The Fourth Pig (8 page)

And she was prettily spoken, though where she picked it up, no one knew, for the Smiths were just plain folks in a back street in Aston, and that's no beauty-spot, as everyone in Birmingham knows, or would if they took a No 8 from the centre, the line Mr. Smith used to drive on. But where she did get her pretty way of speaking from was her mother, her real one, that used to come
into her room of a night in Spring-time—down through the skylight, for Mary's room was just a bit of a corner that had been a box-room in old days when the place had been a one-family house and servants kept. She'd sit on the end of Mary's bed, would that April, looking for all the world like a young girl, not an old married woman—or what you might call married, for I never heard that her and old January ever went to church, the way decent folks do in Birmingham and elsewhere.

She'd sit there, chattering half the night to Mary, and all round them the room'd be full of the scents and flowers and bird-songs and sunrises that had slipped in after her through the skylight, fidgety little things they were, all legs and eyes and wings, perching on the edge of the Co-op calendar, and scuttering up and down Mary's old macintosh on the door-peg, and when they'd gone they'd leave a kind of a dancy, crazy feeling behind them, that'd go on into Mary's dreams. But she never told Mrs. Smith, though she was fond enough of her in a way, and she never told her teachers, nor any of the girls at school, not even Betty Wothers, who was a council scholar and ever so good at languages and history, and she never told any of the boys who came round after her and took her to the movies, evenings, or a shilling tram-ride out on to the Lickeys of a Sunday.

For she had the boys all round her, had Mary, from the time she was fifteen, and some of them steady chaps with a good job, the marrying kind, working full time at Cadbury's, as it might be, or the Birmingham Small Arms. Any other girl would have got silly, I know I would have, but Mary didn't. She knew what was what, maybe she got that from her mother, and she didn't ever let them get messing around with her, no, not even coming back
from the Lickeys of a summer night, when it's been sweet and cool up there among the trees, but then you get down near the tram-stop, and it's warmer, and you get out the Gold-flakes and light up, and there's a smell from the public houses that are opening now and your boy says Let's have one, and you hear the girls and young fellows larking and giggling about, and there's the Bristol Road ahead of you all dipping and lifting and shining with lights and traffic—well, you know. But Mary didn't care, she just nipped up on a tram, and if the boys wanted to stay with her—and you bet they did—they had to nip up too.

There was only one boy she liked at all, and when you got down to it all she really liked about Bert Hobbis was that he was a mathematician too. Believe it or not, those two used to go off of a Sunday, talking nineteen to the dozen, and when you listened it was nothing but a pack of nonsense about coefficients and absolutes and I don't know what-all. Bert was a nice-looking young fellow, too, and sometimes he'd want a kiss at the end of all that mathematics, but he didn't get it, or at least, not the way a young fellow likes to get a kiss from a pretty girl. Mary wanted the talk well enough to give him just what would keep him quiet, but that was all.

And so things went on till she was near seventeen, and it seemed like she was sure to get a scholarship at the University. Everyone was talking about it down Aston way. But then a fellow came along. He was a traveller from Manchester, in cotton goods, and the last time he'd been along he'd been walking out with Mary's friend, Betty Wothers, and they were as good as fixed up. He'd got a lot of connections, and he was a big, red-faced chap with curly black hair, sort of foreign type, not Lancashire at all,
and as strong as a horse; why he could lift a fifty pound box of samples as easy as wink. Well, this time, when he was waiting about at the corner by the Feathers for Betty, who should come along but Mary Snow, as pretty as a picture and all by herself.

Well, there are some who said it was her fault, there always are when it's a girl. But I say, she wasn't that sort, it wasn't in her then, not if she'd wanted to. But whether or no, this young fellow—his name was George Higginson—he just up and followed her, and when she'd got a bit past the turning, he stepped up to her and said Good evening, Miss, and the next minute he'd got both arms round her and was squeezing her up like the bad men on the movies. Mary let out one screech, and do you know what happened then? Why, a crowd of birds flew into his face, sparrows they must have been for there's nothing else in Aston, and he said afterwards he felt like as if he was being slashed about with branches and prickles. Anyway, he let Mary go, and she went tearing off home, and she never told anyone, least of all Betty Wothers.

But Betty got to know. Oh yes! That George Higginson went straight round to her house, just like a man, and he said: “We aren't going to get married. See?” Just like that he said it, for she told me so herself, and then there was a nice turn-up, what with Betty screeching and her mother going all red and dignified and getting the words mixed up, and him telling them both off—oh real nasty, he was, and he said he was going to marry Mary Snow and no other girl, no, not if all the girls in Aston came along on their bended knees, and that was that!

Well then, it was all over the place and everyone set on Mary, like they would. But she said: “I'm not having any of that from
him. He's not going to sell
me
any samples!” And you saw she really meant it like that. Some thought she was just kidding, but I didn't. I knew she came all over queer when a man got hold of her that way, felt like she was melting, she said. She'd get real frightened, and she couldn't get it out of her head except by studying in her school books, that were getting more and more difficult and full of outlandish looking figures and squiggles. She shut herself up now in her attic, and studied for her scholarship, and when young George Higginson's thick red lips and curly hair came back on her—you know, like onions—she got up and scrubbed her face with cold water and went on at her books and figuring.

Well, after that, three things happened. Young George had half a ticket in the sweep and won £100, and Betty's mother, Mrs. Wothers, took it into her head that Betty ought to sue him for breach. That was one. But Betty wouldn't, and why? Because Bert Hobbis, the boy who was keen on mathematics, had got a job as draughtsman at Austin's, and he got keen on Betty, and she got keen on him, and pretty soon they were walking out regular. That was two. And then old Mrs. Smith began going on at Mary about how she ought to be a bit nice to George Higginson, who was always hanging about the place whenever he was in Birmingham, and who'd bought a scarf and a 2 lb. box of chocs for Mary out of his sweep money; Mrs. Smith kept on hinting how useful that £100 would come in, and how she'd always treated Mary as a real daughter—which was true enough. That was three.

Mary, poor kid, took it a bit hard. She couldn't get away from Mrs. Smith nagging and hinting, not even when she was sitting over her books, for the old woman had got all worked up over the £100 and what a chance it was for Mary. But when she went out
there was plenty of neighbours ready to say something spiteful, as if it had been her fault. She let on she didn't care, but of course she did, and they noticed at school that she wasn't as careful over her work as she had been. Most of the boys wanted to take her out still, though some were beginning to be a bit impatient, saying you never got anywhere with such a stuck-up kid, and they were a bit afraid of what George Higginson might do—if he saw another fellow hanging round Mary, he'd go for them like a bull. Anyway, Mary didn't want to go out with fellows, no more than she used to; she just wasn't made that way. She did want to go talking mathematics with Bert Hobbis, but that was n.b.g. now; he spent all his evenings with Betty, and he didn't seem somehow so taken up with mathematics as he was. Not that I could ever see what either of them saw in it.

There were times Mary got her home-work finished early and then she'd go out for a walk before bed-time, and sometimes she used to see Betty and Bert together, walking home, as it might be, and his arm round her and her head snuggling down on his shoulder, both looking soft and solemn, the way two of you do when he's got a steady job and prospects, and you're both thinking about getting a little house and a bit of garden somewhere on the new estates, and you're thinking about all the things that never seemed worth thinking about before—rates and rent and gas cookers, and wallflower and broccoli plants for bedding—and he says: “I put our names down on the list for a Council house”—and you say: “Mum's going to fix us up for crockery and I was looking through the sales catalogues”—and then you pass a shop with baby clothes and woolly lambs, and you look at one another and both of you giggle a bit and look away, and it's made
you feel all soft and silly like you never thought you could be, only now it seems all right somehow. That was how Bert and Betty were.

And, you see, Mary didn't understand—well, no one does till they've had the chance themselves, but Mary, she understood less than most. Only, she could make out well enough that they were happy, and that they didn't want to talk to her. Two or three evenings she'd seen them that way, and the last evening she'd watched them ten minutes and more, both standing staring in at Lewis' window, looking at curtain stuffs, and Betty saying she'd seen just as good down Aston way at half the price—the way one does, you know, when one wants something bad but one hasn't the money for it. And Mary could hear the way they talked to one another, not minding a bit about things they couldn't get, not minding anything yet, just because they were in love. And Betty Wothers was never once thinking of school days with Mary and how keen they'd both got about class-work and hockey on Saturdays, and doing better than the rest of the girls, and having tea with the headmistress. And Bert forgetting all about his mathematics and the ambitions he used to say he had—not about getting on at the Works, like he was always telling Betty he was going to, but about being a great professor at the University and all that. Well, of course they weren't thinking of any such thing now, neither of them! But Mary, she just couldn't understand, she couldn't get it straight in her head that men and women do just fall in love with one another and then they don't care any more about their friends nor what they used to want to do and be. It's plain enough to most of us, or how would the world go on, but it wasn't plain to Mary Snow.

So Mary, she just turned and went back, walking rather quick so that she wouldn't get spoken to at the corner of the Arcade or in Corporation Street. It took her a bit of time getting home, and instead of thinking about mathematics the way she mostly did when she was alone, she kept on puzzling and fidgeting about Betty and Bert, wondering what it was that made them look like that and act like that. It made her feel lonely, and a bit cold, somehow, and then she began remembering young George Higginson and how it had felt when he'd caught hold of her and squeezed her up. And because she'd hated that and because she remembered pretty clear just exactly the way she'd hated it, she felt lonelier than ever, and a bit frightened. She got home all right, and said good-night quickly and went to her little room, up the stairs where the lino was mostly worn away and the plaster was a bit loose here and there, the way it is in old houses. She sat down on the bed, carefully, because there was one of the iron legs of the frame that was a bit funny, and she hunched herself up with her outdoor coat still on and the counterpane round her shoulders on top of that, and she began reading one of her books on mathematics.

But it didn't help her this time. It didn't stop her feeling lonely. It didn't make those nice comfortable, five-way patterns come up in her mind, the way she liked. It didn't somehow seem to make sense. She'd kicked off her shoes and was wriggling her stocking-feet up against one another to get warm; her hands were cold too and she tucked them one at a time under her arm-pits hoping they'd warm up soon; she didn't mind being cold really, not like some—mostly she worked better so. But it was all nothing to how cold her mind was: it was just as though
there wasn't anything in the world would ever be able to warm it up again.

So she began to write marks on a piece of paper, the same as if she'd been figuring out one of those kind of examples you get in the Advanced, and she wrote out some long numbers, with decimal places in them and all that, and she put them together into sums. Only they were a queer kind of sum, and while she was doing that she kept on talking to herself. And when it was all finished and cancelled out, her mother came down through the skylight, her mother April, all in a dazzle of pale sparkly sunshine, with trimmings of green like what you always forget in winter, and then one Sunday you take a bus-ride off into the country, and it's all new, newer than your new Spring hat, so new and clean and surprised looking, if you see what I mean, that you don't hardly like to touch the grass under the bushes or the silly little beech leaves all beginning again. It was the same as that with April, she didn't look as though she ought to be touched. But all the same, oh she was kind and sweet and gentle, and Mary shut her eyes and snuggled up against her, and she felt like her feet were treading in soft warm moss and her hands were spread out in the sun, and “Mother,” she said, “Oh Mother, I want what Bert and Betty's got!”

Then April's face, it got all still and solemn, like the last minute before a rain-storm, and she said: “You remember about the Sun.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “I remember and I don't care. I won't go on just being Snow.'”

And April said again: “You have to decide, but if you choose wrong, it will be too late afterwards.”