Читать книгу Child on the Doorstep - Anne Bennett - Страница 8

A few weeks later it was almost time for the schools to break up for the summer. Connie was pleased, for it meant she would be able to help her mother more, especially in looking after her grandmother, whose health had had a little boost in the warm days they’d had of late.

Both Angela and Connie were surprised when the knock came to the door, for few people knocked in these streets except to collect debts. As Angela was in the cellar getting a scuttleful of coal, Connie went to open the door. She saw at once that the young man outside looking at her quizzically was not of these parts. He had no hat, but his brown hair was brushed sleek and she could tell that the navy suit he had on was of top quality. Beneath it his shirt was snow-white and the handkerchief in his top pocket matched the tie, which was fastened with a gold tie pin. Gold cufflinks glistened in the shirt sleeves just peeping out from beneath his jacket and he wore shoes, not boots, and they were black leather and polished so they shone.

Suits were familiar to Connie for most men wore them for Mass unless their wives hadn’t the money to get it from the pawn shop where most suits were taken on Monday morning. However, none of the suits she’d seen were like the one the young man had on, nor were they worn in the same way. Her neighbours often looked uncomfortable in their suits, encased some of them seemed, but this young man wore his suit as easily as if he wore one every day.

All this Connie took in in an instant, and the young man was fair dazzled by Connie’s smile, which she bestowed on him as she said, ‘Can I help you?’

The young man wasn’t half as self-assured as he appeared. He wasn’t at all sure he had got the right address and he said a little hesitantly, ‘I need to speak to a Mrs Angela McClusky.’

That took the wind right out of Connie’s sails, for it had been the last thing she had expected him to say, and she wondered what such a person would want with her mother.

The man, seeing her reaction, said, ‘Have I come to the right place?’

‘Oh yes, that’s my mother,’ Connie said.

‘Who is it, Connie?’ Mary asked from her chair by the fire.

‘Someone to see Mammy,’ Connie told her and to the young man she said, ‘You’d best come in. My mother is in the cellar, I’ll tell her you are here.’

The young man thanked her and stepped into the room. Connie made for the cellar steps as Mary swung round in her chair.

‘Come nearer,’ she said, for her eyes weren’t as good as they once were. The man hesitated and then took a step forward. ‘Closer than that,’ Mary said. ‘I can’t see you from there.’ And as the man took another step so Mary could see him clearly he started with shock when Mary burst out, ‘Almighty God. You’re Stan Bishop’s son, aren’t you?’

The man was a little shaken and he said, ‘How … How do you know that?’

‘Because you’re the spit of him, lad,’ Mary said. ‘Your father was a fine-looking man and you look just like him. Angela will get a shock too. You’d better take a seat.’

He sat on the edge of the settee but when Angela came into the room a few minutes later he rose again and Mary was impressed he had been brought up with such good manners. The words dried up in Angela’s mouth when she saw the young man in front of her. Memories of his father, Stan Bishop, came flooding back. He had been her husband’s best friend and a friend to her too – she missed him almost as much as her husband. She was almost in shock at seeing the young man in front of her. When Connie had described the man, she presumed he was after money and she wondered how quickly she could get rid of him, but her heart gave a jolt for it was as if the years had fallen away and she were looking at Stan again.

‘You’re Daniel Swanage,’ she said. ‘Stan Bishop’s son.’ Realising he had stood up at her entrance, she sat down in the armchair and said, ‘Please sit down. You are the last person on earth I expected to see.’

Daniel sat on the settee as before, as Connie followed her mother into the room. She had heard her mother’s words and her first thought was that Stan Bishop was the name of the man her grandmother had told her about just a few weeks before and she said to her, ‘Granny, you told me about a man called Stan Bishop, but you never said he had a son.’

‘I didn’t think you’d ever need to know.’

Connie ignored that and said to the man directly, ‘And how can your name be Swanage if your father’s name is Bishop?’

‘Daniel was adopted after his mother died,’ Angela said. ‘His aunt and uncle adopted him and their names were Betty and Roger Swanage.’

‘Yeah,’ Daniel said, and the bitterness of his tone was at odds with the hurt Angela could see reflected in his grey eyes. ‘Your grandmother was right,’ he said to Connie. ‘My real father never had a son because he gave me away and then forgot all about me.’

Angela’s heart constricted in pity for the man who had presumably just found out about the existence of his father. She knew, though, that the hurt Daniel was feeling was nothing like the betrayal her own younger daughter would feel as she grew up, for Angela hadn’t left her in the loving arms of an auntie, but completely alone on the workhouse steps. She had thought the guilt would ease as the years passed, but in fact it had increased as the child had grown older and Angela knew her daughter would now be aware of being a foundling that no one even cared about.

To cover her emotions, she got up and filled the kettle and put it over the fire, getting cups out of the cupboard in the cubby hole of a kitchen. Mary had been a little surprised by Angela’s silence till she caught the preoccupied look in her eyes and knew she was thinking of the abandoned child. And so before the silence became uncomfortable, she said, ‘Your father never forgot you, Daniel. He gave you up because he had to.’

Angela swallowed the lump in her own throat and pushed her own sorrowful memories away because she felt it important to set the record straight as far as Daniel was concerned.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘I knew your father well and cared for him a great deal and what he did, signing away his rights to you, he did for your sake. Look around this area and think what your life would have been like if he hadn’t have done that. Your home would be a house very like this and in this area. Your father had to work so you would probably have been left in the indifferent care of some slattern, who might have had no thought of you other than as a way to earn easy money.’

‘Angela’s right,’ Mary said. ‘It hurt Stan greatly to sign all rights to you away. I know because I was there. I was with your mother when she was in labour giving birth to you and a kinder, finer woman never walked this earth and your father loved the very bones of her. She was everything to him and when she died, your father was beside himself. He had no idea what to do. It was a tragedy a young woman should be taken like that and your father was grateful for Betty who came and cared for you from when you were a few hours old.’

‘I think that’s really sad,’ Connie said. ‘It must be awful to grow up without a mother.’

Connie’s words were like a dagger in Angela’s heart and yet she said to Daniel, ‘Has Betty just told you all this?’

‘She won’t tell me anything,’ Daniel said. ‘Even now she won’t. It was the man at the bank. See, I was twenty-one in April and the bank contacted me. Apparently my mythical father had left money in the bank for me to have when I was twenty-one if he didn’t survive the war. As they hadn’t heard from me – well they wouldn’t, seeing as I knew nothing about it – they asked me what I wanted to do with it. Along with the money was a letter and in the letter it said he was my father and the money was mine to do with as I pleased.’

‘That must have been a shock if you had not been told about the adoption.’

‘I’d been told nothing,’ Daniel said. ‘And the letter was a far greater shock than the money, though there’s over two hundred and fifty pounds he has left for me. What threw me completely was that he continued to add to the account until 1918, which must have been when he died. I could have written him. Hell, I could have seen him before he enlisted, got to know him a bit, but he obviously didn’t want to do that.’

‘Daniel, he did,’ Angela said. ‘Look at the money he put on one side for you, the letter he sent.’

‘What’s a letter?’ Daniel said, disparagingly. ‘Even money is easy enough to give if you have enough to spare and letters are just words on a page. It’s guilt money as far as I’m concerned.’

For a moment Angela considered leaving Daniel thinking that. It was important that he still got on with his adoptive parents, for that’s all he had, and their relationship already appeared to be somewhat strained. Whatever he thought of Stan couldn’t hurt him now.

But she couldn’t do it, she had to put Stan’s side of the story. And so she said, ‘Daniel, your parents Betty and Roger cannot have children of their own and that has been a great cross for them to bear. I believe she suffered multiple miscarriages, didn’t she, Mammy?’

‘She did,’ Mary said. ‘Your true mother, Kate, told me that herself. She said she was always the type of person who wanted to be needed. She liked to care for people and she had been a great big sister to her when she was growing up. She longed for a child of her own and was quite jealous of Kate when she was expecting you. When Kate died she was undoubtedly upset. She was, after all, her little sister. Many were upset for she was well-liked, your mother, but your father was burdened down with grief. You were only hours old and when Betty suggested looking after you Stan was only too pleased. After the funeral she took you away to Sutton Coldfield.’

‘That’s not that far away,’ Daniel said. ‘He could have come to visit me if he’d cared enough.’

‘Betty forbade him to,’ Angela said. ‘I think Betty wanted to pretend you were all hers and Roger’s, their own child, and Stan popping up now and then would have spoilt that.’

‘So he just left them to it. I call that spineless.’

‘Betty said if he was going to keep a stake in your life then she would refuse to look after you and he would have to find someone else,’ Angela said. ‘My husband always said your father should have called her bluff. He said Betty loved you too much for that and he should have carried on visiting you and letting you know you had a father who cared.’

‘But he didn’t do that,’ Daniel almost spat out. ‘You can say what you like, but as far as I’m concerned he just bowed out of my life and let me think the only father I had was Roger Swanage. He didn’t want me in his life and that’s that.’

‘Why are you here then?’ Connie asked from the hearth where she was making tea for them all as the kettle had begun to sing. ‘If you really don’t care as much as you say you do, why did you come here asking questions about him?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘D’you know, I’m not totally sure,’ he said to Connie and then asked, ‘Did you ever meet my father?’

It was Angela who answered. ‘Connie did, but won’t remember. She was very young when he enlisted. And you too were just a child. I am sorry that you didn’t get to know him, but regardless of how he seemed to neglect you, he was a good and honourable man. I think his insecurity with you stemmed from the time he took you home for the weekend.’

‘When was this?’

‘You were very young,’ Angela said and she remembered the heartfelt story Stan had told them that Christmas Day years ago that he had spent with them all. ‘Stan wanted to spend the weekend with you and collected you from Betty after booking the time off from work. But you loathed everything – his house, the area, him – and became so distressed he eventually took you back to the only home you knew. You said you hated him and didn’t want to see him any more and that broke Stan’s heart.’

‘I don’t even remember that.’

‘Why would you?’ Angela said. ‘You were a small boy and you hadn’t really got to know Stan. Stan didn’t know you either and took the words you threw at him at face value for it was at a time when he was hurt and vulnerable. He told me he felt he had failed miserably as a father and then Betty issued the ultimatum to shut Stan out of your life in exchange for them adopting you. He had to sign to say he’d have no contact with you and he did it because he knew Betty and Roger loved you and you loved them. And added to that they had a fine house, where you would have your own room, and there were gardens back and front to play in. He knew you would never want for anything and your happiness and security mattered far more than his own. And so he signed away all rights to you.’

Connie handed around the tea and Daniel stared down at it while he stirred his spoon in his cup and it was the only sound in the room.

Eventually the silence went on so long Angela felt prompted to say, ‘Daniel, I’m sorry if I have upset you by casting Betty in such a bad light. That was not my intention though – I believed you needed to learn the truth of what happened at the time. Having said that, Betty and Roger have done a good job raising you for you are a fine young man.’

‘I’m not offended by anything you said,’ Daniel said, raising his head at last. Though his voice was firm enough, his eyes were very bright. ‘I know that you spoke the truth and perhaps it explains why my mother, especially, was the way she was.’

‘In what way?’

‘I grew up knowing I was somehow precious to my mother. She barely let the wind blow on me. I grew up only a short distance from Sutton Park. Have you ever been there?’

‘Only once and it was in the winter,’ Angela said. ‘I was impressed even so and always intended going back when the weather might be more clement.’

‘What a pity you didn’t.’

‘Circumstances dictated otherwise,’ Angela said. ‘Once war was declared the park wasn’t the same. Some of the army training camps were there. I mean, certainly Barry and possibly your father did their basic training there and later a POW camp was set up there too. It meant much of the park was commandeered and out of bounds and Barry said it was ruined and we must wait for peacetime when we’d be able to take Connie. I couldn’t have taken Connie during the war anyway. I was working making shells six and a half days a week with no time off and on Sunday, the only day I was free, I was too tired to think of going on such a jaunt. And after the war I seldom thought of it, and now I work Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday lunchtime at the Swan pub on the corner of the road. We should go up one Saturday though, Connie. As I don’t work till the evening we could have the whole day. Sutton Park is well worth a visit.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Connie said enthusiastically.

Angela looked at Daniel and said, ‘You were lucky growing up near a park like that. I bet you lived in there in the holidays.’

‘That’s just it,’ Daniel said. ‘I seldom went there and never without at least one of my parents, usually my mother. Other children from school would go, but I wasn’t allowed.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘My mother seemed jealous a lot of the time, even of my friends,’ Daniel said. ‘My father brought me up to know that the very worst thing I could do in the world was upset my mother, so when she said she didn’t want me running wild in Sutton Park with my friends, which was the one thing I wanted to do, I didn’t go. Instead I would be taken on a sedate walk, where I was expected to talk of sensible things with my father in particular.’

‘Ugh,’ said Connie, for it was the worst thing she could think of. ‘Didn’t you mind?’

‘Course I minded,’ Daniel said. ‘But I minded more being called namby pamby and a mummy’s boy. I didn’t have many friends. Most, I suppose, thought me a bit wet.’

Angela suddenly sorry for this young man, for she could imagine how sterile his life had been, but he caught the look and said, ‘I was better off than many, I know that. I never have known hunger and I always had shoes on my feet and a warm coat in the winter and gloves and a hat. The house was always warm and I had a fire lit in my bedroom through the winter months.’

Connie’s mouth dropped open, for a fire in the bedroom was luxury indeed. The bedroom in the attic that she shared with her granny hadn’t even a light except the candle balanced in a saucer.

‘Lucky you.’

‘I know,’ Daniel agreed. ‘That’s why even now maybe I shouldn’t complain so much. At the time I didn’t really think my life narrow or strange because, though I hated the teasing, I accepted life the way it was. I knew my parents loved me and, if I had been in any doubt, my mother told me often and would hug and kiss me as long as I would stand it. They had no friends either. Their life was me and that too I was told often and so it was the three of us all the time.’

‘No grandparents?’ Connie asked.

Daniel shook his head. ‘Both dead and after my real mother died there were no uncles or aunts either.’

‘Well, we are a small household too,’ Connie said.

‘But I bet you all have friends.’

Connie thought about it and thought really they were friendly with all the street and certainly the yard – and some, like Nancy Webster, closer still. Her grandmother was liked by all, but her particular friend was Norah Doherty who had moved to Birmingham before the McCluskys and helped them so much when they were newly arrived. And her mother had a special friend she called Auntie Maggie who had married Michael Malone even though he only had one leg. And because she was a special friend of Sarah Maguire, her mother was friendly with her mother Maeve and at Mass they seemed surrounded by friends.

‘Yes, I suppose we have,’ she admitted. ‘But surely your parents made friends at church?’

‘They could have done if they’d wanted,’ Daniel said. ‘We went to Mass every Sunday certainly and they would greet people but that was all. They had a manner that wasn’t exactly unfriendly but told people they definitely didn’t want to take the conversation any further. So, in the end, people just greeted them then left them alone. I didn’t find this odd at the time, it was later looking back on it that I thought it was a peculiar way to go on. But still, looking at the suffering others were enduring after the Great War and all the hardships many were enduring, these things were minor.’

‘I see what you’re saying,’ Angela said. ‘It’s hard not to feel immense sympathy when some people can’t heat their house or feed their barefoot children adequately. And yet to be friendless too is a lonely place to be, don’t you think, Mammy?’

There was no answer, for Mary was fast asleep. Angela smiled sadly, for Mary was dropping off to sleep more and more of late. She knew it was more than likely that one day Mary would not wake from one of these naps; she would slip into the ultimate deep sleep and Angela dreaded that day.

Daniel, however, hadn’t followed Angela’s train of thought and shrugged as he said, ‘University saved me.’

‘Golly, you must be clever.’

Daniel smiled as he said, ‘It’s easier to work when you have no friends to distract you and parents and a school that expect you to work hard. My parents did all they could to make study as pleasurable as possible. I was doing what they wanted so a desk and bookshelves were put in my bedroom. The shelves of the bookcase were filled with books recommended by the school and often a merry little fire burned in the grate.’

Connie said nothing, but she knew her life would be a lot harder than Daniel’s if she took the route her mother wanted her to take. Between October and April she went into the attic only to sleep, for it was far too cold to linger in. And she had no desk or bookshelves, let alone recommended books to put on them.

‘How do you mean, it saved you?’ Angela was saying.

‘I saw how other chaps lived,’ Daniel said. ‘I saw my upbringing was not the same as most of theirs and for the first time I made friends. My parents would not permit me to leave home to attend a university further afield so I got a place in Birmingham University.’

‘Where’s that?’ Angela asked.

‘Edgbaston.’

‘Hardly easy to get to from Sutton Coldfield, I wouldn’t have said.’

‘It isn’t,’ Daniel agreed. ‘I had to take a train to New Street Station, cross the city and get a bus out. It was hellishly difficult to get there in time for morning lectures, so one of the others would often put me up. I slept on a great many sofas, armchairs, even a bath a time or two, and some floors.’

‘How did you get away with that?’ Connie asked.

‘Well, my parents didn’t like it when I started staying out overnight, as you might imagine,’ Daniel said. ‘So I showed them my timetable and told them how many times I had been late for lectures initially. As they obviously didn’t want me to be late, they could do little about it and let me share a house with some of the others. And being away from home I learnt that life isn’t all about study, that normal students go to the pub, have parties, get drunk and generally enjoy themselves. I felt I was living for the first time. My parents knew nothing of my double life. I did enough to keep up in class, hand essays in on time and do well in my end-of-term exams.’

‘What did you study?’

‘Maths and Accountancy.’

‘So, are you following Roger into the bank?’

Daniel made a face. ‘He’d like me to.’

‘And you’re not keen?’

‘It’s not that, and not really about the job, it’s just that I have tasted freedom now and I don’t want to go back to the life I had. I am turned twenty-one now and my friends all said I should stick up for myself more, but it’s hard when you have never done it. And then I got the letter from the solicitor chap and learnt about this man I’d never heard of leaving me all this money. The letter told me who he was – my father – and I realised all my life I had lived a lie. My parents have lied to me and they weren’t my parents at all, so I don’t have to consider them any more.’

‘Yes you do, Daniel,’ Angela said. ‘They are not your birth parents but they adopted you legally and so they are your parents and they have done their best by you. Admittedly they have smothered you and you have to confront that and tell them there is to be no more of it, but I’d say you are their reason for living. Don’t turn your back on them totally.’

‘If only they’d told me,’ Daniel said. ‘My mother said if I wanted to find out about my father who had just abandoned me to their care I had to come here.’

‘Your father didn’t just abandon you, as I’ve explained,’ Angela said. ‘And I’m surprised Betty knew exactly where we lived.’

‘I don’t know whether she did or not,’ Daniel said. ‘The point is, my real father had left your address with the solicitor in case there were any problems. The stipulation of no contact was null and void when I was twenty-one so the solicitor had my address to write about the inheritance. So you see, even after I confronted her, my mother wasn’t at all helpful.’

‘She was probably in shock and perhaps a bit frightened.’

‘I don’t know why you are making excuses for her,’ Daniel said. ‘Doubt she’d do the same for you. And I don’t know what she has to be frightened of. My father is dead and when I could have got to know him, my parents – principally my mother – prevented me.’

‘She thinks you may hold it against her.’

‘Well I do a bit now, if I’m honest,’ Daniel said. ‘And, like it or not, if I can’t actually meet him, I think I’d like to know all there is to know about him.’

‘Well, as a young man both before your birth and just after, Mary will know more than me because I was just a child. She will probably be able to tell you bits about your mother too. But I can fill in the gaps later, before he enlisted, and so you can have as complete a picture of your father as we can give you.’

And then Angela stopped and cried, ‘Oh, I almost forgot. I have a photo of your father, the army took it. Here’s Barry’s, look. I put it in a silver frame.’ And she took it from the sideboard and showed him. ‘It was important for Connie to know what he looked like so she couldn’t forget him.’

‘I understand that,’ Daniel said. ‘I would so like to see what my father looked like too.’

‘It’s upstairs, won’t be a minute.’

When Angela had gone, Daniel said to Connie, ‘Could you remember more about your father when you saw his photograph?’

Connie shook her head. ‘Not really. I was too young when he joined the war he didn’t come back from.’

‘We’re more or less in the same boat then.’

‘Yes, except that I heard about my father all the time,’ Connie said. ‘The memory of him was kept alive mainly by Granny. Mammy generally doesn’t like talking about the past, but she’d often say things about my father. Granny said she loved him very much and it was hard for her to go on without him.’

Daniel didn’t reply to this for Angela had come in with a box. ‘I put the photograph in the box I kept all the letters in, because I used to write to your father, you see. Here it is.’

Daniel’s hand shook as he took the photograph and he knew now how Mary and Angela had known who he was because it was like looking in the mirror, for he was so like the father he had never known.

‘You say you used to write to my father?’ he said to Angela in the end.

‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘Barry didn’t mind me doing it. He said some of the chaps in his unit that got no post looked really sad when the letters were handed out. It connected you to the people back at home and if no one wrote to them they might feel sort of forgotten.’

‘I understand that perfectly well,’ Daniel said. ‘But you shouldn’t have been writing to him. Or, at least, what I mean is you shouldn’t have been the only one writing to him. My mother is his sister-in-law. Oh, I know there was that thing about him not contacting me, but as he was away fighting in a bloody world war, surely that should have changed everything.’

‘Not in Betty, your adoptive mother’s, book,’ Angela said and she fought to keep any bitterness out of her voice, for she had thought Betty heartless. ‘When Stan enlisted, he wrote and told Betty, but she never replied. And when we’d had no letters for weeks at the end we knew there was something wrong and eventually I got the telegram saying Barry had been killed in action, but there was no word of your father. I thought that, although the letters were sent here, he might have listed Betty as next of kin when he enlisted and so I wrote to her, telling her of the death of Barry and asking if she’d had any word from Stan. She must have replied by return and she made no mention of Barry at all and said Stan would never contact her as that was part of the deal they made and she would be obliged if I didn’t write again.’

Daniel shook his head in bewilderment. ‘You know, that is so callous,’ he said. ‘My father was the husband of the younger sister that she was supposed to adore and she passed me off as her child. She appears so hard-hearted. I have never seen that side of her, and though I don’t doubt a word you say, you are describing a woman I don’t really recognise.’

‘Daniel, have you ever opposed your mother?’ Angela asked.

Daniel shook his head. ‘No, and if I had ever tried my father would have been very angry with me. That is, until now of course. When my last exams were over, my mother advised me to have a break for a while because I’d worked so hard. I wasn’t that keen because I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. Those of my friends from uni who were not starting jobs immediately were going on proper holidays or camping somewhere. I knew my parents would never stand for me doing anything like that.’

‘Maybe they have a holiday planned for all of you?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘We never went on holidays. Don’t know why, except for the fact that my father never seemed to have much free time. My mother used to say he was married to the bank. I imagine what my mother wanted was for me to sit with her and keep her company and the idea of doing that day after day filled me with horror. Of course, the letter from the solicitor chap changed all that. Tell me, did she know about the letter and money?’

Angela nodded. ‘Stan wrote and told her,’ she said. ‘Mammy said it was too much of a shock to find out like this and she should tell you of Stan’s existence at least. But that was another letter she didn’t acknowledge and apparently told you nothing.’

‘No, and another thing I must challenge her about,’ Daniel said, getting to his feet.

‘Go easy on her,’ Angela said.

‘Why d’you say that?’ Daniel said.

Angela shrugged. ‘She loves you very much. Maybe a little too much and that has made her act in ways that have not been sensible and sometimes downright hurtful, but she has never stopped loving you. Remember that when you are talking to her. Now I must try and rouse Mammy or she will never sleep tonight.’

‘Can I come again?’

‘Of course,’ Angela said. ‘Stan was always welcome here and so is his son.’

‘Come and talk to my granny about days gone by,’ Connie said as she let Daniel out of the door. ‘She likes nothing better.’

‘I will,’ Daniel said with a smile for Connie and she watched him stride down the street till he reached Bristol Passage.