Maggie Rowan

by Catherine Cookson

  He stood still a moment before turning round. She was standing in the doorway, and in the dim light she had the appearance of a corpse. Her eyes looked lifeless; almost they appeared to have vanished, leaving the sockets to emphasise the dead expression of her face.

  He wanted to say, ‘There’s no hurry; I’ll stay for a while,’ but he found he could say nothing. His pity for her rose, yet so strong was she that he could only do as she bade him.

  As he walked towards the door, the weight of the cases pulling at his shoulders, he had the idea that once again he was carrying the swill to the pigs, and an intense longing came over him for the days when he had done just that, before the lure of the bicycle shop filled his horizon, and before Maggie had thrust herself into his life…

  As he had watched George leave, so Maggie watched him. She stood well back from the window, and she could see only his head and the top of his shoulders as he heaved the cases into the back of the car. She saw him slowly close the door on them; then still slowly wriggle himself into the driving seat. She watched him without thinking of him.

  So much had happened during the past two days that her mind should have been awhirl with the conflict of her thoughts, but, as if like a thing apart it realised the impossibility to bear the weight of the sum total of her troubles, it dealt with only one thing at a time. All day it had worked around Stephen, one minute bidding her to fly to the Taggarts and tear her son from that slovenly, slipshod woman, only the next to recall the terrible burden the doctor had laid upon her…‘If you want him to remain normal you’ll leave him where he is for a time. His only chance is to be allowed to run loose; and he’s in the right place for that.’ When she had reared up at him and said, ‘I’ll not! I’ll get other advice,’ he had answered, ‘By all means. By all means. I have already seen Mr Spence—your husband suggested it. Very likely he’ll order the boy away.’

  This last statement had checked any further protest…Her son to be taken away. And they would say it was because of her. She knew the doctor was against her. They were all against her.

  Afterwards, the day had worn slowly on its endless way. She had wandered about the house like someone lost. Christopher hadn’t come back. When she attempted to think of him her hand had gone to her lower lip, swollen and sore inside where her tooth had cut into it. She felt no anger against him; it was almost as if he did not exist for her to apply her anger to. But behind the seeming indifference towards him she knew that presently she would have to think about him, and more than she had done before.

  A short while ago when she had heard the heavy steps across the hall, she had thought it was him returning, but it had been her father.

  Like a grown girl who had suddenly been told she was adopted, she asked of herself now ‘Who am I?’ but with a difference…she was not asking who her parents were, but from which of them she inherited most of her complex self. And the answer was with her before the question was ended…him. The conflict that was forever warring inside her was of him; the censor that had watched her every reaction was of him, as if through her he was making reparation for his moral slackness. But there was still the other side. However small, there was the side that knew life, life that was bred purely of desire. Now it was plain how she had come to the knowledge of men’s actions and reactions, of men’s demands and desires; there was no necessity for her to have experienced or seen anything of the darker side of life, for it was part of her, she had been born of it.

  She gazed with blank eyes out into the empty drive, and without any warning she retched. Clapping a handkerchief over her mouth, she groped behind her for a chair and sat down…Polly Harkness…a bob a time! The retching came again, and she sprang up and staggered out of the room and up the stairs and into the bathroom.

  When she came out there was no semblance of colour left in her face, even the mottle had paled into the dead whiteness. She stood on the landing uncertain which way to go. Never in her life had she felt as she was feeling now. She was well-acquainted with loneliness, but not with this isolated feeling. There was no-one left to turn to. She had never before, even in the very depths of loneliness, longed for someone to whom she could fly, someone to whom she could pour out all her misery. If she had, it would surely have been her mother. The thought of Nellie brought a trembling sensation into her throat. If she had loved anyone before she loved Stephen, it had been her…mother. But now she was no longer her mother. But she was still Ann’s mother.

  Was this why she had hated Ann from the very day she had seen her lying in the crook of Nellie’s arm? In the subconscious layers wherein all truth and knowledge were stored she had known all there was to know, and it had bred her hate, and the hate had never lessened.

  Her father had poured out his venom because he blamed her for Ann’s breakdown—they would all blame her for that; people always blamed the last straw. She did not hold herself responsible for it, yet had she accepted the responsibility still not a spark of sorrow would have touched her. Did any of them ever think to blame Ann for the sleepless nights and tortured days she herself had suffered? They could not all have been blind to Ann’s tactics. No. She was not sorry for anything she had done to Ann; she had taken her son…and her husband.

  She made her way slowly along the corridor. To her mind Ann had always been silly and babyish; there was not a thing outstanding about her, neither in looks nor brains. As women went, she was a nonentity. Yet she was loved. David loved her…or had; Stephen loved her—the knife turned in her heart at the admission; her father loved her; and Christopher—he had loved her from the time she could crawl. Looking back, she could see that he had never stopped loving her.

  She passed her own door and moved towards Christopher’s. Here she paused; then slowly she pushed the door and went in. Already the room had a deserted look. The sweet, thick smell of his tobacco pricked her nostrils. Her head lifted…why was she here? He was gone. Hadn’t she told him to go? But he would have stayed.

  Under the foot of the bed she could see a pair of his boots. With her toe she moved one into full view. If there was anything that could bring her back to the normal way of thinking about him it would be his boots. The enormous boot with its thick welt and bulbous toecap looked abandoned, the stiff leather, moulded with use, falling away in small ripples on each side of the lolling tongue. She was not given to fancy, but at this moment she thought the boot looked like a dog pining for its master. Whereupon, with a quick movement of her foot, she kicked it under the bed again. There was a dull clatter as it hit its partner; then the room was as it had been, quiet and desolate.

  Whether the added desolation of the room seeped into her or her own feeling of desolation flowed over into it she did not know; she only knew that she could not bear this misery. Never, even in the depths of her loneliness, had she allowed herself the relief of tears—tears were for senseless women, women like Ann—but now the avalanche of her emotion drove her, not towards the chair, but towards Christopher’s bed, and, dropping on to it, she thrust her face into his pillow, and, putting her hands under it, she pressed it to her mouth to still the terrifying sounds of her weeping.

  PART FOUR

  ANN

  Chapter Fourteen: The Law of Opposites

  Nellie’s world had been lying in fragments about her for months now. There seemed not a splinter left to fall, yet each day as she covertly watched Tom eating his meal in feverish haste with never a word to her, then changing and speeding away on his bicycle, she experienced anew the tearing pain she felt when first she knew that his haste was speeding him to that woman. She had no actual proof he was going to her; she had heard no whisper; and she had not spied on him, although more than once she was tempted to do so. No, she knew without any evidence where he went. And she cried out hourly, ‘He can’t do it. God won’t allow him to do it . . . a woman who is having a child to his brother-in-law, who has broken up his sister’s life and turned her mind . . . he can’t do it. It is an evil thing.’

  But he d
id it. He went to her each day; even when he was on nights and finished at six in the morning, he would mount his bicycle and away. Which way he went she did not know; but she guessed by the condition of his shoes that his journey took him beyond the town.

  She looked now out of the window at the snow blowing like smoke clouds on the wind…the first snow of the year. Vaguely she hoped that it wouldn’t lie. But what if it did? Nothing mattered any more. Christmas was a week away, but there’d be no jollification in this house…Ann in that place; Maggie separated from Christopher, and her child taken away from her for the second time; George going about like a man deprived of his spine, no will to live left in him; and all because of that woman. It couldn’t be! It mustn’t be! She clenched her fists and pressed them on to the draining board…But it was. All these things had already happened; all that could happen had happened, except that her son had yet to tell her he was going to leave her. When he should tell her that there would be nothing more that could happen to her.

  She looked down on her clenched hands, red and toil-worn with work that had been done as a duty to her husband and for love of her son. If or when he should tell her that, there would be something she could do…she would curse the woman; she would curse her in the name of God, and she would pray night and day for her to wither and for all she should touch to do likewise…even if it should mean the main thing she touched…

  The snow had changed from a thin spray to thick heavy flakes before Tom left the town. The flakes clung to his eyebrows and to his narrow moustache, and the front of his overcoat took on a breastplate of white. It was only half-past three, but already it was nearly dark.

  Before reaching the fells he took the track forking sharply right. It was so uneven that the cycle bounced and lurched as on a switchback. But after some distance it smoothed out and widened. He passed a farmyard, where a heap of fresh dung steamed through the snow, and the smell and lowing of cows all suggested warmth. A farm hand gave him a muffled hail and he hailed back. About a mile further on he dismounted, and, pushing his bicycle through a gap in some treacherous hawthorn bushes, he made his way through a little copse of young birch saplings. Where the saplings ended a wood began, thick with naked trees and snow-sprinkled undergrowth; and here he left his cycle, pushing it into a dry hollow. Then banging the surplus snow from his clothes he went into the wood. Beneath the trees it was almost impossible to see, for besides the falling snow the canopy of entwined branches was like a curtain across the sky. But without hesitation he kept to the narrow path until it bore sharply left. Then he moved away from it in the opposite direction. The path he now took, through the undergrowth, was singularly clear. But he moved with more caution, until he neared the wide girth of an oak; and here he stopped, to peer through the gloom before slowly moving on again. Within a few yards from the tree he was standing by the broken fence that marked the boundary of the wood, and beyond was the road he had left earlier on.

  Through the snow he could just make out the fuzzy outline of the cottage on the far side of the road. No light gleamed even dully through the little window; and he pulled his lower lip between his teeth, and stood, his hands deep in his pockets, gazing at it…Was she bad? Where was the old woman?…He hadn’t seen either of them for a week now. What if they were both bad and in there alone? His hands inside his pockets opened and shut. There was no way he could find out…none, except to go and knock. He stepped backwards, as if checking himself…Well, what was he to do? His mind derided him with the answer. Do what you seem pretty good at doing…stand and watch.

  How many weeks had he been watching now? He had lost count. Six? Eight? He didn’t know. If he hadn’t seen her again perhaps it would have been all right; and if his mother hadn’t asked him to go with that message to Maggie he would never have seen her. How would his mother feel if she knew it was she herself who had started him on this game? He knew that she guessed where his daily trips were taking him; she had suspected him long before he had taken to following Beattie.

  It had all come about because Stephen, who had been back with Maggie only a few days, came crying to his Granny Taggart, his twitch worse than ever, and stammering so much that he was incoherent, and no amount of coaxing would make him return home. Kitty had come to Nellie, wondering how she was to let Maggie know, for Christopher was away at work, as also were Sep and the twins. Nellie had turned to him then and said, ‘Would you go to the laundry and try to explain to her?’ And reluctantly he had gone.

  It was weeks since he had seen Maggie. He knew, as who didn’t, that she had left the Hill and was now living in a little house not far from the laundry. He knew the house; it had been built just before the war and was privileged to have the wall of the new electric components factory on one side and on the other two a high cypress hedge, which gave it seclusion. Personally, he considered it a great advance on the mansion on the Hill, but what Maggie thought no-one knew.

  The news that she was only his half-sister had at first surprised him and given him the reason for her difference. He had never been able to like her; yet on that day he had stood in her office and looked into her drawn face and deeply sunken eyes he had been sorry for her. He had fully expected her to jump down his throat when he delivered his message, yet her reception of it had been strange; she had turned away and sat down at her desk, and after a while she had said, ‘All right. Let him stay.’ She had even added, ‘Thanks for coming and telling me.’

  In that moment he had glimpsed a little of her suffering, but he could do nothing to help her; there was no link or ever could be between them; he didn’t understand her.

  A wooden trolley full of sheets had blocked his way at the top door, and rather than stand amid the curious glances and laughing eyes of the girls he had turned abruptly and made his way out through the wash-house. It was then he had seen her; across a bogie load of wet linen their eyes had met and held in startled recognition. Hers were the first to fall away, and as she turned to push the bogie he saw the shape of her, and his anger had almost choked him. The anger stayed with him for days; but it wasn’t levelled totally against her; of the two, David came in for the greater part.

  It was nearly a week later that he followed her to her home. She took the bus, and at a distance he followed it on his bicycle. He was surprised to find she was living so far out of the town. The cottage was just off the main road; but he made it his business to find another way to it. And now his watching had become almost an obsession. He watched her leave early for the laundry; he waited her return in the evening, listening for the bus to stop on the main road and knowing that within a minute she would come round the bend and pass so close to him he could almost touch her, and he would watch her enter the gate of the cottage and walk slowly and heavily up the path.

  Why did he watch? Was he hoping to see David go in or come out? If he were to see him, what would he do? He knew what he would like to do…kill him. Nothing was deep enough or strong enough to describe the loathing he now felt towards his brother-in-law. Once it had been even possible to say that he loved David; but now his hate was so great that when he was forced to meet him down the pit he wanted to spring on him and throttle him. As his hate of Beattie had lessened, his hate of David had grown; it was as if the amount could not diminish.

  A sound coming from the direction of the cottage brought his body up taut; it was the door opening and the latch dropping back; and when the blurred bent figure in the long coat showed through the snow he could not distinguish whether it was her or the old woman. He listened to the rattle of the windlass lowering the pail into the well…Whoever it was would have to pull that bucket up…His own hands were freezing inside their gloves and coat pockets. The windlass handle was of iron…He made a forward movement; but again checked himself. He was now standing level with the hedge, and the person at the well had only to look across the road and he would be seen, even through the falling snow, for the light here on the road was considerably lighter than in the wood.

  Bu
t the woman did not glance in his direction. Laboriously she wound the bucket to the top of the well, unhooked it and stood it on the ground, then straightened herself as if to gain breath before stooping again to pick it up.

  She had become almost lost to him when he heard her cry out sharply. There was a dull thud and the clatter of the pail as it rolled on to the stones of the path. When he reached her she was turning on her side in an effort to rise. Even when he put his hands under her arms and brought her to her feet he still did not know which of them she was; not even when the voice coming from the depths of the shawl said, ‘That’s the last straw,’ not even then did he know; for the voice was merely a broken croak, which told of a severe cold.

  When she was standing firmly again he withdrew his support and said, ‘Go inside, I’ll get the water.’ And when he had filled the pail and turned towards the house again, to see her still standing where he had left her, then he knew which of them she was.

  ‘What—do—you—want?’ Each word was uttered as if it gave her pain.

  He did not answer but walked towards the door with the pail and waited. Before reaching him she stopped again and said, ‘Did you hear? Get yourself away.’

  But he still stood. She began to shiver violently, then she swept past him and turned swiftly to close the door. But quite gently he kept it open. And when she released her pressure he followed her inside and closed the door behind him.

  At first he could not see her but her voice came hoarsely to him: ‘Will you go away!’

  It was then he discerned the dark bulk of her moving back from him.

  ‘Do you hear? Go away.’

  A fit of coughing seized her; and when it passed he said, ‘I’ll go soon enough. Why don’t you light the gas?’