The Fifteen Streets

by Catherine Cookson

  After Mary’s victory of claiming a room to herself the creature comforts were diminished for a time; if she wanted a fire in this room she had to light it. Yet after a while, Beatrice Llewellyn saw that by pandering to her daughter’s ridiculous idea of privacy, a new tentacle could be affixed. But since New Year’s Eve, much to Mary’s discomfort, this tentacle had been released. No fire had been lit in the sitting-room for a fortnight, let alone in the bedroom, and Mary’s enquiry of Phyllis had been answered by, ‘The mistress says there are fires in the drawing-room and dining-room, Miss Mary.’

  For the first week of the new year it had not irked her, for her evenings were spent with John; and the fireless room was merely something that showed up her mother’s pettiness. But for six days now she had seen John only once, and that under such circumstances, she would rather not have seen him at all. Added to this, the striking cold of her fireless rooms seemed to have brought her up against life with a vengeance.

  Last night, after having gone fruitlessly to their meeting place, she wrote John a letter . . . a letter bare of pride. She had thrown pride over from the first night he failed to keep their appointment, for each dinner-time since, she had taken a round-about way home, walking slowly through the arches, hoping against hope to meet him. Then today she saw him; but unfortunately only after she had met her mother and father almost at the dock gates. After her father’s kindly greeting and her mother’s fixed stare, they were walking on abreast, past the gates themselves, when John came out. His abrupt stopping brought them all to a halt; but before she even had time to speak, he was gone, across the road and into the Jarrow tram.

  It was only by using all her control that she did not follow him. In the brief moment of meeting she could see something was wrong. He was in trouble, and he had been fighting. His eye was discoloured, and there was a scar across his lip. But it was the look in his eyes that shocked her. They were not the brown, kindly eyes of her John, they looked haunted . . . even frightened.

  It was disastrous that her mother should see him like this. Mary knew, by her mother’s tilted chin and stiff profile, that she recognised him and was showing her disgust. And her father’s repeated short coughs spoke, too, of his embarrassment.

  Mary stood now in her bedroom, recalling the incident. There was another hour and a half before she would know if her letter had broken this estrangement for which she could find no cause. She pulled her fur coat tighter about her as she sat down by the window and looked out into the black garden. If he did not come tonight what would she do? Her life seemed barren and futile without him, and he had toppled her standards overboard. Up to a few months ago she was sure she knew what she wanted from life: culture, travel, and of course a lovely home. It was true she had never loved Gilbert Culbert, but it was his profession, she thought, had weighed her feelings against him; for she could not see herself going out to work when married, and thirty-seven shillings a week wasn’t going to enable her to do the things she had planned, although she knew if she were to make this match there would be considerable help forthcoming from her mother. Yet, compared with John, Culbert was a man of means. But here she was, willing to forgo everything she valued for this man, who would hardly be able to feed her, as her father had so strongly pointed out, apart from supporting her in the smallest comfort.

  She was helpless before the power of her feeling. No clear thinking would touch it. Nor did she want it to be touched, for she realised she had found something given to few, a love strong enough to defy convention. And not in the ordinary way; but to defy convention by living under its nose. For that’s what it would mean if she, Mary Llewellyn, the boat-builder’s daughter, married John O’Brien, the docker.

  ‘Miss Mary!’

  Mary started. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your mother says she wants . . . she would like to see you in the drawing-room.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Mary turned from Phyllis, whose bright eyes were greedy for more scandal. Mary guessed her own doings were the high spot of conversation in the kitchen, and knew that, because she was associating with one whom they considered to be below their class, she was unworthy of their respect. It showed covertly in their manner, and she upbraided herself for being hurt by it. For this, she told herself as she went downstairs, was nothing to what she would have to put up with—she must get used to scorn, and the scorn of the poor was scorn indeed.

  Her mother was sitting in her wing chair to one side of the large log fire, the heat of which met Mary as she entered the room. Beatrice Llewellyn looked smaller and younger and more fragile at this moment than ever before.

  ‘You wanted me?’ Mary halted in the centre of the room.

  ‘Yes.’ Beatrice Llewellyn paused, adjusted the lace cover on the arm of her chair, then went on, ‘I would just like to ask you, Mary, to conform to the rules of this house if it is your intention to stay in it.’

  Mary remained silent; it was like the ultimatum to a lodger.

  ‘You know your meals are served in the dining-room! If you do not deign to have them there with us, then I’m afraid you’ll have to eat out, for I’m not having them taken to your room.’

  Anyone but Mary would have been deceived by her mother’s tone into thinking that behind its evenness lay forbearance and toleration, but to Mary its studied calmness, in itself, was a danger signal.

  ‘Is that all you wanted me for?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it is not all I wanted you for.’ Beatrice Llewellyn lifted her eyes from the contemplation of the lace cover and looked straight at her daughter. ‘You astound me, Mary. I cannot begin to understand you . . .’

  ‘No?’ Mary raised her eyebrows slightly and waited.

  ‘I can’t think that one, even with your liberal tastes, can have sunk so low as to continue to associate with a man who is the father of an imbecile girl’s child!’

  The words glanced off the surface of Mary’s mind. She was prepared to hear something against John, she hadn’t thought her mother would speak otherwise, and at this moment she was feeling sick with cold and worry; so until, like a boomerang, their meaning rebounded back at her she just continued to return her mother’s stare. There was a cause then for the six empty nights and his avoidance of her at dinner-time . . . there was a reason; someone was going to have a baby by him.

  What!—her mind jumped clear of its numbness—her John who was clean and loving and kind, whose love, so full of desire, was yet restrained, whose hands, even in their loving, were not the probing, groping hands of Gilbert . . . her John going to father a what!

  She repeated aloud, ‘What! What did you say?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  ‘And you expect me to believe you?’

  ‘No’—her mother’s voice took on a note of resignation—‘No, all Tyneside could believe it, but not you. You are so obsessed by that . . . that man, that individual with the brutalised, battered face, whose licentiousness drives him to take a poor imbecile . . .’

  ‘Be quiet! How dare you!’

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that, Mary!’

  ‘I will! You sit there taking a man’s character away . . . damning him . . . you, who know nothing . . . !’

  ‘I take his character away! Can a man have any character who would touch that dreadful Kelly girl?’

  ‘Kelly. You mean Nancy Kelly?’

  ‘Yes, I mean Nancy Kelly.’

  ‘You’re mad! No man would . . . would go with that girl.’

  ‘She’s going to have a child, and you don’t for a moment imagine it’s an immaculate conception, do you?’ Her mother was being unconsciously funny; if only the implications for John were not so terrible Mary would have laughed.

  There was scorn in her mother’s smile and maliciousness in her voice when she said, ‘His exalted position of being a gaffer is in jeopardy too, I understand. For even certain dock men have standards of morals.’

  The desire of her mother to hurt her was so palpably evident that Mary was s
tung to reply, ‘Yes, for your sake, I should hope so, seeing that my father worked in the docks until he was twenty. You seem to forget that, don’t you. I, in my way, am doing exactly what you did . . . taking up with a dock worker.’

  Beatrice Llewellyn rose swiftly from her chair—she was no longer calm; Mary had touched a vulnerable spot, and she hated to be reminded that her prosperous husband had ever been other than what he was now. ‘There’s a coarseness in you, Mary, that disgusts me,’ she said sibilantly. ‘Your father was never a dock worker; he was apprenticed to a trade, as you well know.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ Mary found she wanted to argue, to keep talking, so that she would not have to think.

  But her mother ended the interview by leaving the room. She walked past Mary, her face tight and her blue eyes flashing with vexation, causing the air seemingly to vibrate with her displeasure. Mary did not move—she stood nervously tapping her lips with her fingers . . . Nancy Kelly was going to have a child . . . that dreadful-looking girl who was no more than a child herself. And they were saying John was responsible. So that was why he looked as he did. And that, too, was why he had been fighting. How had he come to be accused of such a thing?

  The old saying: There’s no smoke without fire, came to her. But she refuted it with her mind and body; and she swung round and rushed upstairs. Yet the thought persisted; why had he been named?

  Mary reached their meeting place half an hour before the appointed time. In the darkness of the lane she waited, each moment dragging itself out into seeming hours, filled with dread and anxiety. Twice she heard footsteps on the main road, but they didn’t turn into the lane.

  When at last she heard the heavy tread of feet coming towards her, she pressed back into the hedge, fearing lest it was not him. But as the dark bulk drew to a halt, she whispered softly, ‘John.’

  No answer came to her, and she moved slowly forward, and again she said, ‘John.’

  In the centre of the lane, he stood out against the starlit night, and she could feel the tense unhappiness holding him down. She reached out her hands and again spoke his name. This time he answered her. His arms went about her, and she was lifted into his embrace and held tightly against him in an unhappy silence. He did not kiss her, but bent his head and buried it against her neck; and his mental anguish engulfed her.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’ She purposely asked the question, for she felt he must tell her himself, and in the telling perhaps the strain would ease.

  But he said nothing. And so they stood, wrapped close in an embrace that was full of questioning and stress. Then, as if his words had journeyed through many doors before finding a way out and were now tremulous in their release, he asked, ‘Mary . . . would you marry me if I had enough money?’

  The proposal was so unexpected—it was the last thing she had thought of hearing at this moment. She had imagined he would give some reason for their separation, if not speak of this dreadful other thing. For perhaps a second she remained still. Then she gently took his head between her hands and raised it. His face was indistinguishable in the darkness, but so well did she know each feature that his expression seemed at this moment to be outlined in light.

  ‘Oh, my dear, I’d marry you now, just as you are.’

  The question of Nancy Kelly flashed like a falling star across her mind, only to disappear into nothingness; its dreadful import could not possibly touch this man.

  ‘No, no. Never that.’

  John’s arms fell from her, but she held his face tightly, saying, ‘Why not, my darling? Why not?’

  ‘Because’—his head moved restlessly between her hands—‘I’ll never take you while I’m in the docks.’

  ‘But, my dear . . .’

  ‘It’s no use.’

  He gently released his face from her hands, and held them tightly: ‘I couldn’t do it . . . Mary, I’m going away. Will you wait for me?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘America.’

  ‘America! But John! Oh, my dear’—she pulled him towards her—‘I can’t let you go . . . not all that way, not without me . . . John, take me with you. Let’s start together’—she was pleading as if for her very life—‘if we are together nothing matters.’ She had her arms about him now, and he stood still within their circle, steeling himself against her offer, which for the moment had lifted him out of the terrifying depths of despair and revulsion to life that had almost overwhelmed him during these past few days, and which during that one brief moment had erased the picture of Nancy Kelly from his mind, so that he could no longer see her waiting for him at the corner of the street, or watching the house from her door or front window. His whole life had been coloured darkly by her. He would see her face reflected in the expression of the dock men’s covert glances and in the too friendly overtures of a section of the men, who wanted him to know they didn’t believe the rumour. The house that, during the holidays took on a semblance of happiness, was now a place of dread, and his mother seemed to have become bent under the load of it. Time and again he had found her watching Nancy from behind the curtains as she, in her turn, watched the house . . . What would his mother do when he was gone?

  He jerked his head as if to throw off this additional worry, and answered Mary, rejecting her offer, as he knew he must, but crying out internally at the necessity that drove him to it: ‘No, it wouldn’t work. I’ve got to go there and get a start, and make enough money to set up.’

  The term set up and all that it implied lifted him back to a week ago, when there was no fear in his life, only the ecstatic feeling of loving her. He pulled her to him blindly and kissed her, and so was lost for a time, until she murmured, ‘John . . . listen to me. Now don’t get wild at what I’m going to say. But I’ve got a little money . . . only a little’—she felt his withdrawal and clung on to him—‘Listen, darling, don’t be foolish. It isn’t much, for I’ve never bothered to save. It’s what my grandfather left me. There’s two hundred pounds. We could . . .’

  ‘Mary . . . do you love me enough to wait a year, perhaps two?’

  It was as if she had never made her offer. She answered, ‘Yes . . . for as long as you wish.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  He kissed her again. Then said, ‘I’ve been making enquiries; I’m going as soon as I can. I went up to see some people called Hogan in Jarrow last night. They’ve told me what to do.’

  ‘Oh, John’—the huskiness of her voice was deepened by the catch of tears—‘why . . . why all this rush?’ And as she asked the question, Nancy Kelly came back into her mind. It was because of this he was going more than anything else. He was running away.

  ‘John, what is it? What’s worrying you? Tell me.’

  He remained quiet, and she felt the stiffening of his body again. Then he put her thoughts into his own words: ‘I’m running away . . . I’ve been accused of something, and I can’t face it . . . Mary’—the muscles of his arms hardened against her soft flesh—‘if you heard something bad about me would you believe it? I can’t prove to you that I’m innocent, I can only tell you I am . . . It’s about . . . I’m . . .’ He stopped and a shiver passed through his body. He could not bring himself to say, ‘I’m accused of giving Nancy Kelly a bairn,’ nor could he say, ‘I’m as innocent as Christ himself, for I’ve never had a woman; nor will have until I have you, be it in two years or twenty.’

  The cold dark bleakness of the night pressed down on them. They stood slightly apart, and Mary waited for him to go on and voice his misery. But he remained silent. The silence seemed to fill the lane and to widen the distance between them. At last she could bear it no longer, for now she was with him she knew without doubt that he was incapable of committing that of which he was accused, and she cried out, ‘You would never do anything bad. Never! Oh, my dear, don’t let this thing cause you to make hasty decisions. Don’t let it drive you away. Stay and see it out.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is they are sa
ying.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I know all about it.’

  The silence fell on them again, softly now, filled with reverence.

  She knew all about it and she was here! He whispered, ‘You know about Nancy Kelly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The wonder of her love and faith coursed like a mountain stream through him, sweeping before it the fear and dread that had been intensified by the thought of her revulsion towards him should the rumour ever reach her. Her name burst from him on a broken laugh that could scarcely be identified from a sob.

  She was in his arms, crushed tightly against him, and he was pouring words over her: ‘Nothing matters now. I can face anything. I’ll make money. We’ll start a new life together . . . Oh, Mary, my love, I’m as innocent of what they say as . . . as Katie is. I’ve always been sorry for the girl. I used to mind her when she was a bairn, and she would come to me when she was frightened . . . She’s changed; she’s different now. But somehow, I think she’s still frightened, and that’s why she’s made a dead set for me. And it’s made them think . . . But what does it matter now? Nothing matters, only you. We’ll start life in a new land; and you’ll teach me, as you were going to, and make a new man of me.’

  She tightened her arms about him . . . She teach him! What could she teach him but the superficialities, whereas he could teach her all there was to know of life.

  11

  Ask and Ye Shall Receive

  The February storm had raged for three days, during which hail, snow and rain was driven against the houses with such force as to almost penetrate the walls. It succeeded through many windows, and some of the people found it as dangerous to stay indoors as to go out and risk the flying slates and toppling chimney pots. But today the storm was lashing itself out. The streets were dry and the sun shone fitfully through the racing clouds.

  It shone now on Nancy standing in her doorway. It showed her up vividly to Mary Ellen as she watched from behind her curtains. For the past three days Mary Ellen had seen Nancy only dimly, and appearing more grotesque than ever through the two rain-streaked windows. But now, there she was, as vivid as the picture that was seared on Mary Ellen’s mind.