The Mallen Litter

by Catherine Cookson

He had his breakfast in bed, as he had done on the previous two mornings, and, as usual, he joked with Betty. Then he got up and soaked himself in a bath, dressed slowly and went downstairs.

  He found his mother in the drawing room. The fire was blazing, the room looked beautiful, and so did she.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Like a top. You mightn’t believe it but I’ve learned to sleep standing up. If anyone had told me this time last year it could be done I would have laughed at them.’ He sat down on the couch within an arm’s length of her, and when he stared at her her eyelids flickered and she asked softly, ‘Have you enjoyed your leave?’

  ‘I’ll say. It’s been like heaven.’

  Her face was straight, her eyes sad as she asked, ‘Is it so terrible out there?’

  ‘It isn’t good.’

  After another moment she asked, ‘Have…have you no idea when it will end?’

  He smiled wryly, shook his head and said, ‘Nor have they. A child playing with tin soldiers could make a better job of it than some of them out there.’

  Her voice was very soft now as she said, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t go with Jonathan and Harry.’

  ‘I’ve thought that myself more than once; at least there would be no mud.’

  She turned from him and looked towards the fire as she asked, ‘Would you mind if I came to the station with you?’

  He gazed at her profile. She had asked would he mind if she came to the station with him.

  When she looked at him he said slowly, both on his fingers and verbally, ‘I’d like that very much.’

  ‘Your…your father said he’d be home about eleven.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he told me.’

  He was experiencing that warm, relaxed feeling inside again, and he told himself he’d experience it again and again in the weeks to come, when he remembered this moment. Of a sudden he was glad that a war had come upon them; nothing but a war could have changed her attitude towards him. How was it that no mistress, and not even the prospect of a wife, a beloved wife, could fill the void in a man who had craved mother love all his life. What were men after all but overgrown boys, children, babies still hanging onto the breast? He had never known her breast, he had been wet-nursed; he had never known any part of her until these last two and a half days. He was happy as he had never been happy before. He had an overwhelming desire to fall against her. But that would likely scare her; he must let well enough alone. They would go on from here.

  She looked at him fully in the face now as she said, ‘It would have been nice if you’d all been together once more,’ and he said without any rancour, ‘Yes, it would; it would have been just fine. But there’ll be another time.’

  ‘Can I pack you something? I mean is there anything you would need on the journey besides what we spoke of yesterday, woollens and suchlike?’

  ‘No, I think you’ve covered everything, thanks.’

  The sun was shining, she looked towards the window. ‘It’s not so cold. The…the spring will soon be here. It…it will be easier for you in the finer weather.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Won’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, much easier in the finer weather.’

  In the awkward pause that followed there came the sound of a commotion from the hall. She didn’t hear it, but the sound brought his head round towards the door as he heard Ada exclaiming highly, ‘Oh my God! Oh no! Oh my God!’ then Betty saying. ‘What is it? Eeh, no! No!’

  He said, ‘Excuse me a minute,’ and got up from the couch and went down the room and into the hall, closing the door behind him. The front door was open, the telegram boy stood there. He had something in his hand which was extended towards Betty, but Betty had her apron to her face and her grey head was shaking and she kept repeating, ‘Eeh, no! No!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look! Look!’ Ada who was standing further back in the hall pointed towards the boy, and Ben said harshly, ‘Don’t be stupid, woman, it could be anything. It could be for me. Give it here.’ But even as he took the telegrams from the boy’s hand he knew they weren’t for him, they were addressed to Mr Daniel Bensham and headed On His Majesty’s Service.

  He felt terribly sick, he was actually going to be sick. He gulped in his throat, swallowed a mouthful of spittle, then even as his mind yelled, ‘No, no! Not this’, he knew it was this.

  He opened the first telegram. He saw nothing but the name of Harry Daniel Bensham. He opened the second one. He could see nothing now. Then his vision cleared and he saw disjointed words: It is with deep regret…Jonathan Richard Bensham. Oh Christ Almighty! No! No! Oh Johnny, Harry. Johnny, Harry. No! No! Oh Jesus Christ! Why have you done this? Why? The question was bawling in his head when the door opened and he turned. They all turned and looked at the woman standing there. She was staring at the telegrams that Ben was holding before him, one in each hand, like prayer books. Then she seemed to leap across the distance from the drawing-room door right to Ben’s feet and she tore them from his hand and stared at them.

  No-one moved. The girls had stopped their crying. Ben held his breath, and it was as if Barbara had long since died. Her face was ashen, her body straight and stiff. There was no flicker of her eyelids as she stared into Ben’s face; no muscle in her body moved until the scream erupted that brought them all into moving, shouting life.

  For the first time since he was eight years old Benjamin put his arms around his mother. He held her tightly to him and shouted above her screams, ‘Don’t! Don’t, Mother! For God’s sake!’ Then his hands were mixed with those of Ada’s as she tried to unloosen her mistress’ grip from her hair. The neatly plaited black coils were hanging loose and the hair pins were dropping on the polished floor of the hall, their pinging sounds lost in the screams. Ben tried to close his ears against the sound, yet in his head he was screaming too.

  Struggling as if with a maniac, it took him all his time with the help of Ada and Betty to get his mother into the drawing room, and when once they had forced her onto the couch, her screaming and struggling stopped so abruptly that they all lay for a minute in a huddled heap over her. Then Ben, pulling himself back onto his knees, looked up at Ada and gasped, ‘Send…send for the doctor. And Betty, go…go down to the village post office. Get them…get them to phone my…my father.’

  Why…why in hell’s name hadn’t they got the telephone in the house by now!

  Oh God! The two of them. There’d only ever be a third of himself left now. They had been one, they had been born as one, and they had grown up as one. She hadn’t been able to divide them; her love and her hate hadn’t been able to divide them. Oh God in heaven, look at her; was she going too? In sudden fear he put his hand on her breast, then dropped his head to it. There was a faint beat. He gently lifted her eyelids. She was unconscious.

  His mind began repeating his brothers’ names, in agonised fashion: Oh Harry; oh Harry, oh Jonathan; oh Jonathan; Harry, Harry.

  He dragged himself to his feet. His head was bowed, the tears were raining down his face. If anybody had to go, why couldn’t it have been him? He had been near it a dozen times these past months; twice he had been surprised when he had come to and found himself alive. Once he thought he had been buried alive. When they dragged him from the mud and from amidst the four German bodies, the bodies from which he had taken life, they’d had to scrape the mud from his face and out of his mouth. They’d had to pour the thick hot tea down his throat because he thought he’d lost the use of his arms, and he had until the shock wore off. But had he died, and a single telegram had come, the shock she would have received would not have made her scream.

  He turned to the fireplace and, resting his arms on it, he lowered his head onto them. The world had been created by a madman; God was a madman; no reasonable thing or power would create torture for no purpose. The experience of the past months, the chaos in which the world was drowning was not, to his mind, the result of either a country’s greed, or the ambition of nations; politicians of their own voliti
on could not, he reasoned now, create such havoc, for the human mind could and would think, dissect, reason and then act in the end to preserve its own survival. No, there was a malevolent power, a mad God playing with the universe, and he was so powerful, so indiscriminate he directed his attention equally to families as to nations; he inflicted special torture…‘Aw’—he tossed his head from side to side—‘stop it! Stop it.’ This business about God and pain. It wasn’t the mud that sent you mad, nor mangled bodies, it was deep inner personal misery…And now he was really alone. No more Jonathan or Harry. No more the other parts of himself. It was unbearable, unbearable.

  The long shuddering breath turned him swiftly towards the couch and he was kneeling by her side again. He watched her whole body quiver. He caught hold of her hands and waited for her to open her eyes.

  It was some minutes before she did, and he looked down into them, his own shining, seal-black with tears, compassion and love. She stared straight up into them and, as if remembering a nightmare of which he had been part, she shrank against the back of the couch and, her hands snapping from his, joined themselves between her breasts and there appeared on her face such a look of hate and condemnation that he literally drew back from it.

  Plainly, as if written there, he read the condemnation in her eyes. She was condemning him for being alive; her beloved Jonathan and her dearest Harry were dead, but he, the scourge of her life, the reminder of her beginnings, still breathed, and he groaned inwardly and deeply, No, no!

  There now came over him the dreaded feeling that he had experienced once before when, during the retreat, he found himself separated from the others. As the night lifted and the dawn came up, he saw that he was lying on some kind of plain and he was afraid to get off his belly and crawl, much less to stand up, for he got the weird idea that once he took a step forward he’d fall off the edge of the earth.

  Now he was standing on the brink again and all he desired was to fall over, but such was the weight of despair in him that it kept him riveted to the spot.

  It was the doctor who, entering the room, pushed him back and into sanity…for the time being.

  THE EDGE OF THE EARTH

  One

  ‘I’m being sent, I’ve got no say in the matter. I’ve told you.’

  ‘You can object.’

  ‘But what if I don’t want to object?’

  Hannah Radlet looked from her mother to her grandmother, where they stood like a combined force behind the kitchen table. Hannah was thirty-two years old, and of those years she had memories that took her back for twenty-eight of them, and they always conjured up the picture of her mother and grandmother standing together whenever they were doing battle. Her father would be on one side of the table and there they would be, not shoulder to shoulder, because her grandmother, although stooped, was much taller than her mother, but side by side, and nearly always their expressions would be similar, as if their thoughts were being projected from one mind.

  She had thought of late that a war was nothing new to her, for she had been brought up in the midst of a private war. When she was very young she had stood on the outside and watched, but as she grew older she was drawn into it.

  She was twenty-two before she escaped the battlefield of the farm. She knew now that her sole reason for marrying Arthur Pettit had been in order to get away from her mother and grandmother. But she hadn’t been married a week before she realised she had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, for then her own daily fight, and it was a daily fight as well as a nightly one, was to prevent her body from being ravished by a man who, when it came to satisfying his needs, had no idea of tenderness.

  Arthur Pettit had been an auctioneer and estate agent, and part of her misfortune, she considered, was that their flat was over his office.

  She often wondered too what she would have done eventually if he hadn’t died within three months of their marriage. He died a heroic death, everybody said so; he was trampled to death right outside his own home by two huge-footed brewery horses pulling a dray. He had been entering his office when he saw the child aimlessly crossing the road and the horses frantically galloping down from the other end, the dray swaying madly while the barrels rolled off it.

  The two horses, placid creatures, pets of many of the townsfolk, had been shot into an hysterical gallop by simultaneously being stabbed in their haunches with hatpins in the fun-seeking hands of two gormless youths.

  Both he and the child had died, and the town had mourned him and pitied Hannah, and she had cried openly, and in secret she had cried, with not a little shame that she could feel nothing but release at being free once more. And she wasn’t only free from the marriage, she was free from her mother and her grandmother, and she was determined to stay free.

  After having refused their pressing offer to return home she took up nursing. But things didn’t work out here for her either; it was, she imagined, as if the two women on the farm were willing her back to them, for she suffered recurrent attacks of rheumatism. The rheumatic fever she’d had when a child had fortunately left her heart intact, but inflicted, from time to time, severe bouts of rheumatism on her, particularly in the lower part of her back, and these could leave her incapacitated for weeks.

  When her father had collected her from the hospital on this particular occasion she had said to him, ‘I’m not staying, mind,’ and he had answered, ‘I don’t want you to’, and she knew he didn’t. As much as he needed her comfort he would let her go without a restraining word.

  She had lain on her back five weeks, but it was almost five months before she was fully recovered, and during that time she was once more drawn into the private war. So again she left them. Tears, recriminations, admonitions did not deter her once she was able to look after herself.

  She was stubborn. She was spoilt. Her father had spoilt her. They both said this, but, as always, her mother finished, ‘He hasn’t only ruined my life and made your granny’s a misery, he’ll spoil yours an’ all. You’ll see. You wait and see.’

  When she was very young she had thought, Poor Dad. Poor, poor Dad. That is before she knew about the woman, and that they on their side had a case. It was her mother who had screamed the facts at her one day when she was fifteen. ‘Fishing!’ she had yelled. ‘Fishing! You want your eyes opened, girl. You want to see him as he really is. Your dear, dear dad has been leading a double life for years, keeping two houses. Yes, yes, keeping two houses. He’s got a fancy bit, the fancy bit that took this off.’ She had beaten her hand against the empty dress. ‘A devil from hell if there ever was one. And her a married woman with a good man and three sons. But she’s not satisfied. She never was satisfied; she wanted everything; nothing but the world would suit that Mallen piece. By God! If she gets my prayers her death will be long and slow, and her mind clear. Where do you think he was last week when he was out all night? The rim was supposed to come off the wheel, remember? And Shankley only had the cart in a few weeks afore. The rim came off the wheel! Huh! And his day off a week that he insists on. How many times has he taken you into town of late? Answer me that.’

  She had stood amazed looking at her mother and, with a strange pain in her heart, had thought of all the excuses her father had made not to take her into Hexham or Newcastle or wherever he was going, and on that day she recalled with surprise that she had already seen the fancy woman, she had met her. It was in Hexham on a market day. How old had she been? Ten or eleven? She had gone to the shops for some errands and had left her father in the market place. It was when she was making her way back that she saw him standing up a side street talking to a lady. When she went to him, he had put his hand on her shoulder and the lady had stared at her, and he had said, ‘This is Hannah.’

  She remembered that the lady had been very pretty—she hadn’t put the word elegant to her in those days but now she could. She had recognised her as class, but her face had been white and strained, and it almost appeared to her as if her father was in the middle of yet another ro
w, and with this smart lady.

  He had pressed her away, saying, ‘I’ll catch up with you. Go on down to the market.’ And when he did catch up with her he was quiet and looked worried. It wasn’t until they were on their way home that he said, ‘Hannah, will you do something for me?’ and she said, ‘Yes, Dad, I’ll do anything for you.’ He had then stopped the trap and taken her hand in his and said to her, ‘Don’t say a word to either your mother or your granny about the lady you met today,’ and she had said, ‘No, I won’t.’ And after a while she had forgotten about her. That was until she was fifteen.

  Now there was nothing she didn’t know about the Mallen piece or the family connection between her and Grandmother Radlet. Moreover, she knew all about Brigie, the governess, who had been old Thomas Mallen’s kept woman, and who was now mistress of the Hall over the hills; the Hall that had been turned into a hospital-cum-convalescent home, where she was going to work.

  ‘Do you know it’s full of loonies?’

  She came back at her mother sharply now, saying, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mam! Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Don’t you take that tone with me, girl.’

  ‘Well, don’t talk about things you know nothing about.’

  ‘They’re loonies. Your Uncle Jim said you can hear them yelling from the road.’

  ‘Me Uncle Jim! He should have been writing stories, me Uncle Jim, or running a daily gossip column. He’s an old woman.’

  ‘That’s enough. That’s enough, Hannah.’ It was Constance addressing her now. ‘Don’t speak like that about your Uncle Jim who has worked so hard and who cared for your mother long before she came into this house.’

  ‘Well, to my mind it’s a great pity he did, and then he wouldn’t have made me and everybody else feel we owed him the earth.’

  The two women were so shocked that for a moment they were deprived of speech, and they remained indignantly silent as Hannah went on, ‘Those men over there are no more loony than you are; some of them are the result of shell-shock, others have been gassed, and some just couldn’t stand any more.’ She now leant slightly forward and stuck her chin out towards them as she said, ‘And you know what happens to people who can’t stand any more? They explode…up here.’ She tapped her head twice with her finger. ‘That’s what they do…’ She paused, then ended, ‘But them over there, they’re just ordinary fellows who one way or another have had more than enough.’