The Mallen Girl

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘Well, she must not be criticised for that. But I cannot see her changed opinions in that direction as an entire reason for avoiding me. Do you know of any other, a new interest perhaps?’

  She picked up the implication in his voice and replied, ‘Yes, a new interest perhaps.’

  ‘Oh.’ Again his finger went to his moustache, but now he stroked it thoughtfully from the middle of his lip to the end, first one side and then the other, before he said, ‘Don’t you think she might have told me? We had become rather good friends, you know.’

  ‘As far as I can gather the new interest has only been recently acquired. The first reason I gave you I think was the main one. She is very young and sees everything at present in black and white; there is only good and bad.’

  ‘Well’—he smoothed down the front of his coat, his fingers pausing as they came to each button, and when he came to the last one he rose to his feet, saying, ‘I mustn’t detain you; I have a great deal to attend to before I leave.’

  ‘You are going away again then?’

  ‘Yes, yes; your precipitate guess was correct.’

  As she looked at him she knew that her guess had been just that, merely a guess, and that his intention of leaving suddenly had been kept in abeyance, a reserve defence to counter what might be disappointment. As she walked into the hall with him she asked, ‘Have you seen Constance lately?’

  ‘Yes, we met about a fortnight ago in Hexham; she was on a shopping spree, we had tea together.’

  On the terrace they stood for a moment in the late afternoon sunshine looking over the garden, and as he raised his hand toward the groom on the drive below, which was an order for his horse to be brought round, Miss Brigmore said gently, ‘Constance is very fond of you, Pat; I believe you know that.’

  She hadn’t looked at him as she spoke and she heard him sigh before replying, ‘Constance and I understand each other, Brigie; we always have done. I had a very youthful passion for her at one time: when she married it died. It would have died in any case, I think, because first loves are based on pure idealism and idealism is never strong enough to hold up life, married life. Yes, Constance and I understand each other.’

  She was looking at him now and she thought sadly, very sadly, how blind some men were, especially if they happened to be moral men. Thomas had never been blind to a woman’s needs; but then Thomas had never been a moral man.

  He was bowing over her hand again and saying, ‘When you next see Constance give her my warmest regards, won’t you? Goodbye, Brigie. And…and thank you for your candour; you have been very helpful.’

  She said nothing. She watched him running down the steps on to the drive; he was still a young man, his step was light, his bearing and everything about him was what any sensible girl would admire. But were girls ever sensible?

  A few minutes later, after he had mounted, he raised his hand to her in farewell, then urged his horse forward into a trot, and as she watched him disappearing down the avenue of trees she thought, Constance and I understand each other. Poor Constance. She did not think, Poor Pat, deprived of love for the second time, because a man such as he could find consolation if he so desired; nor did she think, Poor Katie, for although it went against the grain to admit it, Katie as she had become would be much happier with Brooks’ son than ever she would have been as Mrs Ferrier, perhaps someday Lady Ferrier. There remained Constance, and again she thought, Poor Constance.

  Two

  Dan arrived at the Hall unexpectedly in the middle of the week, but it was not unusual for him to arrive at odd times for apparently his absence from the mill in no way affected the workings of that establishment. Since the staff had been given no notice of his arrival the carriage wasn’t at the station to meet him, so he had taken a lift on the carrier’s cart, he informed Brooks, then asked, ‘Miss Brigmore about?’

  ‘No, she’s not in today, Mr Dan; Miss Barbara came along a while back to say she’d caught a bit of a chill an’ was staying indoors.’

  ‘Oh.’ He walked across the hall to the foot of the stairs, and there he turned and said, ‘I’m going to have a wash. Have a drink sent up to my room, will you? Whisky.’

  Not being an imperturbable butler, Brooks showed his surprise on his face. He hadn’t known Mr Dan to drink whisky; a glass of wine with his dinner perhaps and then he didn’t seem overfond of that either.

  When, a few minutes later, he handed the tray to Armstrong he said confidentially, ‘I’ve made it a double, he needs it by the look of him. Peaked, he is; hard work doesn’t seem to agree with him.’

  When Dan came downstairs again he ordered a meal. ‘Something light,’ he said; ‘I’ll have it on a tray by the fire, and I’ll have it now.’

  The young master’s attitude huffed Brooks. He considered that the six months Mr Dan had spent in the factory had not only taken some of the flesh off his bones and the colour from his cheeks, but also it had altered his manner; there was a grittiness about it that hadn’t been there before. He would have said he had turned from a boy into a man, even more so than Mr John had, and Mr John was older by more than a year. He didn’t approve of the change; once upon a time Mr Dan’s manner had been almost chummy; now, the name he would put to it was bossy.

  Brooks would have been very surprised indeed had he been able to read Dan’s mind as he placed the tray on a small table before him.

  It was hardly believable to Dan now that at one time all his sympathy had lain with the staff, when he had seen them as the poor underdogs; but, after having spent six months in Manchester he had become not only appalled with the conditions in his father’s mill, which were considered good by the standards of the time, but also more incensed with conditions in mills known to be behind the times. The whole scene horrified him and aroused in him an anger that he knew to be fruitless, for he could do nothing to alleviate the conditions he saw, or, more to the point, he was going to do nothing to alleviate the conditions, for once his year of probation was up he was getting out, and as far away as possible from the grime, poverty, and sordidness that hurt him. Time and again over the past months he had asked himself why he didn’t do something, but he was honest in that he knew his efforts would be futile, for he wasn’t the crusading type. There was in him, he knew, a soft core; how it had come to be there he didn’t know, being the offspring of Harry and Matilda Bensham. He only knew that the sight of barefoot women, their bodies stripped of all but garments that looked like shirts, working like clockwork bees in an overheated hive caused in him a pain for which there was no salve but beauty.

  Yet when he talked to the clockwork bees the majority of them would laugh and joke with him, especially the spinners whose ambitions or dreams he understood from them were simply of becoming weavers.

  But there were those who didn’t laugh and joke at their lot, for they were too old, too worn, too pain-racked, yet had to continue to work in order to die slowly.

  Like Engels before him, he, too, drove through the streets of the poor on his way from his home on the outskirts of the town to the mill in an earnest endeavour to enable him to realise the real position of the workers. Idealistically, at first he had scorned the carriage, but a week of plodding through narrow alleys, battling his way through the stench that surrounded everything like a curtain of gas, of finding his boots covered with excrement, and more than once missing by inches an indescribable deluge from a bucket heaved out of an upper window, knocked out for good and all his feeble ardour in that direction.

  When he tackled his father about the conditions, suggesting that many of their own workers had to suffer them, Harry’s caustic answer to his son’s tirade had been short and telling: ‘Put a Paddy in a palace and he’ll fetch in a pig.’

  As time went on he had to admit that his father was right. They were a feckless crew, the Irish; yet strangely, these were the ones who besides the stench, gave off the aroma of cheerfulness. They were also, he soon found out, no respecters of class, for they didn’t recognise the barrie
rs. Within a couple of days of his being in the factory they were addressing him as if they had known him all their lives. ‘Begod! You’re looking well this morning, Mr Dan. Now isn’t that a fine piece of cloth you’ve got on you, as good as they’d make in any cottage in the old country. Tweed that is, isn’t it? And every thread crossed with love. And you’re the man to carry it, Mr Dan. Christ Jesus! But you’re an attractive-looking fellow, you are that.’

  What could you say? What could you do?

  What he could do and now, was to tell Brooks that he was having it soft, that the whole lot of them here were having it soft. But then Brooks had not always had it soft; wouldn’t this be the life he, too, would like to give all of them, every man jack of them back there in the mill? There were seven of the indoor staff from Manchester, his father had done that at least.

  Oh…He lay back in the chair, his meal untouched. This was Wednesday; he had up till next Monday to fill his body with fresh air and feast his eyes on the endless hills—and to see Barbara.

  ‘Why hello, Mr Dan,’ said Mary, ‘you dropped out of the sky?’

  ‘Yes, Mary, just this very minute.’ Dan laughed down into her round, rosy face. ‘I’m the second fallen angel; I was on my way to join Lucifer, but I thought I’d just pop in.’

  ‘Aw you! Mr Dan.’ Mary pushed him in the back as she had done since he was a small boy, then added, ‘Miss is in bed. She’s got a cold on her chest an’ I wouldn’t let her up. You go in the sitting room there and I’ll tell Miss Barbara you’re here.’

  As he crossed the hall he cast a glance toward the stairs which Mary was now mounting stiffly, for her leg was troubling her. Then he saw her stop, and he too stopped and looked upwards to where Barbara was standing at the head of the stairs, one minute looking down at him, the next running down toward him, her face alight as if she were glad to see him. He stared at her as she came forward, her hand outstretched, and when he grasped it he did not speak but just continued to look at her.

  ‘Why have you come? Anything wrong? It’s only Wednesday.’ Her voice was high, her words clipped.

  ‘Is it? I wouldn’t know, I never count days.’ Automatically he mouthed the words.

  ‘Oh,’ She shook her head at him, the while she continued to smile. ‘Well, how did you get here? Did they know you were coming? Brigie didn’t say.’

  ‘I arrived on the carrier cart; no-one knew I was coming, not even Brigie.’

  They were in the sitting room now and as they seated themselves at opposite ends of the small couch, he said rapidly on his fingers, ‘Are you very bored?’

  ‘Bored?’ She spoke the word.

  ‘Yes, bored.’ He, too, now spoke the word.

  ‘No. Why? Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Oh’—he shrugged his shoulders—‘I imagined you must be because you were so pleased to see me. The women have a saying in the mill, Better the divil for company than be alone with your mind.’

  The smile slid from her face, her chin went up, and her lips fell tightly together for a moment before she said, ‘The same old Dan.’

  ‘Yes’—he was smiling now—‘the same old Dan, irritating, annoying, always saying the wrong thing. Anyway, how is Brigie, not really ill I hope?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just a cold and…and she’s tired. I’ve been worried of late; she seems listless, not her brisk self, you know?’ She shook her body, stretched up her neck, and put her head to one side in a good imitation of Brigie, and he laughed and said, ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘But what’s brought you here, I mean in the middle of the week? How is the mill managing without you?’

  ‘Oh, the mill.’ He pursed his lips. ‘It’s closed down until I go back; everybody’s out of work, but’—his lips pouted further—‘what do I care? Let them starve.’ He waved his hand airily, and she, joining in his mood, waved hers too and repeated, ‘Yes, let them starve.’ Then they both laughed together.

  ‘Are you getting used to it there?’ she now asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That would take a long time to answer. Come and see the mill and then you’ll know. Yes, that’s what you should do’—he was nodding deeply at her as he spoke on his fingers—‘you should come and see the mill, it would do you good.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have done you much good. You look thinner, much thinner.’

  ‘Yes.’ His face took on a mock sad expression. ‘I know, I’ve shrunk still further; I should say I’m almost three inches shorter than you now.’

  ‘Yes.’ She too assumed a mock attitude and her manner became matronly as she said, ‘I should say you are. Yet when I saw you standing at the bottom of the stairs I imagined you had grown taller. It was a mistake.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  They were sparring but sparring amicably, which was a change.

  ‘But tell me,’ she insisted, ‘what’s brought you in the middle of the week?’

  ‘Oh’—he made a dramatic gesture. ‘Dad thought it advisable to get rid of me for a time. You see’—he leaned toward her—‘I’d fallen in love with one of the mill girls, handsome’—he spread his two arms in an embracing curve—‘jet black hair’—he waved his hand around his head—‘flashing black eyes.’ He now took his eyebrows between his middle finger and thumb and pushed them up and down. ‘Really, really attractive. He had the idea I was going to run off with her, so he separated us.’

  She gave him a scornful look before closing her eyes and turning her head to the side, and when she looked at him again he said solemnly, ‘It’s a fact.’

  And in a way it was a fact; his father had separated him from young Mary McBride, for twice in two days she had made him sick. The first time she affected his stomach was when he was crossing the yard from the mill to the office. It was bait time. He saw her running to a bench in order to be first to get a seat when she slipped in a thick puddle near the closets. She had managed to save herself from falling but her bait had burst from the hanky, the slices of bread spattering into the filth. He had paused for a moment, thinking to go to her aid if she fell, and he still paused as he watched her pick up the bread and rub it on her skirt, then bite into it as she sat down.

  His breakfast had been well digested when he witnessed this, and so the nausea had no result; but the following day when by his father’s side he saw her running between looms, then stop for a moment to scratch her head vigorously, take something from it, examine it for another second as she held it between her finger and thumb, then squash it under her nail against the side of the machine, he had put his hand over his mouth. Only fifteen minutes before he had returned from the club after eating a very heavy meal, and the sight of the girl ridding herself of her lice had the effect upon his stomach as a storm at sea might.

  Looking at him in some alarm, Harry had shouted, ‘What in Christ’s name! Lad, you’re not going to bilk, are you? My God! Because you saw her killing a docky? Don’t you know all their heads are walkin’?’

  No, he hadn’t known all their heads were walking. He knew that the body smell of some of them was nauseating, he knew that their lives were crude and their language cruder still, but what he remembered at that moment was what this girl had eaten yesterday, and the combination of the two was too much.

  When his father joined him in the office a short while later he had looked at him somewhat sadly and said, ‘Look lad, I’ve been noticing, you’ve been peaked for days now. I was going to write to Brigie and tell her about the weekend, but you can take the message down instead. Get yersel’ off first thing in the mornin’.’

  He had made no protest, it was like a reprieve as he had told himself, the only antidote against it was beauty.

  Now he was feasting his eyes on it. She grew more beautiful every time he saw her. Some day when some man told her she was beautiful she wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, for soundless words and fingers, no matter how expressive, had unfortunately no inflexion.

  When he
saw that she was not going to meet his bantering mood much longer he said, ‘What I really came down for was to tell Brigie that the family will be arriving en masse on Friday afternoon, together with one extra guest.’

  ‘Katie too?’

  ‘Yes, Katie too.’

  ‘And who is the guest?’

  ‘Ah! Ah! That’s a secret, I haven’t to let on.’ He dropped into the vernacular.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not being silly. I was told I hadn’t to say anything about the extra guest until they arrived.’

  She looked intrigued now. ‘Is it someone that’s been before?’

  ‘Ah! You’re trying to catch me. I cannot tell you.’

  She again assumed Miss Brigmore’s attitude but quite unconsciously now as she said, ‘You are reverting to your irritating self. Why did you mention the extra guest if you weren’t going to tell me who it is?’

  ‘Because my orders were to ask Brigie to tell Mrs Kenley to prepare an extra room.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter as long as the room is habitable, the roof doesn’t leak, the bed has sheets on it, and there’s a fire in the grate.’

  She looked at him in annoyance for a moment; then, her manner changing, she asked, ‘Is…is the guest someone important, I mean is there something connected with him or her, some event?’

  ‘Yes; yes, you could say that, there’s something connected with him or her, some event.’

  ‘Oh, Danny!’ She moved her head in two wide sweeps before going on, ‘No-one in this world has been able to irritate me like you have. I…I was really pleased to see you, I haven’t seen anyone for nearly a fortnight, and…’

  ‘What’s happened to the blond farmer?’

  ‘The blond farmer as you call him has been very busy, it’s the end of the harvest; they’re preparing for the winter.’