Maggie's Boy

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘He sent me a lovely card,’ Maggie said. ‘From Madrid.’

  ‘But nothing else?’

  Margaret Toan parried that because it sounded like criticism. ‘I expect he’s busy, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I’m sure he is,’ Alison replied, wishing her mother-in-law wasn’t always so distant with her.

  ‘Well then. You won’t lop against that coffee table, will you Emma?’

  Alison took the little girl on to her lap. She looked at the love birds in their ornate cage, the Dalton china in its display cabinet, the crystal wine glass in her mother-in-law’s hand. ‘The thing is,’ she began, ‘he hasn’t paid the mortgage for six months and if he doesn’t pay it soon, the house will be repossessed.’

  Margaret Toan gave her little tinkling laugh to show how absurd her daughter-in-law was being. ‘How ridiculous!’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not to my Rigby.’

  ‘They would,’ Alison said. ‘If the money isn’t paid, they’ll repossess the house and we shall be homeless – out on the streets.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Margaret rebuked her. ‘You mustn’t say such things. It isn’t nice to tell lies.’

  ‘I’m not telling lies. It’s true.’

  ‘You’re telling lies,’ Margaret said, as firmly as her fourth G and T would allow. ‘You’re telling lies and you’re being hysterical. Kindly stop.’

  ‘Look, I know you don’t want me to tell you this…’

  ‘I don’t. Quite right.’

  ‘I know. But I’ve got to. If I don’t, these children will be homeless. Your grandchildren.’

  ‘Oh stop, stop, for heaven’s sake,’ Margaret implored. I can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘You could,’ Alison said, her voice all entreaty. ‘That’s why we’ve come here. You could.’

  ‘My dear, the only way anyone could help you would be to pay your mortgage for you. I hope you’re not suggesting that I should do that.’

  ‘Well not you exactly,’ Alison said. ‘I thought perhaps you might let Rigg have part of his money, in advance.’

  Her mother-in-law’s painted eyebrows rose into her platinum hair. ‘What money?’ she asked.

  ‘The money from his father’s will.’

  ‘That,’ Margaret said as sternly as she could in her drunken state, ‘is nothing to do with you. That is a private matter between Rigby’s father and myself.’

  ‘But it’s Rigg’s inheritance.’

  How irritating she is, Margaret thought. Some people have no discretion. She tried to dismiss the subject with a flick of her ringed fingers. ‘It’s no good talking to me about it,’ she said. ‘It’s all legally tied up. Nobody can touch it.’

  Alison held her mother-in-law’s gaze. ‘But couldn’t you…’

  ‘No. I couldn’t. It’s not up to me. My husband saw to all that. Take my advice, Alison, don’t even think about it. I never do.’

  ‘If I can’t pay this mortgage we shall be homeless,’ Alison said, making one last despairing effort.

  The bejewelled fingers flicked again. ‘No, no. You won’t,’ Maggie said lightly. ‘Stop worrying. You’ll only give yourself a headache, you silly girl. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.’

  ‘People are being repossessed all over the place,’ Alison said.

  ‘Yes, I know. But they’re stupid people. They’re not like you and Rigby. Don’t worry. It won’t happen.’

  In the face of such unyielding complacency there was nothing Alison could do. Taut with anxiety and disappointment, she took her children by the hand and made as dignified an exit as she could. There was no one else she could turn to. Dear God, she thought, as she walked the children home, if Rigg doesn’t answer my letter and come up with the money, what can I do?

  In Fish Lane, crows were riding the tossing branches of the Scots pine trees. They rose into the dark air, serrated wings outspread, cawing incessantly in their harsh, cracked way, both menacing and mocking. ‘Waah! Waah! You’re no good! You can’t! You can’t!’

  That night she lay awake until four in the morning. The waking nightmare wouldn’t go away and there was no way out of it. Not even sleep. For when she slept she dreamed of being dragged out of the house by a gang of masked men with guns. And they were laughing at her. ‘Waah! Waah! You can’t. You can’t.’

  Even Morgan’s friendly letter from Manchester, which arrived the next morning, failed to cheer her. During the last few weeks she felt as if she lost a skin. Now she was acutely aware of all the cruel things in life. The early morning news was full of pictures from the Gulf where the crisis appeared to be coming to a climax. There were now, so the newsreader claimed, 420,000 troops in the region – from thirty countries – 2,200 combat aircraft, 530 helicopters, 150 warships. The British ground forces numbered 25,000 men of the 1st armoured division, 7th and 4th armoured brigades. And there they were, churning up the desert sand in their Challenger tanks and waving at the cameras as they passed.

  It’s like a game, Alison thought, watching them as she set out the breakfast things. They’re playing soldiers. But if this war starts, there’ll be hundreds of people killed and it won’t just be soldiers, it’ll be women and children. She poured milk on to Jon’s cornflakes – nice, ordinary, peaceful milk – and stood holding the bottle in the room she would lose in another three weeks, in the home she couldn’t even think of as hers.

  The newsreader was speaking seriously. ‘The United Nations deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait is on Tuesday. So Saddam Hussein has effectively four more days to make up his mind to meet the United Nations’ demand.’

  He’s got four days and we’ve got three weeks, Alison thought, putting down the milk bottle. He’s got four days and he can get out of it whenever he wants to, but he won’t. We’ve got three weeks and I’d do anything to get out of it, but I can’t.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chichester’s county court stands on an island surrounded by a three-lane traffic system at the southern end of the city. It is next door to all three stations – bus, rail and police – but isolated from the general public by the incessant traffic which roars round it. To make matters worse, there is no obvious entrance to the place, just a discreet side door which you discover only when you walk along the footpath between its two main buildings.

  Alison was in such a state that it took her several minutes to find the entrance and, by that time, she was extremely worried that she was going to annoy the court officials by being late. Ever since she’d received the letter giving her the date and time of the hearing, she had been in a state of acute anxiety – about the jewellery hidden under her bed, about whether the children were getting enough to eat, about the clothes she ought to wear to the court, about leaving the children for Sally to look after. In short, about anything rather than face the enormity of being made homeless.

  Once inside the court, an old-fashioned office with a long wooden counter and wooden partitions from floor to ceiling, she found that the court officials were kindly and unexpectedly sympathetic. But by then she was so tense that she couldn’t respond to them.

  She walked obediently up a carpeted stairway, along a glass-sided walkway between the two buildings where the sun warmed her face, and into a waiting room where there were rows of seats against all the walls and three windows giving out to the traffic and the workaday world. There were two men and four women waiting silently, their eyes averted from each other.

  Presently a young man in a suit arrived and called ‘Mrs Alison Toan.’ He said he was from the building society and asked her if she wouldn’t mind giving him a few moments before the hearing began. Alison was too numb to mind. What were a few moments here or there? They wouldn’t make any difference to the outcome of the hearing.

  They stood in the walkway and looked through the glass at the wintry trees swaying in the cottage gardens on the other side of the road. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve been able to get in touch with your husband, have you?’ the young man asked,
and his tone suggested how little hope he had of a positive reply.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I haven’t.’

  ‘No, well,’ the young man said, ‘once they’ve done a runner you never find them. At least that’s our experience. The thing is, are you going to oppose our application?’

  The question bemused her. ‘What for?’ she said. ‘I can’t pay the mortgage, so what’s the use?’

  ‘Quite right,’ the young man said. ‘That really is the best attitude to take in a case like this. You’ll have to move out eventually. If you’ll take my advice you’ll agree to it now and let us have the property as soon as you can so that we can get on with the business of selling it. The longer you hold on to it, the bigger the debt will be. It’s £3,500 now, you know, and we don’t close the mortgage until it’s sold.’

  She could see the sense in what he was advising. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to oppose it. Sell it as quickly as you can. I’ve faced the fact that I’m going to be homeless.’

  ‘I wish we didn’t have to do this,’ the young man said. ‘It’s a hideous business. But the law’s the law.’

  That was the judge’s opinion too when Alison sat meekly before him in his chambers, which turned out to be a sunny room containing two long tables, one for him and the other for her, the man from the building society and another man who was introduced to her as the court clerk. He smiled at her so sympathetically that she was afraid she was going to cry.

  But it was handled so quietly and gently, it was over before she had a chance to succumb to any emotion at all. The judge explained that the building society had the right to repossess her house ‘within the next fortnight, if possible, alternatively within the next three calendar months’, and commended her good sense in agreeing to move out as soon as she could find other accommodation. She signed the necessary papers, shook hands with the young man from the building society, and ten minutes later was out in the February cold, facing the roar of the traffic and with no further rights to the house she’d lived in since she was married.

  Lorries rumbled past. Rain clouds stained the sky over her head a darkly ominous blue-purple. I’ve lost everything, she thought. I put every penny I ever earned into that house. There were months when I went without to pay that awful mortgage, and what was the good of it? I decorated it and furnished it and kept it clean and what was the good of that? Damn you, Rigg. Why did you do this to us?

  But there wasn’t time for anger. Or tears. There was a job to do. Straightening her shoulders, she set off to catch the bus to Hampton and the Social Security Office.

  The woman behind the counter there was younger than Alison, but she was quick, sympathetic and extremely practical.

  It didn’t take her long to work out how much the council would be prepared to pay towards rented accommodation. ‘I presume you’ll be putting your name down for council accommodation too?’ she said.

  ‘Am I entitled?’

  ‘You’re a deserted wife,’ the woman said. ‘So yes.’

  And so I am, Alison thought, looking down at her hands. ‘I suppose there’s a long waiting list,’ she said.

  There was. ‘About two and a half years,’ the woman said. ‘Are you likely to go back to full-time work when both your children are at school?’

  The question restored a little of Alison’s dignity and made her feel less of a dependant.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘With any luck.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I’ll give you some leaflets to take home and study at your leisure. And there’s a list of the local letting agencies. If you’ll get back to me as soon as you’ve found a suitable place, we can sort something out.’

  Finding a suitable place was easier said than done. There were plenty of houses to let but most of them wouldn’t accept children and those that would were mostly beyond her means. In the end, after a demoralising traipse round all the letting agencies in the town, her ‘choice’ was narrowed to three possibilities, none of them good.

  She chose a semi-detached house on a bleak estate to the north of the town, one of a terrace on the south side of a patch of scrubby grass called Barnaby Green. It was more than a mile from Jon’s school, nearly as far from any local shops, none too clean and decorated in such glaringly ugly colours that it made her feel nauseous to see them. But it was a house, and within her price range, and she could have it if she wanted. She signed the agreement, comforting herself that it would not be long until she could find something better. Then she went home to her own, clean, beautifully decorated, repossessed house.

  There were so many things to do. She knew she ought to write to Rigg and tell him what had happened but she couldn’t face it. She knew she ought to answer Morgan’s letters because he kept writing to her, but she couldn’t do that either. Instead she struggled through the day, dragging from chore to chore, sunk in a new, frightening fatigue that weighed her down from early, woken morning to late, lost night. Now she understood what it felt like to have a millstone round your neck.

  But she did her best. She notified the gas board about the date of her move, and the electricity, the poll tax, the phone, the water board. She accepted Sally’s offer of the loan of half a dozen tea chests and began the miserable business of packing up her home, folding their clothes into cardboard boxes and wrapping spare china and jugs and vases in wads of newspaper to keep them safe in the tea chests. But she was working automatically and without power, like a creature in a nightmare, as if none of it was real.

  And she still had to break the news to her mother and Mark. She chose her moment as carefully as she could, waiting until the next family tea.

  ‘I’ve got some news for you,’ she said brightly, when the meal was over and the table cleared. ‘Do you want the good news first or the bad?’

  ‘Is it about Rigg?’ her mother said, looking worried.

  ‘In a way,’ Alison said. She was brittle with false brightness. ‘What do you want then, good or bad?’

  ‘Bad first,’ Elsie said, ‘and get it over with.’

  Alison took a breath and plunged into her prepared speech. ‘Well, the bad news is we’ve been repossessed but the good news is that I’ve got another place.’ She smiled at them, one after the other – Mum, Mark, Jenny, young Katy, William – knowing how false the smile was. And it didn’t work. They were horrified, and their horror intensified when they heard that the mortgage hadn’t been paid for six months and that Rigg hadn’t told her.

  ‘But what was he thinking of, Ali?’ her mother asked. ‘Why didn’t he pay it?’

  ‘More to the point,’ Jenny said, ‘where is he now?’

  ‘He’s in Spain, trying to sell the flat.’

  ‘You mean he’s walked out on you.’

  ‘No,’ Alison said with an anguished face. ‘You mustn’t think that. It’s not like that at all.’

  ‘All right then,’ Jenny said. ‘He’s done a runner and left you to pick up the pieces. I think it’s disgraceful.’

  ‘No. No. Really,’ Alison implored. She was very near tears and, sensing her distress, so were Jon and Emma.

  ‘When’s your moving day, kid?’ Mark asked, coming to her rescue.

  ‘Thursday week.’

  He whistled. ‘They didn’t give you much notice, did they!’

  ‘I could have had longer,’ she told him. ‘I wanted to get it over quickly.’

  He was instantly and reassuringly practical. ‘Have you ordered a removal van?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘OK. Then you can leave all that to me. I’ll get a small one from Bennett’s and make several runs. That’ll be cheaper. I can do the first one before I go off in the morning – we’ll get it packed the night before – and we’ll finish off in the evening. Do you need a hand with the packing? Katy’ll help, won’t you, Katy?’

  ‘And me,’ William offered.

  ‘We’ll all help,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ Alison said stiffly. ‘I don’t wan
t to be a nuisance.’

  ‘Don’t talk cobblers,’ her brother said, leaning across the arm of the chair to hug her. ‘Moves are an abomination. I’ve not forgotten ours. You’ll need all the help you can get, believe me. Now then, let’s get down to brass tacks. Have you got any tea chests?’

  Even though she was prepared for difficulties, moving day was one of the worst Alison could ever remember. For a start, it poured with rain, so that they trailed wetness in and out of both houses. The bed frames were so rusty it took ages to dismantle them, the living room carpet was too long to go in the van and had to be bent in half, and there were so many boxes and packing cases piled up in the living room at Shore Street that nobody could move more than two feet without barking their shins. Then, because she’d forgotten to label any of them, nobody knew where to put the cases when they arrived at Barnaby Green, and they piled up in the living room where they were even more of a nuisance.

  ‘See you at tea time,’ Mark said when he’d helped her unpack all the bulky stuff from the first load. ‘If I don’t go now I shall be late. Mind how you go.’

  Jenny was driving him home to collect his car. ‘I’ll come back and help you till twelve o’clock,’ she said, ‘but I’ll have to get off to the office then. You do understand, don’t you? I know it’s only a part-time job but I don’t want to lose it.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you,’ Elsie said, anguished by the look on her daughter’s face. ‘Don’t fret.’

  ‘If we can get the kitchen sorted out,’ Alison said, ‘I shall be fine.’ She was determined to stay cheerful, even though both the kids were grizzling and Emma would keep saying she wanted to go home.

  But the kitchen was so filthy they were still scrubbing shelves when Jenny had to leave. And by then Jon had discovered the box she’d packed their playthings in and there were toys littered all over the living room.

  It was a long, dirty day and at the end of it, when Jenny and Mark returned with Katy and William and the second load of furniture, the place was still a tip and Alison was grey with dirt and fatigue. True, there were curtains at the living room windows, but they didn’t fit and hung very badly. True, the cooker was connected and the food was stowed away in the fridge and the newly cleaned kitchen cupboards, but none of the china was unpacked. To make matters worse it was growing dark, and when Alison tried to switch on the lights she discovered to her dismay that there were no light bulbs in any of the sockets.