Maggie Rowan

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘There was plenty of air, then?’

  ‘Oh yes, that was all right. It wasn’t a bad do at all. Except for Mr Ferguson copping it in the leg.’

  Nellie walked on in silence. Being shut in the bowels of the earth for twelve hours, not knowing whether he would see the light again, had not touched him. It hadn’t frightened him…It came to her that that was what she had been hoping for, that he would be frightened.

  Deep inside her a sadness settled. She had not realised before just how much she had banked on him eventually becoming a minister. Now she knew he would never leave the pit, no matter how Mr Fraser used his influence. His talking to the men, and the fact that they listened, men like the hardbitten Blackett and Findlay, had not pointed out to him that his path lay in saving souls; it had only strengthened his primary idea that more could be got over to them if you worked alongside them, breathing the same air, your sweat washing off the same dust, and in your brain, as in theirs, ever a secret fear that one day…the pit would get you.

  Chapter Two: The Proposal

  Maggie had not been to bed. After tidying the house she had walked slowly down to the pithead just about the time when the agent had passed through the crowd. She heard the murmurs against him, and any sympathetic feeling she allowed herself on the matter went to the man in the car. From the time she had first started to think for herself she had despised the miners. Perhaps at first this was caused by her father; but now all miners came under her scorn. She thought of them as bigoted, ignorant clods, heaving more coal at the corner ends, in the bars, or on the allotments than they did down the pit; they talked and talked. And what did their talking amount to? A strike, weeks of tightened belts; then crawling back to where they had left off. Look at the Taggarts. If any of them had a shilling or two over, what did they do with it? Played pitch and toss down the quarry, or put it on the dogs, or threw away their shillings on games of quoits. And their wives, what did they do when they had a full week’s money? Buy boiled ham and tinned peaches for the Sunday tea! And when a short week came they were borrowing.

  In her mind’s eye she had tried to see her sister brought to this state, but the picture would not form; Ann had the careful ways of their mother. But David was a Taggart, and they were all thriftless, and through him she could see Ann fighting a losing battle.

  And what of Chris Taggart? Her fast-forming plans made her ask this question, but she gave herself no answer. Her eyes had searched for him as she walked on the fringes of the crowd. She saw most of the Taggart family there, but no sign of Christopher. And she had returned home to sit brooding over the fire.

  Sitting alone in the dead of the night in the empty house gave her the opportunity to think. At least, she told herself this, for she would not admit that anything that could happen to the family would cause her to lose sleep. She gave no thought to her brother’s safety, nor did she chide herself for this unnatural attitude; she was no hypocrite. Like her feelings towards Ann, any towards Tom were of resentment, which in his case revolved mainly about his looks—it seemed part of the unfairness of life that he should be endowed with features almost as delicate as a girl’s.

  Towards morning she had dozed in the chair; and it was the entry of her mother and brother that aroused her. She mumbled a few suitable words that the occasion demanded, and some small part of her drew comfort from her mother’s evident pleasure and her saying, ‘It was good of you to clean up.’

  She was on her way up the stairs when she heard her father come in, and she thought it was with unnecessary eagerness that her mother related to him what she had done. But she heard no appreciative word from her father.

  She drew the blind in her room, and as she had watched the sun going down last night now she watched the light of the dawn lifting each ramshackle hut on the allotments as if out of the earth. They came slowly into view, their chimneys, their roofs, and their patched walls. The Taggarts’ chimney was smoking…Chris must already be there cooking the pig food. She could hear Mr and Mrs Taggart downstairs talking to her mother and father.

  After a long moment during which she remained staring fixedly into the distance towards the chimney, she turned swiftly from the window, and taking a coat from the cupboard, she put it on. She had reached the door when she paused and, turning back, went towards the dressing table, and opening the small top drawer, she took out a new box of powder and broke the seal; and using her handkerchief she dabbed some on to her face. The effect of the pale pink powder was to sharpen her nose still more. She saw this and rubbed the powder vigorously off, and went hastily from the room, censuring herself for her weakness.

  They were still talking in the kitchen when she let herself quietly out of the back door. A few steps up the back lane from the garden gate and she was on the steep rise of the waste ground. The allotments were deserted and were an unlovely sight; the rusty iron bedsteads and pieces of corrugated iron which marked their boundaries screamed their ugliness at the fresh delicateness of the morning. Only here and there had a hedge been grown round a plot of land, and the earth of these plots was grooved into neat patches. The Taggarts’ double plot was railed in, but wood was the least of its supports; besides hoardings, pieces of iron beds were driven and entwined into use to enclose it.

  Maggie paused at the makeshift gate. She was trembling. What would happen to her if he said no? To be refused by an ordinary man would be bad enough, but to be refused by him…But he wouldn’t refuse; he wanted that shop. She thrust open the gate, skirted a heap of old iron and the two pigsties and came to the door of the hut, and as, without any preamble, she thrust it open, she had the overwhelming desire to find the hut empty. But it wasn’t empty. His elbows resting on his knees, Christopher was sitting on an upturned bucket staring at the round black stove. And so sharp was her entry that she caught a dreamlike look in his eyes before his surprise had time to overshadow it.

  He lumbered to his feet, upsetting the bucket as he did so. ‘What’s up? Is anything wrong? What’s happened?’

  She could see his mind flinging about trying to pin down the particular catastrophe that had brought her, of all people, here. His bewilderment calmed her own turmoil, and she felt herself in command of the situation.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He passed his hand over his unruly mass of fair hair and his whole demeanour continued to show his bewilderment, like someone aroused from a deep sleep and doubting his wakefulness. ‘Yes. Yes, of course, Maggie. I’ll get you something to sit on.’

  He took a box from the corner of the hut and stood it on its end; then looked at her.

  He was standing about two feet from her and she had to look down on him. If they were to stand close together she thought his head would reach her chin. This would be only one of the many things at which people would laugh; and all her life even this one thing would be a constant irritation to her, for she couldn’t stand short men of any kind. In her dreams her men were always tall and strong and virile.

  She sat down on the box, and now his eyes were just above the level of her own, those great dark, sombre eyes. And as she looked into them a strange feeling welled in her, a mixture of weakness and fear and revulsion. The revulsion was natural, she told herself, and she would not admit that the fear was in case he should refuse her offer; but the feeling of weakness was foreign; she could not disown it for she could lay it to no cause. He righted the bucket and sat down, and his head sank into the hollows of his shoulders, but it sank stiffly, showing that he was tensed.

  He was waiting for her to speak, and when she did, his whole body suddenly raised itself and for an instant took on a look of normality.

  ‘Do you want the bicycle shop badly?’

  ‘Yes, very badly.’ His eyes were opened wide with hope.

  ‘I’ve got the money; you can have it.’

  ‘Maggie!’ He was on his feet, standing close to her, looking into her f
ace, and she had the fleeting impression that his face looked beautiful. ‘Maggie, would you?’

  He actually took her hand, but she pulled it away from him, saying, ‘Yes. But wait.’

  ‘Oh, Maggie! You’ve got no idea what this’ll mean.’ Without taking his eyes from hers, he stooped sideways and pulled the bucket closer, and sat down again with his knees practically touching hers.

  ‘I want something in return.’ Her voice was low, almost shy, but she did not move her eyes from his.

  ‘Anything, Maggie…anything. I’ll give you interest, or half share or partnership, or anything. I’ll make a go of it if I get the chance.’ He was talking with the eagerness of a boy: the weight of his thirty crippled years had fallen from him.

  ‘I want a partnership.’

  ‘All right, Maggie.’ His eyes and lips were smiling, and his large face was moving from one pleasurable expression to another.

  ‘But I want something else.’

  ‘Yes?’ He nodded, eager to hear more.

  ‘I want to be married.’

  The mobility of his face was halted abruptly, as if governed by a switch. ‘Married!’ His lips mimed the word and his brows contracted. ‘But what’s that got to do with the shop?’

  As they stared at each other the lid on the boiler of swill was forced upwards by the steam, and potato peelings spurted out on to the floor at their feet; but neither of them took any notice. She did not reply to his question, for to her the answer seemed obvious. But apparently it wasn’t to him, for he went on: ‘But how can that have anything to do with lending me the money?’

  Still she did not answer, and his eyes blinked once with the slow movement of an owl’s and he shook his head in perplexity.

  ‘I want you to marry me.’

  She rose to her feet as she said this, and his head slowly fell backwards as his eyes travelled up the long, thin length of her to come to rest in utter amazement on her face.

  She stood waiting, her jaws hurting her with the clenched tightness of her teeth; then her answer came.

  Christopher began to chuckle, a thick, deep sound at first; his head rocked gently with it; then the rocking passed into his body, and his body began to rotate, scraping the bucket on the floor with its motion; then the chuckle dropped into his thin legs, bringing them off the ground. This seemed to be the signal for the release of such laughter as Maggie had never before heard. Each vibrating peal of it cut through her, tearing open the dark privacy of her tortured being. For one suspended moment an emotion, terrible in itself, rose in her, bidding her spring on him and kill him; but, as if in fear of it and of the sound of his laughter, she flung around, groped for the door, and ran out of the Taggarts’ enclosure, across the allotments to where the old quarry with its rim of sheltering trees began.

  Christopher was on his feet, leaning against the boiler, oblivious of the steaming liquid soaking into his clothes. The laughter in his body was bubbling like the steam, and as the steam bounced the lid, so did his laughter bounce him. He began to be in pain with it, for never had he laughed like this before. Often he had thought if he could laugh at himself as if he were a natural clown then things would be easier. But laughter had rarely come to him, and when it had it was the inward kind, of a gentle quality, aroused by the fecklessness of his mother or the comic art of the twins; but never had he laughed outright at anyone, perhaps fearing that their laughter would be turned on himself.

  He had been dreaming about the shop when Maggie came in, imagining it as a thriving business that would, with his hard work, furnish the four rooms above it. He had seen them filled with homely things, some perhaps that he’d even made himself. For a number of years now he had been trying to direct his desires towards inanimate objects, for these had not the power to tear the emotions into shreds. It was after David first took Ann out that his mind turned in this direction. He was twenty-four then, and fully sensible of the fact that his life must be barren of all Ann stood for.

  The first year during which his brother had quite unconsciously deprived him of the only female company he was ever likely to have was one of almost exquisite torture, for he wanted, above all things, the happiness of both his brother and Ann. Yet he had protested to himself that Ann could have loved him. Wasn’t it to him she had always turned in her every difficulty? And wasn’t she, even in maturity, small and slight, her dark elfishness not contrasting startlingly with his compressed body? So he reasoned that if anyone could have loved him it would have been Ann. And yesterday he had been thrown back into the vortex of that first painful year. But only for a time, for the marriage had been inevitable from the start, and when the final link joined Ann to David, he knew a feeling of freedom, which urged him more than ever to find some opening whereby he could release himself from the monotony of his days. Wild schemes had passed through his mind for purchasing Seymour’s shop—he had been sitting here thinking them up—but none were so wild and fantastic as Maggie Rowan’s offer.

  His laughter rocked itself out, and he stood mopping his eyes. Why, in the name of God, had she made such a proposal? Had he been a straight, ordinary fellow he could have understood it. But would she have asked a straight, ordinary fellow? No; she had asked him because, like herself, he was an oddity. But again why? She could not care for him. She acted towards him as she did towards his brothers and all the men with whom she came in contact, coldly, and often at times in open hostility. Was it because Ann was married and she was feeling lonely? He knew what it was to feel lonely, with the future stretching endlessly ahead and the space inside of you growing wider each day as if to make room for the hollowness that the coming years would breed.

  He thought of her face as she said, ‘I want you to marry me.’ In her eyes there had been grim determination and defiance, but behind these signposts of her usual attitude there glowed dimly the reflection of the loneliness which was forcing itself from the secret reserved depths of her. And he had laughed at her, laughed like a maniac. He could not imagine why he had laughed, for his feelings now were mainly of pity. He thought: Poor Maggie! To be driven to ask the likes of me to marry her. What a pitch she must have reached to bring herself to such a point! And he had laughed! The very last thing he would have dreamed of doing. Where had she gone, running wildly like that? What if she did anything, killed herself or something? For it must have been awful to have her offer laughed to scorn, and by him!

  He passed his forearm over his wet face, more to wipe away the confusion in his brain than to dry the tears of his laughter. He must go after her and tell her he didn’t mean it. He would thank her for her offer, and put her mind at rest by tactfully inferring that he would forget it and that no-one in the world would ever know of it.

  He ran out of the hut and across the allotment. But when he reached the gate there was no sign of Maggie. She would likely be home by now. Yet, somehow, he didn’t think she would go home; she would more likely want to go and hide herself. But where? There was only the quarry.

  He made for the spinney that bordered the far side of the quarry. Although it was now daylight, the trees still seemed to hold the night fast in their entwining branches, for once under them he had to stop and peer about him.

  He called softly, ‘Maggie, are you there?’ But he received no answer. He zigzagged across the narrow belt still calling softly. And then, as he was about to retrace his steps, he saw her. Her clothes were making a darker line against the black-brown trunk of a tree. It was the last tree of the spinney, it stood sentinel above the town straggling in the valley below, seeming to be on a level with Brampton Hill; and it was towards the far hill that Maggie was looking. She seemed taller, thinner and straighter than ever; the rebuff had not bowed her, and as Christopher approached he was made to feel further uneasy by the forbidding aspect of her. Whether or not she had heard him he could not tell, and he went forward hesitantly, and stood a moment by her side before saying gently, ‘Maggie, I’m sorry.’

  He looked at his feet as he spoke, star
ing unseeing at the wet swill on his boots.

  She gave him no reply, but seemed to stretch herself even straighter. And he went on hurriedly, ‘You know I wouldn’t laugh at you really. Who am I to laugh at anybody? It was because it was so unexpected that you should…anyone should want to marry me.’

  His head remained drooped and her body remained straight, and the silence that was heavy on her fell on him. So still did they stand that a blackbird, leaving its nest, did not rush in alarm along the belt of trees, carrying a warning to the other inhabitants, but dropped on to the grassy slope below them and tugged a worm from the sward.

  Christopher slowly raised his head to look up at her, and he was surprised to see no tear stains on her face; it was dry, and in this early light the mottled texture of her skin appeared freckled, and the poignant sharpness of her nose aroused in him further pity. His eyes went to her hair. She was without a hat, and even without the aid of the sun the auburn lights were gleaming in the thick coiled braids, yet he could not but think that it was lost on her.

  His pity drove him on to say, ‘I’ll never forgive myself, Maggie. I wouldn’t hurt you…and it won’t go any further…I mean what’s happened.’

  He followed her gaze to Brampton Hill, and after what seemed to him an interminable time, he went on in tones of bewilderment, ‘I…I didn’t think that you cared…well, could care for a fellow like me.’

  ‘I don’t…’ The words came cold and sharp with scarcely any movement of her lips. ‘Why should I?’