A Song Twice Over (49 page)

‘Cara …' Knowing that he was about to be reasonable, rational, she rapidly shook her head.

‘Oh no – don't hush me like you always do. Just tell me what future you see for yourself – in that damn mill.'

‘Oh – it's not so bad …'

She did not believe him. ‘Bad? It must be hell.'

‘I'm used to it, Cara. You're not.'

‘No, thank God.'

Thank Him indeed. For if she had known toil and hunger in Ireland, at least there had been no factory gates to slam shut behind her, no power-driven mill-wheels to grind her down.

‘Then how can you judge?'

‘Because I have eyes and ears, Luke. It's like a prison. Everybody says so. They lock you in, don't they, every morning and don't let you out again until the hooter goes?' And, having never experienced it, it seemed doubly terrible.

‘Ah yes.' He was smiling. ‘That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that they're not so much locking us in as locking the latecomers out. Otherwise how could they collect the fines? It's a shilling per head for latecomers, you know, if they want to be let in at all.'

‘I know. And fines for other things …'

‘Of course. All sorts of things: a shilling for being found dirty at work, and another shilling if you get caught washing yourself. And then, at Braithwaite's at least, there's a fine for whistling because old Mr Braithwaite, who's been dead ten years, didn't like the sound of it. And another shilling to pay for opening a window. And if you fall ill you're expected to send somebody else to do your work, otherwise they'll charge you six shillings a day for the steam they reckon they've wasted on account of your machine standing idle. They don't leave anything to chance.'

Nor did she, if she could help it. But – even so. It was too petty, too mean, for
him
.

‘And is it part of your job to supervise all that?'

‘Oh no. I'm just an overlooker, Cara – a loom-tuner. When a loom breaks down, the weaver comes running to me to put it right – and running in a panic, at that, since she's paid by how much work she can produce and a loom standing idle is taking money out of her pocket and bread out of her children's mouths. And when six of them want me at the same time I have to exercise the judgement of Solomon because whichever one I choose the other five will accuse me of favouritism, and accuse her of letting me have my evil way in a corner somewhere, on a heap of waste.'

‘You wouldn't do that.' It was not a question and, drawing on his pipe, he smiled.

‘There are those who do. And too many women feel forced to put up with it.'

But this was too near her bone and she said roughly, ‘I know all about that. But what about you? How do you spend the rest of your time?'

‘Very pleasantly.'

She had expected him to say that. And she knew all about the lectures he attended at the Mechanics Institute on history and music and such things at which no fortunes could be made, and the ‘study group'which met every Thursday night to read and discuss works of literature and philosophy in a shed in Frizingley Park which, having been used as a cholera hospital in the last epidemic five years ago, they had been able to rent cheap. She knew about the money he sent every week to the fund to pay off Richard Oastler's debts. She knew about the visits he made on Fridays to the back room of the Dog and Gun to drink his moderate weekly allowance of ale, read the tavern's copy of the
Northern Star
and listen to itinerant Chartists – like Daniel – reporting on their cause. She understood the tolerance, the plain-spoken affection, the amused loyalty, the tough-grained respect he felt for his mother. In her better moments she felt it herself. But was it something which should go on unchanged, day in, day out, forever. Was it a future?

‘It's not good enough for you, Luke – not half way good enough.'

‘What isn't, Cara?'

‘This – this
situation
.'

This trap of poverty into which they had both been born and from which she was slowly, by the skin of her teeth perhaps, but
surely
, lifting herself. He had it in him to do the same. She would take her oath – any oath – on that. She believed in him utterly.

‘Situation?'

How maddening he could be when he didn't want to understand.

‘Yes. Working for Ben Braithwaite, who isn't half the man you are …'

‘You know him, then?'

‘I know him. He should be working for you.'

He looked amused, tolerant, unruffled, as he often did with Sairellen.

‘That's not likely to happen.'

‘No.' She was seized, as
she
often was, by a great resentment. ‘I agree – not until you start studying something more practical than Handel's Messiah and Plato's Republic – not until you let your mother stop pushing you into one lost cause after another.'

There was a short silence.

‘Do I have to apologize,' she said, ‘for saying that?' He drew on his pipe again, the fragrance of the tobacco reminding her, with a sharp pang, of the nights he had come to meet her from the Fleece – before Christie. Before so many things. Reminding her that he was the last person with whom she could bear to quarrel.

‘No, Cara.' And the even tone of his voice immediately reassured her. ‘There's no need. Because you know I choose my own causes. And, for the rest, perhaps I do the best I can. Like you.'

‘No you don't. That's just it. You could be …'

‘What?'

‘A mill-manager, couldn't you?'

‘No, I couldn't.'

‘Why not? You're clever enough.'

She
knew
that. And, furthermore, she
was
acquainted with Ben Braithwaite, well enough to know that he desired her. And she acknowledged to herself, quite coolly, that if Luke wanted to be a mill-manager, she would do anything to help him.

He shook his head. ‘Well – I reckon I could do the job. But they wouldn't give it to me. Because my father was Jack Thackray. And I wouldn't take it for the same reason. And what else is there for a man like me? Be realistic, Cara. I'm not like our Chartist candidate, who can afford to play the grasshopper because he already has his education in his hands – his classics degree that can open doors in his life for him whenever he chooses. Those doors are closed to me, Cara – tight shut. You know that as well as I do. Yes, I have a good brain. I even use it, to keep it active, in the only way I can – by reading all those poets and philosophers which, as you rightly say, are unlikely to profit me financially by one penny. I went to a dame-school, Cara, where an old woman taught me the alphabet, which was about as much as she knew herself. And I was lucky to have even that much schooling, since my mother never went to school at all. And then, when I was eight years old, I went into the mill – like
everybody
in this town goes into the mill – because there was nowhere else to go. And now I'm nearly thirty. Half-educated. Self-educated. A success in St Jude's, where overlookers are men to be looked up to and kept on the right side of. Nothing in my own estimation, perhaps. Full of haphazard reading that doesn't qualify me for anything and never could. The professions are for gentlemen, Cara, you know that. And the only men who get promoted from the factory floor are those who think as Mr Braithwaite tells them to think. I don't.'

‘Oh Lord …'

‘Yes, Cara?'

‘Your fancy ideals.'

‘I'm afraid so. I'd feel the cold without them.'

She glanced at him sharply. He was warm then, it seemed, in his integrity. While she needed a velvet cloak with a double lining between herself and the weather.
Needed
it. Bitterly she drew it around her, shivering slightly, her throat, suddenly and to her intense annoyance, very tight with tears.

‘I have no religion either,' she said.

He smiled, enduring and immovable, his straw-coloured head bare, his eyes far-sighted and kinder, sometimes, than her flesh and blood could stand.

‘What does that mean, Cara?'

‘I don't know – I don't know – No ideals, no religion, no politics. Oh Lord – you know what I am.' Christie Goldsborough's woman, she meant. He did not. And again, at this vulnerable, fragile moment when she could least resist it, she felt that he had clasped her hand.

‘Yes, Cara. I do know what you are. From the start – I knew.'

‘
Luke
. I want something wonderful to happen to you,' she hissed at him, meaning it with all her heart yet sounding as if she were spitting venom.

He took it calmly. ‘Perhaps it has.'

She was very cold now, struck by a chill which brought her yet another memory, of Gemma Gage's wedding morning when she had stood in the churchyard wrapped in two plush tablecloths stitched together, shivering before Christie Goldsborough and longing for nothing more – in that killing wind – than his spectacular fur-lined cloak.

She had her own cloak now, and she was no warmer.

No. If Luke meant that
she
had happened to him then it was not wonderful. No. When there was so much of her that she could neither show him nor tell him. Could he mean that? She felt her heart lurch and a great fluttering start up inside her, like wings beating through warm water.

‘I want you to be happy, Luke.' It was a plea. For if she could see joy in his life then at least she would have had something. She believed it would content her.

‘That's a lot to ask,' he said. ‘I want the same for you – although perhaps I don't expect to get it. I reckon that's the difference between us. I can settle for less.'

They walked back quietly, rather carefully, Luke's hand not touching her elbow but, just the same, guiding her, guarding her, first over the coarse tufts of moorland grass and then, when the town started, over the uneven cobbles. Although in fact she did not stumble, keeping pace with him, warmed by him and cleansed by him as she had always been. From the start. A little exasperated too. But that had always been present in the brew that was her affection for him. Her trust. The comfort she derived from her certain knowledge of his worth.

Had anything changed? If, now, she were to reach out and put her hand in his what would he do? Once again she felt that strange, churning sensation of wings through water. An excitement she did not wholly welcome. She had wanted peace from Luke. Now her mind was filled with what he might want from her. And whether – or not – she could give it.

A crowd had gathered at the top of St Jude's Street, not the usual, indifferent ebb and flow of passers-by but silent, solemn groups of women in blanket shawls and men in cloth caps, all staring in the same direction, a sure sign of something amiss. An accident? Common enough in these streets where children were left to roam untended. And in these houses with their open, unkempt fires of sticks and rough-hewn wood that sparked and splintered and could so easily set fire to a child's dress. Liam? Her heart lurched now with an entirely familiar panic. But no, for there was Odette looking troubled but not bereaved – sorry for others, thank God, not herself – standing beside a grim, bare-headed Sairellen Thackray who seemed as impervious to the cold as her son.

‘It's the Rattries,' Luke said.

Of course. What else? The Rattries, or rather the end of them. A common enough sight in St Jude's. And as she watched the landlord's men – Goldsborough's men – carrying out the few pathetic sticks of furniture into the street, roughly, since nothing was fit to sell to recover the arrears of rent, she was merely surprised that Mr Rattrie had managed to keep a roof over his head for so long. He had had no work, that she knew of, since his wife died. Yet, since he had been continuously drunk and she was not ignorant of the price of gin, money had come from somewhere. The pittance she gave Anna, she supposed, and whatever Oliver could earn from Christie. Dutiful children then, in their fashion. Despicable father, who had spent their wages on strong drink, which meant that Christie Goldsborough, who owned both the cottage and the gin-shop in St Jude's Passage, had had his money in any case. Once, that is, rather than twice over.

An old story. Particularly at the end of a short winter afternoon with the sky darkening and the rain coming on. And there was often high drama at evictions, sobs and swoons and hysteria, fisticuffs sometimes as husband and wife turned on each other, tooth and nail. ‘See now what you've done to me. If you hadn't been bone-idle, or drunk. If
you
hadn't always been pregnant.' So that St Jude's was accustomed to public agony and humiliation, skin and hair flying and, rather less often, to surprising moments of love. They had seen old couples who, clinging together like limpets, had been prised apart and taken off to the separate male and female wards in the workhouse. They had seen a young man, last winter, put out into the street with his sick wife in his arms, begging for shelter none of them could afford to give since she had been spitting blood and everybody knew what that meant. They had seen men who had once been decent, cursing and foaming at the mouth, turned into mad dogs by frustration. And although it was not a spectacle which anybody in St Jude's savoured, it brought them out of doors as they would have come out to watch a funeral, to pay respects, to acknowledge the ease with which it could happen to any one of them, to give whatever help one could so as to be able to claim help, more easily, in one's turn.

But the Rattries came quietly, nine – or was it ten? – little weasel-children huddled together in drooping, blank-eyed silence around the soiled mattresses and broken chairs, the few gaudy fairground jugs and vases which had been their mother's treasures piled up on the cobbles, with not even a wheelbarrow, by the look of it, to carry them away in. Ten little weasels, all alike, except for Anna who had grown taller since Cara had been feeding her, and furtive, fidgety Oliver who ran errands and listened at keyholes for Christie Goldsborough.