Page 49 of The Show Woman
48
The stream
Lena is on the train back to Glasgow, swaying from side to side, barely listening as two drunks further down the carriage start up a brawl. In her pocket she feels the cool metal of the two lockets warming gently in her hand. The one she found in Galston, tucked away inside the old oak tree, has corroded from years of rain and winds, covered in rust and mud, but the picture inside is remarkably untouched. It is of her mother.
She is younger, yes, not much more than a girl really, but it is the same face that graces the postcard taken when Lena was a bairn. It is unmistakably her. The high cheekbones, the Cupid’s bow mouth. Her hair parted down the middle and pulled back in the old Victorian style. If her mother had hidden this locket all those years ago, she must have been trying to keep it from someone. Her daddy? Surely not. It could only be the person whose picture is contained in the other locket.
She can hardly wait to get off the train at Glasgow, past passengers fussing with trunks and luggage, past the policemen on the platform now fighting their way on to the carriage to deal with the drunks, batons raised, past the tobacco stands and newspaper sellers and out into the sodden city. It is raining here too, a persistent grey drizzle, but she does not care as she skites down Union Street, past the bridge where she will not look, she must not look – oh, Violet; she cannot think of her now – across Glasgow Green and past the High Court where a judge, still wearing his wig, holds a newspaper over his head as he waits for his carriage, then up the High Street, on to Gallowgate and back, back to Vinegarhill.
She bursts into the wagon, finds her sitting on a stool, knitting a long, intricate shawl.
‘Why is there a picture of you in my mother’s locket?’
Mary Weaver looks up. Her face is old and ragged, weatherbeaten from years on the road. But, looking into Lena’s eyes, it softens.
‘Have you got it, hen? Have you got the locket?’
Lena says nothing.
‘The one in Galston, I mean. I know you’ve got the other one, the one of me. I put it there. In among your mammy’s things. Just in case your daddy went searching. He always thought it was just a pendant, you see.
‘No, the other one I never could find, although I did look. Every year when we went to Galston I’d scrabble about, see if she’d buried it somewhere, hidden it in a copse or down by the stream. But I never had any joy. Well, you always were a smart one. Just like your mammy. Let me see.’
Lena, trembling, brings the old, battered necklace out of her pocket and hands it to her. Mary unfastens the little catch.
‘Ah, there she is,’ she says, admiring the tiny image of Lena’s mother. ‘We got those pictures done at the same time. Studio away over on Union Street, got all tarted up for it. It was my idea. I thought we could wear each other’s lockets, a wee keepsake, a reminder of the past, but then I was so taken with my own likeness that I kept mine, and your mammy kept hers.’
She gives a thin laugh.
‘And of course, Maggie said she wanted to give it to her daughter one day. Sit down, love, you look soaked to the skin.’
Lena sits on the edge of the bed. Rainwater is trickling down the back of her neck.
‘I don’t understand,’ she says.
‘No,’ says Mary. ‘You wouldn’t. We worked very hard on that. Well, your mammy did. It would have made no difference to me – to have folk know she was my daughter, I mean. But she wouldn’t have it. Fresh start. Wanted to get away from me, I think, but then, I wouldn’t have that.’
‘She was your daughter,’ Lena repeats. ‘So that means I’m your...’ she stumbles on the word ‘...granddaughter.’
‘It does, aye. Although it was hard to think of you like that, what with you and Violet being almost the same age. Just like me and Serena.’
‘Serena,’ says Lena slowly. ‘My aunt.’
‘Ah, so you’ve been to see the auld witch, then, have you? Harry did mention it. I didn’t think she’d come clean, though. She must be up to something.’
Lena looks at a spot of damp on the roof of the caravan, single drops of water plopping down on to the floor below. Her mind is racing. Mary her grandmother. Violet a sort of sister, but really a sort of aunt. Did that mean she and Harry were related as well? The thought made her feel ill.
‘William and Harry aren’t mine,’ says Mary, as if she is reading her thoughts. ‘Auld Billy was a widower when he married me, two weans already. We just carried on as if we were all one big happy family, didn’t feel the need to tell people our business. That’s one of the good things about the shows. It’s so easy to . . .’ She stops, relishes the word. ‘Disappear.’
Lena leaps to her feet. ‘What did you do to my mother? Tell me!’
Mary gives her a calm, maddening smile. Her knitting needles continue to click. ‘All in good time, lass. Don’t you want to hear about your grandfather first? And me?’
And so Lena sits back down in the little caravan, the hushed drizzle pattering down outside, and listens to Mary talk. An orphan, she’d been, a city girl from Glasgow cast out alone at just sixteen years old and desperate to avoid the poorhouse, when she’d come across the great Benjamin Linden, circus proprietor, widower, and spotted an opportunity to make a good life for herself. He’d been easy to seduce, an old man like that, and his daughter, only a year younger than Mary, helpless to do anything about it.
Mary laughs. ‘Oh she hated me from the off, did Serena. Couldn’t stand to look at me. Spent all her time on horseback or on the ropes, just to get away from me. And then the babby came along – that’s your mammy, Lena – and she was just fizzing with rage. Thought she was going to be replaced.
‘And she would have been too, if I’d persuaded old Benjamin to marry me and change his will. Then that circus would have been mine. A proper show woman I’d have been then, hobnobbing with the royals, my picture in the newspaper. But the TB carried Benjamin off far too quick, and I never managed to get him to change the documents. And before he’d even been buried, your dear Auntie Serena kicked wee Maggie and me out. That was when things got difficult.’
On and on she goes. They’d ended up in Glasgow, Mary trying to look up old relatives, falling on hard times, Maggie still a bairn. Mary had taken a liking for the drink, had a fall one night on the hard cobbles and been given laudanum.
‘It wasnae my fault,’ she says. ‘I just liked the stuff. Life was hard. And it made things softer around the edges.’
She had taken to working the streets, living hand to mouth, the occasional rich benefactor making life easy for a few days or even a few weeks.
‘That’s when we got the lockets,’ says Serena. ‘Rich old man from the west end, liked a bit of the rough stuff but he paid well. He bought them for me, real silver they were, and paid for Maggie and me to have our pictures taken, too. Looking back, I think he had his eye on Maggie.’
At sixteen years old it was Maggie’s turn to run away. Said she was going to join a circus, just like the one her daddy had run. Wouldn’t live the life her mammy was living.
‘I knew she’d come to Vinegarhill. We’d visited the winter fairs here; she always loved it. So when I came to find her, discovered she’d already shacked up with Joe Loveridge, I wondered why I hadn’t done the same thing myself.’
And so Mary had hung around the shows, taken up with and eventually married Billy Weaver, an old pal of Joe Loveridge, and the two women’s lives had remained inextricably linked.
‘She didn’t want anyone to know our past,’ says Mary, baring her rotten, yellowing teeth. ‘Joe must have thought she’d been conjured up in a puff of smoke. And so of course, I thought I could use that to my advantage. Every week she’d have to give some of their takings to me, or I’d blab the whole story to Joe. You could call it blackmail, I suppose, although I preferred to think of it as a business transaction.’
For years the two families had trundled round the fairs circuit, sometimes together, sometimes apart.
‘I knew Maggie was itching to get away for good, particularly as you got older,’ says Mary. ‘She’d talk about going down to England, joining the fairs in Yorkshire or Cumbria, but Joe wasn’t keen. Scotsman through and through, that one.’
Mary stops knitting and stands up, goes to the door and opens it. ‘All quiet out there,’ she says, as a smattering of rain lands on her skirts. She shuts the door again and this time Lena can see she has locked it, put the key down her stout cleavage.
‘Ach, well, the truth of the matter is, hen, I got greedy. Started asking for more and more money. Joe couldn’t understand it. Where their takings were going. He was never good with the pennies but even he could see that he and Maggie were struggling. Caused a fair few rows.
‘I was old when I had Belle, too old to be having more bairns really, and the pain afterwards was unbearable. So I went back on the laudanum. It was easy really. Billy was away all summer with the fairs and the older weans while I stayed back with the babby, so I could do what I liked. Only, Violet got canny to it. Asked me why I always looked like I was about to fall asleep.’
An old memory swims into Lena’s mind. An autumn evening, fires crackling across the showground just weeks after the end of the season, the last full one with her mother. Lena tucked up in the Weavers’ wagon with Violet, and Mary standing over them, havering about ghosties and ghouls, tiny flecks of spittle landing on the blankets. At the time they had giggled, thought it was funny, Violet’s mammy having a silly turn. Now Lena sees that she must have been out of her mind.
‘Your mammy found me that day in Galston in their wagon, rooting through their things. I had decided to come out on the road with Billy that year; it was an awful mistake, and I had the jitters bad. I was desperate, hen. You have to understand that. I’d heard there was someone in Galston could help me out, a doctor, and I needed something to sell. I had her locket in my hand when she found me.’
She pauses, looks down at her knitting. The needles have stopped.
‘It’s funny. Couldn’t bring myself to sell my own. It was a wee reminder of the good life. So I thought I’d sell hers instead. But no, she wasn’t having it. Said that was enough now. She didn’t care any more who knew I was her mother, just wanted the world to know I was a wrong ’un. A thief. That I’d been on the streets to get by. She would tell Billy, and Joe, and Harry and all the weans. Even you. And she wasn’t going to let me have that locket. Wanted to leave it to you. So she snatched it out of my hands and went haring off towards the stables.’
Lena swallows hard. ‘So what did you do?’ It comes out as a hoarse whisper.
‘We got into a little tussle, when I found her. Fell into the stream, the pair of us. Soaking wet, we were. And then there was nothing for it but to hold her under until she stopped wriggling. I took her away into the woods after that, left her under a big pile of leaves and sticks. She was heavier than she looked, I can tell you. But I knew the police wouldn’t look for her for long, if they even looked for her at all. People like us, the law doesn’t pay much attention.’
Lena holds in a sob, thinks of her mammy bidding her goodbye that bright, sparkling day all those years ago. The pat on her cheek. The beautiful blue shawl. She had only been going for apples, she said. Lena finds herself wondering if she had already bought them when she went to meet Mary, was thinking about how they would share them that night, back in their cosy wagon. Her hand flies to her mouth.
‘Of course your daddy wouldn’t let it lie. I was always telling him he had to forget about Maggie, move on, find someone new. That’s why I sent the letter. He’d been poking his nose in at Galston, and I felt I had to put a stop to it. It was only years later I remembered that Maggie didn’t read or write, what with being a circus bairn, rather than a city girl like me. And I realised you’d never told him, that you’d kept quiet. Otherwise he’d have kicked up hell. That’s why I know you won’t be telling anyone this time either. You’ll keep your counsel, won’t you? You always have. And after all, who would listen to a wee show woman with no family and no show, eh, love?’
Lena springs to her feet. ‘Don’t you “love” me!’ she says. ‘You ended everything. You killed my mammy. My poor, lovely mammy. Your own daughter!’
‘Except she wasn’t really, by then,’ says Mary. ‘She’d disowned me a long time before. Ashamed of me, she was. Of us. Of all of it. There’s a lesson in there for you, hen.’
Lena flings her arms out towards Mary but the old woman, surprisingly spry, is too quick for her. She is on her feet in a flash, brandishing the knitting needles.
‘Come one step closer and I’ll stick these in your eye,’ she says, and she bares her teeth. There is a granite hardness in her voice. ‘You’re too much like your mammy, I can see that now. Too concerned with what’s right and what’s wrong. I might have known she’d produce a poor specimen like you.’
Lena kicks at Mary’s heels and the woman doubles over, her hands still grasping the needles.
‘Oh, you’re a vicious wee bitch, are you? Your mammy fought too, you know. But I was too strong for her. I always was. She was never going to get the best of me.’
She lashes out with the knitting needle, catches Lena on the arm. Lena pulls it away, sees it is bleeding, looks round blindly for a weapon and snatches up an old cooking pot. For the first time she feels a visceral fear. This woman has killed before. She could easily kill again.
‘Stay away from me,’ she shouts.
Which is when the hammering on the door starts up.
‘Mum? Mum, is that you? Are you alright? What’s happening in there?’
It is Harry. Both women freeze. The blood is running from Lena’s arm now, pooling into her palm.
‘Aye I’m alright, son,’ says Mary. But her voice is wavering, weak. She is breathing heavily. The fight has taken it out of her.
There is a crash at the door and it bulges dangerously. Another bang, a click, and Harry falls through it and into the wagon. He looks first at his mother, still brandishing the knitting needles, and then at Lena, cowering in the corner, saucepan in hand, berry-red blood rushing from her open wound.
‘Jesus Christ!’ says Harry. ‘What the hell has been happening here?’
‘I don’t know, son,’ says Mary quickly, her breath recovering. ‘Lena here just came barging in, made all sorts of accusations. Then she cut herself.’
Lena is on her knees now, shaking violently. She drops the saucepan, shakes her head.
‘No,’ she whispers. ‘No, no, no.’
Harry comes to her, bends down. ‘Let me see that arm.’
She holds it out, and he feels in his pocket for a handkerchief and ties it round the wound in a makeshift tourniquet.
‘There,’ he says. ‘That ought to stop the bleeding for now.’
‘She’s mad,’ Mary is saying behind him. ‘Doolally. Gone round the twist.’
Lena shakes her head, sobbing now, willing Harry to believe her. ‘She killed my mother,’ she says in a low voice, and she grips on to Harry’s shoulder. ‘She killed her. Please believe me, Harry. She killed her. She just told me. She drowned her in the stream, that day back in Galston.’
‘Don’t listen to her, Harry,’ says Mary. Her voice is hard now, dangerous. ‘She’s away with the fairies.’
Harry stands up, turns towards his stepmother.
‘Where have you been, any road?’ she says. ‘Three days you’ve been away, not a word. What have you been up to, eh, son?’
Harry’s clothes are rumpled and dirty. He looks as though he hasn’t slept in a couple of nights. There is a cut under his left eye.
‘Never you mind. I think you need to tell me everything,’ he says, and in one graceful movement he swipes the knitting needles out of his stepmother’s pudgy, grasping hand.