cuffs and a flouncy bow at the neck. She looks reet good, people say. She always looks great. They are similar enough that you’d know they were sisters, Jane and Helen, but where Jane’s features are pinched in her narrow face, Helen’s seem to fit, somehow. Jane can’t believe the wild, crazy certainty she had that she knew what life was and Helen’s was blinkered and dull. How could she think that? Helen has reached the punchline and is doubled over, cackling, grabbing Jane’s forearm. Jane makes herself laugh, too. She has no idea what Helen has been saying. All of her – the her that matters – is coiled inwards, around the creel of her son. Their son. She must remember that, she must trust that. Their baby: their son. When she asked the nurse if you could tell the sex of your baby, the nurse said most of the time a mother’s intuition was right. Patrick Michael. Patrick Michael Jr. She doesn’t like Paddy – nick nack paddywhack, give the dog a bone. He’ll always be his full name, Patrick. Patrick Junior. She has to keep faith, and trust, and believe. If she doesn’t, she’ll go under. She has to remember that certainty she had, the certainty she has, when she is with him.

  ‘Want another?’ Helen’s glass is almost empty, a couple of centimetres of sediment and a sodden cinnamon stick. She waggles it at Jane, then notices Jane’s glass. ‘Ey up’ – they like to talk Yorkshire to each other, ironically, as both of them are trying to lose their accents – ‘you’ve hardly touched yours, lass. Be a good girl and bezzle it back.’

  ‘Mort sweet for me, this is,’ Jane says, trying to play the game.

  ‘A vodka, then? Or a gin? Come on, it’s Christmas. And Christ,’ she says, dropping the accent and grimacing, ‘we’ve got to get through the evening somehow.’

  ‘I think I’ll just have a club soda, actually.’

  Helen rolls her eyes and plunges back towards the bar, and when the boy comes around for the glasses Jane pushes the mulled wine towards him along with the empty pints. Your baby is physiologically complete, now: right down to the patterns on his fingertips.

  They have their second drink. Helen’s cheeks flush prettily (where Jane’s would come out in blotches) and Jane lets her sister do most of the talking. It’s dark when they leave the Inn and start walking back. The wind is raw, and tinged with snow. Their faces feel peeled, their eyes start to weep. Helen links her arm through Jane’s and they discuss how awful it is to be stuck at home, how awful it would be to be here permanently. Helen doesn’t realise, at first, how quiet Jane has become. When she does, she nags at Jane to tell her.

  Jane shakes her head.

  ‘Is it a lad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is, and all.’ She is silent for a moment, and then she says, ‘Is he married?’

  Jane gapes at her, then remembers to close her face over. She feels the blood drain from, then flood back to her cheeks: she’s grateful for the night, the lack of street lights.

  ‘You wazzock,’ Helen says.

  They are almost home now, but by unspoken agreement they keep on walking, turn left down Meaux Lane towards the churchyard. All Saints’ is a handsome, solemn church, built from sober grey stone; its tower dates back to the twelfth century. Once, people would have walked from hamlets all over for services here. But the last rector left ten years ago and since then there’s only been a curate, the vicar from Beverley, who comes twice a month for Sunday Communion and special services and once a month for Evensong. When they were teenagers, Jane and Helen – though mostly Helen – used to meet their friends in the graveyard, practise smoking cigarettes or drinking ginger wine or damson gin that the farmer’s daughter used to bring along in battered plastic cartons. They push through the same gap in the hedge now and make their way to the back of the church, to the flat slab of long-weathered gravestone they used to sit on. They perch there now, the creeping chill of it, the mossy damp. Helen lights one last menthol, looks at Jane as she blows out the smoke in a lopsided attempt at a ring.

  ‘You wazzock,’ Helen says again. ‘You’re too naive, Jane. You really are. You’re not cut out for that sort of thing. Trust me.’ Then she says, ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Patrick,’ Jane finds herself saying, and it’s a rush of relief just to say his name aloud. ‘His name’s Patrick, and he’s a doctor at the clinic – a surgeon. And he’s – he’s . . .’

  How to describe him – where can she possibly begin? He’s ten years older than me, and Northern Irish, and six foot three, with wild curly dark hair and a beard and he’s the funniest cleverest man I’ve ever met, and the most maddening, and when we make love he pins my wrists down as if he might break them, and he licks the sweat from where it pools in the small of my back and he laps at me like he could never be satisfied –

  ‘I love him, Helly. I’m head over heels.’

  Helen just shakes her head and smokes. Jane hears her words jangling in the air; how cheap and tawdry and meaningless they sound; a handful of loose change. ‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘I love him. And he loves me.’

  She can tell Helen doesn’t know what to say. Helen is embarrassed for her.

  ‘We should be getting back,’ Helen says, getting up.

  Christmas Eve. Taking cards around to the neighbours, the Spratleys by the village hall, the Dunnings at the rectory, the Sewells and Lamplughs and old Mrs Jewitt. Mince pies and offers of sherry, mince pies and offers of cherry brandy, cups of tea, cups of tea. Down Meaux Lane again to the farm; collecting the turkey; a Christmas pudding exchanged for a joint of gammon. Mixing the stuffing; stuffing the cold, greasy cavity and tying it ready for the morning. Sucking on candied ginger all the while, as a precaution. The fibrous taste of it, sucked to strings in her mouth. Carols on the radio and a fire in the front room. Helen capering and joking about, coaxing smiles from their father. Finding a box of old records on top of her wardrobe and playing, over and over, The Kinks, ‘Tired of Waiting for You’. She was sixteen when it came out. The lyrics had just been words, then. They don’t have a song. Wondering what he and she danced to, on their wedding day. Knowing she’s being childish – knowing thinking like this won’t help – not able to help it. The mere fact of being here regresses her; she acts and thinks like a child. If she came back here, she’d get trapped: he’d cease to exist and she’d never leave. Breathe.
Christmas Day. Church in the morning, home, peeling potatoes, criss-crossing sprouts, slicing carrots and parsnips to boil, the usual. Sherry, and she allows herself to drink it, sweet and oily, the same bottle as last year and the year before, crusty at the neck; lunch, crackers. It is just the four of them, these days. They’ll see their second cousins tomorrow – the second cousins they only ever see on Boxing Day. Their mother’s brother emigrated to Australia some years ago. Their father’s brother died in Africa in the war. All of their grandparents are passed away, now. It would suffocate her. Her mother, her father, her and a baby. She couldn’t do it. Presents are after lunch in the Moorhouse way of doing things. First it’s the Queen’s speech, everyone gathered round. My whole family has been deeply touched by the affection you have shown to us when we celebrated our Silver Wedding, and we are especially grateful to the many thousands, blah blah blah. One of the great Christian ideals is a happy and lasting marriage between man and wife. How sick she feels, pinned to the spot. Trying to block it out: it’s only words, it’s meaningless, it doesn’t touch her. In the United Kingdom we have our own particular sorrows in Northern Ireland and I want to send a special message of sympathy to all those men, women and children who have suffered and endured so much. She gets up, blurts that she needs the toilet. Her father frowning, her mother blinking and shushing her, Helen’s beady eyes. She waits in the hallway until the broadcast is ended. Christmas is above all a time of new life. A time to look hopefully ahead to a future when the problems which face the world today will be seen in their true perspective.

  Presents: blindly opening, dutifully admiring and thanking. Afterwards, helping her mother with the washing up. The day is almost over. Only tomorrow to get through, then on Tuesday she’ll go, the two-forty train. By then she’ll have told them; by then it’ll be done.

  Her mother is washing, she’s drying, wiping the soapy smears from the plates and cutlery and handing them to Helen to put away. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her mother says, Are you pregnant? It isn’t a question. She stops moving; time slows. Helen is next door, putting the crystal glasses, a wedding present they only use once a year, in their place in the sideboard. Her mother doesn’t look at her, just keeps her eyes fixed on the sink, keeps scouring the plates.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ she manages.

  ‘I’m your mother,’ her mother says, quietly, turning to her now, lifting her dripping hands from their cage of cutlery in a gesture of something.

  Her mother is small, bright-eyed, her hair mostly grey, now, and cut shorter than suits her. Margaret, her name is. Margaret Ann Moorhouse née Pearson.

  ‘You’ve happened an accident, haven’t you? Ah, Jane.’

  She is shaking. She is trembling, all over.

  ‘He’s married, Mum,’ she says. Her script, painstakingly planned and memorised and practised, is instantly forgotten.

  Helen comes back into the room: stops. ‘Helen,’ says their mother, ‘will you go and sit with Dad, please?’

  Helen looks from her mother to Jane. ‘Oh my God,’ she says.

  ‘Helen.’

  Helen turns and goes.

  Jane is expecting her mother to be furious with her, to shout, to rage. She has prepared herself for this. But her mother just stands there and starts to cry, silently, hands forgotten in the nest of knives.

  Allenby Mansions, Earls Court,

  June 1973

  A fortnight before the baby’s due, Margaret Ann comes down to London. It’s June, and warm, a heatwave rising, but she wears her Sunday-best skirt-suit and matching hat like armour. Nobody in London, on a Tuesday morning in 1973, is wearing a full skirt-suit and stockings, a thick silk blouse and hat and court shoes. Jane will notice the effort, of course, and she hopes her daughter doesn’t hate her for it. She should have dressed down, she knows that now, because that would send the message that it wasn’t such a big deal. Already she’s sweating through the blouse and into the armpits of the jacket, and hoping that if she keeps her arms clamped down it might not show. Her hair is damp, too, under the hat, the hairspray turning sticky; she can feel it. Lipstick melting into the runnels above her lip. She’s borrowed a trolley-bag from old Mrs Jewitt and packed it with casseroles, vegetable and meat, and shepherd’s pie, all portioned in sealed bags or tinfoiled in freezer-proof dishes. She’s been cooking for two days, now, boiling and chopping and frying and baking. There’s a cake, too. She feels conspicuous, ridiculous, hauling the bumping trolley-bag behind her, up and down the greasy wooden escalators and airless tunnels of the Underground. Jack gave her money and made her promise to take a taxi, from and to the station, but if she takes the Tube she’ll be able to give that little extra to Jane. In the warmth of the Tube carriage, though, she’s sure you can smell the food, even through its packaging. The meat, thick and intimate. She didn’t freeze it before she came, because it would defrost on the journey, and then you couldn’t freeze it again. Her hair itches the nape of her neck and sweat seeps between her breasts and she glances around, furtively, to see if anyone’s frowning or sniffing the air. She feels self-conscious and miserable, and this mission feels wrong already.

  She’s been hoping, hoping and praying, that Jane will change her mind and come back home. Sometimes, she lets herself think it might even be something, having a bantling about the place. The prattle of it, the company, the fat little legs as it learned to toddle. She misses that, the milky smell of them, the way they’d hurtle downstairs as if there was nothing more urgent in the entire world than to give you a kiss. Gone are the days – her days – when a baby outside marriage would be looked at askance, called names, or shunned. There’d be talk, of course, but nothing they couldn’t steel themselves against and rise above, and talk always dies down. Jane could get a job, in a year or so; Jack could put in a word for her at the base, or there’d be something in Beverley . . . But Jane has refused even to acknowledge their suggestions. A week ago, Helen phoned to say: Mum, she’s not coming home, she’s made up her mind. Building her ain gallows and dead set on putting her ain neck in the noose, that’s how Jack put it. That was all he had to say about the matter, but it cut him deep, she knows that. It’s cut them both deep. You feel your children’s pains more deeply than your own, always, even when they’re not children any more.

  A grandchild. It’s just not fair, she thinks, in dark, selfish moments. You’re supposed to enjoy every second of it, to be able to boast about it, show the bootees you’re knitting and indulge in it all. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to knit a single thing, and it was only after a week of sleepless nights that she decided on the cooking and the visit, and there’s been no pleasure in it. If only Jane would come back home.

  The Tube train rattles and shakes into Earls Court and she tries to blank her mind, to steel herself, for going where she has to go and doing what she has to do next.

  Jane has done her best to make the place menseful, as her mother would say, to tidy away the signs of Patrick, his paraphernalia. She did it with a conflicted, resentful heart. The thought of her mother coming makes her feel guilty about being here, even guiltier than she normally feels, guilt she can normally block out. She’s learned, the last few weeks, that you just have to keep on, as if you’re on a tightrope: not looking around, not seeing yourself from outside or above, just fixing your eyes on a point ahead of you and putting one foot in front of the other and letting nothing else exist. Her mother coming threatens to unbalance everything.

  She moved into Patrick’s flat a month ago, when her maternity leave started. She quit the job – making out to the other girls that it was a lad from home, and she’d be moving back there – and then she moved to his. It makes sense, she told Helen on the phone. She couldn’t stay on in the flat-share with the other girls, not once the baby was born. And what was the point of wasting her meagre savings and more of Patrick’s on renting a room somewhere – provided she could find a landlord who would have a crying newborn baby – when the flat was there for the using? S
itting empty most of the time, she said. And that was true: being in it makes her feel how seldom he’s actually there. She likes his things lying around because it makes her feel that any moment he’ll be back, that he’s not gone back to Ireland but only to the corner shop, or down the road. He’s messy, Patrick – no, messy’s too harsh a word, he’s just not concerned with fussing, everything so-and-so. Things rest where they fall, old newspapers strewn, coffee cups, fag-ends in ashtrays or saucers. His huge smelly astrakhan, bought at her urging at a flea market in Notting Hill, that he could never wear in Belfast and so leaves here, draped over the armchair because it’s too bulky for the wardrobe and too heavy for the hook on the back of the door. His two scarves – the one she knitted for him and the silk one that was a present. They smell of him, and she likes them there, to touch, to wrap around her neck, or twist up her hair with. His old-fashioned brogues (nobody wears brown brogues in London in June 1973, not even men his age and she loves him for it) by the door and his razor on the bathtub, his dressing gown on the back of the bedroom door. A stethoscope, a spare packet of cigarettes and a heavy glass ashtray, a bookmarked book, a medical journal, post stacked up on the mantelpiece, Mr P. M. Connolly – Mr because he’s a surgeon, but sometimes it’s Dr – all of these things are bundled away in cupboards today, stuffed into wardrobes, behind cabinet doors.

  A small, persistent part of her wants to leave them all where they are, to challenge her mother. This is my life and this is my choice, so you can swallow it or bugger off back to Routh . . . Life is harder, more complicated, than you can understand, and despite thinking that you do, you don’t, you don’t understand. It’s been hard, her mother’s pained tolerance and hurt, her father’s deliberate silence. She wishes they’d shout at her, or kick her out, cut her off, and then she could forget about them. A break, clean, clinical, that would be best, that’s what she wants. The last time she went back to Routh, two months ago, she was already huge, and her father couldn’t meet her eye, and strangely, that was easier. If she could just have nothing to do with them, their judging, their pitying, until he’s made the break with his wife and she and he can face the world together, vindicated . . .