The Invisible Cord

by Catherine Cookson

  She did not go immediately into the kitchen but went into the sitting room and straight to the couch and felt the cover to see if it was wet. Yet she wasn’t thinking of the cover but planning what she was going to do. She next went into the hall and looked at the clock. Rance and Tishy should be in from school any minute now.

  As she entered the kitchen she heard the back gate open and Rance came racing up the yard and burst into the kitchen, crying, ‘Mam! Miss Warrington said me drawin’ was the best in the class, she said it looked like a real mota car an’ I told her it was a real ’un, one of me dad’s.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine. I’m glad she was pleased with you.’ She smiled down on him. ‘Where’s Tishy?’

  ‘Comin’.’

  ‘What do you mean comin’? I’ve told you to see to her from school, haven’t I?’

  ‘Aw, you know what she’s like, Mam, she won’t stay with me. I tried to grab her and she kicked me.’

  She shook her head. It was strange but her two eldest children had never got on, not even when they were babies. Rance had resented the arrival of a second baby and his reactions to it had made the elders say, ‘Oh, it’s natural, he feels his nose has been put out.’ And as she grew, Anastasia’s reaction to her elder brother was even more aggressive than his, and it had deepened since the business of the rabbit.

  ‘I’m goin’ out to play. Can I have a slice, Mam?’ Rance was on his way to the pantry when Annie checked him, saying, ‘No, hold your hand a minute, I’m going to set your tea. Now listen. I’m…I’m going down to the garage to see your dad, an’ I want you to look after the house till I come back.’

  ‘Aw, Mam, I want to go out to play.’

  ‘You’re going to stay here till I come back; I won’t be more than half an hour, and then you can go out to play.’

  ‘Has our Tishy got to stay in an’ all?’

  ‘You’ve all got to stay in.’

  ‘She’ll fight me.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Tishy.’

  ‘She’ll still fight me, an’ if she does I’ll kick her, I will, I will.’

  ‘Now, Rance, behave yourself. If there’s any trouble when I’m out that’ll put paid to the puppy. Now mind, I’m warning you, there’ll be no puppy for you.’

  As she hurriedly laid the table for the four of them, the boy sat sulking. His chin resting on his folded arms on the kitchen window sill, he stared down the backyard. Rance worried her at times, because the traits of his nature were so opposed. She knew that among boys of his own age he did quite a bit of bullying, yet he was afraid of Tishy, and his fear caused him to retaliate—she never used the word underhanded or sneaky when thinking of his reactions to his sister, but told herself that against the open hostility of Tishy he had to be on the defensive.

  When he turned quickly from the window and seated himself at the table she knew Tishy had entered the yard, and when the child came into the kitchen she said to her, ‘Hello there.’

  ‘Hello, Mam…Mam.’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Guess what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something nice happened?’

  ‘A-hah. I think I’m gona be picked for the May pocession.’

  ‘Procession, Tishy.’

  ‘That’s what I said, Mam, pocession. Miss Willard heard me singing, “O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels an’ Queen of the May”; an’ she said I sang good.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice. Wash your hands now quickly an’ sit up and get your tea.’

  ‘Am I…am I not goin’ out to play?’

  ‘Not until I come back. I’m just going to slip down to the garage to see your da and I want you to be a good girl.’

  Tishy went to the sink and washed her hands. This done, the tap still running, she put her hands under it and scooped some water into her mouth and started to rub her tongue with her fingers.

  It was her choking that brought Annie’s attention to her and she cried, ‘What are you up to, child? Are you trying to choke yourself?’

  Tishy spat into the sink, wiped her mouth on the roller towel, then walking to the table, took her seat before she said casually, ‘Father Ryan says people who swear should have their mouths scrubbed out.’

  ‘But you don’t swear…do you?’

  ‘No…but…but I think things, swear things.’ The child stared up at Annie, her mouth set in a thin line, her eyes wide and serious.

  Suppressing a smile, Annie put out her hand and touched her child’s head, saying, ‘Get on with your tea.’ At times this daughter of hers was so honest she was embarrassing.

  She now ran upstairs and put on her coat and hat, and glancing at herself quickly in the mirror she turned her face first to one side and then the other. Was she getting a double chin?…Aw, of all the things to ask herself at a time like this when her mind was full of the other business. She was barmy at times, stupid, daft.

  In the kitchen again where they were all seated round the table, she addressed herself to Rance, saying, ‘Now mind, remember what I told you.’

  The boy didn’t answer, but Tishy asked, ‘What did you tell him, Mam?’ and before she could speak Bill supplied the answer, saying, ‘He’ll not get his puppy if he wallops you.’

  Annie sighed, then cried at them, ‘Now I’m warning you, all of you. Any trouble an’ you’re all for it. Now mind…and see to Kathy. Do you hear, Rance? See to Kathy.’

  ‘If Grandma Cooper comes she’ll see to her, then can I go out?’

  ‘No, Boy, you can’t, an’ that’s final.’ She stared at him hard before turning away.

  Grandma Cooper! Her mother had not been near them since they moved. She’d made her mouth go about them living at the depot but since they had got some place decent, and better by a mile than what she had, she had ignored the fact. Her da had said, ‘Leave her be, she’ll come round, if it’s only out of curiosity.’ But she was a long time in coming round. Oh, her mother was a queer creature.

  She caught a bus to the bottom of Fowler Street, from there she walked to the garage.

  The front of the garage lay back from the main thoroughfare. It had two sets of double doors at the front and two petrol pumps. It also had a back entrance, and it was to this Annie made her way. Having passed through an alley, she came into a broad lane, bordered on both sides by six-foot stone walls. In the middle of the lane a large single door led into the back of the garage. It was partly open and she went through, past the car pit, above which a car was suspended, and round the corner into the main area. At the far end near the front doors was a makeshift erection that served as an office, and she came to a dead stop when she saw, standing in its doorway, Arthur Bailey, and facing him, Georgie.

  When neither of them turned towards her she realised they hadn’t seen her, and instead of going forward she stepped back into the shelter of the raised car and stood with her fingers against her lips. When she heard their footsteps approaching the middle of the garage she urged herself to move. She didn’t want to be caught standing here as if she were listening. But she didn’t move for the footsteps had stopped.

  ‘It would be like a new life, Georgie.’ That was Arthur Bailey’s voice, and now Georgie answered, ‘I cannot understand you, man; there’s nowt but muck around here.’

  ‘It isn’t places that matter, you know that, Georgie, it’s people.’

  ‘Aye, aye, you’re right there.’

  ‘You could expand. As I said I’ll put all I’ve got into it. I could do the buying and selling, and you could teach me a bit of the mechanics…Think about it, Georgie, will you? You’ve got no idea what it’ll mean to me. As I said, it’ll be like starting to live again…Think about it, Georgie…Please?’

  The last words were a plea and they brought her fingers pressing tighter against her lips.

  ‘I’ll…I’ll have to talk it over with Annie.’

  There was a pause before Arthur Bailey’s voice came again, saying, ‘Yes, yes, of course. And…and you could point out to h
er that she’d have Mona with her again. She would like that, I’m sure, they used to be good friends. It could work out, Georgie, it could.’

  ‘All right, Arthur, all right.’

  When she saw them standing close together, Arthur Bailey’s two hands gripping Georgie’s, her body swayed forward, and she had no power to stop the protest rushing up from the depths of her and spurting from her lips almost in a scream, ‘No! No!’

  The men started as if they had both been shot, then stood transfixed for a moment gazing at her before she turned and ran.

  When she reached the entrance to the alleyway she heard Georgie’s voice calling after her down the back lane, and as she came out of the other end of the alleyway and ran down the street, she could still hear him shouting, ‘Annie! Annie! Do you hear me, Annie?’

  A passer-by tried to stop her. ‘What’s up, lass?’ he said. Frantically she thrust him off and went on running.

  Because she knew she must look mad tearing along the main street she jumped onto a bus that was picking up passengers and she alighted at the next stop, boarded another and within ten minutes was back in the house …

  Preparing for what was to follow, she bundled the children out to play; then she waited. She knew he’d either close the garage up or leave it in care of the lad.

  He stormed in the front way almost banging the door off its hinges. She heard him go into the kitchen, then the front room, then come up the stairs. She had chosen to wait for him in the bedroom, for here their voices would be less likely to carry to the neighbours on either side, at least they wouldn’t be able to make out word for word unless they made a point of coming up into their own bedrooms and putting their ears to the wall.

  She was standing with her arms folded looking out of the window when he entered the room.

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  She turned slowly towards him. Her lips trembling, but her voice low, she said, ‘If you don’t want the whole street to know what I mean stop your bawling.’

  They glared at each other, their angers equal, Annie’s depriving her face of all colour, Georgie’s flooding his to a purple hue.

  She said now, still low, ‘You’re not taking him on.’

  She watched him gulp twice before he replied, ‘That’s up to me.’

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t. Let me tell you somethin’, Georgie McCabe.’ She took one step nearer to him and gripped the end of the bed rail. ‘You bring him into the business and I walk out. Now think on what I’m saying. That fellow comes in, I go out.’

  Again they were staring at each other in silence. Then taking his fist, he beat it against his head, and the sound made her wince. She watched him go round in a small circle, his body almost bent double, and when he stopped he was gripping his grease-streaked hair, and he cried at her, ‘What the bloody hell’s up with you, woman? Spit it out! Go on, spit it out!’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ll spit it out.’ Her head was bobbing on her shoulders. ‘That…that Partridge fellow. I told you what he suggested, told you, and when I did you didn’t fly off the handle, did you? One would have expected a fellow like you to go back there and wring his bloody neck but you didn’t, did you? You didn’t even put up a show of doing it.’

  He was leaning towards her now, his hands flat on the middle of the bed. His lower jaw worked from one side to the other before he could get his words out, and then, the saliva spraying from his lips, he said, ‘Do you know what you’re saying? You’re telling me I’m a bloody queer.’

  She stared at him while the tears swelled her throat to bursting point. Yes, yes, that’s what she was telling him, she was telling him he was a bloody queer, and she knew he wasn’t. What was up with her? Was she mad? No, she wasn’t mad because there was something fishy, something not quite right, and she said so.

  ‘I’m…I’m not saying anything of the sort, but what I am saying is there’s something not right with him. You know it yourself, you do, you do.’

  She watched him droop his head slowly forward now and she cried at him, ‘I’m right aren’t I? I am, I know I am.’

  As he twisted his body round and slumped onto the edge of the bed the sickness within her erupted, but it, too, stuck in her throat. She leant back against the dressing table, her two hands pressed tight into her breasts as if to check the heaving inside her.

  Leaning forward now, Georgie put his elbows on his knees and dropping his joined hands between them he began to speak in a tone which seemed to be deprived of all emotion. ‘All right, he’s queer,’ he said, ‘but I’m not…not that bloody way any road.’ He cast an infuriated glance towards her. ‘And what’s more he’s not, not really. He’s the odd man out, an oddity if you like. God help him, he’s neither one thing nor the other. I’ll tell you something now.’ He turned his head slowly and looked at her. ‘I wish he was queer, real queer, for his own sake, then he’d have something. As it is he has nowt.’

  He now rubbed his hand around his face, and there was a pause before he went on, ‘When we first met in the cookhouse I knew he was different in more ways than one ’cos we were bloody well poles apart. But you know somethin’? He was the only one up till then who hadn’t treated me as a bloody numskull. I appeared as somebody real to him, so he said, an’ I could understand what he meant after meetin’ his folks. And that’s another thing I’ll press home to you, I was never taken in by them. Me brains might be scarce but what I lack in them I bloody well make up in cuteness. I can weigh people up. Oh aye, I can that. I’m like me mother there, and the more they take me for a bloody fool the more I learn about them. Oh, I took his folks’ measure all right. I was good for a laugh, I suited their purpose. But at the same time they suited mine, an’…an’ I was seein’ a different way of life, a kind I’d never seen afore, a different way from our bloody hand-to-mouth kind. If you want to know something—’ he turned his head and looked at her—‘I was grateful to him for noticin’ me, just noticin’ me. Do you understand that?’ He thrust his head forward now. ‘Not a bloody soul afore had given me credit for havin’ a grain of gumption. I was Georgie, the easygoing gullible galoot, on a level with Barney Skillet and John Fowlcroft, the two blokes in our street who couldn’t even keep their bloody noses clean. So there you have it. An’ as for what you heard that stinking sod Partridge say, well whatever grounds he had for it I don’t know, but it didn’t apply to me, let me tell you that.’

  He turned his head from her now and gazed down at his joined hands and said with unconscious humour, ‘If you think I’m queer then I must have bloody well created a new species. Four bairns I’ve given you an’ could do with it six times a day, that’s not countin’ overtime. An’ then you think I’m queer. Bloody God!’

  She rushed out of the room and across the landing and into the bathroom, and when she stood heaving over the sink he came and put his arm around her shoulders and held her head. Then he wiped her mouth, as he had done on the only other occasion when this subject had been mentioned between them.

  The tears streaming from her eyes, she now gazed into his homely looking face, and there came to her in one great shock of surprise the fact that she loved him. She loved Georgie McCabe, the big loud-mouthed numskull, and that was the reason for her…carrying-on, as she had done. Whatever affection or love he had to give she wanted it directed towards her, and her alone.

  Intuitively she knew it wasn’t love he had for Arthur but compassion, but her intuition had warned her all along that compassion was a dangerous ingredient when combating love, and she was still afraid of it.

  She said softly, ‘Don’t take him on, Georgie; please, please, don’t take him on.’

  He looked back into her eyes for a full minute before he answered. ‘All right, lass. If that’s how you feel about it, things’ll stay as they are.’

  When she fell against him and her crying mounted and her arms, for the first time that he could remember, held him tightly he stared over her shoulder while stroking her hair. A question slowly comi
ng into his mind, he pressed her gently from him and looking into her streaming face, he asked her quietly, ‘Tell me, Annie, do…do you like me? I mean…I mean more than just puttin’ up with things…with me like?’

  When she blinked and nodded her head twice he said, ‘Honest?’ and she muttered, ‘Honest. Honest, Georgie.’

  His lids blinked rapidly before he pulled her to him and held her tightly, and what he said thickly, and with a certain wonder, was, ‘Bloody strange thing, life.’

  PART FOUR

  ALAN

  One

  Georgie McCabe had got on like a house on fire. Everyone said so; even Mary grudgingly admitted as much, but she never failed to qualify it with, ‘Our Annie’s been behind it all. If it hadn’t been for her he would still be shovelling coal in the yards.’

  Mollie, of course, gave Annie full credit for her son’s success. She would continually say, ‘Well, lass, didn’t I say if anyone could make a roof with rotten straw you could?’ And she would add, ‘But the straw wasn’t so bad after all, was it, lass?’ to which Annie invariably answered, ‘It was you that said it was rotten, not me, Mollie.’

  In the thirteen years that had elapsed since they had moved to 17 Bewlar Terrace, everything, from an outsider’s view, had seemingly gone McCabe’s way; not only had he been able to buy the garage but also to extend it by acquiring two shops to the right of it and a house to the left, the latter having since been converted into an office downstairs and a mechanic’s flat above.

  The McCabe family itself had also expanded in a truly surprising fashion. Take the daughter, Tishy. At eighteen she was about to leave home and go to a teachers’ training college. She was a clever one was Tishy, relations and friends alike said this. They said it to her face; but, as some said behind her back, she had to have something to make up for her looks; it was a shame that she should be so awfully plain and it showed up more so because Kathy was so bonny. It didn’t matter about Kathy not having any brains, you didn’t need brains when you looked like her. A great future was prophesied for Kathy by both relations and friends. She could win a beauty contest, she could be a model, she could even be picked for a film star.