Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  ‘He would only have been in the way,’ she told Clara’s mother three hours later in the little front bedroom, clenching her teeth as she pulled hard on a roller towel fastened to the bottom of the bed.

  ‘No, he’s done his bit, and anyway it’s no place for a man,’ Mrs Hobkirk agreed, wiping the sweat from Maggie’s forehead then going to sit by the fire.

  The fire had been lit in the tiny grate in honour of the occasion, a smouldering fire that did little else but belch clouds of smoke into the room.

  ‘You’re going on nicely, love,’ Mrs Hobkirk told Maggie from time to time. ‘It’s with being country bred like as not.’

  Maggie caught her breath as pain gripped, and clamped her teeth down on her bottom lip to stop herself from crying out.

  What she could not accept, what she must not accept, was that the other baby, Joe’s baby, that half-formed embryo, had meant more to her than this full-term one did. Then, that awful time, she had been alone, all alone, not surrounded by attention and care, with the baby’s things airing downstairs and a binder all ready to be wrapped round her stomach once the baby was born.

  This baby had everything, and Joe’s baby, the little one that had never had a chance, had had nothing. She drew up her legs and whimpered as another pain caught her unawares.

  ‘I think it’s time to send for the nurse,’ she said quietly, ‘and then perhaps Arnie could go and tell Kit. He’ll never forgive me if it’s all over when he comes home.’

  ‘I was a full two days with our Clara, then it had to be the forceps,’ Mrs Hobkirk said, but when Nurse O’Mara came into the house, taking charge even before she had climbed the stairs, she was able to tell Maggie that her baby had black hair.

  ‘You left it long enough,’ she scolded Mrs Hobkirk, then she turned her attention to Maggie.

  ‘Right, love. Hang on to my pinny if you want to. Come on now! Right! That’s a good girl!’

  And as Kit opened the front door, the first real sound that Maggie had uttered, froze him to the spot with terror.

  ‘How long has she been like that?’ he demanded, glaring at Clara who was taking the kettle from the trivet, and starting with it for the stairs.

  ‘Give that to me,’ he ordered, his manners forgotten completely.

  He had just reached the tiny landing when he heard the baby cry, a full-blown howl of outraged fury. Stopping transfixed in the doorway, the kettle still miraculously in his hand, he saw the nurse holding his daughter by the ankles and giving her a resounding slap between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Get that man out of here!’

  Nurse O’Mara’s voice had the authority of a woman doing a woman’s job, and Clara’s mother, enjoying every minute, walked over to Kit, took the kettle from him with one hand, and with the other firmly closed the door in his face.

  ‘How dare he!’ Nurse O’Mara said, handing over the baby, and bending over the bed again. ‘In all me born days that’s the first man, not counting the doctor, who has ever set a foot in his wife’s room before I’ve got her all tidied up like. Whatever is the world coming to?’

  ‘Is the baby perfect?’ Maggie’s voice whispered from the rumpled bed.

  ‘A fine girl, love,’ the nurse said. ‘Now just do as I tell you, and then you can see for yourself.’

  ‘It wasn’t all that bad,’ Maggie said, lifting both arms above her head only to have them smartly pulled down by the nurse.

  ‘No raising your arms my goodness me,’ she said, reaching for the pile of newspapers at the foot of the bed. ‘If all my mothers had an easy time as you’ve had, love, there’d be nothing for me to do. May you go on and have a dozen if they all come as easy as this one.’

  ‘Catholic,’ Mrs Hobkirk said with a sniff when the nurse had gone downstairs with the baby in her arms, bound and swaddled so tightly her tiny face had turned purple. ‘A dozen indeed! They’d like that just so they can take us over. I’ve never had a good word for the Pope ever since that Bernadette Cleary from the top house used to cross herself every time she saw our Clara.’

  Maggie raised heavy eyelids in silent enquiry.

  ‘Because of her eye,’ Mrs Hobkirk explained, tucking the bedclothes in so firmly that Maggie feared her ankles would never revert to their normal position again. ‘Superstitious rubbish, that’s all their religion is.’

  ‘It’s a girl, Mr Carmichael,’ Nurse O’Mara said, standing before Kit and showing him the baby. ‘A bonny little girl. Small to be sure, but with a pair of lungs on her like the six o’clock hooter.’

  Kit looked at the tiny squashed face, at the blood-red pressure marks on the snub nose, at the forehead creased into lines of anxiety. Tears gathered in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. All along he had been convinced that his Maggie would have a girl. He had seen himself walking up the street with a bouncy little girl holding on to his hand, staring up at him in adoration.

  Kit didn’t like little boys. The boys who played out in the street round the lamp standards were dirty and noisy, and often shouted rude things after him. They had black fingernails and permanent bruises on their knees and they played all the rough and tumble games he had never wanted to play.

  ‘When can I see my wife?’

  His tone was suitably humble and Nurse O’Mara, knowing she had asserted her authority and won, said he could go up straight away.

  ‘We will call her Rose, because that is what she is, a perfect pink beautiful rose.’ He looked at his wife and his daughter with the expression of a man who has just seen a miracle, and Maggie looked down at the tiny face, at the twitching eyelids and the furiously sucking lower lip.

  There was nothing rose-like about this baby who stared cross-eyed up at her with the picking glance of the dead and buried Mrs Carmichael.

  ‘She’s like your mother,’ she said, then closed her eyes before she could see the pleasure on Kit’s happy face.

  10

  WHEN THE BABY was almost four months old, the annual fair came to the town, and Maggie, on the evening of Kit’s Wednesday off, suggested that they took the sleeping baby next door and then walked down to the market-place.

  ‘Fairs are filthy places, full of gyppos,’ Kit said, busy with the pipe he had taken to smoking, striking one match after another instead of using the tapers Maggie had placed in a jar in the hearth.

  ‘Kit Carmichael,’ she said, standing before him with her head on one side, and her eyes bird-bright. ‘If I do not get out of this house I will die of boredom. No, I won’t. I will run round this room pulling the pictures down from the walls. I will take the pots from the dresser and smash them one by one on the floor, and I will jump on the table and do a clog-dance in my bare feet. I will!’

  She plumped herself down on his knees, setting the rocking chair into motion, leaning back, the narrow band round the neck of her dress unbuttoned to reveal the line of her throat, and the soft swell of her breasts.

  ‘Kit, oh, Kit, do you never want to burst out of yourself and do something mad? Anything? Just to relieve your feelings?’

  ‘Not really,’ Kit said honestly.

  He glanced down at her with affection, and thought what a child she was. In spite of her baby daughter asleep in her cradle upstairs, in spite of her growing hair pinned up into the semblance of a tiny bun with little tendrils escaping from it. As unlike most of the women who came into the shop as chalk from cheese.

  Drabs most of them, with shawls round their heads and clogs on their feet, their babies fed on condensed milk at two tins for threepence-halfpenny. Terrible managers of money, unlike his Maggie who could make fourpence do the work of a shilling, and then have something left over.

  He bent his head, and holding his pipe well away, kissed her gently at the side of her mouth.

  ‘Kiss me properly!’ Maggie gripped him fiercely to her. ‘Pretend I am a beautiful woman with long red hair.’ She pulled at a strand of her shortened hair and found that it just reached her mouth. ‘This is the way I measure it every day. Look, Kit,
soon it will reach my right ear and then soon I will be able to put it up into a proper bun, not a little scraggy thing like a hen’s backside.’

  He pretended to be shocked and failed.

  ‘What if Clara comes in?’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘She’s in before you can blink.’

  ‘She always calls out first,’ Maggie reminded him. ‘Yoo-hoo!’ she called, in such an exact imitation of Clara’s loud and ringing voice that Kit laughed in spite of himself.

  Maggie got up from his knee, unkissed and restless.

  ‘I don’t like the way Clara comes in like that,’ she confessed. ‘I never have, but she has been so kind to me I would not dream of saying anything. Once I even tried putting the bolt on the front door, but she just came round the back.

  ‘“What have you locked the door for? You been up to summat I don’t know about?” she asked me, straight out. Kit. Let’s go to the fair. Just to look, then?’

  Knowing when he was beaten, Kit knocked out his pipe and went to fetch his jacket.

  ‘All right then, Maggie, but not for long now. Bring the baby down and we’ll go to the fair.’

  Then, as he was enveloped in a bear-hug that almost knocked him off his feet, he smiled.

  ‘I don’t know about you wanting to put your hair up. It strikes me the way you behave it would suit you better floating down your back. Strikes me you’re not old enough to behave like a married lady. . . .’

  There was no need to risk waking the baby to take her in next door, because Clara offered at once to come in and sit.

  ‘Arnie’s gone out again,’ she grumbled. ‘So I might as well sit in your house as in me own. He’s gone up to the Mother Redcap, to play dominoes he says, but he’ll come back smelling like a brewery and swear he’s had nowt but a pint of ale. I’d think he’d got himself another woman if I thought he had it in him.’

  ‘Poor Clara,’ Maggie said, as with her arm linked into Kit’s, they set off for the market-place.

  It was a warm evening, an evening anticipatory with the soft warmth of the summer yet to come. Maggie wore the hat with the daisies sewn back on to the wide brim, her navy-blue coat, and her much darned gloves buttoned neatly into place. Her eyes sparkled with excitement, and when they saw the fair, lit to splendour by naptha-lights, and when they passed the caravans and the weather-stained tents, she gripped Kit’s arm even more tightly.

  ‘Once, when I was a little girl, my father took me to a fair, and one of the fair-ground men took us inside his caravan, and I have never forgotten it. There were white muslin curtains with pink bows, and the beds were like berths on a ship.’

  Then as the thought of ships came into her mind, her face was still, all the vivacity gone from it. ‘Do you know, Kit, there are whole days now when I never even think about my brothers. I don’t want to forget them, but I will, I know.’ She looked up at him earnestly. ‘Oh, Kit, doesn’t it make you think that we owe it to ourselves to make the most of every day, of every minute, because we never know what is going to happen, do we?’

  Used to her rapid change of mood and unable to follow her swift and emotional reasoning most of the time, Kit patted the hand that lay on his arm.

  ‘What a life for the fair people,’ he said, wishing he was back home already. ‘Packing all night, then moving on to another town. Collecting the horses from the inns they’ve been stabled at, and moving on. Not putting down roots, like us.’ He smiled at his wife’s glowing face. ‘Not lucky like us.’

  He held even more tightly to Maggie’s arm, afraid to let her move away from his side by as much as an inch. Convinced that all the riff-raff of the town and the surrounding countryside were there that evening at the fair. Men with weasel faces, caps pulled down over shifty eyes, factory girls with their high shrill laughter as they moved from one side-show to another, linking arms. Fathers, who should have known better, in his opinion, with small boys riding piggy-back, the night women with raddled faces, and over there by the Bioscope, a woman known as the town’s oldest whore, with only half a nose.

  Maggie was pulling him towards a pea-boiling cart, the steam rising from its cauldron, then on to a hot-potato cart, the coals glowing red and the box of salt suspended from the side.

  ‘Please, Kit,’ she pleaded, and much against his better judgement, Kit handed over a penny and received in a double fold of newspaper, six small potatoes, roasted in their skins.

  Then, as a father would indulge a beloved child, he watched as his wife unbuttoned her gloves, handed them over to him for safe keeping, and smiling broadly at the man in charge of the cart, put her hand into the salt-box and sprinkled the potatoes carefully, one by one.

  ‘Oh!’ she fanned her mouth with a hand. ‘They’re red-hot, but you don’t know what you are missing, Kit.’

  Just to please her, he took one, averting his eyes from the potato man’s dirty hands, their nails broken and black-rimmed. His fastidious nature winced at the indignity, and what his mother would have called the ‘commonness’ of it all.

  Never taking his eyes from Maggie’s straight little back, he followed her reluctantly to a side-show where the dancing ladies shook their tambourines and wiggled their hips in time to tinny music from the hurdy-gurdy.

  There was a man, a young, bold-looking man with a shock of jet-black hair, and a face as brown as a hazel-nut, standing on the makeshift platform, calling out to the crowd.

  ‘Feast your eyes, ladies and gentlemen!’ he shouted. ‘What you are seeing now is nothing to what you will see if you come inside the tent. Straight from a London music-hall every man Jack of ’em. Chorus girls, ladies and gentlemen, in between their London engagements, and here to delight you with their abandoned dancing!’ He winked at Maggie. ‘Talk about the Can-Can. This little lot make the Can-Can seem like a ruddy minuet done in their sleep.’ Unable to take her eyes off him, and seeing Joe Barton in the tilt of the black head, the boldness of the laughing eyes, Maggie pulled at Kit’s sleeve.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ she said, a hot potato half-way to her mouth.

  Kit took her arm and tried to pull her away, but she stood firm.

  ‘There aren’t any ladies going in,’ he pointed out, trying not to look at a blown-up picture of a girl lifting her skirts to show a wide expanse of bare leg encircled by a frilly garter.

  ‘I’ve heard they don’t wear no bloomers,’ a man’s voice said into a sudden silence, and the dark young man threw back his head, showing a strong line of throat as he burst into uninhibited laughter.

  ‘Come in and see for yourself, mister,’ he called out.

  Although Maggie had given no sign of having heard, Kit saw that she had turned scarlet, and made no protest when he led her away.

  ‘They’re not like the Romanies who used to come round to the house selling pegs,’ she conceded, and Kit, taking advantage of her hesitation, handed her his clean handkerchief to wipe her hands, then the gloves, pulling her into the shadow of a tent as he helped her to button them on again.

  ‘I told you you wouldn’t like it, love,’ he said.

  She lifted her head and stared straight into his eyes.

  ‘I could like it,’ she flared, then biting her lips, was silent again.

  What she had almost said was: ‘I could have liked it if you had not been here spoiling it all for me.’

  For a long moment they stood together, Kit miserably uncomfortable in surroundings he hated and mistrusted, and Maggie restlessly defiant, craving something she could not put a name to. Something far more than the loud blaring music, the happy, pushing crowd, the vulgarity of it all.

  ‘Go home!’ she wanted to shout at Kit. ‘Leave me to be myself again! To be young again. To be winked at by the man with black hair who reminded me of Joe, to eat hot peas doused in vinegar, and brandysnaps straight from the bag.’ She clasped her gloved hands together, the music filling her senses, almost as if it were a part of her.

  ‘Let’s go on the horses, Kit . . . oh, please. I haven’t been on a roundabout sin
ce I can’t remember.’

  ‘It’s coming on to rain,’ Kit said, presenting his face with relief to the sky. ‘I said it would.’

  Even the fair people raced for shelter as the cloudburst caught them unawares, and within minutes the whole glittering display of stalls looked like some dingy squalid ruin, with tent flaps whipping back against the canvas in the strong wind. Girls squealed as their boots slithered and slipped over the greasy cobblestones.

  Quickly Kit, with his arm protectively round Maggie, guided her across the road flanking the ground, and pulled her into the shelter of a wooden booth, specially set up for the three days of the fair.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ Maggie said, clinging on to his arm with one hand and hanging on to her hat with the other.

  ‘Oh, Kit, it’s not a public house. It’s only a place set up just for the fair, and anyway, I haven’t signed the Pledge, remember?’

  ‘It’s not right,’ Kit kept saying, as sitting opposite to his wife round an upturned barrel, he watched her sipping a glass of ale, her eyes blazing with excitement, missing nothing as she watched the people crowding in out of the rain, the men shaking the raindrops from their caps, and calling out to each other.

  ‘To think all this is going on while I sit at home with my sewing round the fire!’ she marvelled.

  ‘This place only has a three-day licence,’ Kit reminded her, his face registering a mixture of pride in the attention she was attracting, and apprehension at what she might do next.

  ‘I know. I know, Kit. But look over there. That little man hardly able to stand up is one of the door-keepers at the Teetotal Mission! It is him, it is, and oh, Kit, he’s as drunk as a lord. Don’t you think that’s funny?’

  ‘No,’ Kit said, jumping up with dismay as the man, an old soldier, and a supposedly reformed character, started to weave his unsteady way towards them. ‘Come on, we’re going home,’ he said.

  The rain had stopped as quickly as it had started, and the stall-holders were taking the covers off the trays of ginger-bread, the Eccles cakes, the nuts and the brandysnaps.