by Marie Joseph
‘I thought Mr and Mrs Hobkirk lived next door to Mrs Preston. Nobody told me they’d flitted.’
Her voice was deep and throaty, and at least an octave lower than her son’s. Maggie averted her eyes from the invalid’s flourishing moustache.
‘No, Mother. They haven’t moved. Miss Craig lives the other side of Mrs Preston, dear.’
Mr Marsden, the minister, cleared his throat, and in a determined voice, because he had four other visits to make, said:
‘Let us pray.’
The little group round the bed lowered their heads obediently, and folded their hands together.
From beneath downcast eyelashes Maggie studied them with interest.
The Reverend Marsden and his wife, small, grey-haired, almost a mirror image of each other, devout and pious as befitted their standing in the Chapel community. Clara’s parents, Mr and Mrs Hobkirk, eyes squeezed so tightly together with heavenly fervour they appeared to be suffering the most exquisite torture. Mr Elphick, the tiny dwarf man who pumped air into the newly installed organ behind the choir stalls, and Miss Birtwistle, crossed in love, so it was rumoured. Clara, with her clasped hands almost hidden beneath the shelf of her matronly bosom.
And Mrs Carmichael’s large son, Kit.
Studying him carefully, Maggie decided that he was ‘nice’. In spite of the fact that only a little while before she had decided that all men apart from Joe were less than the beast of the field, she knew, without being told, that Kit Carmichael was different. A mother’s boy, no doubt about that. Head on one side, and tongue protruding slightly, Maggie set about calculating his possible age – difficult because of his bulk – but around thirty-five she thought. Yes that would be about right.
Maggie blushed and lowered her head as he opened his eyes and stared straight at her, but not before she had seen the kindly gleam of amusement in his eyes.
Yes, she wasn’t mistaken. He was nice. . . . Not as nice as Joe, but nice. . . .
The Reverend Marsden threw his head back so that his face was parallel to the ceiling.
‘Save this our sister from the ravages of the flesh,’ he intoned. ‘Lift her up so that she shall see Thy face and know that Thou art beside her. Comfort her in the dark watches of the night, and sustain her in her cruel affliction, until the day she comes into her glory, when she shall know pain no more.’
‘Amen.’
‘Amen,’ Maggie said, stealing a glance at the small woman with the dark gypsy colouring, her high-necked nightgown decently covered by a high-necked bedjacket, topped with a three-cornered shawl.
Then as if to justify the prayers on her behalf, Mrs Carmichael began to cough, a great bark of a cough, so shattering to her thin frame that her face turned purple, and the deep-set eyes bulged forth. Maggie started forward with outstretched hands as she flung herself backwards on her pillows, tiny hands clutching the air as if she clawed for breath.
But Kit was there before her, taking his mother’s scrabbling hands into his own, talking softly to her, calming her, smoothing the black wiry hair back from her forehead.
‘You’re all right, Mother,’ he told her firmly. ‘I’m here, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. These are your friends come to pray for you. . . .’
Mrs Carmichael stopped coughing with dramatic suddenness. Her contorted features relaxed, and the Reverend Marsden resumed his praying.
‘Hear our prayer, oh Lord,’ he commanded.
‘And let our cry come unto thee,’ answered the Hobkirks, whilst Kit Carmichael patted his mother’s face with one hand, and plumped up her high-piled pillows with the other.
‘Amen,’ said Miss Birtwistle with such deep feeling that Maggie had to swallow hard to rid herself of the giggle rising up in her throat.
‘No, you’re not a nice person, Maggie Craig,’ she told herself for the second time that day, as in the wrong key, and with Mr Hobkirk raising his tenor voice in a shaky descant, the short service was ended by the singing of the twenty-third Psalm.
It was no good. More than one person singing without accompaniment always made her want to laugh. She stared fixedly at the wall, not risking a glance either to the right or the left as she joined in the singing.
What was she doing in that overheated room anyway? Standing there with her best Sunday hat on round a complete stranger’s bed. A woman who in spite of her recent coughing fit was now singing in a husky baritone?
Mrs Carmichael and her father. Trying it on the both of them. Touting for sympathy, even though some, she supposed, would call it a cry for help. Maggie stood on one foot then eased herself on to the other. There was tomorrow’s dinner to prepare, and her father to make comfortable, and Arnie to avoid . . . she stole a sideways glance at Clara singing away at the top of her voice.
Arnie had made her feel diminished, yes that was the word, he had spoilt an easy undemanding friendship, and if he ever tried anything like that again . . .
Maggie’s expression grew so fierce that Kit Carmichael, watching her, decided that she was making up her mind never to come again. He sighed, head bowed as the Reverend Marsden pronounced the Blessing. . . .
‘Seems funny,’ Maggie told Clara, as they hurried back down the street, with Mr and Mrs Hobkirk following at a more leisurely pace. ‘Him seeing to his mother, and me seeing to me father.’ She laughed. ‘She came round from her coughing fit almost as quick as me father came round from his fainting do.’ She steadied her hat with one hand as a sudden gust of wind threatened to blow it away. ‘Did you notice how gentle he was, Clara? More like a woman than a man. You’d never expect such a big man to have such a high voice, would you?’
‘They say he does everything for her,’ Clara said darkly. ‘It seems all wrong to me somehow to think of a man seeing to his mother. I mean she is a woman after all.’ She sniffed. ‘Arnie’s never seen me properly undressed, but they say Kit Carmichael washes his mother down twice a week.’
‘Can’t she get out of bed at all?’
‘On her good days she sits out in a chair. Her son does all the housework, and the cooking and what not, as well as working as a day servant to an old man in a house up North Park Road. I’ve heard the old man thinks the world of him, and won’t let a woman come near him, not for love nor money.’
‘He’s a good man,’ Maggie said, her interest in Kit Carmichael completely evaporated. They turned into the row of shops leading to Foundry Street. ‘But not my cup of tea somehow.’
‘They say he doesn’t bother with girls, and never has,’ Clara volunteered, wondering if Maggie would understand what she only vaguely understood herself, but Maggie was walking quickly now, twitching her long skirt up as they crossed an uneven place in the road.
Her conscience was troubling her as she told herself her father ought not to have been left alone for so long, even though she had left him comfortable in bed, with a warm fish tea settling in his stomach.
He hated her going out at the weekends, even though she had told him all about Joe, about how nice he was and how she was bringing him to tea one day.
‘I’m on my own so much during the week,’ he’d say.
‘Steady on, love. Where’s the fire?’
Clara was panting along at her side, but Maggie walked even more quickly. She ought not to have left him, but when she got in she would make him laugh, describing the prayer meeting to him. As deeply religious as he was – as he used to be – Maggie corrected herself, her father could always find the over-sanctimonious amusing.
‘I’m sure God Himself has a good laugh sometimes,’ he’d once said.
Clara said goodnight to her and pushed open the door of number four.
‘That you?’ Arnie called, as she stopped to unpin her wide hat and tidy it away neatly in the sideboard cupboard.
Then as Arnie turned a vacant face towards her, and as Clara opened her mouth to ask him what he thought he was doing sitting there and watching the fire go out, through the thin walls dividing the house from number two, they
heard the scream.
‘It’s Maggie!’ Arnie said, and moving more quickly than Clara had ever seen him move before, he started for the door.
Maggie kept her best coat and hat upstairs in the walnut cupboard in her room, so she went up just as she was, deciding against calling out in case her father was asleep. Sleep was all he seemed to want to do these days, she told herself as she ran lightly up the uncarpeted stairs. Sleep and eat, and grumble in a voice which had no light or shade. Almost like the voice of a deaf-mute, she told herself.
The door of his room was closed, properly closed, not just left ajar as it normally was. Maggie frowned, feeling a small trickle of fear in her stomach as she turned the knob, pushed at the door, and felt something holding it from the inside.
‘Father? Let me in! It’s me, Maggie,’ she added absurdly, heaving and straining at the door, then with heart pounding, putting her shoulder against it, leaning on it till it gave so suddenly she almost fell inside.
For a moment she lost the power to move, to make a sound, to even breathe as she looked on what was left of Thomas Craig. For a moment it seemed as if the man lying on the floor by the side of his bed had two mouths. Both of them spilling blood and grinning at her.
So great was her shock that at first it did not register what had happened. Blood was everywhere, staining the cotton bedspread and spreading in a sticky shiny pool by her father’s head, down on the cold linoleum.
Then she saw the open razor by one outstretched hand, and knew that he had slit his throat, slashing it from ear to ear.
She knelt down beside him, and screamed. And screamed. . . .
For just that one night, and then only because the shock seemed to have driven her willpower away, Maggie slept next door in Clara’s spare room. If it would not have shocked people and been an insult to her father’s memory, Maggie would have gone straight back to the mill.
Back in the house she made herself walk upstairs. She was going to sleep alone that night, no matter what anyone said. So she forced herself to open the door of Thomas’s room, to see for herself that there was nothing to be afraid of.
Immediately her glance went towards the empty bed, but she walked over to the bedside table, and there was her father’s leather-bound copy of Wordsworth, a book he had once carried around with him on his country walks as if it were his second skin.
Maggie picked it up and held it against her cheek for a moment, feeling the rush of tears to her eyes. A slip of paper, concealed in the leaves, fell to the floor, and as she picked it up she saw he had written a sentence in his neat schoolmaster’s print:
‘A power is gone, which nothing can restore.’
The word ‘nothing’ was underlined, then underlined again, as if he was trying to tell her something.
She backed towards the door, trying not to see the stain on the mattress, stripped by Clara and her mother the night before. Downstairs the fire was giving off little sluggish puffs of smoke, as if it needed and missed Thomas’s constant attention with the brass-handled poker. As she knelt down to see to it, Maggie’s foot caught in the rocker of his chair and set it into silent motion.
‘Oh, Father,’ she sobbed, catching the chair and holding it still. ‘You would not even try to let me make you happy. And now you’ll never see Joe, and I wanted you to like him. I thought he might have made you laugh. . . .’
‘Our father started to die the very day our mother left us,’ she wrote to her brothers, sitting at the table, with a new Waverley nib in her pen. Then she pushed the writing pad to one side and covered her face with her hands. . . .
And in the days that followed, she saw to the things that had to be seen to. She failed to convince herself that what her father had done was a sin in the eyes of the Lord, and she went to his funeral against all advice, holding on to her hat in a corner of the windswept cemetery, with Clara lending a solid arm of support.
When Doctor Bates came over to see her, a little older and a lot more stooped, but with the nose still in glorious bloom, she listened to him gravely.
‘You have no cause to feel remorse,’ he said, as everyone else had said. ‘Your father had a mental condition that meant he could not even try to overcome his depression.’
Maggie nodded.
‘But on the day he died he had collapsed in the street, Doctor, and I mentioned the Workhouse to make him come to.’
‘And I bet as soon as you said that, he did come to?’
‘But I ought not to have said it.’
Her head drooped, then she lifted her eyes and gave him her straight and candid gaze.
‘I looked after me father, Doctor Bates, and I . . .’ She hesitated, finding it impossible to talk openly about love to the nose. ‘I was right fond of him, but till I die I’ll wish I’d made more fuss of him when he was brought in from the street. I knew he was trying it on to force me to stop talking about fresh air.’ Just for a moment her voice wavered on the verge of lost control. ‘He said he hated fresh air! Me father, who knew the call of every birdsong.’ She blinked the unshed tears rapidly away.
‘He wanted sympathy. . . .’ She spread her hands wide. ‘Oh, Doctor Bates, me father wanted sympathy every day; he wanted to talk every day about how unfair it was me mother dying. And there were some days when I just hadn’t any more sympathy to give.’
The doctor moved his big head up and down in a motion that said he had heard it all before.
‘Maggie, love. Listen to me. If you had talked to as many bereaved folks as I, then you would believe me when I tell you that we always, yes always, wish we had said this, or not done that.’ He wound his heavy gold watch-chain round his fingers. ‘What we have to think about is your future. . . .’
He looked genuinely worried, so worried that Maggie put out a hand and touched his arm.
‘I can take care of myself, Doctor. As long as I keep in work, my wages cover the rent of this house and give me enough to eat. I’ve got three looms now.’ She smiled to cheer the doctor up. ‘And I could always take in a lodger or two. Arnie Preston next door works at the bottle factory, and he says there’s always Irishmen looking for a good place to live.’
It was terrible, the doctor told his wife that evening, terrible seeing that young girl, pink-cheeked and dry-eyed, calmly telling him that she would manage.
‘Talking about having Irish navvies living in, and her no more than seventeen and as bonny as a morning in spring. I remember her mother as a bonny woman, but young Maggie Craig is a real beauty, and as innocent as a new-born babe. I’d stake my life on that.’
His wife shook her grey head. ‘It’s to be hoped she doesn’t take up with the wrong one now that she is entirely alone. That girl has got to find love and affection from somewhere, it stands to reason.’
Doctor Bates fingered his watch-chain.
‘There was a whisper about a boy at the mill, but I don’t think there can be anything in it. Maggie’s only a child.’
‘That’s something she has never had a chance to be,’ Mrs Bates said sadly.
Joe Barton walked down Foundry Street and knocked at Maggie’s door the day after the funeral.
When he saw her white face and the way her eyes filled with tears when she saw him standing there, he walked straight in, kicked the door closed behind him, and took her into his arms.
It was the first time they had been alone, in a house, by a leaping fire; the first time he had seen Maggie cry, and the sight of her tears moved him so deeply that he drew her down beside him on the sofa, tangling his fingers in the soft weight of her hair, loosening it from its little high-pinned bun so that it fell clean and sweet smelling round her face.
‘I love you,’ he whispered, almost in tears himself. ‘I love you . . . love you . . . love you.’ Then to try to still the trembling of his own body, he held her closer, listened as she told him in jerky halting sentences how it had been.
‘There was blood everywhere,’ she sobbed, and Joe covered her mouth with his own, kissing the word
s away.
When they slid down on to the rug together, Maggie’s arms were round his neck, and as their bodies fitted closely together as they lay side by side, Joe told her he was going away.
‘Tonight,’ he whispered, then as her arms clutched him tighter he told her why.
‘Belle had to have dresses and aprons and caps for her new job, and I’d earned a bit more by staying on late at the mill, you know that.’ He lifted his head and looked down at Maggie’s flushed and tear-stained face. ‘I hid it away in a place where I thought me mam couldn’t find it. But she’d had it, Maggie. She’d got her thieving hands on it, and spent the lot on drink. It was for Belle, and she still took it, knowing.’
‘Oh, Joe. . . .’
Maggie raised a hand and stroked the thin and earnest face bending over her. ‘Poor, poor Belle. What will she do? She was looking forward to that living-in job so much. What will she do now?’
Joe grinned. ‘Oh, Belle got her things all right, love. Me mam’s big man stopped the night and left his money in his back trouser pocket, so I took it and gave it to Belle, and now she’s safe, and I’m off, because when that loud-mouthed sod finds out he’ll have the police on me. As sure as my name’s Joe Barton he’ll have me put away.’
They kissed again, a slow lingering kiss, and when Maggie spoke her voice was slow and dreamy as though what she was saying bore no relation to the meaning of the words.
‘Where will you go, Joe? I can’t bear it if you go away. . . .’
Joe was going away and she didn’t want to believe it. He was kissing her and swearing he would come back, that he would marry her when he had a decent job.
‘And we’ll live in a house like this,’ he was saying.
He was whispering into her cheek and turning her mouth into his, and his teeth were hard against her lips so that she opened her mouth, and his hands were moving gently over her.
Not like Arnie’s, nothing like Arnie’s. Joe was moving with a fierce protective urgency, lifting her clothes, murmuring to her, broken words, moaning sighing whispers of love.
There was one sharp swift pain, when for a moment, she saw her father’s dead face and cried out, then it was all rushing comfort, soothing, straining movements of love.