by Marie Joseph
What had to be, he told himself, praying to a God whose existence he had never even acknowledged.
There were only five minutes to go when he saw the taxi-cab turn in a wide circle and chug into position at the front of the station.
When Maggie got out wearing her long dark coat and a small velvet hat pulled well down over her forehead, he saw that she was carrying a brown paper parcel, and nothing else.
‘The baby? Where’s Rosie?’
Joe hurried her towards the ticket collector’s box, then up the slope to the platform, so overwhelmed at seeing her that he could talk only in jerky syllables.
Maggie shook her head, not looking at him.
‘I couldn’t bring Rosie. She is too little. Joe, you know that.’ She glanced up at him. ‘You knew that if I came it would not be with Rosie.’
She was as deathly pale as he was himself, and when he tried to take the parcel from her, looping the stick over his arm as he tried to manage without it, she clung to it.
Walking by his side, and looking straight ahead, she said:
‘I’ve left her with Clara. But only for a few days, Joe. An’ I want you to know, before we get on the train, that I am coming back. I am definitely coming back. I cannot leave Kit. You have to know that.’
As they reached the top of the second slope up to the platform, the train was in, bursting with great clouds of steam which rose and dissolved against the filth of the high glass roof.
The guard, his whistle already in his mouth, had his green flag at the ready, as he stood by his van, watch in hand.
‘We are going to miss it,’ Maggie said, but Joe stopped dead, staring at her in blank amazement.
‘You mean to tell me you are just coming away with me for a holiday? A ruddy flaming holiday?’
The whistle blew. Joe wrenched open a door, almost pushed Maggie inside, then with a strength he had not known he possessed, dragged himself in after her, throwing the case in first.
A porter, running alongside the train, slammed the swinging door, his mottled elderly face scarlet with anger.
‘Tha silly buggers!’ he shouted. ‘What’s t’ trying to do? Commit bloody suicide?’
The compartment was empty, and as the train drew slowly out of the station, they sat opposite to each other. Joe with his case on the seat beside him, and Maggie with the neat brown parcel tied with string held carefully on her knee.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d manage it, but I have, and we’re off, aren’t we? Aren’t we then?’
Joe stared at her. He had imagined that the first thing he would do would be to take her in his arms and kiss her, and never stop kissing her till they got to Preston.
But this wasn’t the Maggie he had left sobbing on the floor only two hours before.
This was a Maggie he had never seen before. This was a woman with fierce determination in her expression, a woman who knew what she was doing and exactly why. A far far cry from the joyous vulnerable girl he remembered best.
‘I wrote a letter for Kit to find when he comes home tonight. I propped it in front of the clock like they do in all the best stories,’ she said.
Her head was up and her voice rang clear over the sound of the train wheels.
‘I had a long think after you had gone, Joe. I had a long look at myself, and at what was in store. I weighed up the consequences, and I came to the conclusion that a few days out of my life was not going to change things too drastically. If Kit were stronger – if I thought he would come after me and try to find me and knock you about – then I might have thought different. But in this case his weakness has turned out ironically to be my strength.’
She unbuttoned her carefully darned gloves and frowned at the stitches along one finger.
‘I told Clara some cock and bull story about a sick relative down in London, and though she knew I have no relatives, sick or otherwise, she was too busy settling little Rosie into her house to be over-inquisitive. . . . And in the letter I told Kit the truth.’
Joe’s mouth dropped open.
‘You told him you were coming away with me? And you think he will have you back?’
The head in the small velvet hat nodded.
‘He will have me back, and worse than that he’ll forgive me, Joe.’
‘And what about me? Where do I come into these calculations? Might I ask that? Have you got me weighed up an’ all?’
Maggie put the parcel down beside her, then came to sit beside him. There were tears sparkling on the ends of her long eyelashes, betraying her calmness.
‘Joe, dear Joe. All I knew was that nothing, no power on earth, could have kept me off this train. You see I tried to see how it would be with you gone. For ever this time, just as you said, and I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t let you go. Oh, Joe, if I have to spend the rest of my life paying for what I am doing, I don’t care. Not at this moment I don’t. The future was so bleak, and I love you so much, so very very much. . . .’
Then she was in his arms, and he kissed her, and then they were silent. As the train rocked and swayed, and the fields, hoary with frost, flashed by the windows, Maggie snuggled closer and began cautiously to dare to accept the faint beginnings of happiness. Of a joy she would only have dreamed about had she stayed.
There was a dreadful aching weight of guilt on her, but as she told herself with her usual practical northern common sense, if she really was sincere in her guilt, then she could get off at the next station and go back.
And she was not going back. For just a little while she was going to be the woman she might have been if she had married Joe Barton and not Kit Carmichael. And she was going to give as well as take. She was going to take that dreadful suffering look off Joe’s face, and make him smile at her the way he used to do before their long separation and the war.
When they changed trains and were standing on the platform, it came to her that she was wicked. Really wicked, so that, according to her Chapel upbringing, all she could expect was a burning in hell’s fires. Maggie had never believed that merely to confess to some misdeed put it right with God, the way Catholics did.
For a minute she shivered, only to feel Joe’s hand firm on her arm.
‘Will you never stop surprising me?’ he grinned.
Once more they changed trains, and by the time the main line train pulled into Euston station, Maggie was asleep with her head on Joe’s shoulder.
It was only as they got down from the taxi-cab and Joe propelled her through the revolving doors of the big hotel in Paddington that she really became aware of her surroundings.
‘I must have been tired,’ she whispered, and Joe smiled down at her telling her to stop where she was for a minute.
The foyer was wide, and so were the flight of steps straight ahead. There were potted plants everywhere, and it was all so huge and impressive that Maggie felt she wanted to turn and revolve herself back through the doors again.
Telling her again to stop where she was for a minute, Joe went over to the curved reception desk, then came back to her smiling.
‘They’ve had a cancellation, so we can have one of their best rooms,’ he told her. Then they followed an ancient hall porter along a wide corridor to the right.
Surely the corridor was as wide as Foundry Street? There were lights set high in the red-flocked papered walls, and a marble surround either side of the crimson carpet.
She hid a smile at the grand way Joe tipped the porter, then as he left them alone, she stared around her in amazement.
‘You could fit the whole of our upstairs into this room,’ she cried. ‘Oh, Joe, just feel these curtains, and this bedspread! Lined both of them. Oh, I’m not used to materials like this. Beats cotton fent, doesn’t it?’ As she stroked the spread she was doing rapid calculations in her mind.
‘It must have cost a fortune, an’ it’s not skimped, neither.’
She opened the wardrobe door and it swung back, revealing a cavernous interior. ‘Oh, Joe, my two clean
blouses are going to look a bit lost in there, aren’t they?’
‘See through here,’ he said, opening a door, and Maggie stood on the threshold of a high-ceilinged enormous bathroom, and clasped her hands together, like a child who has suddenly seen riches beyond her wildest dreams.
‘A proper bathroom! An’ taps! Hot and cold! Just look at that marble surround, and feel these towels!’
She picked up a white and fluffy bath towel and held its softness to her face. ‘This beats bringing the bath in from the yard on a Friday, and filling it with jugs and heating the water up with pans and the kettle off the fire. Oh, Joe. Can I have a bath right now? Right this minute?’
He smiled on her with love. Now he had got his Maggie back. This was how he had always remembered her. Laughing, joyous, cheeks flushed, hair wisping down from its slipping bun as she darted from one thing to another, exclaiming, incredulous, eyes sparkling.
‘Just a minute,’ he said, pulling her to him, and tilting her face with his finger so that he could look deep into her eyes.
Then suddenly he threw back his head and laughed out loud.
‘Well, bugger me! You’ve got odd eyes, Maggie, lass. There’s one brown and one with green in it. You should be in a circus alongside the bearded lady, or in a tent on the fair, did you know that?’
‘The odd-eyed woman from the north,’ she agreed, and then they held on to each other, rocking and laughing, then as quickly serious and intent as he bent his dark head and kissed her mouth.
And later, when they had bathed, and sworn that neither of them was hungry, they made passionate love, with Maggie’s white cotton nightdress tossed to the floor in a heap of white.
Maggie buried her hot face in Joe’s shoulder and sighed.
‘Why is sinning so lovely?’ she wanted to know.
And uncomfortably but cosily, they slept in each other’s arms all night and woke up so hungry that they were first in the dining-room.
‘You are so beautiful it hurts my eyes just to look at you, lass,’ Joe said.
‘If I am then it’s you what’s done it,’ Maggie replied, and they ate bacon and eggs, sausage and tomatoes, and when Maggie wondered aloud how such food could be Joe wrinkled his nose at her.
‘Money buys anything, lass. I learnt that a long time ago. You can be happy without much brass, oh aye, but with it you can be doubly so. Especially when you have known the other way. That is one advantage of coming up the hard way, you never take nothing for granted.’
They got their coats, and he took her outside into the cold frosty morning, and as they walked along Maggie had to keep stopping to stare at the tall buildings, and to watch the traffic streaming by.
‘Why does everything move so fast? Even the people? Where are they all going to, Joe?’
He touched the tip of her nose. ‘I know where we are going, love. Into that shop over there to buy you a dress. A brown dress trimmed with green to match your eyes. Both of them.’
‘No!’ Maggie’s face changed its expression to one of dismay. ‘I can’t go home with a dress bought by you, Joe. You must see that. I don’t think even Kit would stand for that.’
But they were already in the shop with its lavish Food Hall on the ground floor, and Maggie forgot her dismay as she left Joe’s side to move rapidly from one counter to another, eyes sparkling as she pointed out one display, then rushing over to the next.
‘Look at that tea, Joe! Oh, my goodness, half a pound of that and you would have to starve for the rest of the week. And that coffee! Oh, it can’t cost that much. It can’t possibly!’
There were biscuits in shiny brightly coloured tins, succulent whole hams laid out on marble slabs. Oranges in flat boxes, with every other one wrapped in silver paper, and chocolates in boxes as big as trays, with pictures on the front of the Tower and Buckingham Palace.
‘That’s what we are going to do tomorrow,’ Joe told her. ‘This leg of mine won’t stand up to much walking yet, so we are going to hire a taxi-cab and get the driver to take us round to see the lot. The Palace, and the Tower, and Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus . . . everything!’
Then because she was adamant about the dress he took her into the fur department and bought her a muff. It was soft brown fur, and lined with silk with a pocket inside, and she couldn’t get over it.
Privately Joe thought she was splitting hairs about her acceptance of the muff and her refusal of a dress, but he said a diplomatic nothing, not wanting to spoil her pleasure.
Maggie kissed him thank you, right in front of the smiling saleswoman, and when they came out into the street again, he bought a bunch of early primroses from a flower girl, and Maggie pinned them in front of the muff, and insisted on wearing it there and then.
They slept the afternoon away, and when Joe tried to make love to her and failed, Maggie held him close and told him that it did not matter.
‘Loving is sometimes just a holding,’ she whispered. ‘Like this. It doesn’t have to be no more. Just a touching and a holding.’
And when he slept she thought of Kit and the way he always shied away from any physical contact with her.
As though he doesn’t like the feel of me. As though my skin is repulsive to him, she thought, sadly.
Then, remembering how the night before, Joe had kissed her all over, lingering at the hollow of her throat, moving his mouth downwards over the slight swell of her stomach, she blushed.
Then the pale winter sunshine, filtering through the tall windows lay like a blessing on their closed eyelids.
There was so much to say to each other, so much catching up to do. Foundry Street was another world away; it was another life, and though there were heart-stopping minutes when she wondered how Clara was coping with Rosie, and when she saw Kit’s face as he read her letter, she pushed the thoughts away with a ruthless determination.
‘This is to last me for the rest of my life,’ she told Joe, and when he asked her if she would like to go and see where he had lived before he went to France, she shook her head.
‘That would make it too real, love. This . . . all this is a dream, and though I know I have to wake up, I’m not ready yet. Not yet. Waking from it is going to last me a long long time.’
They walked hand in hand in Hyde Park, and he showed her where the toffs rode, and where, in summer, lovers sat on the grass.
‘It’s all so light,’ she told him. ‘It is as though the sky is higher than it is at home. I thought the Corporation Park was lovely, but this is so fresh and clean, and yet there are motor buses and charabancs not far away. Open charabancs, even at this time of the year.’
‘Aye, winter doesn’t seem to dwell so much down here,’ Joe agreed, then she ticked him off for talking like a southerner, and teased him for turning into a toffee-nosed snob.
‘I am never going back, all the same,’ he said seriously, and they sat for a while on a bench for him to rest his leg, whilst London sparrows pecked hopefully round their feet, and two men in top hats walked by, twirling silver-topped canes.
That night their love-making was ecstatic. They were becoming more used to the needs and desires of their bodies, and Joe was filled with surprised delight at the way Maggie responded, and sometimes even took the initiative. So natural was her giving, so completely without shame that he realized this was the way God had intended her to be, as she expressed a love that had been kept in check for all the barren years of her marriage.
When, around midnight, she said she could just do with a cup of tea, he immediately rang for the chamber-maid.
‘Joe!’ Maggie reached for her nightdress. ‘You are terrible. What will she think, us wanting a pot of tea at this time?’
‘Just put it down there, and thank you. My wife will pour,’ he said grandly when the tray arrived.
The pride in his voice, and the possessiveness turned Maggie’s heart over, and her hand as she picked up the pretty flowered tea-pot, was far from steady.
‘One more day,’ s
he said. ‘It’s got to be faced, Joe. I have to go back, you know that.’
He was so thin, sitting up in bed, holding the gold-fluted cup in his hands, so vulnerable, so much younger looking than his years now that his face was gentled by love, that she felt the tears spring to her eyes.
‘I can’t leave Kit,’ she said quietly.
‘No,’ Joe agreed equally quietly. ‘You can’t leave Kit because he needs you. You’ve told me that over and over.’
He looked at her with anguished eyes. ‘He needs you to mother him and to slave for him in that bloody awful little shop. Kit Carmichael needs you to keep him going, and to be his strength and his bloody rod and his bloody staff. But what about me? What about me, Maggie? Don’t I count for nothing? Aren’t my needs as great as his?’
Maggie put her cup down, and going over to the dressing-table, sat down and stared at herself in the walnut-framed mirror.
She had shed ten years over the last few days. Her hair was softer and curling more. Her skin had a luminous quality about it, and her eyes were bright, with the whites shining clean. Joe’s love had transformed her; she was fulfilled and replete with the kind of love that rarely happened between a man and a woman, the kind that had happened for her and Joe.
‘I married Kit,’ she repeated. ‘And even if he did destroy your letters, I was married to him when they first came. He stuck by me, Joe. In the Chapel, in front of everybody, he came and stood by my side when they turned on me. I cannot forget that.’
She turned round to face him.
‘Kit could be a drinker; he could beat me. He could be mean and selfish and cruel, but he is none of these things. He nursed me, Joe. When I would almost certainly have died, he sat up with me day and night, and sponged the fever from me and saved my life. I wouldn’t be here with you now but for Kit.’
Her head drooped.
‘And he married me, knowing I had lost a baby to someone else. . . .’
She got back into bed and tried to pull Joe down beside her, but he resisted.
‘Aye, you’ve told me the credit side. Now tell me the other.’