Pure as the Lily

by Catherine Cookson

  “Mam, are you all right?”

  She looked at her daughter.

  “Yes, I’m all right, hinny. Go and play with Bella, I’m going out for a short while. I’ll go out the back way.

  If your gran da wants me tell him I won’t be long. Tell Teresa also that I’ve gone out for a short while. “

  “Where you going, Mam?”

  “Just on a bit of business, dear “ Not down to the hospital? “

  “No, not now, not down to the hospital. I won’t be long.” She put on her hat and coat and went out.

  The time that it took her to get from Cornice Street to Haydon Terrace was filled with the admonition. Don’t touch her. Don’t touch her.

  Don’t lay a hand on her. “ Yet from all areas of her brain, it seemed, the question came at her, how could she resist not laying a hand on her?

  She had never been in the house in Haydon Terrace but from Jimmy’s description she knew the layout.

  She went in the hallway and stopped at the door on the left-hand side.

  She knocked once, a hard sharp knock, and when it opened Betty was standing there. When she saw who her visitor was she put her hand over her mouth and muttered, “No, no.”

  “Get out of me way.”

  As she went into the room Betty grabbed at her arm, saying, “It’s no good. Leave her be.”

  “Where is she?”

  Betty jerked her head back towards the door.

  “You can’t do anything, it’s no good.”

  With a sharp push she threw Betty off and went to the door and thrust it open, and there, opposite her, in a double bed lay her mother. Her two arms were lying limp on top of the patchwork quilt, her head was tight against her shoulder and the corner of her mouth was drawn upwards into her cheek.

  ‘you see. You see. “ Betty was by her side now almost jabbering.

  “She can’t speak, do nothing, she’s had a stroke. She’s been like that since she heard about....”

  “Heard about?” Mary looked down on Betty, and she repeated “Heard about? You mean since she burned Lally to death, and Jimmy nearly.

  That’s what you mean. “ She looked towards the bed again, then took a step forward. There was no pity in her for the paralysed form. You took paraffin, didn’t you, Ma, a tin of paraffin and set light to the wood outside, and tried to bum them alive. Nobody was going to get Moat Cottage, least of all Jimmy and Lally. You’d always had your eye on the place, hadn’t you? And it was the last straw that they should be happy there. Well, I’m going to tell you something. Your son’s been happier this year than ever he’s been in his life. He had one year that few men ever enjoy.” She turned her face towards Betty now.

  “And that’s for your ears an’ all.” Looking back at her mother, she ended, Your catch phrase was “everybody gets their deserts” Well now, it’s come true, hasn’t it? “

  The eyelids flickered, the face strained, the saliva ran out of the corner of the twisted mouth, guttural sounds filled the room, and Mary stood watching, pitiless in this moment. And then she said, slowly, “I hope you live for years, Ma, years and years, until you’re a very old woman.” And on this she turned and walked out.

  She was opening the door to go into the hall when Betty came scrambling after her and, looking up into her face, whimpered, “She didn’t know, she didn’t know they were in there. I told her they weren’t going in until the Monday; she wouldn’t have done it else.”

  “You knew then, you knew what she was going to do? Well you’re as bad as her. Whether she knew they were in there or not she was going to burn their home down and, whatever she or you might say, she would be wishing in her heart they were in there. And she got her wish. Well now, I said I hoped she lived for a many a year. I hope you do too;

  you’ll be good companions for each other. “ She stared down into Betty’s taut, trembling face, then she opened the door and went into the hallway, and as she went through the main door Betty’s whimpering voice followed her, saying, “ I’m not having it, she isn’t my responsibility. I’m not having it all me life. She’ll have to go to Harton, I’m not having it’

  Chapter Twelve

  when Mary brought the baby from the hospital the whole routine of the house was disorganized. Everything had to be adjusted to a delicate child who had an ear infection, who had to be fed every four hours, and who cried most of the night; even when it wasn’t crying she was aware of it, for she had the cot by her bedside.

  Then Annie had to be moved out of her room and her bed put in with Cousin Annie’s, not without protest from both of them. Although young Annie was fond of her Uncle Jimmy and Cousin Annie was in sympathy with him in his trouble, neither of them wanted to be made uncomfortable because of him.

  r Why, they both asked, couldn’t he go in with gran da

  Because he wasn’t going in with gran da

  Mary gave them no further explanation. Jimmy, she knew, would take a long time to pull himself together. There would be nights when he would want to walk the floor and cry, so he would need to be alone.

  It was ten days later when she brought him home. He sat like a child, looking so lost, so alone, that her heart was crying for him even while she said to him, “What’s done’s done, you can’t make a better of it. I’ve been through a similar experience and you can’t make a better of it, you’ve got to face it.”

  “Face what, Mary?” he said to her quietly.

  “Life,” she answered.

  “What life?”

  “Jimmy’—she sighed heavily ‘you’ve got a child to see to.”

  “A child? Oh yes.” It was as if he had just remembered the child and, looking at her pathetically, he said, “But you’ll see to him, won’t you, Mary?”

  “No, Jimmy. No.” She made her voice harsh.

  “He’s your responsibility;

  you’ve got to face up to it. “

  She did not add “I’ve got enough on my plate, with me da, Cousin Annie, and a daughter, and two businesses to see to, besides taking on you and the child permanently.”

  He looked up at her and, as if the child had never been mentioned, he said, “Mary, I can’t get it out of my mind what I’ve done. If I hadn’t been drunk, at least tight. And if only I’d taken heed of her. She told me.”

  Be quiet, Jimmy; it wasn’t your fault. “

  “Oh! Mary, Mary.” He shook his head from side to side and as he lowered it she looked down on the partly bare, scarred scalp, and she wondered if the hair would ever grow again. From the front he looked bald, it made him look old.

  She sat down in front of him and stared at him. Her mind in a turmoil, she asked herself whether she should tell him the truth, who really was to blame for the fire. But she was afraid of the effect of the truth on him at this moment; in his present state it wouldn’t take much to unbalance him altogether. Perhaps it was better to let him bear the guilt for a little longer until she got him on his feet.

  The doctor had told her he was in a very low state, he would need care, gentle handling and care.

  Poor Jimmy!

  The following morning, she was down in the shop early. She had been up before six with the child and hadn’t gone back to bed. She did not open the shop until eight o’clock these days and she was pulling the blinds when the postman pushed the mail through the letter box. She did not go immediately and pick them up; they would undoubtedly be bills and circulars; she never received personal mail, she had no one to receive it from. She picked up the half a dozen brown envelopes and the white one, which was addressed to Mrs. Mary Tollett. She turned the envelope over, then looked at her name again before opening it.

  She hadn’t thought to look at the postmark. The letter began: Dear Mary’, and went on, “I’ve never called you Mary before, but that’s how I’ve always thought of you. I just want to say how sorry I was to hear of the tragedy to your brother and his wife my mother wrote and told me. We are sailing for America tomorrow and I go with mixed feelings.


  I just wanted to say goodbye again in remembrance of the old days when we were young. Yours ever, Hughie Amesden. “

  She went into the back shop and sat down on an upturned box. In remembrance of the old days. What old days? In the old days when they were young, really young, he had never spoken to her except that once to say hello. What memory had he of the old days? Twice he had spoken to her in the shop, and once in the cemetery, and now he had gone to America. Why had he written his letter? To say he was sorry about Jimmy and Lally? He had called Lally Jimmy’s wife;

  that was kind of him; but why had he written? She had thought that he was already in America. It was doubtful if they would ever meet again.

  In memory of the old days when we were young.

  She recalled the white light that had enveloped him and the feeling that it had given her. But he knew nothing about that; and even so that light had faded and died when she met Ben. She went to crush the letter in her hand, then stopped herself. He was only being polite, kind to someone in the same boat as himself. He had lost his only child; she had lost Ben and David, and her grandparents, and they had all gone on the same night. He was seeing her as someone alone, a widow, and, therefore, showing his sympathy.

  Alone! She looked upwards to the ceiling into the house up above.

  There were five of them up there now, Annie was twelve. In another five or six years she could marry and be gone, but for the rest, her da, Cousin Annie and Jimmy, and the child, she had them with her for life.

  Suddenly she covered her face with her hands and tried to stop the tears flowing, but they squeezed through her fingers and ran down her wrists, and no matter how she chided herself for being selfish and thinking only of herself, she couldn’t stop crying. When at last she did, she looked at the letter on her knee and saw that her tears had made the ink run until the writing was blurred, one letter into the other.

  It was almost three months later when she told Jimmy who was responsible for Lally’s death.

  Physically his body was recovering, and mentally, too, his mind seemed to be groping its way back to normality, for he had said to her yesterday, “I must start thinking about getting back to work, I’ll have to use my hands sometime.” And to this she had replied, “There’s plenty of time for that. Go on helping Da downstairs; that’ll give you plenty of exercise.”

  He had moods, black moods, when he was borne down with

  self-recrimination. It had been three weeks since the last one. When in these moods, he would sit staring before him and no one would get a word out of him; and he mightn’t eat a bite for forty-eight hours. And when he came out of them he would always look at her and say, “Can I have a drink, Mary, just a short one?” and she would give him a drop of whisky.

  It was around four o’clock in the afternoon when she returned with the child. She had taken him down to the Infirmary for the weekly treatment on his ear. She was tired with the journey and also through lack of sleep. Her nights had been broken for months past. The house seemed full to overflowing, there was no privacy; and only yesterday Cousin Annie had told her out of the blue that she had sold her house in Wallsend, which meant that she was stuck with Cousin Annie for good. Well, she had always known this; but it was the fact that the little woman had gone about the business of selling her house in secret. Yet in a way she understood the reason for her doing this, for she was likely afraid that, had she consulted her, she might have been told it was about time she returned across the water. It was a fait accompli. Ben had often used that term. She hadn’t known what it meant until he explained it to her. But she knew well enough now, for everybody seemed to have come into her life in this way.

  When she got upstairs it was to find Jimmy sitting staring into the fire. He didn’t even turn his head when she entered the room.

  “Oh no,” she said it aloud. Then going immediately out and putting the baby in the cot, she pulled off her things, marched back into the room, sat opposite him, gripped his hands and said, ‘now look you here, Jimmy. “ She had to jerk him round to bring his gaze to bear on her.

  “Snap out of it Do your hear me? I’ve got something to tell you.

  Listen to me. “ She shook his arms, anything but gently, and he blinked as he said, “ Aye. Oh yes, Mary. “

  “Listen to me. Jimmy. About... about the fire.”

  He stared at her.

  “About the fire?”

  “You didn’t cause that fire, you didn’t set that place on fire.

  Remember the insurance men who kept coming back and forward here? I didn’t let them talk to you, you weren’t fit. The cottage was set on fire. Jimmy, deliberately set on fire. “

  He closed his eyes tight, screwed them up until they were lost in their sockets, then stretched them wide.

  “Set on fire?”

  Yes. “ She was gripping his hands tightly now, staring into his face.

  “With a tin of paraffin sprinkled all over the bomb site wood that you left outside. Remember? There was a pile of it each side of the door.”

  “Paraffin? On the wood?”

  “Paraffin on the wood, deliberately put there.

  You-didn’t setthatplaceon-fire. It had nothing to do with the chimney.

  You could have roasted an ox on that fire and the chimney would have stood it. Don’t forget you’d had it cleaned, you’d taken all the soot down. The fire didn’t start inside, Jimmy. “ She bounced his hand up and down on his knee as she repeated. The fire didn’t start inside, it was deliberately done from the outside.”

  “Who? But who?” His face was stretched now, his eyes wide. She stared at him for a long while, and she gulped two mouthfuls of spittle before she could say The ma. “

  She watched the expression changing on his face from amazement to horror, to disbelief, and back to horror again, before he said, “No!

  no! she wouldn’t, not that. Bad as she is, not that. “

  “She did. She always wanted that cottage, remember? Remember years back when she wanted me da to take it, but the rent was too high? And when she knew you were going into it she couldn’t bear it, she....”

  She almost fell backwards when he flung her hands away. Then he was on his feet and running towards the door.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy!” She caught him and hung on to his shoulders, crying, “Listen! Listen! It’s no good going to her.”

  He was looking down at her face.

  “You say she set light to the house, she burned Lally to death, and it’s no good...!”

  Using all her strength she pushed him against the wall.

  “She didn’t know you were in. Apparently she had got wind that you were moving in on the Monday, she didn’t know you had gone in on the Saturday. She just meant to bum the place down.”

  “But... but she burned Lally.” He put his hand to thrust her away again, and she flung herself between him and the door and cried at him rapidly now, “It’s no use you going to her, I tell you, she’s had a stroke, she’s paralysed, she’s been paid out. I went, I went to the house I was for murdering her myself and then I saw her. She couldn’t move hand nor foot, her face all twisted, the only thing left alive in her were her eyes. You’ll do no good going. Leave her be. I told her I hope she lives for years, and I do. I hope she’s pickled in the poison of her mind. Oh aye, I hope she’ll live for a long time.”

  She watched him go limp. He seemed to lose inches. Then he was staggering back to the seat at the fire. And now he began to laugh, and this really frightened her, for this was like no laugh that she had ever heard. She pleaded with him, “Jimmy! Jimmy! give over.” But he went on laughing. She was gentle with him at first, saying, “Come on, lad, come on. I felt you should know. I had to tell you, you were flaying yourself. It’s better you should know the truth. I waited.

  Give over! Give over! Stop it! “

  When the laughter rose it became so loud that it filled the house. She took him by the shoulders again and shook him, and gradually it subsided. But he filled its pla
ce now with sobbing, and she didn’t know which was worse. He cried loudly, not like a man crying, silently, half ashamed, but like a young lad or a young girl who had been faced with some unbearable catastrophe; and in between his sobs he kept emitting two words, The ma! me ma! “ Sometimes the name would reach a high crescendo, sometimes it would be just a muttering, but mostly it was a loud wailing cry, loud enough

  237.

  to be heard down in the shop and bring Alee and Cousin Annie upstairs, and to make the women customers look at each other and say, “He’s calling for his ma. Aye well, it just shows. Blood’s thicker than water, it’s your own you want when you’re in trouble.”

  Jimmy stayed in bed until the following dinnertime, and then unbeknown to Mary he went out. Almost demented, she waited all afternoon for the police coming to tell her the latest news, but no one came. She waited all evening, and it was about half past nine, when she was on the point of going to the police herself, that two men brought him home.

  One was a man who lived up the street, the other was a stranger. They themselves had also been drinking, but they didn’t appear to be the worse for it. As one of them said, “It didn’t take much to make Jimmy mortallious.” They left him on the jj’ landing floor and bid her good night, and as she looked down 1^ on him she knew that this was the beginning of the long end.

  Book Three. The New Species, Jarrow 1972

  Chapter One

  T)o you mean to say that you’ve never, never, had . “

  “Oh, be quiet, Maggie, you make things sound so ... aw!”

  “Aw! yourself. But honest, tell me. Why, I thought you and Cliff....”

  “Well, you thought wrong then Maggie Pearce jumped up from the rug where she had been sitting in front of the electric fire, and, putting her hands behind her back, began to walk between the two single divan beds that stood opposite each other, each against a wall of the long narrow room. Her body half stooped, her chin thrust out, she was mimicking a figure well known to both of them, that of Old Dodgett, Professor of Applied Mathematics.