The Invisible Cord

by Catherine Cookson

  Kathy sat down on the side of the bed, then jumped up immediately, saying, ‘Oh, help me off with it.’ And when the white gown was laid across the foot of the bed, Kathy, shrugging her long shapely body into her dressing gown, turned to her mother and said in a flat voice, ‘Mam, I’m beginning to get nervous, sort of frightened.’

  ‘And you’ll be worse before you’re better.’

  ‘You’re some help.’

  ‘Come and sit here.’ Annie pulled her down beside her at the head of the bed, and, looking at her with her head on one side, said, ‘Everybody goes through this you know; although the things they’re frightened of might be different. I’m not going to go into the birds and the bees with you.’ She now pushed her daughter in the shoulder while bending forward and laughing as she continued, ‘Do you mind the time I tried to give you a bit of advice on that subject? Do you mind what you said?’

  Kathy, laughing now, said, ‘Buck up and be a rabbit, Mam.’

  ‘Aye, buck up and be a rabbit. I didn’t know whether to laugh or box your ears, but I’ll tell you something I remember feeling at the time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I felt you were much older than me.’

  ‘I still feel I’m much older than you, Mam, because in some ways you haven’t got a clue. Tishy says it’s because you shut your eyes to things, but I think it’s just you.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much, both of you.’ Annie turned her head away in mock indignation, and Kathy said, ‘Well I like you like that. I always thought you were different from other mothers; Mrs Bates, for instance. When Jane first asked Linda round there to tea, Linda said that Ma Bates looked as if she was fighting off age with a hatchet and it had slipped and caught her in the face.’

  As they both pushed at each other and laughed, Annie said, ‘That was a cruel thing to say.’

  ‘Well, you know Linda; she has a tongue like a rapier. But she’s right, she’s right most of the time. The other day in the shop when we had that beauty expert down from Newcastle and she kept yarping on about the indefinable something, charm you know, allure, she said people couldn’t put a name to it, or lay a finger on it, and all the while she was putting over to us how much of it she had. Of course, Linda twigged this immediately and she nearly made me choke by whispering, “Poor soul, she must have lost her something in the monkey puzzle”.’

  As Annie looked at her daughter’s animated, beautiful face she recalled to mind a vivid picture of the times when she and Mona had sat on the bed talking like this. She herself had been to Mona what Linda was to Kathy, yet at the same time the positions were partly reversed for Kathy had the looks and charm yet idolised Linda whereas Mona had idolised herself; but her daughter’s friendship, she felt, would fade away just as her own had with Mona once the marriage got under way.

  The marriage! She would never cease to wonder what this beautiful girl saw in Mr Percy Rinkton. She could have had her pick of any fellow in the town; they had swarmed round her like bees for years; yet she was going to marry that stiff-necked, pedantic know-all. What was it about him that attracted her? His persistence? For God knew he had been persistent enough, and so formal about his courtship that at times she had wanted to scream at him.

  He had allowed six weeks to elapse after Georgie’s death before coming to the house to ask formally for her permission to take Kathy out.

  Although Kathy had predicted his visit she had laughed her head off when she knew he had been; she had doubled her legs under her on the couch and rocked herself with her mirth. ‘I wouldn’t be found dead with him,’ she had said. Yet when he called again and saw her personally and asked her to go out she hadn’t laughed at him, she had been coy and said she was so very sorry but she had a previous engagement.

  The name of Percy Rinkton became a household joke, bringing flashes of humour into the dull atmosphere.

  During that year Kathy’s suitors came and went, only Percy Rinkton remained faithful inasmuch as periodically he would knock on the door and ask if it was convenient to see Miss McCabe…Miss Kathy McCabe.

  It was during a slack period of suitors that Kathy first went out with Percy Rinkton and from then on she stopped laughing at him. He was no longer a joke, he was someone to hold up to the family, especially to Bill, as an example of manners and interesting conversation.

  But it was Rance who said to her, ‘You’re not serious about that little runt, are you?’ and when she had turned on him they’d had their first quarrel, because whereas Rance hated Tishy with a deep intensity, his liking for Kathy went just as far the other way. From then on Rance made it his business to pick an argument with Kathy’s suitor whenever an opportunity afforded; that he repeatedly got the worst of it didn’t seem to get through to him. Percy Rinkton’s clinical logical reasoning was thrown aside as claptrap by Rance.

  Bill, too, laughed at Percy. While conceding that the fellow had plenty up top he nevertheless pointed out at every opportunity in the beginning that the fellow was an inch, if not more, shorter than she was, and she was still growing. ‘By the time you’re twenty,’ he joked, ‘he’ll need a stepladder to reach you.’

  But the more opposition there was to Percy Rinkton as a suitor the more Kathy became determined to keep him in that category; and now, three years later, she was about to marry him, and Annie still couldn’t understand it.

  It was, she supposed, a very good match for her youngest daughter. Percy came from one of the best families in the town. His father was a leading doctor, he himself was an accountant, a fully fledged one at that. She had nothing to complain of at his people’s reception of them. His mother wasn’t uppish at all, she was really a canny body. Mrs Rinkton was forty-six years old, only four years older than herself but she always looked upon her as an elderly woman. Percy himself was twenty-six and that was a nice age for a man to marry. Everything about Percy and his family was correct. Perhaps that was the trouble, it was too correct, it was irritatingly correct; it was all right being good mannered but when somebody popped up from his seat every time you entered the room it got a bit too much.

  Last night she had tried to make a breakthrough when he had said to her, ‘What am I to call you in future? I can’t go on calling you Mrs McCabe,’ and to this she had answered, ‘You shouldn’t have gone on calling me Mrs McCabe all this time, Percy.’

  ‘Then what shall it be?…Mother?’

  He had been startled when she said, ‘Oh good God, no! Make it Annie.’

  The look of shock on his face had caused her to laugh, and when he said, ‘Oh, I…I really couldn’t,’ she demanded, ‘Why not? Anyway, call me what you like but not Mother.’

  Mother to Percy, that would be too much. She smiled inwardly as she now said to Kathy, ‘We were supposed to be talking about you, not me,’ and, her voice losing all its banter, she added, ‘Are you quite sure in your mind, lass, you know what you’re up to?’

  ‘You mean with regard to how I feel towards Percy?’

  ‘Just that…’

  ‘Yes, Mam. I love Percy. I know you think that’s strange, but you see I…I know him like none of you do. When…when we’re alone together he’s not so starchy.’

  Annie only just prevented herself from saying, ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘It’s…it’s sort of nerves with him, he’s…he’s got an inferiority complex.’

  ‘Percy! With an inferiority complex?’

  ‘All right, Mam, you can say it like that, but that’s what it is; he’s naturally good mannered and this shyness makes him force it home more.’

  Again Annie only just stopped herself from exclaiming, ‘Shyness!’ Percy Rinkton shy; a fellow who had persisted in knocking on her front door for a full year, knowing that the object of his attraction was likely to turn him down for some other fellow. Percy Rinkton shy? Well, perhaps she hadn’t a clue about people, perhaps this daughter had a deeper insight into human nature than herself, for all her experience; but then her daughter was the product of this new gener
ation. The young people of today frightened her with their perception and knowledge; things that were hidden in her young days were now stripped bare and flaunted on posters, papers and books, not only laying bare the body, but the mind. The latter was more frightening still. There were things in the mind that should be kept hidden; everybody had things in their mind that should be kept hidden.

  ‘Mam, do you think our Rance will play up?’

  ‘No, don’t you worry about Rance; I’ll see to him.’

  ‘Tishy always says when he’s quiet he’s up to something. He’s been quiet for the past week or so.’

  Yes, Rance had been quiet for the past week or so. She didn’t need that to be brought to her notice. He was up to something all right; only one thing she was sure of, it wasn’t connected with the garage. The garage was clean, figure-wise with regard to the books, and materially as to the place itself, for never a working day had passed since Georgie had died, but she had visited the garage. This remained the bone of contention between her and Rance but she ignored it.

  But Rance, she felt, had other irons in the fire. He wasn’t gambling, it wasn’t that, he didn’t stay out late enough. He’d been at her this past while to move to Westoe. Only last week he had tried to induce her to take a house that had been turned into two large flats. ‘Why two flats?’ she had asked, and he had answered that he’d like a flat of his own. ‘Well, you go and take a flat,’ she had said, and he had looked at her a long while before saying, ‘You know I couldn’t leave you.’

  When he spoke like that to her she forgot her fears concerning him; she forgot that there was that cell in her mind in which was stored his real worth; such words blotted out his lifted foot and the kick in the groin. Rance would never leave her because he needed her. It was as if the umbilical cord had never been cut between them. When he spoke to her in that way it caused some part of her stomach to jerk as if he were tugging at the cord, reminding her that they could never be separated.

  Sometimes in her anger against him she thought that nature, in siphoning off nearly all her affections into her first-born and leaving little for the rest, had played a dirty trick on her. Tishy was right, Tishy was nearly always right, she liked the others but she loved Rance. Yet of late a strange element had entered into her love and it disturbed her. It couldn’t be said it was dislike. Or could it? Or hate, when she thought of his lifted foot? Oh no! No.

  ‘Our Rance is drinking.’

  ‘Rance drinking?’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t see it but he came in the other night late and almost staggered up to bed; he was all bright-eyed and sloppy, he even spoke civilly to Percy. Well, I wouldn’t mind him getting drunk on my wedding day if it keeps him civil.’

  Annie repeated, ‘Our Rance drunk? He hardly ever touches the stuff.’

  ‘He’s sly, he does it on the sly.’

  Annie rose from the bed and went towards the door, thinking, It might not be such a bad thing if he did drink, it would loosen some of the tensions in him, for a time at any rate. The doorknob in her hand, she turned and smiled at Kathy, saying, ‘Well, I’ll get him bottled up on the day, eh?’ She had ignored the remark that he was sly.

  ‘Aw, Mam.’

  Kathy looked at her and shook her head, and in the action and the words there was an impatience underlying a kindly tolerance, and it made Annie feel for the moment that indeed she was younger than her daughter; or was it that she was just gullible?

  Two

  They were all in the front room, Kathy and Percy, Rance, Tishy, Bill and Annie. There was no talk of the wedding that was to take place in two days’ time. Bill was talking about his future as a teacher. When he went back to the university after the Christmas vac it would be for the last time. He wished, he said, he was staying on now and trying for his Ph.D., for by the sound of things they were lining up for teachers’ jobs.

  To Tishy, who was in her first year as a teacher at the secondary modern, the solution was to move away, get out of the north-east. ‘The trouble with us in this corner of the globe,’ she said, ‘is that we are too insular. Metaphorically speaking, everybody in the north-east has the chummy back lane, back-to-back mentality. People won’t move. If they do it has to be within easy reach of the town in which they were born. If they go farther afield they develop symptomatic phobias.’

  ‘I’m with you there,’ said Bill.

  ‘Don’t talk rot.’

  They all looked at Rance, but he didn’t lift his eyes from the evening paper.

  After a moment Percy Rinkton spoke. ‘I should say that the regional feeling remains more marked in the north-east than anywhere else in the country,’ he said, stressing as usual the last consonant of each word. ‘Yet one cannot but say that things have changed. The two wars in this century have acted as catharses on society. For instance, in the First World War you needed money and education to die as an officer, whereas in the last war any Geordie could get some sort of commission in the army, or the navy for that matter, be he an insurance agent, a lorry driver, a car mechanic or a…’

  ‘Or a bloody cheapskate accountant.’ Rance had thrown the paper down and was glaring at Percy. ‘Car mechanic!’ His lip curled. ‘Any apprentice car mechanic in this town could buy and sell you, mate. And let me tell you something. You wouldn’t be where you are the day if it wasn’t for your bloody…papa.’

  ‘Rance! Stop it!’

  Percy’s face had drained white in the last few seconds, but looking steadily across at Rance he said, ‘You are bent on asking for trouble, aren’t you? But I’m not going to argue with you.’

  Rance had risen to his feet and was glaring at Percy where he was sitting, his back tight against a straight-backed chair, and he said, ‘You know what you can do, mate, you can take a single ticket to hell.’ And on this he went out, and Annie, after closing her eyes tight for a moment, followed him.

  Tishy was the first to move. She got up, went to the fireplace and, grabbing a piece of coal with the tongs, flung it on the fire, saying, ‘He’s a pig, an utter pig.’ Then turning to Percy she said, ‘I’m sorry, Percy. Take no notice.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t, I don’t.’ Percy gave her a weak smile. Then looking at Kathy as she sat with her head bowed and her hands tight under her oxters as if protecting herself against the cold, he said, ‘It’s all right, dear, don’t be worried for me. I…I understand Rance. Yes, yes, I understand him. He doesn’t understand me but I understand him.’

  Bill, leaning his head back in the corner of the couch, now exclaimed, ‘Well, if you do, Percy, you’re about the only one who does; even Mam can’t understand him and she’s worked on him long enough.’

  ‘And for him.’

  Bill nodded at Tishy as he repeated, ‘Yes, and for him, and she’ll likely go on doing it until the end of her days…’

  In the kitchen Annie was giving the lie to this. ‘Look,’ she was saying, ‘we’ve had about enough of this, and we’ve all had about enough of you. You’re not merely rude, you’re ignorant, raw ignorant.’

  ‘He makes me sick.’

  ‘Because he’s different from you.’

  ‘Yes, he’s different from me, and thank God for that. Who’d want to be like that pipsqueak? I ask you!’

  ‘That pipsqueak, as you call him, has something, Rance, that you’ll never have, and that’s brains. And he uses them.’

  ‘Aw, now we know whose side you’re on. We know where we stand, don’t we?’

  ‘I’m on nobody’s side, I’m only trying to point out to you that you can’t go on like this. You’ve been like a bear with a sore skull for months.’

  ‘And if you had any sense you would be acting in the same way and putting a stop to our Kathy making a bloody fool of herself letting her marry him. Do you want to get rid of her? With her looks she could have picked and chosen, but you let her take a neuter like him.’

  ‘What do you mean, a neuter?’

  ‘Just what I say. He’s not half a man; you’ve just got to look at him.�
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  She stared at him grimly before she said, ‘That’s got to be proved, hasn’t it?’ Then she went on, ‘Now look here, Rance, I’m warning you. You cause any trouble on Saturday and you and I are finished, finally. She’s the first one to leave home and she’s going to leave it peaceably if I have anything to do with it. You create the slightest bit of trouble and you’re out. Do you hear me?’ She placed her hands flat on the table and leant over it towards him. ‘I’ve shielded you for years; I’ve got their backs up ’cos I put you first in everything…’ She stopped abruptly as the kitchen door opened suddenly and Tishy came in.

  Tishy, the door closing behind her, stood with her back to it and stared at them, and they at her. Tishy at twenty-two looked tall, even taller than her five foot seven because of her extreme thinness. Her face had hardly altered at all in the last four years but she looked much older. This was due mostly to the way she dressed her hair, which was drawn tightly back from her forehead and kept in place by a band on the back of her head. Her thin lips scarcely moved as she said caustically, ‘Having a job to get through to him?’ She did not immediately take her eyes from her mother when Rance took a step towards her, his teeth gritting audibly, but when she did look at him she held his gaze for some seconds before she said, ‘You do anything to upset Saturday, just anything mind, one little thing, and it’ll give me great pleasure to go down to the police station and tell them that I’ve been withholding information, vital information, with regard to a murder.’

  She made no movement when she saw Annie’s body slump further over the table, but kept her eyes tight on those of Rance and watched them darken to a blackness in which his hate smouldered.

  It was the sound of the doorbell ringing that snapped the tension. Turning away she went out of the kitchen, but was back within a minute and, looking to where Annie was now sitting by the side of the table, she said, ‘It’s…it’s Mr Wilkins from down below, he wants to have a word with you.’