by Marie Joseph
Padding bare-footed over to the window, she pushed a corner of the blind aside and looked down into the dark street. Making love wasn’t the only thing that mattered, she was ready to admit that.
With Joe it had been wonderful, and joyous, and filled with the ecstasy of giving. Tonight she had not expected or even wished for that. No, it was just that the whole day had been grey, and drab, with no excitement in any part of it.
She rubbed a place clear on the window and narrowed her eyes. For a moment she had thought that someone, a man, had turned the corner from the canal bank . . . but it was a shadow, a trick of the shifting clouds wisping across the dark sky. Maggie let the blind drop back with a click, and immediately Kit was calling out to her.
‘Come to bed, lass. What are you doing standing there? You’ll catch your death.’
Maggie, shivering now, crept back into the warm hollow she had recently left, facing the window, feeling Kit tuck her in for the second time.
She was the luckiest girl in the world to be married to a man as unselfish and kind as Kit Carmichael. She was . . . oh she was. After what had happened about the baby that nearly was, it would have served her right if no man had ever looked her way again.
And yet, even as she counted her wedding day blessings, she knew that if the shadow down in the street had been a man, and that man had been Joe, then she would have run out of the house in her nightdress to meet him.
There were no two ways about that. . . .
8
‘I’M ONLY HUMAN,’ Kit told himself aloud when the letter with the London postmark came for Maggie the next week.
Insisting on her lying in bed in the mornings – just till she got her strength up – he caught the postman actually in the act of raising his hand to the door knocker.
‘I’ll take that,’ he said, his pulse beating quicker as he pushed the envelope in his pocket. Then he walked with his light springy step up the street, muttering to himself as he went.
Kit knew who had sent the letter. Maggie had told him that Joe Barton had said he was going to London to seek his fortune. Besides, it was addressed to Maggie Craig. He patted the pocket as he crossed the main shopping street, then turned into the hilly web of streets he used as a short cut to the shop, passing late stragglers as they clattered their way down to the mill.
Once in the shop, he went straight through into the back, a small room kept for stores, and bending down set a match to the pile of shavings and wrappings in the grate.
He slid a finger under the flap of the envelope, took out a closely written sheet of paper, saw Joe’s name scrawled at the bottom, and tore and tore until the letter was shredded into pieces not much bigger than confetti.
‘And that’s where they’ll go till he stops sending them,’ he said aloud, his anger as white-hot as the ashes which crumbled before his gaze. ‘Every man Jack of ’em. Every single one!’
Although Wednesday was supposed to be Kit’s day off, Mr Yates sometimes sent him down to the wholesale warehouse at the back of the station, preventing him from catching the train to the gaunt asylum built like a medieval prison.
When Mr Yates relented enough to allow his assistant to take what was, after all, no more than his due, three weeks had gone by since Kit’s last visit.
‘Let me come with you,’ Maggie pleaded. ‘I would wait outside, but at least I would be with you. I feel strong enough now. An’ just look at my hair! It’s growing fast!’ She pulled hard at a strand. ‘I’m getting fat on all that cocoa and the bits you bring home from the shop.’ She patted her flat stomach. ‘Fat and a lazy so-and-so, that’s me.’
She stood in front of him, laughing. ‘Do you know, Kit, I’ve never been as idle in the whole of my life. If the weather turns warm I’ll be taking a chair outside and sitting on the flags with Clara and her mother.’
Kit smiled, adoring her, knowing that his Maggie would never do that. She was too ladylike to sit out at the front, and his mother had been just the same. In some ways Maggie reminded him of the way his mother had been a long time ago.
His mother had devoured the newspapers, every single word, and her movements had been quick and certain like Maggie’s.
He watched her as she bustled about the room, laying a white cloth over the red chenille on the table, setting out knives and forks, her cheeks pink from the oven.
Aye, she was a grand little wife, and he wasn’t going to have her upset by going with him this afternoon. He wasn’t going to have her upset by anything, not if he, Kit Carmichael, could help it. . . .
Three hours later, Kit walked back down Foundry Street, a scarf held over his face, praying he could get into the house without being seen. Hoping he could clean himself up a bit before Maggie saw him.
They had tried to make him say he would stop the visits, but he could never say that. How could he when the emaciated, desperate, vicious little creature who had rushed at him, raking her nails down his cheeks, biting, mouthing obscenities, had once been his mother. So caring that she would take him into her own bed, soothing him with whispered words of love when he had the toothache bad?
But it was no use. Maggie was there even as he put his hand on the latch, drawing him inside with a smothered exclamation of horror.
‘She did not know what she was doing,’ he kept saying, as she bathed the long weals with water, dabbing at them gently. ‘They told me she had been quieter for a while, that she had been eating better, and so they stopped giving her the dope for a while.’
Maggie winced as she bathed a nostril that looked as if it had been half torn away.
‘You look as if you’ve been attacked by a wild animal,’ she whispered, horrified, shuddering at the clear marking of teeth bites at the side of his neck. ‘Maybe she is not as insane as they think? Maybe she has found out somehow that you have married me?’
‘How could she do that, love?’
Maggie laid the damp cloth tenderly over a deep scratch. ‘I don’t know, but they say there’s none as astute as the daft.’
Kit bit his lip. ‘Sometimes I blame myself for her being in there. Perhaps I should have . . .’
Maggie suddenly exploded. Throwing the cloth down into the bowl of warm water, so that it splashed over the side, she said in her clear voice:
‘That is rubbish, Kit! As far as your mother is concerned you have done nothing to reproach yourself for. Nothing!’
Making a mistake, turning his swollen face towards her, Kit tried to explain.
‘But I have, love, don’t you see? Many a night, without you knowing it, I’ve laid awake going over what happened that night.’ He tried to find the right words. . . . ‘To begin with, I was so upset when Arnie came round, I left her all alone in the house, with hardly a proper explanation as to how long I would be.’ He put up a hand to his cheek and, wincing, took it quickly away. ‘I was that upset, you see.’
‘Go on.’ Maggie’s voice was ominously quiet.
‘Then you walked in, hours later. Soaked to the skin and ill. But it must have frightened the life out of her, seeing you. As far as she knew, you had come to torment her.’
Now Maggie’s hands were on her hips. ‘Torment her?’
‘Aye, it wouldn’t have been the first time. There was a girl once, a long time ago, a rather forward sort of girl, and she stopped my mother on her way to the butcher’s, and said some awful things. Dreadful, hurting things. My mother had a terrible attack that night.’
Maggie walked over to the fire, bent down and picked up the poker, and found to her surprise that her hand was actually trembling. She dropped it into the hearth with a clatter.
‘True things, I suspect, Kit. True, just the same.’
His swollen mouth dropped open into a wide O of amazement.
‘What did you say?’
Maggie lifted her head. ‘I suspect that girl said a few of the things I should have had the courage to say to you long ago, Kit. Listen to me. . . . Your mother tried to kill me that night. She was out of her m
ind with fear and jealousy because she thought I was going to take her precious son away from her. She wasn’t daft enough or ill enough not to know what to do, was she? If you had not come in when you did I would have died, you’ve told me that yourself. And she would have won.’
Maggie started to pace up and down, almost beside herself with anger and frustration.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Kit Carmichael. I am sick and tired of listening to stories about how wonderful your mother was, how self-sacrificing, how good. How she struggled to make ends meet. Wouldn’t any mother do that for her child? Yes, she would, but she would never leave that child her slave for the rest of his life. She would do all that for nothing. Nothing. Expecting nothing in return, not even love if it wasn’t freely given!’
Kit shifted uncomfortably in his chair, the blood oozing from his nostril again. So overcome with shock to hear her talk like that he let the blood trickle over his chin without raising a hand to mop it away.
Illogically the sight infuriated Maggie even more.
‘You know something? You’ve told me how inconsiderate your father was. How he drank and went with other women; how he used to recite in pubs, and how he went off with a loose woman in the end?’
She gave a fierce little nod of the head. ‘Has it ever once occurred to you, that between you, you and your mother emasculated him so much that he had to get away or be diminished?’
‘He was a bad sort, Maggie. A real bad penny.’
So worked up that tears of frustration filled her eyes, Maggie stamped her foot.
‘Well, it may surprise you to know that from the things I’ve heard about your father, I’ve decided I would have liked him. Yes, liked him, Kit. An’ admired him an’ all. An’ I hope he spent years and years making passionate love to his lady friend. I hope she had bright red hair, and wore green corsets just to cheer him up, an’ I hope they laughed and kissed so that he soon forgot the domineering old cow he’d had for a wife! That’s what I hope, Kit Carmichael!’
There was silence for a long moment, then Kit shook his head at her in genuine and honest bewilderment.
‘You don’t mean any of that now, Maggie. It’s upset you seeing me like this. It shows you’re nearly better. . . . My mother always used to say that when . . .’
The bowl of water was on the table one minute and in Maggie’s hand the next. Then the water was sloshing over Kit’s head, running down his scratched face, dripping in rivulets down the towel she had placed with such concern round his neck not ten minutes before.
She stared at his astonished face, at his mouth, wide open like a fish gasping for air. But her anger was not ready to evaporate, not quite yet.
‘If I hear once more what your flamin’ mother used to say . . . if just once more you try to praise her to me after what she tried to do . . . the next time you’ll get the bowl as well!’
Leaving Kit dripping, but with her own dignity intact, Maggie ran upstairs to sit on the edge of the bed, clenching and unclenching her hands, far too upset to cry. When Kit followed her upstairs, leaving the upturned bowl and the pool of water untouched on the floor, there was a new and unexpected urgency in the way he took her in his arms.
‘Don’t ever shout at me like that again,’ he said, laying his swollen cheek against her own. ‘I won’t go and see my mother again if that is what you want.’
‘It isn’t what I want,’ Maggie said wearily, but now, replacing her spent anger, was a languid tenderness, a floating weariness so filling her with pleasure she lay back and closed her eyes.
‘Take my dress off for me, Kit,’ she whispered, and his hands undid the buttons neatly, slid the dress from her shoulders, held it as she kicked her legs free of it.
‘Now my bodice,’ she said, and he started on the smaller buttons, feeling the silkiness of her warm flesh against his fingers.
‘I love only you, little sweetheart, you know that. You must know that,’ he told her.
‘Kiss me here!’ Maggie whispered, throwing her head back and pressing his curly head down on to her breasts. ‘Kiss me here, please.’
And now as his lips caressed her nipples with an exploratory circling movement, the aching weariness spread to her stomach, to her thighs, so that with a fiercely desperate longing she pulled him over so that he lay on top of her. Then she tangled her fingers in his hair and murmured brokenly that she was sorry, that she was truly sorry. . . .
Almost, but not quite, he stopped what he was doing by repeatedly asking her if he was hurting her. Whispering he would stop if he was.
And hearing the apology in his voice, sensing the reluctance in his fumbling movements, Maggie held him tightly, willing him to forget himself and take her properly. Telling him to hurt her, pleading with him silently to assert his manhood, to stop, even in the act of making love, being so . . . maddeningly considerate.
When it was over, and he rolled away from her, still whispering shamed apologies, Maggie closed her ears to him and curled herself up into a ball. His hot face pressed into her neck as he slept, and she tried to remember, to recapture the floating quiet, the gentle feeling of tenderness she had felt for Joe when their love-making had ended. He too had slept, but that was the time she had held his dark head close to her breasts as a languid sweetness flowed through her.
This time she felt unclean, God forgive her. This time she wanted to slide away from him and wash herself all over at the wash-stand in the corner of the room.
9
WHEN MAGGIE TOLD Kit she was sure, quite sure that she was going to have a baby, it put, as he said straight away, a stop to a lot of things.
It put a stop to her going back to the mill as she had been determined to do, and it put a stop to lifting anything heavier than a saucepan – at least when he was around to see.
And it stopped his sporadic attempts to make love to her.
Three or four times, since the row they had had about his mother, since her frustrated rage had forced him to lose control, he had made a valiant attempt, but his heart was not in it.
There was too much of the role of aggressor in the act for him to enjoy it, and the fumbling flabbiness of the part of him that should have been hard and erect, made Maggie imagine that the first time had been a figment of her imagination.
Yet somehow she had conceived, and Kit was showing almost childlike joy in the prospect of being a father. He worked even longer hours, for sometimes as little as an extra shilling in his wages, and his Wednesday afternoon visits to his mother were few and far between now that she no longer recognized him.
When she died, half-way through Maggie’s pregnancy, his sadness was tinged with relief, and he told himself that she was better off, that it was a merciful release, repeating to himself the trite phrases trotted out by the Chapel members who remembered her as she used to be.
Considerate and kind as ever, he was careful not to grieve openly in front of his wife, even though she held him in her arms and comforted him. Not because the old woman had died – she was not such a hypocrite as that – but because if Kit was sad then she was sad also.
Yet it seemed to her that old Mrs Carmichael was still there, influencing her son from beyond the grave, Maggie thought one night as Kit held her close to him in bed. He had formed the habit of burrowing his head between the soft curves of her breasts, kissing each one in turn, gently caressing with his hands, groaning with pleasure, but making no attempt to carry his love-making any further.
So Maggie held him, telling herself that as usual, Kit was being his over-considerate self. She held him close, stroking his hair, totally unaware that he was reliving the times his mother had taken him into her bed as a small boy to relieve the stabbing pain of toothache.
‘Mother . . .’ he whispered to himself.
‘Maggîe . . .’ he sighed aloud.
Three more letters came with the London postmark before Maggie’s baby was born, and Kit destroyed each one of them. He burnt them without guilt in the fire at the back o
f the shop, and when they stopped coming he rejoiced.
‘I’ve done the right thing, the only thing. No good upsetting her while she’s like she is,’ he muttered.
So fascinated was he by all the medical details of her pregnancy that he would kneel down on the rag rug, and lay his head against her stomach as she sat by the fire.
‘I can feel it kicking!’ he would say.
‘The very minute you start in labour you must send to the shop for me,’ he told her over and over again. ‘I want to be there to look after you before the midwife comes. Think on and don’t forget then.’
Maggie promised, but when, on a cold morning, with the wind rattling the frames of the sash windows till she thought they would drop out, her first pains began, the first thing she wanted was for Kit to be gone from the house. She managed somehow to keep her expression calm when the dragging sensation in her back made her want to moan. She prayed for it to be time for him to go downstairs and light the fire, and when he brought the usual cup of tea upstairs she took it from him and smiled.
‘You had a bad night, didn’t you, love?’ he said, his face anxious and worried.
‘The wind kept me awake,’ she told him.
When he had gone she got out of bed, pulled a shawl round her shoulders and going downstairs knocked on the wall for Clara.
‘It’ll be a long time yet,’ Clara said with the wisdom of a woman, with the know-all of a woman who had never given birth to a child.
‘It won’t.’ Maggie shook her head, holding on to a corner of the table, her face draining of colour. ‘I’ve been at it a long time.’
‘And Kit’s gone and left you to go to the shop?’ Clara’s eye shot straight down into its socket. ‘That doesn’t sound like him. You’d have thought it was him having the baby the way he’s been carrying on.’
‘I didn’t tell him. I don’t want fussing.’ Maggie opened the bottom drawer of the chest and took out a pile of baby clothes, setting them out on the fireguard to air. ‘And I don’t want the midwife yet either. All I want at the moment is a nice cup of tea, Clara.’