The Mallen Girl

by Catherine Cookson

  Last Saturday she had danced again, but mostly with Michael, that was when he wasn’t dancing with Sarah. But even dancing with Michael had afforded her no pleasure for her heart had ached while she smiled, and as the night wore on and she watched the schottisches, the polkas, the de Coverleys and the clog dances, she wondered if the next time the festivities were held in the barn it would be for Michael’s wedding, and when she asked herself who would then be his bride she could not put an actual face or name to her.

  The fear in her that Barbara might become her daughter-in-law had lessened slightly during the past year for Michael had seen less of her; whereas he still welcomed her warmly when she came here, his visits to the cottage had become shorter and with longer intervals between them. Sometimes she thought he was more than a little attracted to Sarah; but then again, they had been brought up almost as brother and sister and his attitude toward her was much the same as that which he showed toward Barbara.

  That he may have acquired female interests in Hexham had not escaped her, for he had twice of late called at the McCullen’s home. Mr McCullen had been his English master at school and he had first gone to his house when, as a pupil, he had been invited to dinner. Mr McCullen had three daughters and a son. James was Michael’s age, but she did not think it was James that Michael went to see, for he had recently received a letter from Hexham and when she had handed it to him she had smiled and was about to remark on the scent of perfume that emanated from the envelope, but the blank look that appeared on his face had checked any flippancy on her part.

  Then there was Miss Ann Hunnetson; yet she could not see him becoming attached to Miss Hunnetson because Miss Hunnetson was very scholastic. Even in her ordinary conversations she impressed you with her scholarship as, she supposed, was necessary in order to run a bookshop. She herself frequented Miss Hunnetson’s bookshop whenever she visited Hexham, and on these occasions Michael had shown a desire to accompany her. But she dismissed Miss Hunnetson, for even in her early twenties, as she surely was, she was already too much like Brigie.

  And there was no way of finding out what was in Michael’s mind for during the past year he had become, what was the word she could use? Reticent? Well, at least not so open where his thoughts were concerned. He was no longer spontaneous in his opinions of this one or that one, and he no longer discussed Barbara with her. At one time, after Barbara’s visits he would have said, ‘Madam’s on her high horse today,’ or perhaps, ‘Madam has behaved herself today,’ but not any more. She realised that very often now after visits from Brigie and Barbara he would take himself off for a long walk, or visit the fields, or check on the sheep, anything that would take him from the house—and herself.

  There was a barrier rising between them and she couldn’t break it down because she didn’t really know what was creating it, except that her son had left youth behind and now in his twentieth year had become a man.

  Sarah said, ‘While I’m that way shall I take a can of tea to Michael and Uncle Jim, it’ll be nippy up there?’

  ‘No, I shouldn’t bother; they won’t be long. It isn’t foot rot, so they won’t be bringing any of them down.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Oh, one of them had got a piece of wire round its foot and another had a festered pad; they have no sense, sheep. Still I shouldn’t say that, they have sense enough to keep warm in weather that would freeze us to death.’

  ‘Yes, Da says they save themselves by all going to bed together.’ She laughed gaily. ‘I remember the six last year that were buried in the snow lying head to tail as if they’d been put to bed, and the lambs we brought up in the stable. Oh, poor things.’ She put her head on one side. ‘They didn’t know what had hit them when they were pushed out onto the fells. I thought about them for days after, especially at night when the frost was still thick, because like always the ewes give them a rough time. I can never understand that part of it, pushing their own out, it’s funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘You mustn’t get sentimental about sheep, or any other animals on the farm except the dogs and horses; the rest are just part of a business.’

  Constance was no longer surprised that she could talk this way. It had been hard at first to clamp down on sentimentality but she had achieved it, as she had achieved supremacy over other weak facets of her personality.

  ‘Well, there’s the bits and pieces; put them in a basket. But first run and get your cloak, for as you say it’ll be cold up there.’

  A few minutes later Sarah left the farmyard carrying the basket of eatables. She wore a green cloth cloak with a hood to it which she had made during last winter, the material having been a Christmas present from Constance. She swung the basket as she walked and every now and again she hitched a step or two as a child might do.

  After keeping to the cart track for some distance from the farm she mounted a bank, went through a small copse, and when she emerged kept to a footpath that ran along a ridge. The ground to her left dropped sharply for a distance of about twenty feet to a long strip of land that didn’t deserve the name of valley, for it was more like a narrow passage bordering the foothills where they mounted gradually to their larger companions.

  The slope and the strip of land were known as Rotten Bottom, a name it had earned because most of it was scree-covered, and here and there large boulders stuck out of the earth. Also at one point it had become a dump for old and useless farm machinery. Like most farms Wolfbur at one time had, scattered around its corners, old ploughs, rusty scythes, broken blades, wagon wheels and often old wagons themselves, and the rubbish and litter strangely did not, in any way, detract from the farm being considered successful. No farmer was thought to be a bad manager because he did not get rid of useless tools. Who knew but that the very thing they might throw away today they might want tomorrow. So Wolfbur for years had had its assortment of useless implements, until Constance had taken over and found that the litter in the yard and surrounding buildings offended her eye, and so she’d had it all gathered up and thrown down into Rotten Bottom.

  The path was a short cut to the cottage now occupied by Lily and Bill Twigg, and it ended abruptly at a roughly made gate that hung in two stone sockets between the drystone walls that bordered a field.

  Sarah climbed the gate—nobody went to the trouble of lifting it out of the sockets, not even the men—and she crossed the field that now went sharply uphill. When she reached its summit she stopped for a moment and looked first to the right in the direction of Alston and then to the far left where Allenheads lay. The sky was high, the light was white and clear. She felt she was looking to each end of the earth; then a movement attracted her attention and she brought her gaze down to the track that she had left earlier, and there, making their way back toward the farm, she saw the small figure of her da leading Chester and Nellie, the two Clydesdales, and even from this distance she could see that they were all walking in unison. She could even see their fetlock hair bouncing with each step they made; even if she couldn’t see their colour, she knew which was which because her da always walked next to Chester who was black while Nellie was bay-coloured. Her da was bringing them back from the blacksmith’s where they had been shod. It was funny but Nellie didn’t like being shod; Chester would stand without murmur but Nellie would do quite a bit of stamping before she could be induced to lift her foot. Nellie was all woman, her da said.

  Oh, it was a beautiful day, frosty, sharp; she wanted to run, fly. She often wondered what a bird felt like. There was an old buzzard hereabouts; she always stood and watched him whenever he came in sight.

  Suddenly she sprang from the top of the hill and took the steep slope of the field below at a run that gained momentum as she neared the bottom. When she reached the level ground she kept on running like a spring unwinding until she came up against a wall, and she leaned on it gasping, then looked down into the basket. The cloth had come off the ham bone, the crust had fallen away from the pie. Eeh! what was the matter with her? She coul
d have joggled the lot out of the basket running like that. She placed the basket on the ground and, putting her forearms on the top of the wall, she rested her chin on them and gazed into the distance where the smoke from Lily’s chimney spiralled straight upwards. She felt so happy, so light inside; she felt she was still dancing, that she had never stopped dancing since Sunday morning. Why was she feeling like this? The answer she gave herself caused her to bring her head down; and now her brow was resting on her forearms. And thus she stayed for some minutes; then, straightening, she picked up the basket, went along by the wall until she found a gap, and went through it and over the narrow footpath that led to the cottage.

  On a distant slope Jim Waite turned to Michael and said, ‘Did you see that? That was our Sarah coming down the hill. What was she doing, trying to fly? She could have broken her neck.’

  ‘Not her’—Michael jerked his head upwards—‘she’s as sure-footed as a mountain goat.’

  ‘Well, I’ll believe that after seeing her doing that stunt. That was Head’s Hill she came down; I mean to say, you take that carefully, at any time; an’ with its face to the north as it is, the frost’ll still be thick on it.’

  ‘Well, she reached the bottom all right. And there she goes across to Lily’s.’

  They stood looking at the distant figure for a moment before Jim said, ‘Aye…well, I think that’s about the lot. Are we for making our way back?’

  ‘Yes, Jim, but I think I’ll go the top road just to make sure there’s none over there. If they get over the burn they could make for the lead workings; we’ve had it before.’

  ‘Aye; but I don’t think you’ll find any of them over there. Still you never know; best put your mind at rest. I’ll go down the bottom track. See you.’

  Michael did not move away immediately from the hillside. He thought he could still see Sarah as she made her way round the side of the cottage and his mind stayed on her. Only last night he had asked himself what his true feelings were concerning her. He always liked to be with her; he missed her when she wasn’t there, even the kitchen seemed bare when she left it. He felt at peace when in her company; her face was always bright, her laughter gay. Was it just sisterly affection he had for her? Was it just sisterly affection he had for Barbara? God! he didn’t know…Well, he should know; he had reached the age when he should know. Barbara had the opposite effect on him altogether from Sarah; Barbara disturbed him, Sarah soothed. He didn’t seem to worry when he was with Sarah; there were no problems to life when he was with Sarah; perhaps because Sarah’s thoughts never went beyond the farm, and cooking, but life became one big problem when he was with Barbara.

  He had tried the association of others. There was Beatrice McCullen; Beatrice was pretty and entertaining but she didn’t affect his senses in any way. He must stop seeing her for he wasn’t really being fair to her. And then Miss Hunnetson. Oh, Miss Hunnetson; now Miss Hunnetson had an effect on him, but mostly on his mind. He liked talking to Miss Hunnetson. She had stretched his view of the world, had Miss Hunnetson, by suggesting that he should read more books. The names of the authors she gave him he had never heard of, nor yet, he was sure, had his mother. Miss Hunnetson was what you would call one of the new women. The newspapers ridiculed them and made funny sketches of them, put them into trousers and, taking the ridicule to extremes, made the men half their size. Miss Hunnetson also believed in unions for women as well as for men, and votes too. He had to laugh at that. Why, it was only a matter of thirteen years ago that they allowed the working man a vote. She was a very odd person, was Miss Hunnetson, yet informative. Oh yes. She had been the means of clarifying his thinking which had made him reassess his values. He happened to say to her one day as he was looking at a book how he envied any man who could write at such length, even without taking the quality of the substance into account; it was an achievement, he considered, to write words to fill six hundred and seventy pages. Whereupon she had asked him if he had read any of the essays by a man called Addison. He had blushed when he admitted he had never heard of Addison.

  The next time he went into the shop she said she would loan him an old book; it was called Selections From The Spectator, and in it she had pencilled an essay by this man. It had impressed him so much that he had rewritten part of it out, and had read it so many times since that he knew most of it by heart. It was like a piece of poetry in his mind:

  When I look upon the tombs of the great

  Every emotion of envy dies in me;

  When I read the epitaphs of the beautiful,

  Every inordinate desire goes out;

  When I meet the grief of parents upon a tombstone,

  My heart melts with compassion;

  When I see the tomb of the parents themselves,

  I consider the vanity of grieving

  For those whom we must quickly follow;

  When I see kings lying by those who deposed them,

  When I consider rival wits placed side by side,

  Or the holy men that divided the world with their conquests and

  disputes,

  I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions,

  factions and debates of mankind.

  When I read the several dates on the tombs of those that died

  yesterday,

  And some six hundred years ago,

  I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries,

  And make our appearance together.

  The more he recited these words to himself the more often he knew that here was fundamental truth, here was the clarification of all the jumbled thoughts and probings of his late school days, and the past few years, especially of the year just past, for during this time his mind and emotions had been taxed so much he knew that it was imperative he should soon find a solution to the things that were troubling him.

  He was a farmer and he’d always be a farmer, but he had no intention of being a gormless one. As he sowed the crops, so he intended to sow knowledge. He sometimes thought it had been a mistake on his mother’s part to send him away to school because there the main part of his education had been to make him think, and when this process was once begun there was no stopping it. It would have been better if, together with Jim and boys from surrounding farms, he had attended the day school, for here no depths of his mind would have been stirred, and his main thought in life would have been the concern of the farm and the people on it.

  Yet wasn’t that still so? Weren’t the farm and the people on it his main concern? He turned abruptly now and went in the direction of the ridge, thinking, why trouble one’s mind, for as Addison said, we would all one day be contemporaries; yet his mind countered with the statement, That’s all very well, but until that day you have to go on living, and he was brought back to the beginning, Barbara, Sarah…and his mother.

  As he walked briskly along the side of the hill his feet kept slipping from under him and each time he only just saved himself from falling. When he reached the brow he went along by the wall until he came to the gate where Sarah had crossed earlier and as he looked over it and upwards he saw her coming away from the cottage, and he stopped and waited.

  She was some way down the sloping field before she saw him. As soon as she caught sight of him however she began to run, and he laughed as she approached and shouted and made pretence of lifting the gate off its hinges to let her through.

  When she flung herself against the gate she was hardly out of breath, her uplifted heartshaped face was rosy, the green hood had fallen back from her cloak, and her brown hair looked tousled as if the wind had been blowing through it, or hands had teased it.

  He laughed down into her face before he said, ‘You’ll break your neck one of these days; can’t you walk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it has occurred to you, Miss Waite’—he now assumed a mock fatherly manner—‘that young ladies bordering on seventeen years of age do not run, they have reached a stage of decorum, or
should have.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t you want to be a young lady?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Taking her cue from him, she had assumed the attitude of a child now.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cos…’cos I ain’t cut out for it.’

  ‘Monkey! Come on, get yourself over.’

  As she climbed up the bars he put his hands under her oxters, and when he was about to lift her over the top, he stopped and set her down on the bar with a plop, saying now, as he looked up into her face, ‘I’m serious though, really I am. If you had lost your footing on Head’s Hill you could have broken your neck; I’m not laughing.’

  ‘No, Mis…ter Mi…chael.’

  He shook her and she laughed, her face hanging over his.

  Slowly now he lifted her to the ground but still held her; then, as if testing her weight, he lifted her slight form lightly upwards, saying, ‘By! you’re going to be a fat old woman in no time. You must be all of twelve stone now.’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  His face was close to hers, and in the silence that held them it moved closer still until the silence was shattered and the moment torn from them by Jim Waite’s voice shouting, ‘Mr Michael! Mr Michael! Here a minute.’

  When Michael turned round, Jim, in the field behind them, was stubbing his finger toward the ground.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come and have a look; this one’s bad.’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ He looked back at Sarah and, putting his hand out, he gently pushed her away in the direction of the path along which she had come, saying, ‘You go on home. I don’t know what it is he’s found, but I don’t want you to be sick all over me. You know what you are.’