Maggie Craig

by Marie Joseph

  ‘Rose?’

  The swollen eyelids were raised as Rose registered her mother’s flushed cheeks, her unbelief, her pleading look that said she wanted to be told it wasn’t true.

  Defiance and shame turned her face to the wall, then she jerked a finger.

  ‘She’s told you then? I’m surprised she waited till now.’

  Maggie put out a hand and trying hard to say the right thing, said the wrong.

  ‘You must tell me, love. Is it right that you’re in trouble? We must talk before your father comes in from the shop. He’ll be late tonight because he’s setting out the window ready for next week.’

  ‘Clara Preston’s a vicious old cow.’

  The words were almost spat out, reminding Maggie of the old woman in the bed, the bitter woman with a tongue like a whip-lash. She sighed and tried again.

  ‘Rose? Rose, love?’

  The softly spoken words, the lack or reproach shocked Rose as badly as if her mother had struck her, and she rolled away to the foot of the bed. When hysteria took over it came as a relief. It cleared at last the dead feeling she had had inside her for the past worrying weeks as she gave way to loud sobs that seemed as if they might shake her body in two.

  ‘Tell me who it was, Rose.’

  The next words were screamed at the top of Rose’s lungs.

  ‘I don’t know who it was! It was a boy I met just once, and I don’t know where he lives or even what he’s called. I saw him once. That was all! Now be kind to me! Just try to be kind to me now!’

  Maggie stood quite still, listening, but not allowing the shouted words to register.

  Rose was a strange girl, but she could never have done that. Not gone with a stranger. That was the sort of thing the night women did.

  She was shocked to her soul, yet all she wanted to do was to put her arms round her daughter, but if they had had no real communication before, how could she expect there to be any now? She tried to move and found that she was quite unable to move from the spot where she stood.

  She wanted to keep calm, to speak quietly, to go on speaking quietly, but it was as though someone else’s voice had taken over.

  ‘You’re not like that!’ she shouted.

  Rose turned a blotched face towards her.

  ‘But I am! You don’t know me. You’ve never known me. Everybody can’t be like you, all holy, holy, holy.’ She bit hard on her knuckles. ‘Always going to Chapel and singin’ hymns and prayin’.’ Now her voice held the bleakness of a dreadful despair. ‘Go away, Mam. Just go away. . . .’

  Maggie moved at last. She went to sit on the edge of the bed, careful not to make any attempt to touch the hunched form curled up by the wall.

  ‘Rose,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t shut me out, not now, not at this important time. We have to talk before your father comes home . . . Rose, love. He has to be told, and he’ll understand. You know he will. As I’m trying to understand. Just give me a little time.’

  Rose turned and the look she gave her mother was so like the look, the never to be forgotten look on old Mrs Carmichael’s face that Maggie flinched. Even the voice was the same:

  ‘Understand? Me dad understand a thing like that? If he was a proper man he might just try to understand, but he isn’t, is he? He wouldn’t be sleeping on his own in a separate room if he was, would he?’

  Maggie tried to control the shaking of her whole body. She had to stay, to listen, to comfort. And yet it was all the same. . . .

  But it could not be. It was a trick of the imagination. And could it be that she herself had made Rose as she was, because she could never blot the memory of that night from her mind?

  Had the ghost of old Mrs Carmichael merely come between her and Rose, not been faithfully reproduced in this girl who was her own daughter? Maggie made one of her sudden decisions.

  ‘Rose, listen to me,’ she whispered.

  And it wasn’t easy to tell her child the way it had been with her and Joe. The fumbling words sounded all wrong.

  What she wanted to do was to tell, to show Rose, that once, a long time ago, her own mother had been far from holy, holy, holy . . . that she had let a boy make love to her, wanted him to make love to her, needed him, as perhaps Rose herself had needed comfort.

  ‘I lost the baby in the room across the landing, with no one to tell, and no one to understand. So you see, sweetheart, I do understand. I loved this boy, but nobody ever tells us how easy it is to let go, just for a brief moment.’ She leaned over to touch Rose gently on her shoulder.

  ‘I love you, Rose. I’ve wanted to show you before, but there was always . . . always something stopping us getting close.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I’ll face this with you, love, and it won’t be easy, make no mistake about that, because folks can be cruel, even those who go to Chapel twice on a Sunday. An’ you won’t be alone like I was. You’ll have me to fight for you, and your father, because he stuck up for me when folks turned on me . . . oh, yes he did.’ Her voice softened. ‘I think that was what made me decide to marry him in the end. . . . Oh, Rose, little love, don’t cry like that. I’m here. I’m right here.’

  When Rose came into her mother’s arms, it was as though Maggie was holding her child for the very first time.

  As though the ghost of Kit’s mother had been exorcised, to disappear for ever.

  15

  WHEN KIT CAME in that night, it was near to midnight. He was actually stumbling with exhaustion, his face clammy with a thin film of sweat.

  ‘Mr Yates wanted everything down off the shelves and all the stuff in the back room checked, then he asked me to re-dress the window to show off some of the posh foods he’s bought in. You’d never think there was a war still on.’

  Because Maggie was dreading what she had to tell him, her voice was sharper than she had intended.

  ‘Posh foods? What do you mean by posh foods?’

  Kit, bending over with difficulty because of his rapidly increasing waistline, began to unlace his boots.

  ‘Oh, you know, love. Tins of pineapple chunks, and tins of what they call After Dinner Mints. Half a crown a tin they are. He’s gone off his chump I reckon. He forgets that most of our customers are like old Mrs Bradshawe coming in begging bacon scraps to stuff a cod’s head with.’

  ‘To feed seven of them at that.’

  Maggie knelt down and unlaced the second boot. Kit’s weight had increased so that his stomach hung like a bladder over the tops of his trousers, and the stiffly starched collars he wore pushed his neck up into a fold as red and loose as a turkey’s crop.

  ‘That awful man exploits you!’ she burst out, dreading what she had to tell him. ‘An’ you just let him.’

  Rose’s cruel words came back to her, making her sharp and irritated, because she knew in her heart there was more than a hint of truth in them.

  But Rose had meant what she said in a cruel way, and this man was so good, so good . . . Maggie stood up, ready to do battle on his behalf, still putting off what she had to tell him.

  ‘You ought to try to stand up to him a bit more, Kit. He’ll never find anyone like you, and you know it. Where could he find a young man to do the buying as well as the selling, plus keeping an account book, and keeping his shop going when the others have closed?’

  Her hands were on her hips now. ‘Look what happened early on when so many customers took their coupons to the bigger grocers down town. You hardly lost a single one. They all brought their registrations to you because they remembered how you’ve helped them and been fair. The old goat knows that, the miserly devil.’

  Kit did not bother to respond. For one thing he was too tired and for another he knew his Maggie. She was working herself up because something else had upset her, and she would tell him in her own good time.

  All her anger stemmed from concern. She was like his mother in that way, but he wasn’t daft enough to tell her. His Maggie had exactly the same mother hen attitude to life – let anyone hurt her family and she would spit in their
eye.

  And he loved it. Her fighting spirit made him feel safe; it was like warm syrup, soothing and comforting.

  He stood up and yawned. ‘I’ll just go out to the back, love, then I’m off to bed. Rose all right?’

  Men did cry, Maggie reminded herself as she lay in bed an hour later, as wide awake as if it were the middle of the afternoon. She had felt Joe Barton’s cheek wet against her own that night, after he had made love to her, and before he went away.

  Kit was an easy crier, she knew that, but his anguish had been so great that he had sobbed in her arms on the sofa downstairs, sobbed like a child with a disappointment so overwhelming he could not bear it.

  Now he was asleep. She could hear the rhythmic rise and fall of his snores from the back room, while her own thoughts darted like a fire-fly from one subject to another.

  Clara would have plenty to say because she had never liked Rose.

  ‘Bring trouble to your door that one will. There’s bad blood somewhere in her and that’s not kidding.’

  Maggie turned and tossed. Where had they gone wrong with Rose? Was it their fault? Kit’s for being too soft by half, and hers for being over-strict?

  No, Rose had just seemed as if she wanted to be awkward all round. There were days when if Maggie had said it was a Monday, Rose would have declared it to be a Tuesday.

  Maggie pulled the clothes up round her neck. Poor Rose. Believing she was so unlovable she had let a stranger make love to her.

  At least she had loved Joe . . . loved him so much that even now the thought of him flooded her body with the ache of remembering.

  Maggie sat up suddenly in bed, her long hair falling round her face. . . . She was hearing Joe’s voice again, calling out to her in anger. . . .

  ‘Oh, Joe,’ she whispered. ‘If you need me, tell me where you are. . . .’

  Moved from the field hospital in Boulogne, shattered in both mind and body, with a leg wound that refused to heal, Corporal Joe Barton was sent first to a hospital in the south of England, then because his sister Belle was down on his papers as next of kin, to the Royal Infirmary in his home-town.

  The week before Christmas in 1918, sleeping fitfully in his narrow bed in the ward filled with wounded soldiers, he dreamed he was standing-to on a trench fire-step.

  Dimly he saw the Passchendaele night turn into a pink-tinged dawn. Through bleary eyes he saw the corpse-strewn waste of no man’s land. When the order to stand down came he dropped exhausted back into the dug-out.

  To Joe the beautiful rosy early morning was nothing more than a hypocritical mockery. It was merely the beginning of yet another day of undiluted horror.

  It took him a good three minutes to realize that the dawn he was seeing now was seeping through the tall window behind his bed, and another three minutes to realize that the war in France had been over for more than a month.

  Sister Fletcher walked with her springy slip-slap walk down the long ward and stopped by his bed. She was carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms, and if Joe had not known her as well as he thought he did he might have suspected that there were tears in her voice.

  ‘Mr Barton?’ she whispered. ‘Are you awake? I wonder if you would do something for me?’

  With her free hand she pulled the covers out at one side of his parcel-neat bed.

  ‘Will you take this newborn baby into bed with you and keep it warm? We’ve just done an emergency in the theatre, and the baby’s mother has unfortunately died.’

  ‘Well bugger me!’

  Joe pushed himself up on an elbow and blinked, but for once the Sister did not stop to reprimand him for his language. She merely deposited the small bundle beside him, tucked the covers back again, and walked back down the long ward. She lingered for a whispered word with the night nurse, who was cocooned in her own little pool of light at her desk, looked back in Joe’s direction, then vanished.

  Joe heard her springy footsteps turn into a rapidly receding and totally forbidden run. . . .

  The rest of the ward was in complete darkness, but the cold grey light from the window showed him a small round face, no bigger it seemed than a man’s fist. It showed him a pout of a pink mouth with the chin sucked in as though the baby knew it was off to the worst of starts, and a surprising shock of jet-black hair growing straight up from a worried, lined and puckered forehead.

  ‘Well bugger me!’ Joe said again. ‘You poor little sod. You’re the baby Nurse Gallagher told me about. The one what the surgeon was going to have to bring on by operating – the one belonging to that lass with no husband.’

  Carefully he raised himself a fraction.

  ‘There’s not many babies born orphans, but I reckon that’s what has happened to you, young fella-me-lad.’

  He peered intently into the tiny sleeping face. ‘That’s if you are a fella-me-lad. By the left but I’ve got to watch I don’t squash you, little chuck. There, just let me move one arm a bit. There, that better?’

  The baby fluttered mauve eyelids, then began making soft little sucking noises, turning its head into the swaddling blanket. Gingerly, scarcely daring to breathe, Joe loosened it with his hand.

  ‘Now, don’t go and smother yourself, you little codger,’ he said.

  He cradled the baby into the curve of his arm, the womanly smile on his thin face at comical variance with the overnight growth of dark stubble on his chin.

  ‘A right bloody turn-up for the book,’ he chuckled.

  Joe Barton, ex Corporal Joe Barton. Bolshie in outlook, even though back in civilian life, before he joined up, he had been well on the way to being a capitalist. Trusting in nobody and with good reason. . . . Putting out a finger he traced the baby’s rounded chin with a feather-light touch, then he grinned to himself as the blob of a nose gave an irritated twitch.

  ‘Sharp little sod, aren’t you?’ he whispered, so engrossed that he failed to see the way the night nurse approached his bed, then as silently crept away.

  He could guess what the rest of the ward would say when waking-up time came at half past five:

  ‘Always suspected old Joe had lost more than his kneecap and half his brain in France. But we’d never have thowt he was expectin’, would we, lads?’

  That would be Nobby Clark, shell-shocked on the Somme in March, and still not able to face the outside world. Poor Nobby, still thinking he was in the hospital in Rouen; not able to believe the war was over.

  Joe held his breath as the baby sighed, a soft little sigh ending on a whimper.

  It was the day the vicar made his weekly round, always stopping by Joe’s bed and beaming at him. As if there was summat to beam about, Joe thought bitterly.

  ‘Now then, Mr Barton,’ he’d say. ‘Sister tells me you’ve been up on those pins of yours a bit more this week.’

  The vicar’s cheeks glowed shiny and red, as if he had been at them with a scrubbing brush. They moved up into little round cushions of fat as he smiled.

  ‘Keep it up, man! There’ll be no holding you back soon!’

  ‘Holding me back from what?’ Joe had asked once. ‘From going down to London and trying to do me rounds on crutches? From convalescing with me sister, who doesn’t want me anyway? At least her husband doesn’t. Holding me back from trying to forget that men I knew well died with their faces shoved in the mud, or their bellies ripped open with pieces of shrapnel? Is that what you mean?’

  The vicar’s cheeks had glowed redder than ever as he had wished Joe a rapid ‘God bless you, my son’ before moving quickly on to the next bed.

  Joe shifted his position with care. It wasn’t fair baiting the little man. He always felt a pang of shame when the vicar had gone on his way down the ward, his Bible tucked neatly underneath his arm.

  But what did a man like that know about owt?

  Fair enough he must have been too old for active service, but Joe knew he had lived out his war in the northern town, with nothing to upset him but the reading of dispatches. The Rev Shuttleworth had not seen me
n screaming as their wounds turned gangrenous from the Salient’s mud. He had not heard them, some of them, crying for their mothers before they went over the top.

  He tightened his arm round the baby, holding it close, willing his own warmth into the tiny body, assuaging the choked-up feeling in his throat by a speech he would have ready for the luckless vicar:

  ‘Right then, sir. What I would like you to tell me is how that oh so merciful God of yours can allow a young lass to peg out, leaving her baby with neither a mother nor a father? Would you not have thought that Him up there would have looked down and decided that she had been bad enough done by by some sod who wouldn’t marry her, and seen to it that things would go right for her from now on?’

  Joe nodded to himself, satisfied with the neat way he had phrased his speech, then shushed indignantly at the occupant of the next bed, who was snoring rhythmically up and down the scale.

  ‘I haven’t minded you keeping me awake all night, old pal,’ he muttered, ‘but this little whipper-snapper here has to be kept warm and quiet, see? He’s going to wonder what sort of a place this is when he wakes up to find there’s no titty milk for him.’

  Suddenly to his surprise, an amazement tinged with shame at his unexpected weakness, Joe felt a tear ooze out from underneath his eyelids and roll slowly down his cheeks. Putting out his tongue as the tear meandered past the corner of his mouth, he tasted the sad saltiness of it, then he felt the familiar pain run like burning quicksilver down the back of his leg.

  For the sake of the baby nestling close to his side, he decided to forgo his usual loud moan, which sometimes resulted in an extra early cup of tea if he could make the moan loud enough to reach the ears of the night nurse sitting writing out her reports at the desk at the far end of the ward.

  Instead he thought about the baby’s mother, the young black-haired woman lying dead now somewhere down the long echoing Infirmary corridor.

  She had been a good looker all right. Sister Fletcher would have skinned him alive if she had known how many times in the past few days he had been on his crutches as far as the side ward where she lay. Oh, she would have been pleased with his progress all right, but shocked out of her starched pinny at the idea of a man patient daring to venture into the women’s wing of the Infirmary.