The Blind Miller

by Catherine Cookson

  Kathleen did not reply to this, but said, ‘That tea. I suppose it’s kind of them to want to welcome her back like that, but having a tea in the street and putting flags out, because that’s what they’ll do down there. You would still think they lived in the ramshackle houses the way they go on. And when me Granny knows she’ll be wild…wild.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about that, it’s their way of expressing their feelings.’

  ‘But she didn’t know hardly any of them from the bottom end, not for years.’

  He patted her shoulder, saying, ‘It’ll all be over this time next week. Everything will have settled down by then. You’ll see, you’ll see.’

  ‘This time next week.’ Kathleen muttered the words to herself as she looked up over the chimney pots and into the sky. She had tried to readjust her life, she had tried to close the wound, but on Wednesday, between her Granny, her Aunt May, and her mother, the wound would not only be torn open again—she would be rent apart.

  Two

  Before she had done a month of her sentence Sarah’s mind came down from the plane to which it had escaped: time had a different meaning now. She got up with it early in the morning, in the mornings that always seemed like night, and the daytime was broken up into pieces of time; pieces when she ate colourless food, when she walked round a square; when she worked in a laundry; when she ate again, and worked again, and ate again, and then went to bed while it was still day. Nevertheless she longed for this time when she could go to bed, not to sleep or rest but to be by herself.

  That was the most difficult thing: getting herself used to time, time being used in a different way from that in which she had used it before. Everything inside was connected with time; everybody was doing time. But she found you can get used to anything; so she got used to using time. She had to, as she had to get used to not being nauseated with the smell, the smell of urine. In the block it permeated the air; even in the laundry, where there was soap and water, the smell still hung around some of the women. She liked few of the women; there was one, but she went out after six years. Her name was Gladys and she had liked reading. She had looked after the library. It was because of her that Sarah had got the job helping in the library for an hour after tea. So for over six years she had accepted time. It would be thought she hadn’t much choice, yet some didn’t accept it, and for them life was a living hell.

  But her acceptance ended one visiting day when Dan had said to her from across the table, ‘Kathleen is going to get married.’ Her heart had come alive at that moment. But she didn’t know for how short a time. Kathleen hadn’t been to visit her for four months, and she had written her only short, terse letters. She was at work and she couldn’t get off, she had a cold. Then Dan, his head bowed, had said, ‘I’ve got to tell you this, Sarah. She’s marrying Michael MacKay.’

  She had mouthed the name without a sound, then asked gropingly, ‘Why, Dan, why?’ and he had to say to her:

  ‘Paul has become a priest.’

  ‘A priest!’ It was the first time she had heard anything about Paul and the priesthood. She had been hurt sore that he had never been near her, nor yet had written her a scribe of the pen, she couldn’t understand it. But then there were lots of things she couldn’t understand, such as Kathleen’s aloof attitude. Her daughter seemed to have turned against her…This was torture.

  Her mind dizzying as it had been wont to do, she asked again, ‘But why, Dan, why?’

  He had been forced to tell her the truth, the truth as Paul thought he had heard it, and, thinking she might as well know the rest, he went on to tell her of John, how he had left May and gone to live in Newcastle. But he did not tell her that he was living with a girl young enough to be his daughter, he couldn’t tell her that. Nor that on the day he had broke away from May she had gone over to Kathleen’s and told her why Paul was becoming a priest. There are things you cannot get the tongue to speak.

  But Sarah had not been concerned at what was happening to John or May, she could only think of Kathleen and Paul. Paul a priest! It was unbelievable. Just because he had heard what was said that day, that terrible but fading day. Why was God doing this to her? Perhaps he was answering Father O’Malley’s prayer and wreaking more vengeance on her. Perhaps, she thought, it was meant that she should go through all this just so Paul could become a priest. But no. No. She wouldn’t think like that. She had given up thinking like a Catholic, she was no longer a Catholic. She was no longer anything that was connected with a God. She was just no longer anything. She didn’t want to go on. She was finished. Paul a priest! A Protestant, with his mother and father bigots. Paul a priest! And then it had penetrated through her mind, the real reason—half-brother and sister. Oh, Kathleen! Oh, poor, poor Kathleen! It was all crazy…mad, mad. Who was causing this to happen, anyway? God?…God was mad.

  It was from this time that she spent three months in the prison hospital, but she could not die. Her body, although thin and a shadow of its former self would not give her up. Her mind was ready any moment, and it did its best to force her release, but it failed. And when she left the hospital they did not put her back into the laundry; her time was spent between the sewing room and the library. And through this change she got to know, and in fact become friendly with a warden called Peters. Her life was now lived on a level plane, orderly, monotonous. Until one day, without any warning, she was told she was going to be released.

  It was seven o’clock on a Monday morning when Sarah stood with one foot outside the prison gates. The officer said to her, ‘Will you be all right? I think you should have told them it was today.’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘I would rather it was this way.’ She spoke in an undertone as if afraid of disturbing someone.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Hetherington, and good luck.’ The officer was smiling and holding out her hand, and Sarah took it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been kind.’ Then she turned away.

  She did not feel the strangeness of being in the open for the first moment because she was thinking…Mrs Hetherington, she was…Mrs for the first time in years. She was Mrs. Then she looked across the road. The other side looked far away. When her legs began to tremble she said to herself, It’s no different to walking inside, and she kept on. The clothes that she was wearing felt strange, loose, as if she had no body to support them. She looked down at herself. She was so thin now. All except her bust. Her bust hadn’t altered so much. The officer had joked with her and said she had a figure like Marilyn Monroe. Were people looking at her? No, no, they weren’t. She passed a woman and glanced at her, but the woman was looking ahead. She felt surprised at this. Wasn’t there some kind of a stamp on her to tell people where she had come from? When she reached the corner of the road she had the desire to run back and bang on the prison gates. She felt frightened; she was by herself and she hadn’t been by herself for a long, long time. She wanted someone near, not to touch, oh no, but just to know that they were near…But yes…yes, she did…she did want someone to touch, a hand to hold. She had been silly, telling them it was Wednesday she was coming out. She should have told them it was today. But she couldn’t face a street tea, anything but face a street tea and a sea of curious faces. She had told the warden that and the warden had understood. Dan said people were kind and this was their way of showing their kindness. Perhaps…but she didn’t want this kind of kindness. Doubtless they had deluded themselves into thinking that in getting up a street tea and a jollification for her coming home they were doing her a kindness, but what they were really doing was giving themselves a bit of cheap sensation. She was not surprised at her own insight into human nature, for, as the idleness of the dole years ago had turned many a man towards self-education, so had her years of confinement and daily dealing with books tutored her mind a little, at least, to a certain stage of analytical reasoning. It had happened unobtrusively, so unobtrusively that she was unaware of the change. And yet she knew she was different, her way of thinking was different. She felt
that she would never know fear as she had known it before; in a way it had overstepped itself. But being afraid, and facing a table full of laughing faces and questing eyes set out in the open street, was a different thing. If it were to rain they would hold it in the factory hall; they were prepared for all contingencies. But wherever it was held they would have provided the opportunity to gape and question…‘What’s it like in there, Sarah? What did they do to you? Did you ever get solitary? Come on, woman, open up, you’re among friends.’ And she was not exaggerating in imagining the trend the reception would take. She knew what some of them at the bottom end were like, and it would doubtless have been these very people who had proposed the welcome-home tea, and their every probe would be in good part. Oh yes, everything would be in good part; it was a favourite cover-up for curiosity, the term, good part. And if she didn’t take everything in good part, she would be damned…She couldn’t have stood it…The officer had told her the way to the station. She turned right down the street, then left, and left again, across a square, up another street, and there it was, the station. She didn’t remember seeing it before, but she must have seen it, at least once, when they brought her here from the magistrates’ court in Jarrow. ‘You are committed in custody to await trial at Durham Assizes.’

  The man at the ticket office said, ‘What do you say, missis? Speak up.’

  ‘A single to Newcastle.’

  ‘A single to Newcastle…there you are.’

  She put the change in her bag. It was funny having a bag hanging from your arm, it felt awkward. She thought people must think how stiffly she held her arm with the bag on it.

  She had the carriage to herself all the way to Newcastle, and she did not stand up and walk from one window to the other taking her fill of both views, but sat quietly in the corner, her back straight, her head turned towards the changing scenery. The trees looked bonny, oh so bonny. The sun turned their browning leaves to glittering gold and bronze. She realised she was looking at colour. She had missed colour; oh yes, she had missed colour. She had always kept her home colourful. Cushion covers made from cheap remnants, curtains with patterns on, never Nottingham lace curtains…How would the kitchen look? She turned her mind deliberately from the kitchen, saying to herself, One thing at a time. You’ll get the bus outside Newcastle station, it isn’t likely that the stop will be changed; and then you’ll get off at the corner…One thing at a time.

  The bus stop was changed. ‘Which part of Jarrow do you want to go?’ said a man in a peaked cap.

  ‘The fifteen streets,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, down that far? Oh well then, you can get either the one that will take you the Robin Hood way, or there’s the other that goes straight through the town. The town one, I think, that’s the one you want. And it’s in, look, over there.’

  Sarah thanked him; then boarded the bus, taking a seat right up at the front.

  ‘Which part of the fifteen streets do you want?’ the conductor asked her. ‘It’s a long walk if you get off at the wrong end.’

  ‘The…top end?’ She put this as a question and he replied, ‘Oh yes. Well, I’ll tell you when to get off.’ Evidently he thought of her as someone who didn’t know where she was going.

  And from Hebburn onwards Sarah saw that she didn’t know where she was going. The immediate landscape had changed; the places which she had last seen as open stretches of flat land were now covered with houses, dozens of houses, hundreds of houses. Here and there, she would think to herself, Yes, I remember that; that is the way to the ferry; that is the way to the church near Dee Street. We should be nearing the church bank now, and the park, and the quay corner.

  At the quay corner she saw the church of St Paul. It looked so much smaller than she remembered; it looked lost, forgotten. She felt akin to it. Then the bus conductor came up to her and said, ‘This is your stop, missis.’ She followed him down the bus without looking to see where she was and the next minute she was on the main road. From the pavement she looked up at him puzzled, and he said, ‘This is the top end, the top end of the fifteen streets…All right?’

  She nodded her head slowly at him, and he rang the bell and the bus sped away. But he paused a while to look at her.

  She stood looking across the road. He had put her off at the wrong end, he had put her off at the bottom end. But it was a different bottom end from when she had last seen it. Then there had been an open space where the four streets had stood before the night of the raid. Now before her were stretched not only four streets but street after street of new houses all with little gardens in front and bigger gardens behind. She walked slowly across the road, and she was at the end of the first street. There was a fancy board supported by two stout wooden pillars at the corner, and on it was written: Churchill Street. She began to walk past the corner of the streets going in the direction the bus had taken. The second street was called Eisenhower Avenue. This was about where they had lived, she thought. The following street was Montgomery Terrace, on and on; Wavell Avenue, Laurence Street, all new streets, all named after men of war. Here and there, there were children playing in back gardens, but except in the distance she saw no adults. Being nearly two o’clock, the men had returned to work and the women were taking it easy for an hour, things seemingly hadn’t altered that much. On and on, slowly, towards the top end she went. And then abruptly the new houses ceased and she could see ahead four of the original streets, and the contrast gave her a shock. Like beggars lying at the rich man’s gate the four streets lay at the foot of the new estate, and they looked dirty, old, and shrunken. Her step became slower. She knew now why the bus conductor had put her off at the other end of the streets. The situation of the place had turned a complete somersault; the top end had now become the bottom end. Yet among the people in the new houses were those who still thought along the lines of street teas. Places, she realised, could be altered or renewed in a week, a month, a year, but not people. It took the accumulated years of a generation and perhaps another to alter people, turn them from their inbred ways. The fifteen streets would be the fifteen streets until this generation died, that was certain. It was only the status of the streets themselves that had turned the somersault.

  The sight of Camelia Street staggered her. This was the place she had once invested with royal status. Here she had lived in the glory of exclusiveness. For years she had thanked God at night in her prayers for depositing her at this end.

  In the middle of the street two motorcycles leaned against the kerb, their new brightness forcing its way through the shadow cast by the dismal houses. There were also three cars standing in the roadway, one of them outside her own door—she still thought of it as her own door. The car would be Michael’s. Fancy him having a car; fancy anybody who lived here having a car.

  She was standing at the door now, her hand half-raised to the knocker. But before she touched it she gripped the front of her coat and shook herself. Now then, steady, steady…take it easy, one thing at a time.

  When the door opened, there stood Kathleen. Sarah watched her mouth drop into a loose gape, then close on a gasp: ‘Wh…why,’ she stammered. ‘I thought…What brought you? Who’s brought you?’ She shook her head wildly, and then, pulling the door further open, she added, ‘Come in.’

  It was as if she were bidding a stranger enter, and, like a stranger, Sarah walked into what had been her home, for immediately she crossed the threshold the change sprang at her. She would have had to be blind not to take it in in one glance.

  Kathleen walked sideways along the little passage through the front room and into the kitchen; she had her hand extended as if for guidance, but she didn’t touch her mother.

  In the kitchen they stood looking at each other, Kathleen with her hands joined at her throat. The action was painful to Sarah, for it gave away Kathleen’s distress.

  ‘You said Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, Kathleen, but I…I couldn’t bear them making a tea and all that.’

  ‘
Oh.’ Kathleen jerked her chin up as if in understanding, and then she said, ‘Sit down. Why, sit down.’ She pulled a chair hastily forward. It was one of the coloured-seated dining chairs and Sarah looked at it before she sat on it.

  ‘I’ll tell Michael. He’s on night shift, but he would be getting up shortly.’

  ‘Don’t wake him, there’s plenty of time.’ Sarah was still speaking in that peculiar undertone she had come to use over the years.

  ‘Oh, I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him.’

  Kathleen almost ran from the room and she went up the stairs calling loudly, ‘Michael! Michael!’

  Sarah listened now to Kathleen’s quick steps overhead. She heard the murmur of her speaking rapidly, warningly, and she bowed her head. How was she going to bear it?…One thing at a time, one thing at a time. Once today was over it wouldn’t be so bad. She reminded herself that she was sitting in her own kitchen, she was home. But was she? She raised her head and looked about her. There wasn’t a stick of furniture that she could recognise as hers. She experienced a new kind of pain.

  When Kathleen came down the stairs there were footsteps behind her, and Sarah turned her head to look at the man entering the room. He was dressed in trousers and shirt; his sandy hair was ruffled, and his eyes still full of sleep, but she recognised Michael MacKay. He hadn’t changed much. He was older of course.

  ‘Well, hello, there,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Michael,’ she answered.

  ‘We weren’t expecting you the day. You should have told us, coming all that way by yourself.’

  He was trying to be kind, not to show his surprise, not to let her see that he was put out in any way. ‘Have you had a cup of tea?’ he said.