Читать книгу Pack Up Your Troubles - Anne Bennett - Страница 10

FIVE

The children loved the train, as Maeve knew they would, and they ate their jam sandwiches, washed down with the pop from the cracked cups, almost as soon as they were settled. They were enchanted by the countryside they passed through. Now and again cows stared nervously at them over farm gates and sheep on the hillsides tugged on the grass relentlessly. Maeve told them the names of the animals and of the crops growing that they’d never seen before.

By the time the train reached Liverpool, both children were beginning to tire, but the excitement of going on a ship buoyed them up and the sight of it didn’t disappoint them. ‘Ulster Prince,’ Kevin said, reading out the name on the side. ‘Isn’t this grand?’ And it was grand, though the day had got duller as they travelled north, and rain began to fall as they went on to the gangplank. Maeve hoped it would stop raining soon so that the children could explore the ship without getting soaked. She peered over the rail and looked at the water lapping backwards and forwards as the vessel shifted slightly. It looked grey and scummy, not unlike the water that was left in the copper in the brew house after she’d done the washing.

The ship’s hooter sounded, making the children jump, and Kevin watched the frenzied activities on the dockside. ‘They’re pulling up the gangplank,’ he cried, ‘and loosening those thick ropes.’

Maeve lifted Grace to look over the rail and the three of them watched the ferry pull away from the shores of England and from Brendan Hogan with relief.

The ferry had gone no distance at all and Liverpool was still a blur on the horizon when Grace began to feel sick. Kevin left his nauseous sister, tended by his mother, who was, he decided, a most peculiar colour herself, and went off to explore the ship.

He was back in just a few minutes. ‘Mammy, there’s a café here,’ he cried, ‘like a proper one with pink curtains at the windows and they’re selling breakfast. Porridge, toast and jam and a pot of tea for one and six.’ He’d watched some of the people eating and his mouth had watered.

Maeve badly wanted to dip into the store of money and give him one and six. It was cheap enough, for Grace was in no state to eat and she herself was trying to ignore the churning of her stomach to deal with her daughter. But, she didn’t know how long the money would have to last them.

Regretfully Maeve shook her head. ‘I have to watch the pennies.’ Kevin didn’t argue – hadn’t it been the same all the days of his life? – but Maeve saw the disappointment in his eyes. She knew he was hungry. They’d not had much to eat on the train and to make it up to him she gave him a few sandwiches, a couple of cold sausages and a slice of cake. After it, Kevin ran around every bit of the ship that he was allowed in, along with other young boys as eager as he was to see all there was to see.

Maeve and Grace didn’t share Kevin’s enthusiasm and were glad to get off the heaving rolling ship and on to dry land once more, where Maeve shared out the rest of the food. Grace was very tired from all the travelling and once she’d eaten a little, she laid her head on her mother’s knee and went fast asleep. Even Kevin allowed his eyelids to droop. He was becoming calmer the further they went from the house, and even Maeve was more relaxed.

‘Lean against me, Kevin, if you’re tired,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you tired too?’ Kevin asked her.

‘No,’ said Maeve. ‘I’m too excited to sleep.’

She was apprehensive too, though she didn’t share that with Kevin, but whatever reception she found at her journey’s end, she knew it would be better than the life she’d left behind. Kevin was reassured and allowed himself to sleep, and so deep was his sleep that Maeve had to shake him awake when they got to Portadown.

The conductor on the rail bus they boarded for the last leg of their journey recognised Maeve. ‘Well, hello there, Maeve Brannigan.’

‘Hogan now,’ Maeve corrected him.

‘And these are your two?’ he said, smiling at the children. ‘Home for a wee holiday, are you all?’

‘We are that,’ Maeve said firmly, before either child was able to say anything else. ‘And glad of it.’

‘And I would be if I lived in Birmingham,’ the conductor said, and added to Maeve, ‘I bet your mammy will be pleased to see you. It’s strange that she didn’t mention you coming.’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Maeve explained, and hoped her mammy would indeed be pleased.

In the dim evening light she could just see the green Donegal hills flecked with sheep, and dotted here and there with little thatched cottages that had plumes of smoke rising in the air. She closed her eyes in relief and happiness. She was nearly home. She pointed out the familiar things to the children and they listened eagerly as she described her parents’ farm to them as the rail bus ate up the miles.

‘Here we are, then,’ the conductor said suddenly.

Grace and Kevin looked about them as they alighted. ‘We can’t be here,’ Kevin said, ‘because it isn’t anywhere.’

Maeve didn’t answer him straight away and instead pulled their luggage from the rail bus to lie at a heap at their feet. She’d helped the children on with their haversacks and picked up the case before she said, ‘This isn’t a proper station like those we passed; really it’s not a stop at all, just the place nearest to the farm. We go through the gate and we’re nearly there,’ and so saying she opened the five-barred gate.

Maeve saw the children looking about them, and led them up the path that ran between two hedges bordering fields on either side. Dusk had fallen and suddenly Maeve felt the children’s hands tighten in her own.

‘Why isn’t anyone here to meet us?’ Grace asked, and Maeve could see Kevin’s puzzled eyes on her too.

Maeve also wondered that. What if they wouldn’t even see her? She told herself firmly to stop frightening the life out of herself and said as confidently as she could, ‘I expect they’re all busy, and anyway, it’s only a step away now.’ And then she laughed at the children’s fright when two cows put their heads over the hedge and lowed at them.

They came to the corner of the cottage and as they turned into the cobbled yard in front of it there was a sudden terrific noise from a building beside the barn, but Maeve told her bemused children it was just the hens locked up for the night disturbed by their footsteps on the cobbles. The words had barely left her mouth when the farmhouse door suddenly opened and two dogs leapt out of it and around them, snapping and barking. Grace screamed and held tightly to her mother.

‘Skip, Laddie,’ said a stern voice from the doorway, and Maeve turned to look at the young man framed in the doorway.

‘Colin?’ she said in wonder and surprise. ‘Little Colin?’

‘Not so little now,’ Colin replied. ‘I’m sixteen.’

She’d known he was sixteen, for hadn’t her mother written with news of the family? But in her mind Colin was still the wee boy of seven she’d left behind nine years before.

‘You’d better come in,’ Colin said.

Later the children told Maeve how pretty they thought the house was. It was low and painted white, with little windows all along the side of it and thatched with yellow straw, and grey smoke escaped from the squat chimney. The door was in two halves so you could open the top or the bottom. Both now stood open and Maeve led the children inside.

She had her heart in her mouth as she entered the dim farmhouse. It was just as if she’d never left. There was the press opposite the door containing all the crockery and a food cupboard to the side of it. Two pails of water stood on stools by the side of the bedroom door, while to the other side was the huge kitchen table before one of the windows with wooden chairs arranged around it. The settle and the armchairs were pulled up before the peat fire, and the curtained-off bed that belonged to Maeve’s parents was in the far corner.

The only difference was in the group waiting for her. There was no Tom, for he’d been married two years before, and no Liam, away in Dublin, and Kate too was living there, in the nurses’ home. Rosemarie was there, but Maeve knew she was engaged to be married, yet she’d been just twelve when Maeve had left home. Colin was still at home, and Nuala, no longer the wee child of just four striking out for independence, but almost a young lady of thirteen.

Her parents hadn’t changed. There might have been a few more grey hairs in her mother’s head, and more lines on her face and on that of her father, but they’d altered so little compared to the children. And across the room, in the silence that screamed around her, she saw them all staring at her.

Annie Brannigan waited for her daughter to speak, to explain to them why she’d done the disgraceful thing of leaving her husband and coming back home with her children.

Grace and Kevin were weary despite the snatches of sleep they’d had, and both were bone tired of getting on and off trams, trains, ships and rail buses. And now they were here in their mammy’s old home and no one seemed to welcome them at all. Maeve saw the wobbling chin of her daughter and the obstinate scowl of her son, and she licked her lips nervously and said in a voice little more than a whisper, ‘Hello, Mammy, Daddy.’

‘Hello! Is that all you can say after nine years and you descending on us like this, and the only notice a scribe of a letter that arrived this morning telling us so?’ Annie asked her daughter angrily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maeve said. ‘I had to come. There were reasons.’

She saw Grace’s face pucker and the tears that had been threatening since she’d entered the farmhouse spilt down her cheeks. She sank to the flagged kitchen floor with a loud sob, crying, ‘I don’t like it here.’

The sight of the child crying smote Annie’s heart. Whatever was wrong it wasn’t the children’s fault, and she went forward and gathered Grace into her arms. ‘And you’re Kevin, I suppose?’ she said to the boy, who was scowling at her, and without waiting for him to answer went on, ‘Take that look off your face, boy, and come away to the fire. If I know weans, a little food won’t come amiss and will put a new complexion on the matter altogether.’

After that, it wasn’t so bad at all. No one spoke of their unexpected arrival in front of the children. Instead Annie began to prepare a meal for them while Rosemarie and Nuala laid the table and Colin carried the cases and haversacks into the bedrooms.

Maeve saw the children were fascinated by the peat fire that everything was cooked on, the frying pan with the sizzling ham and eggs at the side of it, and the potatoes in a large pot fastened to a hook on a black metal bar that swung out from the wall.

The smell tantalised them all, and Maeve and the children were glad enough to scramble up to the table to eat the fine meal. It was served with butter yellower than the children had ever seen – not that they’d seen much butter at all in their young lives – and slices of bread that Maeve explained was soda bread.

Maeve was grateful to her father for keeping the conversation going around the table that first night. He didn’t touch on the reasons for their being there, but instead asked the children questions about their school and friends, and told little stories and anecdotes of his own to put them at their ease. Maeve saw the children start to relax and open up to the kind man she’d always found her father to be. She saw his eyes light on her often and felt comforted, for she knew her father would be understanding and sympathetic when he knew the reason for her flight home.

Much later that night, Maeve sat and talked to her mother. They were alone. The children and young ones, Colin and Nuala, had all gone to bed, and Rosemarie had gone out with her young man, and her father was taking his last walk round the farm with the two dogs, as he was wont to do, checking on the beasts. Maeve had waited until she’d got her mother to herself before she began to explain, and once they were seated before the fire with a cup of tea apiece she began, ‘I’m sorry to land on you like this, Mammy, but really I had to come. Brendan is . . . isn’t the man I thought he was. I mean not like the man I married.’

‘Then he’s like many a one, cutie dear,’Annie said. ‘How has he changed?’

‘Well, Brendan earns good money, but I see little of it,’ Maeve burst out. ‘Sometimes I have barely enough to feed us. The weans go to bed hungry often. If it weren’t for Elsie next door—’

‘God, girl!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re telling your business to the neighbours?’

‘Mammy, the neighbours would know even if I didn’t say a word,’ Maeve explained. ‘It’s not like here. We live on top of one another. The whole street, the whole neighbourhood, knows your business. But Elsie’s not like that, anyway. She’s a friend and she helps me. God, there’s times I don’t know where I’d have been without her.’

‘Where is your husband in all this?’ Annie asked her daughter, tight-lipped.

‘My husband? Did you say my husband?’ Maeve asked crisply. ‘My husband, Mammy, is down at the pub every night, not caring if we go cold and hungry, as long as he has his beer money. Then, when he has his belly full, he comes home and takes it out on me, or wee Kevin.’

‘He hits you?’ Annie cried, at last incensed on her daughter’s behalf.

‘Aye, sometimes he just hits me. I can cope with that. It’s when he really lays into me so my body is bruised everywhere and my face a swollen mess, with my eyes blackened and my lips split, that’s what I find hard to bear.’

Annie’s mouth had dropped open in shock as Maeve spoke, and when she’d finished she still stared at her, while her lips formed words, but no sound came out.

‘I’m sorry, Mammy, for blurting it out like that,’ Maeve said. ‘But it’s how it is often when he has the drink in him. But other times he can be sober, or nearly sober, and yet he takes his belt off to Kevin.’

‘No!’ Annie cried. The rearing of her children had in the main been left to her, although there had been occasions when Thomas had sometimes seen fit to discipline his sons for some serious misdemeanour. He’d used nothing but the flat of his hand across their backsides and they’d grown up with respect for him because of it. But a belt on a wee boy . . .!

‘You’ll see the marks yet across his back,’ Maeve said. ‘Brendan’s been at him since the child was three years old. I get in between them and then I catch it. I think,’ Maeve went on, ‘he resents the weans and especially Kevin. Every time I tell him I’m pregnant, I know I’m for it.’

‘Oh, Maeve, why didn’t you tell us sooner?’

‘After I’d made such a fuss to marry Brendan, I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake and I didn’t want to worry you. What in God’s name could you do?’

‘What about your Uncle Michael?’ Annie asked. ‘My heart was easier about you because he was there.’

‘Well, he’s not so near really,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s not like Ballyglen in Birmingham, you know, where everyone in the town is just a stop away from one another. It’s a tidy walk, but I do go and see him now and again. But his wife, Agnes, isn’t so terribly welcoming.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Mammy, Michael hasn’t got the fine house he’d have us believe. It’s just a back-to-back like my own, though it’s better furnished. Also, he has a job and a good one, but before this talk of war he was put on short time – three days a week, and some weeks only two. They were suffering themselves and very glad of the money and food you sent.’

Annie could scarcely believe what she was hearing. All the time Maeve had been in England, she’d comforted herself with the fact that she was being looked after by her uncle, who had a good job, a sizeable house and plenty of money to help his niece should she fall on hard times. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’

Maeve shrugged. ‘It was Michael’s tale to tell,’ she said. ‘Anyway, even if Uncle Michael had been better off it would hardly have mattered.’ Maeve hated bad-mouthing Michael to her mother, the baby brother she had always loved, but she felt Annie had to know how it was.

‘It would be no good complaining to him about Brendan. He likes him, Mammy. Brendan is a man’s man. When Michael told you he was a fine figure of a man, he told the truth as he saw it. He still feels that. And, even if he should want to help, Aunt Agnes wouldn’t let him, for he does what she wants him to.’

‘Does Agnes not like him helping his family?’

‘No, she doesn’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Her family live all around her and she sees them all the time, but she didn’t want Uncle Michael’s coming over from Ireland and making demands on him.’

‘Is he still on this short-time work?’

‘No,’ Maeve said. ‘Everyone’s fully employed now, with war looming. Uncle Michael’s even got overtime, more than he needs, really, in the foundry. His children, Jane and Billy, are both working too, both in munitions factories. There’s plenty of work for everyone now and plenty of money. Even Aunt Agnes is thinking of getting a job.’

‘Aunt Agnes?’

‘It’s not so shocking over there, Mammy, to see women working,’ Maeve told her mother. ‘Agnes says they’ll need the women if the men get called up, as they’re sure to like they did in the last war. I got a job in a shop and that’s how I scraped the money up to come here, and kit the weans out with decent things.’

‘I wondered how you managed it,’ Annie said. ‘I mean, with Brendan keeping you so short I know you couldn’t have saved it out of the housekeeping.’

‘God, no. It’s bad enough to try and find the money to keep body and soul alive on what he hands over, and he would have it back off me if I didn’t take it to the shops that very day. Mind, all it does is pay off the tick, for the things I’ve had in the week.’

Annie shook her head to think of her daughter suffering this way when they had plenty to eat for every meal. ‘And not a word about a job in your letters?’

‘I couldn’t risk telling you, and you letting Michael know, and have him say something to Brendan.’

‘Surely the neighbours knew?’ Annie said. ‘You said they knew everyone’s business.’

‘Oh yes, they knew,’ Maeve said. ‘At least the women did. I served them. But they knew the life I was leading. They knew the way the weans lived and knew they got little enough to eat. The women probably thought good luck to me if I managed to earn something to feed them properly. Anyway, whatever they thought, no one whispered a word of it.’

‘And what made you decide to come home in the end?’ Annie said.

Maeve was quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘At first, at the very beginning, I used to get the feeling that somehow I deserved what was happening to me. That I must have done something wrong, or Brendan wouldn’t have been so angry with me. I never felt that way, though, when he was hitting Kevin. Then I just felt angry, but for myself . . . Elsie said I was a fool, and that he’d kill me in the end, but I was so scared of him by then, I couldn’t think straight.’

‘Oh, my dear girl.’

Maeve hadn’t been aware she was crying until her mother spoke. She scrubbed at her eyes impatiently and went on, ‘It’s all right, Mammy. I’m fine now. Let me tell you everything before Daddy is back, and you can then let him know what you see fit. You see, it was the first miscarriage when I realised I truly hated and despised the man I’d once loved so much. I felt sad about it too; it felt like a failure. I’d imagined Brendan and I would have such a rosy future ahead of us.

‘Before we married and even in the first few months while we lived above the café and before I fell pregnant with Kevin, we were happy. So when he lashed out at me at first, I felt that in some way I deserved it. It seems crazy now, Mammy, but I hadn’t realised anyone could change so much. And then he was always so sorry in the beginning. He always begged me to forgive him and promised it wouldn’t happen again. It was when I became pregnant with Grace that I had the first bad beating from him and after that, he never bothered to apologise any more.’

She looked up at her mother and saw that her mother’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘You must think I was stupid, Mammy.’

‘God love you, not at all, at all,’ Annie told Maeve, her voice husky with emotion and she clasped one of her daughter’s hands in her own and held it tight. ‘Go on, pet.’

Maeve sighed. ‘After that, Mammy, I knew I’d married a bully and that was going to be the pattern of my life from then on, and fear had sort of taken over from love. But God, Mammy, when I lost the first baby – you mind, I wrote and told you about the two miscarriages early on?’

‘Aye. I was heartsore for you, so I was.’

‘Mammy, I lost those babies after a good hiding from Brendan,’ Maeve said. ‘I wasn’t eating properly either because there was so little food in the house. The first time he hadn’t known I was pregnant and I lay in bed, knowing there was no longer a baby growing inside me and I felt useless. I could do nothing about my own life and couldn’t even protect my unborn child. I not only feared Brendan, but I also realised I hated him.

‘Then I lost another at three months, in much the same way as the first, but this time Brendan knew I was pregnant and concentrated his attack on my stomach and seemed almost satisfied when I miscarried. The last one I lost because of a vicious kick in the stomach that I got from trying to protect Kevin. Then, with me out of action, because he’d nearly knocked me senseless – I still have the scars from the hobnails on my stomach – he really took it out of the child. He beat him black and blue. I think he might have beaten him to death that night if Elsie hadn’t come in. She got the doctor in and he sent for an ambulance for me.’

‘God, child, this is terrible,’ Annie said, greatly distressed. ‘And for you to tell not a soul . . .’

‘I was ashamed,’ Maeve said. ‘I don’t know what of, either. It wasn’t me should have been ashamed. When the doctors asked me about the boot-shaped bruise on my stomach, I told them I’d fallen over the fireguard. They didn’t believe me, but I stuck to my story. Then, when I missed my period again this month, I knew I had to get away. Can we stay, Mammy, till I get myself sorted out?’

Maeve saw her mother was moved by what she’d told her, but she also knew her mother didn’t really want her there. You married for better or worse, richer or poorer, and that was how some would see it, regardless of what the woman had to endure. Her mother wouldn’t turn her away, Maeve knew that, but in the same circumstances many would, and would tell Annie so. By receiving her daughter, Maeve knew Annie would lose face in the small community and that mattered to her.

But Maeve knew she mattered more. She’d always been assured of her mother’s love and support, and she knew she’d not turn her back on her or the children.

And Annie could not, after all she’d heard, refuse them a place of refuge. She’d seen the lines of suffering on her daughter’s white, gaunt face, and had been shocked by the sight of her grandchildren, pitifully thin and pasty-faced, and knew whatever it cost, they were welcome in her home.

She held out her arms and cradled Maeve as she hadn’t done since she was a child. ‘Why, child, of course you can stay here and for as long as you like,’ she said. ‘Where else would you come but home? And as for your father and the others, leave them to me. I’ll tell them what I think fit.’

Tears of gratitude ran down Maeve’s cheeks and she held her mother tight. Years later she could still remember the comfort her mother’s arms and words had been.