The Invisible Cord Page 21

  ‘Why am I not pretty like Kathy, Granda?’

  ‘Because you’re a late starter, hinny. Just you wait; come sixteen or seventeen you’ll turn into a swan. You’ve a swan inside you, it just has to come out.’

  It didn’t come out; the transformation didn’t happen; but at odd times she still thought she was a swan inside. She only needed somebody to love her and she would turn into the swan.

  Oh God! How she needed somebody to love her. She rested her face between the palms of her hands, her elbows on the dressing table, and moved her head slowly at herself, and her affection answered the movement. She was chock-a-block with love. If she didn’t give vent to it in some way it would choke her. Would she end her days pouring it out on animals, a cat, a dog, a budgerigar, as so many women did?

  Perhaps Stanley Stone might ask her to marry him. He was showing an interest, but then he would show an interest in anybody who would listen to him. He never stopped talking. God! Fancy having to pass your days with a fellow like Stanley Stone. Why did parents give a child a christian name like Stanley when their surname was Stone? Stanley Stone, Barry Butcher, Clare Clark, May Minton. She knew all these people and the joint christian and surname names gave to them a silliness that seemed to seep into their characters. What about her own name, Tishy? Could you find a sillier name than that? There had been a horse called Tishy; the name now indicated a non-starter. And she was a non-starter, and how!

  But she wasn’t a non-starter in her mind; that was active enough. She knew she had never met a man as intelligent as herself, except one. When she allowed herself to think of him she didn’t know if the pain that assailed her was created by love or by hate, for always when he came onto the screen of her mind she did not see him standing tall and shamefaced saying, ‘I am going to be married,’ but she saw him sitting on the couch, her mother lying across his knees and he with his arms about her, the look on his face like that of a man filled with deep, desire-filled love. No pain she would ever receive would come anywhere near to that which had rent her in the moment.

  She had seen Alan twice in the past three years; the first time was eighteen months ago. She was shopping in Binns in Newcastle when she saw him walking slowly towards her. She had turned quickly about and gone up a side aisle, but while making a purchase she watched him and the young woman who was with him, and it was on her she focused her gaze, thinking the while with renewed bitterness, She’s almost as plain as me. She was dowdy into the bargain. He must have picked her for her brains, she concluded. What a pity she hadn’t got in first.

  The second time she saw him was about three months ago, in Newcastle Central Station. She was making her way to the platform from where she would get the train to Shields when he came through the barrier from where the London train had just drawn in. For a moment she hadn’t recognised him and she had stopped and stared. He looked so much older; there was no youth left in his face. Again her thoughts were cynical: he must be finding marriage hard work.

  She stared into the mirror now with something of impatient surprise; it was as if she were looking at a different face, for the tears were running down the cheeks of her reflection. As her tongue came out and licked the salt drops she murmured aloud, ‘Don’t let me make a fool of myself at the wedding. Let me be happy for her.’ Then dropping her face onto her crossed arms, she whimpered like a child, ‘I wish me granda hadn’t died. Me granda loved me, and there’ll never be anybody else now, never.’

  PART SIX

  THE COTTAGE

  One

  ‘Well if you don’t put your name to it, Mam, I’ll get it on me own.’

  ‘A twelve thousand pound house…on your own! Things must be looking up.’ Annie closed the hamper into which she had packed foodstuff and, pushing it towards Rance, said, ‘Put it in the boot for me.’

  Rance went to lift the wickerwork hamper from the table but stopped in the act and, leaning heavily on it, looked to where Annie was picking up her handbag from the chair, and he said, ‘Mam, I mean to have that house, with or without you.’

  ‘Then you’ll have it without me. Twelve thousand, huh!’

  He lowered his head and looked down at his white knuckles gripping the handles of the hamper, and after a moment of silence he ground out, ‘Mam, I’m twenty-seven; I’ve got to have a life of me own.’

  Like lightning she rounded on him, crying now, ‘Who’s stopping you having a life of your own? I’ve told you for years to get yourself away. Take a flat. I’ve even gone and got you a flat. A life of your own! Don’t you dare say to me I stopped you having a life of your own. Look, boy.’ She leant across the table towards him now, her face only inches from his, and her voice came as a hiss as she went on, ‘Get yourself away, do what you like, and leave me my life. I want a life of me own too, but I don’t see it sharing a ten-roomed house, me in one part and Benny and you in the other, because he would be there wouldn’t he?’

  ‘He’s a good pal.’ His voice now was like that of an adolescent defending a friend.

  ‘Pal!’ Her lip curled.

  ‘He’s never done anything to you.’

  ‘No, but I don’t like him; he’s too smooth, shifty. And his friends in London. Every time you come back from there you’d think you’d been on the razzle for a week. I’ve asked you this afore, and I’ll ask you again, what’s his real business? You can’t tell me he can run that car of his and live like he does selling panties and girdles; reps don’t make all that much. You can’t tell me.’

  ‘You’ve got no idea of what they make, Mam. It’s a big business.’

  ‘Big business, is it?’ She nodded at him now. ‘Well, you must be in it too if you can afford to take on a twelve thousand pound house.’

  ‘I’ve got a bit put by.’

  ‘A bit!’ She stared at him hard.

  ‘Benny will come in with me if you won’t.’

  ‘Well, Benny can go in with you because I’m not leaving here to live in half a house that’s costing twelve thousand pounds. No, thank you. Now put that in the boot for me, will you?’

  ‘You’ll be sorry.’

  ‘Sorry, what for? ’Cos I don’t want to uproot my life? This house is good enough for me. It’s too big for me as it is. Bill’s gone now, that only leaves you and Tishy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she isn’t off before the year’s out. It won’t be Stanley’s fault if she isn’t, so under ordinary circumstances that would leave the two of us. Surely there would be plenty of room here for you then.’

  ‘You could never make this place into flats.’

  Now Annie banged her fist on the table. ‘Flats! flats! flats! For God’s sake, go and take your house and make it into as many flats as you like, but without me!’

  He stood now, his teeth gritted, shaking his head at her; then he muttered, ‘Sometimes I could, I could…’

  ‘You could what?’

  ‘Mam—’ he was a little boy again—‘it’s too big to run as a house for the two of us, I mean Benny and me, and…and the main point is I want you, I want you about. You know that.’

  Yes, she knew that, but it was a long time since the thought had brought her any happiness. Although she couldn’t stand Benny Warlister she had wished more than once of late that Rance would go to London with him and stay there, yet at the same time knowing that had Rance made this proposal she would have done all in her power to prevent him because there was something not right, to her mind, about Warlister. As she had said, he was too smooth, too polite. When he buttered her up, telling her that she was a fraud and couldn’t possibly be the mother of four grown-ups, she wanted to push him on his back and say, ‘Get out of my house and stay out.’

  Suddenly she said, ‘What about Tishy in your scheme of things? You don’t plan for her to come to the new house, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ His face and voice hardened. ‘I’ve had enough of her to last me ten lifetimes. She could stay here with her Stanley, that’s if she marries him, but I’d like to bet she’ll ne
ver marry anybody.’

  ‘She’s like you then, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’ll marry when I’m ready.’

  ‘Well, so will she. But the trouble with you is you don’t like anyone. What about Bill and his girl? You can’t stand her either, can you, because she’s coloured? And then there’s Percy. One of these days that fellow is going to hit you in the mouth.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’

  ‘It will, and it’ll come. But the point in question is, I can rely on all of them coming to see me here, but if I go into your house…’

  ‘It won’t be my house, it’ll be our house.’

  ‘It’ll be your house, my flat in your house. Tell me something, are you thinking of putting it in our joint names? It would have to be if I was standing half, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘That can be gone into.’

  ‘It’s been gone into.’ She picked up her light coat and put it round her shoulders, saying, ‘Tishy won’t be back from abroad till Friday, but I’ll be home by then. Bill and Alice, well, you never know with them, it could be any day. I’ve been round to Kathy’s and told her. I think that takes care of everything.’

  ‘And I can take care of meself, is that it?’

  She stopped on her way to the door. ‘Well, if you’re going into flat life it’ll be good practice, won’t it?’

  ‘Mam!’ He had her by the shoulders now, his face crumpled almost as if he were going to cry. ‘Look, don’t go and leave me like this. When you go off in a tear I’m worked up for days.’

  Again and again this side of him attempted to break her down. She wanted to put up her hands and smooth his face straight, but she didn’t; she remembered that only yesterday she had looked in the Scotch chest, as she did now from time to time, and found that there had been another three rolls of banknotes added to the amount she had last seen. Sometimes she found no money in the box at all; then it would gradually grow. Besides the Scotch chest there was also a desk now, but she could never find out what it held. He had bought the desk himself, and it had arrived with a patent lock on it. She had tried to open it with several keys but without success. Her son, she knew, was in some racket; what it actually was she daren’t let herself think.

  One of the main reasons for her going to the cottage now was to get away from him, for she felt that if she didn’t she would come into the open, not to ask questions, but to accuse him outright, accuse him of the thing that was keeping her awake at nights.

  He was saying now, ‘Will…will you think about it because…because you know how I feel about being separated from you?’

  She lowered her eyes and as she turned from him, saying, ‘Yes, all right, I’ll think about it,’ he put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘It’ll work out, it’ll work out fine.’

  A few minutes later, as she drove down the street, she thought, Yes. Yes, I’ll think about it, but that’ll be as far as it’ll go …

  It would take her two hours to get to the cottage, so long as she wasn’t held up in Newcastle. She had owned the cottage now for over two years, and she had come by it in a very simple way. Taking a cottage in the wilds of the Cheviots she would have said was not her idea of a holiday retreat. Now if it was a chalet on some quiet beach, that would be more like it.

  She had been on the forecourt of the garage one day when a Mr Sampson, an old customer, had come up to her and said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, Mrs McCabe, I’ll soon be coming for my last fill-up; we’re leaving, going down south.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry about that,’ she had answered; ‘you’ve been with us a long time, Mr Sampson.’

  ‘Yes, ever since your husband started, and that’s some time ago now. What is it, over twenty years? But these things happen. You’ve got to go where you’re sent these days, that’s if you want to get on. What’s more, when you’re getting on in years you don’t say no, that’s if you’re wise.’

  ‘You’re right there, Mr Sampson,’ she had said.

  ‘I would have been off last week if it wasn’t for this damn cottage of mine. We’ve sold the house but I can’t get rid of the cottage.’

  ‘A cottage?’ she had repeated.

  ‘Aye, it’s up in the Cheviot Hills and everybody wants it, until I state the price, and then they say, “What! Fifteen hundred for a cottage? You must be mad, man.” I paid seven hundred and fifty for that place ten years ago and I’ve spent over a thousand on it, having it gutted and completely rebuilt inside, that’s not counting the weekends of labour me and the wife put in and the lads an’ all when they were younger. But now “Fifteen hundred!” they say. I took a bloke out there at the weekend and you know I got that mad at him I nearly did him in and buried him in a pot hole. He knew what I wanted for it afore we left, and he stood there having the neck to offer me eight hundred, and that was his last word he said because there was no piped water, and why wasn’t there? I told him if he wanted piped water he should stay put in the town. But you see the way the brook is placed it would have cost me another mint to get it up to the cottage. Anyway, it’s a good job he came in his own car else I’d have made him walk back.’

  After they had both stopped laughing she said, ‘Is it back of beyond?’

  ‘Truthfully aye, it’s back of beyond, and there’s not many places left the day that’s back of beyond. That, to my mind, was always the beauty of it. We could get away and forget all about everything. Many’s the time I’ve gone up there by meself on a Saturday night feeling dead beat and come down on the Sunday night refreshed and armed for another start. Mind, I can’t say I haven’t had me money’s worth out of it; we’ve had wonderful summers up there; but it hasn’t been used much lately. The wife’s got rheumatics you see, an’ the lads are married and gone away. But I’m telling you, Mrs McCabe, I’d sooner burn it down, and believe me I mean it, I would, I’d sooner burn it down than take a penny less than I’m askin’.’

  ‘Would you let me see it, Mr Sampson? Mind, I’m not promising anything. I don’t know if I’d like the wilds, haven’t seen much of them except passing through the country on my way to the Lake District in the car.’

  ‘Be pleased to, Mrs McCabe. What about tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow’ll do nicely, Mr Sampson.’

  When the morrow had come she saw the cottage. They had left the car in a copse at the end of a narrow track a mile from the main road, and after climbing over a broken stone wall, which took a hundred yards off the journey Mr Sampson informed her, she saw a grey stone house, standing on a rise. It wasn’t her idea of a cottage and not pretty at all, and she made up her mind there and then that it wasn’t for her. But she hadn’t seen inside it then, nor the view from the window, nor had she sat on the top step and drunk a cup of tea while she looked over the wild and beautiful land enclosed by hills.

  By the time she had taken the rough road down to the car again she had bought the cottage.

  As she was passing through Gateshead she was tempted to stop and call in on Mollie, who had for some years now lived with her daughter Winnie, but she knew that once she got talking to Mollie she might be tempted to unburden herself, and so she went straight through, over a bridge into the maze of traffic, and fifteen minutes later she was passing through Gosforth on the road to Ponteland.

  The farther she went the wider the country opened out, and when some thirty miles later she came to Otterburn she didn’t stop at the Percy Arms as she usually did when she was alone and treat herself to a good lunch, but drove straight on until she passed Elishaw; then she turned into a road that was little more than a cart track and a few minutes later she drew the car to a halt within the shelter of the copse. Opening the boot she took out the hamper and small case and began the long trudge up to the cottage.

  It was fifteen minutes later, after having to make stops to rest, that she arrived at the foot of the steps and looked upwards. She always paused here, as much from weariness as from her delight in seeing the place again, for no matter how often she came upon it after an absenc
e of even a short time it brought to her a sense of peace.

  When she unlocked the door she was assailed by a musty smell and she wrinkled her nose against it. Nobody had been here for the past month and it had rained almost incessantly up till a week ago, when the weather had changed, and now the second week in June the weather was giving them a tropical summer.

  Before she brought the case and hamper up she went round opening the windows, telling herself as she did so she must make an effort to get out here once a fortnight during the summer, or at least get some of them to come out. It was odd, she thought, that during that first year the place had never been empty except for a couple of days at a time from May until late September. Kathy and Percy had spent weeks up here. Kathy was carrying the baby at the time and she always said it would grow up to be a wild man of the moors because she had roamed the hills so much during the early months of her pregnancy. It could well be right too, for young Percy, at two-and-a-half, was a rip, and you needed a lead on him like a dog to know where he was. Now she was carrying her second, the trip together with young Percy was too much for her.

  Bill had used the cottage that first year as his headquarters, all through the summer vacation; he and his pals had kipped around in sleeping bags four to a room.

  And Tishy, she had spent every weekend up here, and often of an evening when there was no-one here she would ask for the loan of the car and set off straight after school and not get back until midnight. She liked to go places on her own. Tishy was still a loner, in spite of having Stanley.

  And Rance. Rance was the only one who had never taken to the cottage. He considered she was mad in the first place for paying that price for it, and after his first visit he said the place would drive him starkers. Yet last year he and Benny had spent a weekend up here. She hadn’t liked that.