by Marie Joseph
‘Let’s buy some and take them home for Clara,’ Maggie said.
But Kit had had enough.
‘We’re going home,’ he repeated stubbornly. ‘How you could think that old man in there was funny, I don’t know. He was maudlin and slavvery, and he reminded me of the way my father used to look when he had been drinking. Leering and then being sick over everything, and my mother having to mop up after him. You don’t know what it was like, or what we had to suffer because he went in places like that!’
Maggie stared at him in astonishment.
‘But we weren’t going to get drunk, Kit. Just because you don’t approve of something doesn’t mean you have to run away from it.’ She tripped and would have fallen but for his steadying hand.
‘Not so quickly, Kit. I can’t keep up.’
‘That man made me feel sick,’ Kit said.
Maggie stared at him. ‘Kit, what’s wrong? How do we know what that poor old man went through when he was serving his time in the army? He’s old enough to have fought in the Crimean War. How do we know that just for once he wanted to sing and shout and pretend he wasn’t cold and alone, with nobody left to care for him?’
‘You just don’t know what you are talking about,’ Kit said.
He was walking along with his head bent as if the rain was still beating down. ‘And look at you, Maggie Carmichael. Sitting there amongst them. Enjoying yourself!’
Maggie stopped dead so that he had to turn and face her. In her anger she slipped into dialect.
‘Aye. Enjoying meself, Kit. Just for once enjoying meself.’ She stamped her foot. ‘I know what you would like to do.’
‘And what is that?’
‘Wrap me up in cotton-wool, and shut me up in the house like a prisoner. You don’t even like me going to the market. You’d like me to be like me father, sitting by the fire, and only smelling the fresh air when I put me nose outside the back door. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Don’t talk daft.’
‘You’re the one what’s daft, not me,’ Maggie answered childishly, hearing herself being childish, and not being able to stop herself.
Now the sounds of the fairground were receding, and Maggie turned her head once or twice, but in silence, with his hand firmly on her arm, Kit urged her along.
His sense of what was right and proper kept him talking to Clara after Maggie had rushed upstairs to the bedroom.
‘Had a few words, have you?’
Kit nodded miserably, knowing there was no point in taking offence at Clara when none was meant.
She came over to where he sat slumped in his chair and patted his shoulder.
‘Aye, well, she’s young, Mr Carmichael, and she’s had a rough time taken all in all. She’s different, tha knows.’ Clara touched the side of her head with a stubby finger. ‘Plenty up there, tha knows.’
Kit raised his head and stared at Clara’s bland uninteresting face set above her thick neck, and saw the compassion in her sliding eye.
‘I can’t seem to follow what she’s getting at sometimes, Mrs Preston,’ he confided.
Clara sniffed. ‘If she wants to go back in the mill I’d allus have the baby to mind. We’d manage her between us, me mother and me.’
Kit shook his head. ‘There’s no need for that, Mrs Preston. I’m not having my wife going out to work, not as long as I can provide.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Clara said, huffed, but determined not to show it.
When Kit went into the bedroom Maggie was undressed and sitting up in bed with a grey-fringed shawl round her shoulders, feeding the baby.
He hovered in the doorway, uncertain what to say or do next, getting no lead from his wife, her face hidden by the fall of brown hair, long enough now to cover her eyes.
‘I’ll take the nappy downstairs and put it on soak, and fetch your cocoa,’ he said in a humble tone.
‘Thank you,’ Maggie said. ‘You are very kind.’
The completely detached tone of her voice hurt him so much that he went to sit by her on the bed, his weight causing the mattress to sag down as usual. He stared at her in misery, biting his lip.
It was no good, he could not bear it when she was funny with him, like this. He had not been able to bear it when his mother had been cross with him either. It left him stranded and unsure of himself, unsure of anything.
‘Are you not speaking to me?’ he asked, putting out a hand towards her. ‘Are we not friends, then?’
Maggie sighed and took her time about prizing the fiercely sucking mouth from her breast. The blue veins contrasted with the whiteness of her skin, and in spite of his misery Kit felt the stirrings of a kind of desire. He knew a sudden sharp jealousy, a hatred almost for the baby, its head lolling back on a neck that appeared to be broken, milk dribbling down its rounded chin.
‘All right then, I’ll tell you,’ he said, his voice sounding alien even to his own ears.
‘Tell me what?’ Maggie said with studied indifference, moving the baby over to the other side.
‘I’ll tell you why I wanted you home, and quick. Because I saw that gyppo looking at you and winking at you. Him shouting the odds about those girls being chorus girls and coming from London.’ He snorted with disgust. ‘London! That lot have never been no further than Todmorden. Dirty fast little pieces, and as for him, I saw him staring at you with his eyes standing out like chapel hat-pegs, an’ I saw you smile at him, and wink back. So don’t deny it. An’ another thing. He reminded you of someone, another one with a cheeky grin. You think I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t. You think I’m daft, but I’m not. I have feelings like anybody else.’
‘Oh, Kit. . . .’ Maggie smoothed her daughter’s round head, her hand moving in a gentle circular movement that quickened Kit’s heart-beats. ‘That boy reminded me of when I was a little girl and the Romanies used to camp on the edge of the wood.’ She refused to meet his eyes lest he saw that she was lying. ‘I remembered a young man just like him who rode with his family on a cart pulled by a painfully thin donkey. I was fetching the milk and he winked at me, and when I tried to wink back he burst out laughing.’ She lifted the baby and held her over a shoulder. ‘There now, she’s drunk herself to sleep.
‘Never be jealous, Kit,’ she whispered later, ‘but I like it when you are. I do.’ She wound her arms round his neck, and bewildered by the frenzy of her passion, half aware that even as he struggled to comply, she was thinking of the man at the fair, Kit moved away from her as soon as it was over.
He didn’t want to look at his wife, because he did not like what he saw. This was not the young girl with daisies on her hat, and the demure expression that could change in a flash to twinkling mischief. This was a flushed and beautiful woman, eyelids heavy over dream-filled slumbering eyes.
‘You won’t have another baby on account of you’re feeding,’ he muttered, backing away from the bed, and tripping over the worn oilcloth by the door. ‘But we’d best be careful . . . I’m not having you knocked up again, not just when you’re picking up.’ He rubbed his finger across his chin, wondering how he could put it best.
‘So I’ll go through into the back. The bed’s made up. It’s only fair . . . only fair.’
And as he slid between cold sheets in the single bed in the room where Thomas Craig had killed himself, he failed to hear his wife’s muffled sobs as she wept for a man she never thought to see again.
Only one letter came from Joe Barton during the next year, and Kit marked the envelope NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS, and posted it back into the letter-box.
Rose walked before she was one, but made no attempt at talking, and Maggie, exhausted by the tantrums of the little doll-like child who would throw herself on the floor, kicking and screaming if her will was denied, took her to the doctor to ask him if her daughter was tongue-tied.
‘She’ll be talking your heads off. You won’t be able to get a word in edgeways,’ the doctor reassured Maggie, smiling at her anxious concern.
‘Her father seems to
be able to understand the sounds she makes,’ Maggie told him, prizing a pencil from off the doctor’s desk out of Rose’s twitching fingers.
Darting a look of uncontrolled fury at her mother from beneath black eyebrows, Rose immediately flung herself backwards on to the doctor’s carpet, kicking her heels in noisy fury.
‘Sometimes I think the devil himself gets into her,’ Maggie apologized, scooping up her daughter and carrying her, still kicking, out of the surgery.
11
THE DEATH OF Queen Victoria in 1901 – t’owd Queen, as Kit’s customers called her, was commemorated by every column in the local paper being outlined with a thick black line.
‘Today,’ the paper’s readers were told, ‘the nation is mourning the loss of the best Sovereign in British History.’ They were also told that when the Queen came to the throne sixty-four years ago, her people were neither educated or free.
‘Aye,’ Kit said when Maggie pointed that bit out to him. ‘That’s true enough.’
Her answer was to raise her eyebrows in eloquent exasperation.
‘Kit Carmichael! When will you learn not to swallow every word you see in print? Do you really believe that the majority of the people in this town are both educated and free? What chance have most of your customers had to take advantage of what little knowledge they got from school when they go straight into the factory to work as unskilled labourers?’
She faced him squarely. Up on her soap-box, he thought with amusement, eyes flashing and determined chin jutting forward.
‘How much do you get for the hours you work in Mr Yates’s shop? A pound for six days a week from seven till sometimes eleven o’clock at night!’ Her fierce expression softened as she looked at him.
It wasn’t fair to shout at this mild and gentle man, whose voice was so rarely raised in anger that she had to laugh out loud when it was.
She sighed. It was just that it got her down sometimes thinking of that Mr Yates with his long face and a beard on him like a billy-goat, counting his takings in the upstairs room.
‘Most weeks, like last, we only took eight pounds,’ Kit reminded her, ‘and most of that in halfpennies and farthings. It’s a right run-down area, Maggie. Most of the men, even when they are in full-time work, don’t bring home more than fifteen shillings.’
‘And some of that gone in the pub on their way home of a Saturday dinner-time,’ she said, quick as a flash.
Kit sighed at her, loving her even as he sighed. His mother had been right when she had weighed up his future wife at that very first meeting round her sick bed.
‘A bonny lass, but too cheeky,’ she’d said, and yet, if she had still been alive, surely she would have had to agree that little Maggie Craig had made him a grand wife.
Not a needlewoman by nature or inclination, Maggie had borrowed a barrow from a man across the street, and trundled a second-hand sewing-machine home from the market. From then on she had made all their clothes, even his shirts, and even if they never seemed to fit properly round the neck, who was he to grumble?
She was so restless she had to be doing something, and if it had not been sewing for them and plain sewing for the neighbours, it might have been putting the child out to mind with Clara next door while she went back in the mill.
He had put his foot down about that, right from the beginning.
If only she didn’t have such radical ideas. Kit sighed again. He himself was a staunch Conservative, his principles being nurtured by the contempt his mother had passed on to him for the large community of Irish Catholics living in the area round the shop. They, almost to a man, supported the Liberals, whilst Maggie, refusing to conform as usual, supported a party of her own.
The ‘Underdogs’, Kit called them privately.
At the moment it was the poor bedraggled British Army fighting the Boers, staining, as she put it dramatically, the hills and plains of South Africa red with their flowing blood.
‘It is not a matter women should concern themselves with,’ Kit had said, shamed into remonstrating one summer evening when they came back from a meeting of the Chapel Elders.
To his horror his wife had stood up and asked in her clear cool voice if it was not a cause for the deepest concern that over sixty per cent of the recruits to the army from the north of England had been turned down because they were not physically fit?
‘Sixty per cent!’ she declared. ‘And what do they mean by physically fit but suffering from malnutrition? You should ask my husband here about the tramps who come into his shop of a night pleading for a penny, whilst there are those who can eat twenty-one courses at one meal. Boasting of it whilst their fellow-men die of hunger in the streets! A fine start to the twentieth century for a country that is supposed to be the finest in the world!’
‘Why do you bother yourself about things you can do nothing about?’ he asked her, puffing at his pipe, only to find it had gone out.
At once Maggie leaned forward, lighting a taper at the fire and passing it over to him, the wifely gesture giving him the courage to say what he had had a mind to say for a long time.
‘Maggie, lass. Why do you have to be at everybody’s beck and call in the street? Why is it they come for you when they can’t afford the doctor? We’ve got a child of our own,’ he went on, retiring behind a screen of smoke. ‘Running about as fit as a fiddle. But for how long? How long when you spent all one night last week sitting up with that little lad in the end house, knowing all the time he was dying of the cough?’
He was trying very hard to make her see, but without the sensitivity to choose the right words.
‘Surely you remember what happened with your own mother? She picked up the diphtheria from somebody else’s child and went on to die through it. My mother always used to say that charity began at home.’
Too late he knew he had gone too far. He wished with all his heart he could bite back what he had just said, and he knew too that to say he was sorry would only infuriate Maggie more.
Walking with her light step over to the dresser, she took down two pots for their nightly cocoa. Carefully she stirred sugar, cocoa and a drop of milk into each pot, mixing them to a smooth paste. Then she lifted the heavy black kettle from the fire, and filled them up to the brim. He waited, outwardly calm, knowing inwardly the explosion that must surely come.
‘No, I don’t forget my own mother, Kit Carmichael,’ she said, handing over his drink, ‘and by all that’s holy you don’t forget yours either, do you?’
Sitting down opposite to him Maggie curled her hands round the pot. ‘Though how can you be expected to forget yours when Rose is turning into the living spit? I’ll tell you something I’ve never said to you before, but sometimes when she looks at me it is as though your mother has come back in her. In fact if I were a fanciful sort of woman I’d say that was exactly what has happened. She’s only a bairn, but already she knows how to play me off against you, and you fall for it. Every time. I tell her she can’t have something; she runs straight to you and you give her what she wants . . . oh yes, you do.’
‘I don’t see all that much of her, not with the hours I work, do I, lass?’
Kit’s voice was mild. He knew, and secretly rejoiced in the fact that his little daughter was the image of his mother. Small-faced and gypsy dark, it was as though some mischievous plan had reproduced his mother in exact miniature. Like his mother, Rose was afraid of nothing, would stop at nothing to get her own way, and like his mother, bestowed on him an adoration it would have taken a stronger man to resist.
Maggie was banking up the fire for the night, taking it for granted that was her job, but he could see from her back that she was still angry.
‘I wish you wouldn’t encourage her to come into your bed, Kit. Now she’s in her own little bed she’s out and across the top of the stairs into your room before I can stop her.’ Maggie pushed her hair away from her fire-flushed face. ‘It’s not right a bairn sleeping with her father. It’s not healthy.’
‘I�
�m just going out to the back,’ Kit said, taking the easy way out as usual. ‘You go on up. I’ll see to the door and the fire-guard.’
Once again, by taking the line of least resistance, he had won. Maggie braided her hair in the front bedroom, still from force of habit tugging at it to make it grow. She noticed that even in her sleep Rose twitched and jerked, as if wondering what mischief she could get up to next. Holding the candle-flame well away, Maggie stared down at her small daughter.
Could people come back from the grave to torment the living? Was the dead Mrs Carmichael trying to punish her for daring to marry her beloved son? Frustrated once in her attempt to kill Maggie, was she now here again, living with them in the house, making trouble between them the way children could alienate husband and wife?
Blowing out the candle Maggie got into bed, heard Kit come upstairs with his light tread, and heard him go into the room that had been her father’s. She heard one boot drop to the floor, then the other, heard the springs of the bed creak as he got into bed, and knew that for the first time since their wedding day he was going to sleep without having said goodnight.
A funny old marriage theirs was turning out to be. Wife in one room, and husband in the other. Their child, and what promised to be their only child, growing up disliking her own mother. Because it was true . . . God help her, but it was true.
Tears gathered in Maggie’s eyes to roll sideways into her hair and on to the pillow as she faced the truth. Always one for facing the truth she faced it now. The dislike between them, mother and child, was mutual. God forgive her, but it was. There were times when she understood how mothers, unable to stand the screaming tantrums, the whining defiance, landed out and half killed their own child.
She wondered how it would have been with the other one, the child who had died before it had had a chance to live: Joe’s child. But the thing was settled. No baby and no Joe, and she was wasting her time crying because crying never got nobody nowhere.