Educating Maggie

I was never a Margaret, always a Maggie. What my parents were thinking when they named me on the day of my birth, fifty four years ago, I have no idea. “Your granddad wanted the name Margaret,” my Mum told me, just as my Mum wanted my middle name to be Eleanor after my Grandma who had died when I was one. “At least she had a chance to look at your pretty little face,” she always told me, “You were the first grandchild.” But it will always stand that me, Margaret Eleanor Benson, (changed to Margaret Eleanor Sears when I married Ray of course) was always a Maggie, never a Margaret.

Just as Stephen was always a Stephen never a Steve. Stephen Gates. I was in love with him at school and used to gaze at the back of his handsome head in Math’s classes from my seat behind him. I liked the way his dark hair laid in whorls at the back of his head, curling around and around like tiny mazes. I imagined my fingers becoming lost in those mazes, the pads of my thumbs touching his silky soft hair. He always seemed so self contained, remote, and I was desperate for him to notice me.

He was a clever student, good at Math’s and English, so much so that he went on years later to become a Headmaster in a posh school down south somewhere. I heard all this by rumour; through the grapevine so to speak, my Mum grapevine. Once we’d left school, I never set eyes on Stephen Gates again.

I married Ray on a beautiful autumn day bright with scarlet leaves bathed in sunshine but with a chilly wind that caught you unawares. I remember I had goose bumps on my arms beneath the flimsy white sleeves of my wedding dress. Ray was a good man, steadfast, loyal, never looked at another woman unless you count that drunken New Year’s eve with Audrey Rivers from across the road. Peeking from my sitting room window, I can see her right now; tripping along the pavement in high heels and fake fur, and my God she must be pushing sixty now.

“Mutton dressed as lamb” as my Mum always used to say. She wouldn’t say it now though would she, my Mum, slumped in a nursing home for the past couple of weeks, struggling to recognise me, her own daughter, let alone fake fur Audrey Rivers.

I didn’t marry until I was thirty and Ray fifteen years older than me. “You’re marrying your father,” my Mum always used to say. “You lost him when you were so young, only sixteen, to that awful express train, and he knew that I didn’t like him working on the railway. I remember him telling me that the money was good. Didn’t do him much good though did it?”

Ray and I had had a good marriage for a long time but in around our fifteenth year he had to go and spoil it all by wanting to move to nearby Hampthwaite. He expected me to up sticks and leave Cobby village. Unthinkable! There was no way in this whole wide world that I would leave Cobby, my village, my home. Everything I wanted and needed was right here in Cobby.

The emerald green countryside that seemed to reach up as high as the sky and the cows and the sheep slumbering in the fields, the canal thick with paddling ducks and swans and the river that wound its sparkling way along its green banks. If I peered really hard from my bedroom window I could see the school where I’d fallen in love with Stephen Gates and just around the corner was Cobby College where I’d spent a very happy year learning to type on an old Underwood typewriter (as well as being lured behind the bike sheds and given lessons by the local boys on how to smoke and how to kiss).

Bloomers the Bakers nestled cosily on Cobby High Street between the dry cleaners and the post office whilst nearby was the little ancient church and the tiny graveyard where Ray now lay in perfect peace, a great stone Angel sprouting from his headstone and gazing with vacant eyes at the sky. There was nowhere else like Cobby, even the sun seemed to shine warmer and the stars splattered across a midnight sky were clearer and more beautiful than anywhere else. I couldn’t tear myself away from any of that now could I?

I remember Ray pleading with me, telling me that a beautiful house was coming up for sale and pointing out how unusual this was in the tiny village of Hampthwaite. “Andrea and Les Dowling are selling up,” I remember him saying. “They’ve got the best house in the village and it could be ours Maggie.” I refused so many times that eventually he stopped asking and succumbed to a deep dark silence and hurtful looks which I never managed to penetrate, … no … never, not even to the day he died.

“Hmm,” I thought to myself, a vague memory tugging at me, “Andrea and Les Dowling? I’m sure that Andrea is the sister of that poor Johnny Emmerson who had been killed so tragically in a car accident a year or so ago. He’d been a Councillor and instrumental actually in setting up Cobby Town Council with two of his buddies, a good kind man, attractive too with his head of thick graying hair and startlingly blue eyes.

Now that was a thing, his widow, Kath Emmerson, lost her supposedly wonderful Johnny and, I’ve got to say she certainly looked like a shapeless sack in her grief, and yet within that first year had moved house to a lovely place along the tow path, got herself a very good job as Town Clerk to Cobby Town Council and nabbed herself a very attractive toy boy too, Town Planner, Paul Timpson. She’d seemed to flourish and bloom like some sort of exotic plant and for all I knew could be Kath Timpson by now!

I’d seen the two of them in Cobby Village only the other day, walking along arm in arm, gazing into each other’s eyes, totally besotted by the look of it. How do people move on so quickly? Ray has been gone for more than four years and I was finding it difficult overall to put one foot in front of the other let alone achieve all that Kath had. Was there something wrong with me? Or was there something wrong with her?

I don’t think she, Kath, realised how much gossip she caused around the village at the time. The whole place was rife with rumours. I remember a customer in Bloomers almost having a thrombie because of Kath taking up with another man so soon after her husband’s death. She was so put out that she dithered between sausage rolls and corned beef pasties for ages before making her final choice. If you ask me, it’s mainly jealousy that caused all the tittle tattle, but then again, you might not be going to ask me at all!

Anyway, what am I doing standing stock still in my sitting room reminiscing about the past? I can’t do anything about it now can I? Although guilt at not moving to Hampthwaite still creeps up on me at times and I can see in my mind’s eye Ray’s hurt puppy dog eyes. Checking my watch I noticed the time and, panicking, dashed upstairs to get ready for work. I was due in Bloomers the Bakers for a twelve o’clock shift.

Gazing into the mirror I decided that there was no point in doing anything with my hair which limp and unwashed hung around my pale face so that I bore a very sad resemblance to that old rocker Iggy Pop! “Never mind,” I thought. “The hair net and baseball cap that I have to wear for work would cover it up anyway.” I dabbed minimal make up on my skin which I noticed was becoming festooned with lines like one of those maps that Ray and I used to take with us in the car on long journeys. It was all sat nav now though and maps becoming as outdated as egg timers!

Maybe I should do what Kath Emmerson did and go to a beauty parlour for a makeover, change my job and grab myself a toy boy. Looking hard at myself now though, I really didn’t think I had the energy for it. My old cat Arthur, laid out long like a tatty rug on the end of my lonely bed, narrowed his yellow eyes suspiciously as, sighing heavily; I grabbed my bag and my coat and left the house, hunching my shoulders to my ears as I walked out into the nippy spring sunshine.

***

Customers were queuing out of the door when I arrived at Bloomers, and I could see young Jeff and Lillian, rushing around behind the counter serving sandwiches, pasties and sausage rolls. The smell of freshly brewed coffee and hot chocolate hung in the air like a mist and I could still detect the lingering odour of bacon and sausages from this morning’s breakfast rolls. A few people sat in the small café area eating their lunch and, as I walked past to go into the back room to get changed, four familiar faces swam into view.

“Hmm, what a co-incidence,” I thought. “I’m sure that’s Kath Emmerson’s daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. Lizzie I think she’s called and I’m sure his name is Martin, a nice man, attractive in a kind way, and the two kids, Layla and Joe. Good looking too, the little girl has eyes like patches of bluebells just the same as her grandad’s, Johnny Emmerson, and a good looking daughter come to that, lots of dark curly hair and ruby red lips. The little boy was just, well, cute. I often wondered what it would have been like to have a little grandson just like Joe, and, come to that often wondered what it would have been like to have a child of my own! Kath Emmerson was a very lucky woman!”

Changing into my uniform of black trousers and tee-shirt overlaid by a blue apron, “Bloomers … the Best Bakers by Far,” depicted in white swirly letters on the front; I gazed at myself in the mirror, securing my hair with a scrunchie and piling it into the hair net and cap, turning this way and that to make sure that I looked okay.

“Whatever happened to my plans to work in a school?” I asked myself. I remember in college whilst learning to type that working in a school had been my aim, my dream really and now I couldn’t even remember where the dream had gone!

I recalled Ray asking me the same, “I know you’re happy at the bakers, Maggie, but it’s a far cry from your hankering after working in a school isn’t it?”

I don’t know what I used to say to him, probably that yes, I was happy at Bloomers but yet the time had flown by and …”

“It’s never too late, you know,” he always said. And perhaps he was right.

I noticed on going out into the shop ready for work, that Lizzie, Martin and the two children had gone and a man sat alone at one of the tables sipping from a cup of coffee, a caramel custard doughnut laid on an outspread paper bag in front of him.

He looked rather nice too having black hair with the odd grey snaking through its thick depths like highlights. His nose was very straight and he had what my Mum would have called “sexy full lips” and I also noticed that he had a square chin with a dimple so deep it looked to have been scooped out with a teaspoon.

I didn’t like him sitting there at that dirty table, ringed with coffee marks and sugar scattered like snowflakes across the surface. I noticed a couple of empty cups standing by forlornly their rims smeared with pink lipstick marks. Why didn’t people clear up after themselves?

“What can I get you love?” I heard Lillian say to a potential customer, a little old lady with a shock of messy grey hair who was squeezing the life out of a six pack of bread rolls with long knobbly fingers. “These fresh?” she asked with an accusing glare. I left her to Lillian, who after all was shop manager, and grabbed a cloth and cleaning fluid and went to wipe the tables.

Two young girls walked past the shop, tight black leggings clinging bravely to jaunty buttocks and glaringly white midriffs on display. “A sight for sore eyes,” I commented to young Jeff as he peered at them through the plate glass window, eyeing them from in between a poster advertising Bloomer’s latest chicken curry pasty as being the best ever and so low in calories, as, diligently, I scrubbed until the tables were clean.

The man moved his doughnut on its paper bag plate so I could wipe around it. He picked up his coffee cup and took a long swallow. I could see the Adams apple bobbing up and down in his throat. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked suddenly. He put his head to one side and frowned, his eyes, the colour of a good sherry, narrowed, his gaze appraising. “You look so familiar …”

I was just about to say no, I don’t think so, when a sudden memory overwhelmed me and I wished that I could sit behind him on an uncomfortable wooden chair and see if his hair still grew in whorls like tiny mazes on the back of his head. Oh my God why hadn’t I seen it straight away? “Well, I never,” I heard him say as if from a long long way away. “I can’t believe it … is it really you, Maggie Benson? …”

“No, actually,” I remember saying. “I’m Maggie Sears …” And then everything went black and tiny bright dots flew around me and the ground heaved and rolled and then hit me hard in the face as I fainted.

***

The Care Assistant on duty did a double take when she saw me coming through the nursing home door that evening. She was the younger one, Tracey, (as opposed to the older lady, Winifred, who mainly worked the weekends I think) a rather large girl shaped like a Weeble with a face like a full moon and a heart full of golden treasures. As usual the buttons on her pink checked uniform seemed to scream in agony across her chest. The familiar odour of urine overlaid with lemon furniture polish assailed my nostrils.

“What have you done to your face, Mrs Sears?” she asked as I walked into the home’s communal sitting room where my Mum could sometimes be found hunched in a chair and staring vacantly at the flickering television screen. The room was clean and tidy as usual with chairs of all different colours and sizes ranged around the walls, the focal point of the room being the TV which was switched on yet no sound came from the mouth of the actors on the screen who looked as though they’d spent at least two weeks under a very hot sun lamp. Why didn’t somebody turn the colour setting down!

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” I assured her briskly, knowing full well that a vast bruise covered my left eye and cheek so that I looked as though I was wearing thick black make-up like a glam rocker from the seventies. “Where’s my Mum?” I asked.

“In her room,” she replied still staring hard at my battered face. “A bit peevish today, didn’t want to socialise.”

Glancing around the communal room, I noticed a couple of old men snoozing in their chairs, eyes covered in veiny lids, bobbing balding heads hanging low and wondered who exactly my Mum was supposed to socialise with and if she could come to that. I laughed at Tracey’s use of the word peevish, odd in one so young; and she laughed too and said, “Well, I mean, cranky then, like a fed up little kid … you know what I mean?”

I nodded yes and smiled then made my way along to Mum’s room to find her lying in bed, her head sunk deep into a thick white pillow. She was so thin now that she made barely a mound beneath the starched white sheets and garish pink bedspread that the nurse had tucked around her like a straitjacket. I looked at the doctor’s notes hanging at the end of the bed but couldn’t make head or tail of them. The markings on the pages looked like hieroglyphics to me and I was supposedly quite an intelligent woman!

I stood looking at this tiny person in the bed for a moment or two, mentally comparing her to the Mum from years ago, from another life it seemed, when I was a young girl. Had this tiny frail person really worn tight sexy miniskirts that showed most of her long tanned legs and back combed her hair so high it towered rich and dark on top of her head? Had her soft breath really tickled unbearably deep into my ear making me squirm with pleasure as she cradled me closely and sang about a tiny house by a tiny stream?

“Oh Mum,” I suddenly thought. “Where have you gone?” and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I missed her. I missed my Mum. I felt like stamping my feet and crying like a petulant child and demanding that my Mum come back to me. “What’s brought this on?” I thought to myself. “Was it the blast from the past that I’d delved into this afternoon?”

I sat down on the chair at the side of the bed and reached out and put my hand on her hand. Hers was so little now and wrinkled as a claw. “Mum,” I said, “Guess who I saw today? Guess who came into Bloomers? Go on, have a guess.”

We used to play this guessing game when I was young and living at home and she would join in by shouting out random names, trying to guess who I’d seen that day, but she did none of that now but just lay there, her eyes closed, barely breathing it seemed beneath the thin sheets.

Disappointed that she wasn’t having one of her lucid moments, I turned away and went over to the window where I gazed at the home’s beautiful gardens bathed in what was probably the year’s first golden spring sunshine. A gardener dug the borders with a glittering spade, his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal hairy muscular arms. Sweat stood out like little beads on his forehead and a robin fluttered around the dug over earth, hunting for the worms that would now be wriggling to the surface. I opened the window a tiny bit so that air, fresh and sweet, poured into the lifeless room.

“Yes, Mum, who did I see today? Who made my heart beat so fast that I could barely breathe when he looked at me from his sherry brown eyes?”

I heard a voice, a tiny scratchy voice, like a bird cheeping from its nest, “Stephen Gates?” I spun around so fast that I almost toppled over. Her eyelids fluttered as she valiantly tried to lift them and a small smile hovered around her lips.

“You always liked him,” she whispered. “He must be getting on a bit now though …? Not that good looking young man anymore.”

I sat down beside her and put my hand on hers once again. “Only the same age as me,” I told her. “Oh Mum, let me tell you all about it.”