by Marie Joseph
They were all at Chapel that Sunday evening. All the sewing ladies grouped together, with Clara and Arnie in their usual place at the back. Mrs Hobkirk darted a sidelong glance at Maggie, turned round and whispered something to the pew behind, and Maggie lowered her head over her folded hands.
‘Oh, God, dear loving Father of Jesus, Clara’s mother knows, and if she knows then everyone else will know. And I’m asking you what to do, oh my loving Father, because I don’t know where to turn. Help me, please, and show me what to do. Help me to go on working at the mill for a long time yet, and help me to try somehow to put a bit by, because when there’s no money coming in, what will I do? Will I have to go to the workhouse or to one of those places for fallen women?’
The tears gathered in her eyes and splashed down on her cotton gloves.
‘Am I a fallen woman, God? I don’t feel like one . . . oh, Joe. . . .’
Maggie lifted her head then quickly lowered it again. It felt as if every eye in the Chapel was upon her, and when a woman carrying a bible started to edge her way along the pew and saw it was Maggie, she turned swiftly away, going to sit three rows in front.
But not before she had hissed a single word.
‘Jezebel!’
Maggie felt a cold shiver trickle down her back. Her hands trembled so much she could not find the place in her hymn book, and though she held her head high and tried to sing, no sound came from her lips. Though the Chapel was full she was alone in the long pew, and when the hymn was over and they sat for prayers, bending heads over folded hands, a woman’s voice behind her said distinctly:
‘Praying won’t get thee nowhere, Maggie Craig. You being here is an insult to God. Make no mistake about that!’
Maggie wanted to put her hands over her ears. She wanted to rock herself in her misery, but most of all she wanted to get up and walk out. Back down the aisle with the steel tips on her boots ringing on the metal grids, back to the house in Foundry Street where she could pull down the blinds and shut herself away.
When Mr Marsden went to stand behind the pulpit to give his sermon he banged with his fist and called on God to punish the wicked, and Maggie was sure he was speaking directly to her.
Frozen, with tears like slivers of ice inside her, she told herself that Mr Marsden knew too. He had been so kind to her when her father died, and now he would think she had been wicked even as Thomas lay scarcely cold in his grave.
The sermon was over, and Mr Marsden bowed his head.
‘Let us pray for those who fall from grace,’ he intoned, casting his closed gaze to the high ceiling, speaking slowly because he was, as usual, making up the words as he went along. ‘Let them repent of their evil ways. Let them hide their shame from the godly, and walk from henceforward in the paths of righteousness.’
Completely carried away by the flow of the high-sounding phrases, Mr Marsden’s beautiful voice droned on. Maggie bowed her head even lower, the tears inside hardening into a tight knot in her throat. The minister’s prayer was bouncing back at her from the walls; she knew that if she lifted her head and looked around, every eye in the Chapel would be upon her. Now all desire to get up and walk out had gone. She merely wanted to slide down from the hard seat and lie on the wooden floorboards, hidden from sight.
When it was over Mr Marsden announced the last hymn, and there was a rustling of pages as the congregation found their places. It was one of Maggie’s favourite hymns, but as the voices swelled to the rafters, she heard nothing. Mr Elphick might be pumping the organ till the sweat ran down his little wrinkled face, and the tenors in the back row of the choir stalls were giving of their best in the soaring descant, but still Maggie sat there.
All through the first verse she sat huddled in her seat, conspicuous now as she had never meant to be, tittered at from the row behind, and stared at from either side.
‘We thank Thee that Thy Church unsleeping, while earth tolls onward into light. . . .’
The congregation, led by the choir, started on the second verse, and suddenly Maggie felt a light, a feather-light, touch on her arm.
‘Stand up, Maggie,’ a familiar voice whispered, and looking up she stared straight into the kind brown eyes of Mrs Carmichael’s big son Kit.
Some courage he had not known he possessed had moved him to do this thing. Some well of pity deep inside him had made him leave his own pew, and go to stand by her side.
‘Is it yours?’ his mother had demanded when Mrs Earnshaw had departed in triumph after imparting the shocking news.
Then she had nodded with satisfaction, the blank amazement on her son’s face telling her what she knew already.
‘I could have told you what she was,’ she went on. ‘I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. I knew from that first time Maggie Craig stood round my bed what sort of a girl she was. Now will you listen to me? I bet she doesn’t rightly know which lad it is herself.’
She had raised herself up on her pillows and pointed a finger at him. ‘Keep right away from her, sonny. She’ll be looking for some mug to pin the blame on, you mark my words.’
‘Poor little Maggie.’ Kit had left her sitting up in bed, the three-cornered shawl round her shoulders. He had climbed the stairs and sat on his own bed, staring at the wall.
‘Why?’ he asked himself. Not who, but why? Because he knew who it was. He had seen them together once in the park, and their joined hands and their mingled laughter had filled him with inexplicable anger.
When Kit walked by Maggie’s side out of the Chapel there was a little knot of people already gathered on the pavement outside. Clara Preston, red-faced and looking as if she was giving her mother a piece of her mind, and Arnie, turning his cloth cap round and round in his hands. Then four or five of the sewing ladies, staring at Maggie with a terrifying stillness that made Kit’s blood run cold in his veins.
He held tightly to Maggie’s elbow, feeling sure she would fall down if he let go. His heart was thudding madly, and he knew that when his mother heard about this, as hear she surely would, there would be the very devil to pay.
One of the women drew her long skirt aside as they passed, and another – no, he must have imagined it – turned her head and spat on the cobbles.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Kit Carmichael!’ a woman shouted.
‘Have you no shame?’ another called out, and suddenly Kit could bear no more.
‘Let them cast the first stone!’ he cried in his shrill voice, knowing he was identifying himself with their vulgarity, but unable to stop himself.
‘You shouldn’t have done this, Kit.’
Maggie’s voice was low as he led her away, and she was so small, so desolate that her concern for him made him feel at least ten feet tall.
‘You mustn’t come in,’ she said when they stood at the door of the bottom house in Foundry Street. ‘You’ve stuck your neck out for me enough tonight, and I won’t have you talked about, not when you’ve done nothing to deserve it.’
Kit coughed, shuffled his feet, ran a finger round his stiff white collar and blushed like a young girl.
‘Will he see you right, Maggie? I know it’s none of my business, but will he do right by you?’
She was fitting the key into the door so that he did not see her face as she answered.
‘He’s gone away, but I’m expecting him back. And thank you, Kit Carmichael. I’ll never forget what you did for me, not till the day I die.’
Then, with a swift glance up and down the deserted Sunday evening street, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him gently on his smooth cheek. ‘God bless you, Kit. Always.’
She opened the door, turned briefly, smiled at him with her mouth, but with despair clouding her eyes, and stepped inside.
Kit walked slowly back up the street, his heart already in his boots at the thought of the scene with his mother. He saw her, in his mind’s eye, ranting and raving, and he told himself that as this seemed to be his night for sticking up for people then he would have a
go at sticking up for himself.
But his resolution wavered even as he reached the top of the street, and turning right instead of left, he decided to take the long way home.
5
‘IS WHAT I did the worst sin of all?’ Maggie asked Clara in the weeks that followed. ‘Is nagging and meanness and vindictiveness not just as bad? What do you think, Clara?’
But Clara, who had never been taught to think, just shook her head.
‘I don’t rightly know, love,’ she said.
Now the pattern of Maggie’s days was set. It was getting up when the knocker-up rattled his wire-tipped pole against the window. It was raking last night’s ashes from the fire, laying it ready for the evening, then running to the mill with her tea and sugar screwed up in a piece of paper for the brew-up at eight o’clock.
Lacing her stays as tightly as she could and letting out the fasteners on her skirt, the signs of the baby were only there if they were looked for. True her breasts were fuller, but then she had never been lacking up there, she told herself, and by moving the buttons on her blouses she managed.
At dinner time she ran home, always alone, forced herself to eat a slice of bread and jam, then it was back to the mill and standing in the damp atmosphere by her looms all through the long noisy afternoon until the hooter went and she was free.
Free to go back to the house, light the fire and force herself again to eat something a bit more substantial, an egg or a slice of ham. Freedom to Maggie meant isolation, a shutting herself away from other people, the way Thomas had done. But she refused to think about that.
One evening when she was just over four months pregnant she waited until it was dark, then she took her coat down from its peg behind the back door, pushed her hair up into a tammy, and walked out of the house, round the corner on to the canal bank.
She had promised Joe she would never go down that part of the town alone, but he had gone away and she had to see for herself.
It was a night of shifting clouds and pale glancing moonlight, turning the canal into a glistening ribbon of silver.
‘One in the family’s enough,’ Maggie muttered, looking away from it. ‘That’s the easy way out, and besides, I’m not done yet, not by a long chalk. Joe will write when he’s found a good job. He will . . . he will. If he knew he would be back for me like a flash, police or no police. An’ if we had no money then I’d take in sewing. I could if I set me mind to it. . . .’
She walked even more quickly as she entered the maze of streets leading to Montague Court. In the middle of one narrow street a small crowd had gathered round two drunken men who were fist fighting with the ferocity of a pair of hungry tigers. One man had blood streaming down his face, and his opponent, a man twice his size, was ramming his fist repeatedly into the battered face.
One of the watching men shouted at the top of his voice:
‘Police! The bloody rozzers are coming!’
Maggie watched, holding a horrified hand to her mouth as the small crowd disappeared, dragging the victor with them and leaving the bleeding man lying in the middle of the street being loudly sick. The awful retching sound made her clutch her own throat, and when the policeman puffed and lumbered round the corner, she walked away.
When she reached Montague Court she was panting for breath and there was a stitch in her side like the thrust of a sword. To catch her breath for a moment she clutched at a lamp-post, and as the wavering light shone down on her upturned face, two women crossed the street and stood in front of her with arms folded.
One of them put out a finger and poked Maggie in the chest.
‘We’ve been watching you, we have. We saw you trying to speak to them men at the fight. This is our beat so bugger off!’
Maggie straightened up, holding her hand to her side, as the second woman, well into middle-age, gave her a push that almost sent her sprawling.
‘Bugger off then, or we’ll have your guts for garters. See?’
Trembling in every limb Maggie walked on and knocked at the door of number four, seeing, out of the corner of her eye, the two night women watching her. She knocked again.
From the dim yellow light coming from behind the blind she knew there was someone in, and just for a moment she imagined the big unshaven man opening the door, reaching out a hand and pulling her in. She glanced down the street to where the women still stood, and as the sweat broke out on her skin she raised her hand and knocked for a third time.
‘Who is it?’
The voice was a woman’s voice, thin and wavery, threaded with fear, and as the two night women began to walk towards her, nudging each other and laughing loudly, Maggie called out:
‘I’ve come to see Mrs Barton. It’s Maggie Craig.’
There was the sound of a bolt being drawn back before the door opened for about six inches. Maggie smiled, then the smile faded as she saw that the woman standing there bore no resemblance to Joe’s mother. This was a woman who looked as if she was dying where she stood, with sparse grey hair pulled back from a face as yellow as the buttercups Maggie remembered from her childhood.
‘I thowt it were the rent man,’ she said. ‘Come on in, lass, and tek your coat off. Did you say as ’ow you wanted Mrs Barton?’
The sweet smell in the tiny room was even worse than Maggie remembered, but the bits and pieces of makeshift furniture were the same. The wooden boxes still stood in the middle of the floor, and from the way a brown blanket was pushed back on a single bed Maggie realized that the woman had been lying down.
Her face seemed no bigger than the perimeter of a teacup, and the flesh had dropped away from her face so that it resembled a skull, with forehead, nose and chin jutting out. The effort of getting up to open the door had proved too much for her, and now she sank back on to the bed, staring at Maggie from sunken eyes.
‘Mrs Barton’s dead, love,’ she said. ‘They came and took her off to the Infirmary, but it were too late. She had choked on her vomit, they said, drunk as a lord.’
‘And Belle? Can you give me the address where she works now?’
Maggie wondered why the stitch in her side wouldn’t go. She’d stopped running, and what the woman was telling her wasn’t exactly a surprise. She would have been more surprised to see Joe’s mother sitting there, staring at her with Joe’s eyes.
It all fitted in somehow. Joe had never existed, Belle and the big rough man had never existed, and what she was left with now was a dream-like memory of coming here. And what she was left with now was Joe’s baby inside her.
‘She was a bad lot that Mrs Barton,’ the sick woman was saying. ‘I hope I’m not treading on any toes, but she was a real wrong ’un.’ She shook her head wearily from side to side. ‘I’m not much help, love. I’m sorry. I’m not much help to nobody because I’m on me way out.’ She smiled, and it was as though the skull parted its lips in a hideous grimace. ‘We was lucky to get this place to rent.’
‘We?’ Maggie wished she could say something to comfort the bird-like woman lying back against her pillows, but she was struggling against a desire to give way and slide down on to the floor in a faint. She forced herself to stand upright, though the pain in her back drained the blood from her face.
‘Me husband. He’ll be back soon, and then we’ll have a nice drop of stout. He’s a good man. One of the best, and good men don’t grow on trees, not round these parts.’
Maggie backed towards the door, trying to smile. She heard her own voice as if it came from a far-off place.
‘I hope you soon feel better, then,’ she whispered.
She saw a man turning into the Court as she closed the door gently behind her. He was walking quite steadily, carrying a jug held in front of him. She hoped the stout would help, because the part of her that was all her mother made her want to go back, to see to things, to fill a bucket from the tap out at the yard, and scrub the filth from the floor.
‘Maybe I’ll go back tomorrow with some gruel,’ she told herself aloud, but even as she sai
d it she knew she wouldn’t.
‘When we’re in trouble we behave like animals,’ Thomas had often said, and he was right. ‘We just curl up in a corner and let the rest of the world get on with it.’
Maggie walked as quickly as she could without actually running. Out of the Court, out into the dark labyrinth of streets, past a corner pub with the clinking sound of glasses and the smell of beer and sawdust coming from an open window. The stitch had come back, but not as bad; the night women were nowhere to be seen, and down on the canal bank the silver water still shimmered and rippled as though beckoning her in.
She stood for a moment, swaying, her eyes fixed on the gleaming width of water. Oh, it was true . . . Joe had behaved like an animal. He had been threatened so he had run away. He had made love to her because she was warm and soft, and just for a while he needed softness and warmth badly.
Now she would just have to settle her mind to what had to be and get on with it. And getting on with it did not include jumping into that deceptively attractive stretch of water. Once she was in she would feel the dirt and smell the stench, and down at the bottom there would be dead dogs and cats, and she was young. She was Maggie Craig who had defied Miss Hepinstall, and given her brothers back as good as she had got.
For the first time since the terrible thing had happened, Maggie knew real blazing anger. Not the wild tempers of her childhood when she had snatched her tammy from her head and stamped up and down it, but a deep revulsion at the way she had allowed this thing to happen.
She remembered a book she had once read, where the heroine, faced with the same situation, had actually banged her head against a stone wall.
‘You fool! You fool! You fool!’ she had cried.
‘An’ if I thought it would do any good I’d do the same,’ Maggie muttered, turning away from the water and climbing the bank up to the bridge.
When she woke in the night and discovered the first signs that she might be going to miscarry, Maggie got up, the white-hot anger somehow sustaining her. Some instinct, maybe some far-off memory of the village women, worn out with constant child-bearing, made her get down on her knees and start scrubbing the living-room floor. By the time she had finished, the pain in her back had moved round to the front and was a dragging agony, but she emptied the bucket, re-filled it at the slopstone, and without bothering to heat the water from the kettle, she pulled down the blind in the parlour, carried a single candle through and began to scrub again.