Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  But if he was going to die, then surely he should be thinking of someone, or something?

  Of Belle? Joe tried to bring her pale little face into his mind, seeing her as he had seen her last when she had almost pushed him through the door in case Mrs bloody Armitage came back.

  Of Maggie Craig?

  Of Maggie who had married someone else, and likely forgotten he ever existed?

  ‘Oh, Maggie! Maggie!’ Joe cried her name aloud over and over, because damn it, there had to be someone he could call on.

  ‘Bugger and sod everybody!’ he shouted as standing up he hurled his bomb in the vague direction of the pillbox.

  When his Lieutenant, holding his bayoneted rifle up against the backside of a petrified German, prodded his prisoner back in the direction of the dug-out, Joe was lying once again, face down in the evil-smelling mud.

  14

  THAT NIGHT MAGGIE dreamed of Joe. It was as though he was there, in a corner of the room, calling her name. Calling it angrily, not with love. Cursing her, Maggie thought, sitting up in bed, shivering, then lighting the candle and reaching for a book.

  Across the postage stamp of a landing, Kit slept the sleep of the physically tired, whilst at the other side of the plywood partition Rose coughed and turned, tossed and twitched the blankets over her, then pushed them back as if they were suffocating her with their weight.

  Maggie could hear the vague sounds telling her that Rose too was finding it hard to sleep, and she imagined her daughter lying with her black hair spread over the pillow, staring up into the darkness, thinking her private thoughts, dreaming her private dreams, as alienated from her mother as she had been as a child.

  The war would soon be over. All the signs were there, and then, please God, there would never be another . . . Maggie laid down her book, blew out the candle, and Joe was there again, back with the darkness, like a ghost refusing to go away.

  Maggie got out of bed, then padded silently to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Rose?’ she called softly. ‘I’m going down to make a pot of tea. Would you like a cup?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Rose’s voice sounded thick as if she had been crying. Maggie hesitated, a hand actually on the door knob, then fearing the inevitable rejection, she carried on downstairs, vaguely worried and disturbed.

  If Rose wanted to tell her what was bothering her then she would tell her or not tell her, all in her good time. And besides, Rose never cried. She sulked and winged; she complained and went through black periods of depression, but she never cried.

  Maggie sat in her chair by a fire that had almost died, a terrible weight of sadness in her heart, a sadness that she knew was only a small part of her daughter’s rejection of her.

  And the next day Rose got up heavy-eyed, went to the mill, came home for her dinner as usual, then without speaking to Maggie, went up to her room.

  Sitting on her bed she stared at the dividing partition until her eyes glazed over. She knew she should be shaping herself, but she also knew that by running like mad across the back, over the spare ground and the bridge, she could get there just in time.

  She sat there for another minute, then, as if a time spring had been released inside her, she flew downstairs, taking her coat from behind the back door, and saying briefly that it was time she was off.

  Clara was hanging her washing out on a line stretching from her own yard wall to a post set in the ground.

  ‘Let’s hope it keeps fine, Rose,’ she shouted, the timbre of her voice only fractionally reduced by the peg held firmly between her teeth. ‘I’ve fetched this lot in twice this morning.’

  Looping one end of a flannelette sheet over the line, she pegged it into scallops, giving the fresh wind a chance to billow it out.

  ‘Yes,’ Rose said, and ran on.

  ‘Yes’ was a useful word to bring out now and again. It did not matter whether she listened to what the other person was saying or not. Yes brooked no argument at the best of times. . . .

  Clara watched her go as she hooked a prop into a space between Arnie’s long underpants and her mother’s button-through flannel nightie. Even Rose’s hurrying back looked sly, she decided.

  ‘I would not trust that girl as far as I could throw her,’ she told her mother in ringing tones. ‘And that’s not far with this awful rheumatism in me shoulder.’

  ‘She’s a bad lot,’ Mrs Hobkirk agreed. ‘Going off to the pictures with that Mavis girl out of Henry Street, with muck on their faces. What can you expect?’

  ‘She’s learning dancing in the rooms over the Emporium. Half a crown for twelve lessons, paid in advance.’

  Clara walked over to the window, feeling cross for a reason she couldn’t fathom.

  ‘It’s time Rose Carmichael got herself one decent fella and settled down. The war started her off young with boys. She had too much freedom and too much money. There’s bad blood there. I’ve always said so. She’s even stopped going to Chapel, and Maggie doesn’t go as often as she used . . . Oh, heck, it’s started to flamin’ rain again.’

  After a week of living with a silent Rose who for some reason had stopped going dancing almost every night, Maggie felt the need to go to Chapel.

  Yet the minute the choir stood up to sing the anthem she decided that the choirmaster, beating time with his left hand, had a definite look of Joe Barton about him. There was something about the way his hair grew down into a point in the nape of his neck.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ she prayed, using the words she had been taught as a child. ‘Oh, Lord, I am sailing on the wide sea. Please guide my little boat for me.’

  It was strange though how just these past days Joe had been more in her thoughts than ever. Every other man she saw seemed to remind her of him.

  She had seen it in the milkman’s grin as he ladled the milk out of the churns on his cart. When the doctor’s man came for his weekly sixpence last Friday she had thought how his smile had the same teasing quality about it.

  Maggie opened her hymn book and sighed. She was tired, that was the explanation; she was doing too much sewing, taking too much on, and the mind played strange tricks when you were constantly tired.

  The voices of the congregation rose and swelled. No holding back when Methodists sang.

  ‘Once again, ’tis joyous May. Birds are carolling all day. . . .’

  But not round here they aren’t, Maggie thought, trying to remember the last time she had heard a bird sing.

  Then she sat down and closed her eyes as the minister folded his hands over the edge of the pulpit and said: ‘Let us pray.’

  Obediently Maggie bent her head, willing herself to concentrate, as speaking to God in his simple language, the new minister spoke straight from his heart. No set prayers, dulling the senses with their familiarity. Just a talk to God and his son Jesus, mentioning by name the sick members of the Chapel, thanking for blessings received, and conceding that blessings not received were all part of his perfect plan.

  There was a young-old man in the pew to the side of Maggie. When he got up to sing the last hymn she noticed the haggard stoop and the dull vulnerable expression she had seen on the faces of so many men back from the trenches.

  The minister himself had lost a fine boy, a young officer who used to stand with his mother in their pew, finding her place in the hymn book and smiling down at her. Maggie turned her head and saw her now, singing as if she meant every word. Blaming God for nothing.

  Clara and Arnie were waiting for her outside in the street, and Maggie hoped the surprise at seeing them out together did not show on her face.

  ‘I didn’t see you come in,’ she said.

  Clara nodded seriously. ‘No, we sat at the back because Arnie’s having trouble with his stomach rumbling.’

  Arnie looked affronted, but smiled at Maggie. ‘Rose not here tonight then?’

  Maggie fell into step beside Clara. ‘No, I think she was glad to stop in, she doesn’t look all that well. I’m a bit bothered about
her.’

  Clara, walking next to her husband, was being firmly nudged. He was telling her to keep her mouth shut, she knew, telling her not to interfere in matters that were none of her concern, but she wasn’t going to take any notice. Fiercely Clara nudged him back, almost knocking him off the pavement.

  She was going to speak her mind, and nobody was going to stop her, so after they turned into the long street of closed shops leading to Foundry Street, she did her sideways sniff before saying:

  ‘Did you know that your Rose went to Doctor Leyland’s surgery on Friday morning? Not to your own doctor’s surgery up Mercer Street. To Doctor Leyland’s where I go?’

  ‘I’ll walk on in front,’ Arnie said at once, almost breaking into a run.

  ‘He’s huffed because I’ve told you,’ Clara said, ‘but I think you ought to know.’

  ‘Rose is not a child,’ Maggie said slowly. ‘She can go to any doctor she chooses without telling me first.’ She felt a faint stab of fear. ‘She was sick last week, but she soon got over it.’

  ‘Sick first thing in the mornings?’ Clara persisted.

  Maggie stopped walking so abruptly that a man a few paces behind almost fell over her.

  She put a hand to her mouth in a small inadequate gesture of comfort, whilst little things, things she had not considered of importance, flooded her memory.

  And because Rose had always been secretive, her behaviour lately had meant no more than possibly the rejection by a friend, one of the many imagined slights Rose took so bitterly.

  Then Maggie remembered her suspicion that Rose had been crying to herself in the night.

  ‘Oh, God, dear God!’ Her eyes widened with shock. ‘I must have been blind. I never thought. . . well, how could I? Oh, Clara, it can’t be. She’s never kept a boy for long, you know what she’s like. Oh, no, we mustn’t jump to conclusions. We could be doing her a terrible injustice. She’s not that sort of girl. She isn’t!’

  Both Clara’s nostrils twitched in unison.

  ‘You’re far too trusting, Maggie. You should have seen her face when she saw me at the surgery. I’d gone for a bottle for Arnie’s stomach. Your Rose nearly died when she saw me.’

  They started to walk on.

  ‘She’d been in with the doctor a long time,’ Clara went on with grim persistence. ‘An’ when she came out her face was as white as bleached twill. She never even looked at me. Oh, yes, there’s summat up all right.’

  Maggie walked so quickly that Clara had to take little running steps to keep up with her. In Foundry Street two children played round a lamp-post, swinging from a piece of rope dangling from the short arm at the top as they made fruitless attempts to climb up it.

  Maggie turned to Clara. Somehow she had to get rid of her. Knowing Clara she would be likely to follow into the house, not wanting to miss the drama she sensed was about to be played out.

  ‘You did right to tell me. Thank you, Clara,’ Maggie said.

  But Clara had cottoned on to the fact that she wasn’t wanted, and anyway Maggie looked so small, so defeated, she almost wished she had kept her big mouth shut.

  ‘Ta-ra, then, love,’ she said, and before she had closed her own front door, Arnie was there, his usually passive expression contorted with anger.

  ‘You can’t let be, can you? That girl would have had to tell her mother all in her own good time, and how do you know you’re right anyroad? She could just be having a bilious attack or something like that.’

  ‘You don’t go to another doctor when your mother thinks you’re at work, and you don’t get bilious attacks with carrying on like Rose Carmichael’s been carrying on. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’

  Arnie looked at the thin greying hair, the sagging chin and the lines running from nose to chin on his wife’s flat face.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ he said.

  Ever since her early morning visit to Clara’s doctor, Rose had been numb with a terrible aching despair. It had been a long wait, standing there across the street waiting for the door of the surgery to open. Even when she had been let in, there had been another long wait while the benches filled up with coughing people, clutching empty medicine bottles and trying not to look at each other, but keeping a silent count in order not to miss their turn.

  For over two long months now she had kept the awful fear to herself, persuading herself that it was worry, reminding herself that the boy she had done it with had said she would be all right. She wiped a tear away on the fringe of a grey woollen shawl.

  He had been so nice, so different from all the other boys she had known. So much more the gentleman, and yet . . . she shivered . . . he had managed to persuade her to let him go further than she had ever let any boy go before. Rose faced the truth squarely. It wasn’t as if she was a young girl who didn’t know what could happen if you egged a boy on. She should have known better than go with him in the park. Mavis had paired off with his friend, but she hadn’t done anything so daft; she couldn’t get over Rose having done it either.

  He hadn’t talked much, but as they went through the big ornamental gates he had put his arm round her, and then at the top of the park, past the duck pond, he had led her over the grass and laid his raincoat down on the grass in the shelter of a rhododendron bush.

  She was used to boys fumbling with urgent fingers at the buttons on her blouse, used to the power she felt when their trembling legs pressed against her own. It was the one time she felt important somehow. She wasn’t pretty, she knew that, too small and too sallow of skin, but at times like that the boys she had been with seemed to think she was a bit of all right.

  ‘You’re a bit of a dark horse,’ they would say, and she would smile, thinking of nothing at all except the pleasure of moving hands exploring just so far and no further.

  Silent tears ran down her face. He was from the park end of the town, she guessed, although he had told her less than nothing about himself. His Lancashire accent was far less pronounced than her own, and the cigarette he smoked was a De Reske and not a Woodbine. She knew and was impressed that he had paid two shillings for the packet of twenty-five, so she asked for a puff just to see if she could tell the difference.

  He told her his name was John, but that could have been a lie, just as her telling him she worked in an office had been a lie.

  ‘Which office?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘That would be telling,’ she said, and he told her she was a little tease, then he kissed her in a searching way, awakening a response that no other boy had ever aroused in her.

  It was a response that destroyed his own intention of keeping everything well inside the limits of control. . . .

  What happened he had never meant to happen, but this girl was like no other he had kissed. Fierce and dark, with glistening dark eyes, she was clinging to him, and asking for it. She should have stopped him. All the others had stopped him. It was her fault, her fault entirely.

  It had been over so quickly he could not believe that was all it was about. All the jokes he heard at school in the sixth form, the sly winks, the nudges . . . for this?

  Leaving Rose at the park gates he ran all the way home, then locked himself in the bathroom to wash all over before taking a book down from his father’s study shelves and looking up the symptoms of a certain unmentionable disease.

  He was ashamed and terrified, at one and the same time. . . .

  If anything happened now to stop him going up to Oxford at the end of the summer, his father would kill him. And his mother . . . oh God, it would break her heart.

  Would that girl who had said she worked in an office find out his real name and where he lived? Would her father bring her up to the house and force him to marry her? Would she be waiting for him when he came out of school?

  He actually beat his forehead with a clenched fist, beside himself with shivering horror and disgust.

  Rose shivered. Even if she went looking for him she could never hope to find him. She remembered tha
t he had been tall, and that, passing a lamp, the light had shone down on to a fair head, but she could not bring his features into even a semblance of recognition. Mavis, who seemed to know about such things, had said he would deny it, even if they found him.

  ‘I’ll get you some stuff from a herbalist’s shop. Pennyroyal syrup mixed with turpentine. They say it works every time.’

  ‘Have you ever. . . ?’

  Mavis tossed her head. ‘’Course not. I just keep my ears open, that’s all.’

  Dr Leyland had heard her out in silence, called his wife in from the back of the house, and examined her briefly.

  ‘There’s a lot worse things you could be having than a baby, believe me, dear, I know,’ he said. He stretched out a hand to the bell on his wide desk. ‘Come and see me again in a month, and by that time your young man will have put a ring on your finger, and we’ll have a laugh you and me about you thinking this is the end of the world. All right?’

  The doctor was a kindly, compassionate man, but his surgery was full of waiting patients, and when it was over he had to go and tell a woman in Marstone Road that the tests sent on from Manchester showed that her husband’s illness was incurable.

  And this war would not end with the defeat of the Germans. He could prophesy that more than half of the men who were lucky enough to come back from that hell on earth would have the stamp of it on them till the day they died.

  Besides, he wasn’t getting any younger, and he knew he ought to have talked to that young lass a bit longer. She had a strange look about her.

  But there wasn’t the time . . . there never was enough time.

  So Rose walked away, down the short passage and past the dispensary where she handed over her shilling consultant fee, avoiding Clara’s eyes as she passed through the crowded waiting-room.

  Back at the mill, she stood at her looms, willing her mind into a blankness . . . as she was trying to will it now.

  When Maggie came upstairs wearing her Chapel best hat and coat, she found Rose hunched up and desolate on the edge of her bed.