by Marie Joseph
They were tickled about something, those two, laughing while Mr Craig was on his way out, lying there with his eyes closed, and his jaw hanging loose and slack.
‘Father? Would you like a cup of tea?’
Maggie repeated the question, and this time there was no doubt about it. She was winking at Arnie, and he was winking back at her. Clara sniffed. Well, all she could say was she wished they would let her in on the joke, that was all.
‘I think you will have to fetch the doctor, Arnie,’ Maggie was saying now, her voice low and mournful. ‘There’ll be nothing for it but the Infirmary.’
‘Or the Workhouse,’ agreed Arnie.
‘Ah, the Workhouse,’ said Maggie with a deep sigh.
Clara stepped back a pace as the recumbent figure on the horse-hair sofa raised a languid hand up to his forehead, opened his eyes, and said in a weak but clear voice:
‘Where am I?’
‘In your own house,’ Maggie told him briskly, swinging the kettle-stand over the flames with a deft flick of her wrist. ‘And now I’ll make that cup of tea. I could do with one meself.’
‘You mean the old devil was shamming?’ Clara’s face was a study as she faced Arnie in the living-room of the house next door. ‘Upsetting Maggie like that, and letting you and Mr Isherwood carry him in. I can’t believe it. He looked as if he was at death’s door, you can’t deny that.’
Arnie nodded and stroked his sparse moustache.
‘Oh, aye, he looked a right gonner, I’ll grant you that, but he’d made up his mind he wasn’t going to walk up the street no more, and now he’s won. Well, hasn’t he?’
‘Well, I suppose he can’t keep having to be fetched back.’
Clara still sounded doubtful.
‘He’s a crafty old sod,’ Arnie said, and Clara winced as a look of pain ran like a reproachful shadow over her flat features.
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear like that, Arnie. I know you get it from some of those Irishmen you work with, but it doesn’t sound nice. Me mother was only saying yesterday that she’s seen some of them rolling drunk down by the market. Rolling about and cursing and swearing. They should have stopped where they were, me dad said.’
She gave the oilcloth on the table an unnecessary wipe with the edge of her apron.
‘I’ll just go next door for a minute. There’s plenty of time before we start getting ready for Chapel.’
‘Don’t know why you don’t have a door cut through the wall,’ Arnie muttered as the front door closed behind his wife. ‘Save you going out in the wet, that would.’
Still muttering he went out into the backyard, and stood for a while, his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets, staring with a blank expression at the soot-blackened walls flanking his tiny garden. Over the wall to his right he could hear his wife’s voice as she talked to her mother. Their voices were loud, strident, as if they were rowing, shouting a normal conversation to each other. Arnie bowed his head. Mother and daughter, thicker than the thickest of thieves, thinking alike, two minds as one, with Clara’s father chipping in just now and again like a forgotten echo. Agreeing with them because he daren’t do nowt else.
‘They only tolerate me because I married their Clara,’ Arnie told himself out loud. ‘They knew that mugs like me didn’t grow on trees. . . .’
He jumped as if suddenly prodded in the back as the knocker on the front door rapped three times, and immediately his expression changed.
‘It’s Maggie,’ he told himself, and hurried back into the house to ask her in.
He knew it was Maggie because everyone else in the street just lifted the latch, called out ‘yoo-hoo’, and walked in. But not Maggie. Clara had been right when she had said that the Craigs were out of a different drawer, and it was funny but even when Mr Craig had been lying on the sofa with his mouth agape, he had still looked like a gentleman. Arnie stood back to allow Maggie to walk past him, through the parlour and into the living-room. He jerked his head.
‘She’s next door. Gone to tell her mother what she missed by not being out on the flags when your dad fell down.’
Maggie smiled and gave Arnie a look that said she was not going to take sides, then or ever. She looked so pale that Arnie pulled a chair forward and told her to sit down, then stood in front of her stroking his moustache and trying to think what to say.
If he told her she looked tired she’d deny it; if he told her what he really thought about that miserable old father of hers, she would be up in arms. If he offered to make her a cup of tea she’d say she’d just had one, and if he told her he was sorry, she would ask him what for.
But he was sorry for her, and it was a sorrow that went far deeper than pity. It was, all at once, a terrible anger, taking him unawares, and making him sweat. He ran his finger round his starched Sunday collar.
By the left but she was growing up into a bonny lass. Her brown hair was so tightly raked back that it might have been scragged into position by a garden fork, but there were little curly tendrils escaping round her forehead, and more wisping down behind her ears. From where he stood he could see the sweat standing out on her upper lip, in the tiny soft groove, the sweet hollow from her nose to her mouth. Funny him noticing that. . . . And she wasn’t as innocent as she looked. She had a boy, Clara said so, and a rough sort from Montague Court at that.
‘I’ve persuaded me father to go upstairs and lie down on his bed,’ Maggie was telling him now, then she leaned forward, and the bit of unbuttoned blouse at her throat fell away to reveal the suspicion of soft curves. Arnie swallowed hard.
‘You knew it wasn’t a proper faint out there in the street, didn’t you, Arnie? He looked awful though.’ She sighed, pressing her lips together in a childish gesture. ‘I wish you could have known him before we came to live here, Arnie. He was such a clever man. He had over fifty children in his class and he could put his arms on his desk and recite poetry to them, and they would just sit listening, not a fidget between them.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s such a waste him being like this. I sometimes wonder if I’m treating him right, you know? If I ought to be a bit firmer with him? Then when I have been, like this afternoon, he makes me feel guilty, and a bit ashamed.’ Her head drooped. ‘It was a bit cruel mentioning the Workhouse, because he’s always going on about ending up there, as if I would let him.’
She got up from the chair, and smiled. ‘I’d better go. You’ll be wanting to get ready for Chapel, and I’ve got me ironing to do.’ A rounded dimple deepened at the corner of her mouth. ‘I’ll never go to Heaven like you, Arnie. You’ll be playing your harp up there, and I’ll be fetching the coal in down there.’
‘Nay, that you won’t.’
Arnie’s normally quiet voice was loud and assertive, and Maggie looked at him in surprise. He was staring at her with his eyes sort of glittering, and he hadn’t said much come to think of it. She’d done all the talking. Maggie turned towards the door. Well, there was nothing unusual in that. He often sat there listening to Clara talking without saying a single word. Arnie was one on his own, as her father often said.
‘Don’t go yet!’ he said abruptly.
She smiled at him. ‘But I have to go, Arnie. I didn’t tell me father I was going out, and if he wakes up and finds himself alone . . . besides you’re going to Chapel.’
‘I’m fond of you,’ Arnie said, blurting the words out. ‘Right fond.’
Maggie felt an embarrassment so acute it was a pricking sensation in her stomach. She had no idea what to say back. . . .
‘Well, I’m fond of you,’ she said at last, her face hot, ‘and of Clara. You’ve been good friends to me since we came to live next door. It’s been like having someone of me own.’ She took a step backwards and found she was up against the hard edge of the table. She steadied herself with her hands.
‘I’ll have to go now, Arnie.’
Arnie was breathing heavily with his mouth slightly open. He looked so funny she wanted to laugh, even as she knew this was no laug
hing matter. Then he came right up to her, and putting both hands on her shoulders, brought his face close to hers. His breath had a musty smell about it, and she could see the way the hairs of his small moustache were stained yellow with the smoke from his pipe.
Maggie brought her hands up and tried to push him away, and as if he had been wanting her to do that, he slid his hands down to her waist and jerked her towards him so his body was pressed close to her own.
‘Let me kiss you, Maggie! Please! You’ve got to let me!’
His mouth was over hers, open and wet, and with a strength she wouldn’t have given him credit for, he held her clamped against him as his tongue probed determinedly against her clenched teeth.
‘Let me, Maggie . . . oh let me, I bet you let that boy of yours do it,’ he moaned, and to her horror, she felt one of his hands leave her waist and grip her breast hard. He began to rub himself up and down against her, forcing her legs apart with his knee, then the hand squeezing her left breast crept down and started to hitch up her skirt.
In a wild anger, torn between humiliation and fear, Maggie acted instinctively. Bringing her knee up to his groin as hard as she could, she raked her nails down the side of his face, causing him to stagger back.
Then to her horror, he slid down to his knees, sobbing incoherently into the folds of her long skirt.
‘I’m sorry . . . oh I’m sorry, Maggie, love. I don’t know what made me. . . . Oh, Maggie. She won’t let me near her, and if I try anything on she tells her mother, I know she does, and they look at me as if I was dirt what the cat brought in. Oh, don’t tell her, Maggie. Promise me you won’t . . . promise. . . .’
Shaking with hurt pride, and almost retching with disgust, Maggie prized the clinging hands from her skirt.
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she promised, ‘not anyone. Ever.’
Then she ran out, through the parlour, wrenching open the front door, clutching the edges of her blouse together, and praying that no one in the street was watching.
In her own house, she ran straight up the stairs to her bedroom, and sitting on the edge of her bed, rocked herself backwards and forwards, holding the tears inside her as she stared down at her bared breast and saw the imprint of Arnie’s fingers on her flesh.
With a shudder she remembered the terrifying hardness pressing itself against her stomach, then she unbuttoned the torn blouse with fingers that shook, and rolled it up to hide it away at the back of a drawer.
She poured a little water out of the jug into the bowl on the marbled top of her wash-stand, and making a lather with the soft water and the cake of mottled soap, she washed the top part of her all over, pulled on a clean bust-bodice, and buttoned a fresh blouse over the top.
Then she lay back on her bed, and stared at the ceiling, trying to hold back the tears which spilled out at the corners and ran sideways down her cheeks. ‘Oh, Joe,’ she whispered. ‘You’d kill him if you knew, wouldn’t you? Oh, Joe. . . .’
Then Maggie’s vivid imagination took flight as she pictured Arnie, divested of his trousers, clutching the stout reluctant Clara to him in bed, slavering over her, with the yellow-stained moustache pricking her face, one hand squeezing her enormous breasts, whilst the other . . . here Maggie gave up with a shudder. Swinging her legs from the bed she leaned close to the mirror and wiped away all trace of tears. Then with her back straight she opened the door, stepped across the tiny square landing and went into her father’s room.
‘Feeling better now?’ she asked him.
Thomas turned a face violin-shaped with self-pity towards her, and failed to see the recent torment on his daughter’s face.
With the selfishness of a man for whom the problems of others had ceased to exist, a man who would grumble that he hadn’t finished his dinner if the world came to a sudden end, Thomas noticed nothing.
Indeed, if he had noticed any trace of tears on Maggie’s face he would have assumed that they had been on his behalf.
She had made him go out when he did not want to go out, because what was there to go out for in these mean streets? There was no chance of a bird rising suddenly from a hedgerow, or seeing a clump of primroses, their petals wet from a shower of spring rain. Here there was nothing but grey streets, and people with faces as grey as the washing perpetually hung across the backs, flapping wetly against sooty walls.
‘I’ve got you some tea in the oven. Would you like it, Father?’
Maggie’s usually clear young voice was subdued as she stood at the foot of his bed. Just for second Thomas felt the tiniest twinge of conscience.
It must have upset her seeing him brought back like that. She was only a young lass after all. About the same age his Hannah had been that day long ago when he had seen her coming towards him down a country lane, wearing a blue frock with the sleeves rolled up above rounded elbows.
‘What was that you said, Hannah, love?’ he said.
Maggie clenched both hands on the rail at the foot of the bed.
‘Father, it’s me, and you know it’s me. You can’t go on living in the past. Nobody can.’ She shook her head in tired resignation as Thomas stared at her with the bewilderment of a little boy chastised for something he had not done.
‘There’s a dish of finnan-haddy in the oven, Father. I’ve done it in milk, just the way you like it.’
‘With an egg cracked into it?’ The dark eyes narrowed with greed.
‘With an egg cracked into it.’
Thomas spoke with stumbling hesitation. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to eat it if you’ve gone to the trouble, though it will likely lie like a lump of dough on my stomach, the way I feel.’
‘I’ll bring it up.’ Maggie turned towards the door, then as she groped for the rail bracketed to the wall at the top of the dark stairway, she heard Clara’s voice calling out from downstairs.
‘Yoo-hoo! It’s only me, love.’
Entirely without volition Maggie’s hand crept to the breast that Arnie had kneaded with hard fingers not half an hour before, then running quickly down the stairs, she parted the curtain and faced Clara with her head held high.
Anger was taking the place of distress now, and if Arnie had given the game away, and if Clara had come to say anything, well she was ready for her.
But Clara’s voice was as stridently normal as usual.
‘You’ve changed your blouse, love. Does that mean you’re going to Chapel tonight?’
Keeping her face averted, not quite ready to stare Clara straight in the eye, Maggie skirted the table and taking the oven-cloth down from its hook, opened the door of the fire-oven.
‘No. I just felt a bit hot in the other one. I always get hot when I’m ironing.’ She took out the steaming dish of fish. If she was blushing now then it would not matter – not with the afternoon sun still streaming through the window, and the fire blazing away in the grate. The room was like a furnace anyway.
‘What I’ve come for,’ Clara said suddenly, her voice brisk and full of purpose. . . .
‘Excuse me,’ Maggie said, apprehension tightening itself into a knot in the pit of her stomach. ‘I’ve got to take this upstairs to me father. He’s much better, but he still looks awful. Could you pass me that plate warming in the hearth, Clara, please?’
Why should she feel guilty when she had no cause for feeling guilty? Maggie asked herself. But Clara was obviously leading up to something.
‘That looks good.’ Clara peered into the dish. ‘You’ve been busy this afternoon, haven’t you, love?’
Maggie held her breath, but continued with what she was doing.
‘Whoops!’ Clara said. ‘The way you’re slapping that there fish on the plate, there will be more on the floor than in the dish. Nay, what I came in for was to ask if you would like to come to Chapel tonight with me and me mother and dad? Arnie says he will listen next door, and your father only has to knock on the wall if he wants owt.’ She sniffed and jerked her head towards the dividing wall. ‘He’s in one of his moods, Arnie is. Tr
ipped over a loose edging stone round that flamin’ garden of his and scratched his face on his flamin’ rose bush. Serve him right if you ask me for messing about with them of a Sunday.’
Maggie pulled open the knife drawer set into the front of the table.
‘Yes, serve him right,’ she smiled, weak with relief. ‘And yes, I think I will come with you to Chapel. It’ll get me out of the house for a bit.’
‘Then you can come with us to the prayer meeting after,’ Clara said over a plump disappearing shoulder. ‘It’s a Mrs Carmichael what lives with her son up Hodder Street. She’s bad with her legs and her chest, and can’t get to Chapel. They say she served her time to millinery in the Hat Market.’
‘Then I’d best put me new hat on,’ Maggie said, with a flash of her usual smile. ‘We don’t want her thinking we don’t know what’s what down Foundry Street, do we?’
Kit Carmichael reminded Maggie of an elephant. Big and soft and grey-suited, the skin of his neck hung in flabby folds over his high starched collar, and he shook hands with her in the flabby gesture of an extended waving trunk.
‘It’s good of you to come, Miss Craig,’ he told her in a strangely high-pitched voice, a light voice at variance with his size. ‘Mother will be right glad to see a fresh face.’ He inclined his big head in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘She’s never had her foot over the doorstep for the past year. This half-hour is the highlight of her week.’
He led the way through the front parlour, its glory reflected in a large round wooden-framed mirror tilted slightly forward from the wall above the high mantelpiece. Like every front room in the street, it smelt of cold soot and years of being unused, and the delft rail was lined with blue china plates.
‘This is Miss Craig, Mother,’ he said, leading them into the back room. ‘She lives next door to Mrs Preston. You know Mr and Mrs Hobkirk, Mrs Preston’s mother and father, don’t you?’
The woman sitting up in bed was as small and intense looking as her son was large and mild of manner. She threw Maggie a darting glance from beneath well defined dark eyebrows.