The Invisible Cord

by Catherine Cookson

  When she passed Tishy’s door she paused and, an idea flashing into her mind, she thought, Oh that would be wonderful. But it would be too good to be true. And with that cold on her there wasn’t a hope.

  Get downstairs, she said to herself again.

  When she entered the room he rose to his feet. Wasn’t that nice. Nobody had ever done that for her since she had met Arthur Bailey. She had forgotten for a moment that he was connected with Arthur Bailey; he and Mona seemed to have dropped entirely out of existence. She had seen Mona only once since the day she confided in her, and that was when she had come to bury her mother. They had exchanged a few words at the graveside, nothing more, they had been like strangers. She had been very upset about it.

  After saying, ‘Do sit down…would you like a cup of tea?’ he answered, ‘Yes, but not yet. You come and sit down.’

  She sat down on the edge of the settee and asked, ‘How’s your uncle, your Uncle Arthur?’

  ‘Oh, he was very well the last time I saw him.’

  ‘Have you come this way on holiday, though—’ she shook her head and laughed now—‘I don’t know why you would pick Durham after Herefordshire.’

  ‘Well, I have picked Durham, at least Northumberland, but not for a holiday. I’ve…I’ve just been appointed to a post in Newcastle University.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave a chuckling laugh. ‘I was on the shortlist and, three parts of the selection committee being out of their tiny minds, they chose me. I still haven’t got over it yet.’

  She knew that he was talking himself down and she shook her head as she said, ‘What’s…what’s your subject?’

  ‘Mathematics.’

  ‘Oh, mathematics! Bill, that’s my second son, he has nightmares about maths. He’s pretty good at most other things but maths have always bedevilled him. He’s going to be a teacher too.’

  ‘He is?’

  ‘And my daughter, Tishy—short for Anastasia—she’s going to be one an’ all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She’s clever, Tishy is cleverer than Bill.’

  ‘How many family have you?’

  ‘Four. Rance is the eldest, he’s twenty; Tishy eighteen, Bill seventeen and Kathy just on sixteen. That’s the one I thought you were after; the fellows are never off the door.’ She put her head back and laughed.

  ‘She sounds attractive.’

  ‘Oh, she’s that all right, and very well aware of it. But tell me, how did you know where to find us?’

  ‘Oh, Uncle Arthur gave me your address. He said you might still be here. He said if I found you I had to give you his regards and also remember him to your husband.’

  A chill passed over her causing her to shiver slightly.

  ‘How’s your Aunt Mona these days?’ She felt she should have asked this before, but she was still peeved with Mona. She felt she had been snubbed by her, yet in her heart she knew the real reason for Mona’s silence. Mona knew it was she who had squashed Arthur’s proposal to join Georgie in the garage.

  ‘Oh.’ He uncrossed his legs, then recrossed them again before he said, ‘I…I don’t know, I haven’t seen her these last five years. They…they separated you know.’

  ‘Separated?…No, no, I didn’t know. Where is she?’

  ‘In London as far as I can gather.’

  ‘I’m…I’m sorry. And…and your uncle?’

  ‘Oh, he’s still in the same place. It’s rather a lonely life for him but he seems to prefer it that way.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ She nodded her head; then on a lighter note, she said, ‘And your mother? I remember your mother very well.’

  ‘She remarried about a year ago and is now living in America.’

  ‘Really! And you’re all on your own?’

  ‘Yes, and I like it that way. I had to practically knock her unconscious before she would go. She still looked upon me as thirteen and not twenty-three.’

  ‘But I suppose you miss her?’

  ‘Oh yes, I miss her. Not so much now; I’ve had a year to get used to it. My life’s very full, and besides I was away from home so much. I was at Oxford for four years.’

  ‘Oxford!’ There was a slight note of awe in her voice, then she added, ‘Bill hopes that he might get into a university…it must be wonderful to go to a university.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just like school, only you have a longer leash on you.’

  When a silence fell between them and he sat staring at her, a half-smile bringing one side of his mouth upwards as if he were amused at something, she blinked and said, ‘I can’t get over it. Fancy you remembering me from all those years ago.’

  ‘Well, I was five, and they tell me a very precocious five.’

  ‘I can’t remember anything from when I was five, hardly from when I was seven.’

  ‘I can remember the conversation we had regarding an unmentionable place.’

  ‘An unmentionable place?’ She screwed up her face at him.

  ‘The jig.’

  ‘Aw, yes.’ She was nodding and laughing now. ‘The jig. Yes, yes, I remember.’

  ‘And so did my mother. She said I repeated that conversation daily until I was nearly eight. She was for murdering me. And then I suddenly stopped and never mentioned it again until I was almost fourteen; then out of the blue it came into my mind and when I said to my mother, “Do you remember how I used to go on about the jig?” she put her hands over her ears and said, “Oh, don’t start that again.” So you see what an impression you made upon me.’

  ‘You mean the jig did.’

  ‘No, you. But, you know, I still call it the jig.’

  Again there was silence, and again he was staring at her. And then he burst out, ‘You know, it’s amazing, I can’t get over it, I mean how little you’ve changed. It’s as if I were five last week; you’re so like the memory I’ve retained of you.’

  ‘But…but it’s such a long time ago, over eighteen years.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ His face unsmiling now, he nodded; then after a moment he said, ‘I suppose what helped to imprint you in my mind was that I remember that Christmas as one big holy row. My mother went for my father, my grandmother went for my father, then she went for my Uncle Arthur; if I remember rightly practically no-one was speaking to one another on Christmas Day, and they practically threw my presents at me, so the only happy memory that remained of that particular Christmas was of a lady who ran with me through the woods and laughed with me and discussed—jigs. And I must tell you this, a lady who I thought had come from a strange land.’

  Annie put her hand over her mouth as she laughed. ‘My Geordie accent.’

  ‘No.’ He lifted his finger and wagged it at her now. ‘I won’t say it was your Geordie accent, not after listening to some of the townspeople this past week or so. But seriously—’ he shook his head—‘I can’t understand a word some of them say.’

  She now cocked her chin upwards as she said, ‘Well, all I can say is your education has been sadly neglected in one quarter, anyway.’ Getting to her feet, she added, ‘I’m going to make you a cup of tea whether you want it or not. When did you last eat?’

  ‘Oh, at lunchtime, I had a good meal.’

  ‘And you’re not hungry?’

  He smiled at her again with his lips closed, and she said, ‘That’s my answer. Would you like to come into the kitchen? We can talk while I get you something.’

  As they went towards the kitchen the door opened and Tishy came out, and they all stopped for a moment and looked at each other.

  ‘Oh, Tishy, there you are. You won’t know who this is. Someone I knew a long time ago, Mr Alan Partridge. Alan, this is my eldest daughter, Tishy.’ Oh—Annie groaned to herself—didn’t she look a sight; her little nose was like a red blob.

  Alan smiled at the tall young girl standing before him, holding her handkerchief to her nose. She had an unusual face, he thought, and didn’t look a bit like her mother. He held out his hand. ‘How are you?�
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  ‘It’s pretty evident,’ she said, ‘isn’t it?’ and Annie thought helplessly, That’s Tishy all over, straight to the point.

  Alan laughed and said, ‘A double whisky, a whole lemon and a spoonful of ginger in boiling water. You’ll be a new man—woman, in the morning.’

  ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea—’ Annie looked at Tishy—‘and something to eat. Come on back and talk; you’re bound to have something in common as Alan is going to teach at the university, Newcastle. What do you think of that?’

  Tishy turned a sidewards glance towards the tall man and after a moment she said, ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alan moved his head towards her. ‘And I hear you’re going in for the same racket.’

  ‘Well—’ Tishy was walking back into the kitchen—‘nothing so grand as the university; I’m going to a teachers’ training college.’

  ‘They informed me politely at headquarters that I would have been better equipped for the job if I’d had a year’s training, too.’

  ‘They did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well—’ Tishy sat herself down and crossed her legs—‘if I could trade, I know which one I’d take. What’s your speciality?’

  ‘Maths.’

  ‘Oh! Maths…’

  ‘Don’t say it like that, Tishy, you are very good at maths.’

  Tishy turned and looked at Annie, and in a patient tone she said, ‘There are maths, Mam and maths. What I was very good at was merely maths.’

  As Annie watched her smile at Alan, her cold apparently forgotten for the moment, wild ideas again began darting through her mind. She drew in a quick breath and said, ‘Well, you two can get on discussing maths—and maths, I have something better to do. Maths comes very low down the list of my subjects, food is my speciality.’ She nodded towards Alan, and he, with a broad smile, said, ‘Well, I’ll attend your classes any day; food, too, is my speciality—the eating of it anyway.’

  During the next twenty minutes Annie busied herself about the kitchen, but kept her ears cocked to the conversation which moved from maths to the present student attitude, then on to teachers’ salaries, and from there to the writings of Tolkien—she had never heard of him—and from time to time she wanted to stop and look at them, particularly at Tishy. She had never heard Tishy talk like this. Then, of course, she didn’t know how Tishy talked outside the house, she had never met any of her friends. Tishy didn’t seem to make friends, she was a loner, that was the trouble. Yet here she was talking twenty to the dozen.

  Now they were on about old books and the various places you could get them in Newcastle. Tishy was mentioning particular shops by name, and recommending them to him. Well, well! She was a deep one. But then, there was nothing deep about knowing the names of second-hand bookshops. But it wasn’t that she was really meaning. For the first time she was seeing her daughter in a new light. She glanced again at her face. It hadn’t altered…yet it had. Her mouth, when she was talking like this in an animated way, didn’t look so thin; and there was a light in her eyes. Nothing could ever take away her plainness, but definitely her daughter had another face if she cared to show it. And now she was showing it as she said excitedly, ‘I came across an old book the other day, not in a bookshop, in a junk shop. It was lying among the tuppennies, it’s called Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book. It’s marvellous, the things it’s got in it. Look, I’ll get it.’

  Annie stopped to watch her rush out of the room, then she looked at Alan. Alan was already looking at her and he said, ‘You’ve got a highly intelligent daughter. How old did you say she is?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  He moved his head to one side, then said, ‘Well, if she’s a sample of your family I’ll have to keep up to the mark with the rest, won’t I?’

  ‘Oh, they’re not all like Tishy. Well, I mean, Rance—he’s the eldest—he had no head for learning, not Tishy’s type of learning. Bill has; he’s a year younger than Tishy. And Kathy, oh Kathy’s like me, all tongue and no brains.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ It was like a schoolmaster speaking, and she laughed out aloud, but she immediately turned to her work again as Tishy came into the room holding a faded red-covered book in her hand.

  Thrusting the book on the table before Alan, Tishy opened it and, showing the portrait of a dark-haired, intense and rather handsome-looking man, said, ‘That’s him, Elbert Hubbard. Isn’t he nice?’

  ‘Yes, very handsome. And an American I’d say.’ Then he added, ‘Oh, ’tisn’t so old, it was printed in 1923.’

  ‘Well, it’s over forty years ago.’

  Alan looked at her for a moment and laughed gently, then said, ‘Yes, I suppose that’s a long time.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s got everything, articles, quotations, the lot. Look at that one: “The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.” Emerson. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Very good. But you must remember that Emerson himself was an imaginative man.’

  Again Annie stopped and looked towards her daughter. Tishy was a Catholic, a firm Catholic because she never missed Mass, and there she was talking about the religions of the world as if she believed in them. She watched them turn the pages, then listened to Alan saying, ‘Oh now, I’m with Darwin and what he says here: “If I had my life to live over again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”’

  ‘Do you like music?’ Alan was looking at Tishy, and she answered after a moment’s pause, ‘Yes, and no. I don’t really know what I like yet, I haven’t had time to sort it out. One thing I do know, I don’t like heavy classical.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. And another thing I do know is I don’t like pop. Oh, I loathe pop.’

  Tishy now turned and glanced at Annie, and Annie stopped mixing a batter and, pursing her lips while she assumed an indignant pose, looked from Tishy to Alan and said, ‘She’s getting at me. That’s who she’s getting at; she’s getting at me because I like pop. Well, light stuff you know, like they have on in the mornings.’

  ‘Like they have on in the mornings,’ repeated Tishy scornfully. Yet she smiled as she spoke. Then looking at Alan again she made, at least to Annie’s knowledge, the first joke in her life for she said, ‘You know she’s not my mother, she’s not the mother of any of us. I mean, how could she be, just look at her!’ She thumbed over her shoulder and in sotto voce ended, ‘She’s gaga, but she might grow out of it when she’s turned twenty.’

  As Annie compressed her lips and knocked her floured hands against one another as if getting ready to do battle, Alan leant his head towards Tishy and said, ‘I know what you mean, she was just like that when I was five years old. And her conversation, oh dear, dear! Do you know what she used to talk about?—jigs.’

  As Annie said ‘Oh! Alan,’ it seemed to her that he had been in that kitchen all his life, at least since he was five, for he already seemed a part of it.

  It was at this moment that she heard a key turn in the front door. Wiping her hands quickly on a towel, she went out of the kitchen and saw Rance making for the stairs, and she looked towards him, saying, ‘Why, I didn’t hear the car. What’s the matter, you’re all grease? Why didn’t you come the back way? Come in the kitchen and get washed, and I want you to meet somebody.’

  ‘Is there any hot water?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to have a bath.’

  ‘But you had a bath this morning. Where’ve you been? I thought you were going to the match. Your dad said Jimmy was staying on this afternoon with him.’

  ‘I…I did go to the match.’ He was partly up the stairs now. ‘But I had a job to do after for a friend. I’m going t
o have a bath.’

  She stared at him for a moment before she returned to the kitchen. There, Tishy was saying, ‘I like this bit because I know heaps of people like this. Listen: “There are some faults in conversation, which none are so subject to as men of wit, nor even so much as when they are with each other. If they have opened their mouths without endeavouring to say a witty thing, they think it is so many words lost; it is a torment to the hearers, as much as to themselves, to see them upon the rack of invention and in perpetual restraint, with so little success. They must do something extraordinary in order to equip themselves and answer their character else the standers-by may be disappointed and be apt to think them only like the rest of mortals.”

  ‘Don’t you know people like that? They’ve got to be clever or bust. I’ve taken an oath that when I get in front of a class I’ll only tell them half of what I know and let them find the other half out for themselves. We’ve got a teacher at school; my hackles rise every time he opens his mouth…’

  ‘Are you forgetting something, Tishy? You’re talking to a teacher now.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t forgetting anything, Mam.’ Tishy turned and looked at Annie. ‘What I’m doing in a roundabout way is to inform him that if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll not spread his brains out on the desk.’

  As Annie, aghast, said, ‘Tishy!’ Alan began to laugh. It was a deep rollicking kind of laugh that didn’t seem to match his refined-looking exterior. It was a laugh you might have expected from some burly sailor, it was an infectious laugh, and the next minute both she and Tishy were laughing with him. Yet all the while she kept her eyes on her daughter. Never, never, had she seen Tishy like this with anyone else, and with a cold on her an’ all. Wouldn’t it be marvellous, marvellous, if he and Tishy…Oh, wonderful! And why not? Looking at her daughter now she seemed no longer plain. A few moments ago she had thought her animation could do nothing for her looks, but it had.