Maggie Rowan Read online

  It was strange how her words hurt. She was hitting back, paying him for his laughter. But he was glad of this attitude, knowing that in retaliating her pain would be eased.

  He forced himself to say, ‘Then why did you ask such a thing?’

  ‘I want a child.’

  ‘A child?’

  As he stared up at her his eyes filled with pain. God, the suffering of people. She must want a bairn badly to take a chance on him and another hunchback, for who could bet otherwise? Poor, poor Maggie.

  His pity for her overwhelmed him, and his reasoning was lost under it, and he had no power to prevent himself saying, almost pleading, ‘Would you give me a little time, Maggie, to think it over?’

  For answer, she turned her head and looked down on him, surprise and hope struggling with the tortured expression of her face. She did not speak; but after a moment she turned away and walked through the trees toward home.

  Christopher walked awkwardly by her side, and with each step his brain threw thoughts at him, like quoits into a ring. He could have a shop and a home of his own; he would earn a living; no longer would he depend on the few shillings that came his way when a pig was sold, or the odd shilling slipped to him by a brother, or the selling of a few vegetables out of the garden on the sly to get himself a packet of Woodbines or a bit of baccy; there would be no more tensing himself up to go and look for jobs; no more turning away from the half-derisive, half-pitying looks of the men who said, ‘Sorry, lad; the place has just been taken.’ All kinds of jobs were scarce nowadays, so his chances of being set on were even less now than they would ordinarily have been; but if he were to marry Maggie, there’d be no more of this.

  His mind flung yet one more thought on top of the others and its effect was almost to obliterate them: marrying Maggie meant living with her! All his days he would have to live with her, with the look of her, with her tempers and her meanness, for it was a well-known fact that she was near with money. Could he do it?

  He stole a glance at her, and his question was buried under yet another thought: What if he couldn’t give her a bairn? He had no proof of his potency, only proof of desires that left him weak and ashamed.

  They were walking across the allotments now, and the sight of his home brought the hot colour flooding to his face…What would they all say to this? He knew what they would say: he was mad, and she was a hussy. That’s what they’d call her when they knew she had asked him, they could never be made to believe that he had asked her, of that he was sure, and they would never understand her reason for asking him. His thoughts became still for a moment with surprise that he himself understood, yet he did.

  At the allotment they parted without a word; and he went into the shed and sat down by the fire again, and became lost in a maze of pity for her and fear of the consequences of his pity.

  Chapter Three: A Man’s Past

  George Rowan stripped himself of his pit clothes with a fierceness that suggested that each article was burning his flesh. He threw them one after the other on to the scullery floor, all except his shirt, and in this alone he walked into the living room. ‘You heard what I said?’

  Nellie was filling the tin bath that stood on the mat before the blazing fire; she scooped the water carefully with a jug out of the set pot by the side of the fireplace; once she stopped and adjusted the newspapers laid protectively over the gleaming fender; but she did not answer her husband. The bath half filled, she felt the water with her hand, then moved to the other side of the fireplace and took two towels from the oven top and laid them on the fender within reach of the bath.

  ‘I tell you I’ll not have it! Haven’t I suffered enough! Haven’t I paid all my damn life without having to be made the laughing stock of the town now!’

  He was talking to her back, his voice rising on an anger that was expressed in every muscle in his body.

  ‘Don’t shout,’ she said; ‘and get your wash.’

  His chin became knobbled and square, and his eyes crinkled as if he were about to cry. Then he swung round from her and stepped into the bath, and stood for a moment looking down helplessly at the water. A film of coal dust spread from his legs over the surface of the water, and his feet became lost beneath it.

  Nellie turned and looked at him, and said as if to an errant child, ‘Why didn’t you wash your head first? It’s no use going on like that.’

  ‘Nellie’—his voice was almost pleading now—‘she’ll listen to you. Put her off. The whole thing’s indecent; Chris Taggart, with his hump, and her nearly twice his size; and looking as she does. Can’t you see what people’ll say?’

  ‘If she doesn’t mind, why should we?’

  ‘Because she’s barmy. She’s never been like anyone else.’ His voice was rising again. ‘I know how she got Chris. By buying the shop for him. I bet you anything you like that’s how she got him. Because even if he’s hunched he’s a man, and no man would take her without a bribe.’

  Nellie began to set the table beneath the window, laying out knives and forks and spoons. She took a little fat, red vase filled with soft golden primroses from the sideboard and was placing it on the corner of the table when she started violently, and her hand gripped the vase, almost upsetting it, as George yelled at her, ‘You’ll drive me mad, an’ all, woman! Why can’t you talk about it and tell me what you think?’

  Turning swiftly on him, no longer calm and tolerant, she met him with an anger that matched his own: ‘You know what I think; you’ve known that for years! She’s carried enough all her life; it’s bewildered her. She’s looked at Tom and Ann, and she can’t understand why she’s different, both inside and out.’

  ‘Then it’s time she knew! If Chris Taggart knew, he wouldn’t have her. Aye’—he grabbed the soap and started to lather himself furiously—‘that’s it! That’ll put a stop to her gallop.’

  ‘What about your promise?’

  ‘I’ve kept it long enough…too long. I should have told her, and she’d have gone years ago.’

  The water splashed on to the mat and on to the paper covering the fender, and even on to the shining black stove; and for once Nellie voiced no reprimand, but going to the top drawer of the sideboard she took out a Bible and stood for a moment looking down on it. Then turning to her husband, she said, her voice quiet once again, ‘You wouldn’t do that, George!’

  ‘Won’t I begod! Just wait and see. I’ll stop this farce; she won’t make a laughing stock of me.’

  ‘George!’ The name was uttered as a command, and it brought him slowly upright to face her. She had the Bible open on her palm, and after holding his eyes for a moment she began to read:

  ‘“Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer Thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.

  ‘Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no further.

  ‘Then answered the Lord unto Job out of the whirlwind, and said, “Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.

  ‘Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?”’

  She repeated the last line twice, then stopped and raised her eyes to his. And he tossed his head from side to side like an unbroken colt; then burst out, ‘It’s no use, I can’t keep it any longer.’

  ‘All right, then!’ The finality of her voice brought him to stillness again. ‘If you take away the only bit of security she has, I’ll leave you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that, Nellie?’ George’s whispered words hardly broke the stillness.

  ‘You know me well enough by now to know I don’t talk for talking’s sake. Once you tell her, I leave this house; and Tom goes with me.’

  His long thin face seemed to become boneless, and the sagging flesh brought his lower lip to a hanging point. For a moment or so longer they stood staring at each other; then slowly George bent and picked up the flannel, and more slowly still he began to rub the soap on to it.

  Nellie replaced the Bible
in the drawer. Then she went to the oven, and opening it gently, looked in to ascertain how her Yorkshire was doing. She glanced at her husband. He was still rubbing the soap into the flannel, and she went to him, and without a word he handed it to her; and she walked behind him and started to wash his back. She rinsed it and dried it, and when she was finished she went into the scullery to wash the rim of coal dust from her arms. This done, she picked up the pit clothes from the floor, and going out into the garden and round to the side wall, she banged them, one after other, against it. On her return to the scullery she was again washing her hands when the bulk of Kitty Taggart waddled up the garden path.

  Kitty entered the scullery, for once not chattering. She stood blinking her large, pale eyes at Nellie, and when Nellie did not raise her head to greet her she said in a sort of lost way, ‘You know, Nellie?’

  Nellie nodded abruptly.

  ‘Our Sep’s just told me. He’s near mad. He heard it at the pit. Harry Seymour’s brother told him that our Chris was going to buy the shop and that he was going to marry…your Maggie. It isn’t true, is it?’

  Nellie turned and dried her hands slowly on the roller towel on the back of the scullery door. ‘Yes, it’s true.’

  ‘But, Nellie’—Kitty shook her head in much the same bewildered way that George had done—‘it isn’t de— Well, I’m not saying anything against Maggie, ’cos she’s your lass, and we can’t all be born…Well, what I mean is…Nellie, for God’s sake, say something! Tell me what you think about it.’

  It was the cry that George had made.

  ‘I think they are both lonely. And it’ll work out all right if we stand by them.’

  ‘But Nellie’—Kitty’s face gathered up in protest—‘our Chris is a nice lad. Oh, what am I sayin’!’ She pulled up the bottom of her overall and began to wring it between her hands. ‘What I mean is he’s gentle an’ quiet. An’ he thinks, although you wouldn’t believe it. Somehow, he’s different to all the others, except Davie. Nellie, why has he done it? Somehow I can’t see our Chris havin’ the nerve to…’

  Her voice trailed off, and Nellie turned on her: ‘Isn’t it natural that she should want a home, and perhaps a family, like everybody else?’

  ‘Yes…yes. I know that.’

  ‘Well, if you do, I should let things be. Kitty’—Nellie’s voice was entreating—‘make it as easy for Chris as you can. Don’t pester him.’

  It was unusual for Nellie to entreat anyone, but the entreaty was lost on Kitty at this moment.

  ‘Don’t pester him! But we know nothing, only what Bill Seymour told Sep about them goin’ to be married. And he hinted, likely in a Methodist church! But there’s not truth in that, is there, Nellie?’ Kitty took a step towards the woman whom, had her nature allowed her to put it into words, she would have said she loved. And she cried pleadingly to her now, ‘You’ll not let them do that, Nellie? Why, Father McSweeney’ll go mad.’

  Nellie stiffened. ‘I don’t know where they’re to be married. But Ann was married in your church, Kitty, and Mr Fraser didn’t go mad. And we had to bow to that. And it would be a nice return for you all to do the same.’

  ‘Then it’s cut an’ dried!’ Kitty wrung her hands despairingly. ‘Oh, my God!’ Her hands became still: ‘You know something? It’s just seeming to me, Nellie, that you’re for the whole thing.’

  ‘I want them to be happy.’

  ‘An’ you think our Chris’ll be happy with your Maggie?’ demanded Kitty in a tone she had never before used to her friend.

  It was a question that Nellie could not answer, and Kitty turned from her, saying, ‘Well, I might as well tell you; our Sep’ll put a stop to it. An’ he said George was of a like mind too…You hear that?’ She turned her head over her shoulder and jerked her thumb in the direction of the scullery window and over the fence towards her own kitchen, ‘That’s our Sep shouting now…he’s on to Pat about it, an’ he’ll never let it happen.’

  ‘Sep’s like a lot more,’ Nellie said quietly; ‘he’ll learn that the people who get where they aim to go are the ones who keep their mouths shut.’

  Kitty’s head remained fixed over her shoulder, and she stared at Nellie for a moment longer before going out and banging the door behind her.

  Nellie stood watching that fat figure waddling indignantly down the narrow garden path, and she pressed her fingers tightly to her mouth as if to forbid its trembling. Was it only a fortnight ago they were all laughing and joking at the wedding? And Kitty herself said they’d never had a wrong word. Would this business mean the severance of the bond between the two families? Two brothers marrying two sisters should strengthen the tie; but if this second marriage took place, it would more likely act as a knife cutting them adrift.

  As her gaze left Kitty and travelled over the wasteland and into the future, Nellie felt that she was sure of one thing: it was God’s intention that the two misfits who had been brought up together and had remained strangers till now should be married; and it was natural that He would use her to bring about His intention—she allowed no particle of her mind to suggest that in so doing she was finding a legitimate way of getting Maggie out of her house.

  Chapter Four: The Oddities

  Maggie had changed her route of going back and forth to work; instead of walking into the town and taking a penny bus to the door of the laundry, she now went across the allotments, through the spinney and down the valley, and so into the town by way of the old quarter. This route was much longer, but she took it because, unobtrusively, she could meet Christopher.

  No meetings had been arranged between them during the three weeks that had passed since she startled him with her proposal; but, as if by chance, he would be standing at the allotment gate about a quarter past seven in the morning and again at six o’clock at night, and they would, for a few brief moments, speak together, saying the little they had to say.

  Christopher had been there first the morning after they walked back from the spinney, and he had said, without looking at her, ‘If it’s all right with you, Maggie, I’m willin’.’

  She had unfolded a very white handkerchief and blown her nose sharply, and as she walked away had said, ‘I’ll see about the money.’

  But she didn’t see about the money for some time. First, she made Christopher go and see Harry Seymour with a view to him lowering his price. But when Harry Seymour, who had already brought the price down, wouldn’t do this, there had been a deadlock for a few days. Then later, she told Christopher that she would agree to the price, and that she was going to see about furniture. She said she was going to Raymond’s for it, Raymond’s at the foot of Brampton Hill; and Christopher was made dumb with amazement that she had enough money to go to such a shop. She did not invite him to accompany her; nor did he make any protest.

  When two weeks passed and still the business had not been settled, he became sick with anxiety lest someone else should snap up the shop from under his nose. So one morning he had gathered up his courage and said to Maggie, ‘Don’t you think you’d better put the deposit down in case it goes?’

  It seemed that she looked at him for an endless time before answering, ‘Very well.’

  It was then, when they went to put down the deposit, that the cat was let out of the bag, and to use Christopher’s own words, hell was let loose in the house.

  He had expected an uproar, but the mass attitude of his family, with the exception of David, puzzled him. Only too well was he aware that Maggie was no prize; but then, as God knew, neither was he. Yet it seemed to him that now his people were all blind to his defects. With pathetic humility in the midst of verbal barrage, he had pointed out his main defect, his hump; and he had also pointed out that he was human enough to desire a home of his own. The only effect this had on his father and brothers was to make them repeat one phrase; over and over again they repeated it: ‘Man, you must be mad!’

  But his mother, once she realised that he meant to go on with this outrage, used more than one ph
rase. He had listened to her alternate pleading and recrimination untouched, until weeping, she said, ‘Who’s going to look after the pigs?’ This angered him, and he had momentarily silenced her by crying, ‘To hell with the pigs!’

  The twins, too, had followed their elders, as always, and when he found them mimicking Maggie, he banged their heads together. They were so surprised that they made no outcry, although their heads must have rung from the concussion; and he had been so shocked by the ferocity of his action that for days afterwards he could not face them.

  It became evident to him that life in the house, the life he had expected to live until he died, was finished. Whether he married Maggie or not, the easygoing, harmonious family life was over. Most of the time he felt troubled, and all the time vaguely afraid. It seemed as if a brick had hit him, and the impact had awakened a part of his mind he had not known existed. At times, too, he was weighed down by misgivings of the consequences of joining himself to Maggie, for if she did not get what she wanted how would she react?

  Yet there were bright patches in his thinking; there was the shop, and only this morning it had been brought so near as to make him feel dizzy. If Maggie carried her plans through, and he never doubted for a moment but that she would, on Saturday they would be married, and the shop would be his. That Maggie too would be his he did not dwell upon; he only knew that his pity for her was such that it would make him tolerant. He was already aware that she stood greatly in need of pity and sympathy, more than he himself did; but he had found that she resented his pity, and therefore he must be careful in what ways he showed it, for pity from him must be gall to her.

  She had stopped at the gate only two hours ago on her way to work, and said, ‘It can be done on Saturday morning; have you got a good suit?’

  ‘Aye,’ he had answered. ‘But you don’t mean this Saturday, surely?’