by Ruth Sutton
‘You alright back there?’ he asked.
‘Grand,’ she said. ‘Am I ’anging on too tight?’
‘Bruises fade,’ he laughed, and turned back to drive on. ‘Not far now,’ he shouted to her over his shoulder.
They passed the end of the railway and turned left up a narrow track. Just before a little bridge, John stopped the bike.
‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing ahead to the other side of the bridge. Maggie could see a large building on the right and a smaller cottage on the left. A fast stream burbled under the bridge.
‘This stream drives the water wheel, at the back there,’ said John. ‘Comes down off the fell with enough force to make the wheel turn, even when it’s not rained much.’
‘What’s it used for?’ she asked.
‘Used to be grain, but not any more.’
‘But it’s turning, I can ’ear it,’ she said. ‘Unless that’s summat else creaking back there.’
‘It’s the wheel alright,’ said John. ‘It’s driving a generator, making electricity for the cottage.’
Maggie was astonished.
‘Electric? In th’ouse?’
‘Aye, had it for years. Couldn’t work the mill, with Fred having only one leg, so they wired it up themselves. I told you, they’re interesting people.’ He looked at her. ‘And they might ask a lot of questions,’ he said. ‘Personal things. I was a bit, you know, put out, the first time. They just like people, like to know all about them. Don’t be offended.’
Maggie was alarmed. She had only a few minutes to decide what to say to them. She could already see a short woman coming round the side of the house, wearing layer upon layer of clothing, wrapped up like the lasses on the screens. The woman stopped and squinted at them, holding her head at a strange angle.
John called out to her. ‘It’s me, Hannah.’
‘It ’ad to be you when I ’eard the bike,’ she called back. ‘So who’s that with ye?’
John grabbed Maggie’s hand and pulled her up and over the little bridge. He was smiling and Maggie tried to do the same.
Hannah stood at the front door of the cottage. ‘Fred,’ she shouted, pushing the door open. ‘It’s our John, wi’ a lass.’
Maggie felt John’s grip tighten. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘They’ll just want to know all about you.’ Then he let go of her hand, and hurried towards the older woman, arms outstretched, bent and hugged her. Maggie followed behind, bracing herself.
‘Come ’ere, pet,’ said Hannah. ‘Let me get a good look at ye.’ She put one hand to Maggie’s face, stroked down her cheek and held her chin. Maggie could see one fierce blue eye and the other hidden behind a half-closed lid.
‘Lost the other one when I was a bairn,’ said Hannah. ‘Me dad said I’d never amount to ’owt. Me mam died ’aving me, and ’e never forgot.’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was the only thing Maggie could think of to say.
‘This is Maggie, Hannah,’ said John. ‘Margaret Lowery, from Kells.’
A voice emerged from the room behind the door. ‘Lowery, from Kells. What’s your dad called?’
John and Maggie were standing at the door, peering into the gloom. Hannah was ahead of them, beside a chair from which the voice had come.
‘Frank McSherry,’ said Maggie, wondering what was coming next.
John walked across to the person in the chair, shook his hand and then turned towards Maggie. ‘Maggie was married, Fred. Her husband was killed in the war. Maggie, this is Fred Porter.’
‘Can’t get up easy, love,’ said Fred, looking up at Maggie. ‘You’re a brave one, tekkin’ on our John and that bike.’
‘We’re not …’
‘She’s just a friend,’ said John quickly.
‘Oh aye,’ murmured Hannah and Fred simultaneously.
‘I was coming up, to see if you wanted anything doing, and Maggie said she’d come with me, just for the run, didn’t you?’ John nodded to Maggie.
‘That’s it.’
‘Oh aye,’ chorused Hannah and Fred again.
It was a relief to get out of the house when John went to split logs and Maggie quickly offered to help.
‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘They’re just curious about you. I’ll shut them up if we have to,’ said John. ‘We won’t stay long, and next time’ll be easier.’
Tea was waiting when the log boxes were full and more logs stacked against the wall by the back door. Before they went in, John whispered, ‘Look at the rugs, on the floor. Fred makes them himself, out of rags.’
Before she could do so, Maggie found herself under scrutiny again. She’d unwound the shawl from her head and Fred looked at her with undisguised interest.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘that’s an ’ead of ’air, what a colour, look at that, Hannah. When ye get it cut, lass, give it to me. It’ll mek a grand rug.’
Maggie’s eyes had adjusted to the light and she looked at the floor. Rugs littered the stone flags, six or seven across the room, each one different, with geometric shapes and blocks of colour.
‘Fred makes hookie rugs,’ said Hannah with obvious pleasure. ‘Uses rags that folk give ’im. Makes up the shapes and that. We sell a few. That Miss Plane, she sells ’em for us, to ’er posh London friends. D’ye know Miss Plane?’
‘No, she doesn’t,’ said John quickly. ‘We’ve not been to Newton yet.’
‘So she doesn’t know Jessie?’ said Hannah, looking at him with her one good eye.
‘No,’ said John quickly. He looked hard at Hannah and shook his head, warning her off. ‘I met Maggie and ’er dad at the rugby in Kells, just a few weeks ago.’
‘Where does your dad work, Maggie?’ said Fred, picking up the need to change the subject. ‘Was ’e in the war?’
‘E’s in a wheelchair,’ said Maggie, ‘Roof fall in pit.’
‘That’s a shame, pet,’ said Hannah.
‘We manage,’ said Maggie.
‘Are you working?’ Hannah asked.
John interrupted again. ‘Maggie ’as a little girl,’ he said.
‘Judith,’ said Maggie, ‘seven next birthday.’
‘Growing up wi’out a dad,’ said Fred.
‘Growing up wi’ a dad’s hard sometimes,’ said Hannah.
‘Pick a rug,’ said Fred suddenly, ‘for the kiddie. Any one you like.’
Maggie looked at John.
‘He means it,’ said John. ‘Pick a small one, we can carry it on t’bike. Go ahead.’
Maggie picked the smallest one she could see, a mix of blues and greens.
‘That’s very kind,’ she began.
‘Think nowt about it, lass,’ said Fred. ‘If you make our John ’appy, that’s all we want.’
‘We’ll be off, then,’ said John, seeing Maggie wilt under the weight of assumptions. ‘Got to get Maggie back.’
He shook Fred’s hand, kissed Hannah and steered Maggie out of the front door before they could embrace her, promising to come back before Christmas.
Outside he took her arm and they walked back to the bike, which he had leaned against the wall by the bridge.
‘We don’t ’ave to go yet,’ she said, as he turned to wave to Hannah who was standing watching them.
“I could see where it was heading,’ he said, pulling on his leather helmet. ‘They’d have been asking about your love life next. Don’t cover your hair right up, we’re just going up the valley a bit further. We’ve got a couple of hours and there’s something I want to do while the sun’s still out. We’ll be back in time, about seven, OK? It’ll be dark before that but we can drive back in the dark, easy.’
John turned the bike to the left as they joined the road up the valley, and they drove for few minutes to the edge of a wood, at the bottom of a steep slope where the road climbed sharply. He stopped the bike where a stream ran below them through a gorge. He pointed up, first to a gap in the wall on the far side of the stream, and then higher, to the skyline where clouds were racing across. ‘We’re goi
ng up there, up Harter Fell,’ he said. ‘Quite rough in places, but what a view! We have to do it, before the light goes. I know you’ll love it.’
Maggie was surprised by her willingness to follow his lead without argument. John seemed transformed from the shy man she had seen before. This was his place, and he was showing it to her, like Judith showing off a picture she’d drawn at school.
‘Not done much walking,’ she commented, ‘just to work and back.’ She stopped, realising what she’d said. ‘Before I was wed,’ she added, ‘before Judith.’
‘Where was that?’ he asked, as she knew he would.
‘At the Haig, in the canteen, doing teas an’ all that, for t’bosses.’
‘I would have noticed you if you were there now,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’ll need to stride out.’
And stride out they did, up the clear path that led over from Eskdale into Dunnerdale. Before it reached the highest point, they branched off to the left, up the steep flank of the mountain, zigzagging to lessen the incline, then steep again as they neared the top.
As they stepped past the cairn, the view made her gasp. It stretched across the green valley below them and its lines of stone walls, and then up again to the central peaks of Cumberland. To their left the distant Irish Sea gleamed in the low golden light of late afternoon.
‘Isn’t it grand?’ said John. ‘Look across, you can see right up to where the river rises, and Bowfell up at the top of the valley.’
‘Looks like a pyramid,’ she said, ‘with equal sides.’
‘Aye, I love the way it sits alone. Crinkle Crags to one side, then on the other side the ridge goes on to Esk Hause, and Scafell and Scafell Pike. The highest mountains in England, right on our doorstep.’
‘What’s that down below?’ she asked, pointing down to a clear rectangle marked on a flat patch of ground close to where the road wound up and over the pass.
‘What does it look like?’
‘Square, Straight lines, like someone planned it.’
‘They did,’ he said. ‘It’s Hardknott fort. The Romans built it to protect this pass. They had a fort at the coast and another one at Ambleside, and soldiers would go across here. Grim up here in winter.’
‘Poor buggers,’ said Maggie, ‘so far from home, stuck up here. How d’you know about it?’
‘Read it in a book at Hannah’s. They read a lot those two, but I think her good eye is bothering her now. Did you notice?’
‘Summat I did notice, when we were there,’ said Maggie. ‘You talk different with them, more local, not so posh.’
‘Posh?’ he laughed. ‘Do I sound posh?’
‘Aye, you do. I like it mind. But it comes and goes.’
John thought about this for a moment.
‘You do the same,’ he said. ‘You talk different with me than you do at home.’
‘Nay,’ said Maggie.
‘But you do,’ he repeated. ‘Maybe we all do it, change to fit where we are. I talk local when I’m with Hannah and Fred, and you talk posh when you’re with me.’ He smiled.
‘I can talk posh if I want to,’ she said. ‘I don’t want our Judith to get stuck, just ’cos of how she talks. I want more for her than that.’
‘And for yourself?’ John asked.
‘Aye, me too,’ she said. ‘I could’ve gone on at school. Had to leave when me dad was injured. No choice then, we needed the money. But some day I could go back, not to school but somewhere, to do more learning.’
‘Everything seems possible, sitting up here,’ said John. ‘That’s what I love about climbing, getting up high. Makes you think about bigger things.’
‘Do you want to talk local wi’ me?’ she asked.
‘What do you want?’
‘Give me a chance to practise talking like you. Don’t tell anyone. Can’t do it at home. I don’t want Mam and Dad thinking, you know, that I’m better than them somehow.’ And what would the girls at work think, she wondered.
‘It’s not about being better,’ he said. ‘It’s about choosing what you want, not being trapped. I talk like my mam and dad did, not posh, just Ulverston. And I can do that with you too, if you like.’
‘Feels strange, like talking French or summat,’ she said. ‘It’s our secret, you and me.’
Another secret; both of them thought for a moment about the tangle that lay between them and how it might unravel in the end.Maggie looked slowly around, taking in the browns and greys of bracken and rock, the blue and gold of sky and sea. It was like a map in an atlas, spread out far below. Her auburn hair caught the up draught and lifted in a cloud of curls above her head. She reached up with both hands to spread it flat against her head and coax it down. John saw what she was trying to do.
‘Let me,’ he said, holding the hair down on either side of her face while she flapped the shawl in the wind to straighten it and then wound it tight around her head. He eased his hands out from underneath the shawl and stood for a moment looking down at her.
Maggie stepped away from him and lowered her head. She was frightened now, more than before. The longer she went on not telling him about the screens, the worse it got. She had to do it, but not here, not now.
‘This is a grand place, John,’ she said. ‘I could have lived my whole life so close and never seen it, never known.’
‘It’s what I love,’ he said. ‘The mountains, being up here, ever since I was a lad at school. We went climbing with one of the teachers, I must have been about fourteen, and I knew then. That’s why I moved up here when Mam and Dad were both gone. I know I must seem sad to you, no family close, no friends. But I do have friends, out here, that I see when I have the chance. And that’s all I need, all I’ve needed.’
He hesitated. He could smell rain on the wind, and far out to sea the horizon had disappeared, although further north the sun still shone, sinking slowly into dusk. He wanted to say more about how he was feeling, but he didn’t dare.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down the ridge towards the pass and down the road. That way we can walk more easily if it gets wet or dark.’
For the last half hour of their walk they strode out again, down the twisting road carved out over centuries by people and animals. Maggie felt the pinch of her shoes on the downward slope, and the sharpening wind had swung round, pricking their faces with tiny heralds of the rain to come. As they drove back down the valley and then up the coast road to Kells, she pressed her face into his coat.
CHAPTER 8
THE WINDOWS OF THE NEWTON SCHOOLHOUSE were dark when John stopped the bike outside two days later. He tried the door, but it was locked. There was nobody there. He was about to go home again, regretting the waste of fuel, when he remembered that Jessie often stayed at Applegarth when Agnes was in London. Two minutes later, he wheeled the bike down the steep drive and leaned it against the garage door. There was certainly someone in the house. If it were Agnes he would have to reconsider. He needed to see Jessie alone.
Before pushing the doorbell, he glanced into the lamplit sitting room and saw Jessie sitting in an easy chair by the fire, reading. Then he stood for a minute in the porch, listening for Agnes’s voice. Silence. He pushed the bell and heard it sound inside. The front door opened. Jessie seemed surprised to see him.
‘I remembered,’ he said, ‘about you staying here sometimes when Agnes is in London.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s such a comfortable house. And Agnes likes to have someone here, keeping the place warm, you know. Come in, John. I didn’t hear the bike.’
He stepped into the hall.
‘Go through. I’m in the sitting room.’
He stood awkwardly. He’d thought about what he had to say but knew that she wouldn’t like it. Even after all these years, he was still afraid of her, of her energy and fierce defence of herself.
‘Sit down,’ she said, but he stayed standing, twisting the leather helmet in his hands. ‘Is something the matter, John?’
‘
Not really, it’s just that, I – I need to ask you something.’
‘Ask me what?’
‘Well, tell you really, about – I’ve met someone, a girl, well a woman actually …’
‘Oh, that’s grand,’ said his mother, but her look and her voice betrayed the sudden anxiety that hit her. ‘Is it serious?’
‘Not yet, but I’d like it to be. The thing is, I want to tell her the truth.’
‘About what?’
‘About us. That you’re my mother, not my aunt.’
Jessie stared at him. ‘But why?’ she said. ‘What’s the point? She can’t have asked you about it, can she?’
He shook his head.
‘Then why?’
‘I want to be honest with her. It’s important to me.’
‘But what about me? If you tell her, she tells her family, and that’s it. Might as well put it in the Evening News. Where does she live?’
‘Whitehaven.’
Jessie sat back in the chair. ‘Sit down, for heaven’s sake,’ she said, ‘I can’t keep looking up at you.’
He perched on the edge of a small chair by the window. Jessie got up suddenly and closed the curtains.
‘Does this girl –’
‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘She’s called Maggie.’
‘Does Maggie have to know about it, John, really?’
‘No, but I have to tell her. I wanted to tell you first, so that you could –’
‘Could what?’ said his mother, hearing the walls of her privacy crashing down. ‘If you do tell her, could you ask her to keep it to herself, at least for a while?’
‘I could ask her. It’s a very close family, she lives with her parents.’
‘Just a girl then,’ said Jessie.
He was stung. ‘No, she’s a grown woman,’ he said. ‘She lives with them because she’s a widow with a child and it makes sense.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Jessie.
‘What do you mean? What’s wrong with that? She had the baby while her husband was in the army. He was killed.’
‘So was Clive,’ said Jessie.
‘And you gave me away, Well, Maggie didn’t abandon her child. I want her, Jessie, and I have to tell her the truth.’
Jessie shook her head.
