‘I’m going, and whoever told you that’s a liar . . . Mr Ratcliffe’s a liar, I know he is. He wouldn’t let me da look after Clara. He put Len on, and I heard you tell him to let me da do it.’
She knew she had caught his attention with this last piece of news, for she saw his head lift. She went on, nodding at his back, ‘Mr Ratcliffe’s got it in for me da; he always has. He gives him the worst jobs. Mr Jones says if it was him he would have left. And me ma’s wanted me da to mention it to you but he wouldn’t. And Mr Ratcliffe only sent for me da last night out of spite because . . . ’ Her flow ceased, and Mr Lord turned from the window and finished the sentence for her, ‘. . . Because he knew your father was drunk. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘He wasn’t’ – now her chin was jerking up at him – ‘he was solid and sober!’
‘Stop that!’ Mr Lord’s voice had risen. And hers went to an even higher key as she replied with heat, ‘I won’t! . . . He wasn’t . . . he took me out, he did, and we went into Jarrow.’
‘And he got drunk.’
‘He didn’t, I tell you!’
‘I don’t want any of your shouting.’
‘I’m not shouting. You’ll believe nothing, nothing at all. He didn’t get drunk, so there, ’cos he couldn’t, we went to the pictures. You can ask anybody.’
‘Who’s anybody?’ It sounded now as if he wanted to believe her.
‘Mrs McBride . . . and . . . and . . . ’ Her mind rushed madly around, searching for another likely defender . . . and found one . . . ‘and Father Owen,’ she added. ‘He knows we went. “Enjoy the picture, Mary Ann,” he said, “’cos it’s about Jesus.”’
Eeh! She stood petrified at the length her imagination had stretched, and also at what it was achieving, for Mr Lord’s brows were drawn together in a decided question.
‘You saw Father Owen?’
‘Yes.’ It was a very small yes.
‘And he knew you were going to the pictures with your father?’
‘. . . Yes.’
The bushy brows were drawn over the eyes. ‘What did you see at the pictures?’
‘The Robe.’
‘The Robe?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it about?’
‘About two men and a beautiful lady.’
‘Yes?’
‘And . . . and Our Lord being crucified.’
‘Go on.’
‘And . . . and . . . ’ She stared fixedly at him, trying to conjure up the poster again. But it would not be brought up, and all she had to defend her cause now was her knowledge of Bible history, and she had never liked Bible history, for she had never been any good at it. ‘And Peter and the cock crowing three times,’ she said haltingly. ‘And Our Lord giving everybody fish and bread and saying, if there’s anybody here who hasn’t told a lie he can do the pelting. It was a nice picture.’ Her voice trailed off.
The silence pressed down on the room, and it told her more plainly than any words that she had failed. He had likely seen the picture.
When he turned from her she stood for a while longer. Then taking heed of the rising lump in her throat she swung round and ran out of the room and into the hall, where her swift entry startled Ben in his eavesdropping. Still running, she dashed through the doorway and down the drive . . .
It was nearly one o’clock when she returned home. Mass had brought no comfort. Being the grown-ups’ Mass, Father Owen had been inaccessible. The Holy Family too had offered not the slightest solace; they had stared back at her as if they couldn’t care less. And now, it seemed unbelievable but it was true, there was her granny sitting at the table with her hat off, and from the expression on her face, Mary Ann judged that she already knew everything. Her granny, she had always known, was like the devil – she received first-hand information about the bad things. But it would now seem that she was quicker than the devil.
‘Hallo . . . you been to Mass?’
Mrs McMullen’s tone was civil, which in itself was a bad sign.
‘Yes.’ Mary Ann turned to her mother. ‘Ma, where’s me . . . ’
Lizzie cut short her inquiry: ‘Get your things off,’ she said.
‘Which Mass were you at?’ asked Mrs McMullen.
‘The eleven o’clock.’
‘Why didn’t you go to the ten, that’s your Mass, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why didn’t you go?’
‘’Cos I didn’t want to!’ The shouted words startled both Mrs McMullen and Lizzie, but before Lizzie could remonstrate with her daughter, Mrs McMullen’s hand came across Mary Ann’s ear in a resounding slap.
Lizzie caught her as she reeled back and held her tightly, and looking straight at her mother, she said, quietly, ‘Don’t do that again, I’m telling you.’
‘Then teach her some manners . . . Shouting at me. And after asking her a civil question . . . It’s like him, she is, uncivilised, bringing trouble wherever she goes.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Lizzie. She pushed Mary Ann from her.
‘It isn’t enough. I’ve prophesied this time and again. I’ve been waiting for it.’
‘Then you’re not disappointed,’ said Lizzie.
‘No, I’m not. And neither was the whole of Burton Street. Mrs Flannagan said it was the peak of his career, the way he went on yesterday. He made a holy show of himself. The whole of Jarrow was out.’
‘It wasn’t. Shut up, you!’ Mary Ann’s face, except where her grandmother’s fingers had left their imprint, was white. ‘Shut up! You’re . . . you’re a cheeky bitch. You are! . . . You are!’
Lifting Mary Ann bodily, Lizzie carried her from the room and up the stairs. There was the sound of a door banging overhead, followed by loud sobbing; then Lizzie came slowly back into the kitchen.
Mrs McMullen was standing now, her hat perched on one hand, while with the other she pulled the velvet bow into shape. Lizzie stood just inside the door. Her face wore the protecting tightness bred of past encounters with her mother.
‘What,’ she asked quietly, ‘do you hope to gain from it?’
‘What do you mean? . . . Go on . . . go on and put the blame on me for her being like a guttersnipe.’
‘If,’ went on Lizzie, ignoring her mother’s sidetracking, ‘I was to do what you want and leave him, and suppose I couldn’t earn enough myself to keep us like you imagine we should be kept, who would you have me turn to now that Bob is going to be married?’ And having sprung this piece of news, she waited.
Mrs McMullen’s hands remained poised over her hat. The news was evidently a shock to her, for her prim features were sagging with surprise as she brought out, ‘Bob! . . . I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t.’
‘He told me himself yesterday.’
‘I don’t believe it, not a word. There’s only ever been you.’
‘He is marrying a girl from Jesmond. Pringle’s daughter . . . the fruit people.’
Mrs McMullen sat down. The muscles of her face were tight again. ‘The turncoat,’ she muttered. ‘He wouldn’t dare come and tell me. Why, he said only afore Christmas that the greatest pleasure he’d get from building the old man’s house would be that he could see you.’ She turned her small sharp eyes onto her daughter. ‘It’s a broken heart he’s doing it out of . . . that’s what it is.’
‘You can stop deluding yourself on that point too,’ said Lizzie. ‘I happen to know she is young and very lovely. And what is more, she’ll be quite rich one day.’
Mrs McMullen seemed unable to find an answer to this. She sat for a while longer in silence; then rising, she pulled on her hat without the fuss she usually accorded this operation, grabbed her coat from a hook on the door, and for the very first time in her life left her daughter without a word of admonition.
After her mother’s departure, Lizzie sat down, and resting her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, she said with utter weariness, ‘Dear God. Dear God.’
On Monday morning Mary Ann said
she was feeling bad.
‘Where?’ asked her mother. ‘Have you a pain?’
‘No,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I’m just sick.’
This was true enough; she was feeling sick, the sickness born of anxiety. But she had experienced this before, and it hadn’t prevented her from getting up and going to school. This morning, however, she didn’t want to go to school; it was as urgent as a matter of life and death that she should be here when Mr Ratcliffe sacked her da, as he would do at nine o’clock.
Lizzie wasn’t fooled, but her mind, dwelling on the same thing as Mary Ann’s, was too harassed to cope with her daughter. She could only say, ‘Well, you’ll go at dinner time, mind.’
‘Yes, Ma.’
The victory had been easy. She lay, not curled up as she usually did when she was enjoying a lie in, but with her short length stretched tautly out. Soon Michael would come up for his school bag and things, then she would get up and go to the farm.
She turned her head and stared at the wall. On her eye level were three humpty elephants following a giraffe, a tiger and a penguin. Her da had pasted the animals all round her corner. He had cut them out of a book especially for her. And now she would have to leave them; some other girl would have this corner. She stared at the ceiling. Where would they go to live? They couldn’t go back to Mulhattans’ Hall because the attics had been taken. Perhaps Mrs McBride would take them in . . . But she had only two rooms.
Her da had offered no opinion as to what was going to happen to them. He had been quiet; he hadn’t opened his mouth all day yesterday, nor had he eaten anything, not a bit of dinner, nor yet supper. But twice he had made himself some tea, thick black tea.
‘You’re not sick.’
Michael’s appearance from behind the curtain and his accusation startled her, and she stammered, ‘I . . . I . . . I am.’
‘You’re not . . . you only want to nose around.’
They continued to stare hostilely at each other. Then Michael, turning away to close the door stealthily, came back to her bed and, sitting on it, said, ‘Listen. If you want to hear anything go up in the loft.’
‘But who’ll I hear there?’ Mary Ann was sitting up now.
‘Mr Ratcliffe . . . Look, listen to what I’m saying. You know the long loft where the feed’s kept. Well, the end of it runs over the dairy, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Mary Ann was not certain.
‘Well, next to the dairy is the store Mr Ratcliffe turned into an office, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ She was still not certain, for the topographical situation as Michael explained it was not clear to her.
‘Well, get up in the loft. Go behind the bales until you come to where there’s just the beams, and if you lie along the end one, nearest to the back of the loft, you can hear them talking down below.’
‘Who?’
‘Well, anybody who’s there. And Mr Lord’ll be there. And Mr Ratcliffe’ll be telling him the tale, and you can see if he tells him the truth.’
Their faces were close together, and she saw from the troubled hurt look in his eyes that in his own way Michael was as concerned for their da as she was. But she couldn’t as yet see what good it was going to do listening to Mr Ratcliffe talking to Mr Lord, and she said so.
‘It’ll be no use if I do hear.’
‘It will. Me da can go and deny it.’
‘He won’t.’
‘He will if me ma puts her foot down.’
The idea of her da being forced to defend himself under the pressure of a foot being put down, whether her ma’s or anybody else’s, was enough to make her obstinate. ‘I’m not going to listen,’ she said.
Michael sprang up from the bed, his face almost as red as his hair. ‘Oh you . . . You little . . . !’
‘I’m not.’ Mary Ann denied her subtitle before it was uttered. ‘If me ma makes me da do something, they’ll row, and then things’ll be just as bad.’
‘Nothing can be as bad as him being out of work and likely having to go back to the yards.’
They stared at each other for a moment longer. Then Michael turned away, collected his bag from behind the curtain and went downstairs. When she heard the outer door bang, she got up and dressed hurriedly; but her descent of the stairs was slow, as befitted a sick person.
Lizzie, clearing the table, said, ‘Can you eat anything?’
‘No,’ said Mary Ann.
And this was true, too, for she had no appetite. She fiddled about with her hair ribbon. She sat down. She stood up. She opened a picture book and turned the pages without seeing anything. Then she asked quietly, ‘Can I go out for a walk, Ma?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth.
That was all. She did not question whither the walk would take her; she knew. She did not say, ‘If you are sick, you had better stay in,’ for she also knew that that would aggravate the particular kind of sickness.
Immediately she reached the lane, Mary Ann started to run. She did not turn into the main road which would lead her to the farmyard, but cut across a field that would bring her to the back of the barn. Through a knothole in the barn she saw her da. He was cleaning a machine, rubbing it with an oily rag. He was working slowly as if he was tired. She saw Mr Jones come in and heard him ask, ‘We gonna start on the binder, Mike?’ and her da reply, ‘Might as well.’
From the time she saw Mike and Mr Jones move into the far dimness of the barn until she climbed the ladder to the loft was only a matter of seconds, for she knew that if she was spotted by her da she would be ordered home.
The loft was warm and had a stingy smell that made her want to sneeze, and it was not a little frightening, for it seemed bigger than usual and the stacked bales higher. Cautiously she followed Michael’s instructions, until she came to the beams naked of floorboards. There were only four of them and they could not have measured more than three feet before they disappeared into the slope of the roof, but to Mary Ann they appeared to be yards long, She stretched cautiously over them and looked down. It was dark, and she could make out nothing. When tentatively she put her hand down in between the beams, it touched the roughness of bricks, and she could not tell what was actually beneath her, but Michael had said if she lay across the last beam she would be able to hear. Trembling, she attempted the feat.
A man, or even a boy, could have rested easily over the beams, but her slight body would have fallen in between them, and as her courage was not of the kind that could perform physical feats, it took a great deal more of it to lie along a beam than it would have taken to swear her own life away.
After easing herself back and forwards a number of times for practice she sat and waited for voices to come to her. The minutes took on the length of hours, and the only sound that she heard was the distant closing of a door. It was strange but there weren’t even any farm sounds here. The bales made the corner a silent world in which she could hear only her own breathing, and she didn’t like the sound of that. It was like being all alone in the lane on a dark night . . . And then she heard a voice . . . or the echo of one. It came as if from the bottom of a well. In a second she was lying along the beam. Now the voice was joined by another; but it wasn’t her da’s, it was Mr Lord’s. But what was he saying? She couldn’t make out a thing.
The urgency of the situation overcoming her fear, she thrust her head down between the beams, and, like the voices on the old records Mrs McBride used to play on her gramophone, she heard them talking. They came quietly at first, then rose swiftly.
‘You didn’t carry out my instructions.’
‘Am I managing this farm or not?’
‘You are managing it, but what you seem to forget is that you don’t own it. I told you to let Shaughnessy see to her.’
‘He’s not capable.’
‘There you know you are wrong. Whatever else he lacks it’s not a knowledge of animals. Remember Douglas’ bull. It was he who warned you against buying it. Isn’t that so?’
‘The bull was all right . . . We
are not talking about the bull but about the cow.’
‘Why did you send for him on Saturday night after putting Morley on?’
‘Because Morley wanted a break.’
‘He didn’t. You sent for Shaughnessy because you knew he was drunk. You were to ring for the vet if the animal got worse, but what did you do? You wanted a handle, didn’t you?
‘Look here, Mr Lord, you want to be careful.’
‘You wanted to get rid of him.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘All right, then, why do you say you mean to sack him?’
‘Because he neglected his work.’
‘What if I say he didn’t neglect his work, and he stays on?’
‘You won’t.’
‘Won’t I?’
‘No . . . because if you do I go.’
Mary Ann stared into the darkness, waiting breathlessly for the silence to end. And when Mr Lord’s voice broke it, it was so low and quiet that she could scarcely make out his words.
‘Very well; you go, Mr Ratcliffe.’
Now came Ratcliffe’s voice in a spate of words, forcing their way up through the blocked-in chimney and into Mary Ann’s ear, so loud and so rapid that she could distinguish none of them until their speed lessened. And then they came slower than was ordinary and filled with such scorn that she was thrown onto the defensive.
‘Your smallholding! You fancy yourself as a gentleman farmer. Why, the piggeries in my last job were bigger than this.’
‘Doubtless. Then can you leave the smallholding as soon as possible?’
The tone should have shrivelled Mr Ratcliffe dead.
‘I am due for three months’ notice.’
‘Your money will be paid to you. I want you off my farm at the earliest possible moment.’
The Lord and Mary Ann (The Mary Ann Stories) Page 13
