Gemini Girls

by Marie Joseph

  ‘Oh, Mother!’ Carrie felt her happiness dissolve. ‘How can you think that?’

  ‘How can I not think that?’ Ettie’s mouth worked itself into an ugly shape. ‘It seems to me that even losing your job through – through carrying on with a man in school hours has not taught you a lesson. But I never thought you were so hard up for a man that you would allow someone of his type to make love to you. Have you no shame? No pride?’

  ‘What do you mean, someone of his type?’ Carrie’s voice was dangerously quiet. She pulled at the tied belt of the housecoat, feeling as if her mother had caught her stark naked. ‘Tom Silver is a good man. He is a councillor. He has a house of his own, and a job.’ She heard herself justifying Tom’s status and despised herself.

  ‘He is common.’ Ettie’s face was a mask of bitterness. ‘He talks in a common voice, and he wears a common suit. His hair needs cutting, and his shirt reminded me of a pyjama jacket. And he wants to court you. Oh, my God! What sort of an expression is that?’ She glanced at the broken pieces of china on the small brass shovel still held in Carrie’s hands. ‘No wonder he broke them. Did he pour his tea into the saucer and blow on it first before drinking it?’

  Putting down the shovel on the hearth Carrie went to the far end of the tiled fireplace and laid her head against the mantelpiece. ‘Don’t humiliate me, Mother. Why are you trying to hurt me?’

  Ettie did not answer. Her throat was choked with fear, the fear that had caught at it when she had opened the door and seen the two lovers in each other’s arms. For they were lovers, in the purest sense of the word. When their faces had turned towards her the surprise had been there right enough, but that was all – no guilt or shame. When he had stood up, still holding on to Carrie’s hand, there had been a dignity about the tall, thin man, a steadiness in the dark eyes – and in that one moment she had known. This was the man who would take Carrie away from her. He was a working man; not a weaver with cotton fluff in his hair, nor a miner with dirt on his face, but a working man all the same. He would, to use his own working-class phraseology, court Carrie and then take her away.

  Then there would be no one in the big house but herself. No husband, no daughters, no Sarah, just herself growing older alone. The sudden pain as Ettie made the familiar gesture of clutching her heart was real this time. It was like a knife being slowly twisted beneath her ribs.

  Carrie raised her head, staring down into the fire. ‘I am going to marry him, Mother. He hasn’t asked me yet, but when he does I am going to say yes. And no one is going to talk me out of it. Not you, not Libby. Nobody!’

  The pain was doubling Ettie over, she was gasping for breath – it was filling her chest with fire, and the sound she made brought Carrie to her knees, her face a mask of shock as she saw the beads of perspiration standing out on her mother’s forehead.

  ‘I’ll get Harry! Mother! Stay still. Oh, please, Mother! Don’t die!’

  She ran from the room, tripping over her long silken skirts in her haste. Unhooking the telephone receiver, she prayed he would be there.

  ‘It’s Teal!’ she told the reassuring voice of her brother-in-law. ‘Oh, Harry, come quickly. This time it’s real!’

  ‘She has what Harry calls a dry pleurisy.’

  When Carrie went to meet Tom four days later after pleading with him on the telephone to stay away from Westerley, her heart was wrenched with a pain she had never thought she would be able to bear.

  ‘Libby is with her now, but I can’t stay. She won’t have a day nurse, Tom, and she has only agreed to a night nurse because Harry insisted.’ She took his arm as naturally as if they were husband and wife, and he steered her towards the same restaurant where once Libby had jumped up from the table by the window and rushed out into the street.

  ‘It’s too cold to stand talking outside, love.’ He looked round at the crowded upstairs room filled with chattering women, and smiled. ‘I never thought the day would come when I would join this lot on a Saturday afternoon. Do they always make this much noise?’

  There were no gaps to fill, no explanations of how they knew that their relationship had progressed from a shy awareness of each other to this sweet intimacy. He felt his chest rise in a great sigh of relief as he saw his own love mirrored in her eyes. He stared down through the window to a crowded street where an early snow powdered the pavement, only to be blown away in an instant by the piercing wind.

  ‘I can’t see you for a while. Not until Mother is a lot better.’ Their eyes were clinging, their hands entwined across the white tablecloth. ‘And you mustn’t come to the house. Harry says she must be kept calm.’ Carrie closed her eyes for a moment as she felt his fingers caressing the throbbing pulse at her wrist. ‘She has to sleep propped up on pillows, and she hears everything. There is no way I could ask you to the house without her knowing.’

  ‘Was I so much of a shock to her, then?’ The fingers stopped their caressing as the waitress, balancing the tray on a jutting hip, placed a teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl and two cups and saucers on the table in front of Carrie. Was it the shock of meeting me that made your mother ill?’

  Busying herself with the tea she turned an unhappy face towards him. ‘It didn’t help,’ she said with characteristic truthfulness. ‘But she had been feeling ill for a long time, and this coughing doesn’t help her heart. Mother has always been delicate.’

  ‘And when she is better?’ Tom was stirring sugar into his tea with a face set and cold. ‘Will she welcome me into the family then, Carrie?’ His dark eyes twinkled. ‘You know we’ll be getting married?’

  Not ‘Will you marry me?’ Just ‘We’ll be getting married.’ Carrie pressed her lips together in a gesture that even as a child had always meant she was hugging her happiness to herself. Conditioned by her twin’s stronger personality she was content to be led, and here for the first time in her life was a man who was prepared to do the leading.

  ‘And the next time you can get away we’ll go and see the house.’ Tom looked at her with love. ‘Shall we say tomorrow afternoon?’

  Carrie remembered that Libby and Harry were bringing the baby to show Ettie, and she smiled. ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ she agreed, ‘but you’ll have to meet me at the end of the lane. It’s too soon yet to upset Mother again. You don’t mind, do you, Tom?’

  But he had minded. Carrie knew that. This wasn’t a man prepared to do his courting on the sly, as if they were both in their teens and avoiding the hostile reaction of a possessive parent. This wasn’t Mungo willing to meet her in a secret place, their love a furtive thing to be hidden from the world.

  As she hurried home, preparing herself for the inevitable questions and petulant suspicions, Carrie sent up a silent prayer of thanks that the telephone calls, the harassment from Mungo had stopped. Now she could wipe the memory of that long hot summer off her mind as if it had never existed. What lay in front of her was a future so full of shining promise that as she walked from the tram it seemed that her feet scarcely touched the ground.

  Oh, by the way, Beatrice McDermot came to see me last week.’ Libby, very smart in a small fur toque matching the coat thrown casually over a chair, smiled at her sister.

  Carrie turned pale. ‘Mungo’s wife came to see you? For heaven’s sake, why?’

  The baby was upstairs being shown off to her grandmother by a doting Harry, and the two girls were alone in the lounge, Carrie feverishly trying to get away and Libby sitting complacently in the middle of the massive chesterfield, her fingers twisting a long rope of amber beads into a knot.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she come and see me? We had met, remember? That day Harry took me to Mungo’s house on an errand of mercy. To warn him that Father was on the warpath.’

  Libby felt a pang of guilt as she saw the way the happiness had faded from Carrie’s face. Harry had said that of course Carrie must go out, that something must be done to give his sister-in-law more freedom, and Libby had agreed. Until she had guessed where Carrie was going, whom she was meeting, and t
hen the urge to hurt, to wound and destroy had taken over.

  ‘There’s nothing sinister about it. Heavens, Carrie, to look at your face anyone would think the woman had come to make trouble.’ Libby stopped fiddling with the beads and smiled. ‘It was about the boy. Edwin. His mother feels now that the time has come for him to have more schooling than she is able to give him, and she remembered that I had suggested the same. So – I’ve talked it over with Harry, and Mungo will drop the boy off at my house three mornings a week, then his wife will pick him up at lunchtime. I’ll try to teach him to read.’ She spread her hands wide. ‘I had to find something to do, and this was a heaven-sent opportunity. I’m a trained teacher, Carrie. A good teacher. I’m not content merely to stay at home, like you. I’d go stark raving mad!’

  Carrie let that pass. Closing the door, and closing her mind to the image of Tom waiting in the drifting winter rain outside, she tried to keep her voice low and reasonable.

  ‘But why Mungo’s son? Just when I’d thought all that was behind me, why him?’ Her brown eyes clouded with anxiety. ‘You must have known it was an insensitive thing to do at the very least. You must have, Libby.’

  ‘Mrs McDermot doesn’t know about you and her husband, does she?’

  Carrie moved her body as if trying to avoid something. ‘I pray she never knows. I don’t know what Mungo told her when he lost his job, but for all his faults he wouldn’t involve me. He wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘Well then?’ Libby’s tone considered the matter settled. ‘Now you had better go if you don’t want to keep him waiting. Where is it Mother thinks you’re going this time?’

  They stared at each other in an agony of bewildered frustration. Two identical faces; two minds with conflicting desires. Far more than ordinary sisters, the twins had power to hurt one another, but not without sharing the pain. Now, each striving for her independence, they faced each other like jousting knights, their faces full of what, to the uninitiated, would have seemed like mutual dislike.

  They met, Carrie and Tom, whenever they could snatch a few precious moments together during that long, hard winter. The unemployment figures were rising daily, the outlying factories and mines were closing down one after the other, and some of Tom’s own union members were working a three-day week. His evenings were spent at one committee meeting after another, his weekends sitting at the roll-top desk in the tiny living room of his new house. He became accustomed to the regular knock at his door, heralding a neighbour with a form for him to fill in, or a query about where to apply when the rent man threatened a family with eviction. He went to a house where he saw a table spread with newspapers, and six children standing round it dipping crusts of bread into a tin of condensed milk set in the middle. He heard a widow sob on his doorstep after queueing for two hours down at the labour exchange, only to be told there was no work for her, no work of any kind. He fought with his own management to keep his men on full-time, even when he realized that short-time would soon be inevitable. Clever boys won scholarships to the grammar school and he pleaded with their parents to let them go somehow, only to discover they were forced to leave after one term to work in stop-gap jobs which brought in the few shillings needed to keep the rest of the family in bare necessities.

  At one time he was almost persuaded to seek Labour nomination, but his common sense came to his rescue. He was not educated enough to put the workers’ case across in a dispassionate manner, and he knew it. His temper was too short, and his reasoning too emotional.

  ‘My place is here,’ he told Carrie. ‘Up here in the north we are going into the worst depression the country has ever known.’

  One February evening Carrie was helping him to strip the wallpaper from the tiny front bedroom of the terraced house.

  ‘Your mother must be well enough by now to accept the truth about us,’ Tom urged her. His dark eyes twinkled. ‘Why don’t I come and present myself as a suitor? I’ll wear my best suit and tell her that I have a job which is as permanent as any job can be at this time. I’ll explain to her that I have a house, and that – most important – I intend to spend the rest of my life caring for you.’

  He threw down the knife he was holding so that it dropped with a clatter on the bare boards, took away the brush she was using to paint the old wallpaper with water, then kissed her.

  ‘Carrie! I love you so much, and I want you so much. We are neither of us children playing at getting to know each other. You must know we can’t go on like this. The neighbours must see you coming and going; even they would never believe that our relationship hasn’t progressed much beyond a sweet companionship.’

  He steered her towards the bed. ‘Carrie – I want to marry you now. Tomorrow. Today. Not at some distant time when your mother has decided to come to terms with the thought of me. Pulling her down beside him, he began to kiss the soft hollow of her neck, his lips tracing the pulse beating there, so that her whole body curved into his, and she sighed with pleasure.

  They had been stripping the paper by the light of two candles, one set in a holder on the small cane bedside table, and the other flickering from a saucer on top of the rickety stepladder. Tom put out a hand and snuffed the nearest candle at exactly the same time as the second one died, leaving the room bathed in the soft light from the lamp standard outside in the street.

  ‘I love you . . . love you . . .’ His voice was very gentle as he began to unbutton the front of the heavy coat she had kept on in the damp chill of the little bedroom.

  Carrie’s voice was a whisper. ‘Oh, Tom . . . this is the first time for me.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘But I want to belong to you — even if — even if we can’t be married for a long time. I want you to, but I can’t help feeling it’s wrong . . . I’m not – not a prude or anything, but suppose . . .? Oh, Tom, I’m afraid that this might — that something — that –’

  ‘I’ll take care of you.’ His hands were unfastening the buttons of her dress. ‘Pull this blanket over us. I don’t want you to catch cold. See, you’re shivering.’

  And now she was helping him, sitting up so that he could pull the dress over her head, and he was whispering as he caressed her. When he took her slowly and carefully she felt tears on her face.

  After it was over they lay for a long time, entwined in a silence so deep it felt as if the world had stopped turning. Then at last Carrie tangled her fingers in his hair and he lifted his head to stare deeply into her eyes.

  ‘That really surprised me.’ she told him, and he laughed softly.

  ‘Oh, but that was just a practice run,’ he answered solemnly, and in the yellow light she saw his own eyes were bright with tears.

  He insisted on helping her to dress, grinning as his fingers fumbled with the suspenders anchoring her silk stockings.

  ‘You won’t wake in the night and wish this had never happened, will you, love?’ His voice was suddenly serious. ‘You won’t hate me for this, will you sweetheart?’

  Her answer was to take his face in her hands and kiss him with small soft wifely kisses. ‘Never. I won’t be afraid again. And we will be married, but that’ll be just a formality, because I feel married to you now.’

  When they went out into the street the lamps were like oranges floating in a sea of fog. He insisted on coming with her on the tram, where they sat together, fingers closely entwined, both of them lost and floundering in a haze of love.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MUNGO McDERMOT WAS late dropping the boy off at Libby’s house that morning. Harry was already in his surgery, Nurse Tomkin was settling the baby upstairs, and Libby, fretting behind the lace curtains, frowned as she saw the drop-shouldered man turn into the gate a full twenty minutes past his usual time.

  The bitterly cold February had been followed by a March beset with gale-force winds, and as a windblown Mungo handed over his charge, Libby’s annoyance at his unpunctuality sharpened her voice. ‘You’re going to be late for school, Mr McDermot.’

  Then, as she drew the smal
l peak-faced boy into the hall she gave a gasp of dismay. ‘Oh, your face! What have you done to your face, Mr McDermot? Your eye looks terrible. Would you like me to ask the doctor to take a look at it! You can’t go to school with a swelling like that. It needs attention.’

  But Mungo was already turning away. ‘I’m not going to school this morning.’ He took a few wavering steps back down the path. ‘I got up in the night in the dark and bumped into a door. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Well then.’ Libby closed the door reluctantly and held out her hand for her pupil’s overcoat, her heart aching with pity as she stared down at the small, pinched face, the eyes which she knew saw and understood everything but gave nothing away.

  ‘She hits him,’ she remembered Carrie saying. ‘Mungo’s wife drinks, and when she drinks too much she hits him, knowing that the boy can’t hear. Sometimes he comes to school with his face all bruised.’

  ‘We’ll start where we left off yesterday,’ she said, speaking slowly, almost miming the words. Leading the boy into the dining room she positioned herself opposite him so that he could see every slight movement of her lips. ‘What is that?’ With a finger she pointed to a picture of a cat. ‘C . . . cat.’ Edwin’s lips pouted in an exaggerated fashion, as he struggled to speak the simple word which came out as an expressionless croak.

  ‘Well done!’ Libby took his small hand in her own, holding it against her mouth as she repeated the word. ‘Cat. Cat.’

  Usually this procedure made the boys intelligent eyes crinkle into amusement, but this morning his face remained solemn and set, as if part of him was walking away with his father down the path, as if somewhere in his silent world he suffered in a completely adult way for the man who allowed his wife to scream and rage and smash out at him with whatever came to hand.

  Libby shuddered. How much did he know, this little boy, whose mind, she was discovering, was a prisoner in a brain never stimulated by sound! There was an adult awareness in his eyes that made her want to put her arms round him in comfort, But at the moment she was his teacher, and he was her pupil, and what mattered was the unlocking of his mind.