The Menagerie

by Catherine Cookson

  When the door of Jessie’s cottage closed behind her, without a bang, Larry stared towards it for a moment before turning and walking heavily towards his gate. Of all the things that could happen this was about one of the worst—not that Lottie had been with the fiddler, and God knew that was bad enough, but that the first person to confront him about Pam should be Jessie. Once again he felt himself a swine, and entering the house he thought, God, what a mess! And he knew that the mess must get worse, it couldn’t get better. And yet he would have it no other way.

  Frank stood before the couch, his face turkey-red and his whole manner terrifying, and Lottie, gazing up at him through running eyes, whimpered, ‘Don’t be mad at me, I meant no harm.’

  ‘No harm!’ Frank almost exploded. ‘No harm. You’re not so daft, Lot, you knew what you were doing. What if you have a bairn, eh?’

  ‘Eeh, no, Frank; I won’t have a bairn, I’m too old.’

  ‘I wish to God I could think so, and for your sake I hope you are. Jinny’ll kill you when she hears. All the trouble in the house the night, and now this. For two pins I’d bray you. I would, so help me God. All these years you’ve been looked after, worried after, and now this. Well, there’s something I can do…I can make him marry you just in case you shouldn’t be old enough. I’ll make him pay dearly for his entertainment.’

  ‘No, Frank.’ Lottie tried to rise. ‘Eeh, no, I don’t want to leave home. What could I do? I’d die without you all. I don’t want to see the fiddler no more. Oh, Frank…Oh, I don’t.’

  Her voice was lost in her crying, and Frank, although knowing that his threat was idle, continued to use it until Jessie put in quietly, ‘About getting her across, Dad, there’s no need; she can stay here…it would be easier.’

  He turned to her, wiping his face with his handkerchief. ‘It’s kind of you, lass, but you shouldn’t have to put up with our troubles, you have had enough of your own through us. My God! For this to happen.’

  He dabbed at his neck and Jessie said, ‘It would be better if Mam didn’t see her until tomorrow.’

  ‘Aye, it would that. What she’ll do…’ There were no words to describe his wife’s reactions and he shook his head. ‘Hell’ll be let loose. All these years, Jessie, you know how she’s taken care of her, and if anything further should come of it…’ He checked his tongue at this point—Jessie to him was a young, unmarried lass. ‘Larry and me’s going down there now, and God help him if I get my hands on him. You’ll let her stay the night then, Jessie?’ He was ignoring Lottie now and speaking as if she was not in the room.

  ‘She can stay as long as she wants to.’ Jessie patted Lottie’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s more than she deserves, but she’ll need some comfort with what’s coming to her. She will that.’

  With this soothing, parting shot, Frank went out, and Jessie, looking towards the door, thought, Yet even this will be put in the shade when you know what your son’s up to. Like a mask that had been worn for an evening the new defence suddenly slipped, and the old self emerged fully again and saw the trouble and shame this latest development would bring on the house across the road. The reactions of the girls and of Jack and Lena did not seem to matter. It was the effect on Mam and Dad Broadhurst that stood out, and of the two, Jinny would be the one to suffer most. Jessie had always been aware that Jinny’s secret ambition was respectability for her family, high respectability. Her aim had been to bring them up a cut above the rest of the folks around the place; and behind her restrained, rather taciturn front was a sensitiveness always keyed to respond to the doings, good or bad, of her children. But the sin of her beloved son, when it should come to her ears, would bear her down. Yet in some strange, twisted way it might be a godsend, Jessie thought, for it would divert some of the storm from this poor creature. And feeling that she must try and prevent Aunt Lot from precipitating the storm that she knew was about to burst over her she sat down slowly on the couch beside Aunt Lot, and taking her hand said haltingly, ‘It will be best for everybody, Aunt Lot, if…if you don’t tell Jinny or anyone else that you saw Larry with—’ she could not bear to speak the hated name, so substituted, ‘with anyone else on the fells; it would only upset Jinny more. You understand, don’t you, especially now?’

  ‘Yes, Jessie. I’ll try and not let on…I will, honest. I’ll try and stop it coming out.’

  ‘That’s right. Come on, I’ll help you to bed and get you a hot drink.’

  ‘Oh, Jessie, you’re good. I always knew you were good. I said to Larry—Eeh! There I go again. Do I go upstairs to the front room?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ll strap your ankle up, and you can stay in bed tomorrow.’

  With some difficulty she got Lottie upstairs and settled for the night; and she was in her own room before she realised that the whole evening had passed and she had not taken off the costume. She looked down at it. There were Lottie’s dirty finger marks on the sleeve and a splash of milk on the skirt. But she made no comment on them to herself as she undressed.

  Before getting into bed, she went to the bottom drawer of the chest and took out an imitation-leather wallet from which she extracted a sheet of much-thumbed paper. She looked down on it for a while. On it was the only piece of writing she had attempted in her life.

  When Larry had first impressed her with his cleverness and poured into her willing ears the results of his efforts, she had asked God why He had so favoured her in bestowing on her the love of this clever man—brilliant had been the word she’d used. It was only after months of secret effort on her own part that the few lines on this paper had evolved. They were the total essence of her feeling which had been squeezed from her soul. She did not know if they were good or bad, and she had been too humble to show them to her lord, but she had promised herself that when they were married and everything there was to know about her was made known to him, then she would show him these lines. For the last time now she read them:

  Love I can bring you only faith;

  No money, no power, no deep wisdom;

  No beauty, no brains; no tongue to charm,

  No voice to sing. But to you I come not empty,

  I bring no wrath, I bring you faith.

  Spurn me not for lack of all the charms

  You see in others, but compare them with me.

  Without grace I stand; but no empty hands

  Do I hold forth, but full they are

  Overflowing from my heart’s core

  To bind you ever more…with my faith.

  Slowly now she tore the paper into tiny scraps and put the heap on top of the drawers, and when she got into bed she lay staring up at the ceiling, seeing there what she imagined Lottie had seen in the meeting on the fells.

  ‘Spurn me not for lack of all the charms you see in others!’ Turning her face into the pillows she pressed it tight, trying to check the flood of tears. But they gushed from the well of pain in which her whole being was submerged.

  Chapter Six: The Will of God

  Jinny’s house had always been well ordered. Holidays, strikes, births or deaths: on a Monday she washed; Tuesday she ironed; Wednesday she allotted her spare time to the upstairs rooms; Thursday she did her front room and the inside of her windows; Friday she spent on her kitchen and back, and shopping; and on Saturday she did her big baking. But now, eleven o’clock on Monday morning, she was sitting in the front room by the empty fireplace, staring at the big jar of wilting daffodils that Gracie had brought in last Wednesday. They covered the whole of the opening between the curtains and were an effective shield from the garden path. She was staring at them in troubled, probing perplexity, as if from their dying she hoped to draw some clue to explain her own fading and suddenly troubled life.

  She was fifty-nine, and she had protested silently these past few days that it wasn’t fair, she shouldn’t be called upon at her age to bear such troubles. Not all in a heap anyway. If these things had happened when she was younger then she could, she felt, have stood up to them. But
now, they upset her something terrible. They made her head swim and her heart not only sore but beat so rapidly that at times she became frightened and worried, so that all she wanted to do was to sit and cry. This last troubled her most of all, for she had never been given to crying. Everything, she thought, had happened on that black Saturday. Her two girls contemplating going to the other end of the earth had seemed bad enough until late that night, holding Jack’s child in her arms, had come the awful premonition, which was to grow into certainty not only within herself but in the telling silence of others when they looked down on it. Then Lottie…Lottie. Her small, tightly compact body moved in quick jerks expressing her feelings more clearly than words. If she’d got her hands on her sister that night she would surely have killed her. It was as well that Jessie had kept her over there for the following week, too. But now the anxiety of waiting to see if there were to be results of this escapade were so nerve-racking that she felt that just another week or so like these past few days and she’d go off her head. The dread of Lottie having a child kept her awake at night, and into her waking nightmares would come the thought of the child across the landing, and that would lead to the troubled perplexity on Jack’s face and her growing dislike of Lena, whose constant nagging was upsetting the house still further, and, as always, her thoughts would lead her to her elder son. As they did now, and she asked herself why he hadn’t gone when he’d intended. But, as usual, before she could give herself any answer to this question, she bounced up, saying aloud, ‘The washing…I’ll never get a start…and the dinner an’ all.’

  But before Jinny went into the scullery to begin on the washing she turned up the passage and went to the open front door, and from the steps she looked down on the pram. The pram itself was an irritation to her, for it dominated not only the garden and the house but the whole of the street. There was scarcely a woman in the road who hadn’t examined the pram from inside or outside the gate. It was the talk of the place, and more so because of what it carried.

  In the soft shadow of the high silvery fawn canopy lay the child. The child who rarely cried and who only showed evidence of life when sucking at Lena’s breast. It looked a healthy child, fat and chubby. It showed no definite deformity; it had two eyes, and a nose and a mouth, but the mouth had a sort of shapelessness, and the nose was too small to be a nose. But it was the eyes that drew other eyes. They were not lying in soft valleys, hemmed in with cheeks like blush-coloured mountains, but were lying level with the brow and cheek bone. They looked almost as if they were painted on the flat surface. They were without expression; they looked—what was the word Larry had used?—non-existent. As she stood gazing down at her grandchild the back door opened and Lottie came along the passage to her side.

  In a persistent endeavour to obliterate the trouble she had caused, Lottie’s mind led her to act as if nothing had happened, or if it had, as if it was over. All Jinny’s nagging and scolding could not touch her persistence to be happy like she used to be. With the knowledge that the fiddler had ‘done a bunk’, the memory of the latter part of the time she had spent with him quickly faded, and apparently the only thing that marred her happiness was Lena’s attitude towards her, for Lena would not let her touch her child, not even look at it.

  ‘Can I bring her in, Jinny?’

  ‘No; you’ve been told.’

  Jinny kept her back towards Lottie as she spoke. She had never once looked her full in the face since she had come back from Jessie’s.

  ‘It’s spitting on, and the pram’ll get wet.’

  ‘Get in!’ cried Jinny, digging backwards with her elbow. ‘And shut up.’

  As it was beginning to rain Jinny went down the two front steps, pushed the pram around to the back, in through the scullery and into the kitchen.

  Lottie was waiting, and she pulled a chair out of the way so that the pram could go partly into the corner of the room, and as Jinny pushed it past her, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, she’s smellin’, Jinny. Can I clean her?’

  Gripping the handle of the pram, which almost reached her bust, Jinny’s eyes stared blankly before her for a moment before she barked, ‘If you don’t stop it, our Lot, I’ll hammer you. Before God I’ll hammer you! Lena says you’re not to go near her. Hundreds of times she’s said it, and that’s going to be enough…it’s her bairn.’

  ‘But why should she, Jinny? I minded all our bairns. You know I did. Didn’t I take Florrie and Gracie out on the fells when you were working half days at Mrs Peel’s? Now didn’t I? And you’ve always said the only thing I could do was mind bairns.’

  ‘Shut up, will you!’

  Mistaking the strained quietness of Jinny’s voice for softening, Lottie went on, ‘Ah, Jinny, there’s no harm in me wantin’ to nurse the bairn, is there? Mrs Wilson used to pay me, you remember? A shillin’ she paid me for looking after her Basil. Why won’t Lena? I don’t want nothin’ off her.’

  ‘Lottie Broadhurst’—Jinny’s voice was terrible with threat—‘I’m warning you something dreadful’ll happen if you don’t give over. I’m telling you…if you don’t give over. I want peace in this house, and if you start pestering Lena when she comes in, before God, I tell you, I’ll bray you. She isn’t too good yet and if you upset her any more…’

  Jinny left the threat unfinished. Within herself she knew that she really didn’t care how upset Lena was. She was a fat, lazy hulk, and although she’d had time enough to get really on her feet again, she was playing up. This morning’s walk to the store was the first move she had made out of the house, and then she’d had to be asked to go. She expected both herself and the bairn to be waited on. Well, it wasn’t coming off. She was past looking after bairns…she’d looked after enough in her time.

  Lottie, temporarily silenced, gazed at her sister; then her head began to move with short staccato swings, like the pointer of a metronome, an indication of her bewilderment; when something was beyond her, her head would swing. Suddenly it became still, and looking over her shoulder she gazed down into the pram, and after a moment, as if fascinated by the child, her whole body was drawn round towards it, and as she stared down at the baby, pity swam from her eyes. It was as if the odd seam in her own composition recognised a similar something in the child. Then with deep, soft gentleness she spoke words that set blaze to the tinder of tempers that had been smouldering in the house for weeks.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘She’s just like little Mary Tollet. Mary looked just like that. I remember seeing her…’

  Suddenly Lottie’s words were cut off and drowned by a scream, which preceded a flow of vitriolic language such as no Broadhurst man or woman had used in the house before. Lena, filling the doorway, appeared like someone suddenly caught in a frenzy of madness. She was carrying a handbag in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. The shopping bag she flung to one side of the room, and her handbag, with the heavy metal clasp, she aimed straight at Lottie’s face.

  The bag hit Lottie on the neck, and gasping in terror and hugging it to her she backed towards the fireplace as Lena advanced on her, crying, ‘You! I’ll do for you.’

  ‘Here, here, hold on!’

  Jinny, grabbing at Lena’s arms with a strength out of all proportion to her size, managed to push her into a chair. And now she too began to shout, trying to drown Lena’s hysterical flow. ‘Be quiet, woman! Have you gone mad? Stop it! Do you hear!’

  No-one heard the quick footsteps coming down the stairs, nor did they seem to take any notice when Larry appeared at the kitchen door. ‘What in Heaven’s name’s up?’ he cried as he came in, pulling the braces of his trousers over his pyjama coat. His feet were bare, his hair on end, and his eyes full of sleep.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ He stood at his mother’s side looking at Lena, but her answer was lost under Lena’s cries, and he cast a swift glance to where Lottie was cowering in the corner of the room, and part of the situation was made clear to him. Pushing his mother aside, he grabbed hold of Lena’s shoulders and shook
her vigorously, commanding as he did so, ‘Stop it! Do you hear—stop it!’

  Slowly Lena’s screaming gabble subsided, and she leant back gasping. Her mouth hung open and her tongue lay over her teeth like someone who had been choking. Her face was running in sweat and through her open coat the top of her breasts lay bare where the buttons of her dress had been burst asunder with her fury.

  The kitchen was quiet now but for the sound of her laboured breathing, and Larry, stepping back from her and reaching for a pair of his father’s slippers from the corner of the fireplace, thrust his feet into them, saying, ‘This house is getting more like a madhouse every day.’

  His words seemed to revive Lena’s frenzy.

  ‘Madhouse!’ She sat up. ‘Aye, it is like a madhouse. It always has been with her in it. And now she says me bairn’s mad.’

  ‘I didn’t. Oh, Lena, I didn’t.’ Lottie’s voice was choked with her crying.

  ‘You did, you…!’ She made to rise from her chair.

  ‘Ssh! Be quiet.’ Jinny put a soothing hand on her shoulder. ‘There now, it’s all over. Come on upstairs and lie down.’

  Lena shrugged Jinny’s hand away and looked at Larry. ‘She did. She said…she said it was like Mary Tollet.’

  Larry turned and looked at Lottie. Poor Aunt Lot. ‘Out of the mouths of babes and fools.’ She would have to be the one who would voice the fear of the house. Well, it had to come sooner or later. And poor Jack. It was him he was sorry for, not this fat, sexy bundle of conceit.

  Little Mary Tollet lived in the next street. He had passed her hundreds of times without giving her much thought. She was shapeless, with tight, vacant eyes, a gaping mouth and, more often than not, a running nose. Sometimes she played with the more kindly of the children, but even they laughed when, talking through her nose and with wild gestures of her arms, she’d try to make herself articulate.