The Mallen Streak

by Catherine Cookson

  So it was that after a few days at Wolfbur Farm she knew that she was going to be happy, that Michael Radlet was a good man and, the most surprising thing, he was going to teach her to read the Bible.

  Donald Radlet came into the world protesting loudly, and Jane felt he had never stopped since. As his mother, she should have loved him, but she couldn’t; he had been a separate being from the moment he had left her womb. She would have said that the boy himself did not know what love was if it wasn’t for the protective affection he showed for his half-brother.

  He was two years old when Matthew was born, and instead of being jealous, as she thought he might become, of a new baby taking his place, he was, from the very beginning, protective towards the boy, who in colouring and character was the antithesis of himself.

  Donald was nine years old when he discovered that Mike Radlet was not his father. It happened on a fair day in Hexham.

  They had talked about the fair day for weeks. This day was the highlight of the year; it was the day on which the hirings took place, when farm labourer and maid were bonded into service, and there were such delights as the fairground, inside which there was every kind of entertainment from the shuggy boats to the boxing booths. Last year they had seen a Chinese lady with stumps for feet, a child whose head was so big it had to be supported in a framework, and a fat woman with a beard down to her breasts, which you could pull—if you had the nerve, for she looked as if she would eat you whole.

  As soon as they entered the town Michael let the boys go off on their own for he knew that Donald, although only nine, was to be trusted to look after both himself and Matthew as well.

  The boys knew where to contact their parents. The horse and flat cart was stabled in the blacksmith’s yard and their mother would be drinking tea with the blacksmith’s wife, and while they were exchanging their news their husbands would be out and about in the cattle market and recalling the days of their youth together, for Michael Radlet and the blacksmith were cousins.

  But it so happened that the two men and the two women were in the house around three o’clock that day when Matthew came flying in to them, the tears streaming down his face and his words incoherent.

  When at last he had quietened down somewhat they understood from his gasping words that Donald had been fighting a boy in the fairground, and another two boys had also set about him.

  When Michael demanded to know why Donald was fighting, Matthew looked up at him through streaming eyes and said, ’Cos of you, Da.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’ Michael frowned down on his son, and Matthew, after shaking his head from side to side, muttered, ‘They said you weren’t, they said you weren’t his da; they said because of his white streak you weren’t his da. But you are, aren’t you, Da? You are his da, aren’t you?’

  Michael looked at Jane, and she bowed her head; the blacksmith and his wife bowed theirs also.

  It was as Michael stormed towards the door that Donald entered, and as they all looked at him they voiced a long concerted ‘Aw!’ His lip was split, one eye was rapidly closing, there was blood running from a cut on the side of his temple. His clothes were torn and begrimed, and his hands, which he held palm outwards and close to his sides, gave evidence that he had been pulled over rough ash ground for the thin rivulets of blood were streaked with the cinder dust.

  ‘Oh! boy. Oh! boy.’ Jane put her hand to her face as she approached him, then said pityingly, ‘Come, let me clean you up.’

  He made no move either towards or away from her but stared at her fixedly, and for the first time she knew what it was to suffer his scorn and his condemnation. She had noticed before that when he was angry or deeply troubled like the time Matthew took the fever and they thought he would die, there came into the bright blackness of his eyes a glow as if from an inner fire. You couldn’t say it was a film of pink or red because his pupils still remained black, but there was this change in their gleaming that gave the impression of a light behind them, a red ominous light.

  He looked past her, at Michael, and he said, ‘I want to go home.’

  Without a word Michael went out and harnessed the horse to the cart, and five minutes later they set off. Donald, unrelieved of dirt or blood, did not, as was usual, mount the front seat and sit beside Michael; instead, he clambered up into the back of the cart. His feet stretched out before him, his palms still upturned resting on his thighs, his head not bowed but level, his gaze directed unseeing through the side rails of the cart; thus he sat, and didn’t move except when the wheels going into a rut or jolting over a stone jerked his body, until they came to the farm.

  There, Michael got down from the cart and went to the back of it and, looking at the boy, to whom he had been father in every way possible, said, ‘Go and wash yourself and then we will talk. And you, Matthew,’—he waved the younger boy towards his brother—‘go with him and handle the pump.’

  In the kitchen Michael, putting his hand on Jane’s shoulder, said kindly, ‘Now don’t fret yourself, it had to come. Sooner or later we knew it had to come. Perhaps we’ve been at fault; we should’ve told him and not waited for some scallywag to throw it at him.’

  ‘He hates me.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense, woman.’

  ‘I’m not talking nonsense, Michael, I saw it in the look he gave me back there.’

  ‘It’s the shock; he’ll get over that. You are his mother and he should be grateful for it.’

  He smiled at her but she didn’t smile back. In some strange way she knew that her days of happiness were past. Just as she had been aware of the time they were beginning for her in this house, now she knew that that time had ended as abruptly as it had begun…

  Michael led the way into the parlour, which in itself proved that this was a very exceptional occasion, for the parlour was used only on Sundays and Christmas Day. ‘Sit down, boy,’ he said.

  For the first time the boy disobeyed an order given him by the man he had thought of as his father and, speaking through swollen lips, he said, ‘You are not me father then?’ He had never used the word father before; father and da meant the same thing, yet now he was, by his very tone, implying a difference.

  Michael swallowed deeply before answering. ‘No, I am not your father in that I didn’t beget you, but in any other way I am your father. I have brought you up an’ I have cared for you. You are to me as me eldest son.’

  ‘But I’m not your son! I’m nobody’s son, I’m what they said I am, the fly-blow. The fly-blow of a man called Mallen. One of dozens they said; he’s fathered half the county, they said.’

  Michael didn’t speak for a moment; then he was forced to say, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that, an’ people always make mountains out of molehills. There’s only one thing I do know, an’ I want you to know it too, your mother was not at fault; she was but a girl, an innocent, ignorant girl, when she was taken down.’

  Ignoring completely the reference to his mother, Donald said now, ‘Matthew, he’s not me real brother.’

  ‘He’s your half-brother.’

  ‘He’s your real son; you’re his father, not just his da.’

  ‘They both mean the same thing, father an’ da.’

  ‘Not any more they don’t. Not any more.’

  It was as Michael stared at the boy, who was at that time almost as tall as himself, that there came into him a feeling of deep compassion, for he saw the lad was no longer a lad or a boy. True, he had never really been childish, always appearing older than his years, both in his actions and his talk, but now the very look of him had changed. He had the look of an adult man about him; it came over in the expression of his eyes. His eyes had always been his most startling feature. At odd times when some pleasant incident had softened them he had thought them beautiful, but he wondered if he would ever think them beautiful again. He said now, ‘Nothing has changed; whether you think of me as your da, or your father, or whatever, I remain the same. Go on now and have your meal, an’ be respectful to your mo
ther. And hold your head up wherever you go, for no blame lies on you.’

  Donald turned about and walked to the door, but before opening it he stopped and, looking back at Michael, he answered his last statement by saying, ‘They called me a bastard.’

  When, the following Sunday, Matthew came into the house, his head hanging, and stated, ‘Our Donald’s gone over the hills an’ he wouldn’t let me go with him,’ Jane closed her eyes and muttered to herself, ‘Oh God!’ And Michael laid down the Book and said, ‘When was this? How long ago?’

  ‘Just a while back. I thought he was going over to Whitfield Law but he changed his mind and went towards the Peel, and then wouldn’t let me come on.’

  Jane, bringing out her words between gasps, said, ‘He must have started asking. What if he should go…I mean right…right to the Hall? Oh, Michael, Michael, do something, stop him.’

  Michael wasn’t given to running. If you want to walk a long way you don’t run, had always been his maxim, but on this day he ran, thinking as he did so that it had been one of his mistakes not to have brought the boy over these hills before. It was six years since he had been this way himself, for now that both Jane’s parents were dead there was no need to take this road. Yet, he thought now that in denying this route to the boy when on his Sunday jaunts he must have eventually raised some suspicions in his mind.

  He was blowing like a bellows before he had gone very far. He thought the boy, too, must have run for when he reached the peak and looked down into the next valley there was no sign of him.

  Michael had been on the road for over an hour when at last he saw him. He stopped and stared. The boy, about a quarter of a mile distant from him, was standing on the summit of the last hill. It was one that towered over the foothills where they spread out into the valley in which was set High Banks Hall. In the winter and the spring when the trees of the estate were bare you could get a view of the entire Hall and the terraces and the sunken gardens from that point, but for the rest of the year only a gable end and the windows of the upper floor were visible.

  As if he knew he was being watched Donald had turned about and looked in his direction and then waited while Michael walked slowly towards him. When he came up with the boy he said loudly and sternly, ‘You’re not to go near that place, do you hear me? Anyway, you’d be thrown out on your backside an’ made to look a fool.’

  The boy stared at him. His face, still discoloured from the blows he had received in the fight, was tinged a deep red as he answered, ‘I’m no fool.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Now come away back home…’

  From then on Donald went over the hills every Sunday, and on special holidays, the weather permitting, and no-one could do anything about it. But he went no farther than the last hill until one day in 1851 when he heard that Thomas Mallen had gone bust and that Dick Mallen had nearly committed murder. That Sunday he walked along the road and stood outside the gates for the first time; but he did not venture inside until after the auction had taken place. Then he walked round the house peering in the windows, not like the children had done, more in the manner of someone returning to his rightful home after a long absence.

  The rooms were almost as he had pictured them in his mind’s eye over the years. They were big and high and had coloured ceilings. Some were panelled up to the ceiling, and even in those with only skirting boards the wood was moulded three feet high from the floor. He had run his hand over the great front door, then counted the iron studs; there were ten rows of eight.

  He walked through the empty stables and saw fittings that he couldn’t believe any man would waste on a place where a horse was stabled. The hooks were of ornamental brass, the harness horse was covered with leather like doeskin, and four of the stalls each had a silver plate bearing a horse’s name.

  When he stood back from the house and looked up at it the most strange sensation filled his breast. It began in some region hitherto unknown to him; he felt it rising upwards and upwards until it reached his throat, and there it stuck and grew to a great hard painful thing that was all set to choke him. Even when he was shaken by a violent fit of coughing it didn’t entirely dissolve.

  He had visited the house a number of times alone before the day on which he took Matthew with him, the day when he encountered Miss Brigmore and the girls, and later his father.

  When they returned home that night he had not stopped Matthew from pouring out the exciting news that they had been to supper with Mr Mallen.

  This news had actually shocked Michael, and it had not only stunned Jane but increased her fear of this son of hers, while she asked herself what he expected to get out of it now, for Thomas Mallen, they said, was utterly destitute, living on the charity of his nieces.

  That night, when Michael said to her, ‘I suppose it’s only natural that he should want to see his father,’ she shook her head violently and answered, ‘Nothing he does is natural, and never has been.’

  From that time on Jane lived in fear of the years ahead. There was a dread on her that she couldn’t explain. Yet as one season passed into another and the two boys grew from youth into young men and nothing untoward happened, she looked back and felt like many another woman, in saying to herself that she had been foolish in wasting her time worrying about someone over whom she knew she had no control, for she was fully aware that she meant less to her son than did the cattle in the byres. Indeed, she had watched him show affection for them, especially when a cow was in labour. He had lost sleep to make sure that a cow was delivered of her calf and that both should survive in good fettle; but for herself, she felt that if she were to drop down dead at his feet he would show very little concern, except to make sure that she was put away decently. This was one trait that was prominent in him, he was very concerned with doing the right thing, and this in turn warranted that he should be well put on in his dress. His taste in dress, she considered, was above that suitable to a farmer; but then she had gleaned one secret thought of his: he considered himself a cut above the ordinary run of farmer. Inside, she knew he was proud to be Thomas Mallen’s son, while at the same time despising her for her part in it.

  She also knew that he would never admit to this. His thoughts were locked deep within him. He never spoke his real thoughts, not even to Matthew, and if he cared for anyone it was Matthew. Not until the time came for him to act on any plan he had devised in his mind concerning the farm did he even speak of it to Michael. He rarely if ever informed her of what he was about to do.

  So it was on this bright autumn Sunday morning in 1861 when the four of them were seated round the breakfast table in the kitchen, and only a second after Michael had finished the grace, saying, ‘We thank you, Lord, for our food which has come to us through your charity, Amen,’ that Donald said, ‘I’m going straight over this morning.’ They all looked at him, and each face registered reserved surprise, for they recognised by the tone of his voice and the fact that he’d altered his routine that he was about to impart something of importance.

  ‘I’m going to ask Constance to marry me…it’s time,’ he said.

  Now the reserve slipped from their faces and they gasped at him, in a mixture of amazement, disapproval, and even horror. On any other occasion they would have been more wary, for they never showed their true feelings to him. This attitude, which had been born of a desire never to hurt him, had developed in varying degrees in the three of them. He had to be humoured as one might a sick person in order that he would not upset himself with bouts of temper or withdraw into a continued silence. There was a similarity in their attitudes towards him that was strange for they all viewed him in different ways. But now Michael blurted out, ‘You can’t do that, she’s near blood to you.’

  ‘She’s not near blood to me.’

  ‘She’s Mallen’s niece.’

  ‘She’s not. Her mother was his stepsister, there’s no blood tie atween them at all.’

  Still Michael’s face was grim now. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’<
br />
  ‘And why not?’

  ‘Don’t shout at me, boy. Don’t shout at me.’

  ‘I’m not shoutin’. And don’t forget, I’m no boy.’

  ‘You’ll always be a boy to me,’ Michael thrust his chair back and stumped—for his left leg was stiff with rheumatism—from the table into the sitting room where, as usual on a Sunday morning, he would read for half an hour from the Book before attending to his Sunday duties on the farm. And even on this morning he did not depart from his usual pattern.

  Now Jane spoke. Quietly she asked, ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Know what?’ He looked at her coldly.

  ‘That…’ She was about to say, ‘That you want her,’ but she changed it to, ‘What to expect. I mean, have you given her any inkling?’

  ‘Enough.’

  She stared at him for a moment longer as she thought. That girl in this house with him for life, he’ll suffocate her. Now she rose from the table and walked slowly across the stone-flagged kitchen and out through the low door that just took her height, and into the dairy. It was cool and restful in the dairy and she could ponder there, and she had much to ponder on this day, she knew.

  Donald had now looked at Matthew, waiting for him to speak, and as he waited his face took on a softness that slipped into a smile. After a time he asked quietly, ‘Surprised?’

  Matthew didn’t answer, he couldn’t as yet. Surprised? He was staggered: shocked, dismayed; yes, that was the word, dismayed, utterly dismayed. Dear, dear God, that this should happen, that it should be Constance he wanted. He had always thought it was Barbara, and he had the idea that Barbara thought along the same lines. Why, whenever they had been over there it wasn’t to Constance he had talked but to Barbara, and when he had seen them together he had thought, they’re much alike in some ways those two, given to silences. There were depths in both of them that were soundless, and their silences were heavy with brooding, secret brooding, lonely brooding. As his thoughts were apt to do, he had dwelt on their brooding because he knew that their brooding coloured their lives. He knew that each in his way was lonely and craved something. When the craving became intense it showed, in Donald’s case at least, in bursts of temper.