by Marie Joseph
She could be warmer though, much warmer. The old woman chuckled as she stuck a skinny arm out from underneath the bedclothes, and groping around on the bedside table, felt her fingers close over a small bottle of brandy.
‘If you hadn’t been in such a hurry to go out and leave me, you would have put it away in the cupboard like you always do after I’ve had me hot milk with two teaspoonsful in it, wouldn’t you, Sonny?’ she whispered.
Then back inside the warm tent of heavy blankets, she tipped the bottle, and felt the fiery liquid stream in glowing comfort down her throat.
‘When you were born,’ she muttered, ‘I used to cuddle you up, young Kit, nice and warm, just like this. I suckled you for two years, and even when you were a big boy, we would sit on the couch, just you and me, and you would put your arm round my shoulders. We would sit there of an evening when your father was out doing God knows what. Spending good money on beer; money what should have been for providing us with a good meal.’
A tear ran down her cheek, and she tried to lift a hand to wipe it away, but the hand had grown suddenly too heavy. She was crying in earnest now, just letting the tears fall.
‘What about that time the man came down from the Guardians and said I would have to go up to the Committee after your dad had gone and left us and we had no money? Do you know what he said, that man from Guardians when he saw we had proper chairs and a table instead of orange boxes with covers on them? “You’re not quite destitute, Mrs Carmichael” he said. He had a walking stick, and he pointed it at you. “He looks well nourished, doesn’t he?” he said. So I didn’t waste me time going up to the Committee after that, did I, Sonny? No, I took work in and trimmed hats till me eyes were coming out at the back of me head. I remember one hat took me five hours, and she give me twopence for it. . . . And her in the chair thinks she has more right to you, Sonny, than what I have?’
The brandy bottle was empty, and with her case made out and now rested, Kit’s mother slid comfortably into sleep. . . .
She was abruptly jerked awake to see Kit’s face staring down at her. Whimpering, she reached out for the bedclothes he had wrenched away.
‘Don’t do that, love. You’re making me cold.’
But the beloved face, the face she only knew as a smiling face, was contorted with an anger so terrible, she could only shrink back and close her eyes again.
‘Get me stuff,’ she gasped, clutching her throat, and disciplined by years of ministering to her, Kit thrust what she wanted into her hands.
‘Now get out of bed!’ he said, ‘and put this round you.’
The shawl he gave her was torn from its nail behind the door. She heard it tear, and when the inhalant dropped from her fingers, he made no attempt to pick it up.
‘Kit . . .?’ she whispered, and it was flung on to her lap.
‘See to yourself,’ he said. ‘It would serve you right, Mother, if I let you choke yourself to death.’
And the way he said the word ‘Mother’ was an insult in itself. . . .
Faces came and went each time Maggie opened her eyes. Hands held her, stripped off her wet clothing, wrapped her in blankets, and piled yet more blankets on top of her. A hand smoothed the hair back from her aching head, a voice bullied her; more hands held her head over a steaming bowl with a pungent aroma that made her turn her face weakly aside in useless protest. Held her there and made her breathe. Forced her to take one rasping breath after another.
Once she thought she saw Clara, then Clara’s mother, sitting by the bed, and once an unknown face above a bib of a white starched apron lifted the hair from the back of her head. She heard and felt the snip of scissors.
‘It was taking your strength, love,’ an unfamiliar voice told her, and she submitted because she was in too much pain to do anything else.
‘Kit?’ she whispered, and he was there, always there, holding on to her, tucking the blankets round her chin when all she wanted was to push them away. He stripped them off when the crisis came, and she sweated so much it ran down her sides, into her eyes, stinging with the saltiness of it, running down her legs and soaking the sheet.
‘The fever’s broken,’ she heard Kit say, but he was saying it from a long way away. The room was filled with steam from the steam kettle set permanently on the kettle-stand at the front of the fire, and Kit was sponging her naked body, patting her dry, sliding a clean sheet beneath her, murmuring all the time.
‘It’s all right, Maggie, love. You are getting better. Do you hear me? You are going to be well and strong again. Soon. Do you hear me?’
Into sleep and vaguely out of sleep again. Too weak to smile or speak, or even think. Opening her mouth obediently so that the carefully held spoon could trickle broth into it. Beef-tea. She recognized that, and it tasted good.
‘Good,’ she managed to say, as a child would say it, then she drifted into her first real sleep for days, a healing natural sleep with her breath coming even and unforced.
‘Hello,’ she said, and Kit’s face was there, close to her own, and there were tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘Don’t cry,’ she thought she said, before she fell asleep again.
‘She’s been sleeping all day,’ Kit said when Clara came in, appearing through the door with a covered basin in a basket. ‘No, I won’t go up and get some rest, Mrs Preston. She is going to need me here when she wakes up and finds out she is in my mother’s house, in my mother’s bed. I’ve got to be here to tell her that they took my mother away.’
‘To the loony-bin,’ Clara said with relish, speaking in what she considered to be a whisper. ‘And what else could they do with her carrying on like a mad woman? What else was there for it when you’d found that poor lass half dead with the double pneumonia sitting half dead in a chair by an open window? A window your mother had opened with her own two hands? And the fire out,’ she added, moving over to the hearth and setting the covered basin down. ‘A nice drop of pigeon broth here, Mr Carmichael. That man that’s a blacksmith striker across the street wrung the neck of one his own birds specially. All the street keeps asking about Maggie. Knocking on the door all the time for news. Seems some folk have short memories seeing what they was like with her in the summer.’
‘I could not have done anything else but let them take my mother away,’ Kit said, putting a square slab of coal on the fire, then tipping what was left of the coal bucket round it. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. Maggie would never have lasted as far as the Infirmary. It was warmth she had to have, and her wet things off. There wasn’t time to waste.’
Clara’s good eye held a sly expression; the other one seemed to be non-committal.
‘People will talk all the same. You know what they was like when she . . . when she had that other trouble. The poor lass is after getting herself a bad name without deserving one. An’ what about your job, Mr Carmichael. How’s the old gentleman you do for managing?’
Kit smiled as if it was of no consequence whatever. ‘Oh, he’s told me not to go any more. Said he had got someone more reliable. A younger man, a boy straight from school, but I’m not bothered. Shop work’s what I’ve always wanted, and there might be, there might just be an opening . . . but I’m biding my time.’
‘She’s still a terrible colour,’ Clara said, shaking her head at Maggie lying quiet on her pillows.
Maggie was awake and yet not awake. She could open her eyes if she wanted to, but the effort was too much. The lids felt as if they were weighted down with pieces of lead.
‘Kit?’
But before he had time to move over to the bed and take her hands in his own, she was properly awake. Terror made her cry out as she saw she was in the downstairs room of Kit’s house, the dark brown room, and oh God, help her, she was in his mother’s bed!
Suddenly the sweat was breaking out on her forehead, pricking in her armpits as she tried to raise herself up. When she lifted her head from the pillow the ceiling dipped towards her, and Kit’s face blurred out of focus. Her
heart began to beat wildly as memory flooded back. The telegram, the pain in her chest, the rain and her hair straggling dripping over her face, the feel of the slimy wet cobblestones against her face. A woman at a door with children clutching at her skirts. The telegram, and old Mrs Carmichael pointing at her with a bony accusing finger. Shouting at her to go away when all she had wanted was to sit down and close her eyes.
‘Last night,’ she gasped. ‘I came looking for you . . . oh, Kit.’
She was held safely in his arms, held up against his shoulder, and he was all warmth and softness, and somehow it was as if she was back in the kitchen at the Schoolhouse, held in the cushiony comfort of her mother’s arms. Having her hair stroked back from her face, and being promised that there was nothing to be afraid of.
‘There’s nothing to be frightened of, Maggie, love,’ Kit said. ‘My mother isn’t here. She has gone away. To a special kind of hospital.’
‘She’s fallen asleep again,’ he said, and laid her gently back on the pillows. ‘She’ll sleep herself right,’ he added, then as Clara nodded, putting a finger to her lips, and picking up the empty basket, he followed her through into the parlour, and ever polite, stepped in front of her, and opened the door on to the street.
‘Thank you for the broth, Mrs Preston. I know I don’t need to ask you again not to repeat what you know about what my mother did.’ He pulled the lapels of his jacket together, and it was a gesture that said plainly, ‘I forbid you to gossip about what happened. You did enough damage with your clacking tongue before.’
‘As if I would talk,’ Clara said insincerely. ‘Things is bad enough as it is.’
She walked flat-footed down the street, going over in her mind the things she had to tell her mother. It was a right to do an’ all. The Chapel lot would have something to say when they found out that Maggie Craig was stopping at Kit’s house, just the two of them. And with his mother screaming and tearing her hair out in a padded cell. It was a real caper, it was ’n all. . . .
Two days later Kit pulled up a chair to Maggie’s bed and sat down. She looked, he told himself, about twelve years old. Her eyes were enormous in the small oval of her face, and her cropped hair curled round her ears and fell over her forehead in a fringe.
‘Well, love?’ he smiled, and suddenly shy, Maggie smiled back.
She knew he was going to ask her to marry him, and there was a little niggle in her mind that kept her wondering if he would have asked her if his mother had not gone away. Or if she had gone on and had the baby?
And yet it had seemed to her, lying on her side these past days, too weak even to lift a hand to brush her short hair, too weak to hold a spoon at first without Kit guiding it to her mouth, that here in Kit Carmichael was all the kindness she could ever ask from life.
Someone she could rely on, not someone she was responsible for.
He spoke into her thoughts, ‘Maggie, I am old enough to be your father, I suppose.’
‘You’d have to have started a bit young, Kit.’
He rubbed a hand over his clean-shaven chin. ‘Aye but I didn’t, did I, lass? I wish I could make you see what my mother was like in those days. She could have been a very different woman if she had not married the wrong man. She told me once he made so many promises to her about the way it would be if only she married him. Went down on his knees, she said, with tears rolling down his cheeks, swearing he would give up the drink and go to Chapel Meetings, and sign the pledge.’
‘What a prospect,’ Maggie said, and when he saw the twinkle in her eyes, Kit shook his head and smiled.
‘Aye, put like that, it does sound a bit sanctimonious, but it wasn’t long before he lost his job at the factory.’
‘What for?’
‘He turned up for work dead drunk and pushed his foreman’s face into a vat of water kept for tempering hot steel.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he said he hated the man’s guts. Then he got taken on at the Brewery, and they had to wheel him home one day on a handcart, so drunk he could not stand. That was when my mother started taking work in from the big Manchester shops. She lost three babies before I was born, you know.’
Maggie put out a hand, and Kit covered it gently with his own, rubbing his thumb up and down the thin blue vein at the front of her wrist in an absent-minded way.
‘Aye, she had a rough time, my mother did. Then she took to having her bed downstairs because of her chest, and he took to going with other women. He was too uncouth to realize that after three dead babies, and a delicate son like me, any man with a decent bone in his body would know that his wife had had enough.’
Maggie blushed and hoped Kit would not notice. She wished he would stop telling her about his mother’s life, and making excuses for her. She wished he would talk about them for a change.
She hoped he wasn’t going to try to get her to say she was sorry for his mother, and that they could have been friends if things had been different. Nobody but a saint straight down from heaven could have made a friend out of Kit’s mother, and she doubted if even an angel could have managed it.
‘Nobody would believe what it was like during those years, Maggie. Once, when the hat trade fell off a bit she opened a shop through in the front room. She sold candles and odd bits of grocery – things I could fetch from the warehouse on a handcart. She used to have customers from down Montague Court way.’ Maggie caught her breath, but Kit wasn’t looking at her. ‘Real rough they were, and some of them so poor they had to take the stuff home held in their pinnies because they couldn’t afford the price of a basket. At one time the shop was open sixteen hours a day, closing Christmas Day, and that was all. And do you know what my father did? He took the tin where she kept the takings, and ran off and drank it away. He’d found that tin where she had hidden it away, and through it all she insisted I went to school, refusing to send me into the mill when I was nine, then even when the little shop had to close she went on with the hats and went out and scrubbed other people’s floors.’
He gave her a pleading glance. ‘So what I mean is, I don’t want you to think she was all bad, even though what she tried to do to you was so terrible, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘What did she do, Kit?’
He winced away from the softly spoken question, but it had to be told. Told now and never referred to again. He squeezed Maggie’s hand hard.
‘She opened the window, love, and she unbuttoned your coat, and then she put the fire out, and got back into her own warm bed, and if I had not come in when I did, back from looking for you, you would have died.’
His voice was very low as he told her, and his head was sunk deep on his chest. ‘So if you can’t forgive her, love,’ he said as if reading Maggie’s horrified reaction into her silence, ‘at least I hope that some day you will learn to forget.’
He touched her cheek lightly with his forefinger. ‘What I have been leading up to, really, is trying to make you see that I’m hoping that in spite of what my mother did, you can still find it in your heart to be fond of me.’ He nodded as if to give added importance to his next words. ‘Aye, I am asking you to marry me, even though I have lost my job, and am not qualified for anything but a glorified nursemaid.’ He turned his head and stared steadily through the window.
‘And there’s something else that must be said. I am not like my father. There is nothing in me that comes from him, thank God. What I am trying to tell you, Maggie, is that I won’t bother you if you don’t want me to.’ His back was now almost turned on her. ‘There is more to a marriage than what I just said. There is friendship, and tolerance, and pulling together, and even though you could have anybody with looks like yours, there is nobody in the whole world who could think as much of you as I do. Nobody, not even that other one . . . that Joe,’ he added softly.
‘And your mother, Kit?’
It had to be said. There would never, she felt, be another time, and so she had to say it now.
‘Suppose she g
ets better and comes out of that place? There’s not the room for both of us under one roof, you must know that.’
A shadow crossed his face. ‘She won’t come out, Maggie. I am afraid that my mother is less than an animal now, crawling about in her own dirt on a stone floor, with her food pushed at her in a wooden bowl. She eats it as if she was a pig at a trough.’
‘Oh, my love. . . .’
With an effort, Maggie held out her arms, but ever considerate, he shook his head gently at her.
‘You look tired out, love. I’ve talked too much. Just slide down again, and when you wake up I’m going to try you with a bit of steamed fish.’
He stood up, tucked her hands in beneath the blankets, and bending down, kissed her forehead.
‘And you will marry me, Maggie? Sweet Maggie?’
She nodded. ‘I will marry you, Kit . . . yes I will. . . .’
Even as she spoke the desire to sleep was overwhelming, and it was surely the distorted meandering thinking of a dream that made her start awake, and ask herself the question again:
Would Kit have asked her to marry him if his mother had not gone out of her mind and been put away? Would he even have come to see her again if she had not run out into the wind and the rain?
And perhaps the most important question. Would she have agreed to marry Kit if she had had the slightest hope that Joe Barton might come back some day?
7
‘I WISH WE could do something to make the wedding a bit more of a cheery occasion,’ Maggie told Kit. ‘Mr Marsden says that music at a Chapel wedding is a manifestation of idolatry, but you know, for two pins I’d take the black ribbon off my hat and put the daisies back on.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Nothing can bring Father back, or the boys, or undo what has been done, so why can’t we be happy about the one nice thing that’s happening?’