by Marie Joseph
‘Maggie . . . Maggie. . . .’
Joe’s voice lingered in her ears, even long after it was over and he had gone, leaving her alone in the empty house with what she was sure was her father’s sad little ghost waiting for her at the top of the stairs.
3
KIT CARMICHAEL READ the short piece in the Weekly Times. It was flanked on one side by a full column advertisement of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, and on the other side by a report of a meeting at the Teetotal Mission.
‘You remember Miss Craig coming to our prayer meeting, don’t you, Mother?’
Mrs Carmichael’s small black eyes filled with dislike.
‘Navy blue hat with dog daisies on it. Aye I remember her.’
Kit leaned over the bed rail and read the piece aloud in his high-pitched voice, then tapped the paper with a podgy forefinger.
‘It must have happened the very night she came here. Perhaps at the very time she was joined with us in prayer.’ He smoothed back his tightly curled hair. ‘I think it would be the right thing for me to call and express our sympathy, Mother.’
‘They wouldn’t be able to take his coffin into the Chapel, not with him having done away with himself.’ Mrs Carmichael spoke with some satisfaction.
‘He was insane, Mother. He wouldn’t be responsible for his actions.’
‘They always say that.’
Kit saw the way her right hand crept to her throat, but before she could begin to cough, he was beside her, holding on to her hands and talking quickly.
‘Mother. Miss Craig will be all alone now. I believe she has looked after her father ever since she was a tiny girl. Now surely there’s no harm in me going to see her and telling her how sorry I am? How sorry we both are?’ He stroked her face. ‘You won’t be by yourself because it’s the Sewing Ladies’ Class.’ He gave her chin a little tweak. ‘See, there’s one of them at the door now. I’ll let her in on my way out.’
All the way down the street, he muttered to himself, as he had been muttering to himself for many years now. . . .
It was ridiculous that a grown man of thirty-five should have to be beholden to his mother for his every movement. He had started all wrong when his father went off to live in Liverpool with that soprano he’d met in the town’s Operatic Society during the rehearsals of one of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan’s pieces. He hoped she had not seen that the same company were doing Sorcerer at the Theatre Royal that very week. It would bring it all back to her. And every time it was brought back to her, she had an attack.
Kit stepped off the kerb without seeing it, and twisted over on his ankle. He was too soft, that was his trouble; too inclined to let his sympathy run away with him.
Turning into Foundry Street, he walked with his short tripping steps down to the house at the bottom. A curtain twitched as he went past a house, and for a moment he wondered if he had perhaps been a bit hasty in coming to call on Miss Craig.
Not for a moment would he dream of besmirching her reputation. But it was too late to turn back now. . . .
When Maggie opened the door to him, dressed from chin to ankles in mourning black, her face a pale oval above the frilled neck-line of her blouse, Kit hardly recognized her as the girl with the twinkling eyes who had stood round his mother’s bed so short a time ago.
Quite without volition, his innate kindness overcoming his shyness, he held out both his hands.
‘You poor little thing,’ he said. ‘You poor poor little girl.’
‘You’d better come in, Mr Carmichael,’ Maggie said, and stood aside to let him pass.
Kit Carmichael was well aware that there were those who found him an object of amusement, considered him to be a mother’s boy, but he did not care.
His not caring was in no way derived from apathy, but rather from the fact that his complete lack of conceit made the sly jibes at his lack of masculinity of no importance whatsoever.
‘Our Kit hasn’t got a mean bone in his body,’ his mother was fond of boasting, and she spoke the truth. Kit poured affection and generosity on to everyone he met, so that even those who laughed behind their hands at his high squeak of a voice and his girlish complexion, laughed with tolerance rather than with spite.
‘Has your Kit never walked out with a young lady?’
Mrs Earnshaw lived next door, and often came in to keep his mother company, and her voice carried through into the front parlour where Kit was taking the willow pattern plates down from the rack and giving them a bit of a dust.
He stiffened, the duster held still in his hands.
‘As a matter of fact, Mrs Earnshaw, he’s got a lady friend coming for her tea on Saturday. Miss Craig from the Chapel. Lives by herself since her father came to a sad end.’
‘Not the Mr Craig what . . .?’
Kit saw in his imagination the first finger of Mrs Earnshaw’s hand drawn across her turkey throat in a revealing gesture.
‘Aye, that one.’
‘Serious then, are they?’
Not wanting to hear any more, Kit walked over to the dividing door and closed it none too gently.
It wasn’t that he was annoyed at his mother discussing him like that with the neighbours, he was used to that, but he had to smile the way she had made out it had been her idea about Maggie coming to tea. Kit put a plate back and took down the one next to it. It was surprising the dirt on these plates, especially as there had not been a fire in the parlour grate since last Christmas. . . .
It had taken him almost two months to get his mother to agree to meet Maggie again. Two whole months, two attacks, and countless arguments about the foolishness of giving a ‘girl like that’ ideas.
‘I knew the minute I set eyes on her what she was after.’
‘Now, Mother, don’t talk daft. I bet you can’t even remember what she looks like.’
‘Cheeky face and a hat with too much trimming on it.’
It was no good. He would never get his mother to think any different. Kit breathed on a plate and rubbed it hard, smiling with tolerance. You could never blame his mother for being afraid he might leave her one day. Not after what his father had done to her.
Kit sat down for a minute, taking his weight off feet too small for his bulk. Then he leaned his curly head back against the antimacassar, and closed his eyes.
There had been a girl once. He shuddered with the remembering of it.
He would be perhaps eighteen, nineteen, something like that. He had gone with a lad called Harry Burton to the Theatre Royal to see Billy Thomson’s Concert Party.
He would never have gone if Harry had not taunted him about being tied to his mother’s apron strings, backed up by the other lads from down the street.
‘Go on, Kit. Be a devil.’
‘Tell her you’re going to the Mission to sign the bloody pledge.’
They were jeering at him, caps pulled down over laughing faces, and so he had gone with Harry Burton, a grinning Harry with larded-down sideboards gleaming, and his Prince Albert moustache combed into neatness.
And the Concert Party had been enjoyable, and the inside of the theatre not quite the den of vice his mother had made it out to be. The second half was in the form of a Nigger Minstrel Show, with the men’s faces blacked, and Bones asking Sambo:
‘Who was that lady ah seen you walkin’ with las’ night?’
And Harry had loudly joined in the reply, much to Kit’s embarrassment:
‘That was no lady. That’s ma wife.’
Then at the end Harry had actually put three fingers in his mouth and whistled his satisfaction.
‘I’d have a pennorth of hot potatoes if I wasn’t dressed up like a bloody toff,’ he said as they walked back along the Boulevard. ‘Just look at that poor little donkey. It’s fast asleep between the shafts, and don’t look round,’ he continued in exactly the same tone of voice, ‘but there’s two girls I know behind us. Want an introduction, Kit?’
His eyes were sly, and as they stopped beside the cart, he turned rou
nd, pretended to be overcome with surprise, beamed all over his whiskered face, and made the introductions with great aplomb.
‘Agnes. Florrie. This is Kit, a mate of mine, and if you smile at him nicely he’ll buy you a paper of spuds. Won’t you, Kit?’
Kit winced as he remembered the way they had paired off. Harry with Agnes, and Florrie taking his arm and swaying along beside him, teetering on the tiny heels of her high-buttoned boots.
At first they kept more or less together, then as they turned off the main street down an alleyway leading to the canal, Harry, with his arm round Agnes’s waist, dropped behind.
‘We’d better wait for them, I think,’ Kit said.
Florrie laughed, taking his arm. ‘Don’t be daft. They’ll be glad to be shot of us.’
Kit persisted. ‘What have they gone round that corner for? Does your friend live down there?’
Florrie pressed his arm into her side, leaning so close that he caught a whiff of strong scent mixed with sweat. She grinned up at him showing small uneven teeth.
‘You are a caution, honest you are. I’ve never met a lad like you before. Why have I never seen you before? I know most of Harry’s mates, but I don’t know you.’
Kit tried to pull his arm away, but realized the only way he could do that would be to wrench it from her grasp, and he could not face the indignity of that. He was sweating slightly, and ran his free hand round his collar.
‘I’ll see you home, Florrie, then I must leave you.’ He said her name with difficulty, stuttering a little. ‘I told my mother I was going . . . well, I told her I was going somewhere else than where she thinks I’ve been. She gets herself worked up if I don’t come home when she expects me to.’
At this Florrie did exactly what he had been praying she would do. She moved away from him, swinging round to face him.
‘Your mother? Did you say your mother?’
Utterly without guile, more naive than a cosseted girl of seven, Kit explained with serious politeness that his mother was all alone; that she was not at all well. And that he normally stayed in with her of an evening because she had been on her own all day.
‘She would be really upset if she found out that I had been to the theatre.’ He wrinkled his forehead earnestly as he tried to explain. ‘My father used to go to places like that, and it led him into bad ways, so she’s a bit biased, you see.’
Florrie stared at him as if she could not believe he was quite real, her head on one side, and a tip of pink tongue protruding between her lips.
‘How old are you, Kit?’
‘Nearly nineteen.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘For a man up North Park Road. I keep house for him, but only on a daytime basis.’
‘So you can be with your mam at nights?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you always tell her where you are going when you go out?’
‘I’ve told you, she gets worked up when she doesn’t know where I am. There’s only me can quieten her down.’
‘Well, stone the flamin’ crows. . . .’
Florrie was walking towards him now, and the only way he could try to avoid her bumping into him was to step backwards. And behind him was a wall, a dirty wall that would make marks on his jacket if he leant against it.
She came forward relentlessly, and Kit forgot about getting marks on his checked jacket, his neatly patterned, nipped in at the waist jacket, as her arms slid round his neck.
‘How many girls have you been out with, Kit?’
He clamped his mouth tight shut, waves of horror washing over him and making him feel sick.
‘How many girls have you kissed, Kit?’
The smell of her was in his nostrils, turning his stomach right over as Florrie peered up into his face, laughing at him with her mouth wide open, showing her tongue.
‘I don’t think you know nowt about owt, do you, Kit what’s your name? I think you’re still a great big baby.’
Then, before he could stop her, she had clamped her mouth over his own, and he could taste her spit, and feel the whole length of her body pressed up against his own. She was wriggling like a little eel, and suddenly Kit forgot to be polite. Forgot that he was ‘Sonny’ Carmichael, the apple of his mother’s eye, a boy who never forgot his manners, especially when there were ladies present.
‘You dirty little . . . you dirty little bitch,’ he shouted, using a word he had never used before. Then gripping her by the arms he thrust her from him so violently that she almost fell.
Her hat, a silly flat purple straw, one his mother would not have given house-room to, came off in the struggle, and in the frenzy of his humiliation Kit kicked it away from him, then as she bent to pick it up he pushed her so hard that she fell sprawling on the greasy cobbles with her hair coming down.
Kit moved his head from side to side on the antimacassar as he remembered the way he had waited for her to get up without stretching out a hand to help.
‘You great soft ’aporth!’ she had shouted, actually dancing up and down with rage. ‘Go on. Run home and tell your mam. Most likely she’ll kiss you better, and you’ll like that, won’t you, you great sissy!’
Mrs Earnshaw opened the door and stood there, pulling her shawl into position round her shoulders, and watching him with her foxy pointed face.
‘Your mother’s waiting for you, Kit,’ she said, and it seemed to him that her eyes were sly.
Sly in exactly the same way Florrie’s eyes had been.
4
WHEN MAGGIE MISSED the first month she was not unduly worried. There could be many reasons why nothing had come on the day it should. She told herself the shock of finding her father lying there, his white hair all matted with blood, could be the cause, or it could even be she was inwardly horrified at what had happened between her and Joe lying by the fire.
The more she went over that in her mind the more impossible it seemed to be. She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t like some of the girls at the mill who talked about what they did with boys. She had more sense.
And more than once she had suspected that the girl weavers were just showing off, because look what happened when Elsie Arkwright suddenly went to live with her auntie down in Sussex. Everybody had been shocked out of their minds. They had talked about it for days in whispering and horrified disbelief.
‘I have this friend,’ Maggie told Essie Platt, a big girl with her hair fluffed up into a frizz at the front. ‘She’s a bit scared she might be going to have a baby.’ Then she hung her head and felt the blush creep up from her throat, making her eyes water. ‘But she . . . it was only the once.’
Essie nodded firmly. ‘Then it’s all right. Nothing can happen the first time, especially if she’s never been with anyone before.’
‘Oh, she hasn’t!’ Maggie was shocked at the idea. ‘She’s not like that. It was . . . this friend says it was the first time in her whole life.’
‘Then tell her to stop worrying.’ Essie smiled a sly smile. ‘Worry’s the worst thing out for upsetting the system.’
Maggie saw the way that from that day onwards Essie’s circle of friends eyed her up and down then looked quickly away. For another few weeks she deliberately lulled herself into a sense of false security, repeating to herself what Essie had said during the times when the worry almost paralysed her with its implications.
Every day she looked for a letter from Joe, telling herself that maybe he could not write well enough to compose a letter.
‘I was off school more than what I was there,’ he’d said.
She remembered Thomas saying that the proportion of children leaving school unable to read or write was a disgrace.
‘Half-timers in the main. Children who somehow, through no fault of their own, get left behind in a big class of brighter pupils. Children who move from one place to another and slip through the educational net somehow.’
‘We’re always doing moonlight flits,’ Joe had grinned. ‘Once we escaped through a top
window and over the roofs.’
Maggie, oblivious to the deafening clatter of the weaving shed machinery, bit her lip and nodded. Yes, that would be it. Joe was proud, above all else he was proud. He would never have admitted that he could not write. Somehow he would have covered up. Her father had explained that too:
‘They master the ability to print their own name and that’s all.’
Then with a sinking of her heart Maggie remembered Alice Barton taking the slip of paper down from the mantelpiece and thrusting it in front of her face. All written in Joe’s neat handwriting . . . Rent, tea, candles, tins of milk.
That night she took down one of her father’s books from the shelf in his room, running her fingers over the leather binding. Always, even towards the end, Thomas had tried to find solace in poetry, but when she tried to read the print blurred before her eyes.
‘Oh, God,’ she prayed, down on her knees, holding the book close to her chest. ‘Don’t let it be true. Please don’t let it be true. If it is I don’t know what I’ll do. I keep thinking about what I could do, and there’s nothing to show, nothing wrong with me really but the worry going round and round in me head till it feels it might burst open. And Kit Carmichael’s asked me to tea, and oh God I have no interest in going anywhere or doing anything. I can’t seem to talk to anyone with this great black cloud on me. An’ I know that worrying like this is the very worst thing, so just for a week I’ll stop fretting to give it a chance. I’ll put my trust in Thee,’ she ended. ‘For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.’
‘If Kit Carmichael has asked you there for your tea, then he’s serious. He hasn’t bothered with girls before, you know, love.’
Clara’s eyes were sly. ‘You keep quiet, I notice. Not been upsetting you has he, love, this Kit Carmichael?’
‘He’s kind,’ Maggie said, moving the lamp so that it shone directly on to the sewing in her lap. ‘I can’t ever remember meeting anyone so kind. I think if I asked him for the moon he’d climb up and get it down.’