Maggie Rowan Read online

  ‘Who you bawlin’ at?’ Alec glared at Pat. ‘You were all for Maggie Rowan a minute ago!’

  ‘I was, like hell! Don’t be daft, man; I was just saying…’

  ‘Be quiet, the pair of you!’ Kitty could be silenced by her husband, but she in her turn could at times like the present still command her sons. She reached to the hob for the enormous brown teapot, and proceeded to fill the cups of the scowling men. ‘Be quiet, you, Pat! And no more of it. And go canny with that sugar. If you want to put four spoons in wait till you get home. Now’—she thumped the pot back on to the hob and turned to her husband—‘if you’re as sure of the money as you make out, isn’t it about time he was told?’

  Sep, vigorously washing himself, nodded, and said, ‘Aye, you’re right. The sooner the better, an’ all, for I feel she’s up to something by what George says. And he says she’s as deep as a drawn well, and cute into the bargain. Aye, he’d better be told. Get the bairns to go and fetch him.’

  Kitty went to the back door and shouted, ‘You, Peter! You, Alan!’

  When there was no response to her call she stumped through the kitchen and up the stairs, and there was the sound of a window being thrust up, and her voice came again, calling over the allotments, ‘You, Peter! You, Alan!’

  The noise of the window being banged down had hardly vibrated through the house when the twins appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. They looked at the men around the table as if they were fellow conspirators, and of a like age, and they spluttered into their hands, and Peter said, ‘We was hidin’ under the wash-house table all the time.’

  ‘Go and tell Chris he’s wanted. And put a move on! Go on, now!’ Sep flung out his arm.

  But the twins did not go on; they looked up at their father, and they said together, ‘Our Chris?’

  ‘Yes. Whose Chris do you think? Get cracking now.’ The twins looked towards their brothers, two of them with the dust of the pit still on them, and the gravity of whose faces now made them appear as old men, as old as their father. They continued to stare from one to the other, until Pat cried, ‘Didn’t you hear your da talking to you?’ while Sep said nothing but significantly stooped down to the mat and undid his belt from round his trousers.

  Even at this the twins did not turn and run, but looked at each other, their eyebrows raised comically. Then Peter said, ‘But he’s gone!’

  Sep straightened himself, and his forehead, blue-marked from the blows of the coal, fell into corrugated lines above his grizzled brows.

  ‘Who’s gone?’ Their mother was in the kitchen again. ‘And why didn’t you come when I called you first?’ She bent threateningly towards her sons.

  ‘Be quiet and listen.’ Sep beckoned the children to him: ‘What do you mean…he’s gone?’

  ‘Well, he went out with his best suit on. He got changed in the hut; we saw him. And our Davie was there. And then they went off.’

  The men rose to their feet, their glances flashing back and forth from one to the other.

  ‘Oh, my God, he’s done it!’ The shock caused Kitty to flop into a chair, and she began to rock herself, crying, ‘The fool! Oh, the fool!’ Then she put her apron to her face and moaned, ‘Oh, my God! And himself will be round like a flash. Oh, Jesus in Heaven!’

  ‘Shut up, woman! Look’—Sep bent to his boys—‘how long ago was it?’

  ‘Oh, a long time, Da. Straight after he took the swill.’

  Sep straightened and drew in his breath. He rubbed his hands across the stubble of his chin, and for the moment there was quiet in the kitchen, until Pat said, ‘Well, that’s that.’

  No-one seemed to find anything to add to this, and the twins, after staring at one strange member of their family after another, retreated towards the back door, only to dash back along the passage and out of the front door, for they had no desire to encounter their brother Davie. And then there was Chris with him; and they were susceptible to certain atmospheres the family was wont to create, and the present atmosphere said plainly that their Chris was in for it.

  Chris entered first. He stood just within the doorway and David stood behind him looking over his head. Sep did not turn and look at his sons, but went on slowly washing himself; but Pat, Alec and Bert confronted their two brothers with looks of hostility, and it was peculiar to the situation that it was mostly towards David that the hostility was pointed.

  Kitty, after one glance at Chris, turned her head and stared fixedly at the brown teapot on the hob.

  It was Bert who spoke first, and to David. He’d never had much use for David, always having considered him to be too big for his boots; and now he said pointedly, ‘Been organisin’?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I say.’

  ‘Well, you’d better be careful what you say, else you might have to swallow it.’

  Chris pressed his hand backwards on David’s leg in an attempt to urge him to keep quiet. Then he took a step forward into the room, and ignoring his brothers, he addressed his father’s back: ‘Da, I’ve just married Maggie Rowan.’

  Sep stepped out of the water and mopped himself considerably with the towel before turning to his son. When he did so, he said slowly, quietly and tersely, ‘Thoo’s a bloody fool!’

  Chris said nothing, but his head lifted out of his shoulders and the pale skin of his face slowly turned red.

  ‘We was getting the money for thoo; we’d uv had it by next week. It was the shop thoo married her for, wasn’t it?’

  The red deepened, turning to scarlet as Chris stared back at his father.

  ‘It was, wasn’t it? George was reet. Oh, thoo bloody fool! And in a chapel too!’ His voice was rising now. ‘My God! What we comin’ to!’ He flung round, and grabbing his long pants from a chair, pulled them on with a viciousness that expressed some part of his feeling.

  Chris stood befogged; his father’s words were amazing him. They were getting the money together to save him marrying her. He needn’t have done it! He was tied for life to Maggie…and he needn’t have done it! Suddenly he felt sick. Had she asked him to marry her without the bribe of the shop, even with his pity for her, would he have consented? No. No! He knew he never would…But now it was done, and he must face up to it. And as if he had gained a new courage by his mistake he did face up to it when Bert, picking up his black cap and bait tin from the table, said, ‘Well, if you ask me, thoo wants locking up.’

  ‘When I ask you it’ll be time enough to stick your neb in!’ The retort, flung over his shoulder and the tone in which it was delivered, brought all eyes on Chris. Even his mother stopped her crying to look at him.

  The Taggart family was renowned in its own circle for its ready repartee, which would become even swifter during a row; but Christopher had never been included in the aura of this talent, his usual procedure during family quarrels being to walk out or to sit quietly in the corner; and it was never quite known which side he supported.

  Bert’s derisive laugh as he said, ‘She must have given you some spunk anyway; and by God, you’ll need it!’ made Chris stiffen, but no fresh retort sprang from his lips; for as quickly as his courage and anger had risen, it now fell away, and he felt deflated. What was more, he had no wish to antagonise his family further, for among his conflicting emotions there was a sense of wonderment and gratitude towards them—had they not tried to get him the shop?

  He would have left things as they were and gone quietly upstairs to collect his few belongings had not David answered Bert for him.

  ‘I can’t see where you’ve got much room to talk; you’re hard set to find your pants sometimes yersel’, and you daren’t say a word when Doris is wearing them either.’

  ‘Here!’ Bert threw his tin back on to the table. ‘Who the hell are you getting at this morning! Throwing your weight about some, aren’t you? If it’s a fight you’re after, by God, then you’ll get it. As for anybody wearing the pants, you’ve picked one from a good stock, and you’ll soon find it out. Her mother w
ears the linings an’ all! I’ve had enough of your airs for too bloody long. Come on, out in the yard!’

  Bert tore off his coat, preparing to end the quarrel in their usual way, but Kitty, rising to her feet, clutched him by the arms and thrust him into a chair. ‘Now listen to me, the lot of you!’ she cried. There were no tears about her now. ‘There’ll be no fighting here. If you want to fight, away home to your own houses, or your backyards, but you won’t do it in mine. Now you put that coat on and then get out, off hyem!’

  But her words did not succeed entirely in deterring Bert. Grimly he got up and pulled his coat on, saying to her, ‘Well, this is not the end of it. He’s been asking for it for some time, and he’ll get it. Practisin’ for a bloody deputy he is…or is it an overman? Aye, that surprised you.’ He flung round on David. ‘Been borrowing books from Harry Taylor, and thought nobody knew. But I’m warning you, don’t come no deputy stuff on me.’

  Sep took no hand in the row; he could order his wife about as if she was a halfwit, but when it came to the quelling of family squabbles he left these to her. And he had absolute faith in her powers, for never once during their forty years of married life had a blow been struck in the house. The lads had fought it out in the back lanes or in the quarry, and she had bandaged the wounds of their combats and refused to listen to the cause of them; for, as she said, they’d be as thick as thieves the morrer.

  But now, as Kitty stood amidst the hot anger of her family, she had an uneasy feeling that in all the tomorrows they’d never be as thick as thieves again; and it was all through Chris…him she had always imagined to be the least troublesome of the whole bunch, him who had never brought a penny in—she was purposely forgetting about the pigs. Now he had upset everybody. Just think; for thirty years she had been friendly with Nellie Rowan, and now they were almost like strangers. And look at her lads, like dogs at each other’s throats. And there was worse to come, for Father McSweeney himself would be round like a flea the minute he got wind of this affair. And as mad as a hatter he’d be, and lay the blame on her as like as not for letting it happen. And all this, and the fighting, and more to come, through him. She turned on Christopher, angry tears in her eyes and her voice breaking on her words: ‘You’re to blame! You. Aye, you! She thrust her finger into his hollow chest. ‘All this trouble because of a blasted bike shop. You’ve started something, you have. You’ll have a lot to answer for, you’ll see.’ The tears were raining down her cheeks again, and her words were cutting into Christopher.

  He had never been the one to want or cause trouble in his life, and now it was as she said, because he had wanted that shop he had started something. The weight of all their lives seemed to fall on him. He looked at his mother with pitying, troubled eyes. To think he could be the means of making her cry like this—he had never seen her cry before in his life—and it had all come about because Maggie Rowan wanted a bairn. The thought startled him.

  And it was as if his mother heard the thought, for she cried, ‘And that Maggie Rowan…deep as a drawn well she is. You’ve tied yourself to something now. There’s a pair of you!’ In this moment she forgot that, in spite of his deformity, next to David she considered Christopher the nicest of her brood; all she wished to do now was to inflict some hurt on him. And she succeeded when she said, ‘The sight of her against you! Can you imagine it?’

  ‘Ma…look here.’ It was David speaking quietly and soothingly now in an endeavour to calm her. ‘It’s done and it can’t be undone. Give them a chance to see how it’ll work out.’

  Kitty rounded on David. Her mouth opened to speak but her words were halted by the appearance of Fred in the passage beyond. It was unusual for this son to call in while still dressed in his pit clothes, for he lived at the far side of the town, near the Phoenix pit where he worked.

  They all turned as one now and looked at him—his presence augured no good—and Bert, the only other member of the family who worked at the Phoenix pit, stepped towards him, saying, ‘What’s up?’

  Fred walked into the kitchen. There was an air of bravado about him, but underlying it there was fear, and the fear was more apparent to the family than the bravado. He took up Bert’s question: ‘What’s up? That’s what I should be asking…why the mass meeting?’

  For the first time since Christopher had come into the room, Pat spoke: ‘Chris there has married Maggie Rowan.’

  ‘No! So you’ve done it!’ For a moment Fred seemed to forget whatever it was that was holding his shoulders back with unnatural straightness yet causing the corners of his mouth to droop pathetically. He stared at Christopher as though he were confronting a stranger. Then quite suddenly his shoulders adopted the lines of his mouth, and he sighed and said, ‘Aye, well, she’s working; that’s something…you won’t starve.’

  ‘You got the sack!’ Kitty almost screamed the words. ‘But when, man?’ asked Bert. ‘You come up with me.’

  ‘Harrison sent for me and told me to go to the office. Jackson gave me me cards. It was just as simple as that.’

  ‘They can’t do it! Why, man, what’s the union for?’ All the men except Christopher moved forward. ‘They can’t do it!’ All said the same thing, but in different ways.

  ‘They’ve done it. The union’s about as strong as me guts at this minute.’

  ‘It’s victimisation. They won’t get away with it, we’ll come out.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said they were cutting down.’

  ‘But you’re a puller, man! And there must be pullers. They can’t cut down on pullers if they want the pit to stand up. And what about your marrer?’

  ‘He’s got it an’ all. We’re two of the thirty…that was no rumour.’

  ‘Well, don’t you worry. Go to the lodge and see Buckley. We’re with you, we’ll come out.’

  Fred sat down and the others towered over him, like eagles round a fledgling. Christopher and his marriage and everything connected with it were now forgotten, for the bread of their lives, their very life’s blood, was in jeopardy. They all felt they knew why Fred, a key man in his job, had been selected for dismissal, but they would not put it into plain words. It took Kitty to voice it for them.

  ‘Come out; come out; that’s all you think about. You made your big mouth go.’ Her head bounced at Fred, and his drooped before the avalanche of her tongue. ‘I’ve told you time and again what’d come of it. Now will your talk feed your bairns? You’ve grumbled about your offtakes, but by God, you’ll be wishing you were paying your four bob afore many weeks is over your head.’

  On and on Kitty’s voice went, and the men stood quiet, listening in a strained attitude as if they were learning something.

  Christopher stood outside the circle of them. His father and brothers were joined together by that great welder, the pit. The hate, the necessity, yes, even the love of it, drew them together once again as a family. The power of the pit was like witchcraft: it could embody a community of stubborn, bigoted men into a bond of brotherhood, a brotherhood that stood unchallenged, for no other industry in the world united men as did a pit.

  For the moment Chris knew he had ceased to exist, even for David, and he was relieved, yet as he turned silently from the room, he felt an added loneliness; he was indeed outside the family now.

  Upstairs he gathered his few belongings together and made them into a parcel. He did not look sentimentally around the room in sorrow at leaving it; he had shared it with too many brothers for it to hold any such association; yet it did strike him that perhaps in the very near future he would give anything to be able to return to it.

  This thought brought him to Maggie. He lifted his eyes from the parcel and looked at the wall. She was next door now, and likely just beyond there, doing the same as him…packing up. Or perhaps she was all packed up before she left the house this morning. Already he knew that one of the trials of living with her would be putting up with her methodical ways. Everything she did was done with method and purpose.


  The full meaning of the last word caused him to sit down on the bed heavily, as if overcome by weakness. Maggie never did anything without a purpose. He suddenly felt helpless; he knew he should feel anger, but he felt too inadequate at the moment to feel anything so powerful…Maggie had known they were trying to rake up the money for him; that was why she had rushed the business. My God! She had treated him like a bit bairn. And now he felt like a bairn, a twisted, helpless bairn. His arms dropped on to his knees, and his head drooped over them, and his whole body slumped forward, emphasising the hump of his shoulders.

  Only a few feet away beyond the wall, as Chris surmised, Maggie too was collecting the last of her things, and her feelings were not so far removed from his, for she too felt utterly deflated.

  After the ceremony she had worked herself up to meet her father. For the first time in her life she had felt triumphant, and she had longed to see him, to witness his anger at his plans going astray. She anticipated him yelling, and she had visualised, as she walked home with her mother, the scornful silence with which she would meet it, and the curl of her lip and the loathing that would be in her eyes. She knew from experience that this look of scorn and her silence had the power to madden him more than any retort could. But before she should resort to this usual attitude she had contemplated telling him all the things that had been burning within her for years; she would have said to him, ‘You hate me because I look exactly like yourself.’ She had long ago come to the conclusion that this was the reason for his hatred, having purposely blinded herself to the fact that those very features that combined to make her ugliness created in him a certain attractiveness: the long face, the sharp nose, and the thin mouth, topped by a mass of thick brown hair, together with his six feet of height, gave him a certain distinction, whereas the only thing that could have relieved or softened these features on herself was a different temperament.