Читать книгу A Mother’s Spirit - Anne Bennett - Страница 11

The church was packed out for the funeral, for Brian had been a popular man, but Joe was worried about his mother-in-law, who looked gaunt and frail. He knew, though, however gruelling she found the occasion, she would carry it through to the bitter end for she was that type of person. And so would Gloria, for she had her mother’s backbone. He had such admiration for both of them as he helped them into the funeral car that led the cavalcade of motor vehicles back to the house for refreshments.

He knew the two women might collapse when the mourners left. When the last one went home and Norah announced she was going to bed, Joe wasn’t surprised.

‘Aren’t you ready for bed yourself, my dear?’ he asked Gloria.

‘Not yet,’ Gloria said. ‘I will go up in a little while,’ but she barely waited until her mother had left the room before she asked, ‘What is it, Joe?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are holding something to yourself that I fear probably affects us all. Your eyes are quite haunted by something and you have been like this since you came back from the solicitor’s yesterday.’

Joe shook his head. ‘You don’t want to hear this today.’

‘D’you know, Joe, I have the feeling that I won’t want to hear it any day,’ Gloria said, ‘but the burden isn’t one that you should carry on your own.’

‘Are you sure?’ Joe said. ‘It’s bad.’

‘Then tell me and let me share it,’ Gloria urged.

Then Joe told her, and watched her eyes widen, her mouth tighten and heard her gasp with shock. Her voice was little above a whisper as she gasped, ‘You mean we have lost everything? The factory? Even the house? Everything?’

‘It certainly looks that way,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t know yet how much your father actually owed.’

‘He knew this,’ Gloria said. ‘When Daddy took his own life, he knew this.’

‘Your father wasn’t himself then.’

‘He couldn’t face it,’ Gloria said. ‘That was all. He took the easy way out and, whatever you say, Joe, he knew what he was doing all right when he put the house and the business at risk. He has left us destitute.’ She looked at him in desperation. ‘Joe, what are we going to do?’

Joe put his arms around her and said, ‘Survive, my beautiful, darling girl. We won’t be the only people that this has happened to. I will find us a place to live and take a job. While I have a pair of hands on me, I will not let us starve, never fear.’

Joe was to find that, as Brian’s partner, he was responsible for all his debts, which were considerable. In that first week after his funeral, he seemed to discover one shocking fact after the other.

As the shares had begun to fall Brian had borrowed more and more money, probably hoping to make a killing when they rose again, and he’d used both the factory and then the house as collateral. Quite apart from this, he owed money to many traders in the town. Then the club contacted Joe about the quite excessive gambling debts from Brian’s card games. When he thought he had learned everything, he discovered to his horror that the last two batches of stock had not even been paid for. He had been unaware of this because although he did the accounts, it was left to Brian to pay the bills, and he had neglected to do this. All these creditors would have a claim on the estate.

There was money in the bank to pay the workers for just one more week. Joe went to talk over the future with Bert.

‘There is no point going on making the components anyway,’ Bert said. ‘The industries that we were supplying have gone to the wall themselves. The factory and all in it are worthless. Pay the men off, sir, tell them to go home, and hope to God most of them find jobs elsewhere before too long.’

‘What about you?’

‘Well, I was coming up for retirement anyway,’ Bert said. ‘I have had good wages for years and invested much of it. In the old days I did make money from shares and although I lost money recently, I had cashed in most of my shares in September when they eventually rose again after the dip at the beginning of the month, so I am all right. Don’t you worry about me.’

Most of the workforce knew what was coming too, Joe realised when he spoke to them, and though they were worried, they didn’t blame him. They knew whose fault it was.

That didn’t help Joe much. He locked and barred the factory doors for the last time, shook Bert warmly by the hand and returned home an unhappy man.

‘Don’t feel too sorry for them,’ Gloria said when he told her how bad he felt about making his workforce redundant. ‘We’ll be in the same boat soon, and you might be competing with them for the few jobs there are about, for places are closing down every day.’

‘It’s a dreadful time for the whole of New York,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t know whether it will ever recover from this. It might be better for us to try our luck somewhere else, and yet we might be no better off. I think what has happened in New York is going to have repercussions throughout the whole of America.’

‘To move might totally unsettle Mother too,’ Gloria said. ‘I mean, she has lived here all her life, she knows nothing else, and Daddy and her parents are buried here.’

‘Yes,’ Joe said. ‘We must stay here and weather the storm the best way we can.’ He gave a sudden sigh. ‘Now I must speak to the indoor staff and I am dreading it.’

‘Have you money for their wages?’

‘Not in the bank,’ Joe said. ‘There is very little there, but I have got a stash in that biscuit tin you used to tease me about.’

‘Good job you took no notice of me then,’ Gloria said. ‘It’s money that the bank need know nothing about.’

That was true, and Joe was glad that he was able to pay the wages of the staff for the last time, but he found telling them how bad things were very hard, although they knew that with Brian’s suicide the news would hardly be good.

‘I wish you all the very best,’ Joe told them. ‘I will of course give you all excellent references. I wish I could ask you to stay on longer, but we have to be out ourselves next week.’

‘Have you some place to live?’ Planchard asked.

Joe nodded miserably. ‘A two-bedroomed apartment downtown.’

Planchard shook his head. His mistress and Gloria living in an apartment seemed all wrong to him.

It seemed all wrong to Norah too – in fact, so wrong that she refused to accept that it was going to happen. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said to Joe when he tried to explain. ‘You cannot expect me to leave here and go into some slummy apartment block.’

‘Norah, it’s all that we can afford,’ Joe said. He felt sorry for her because she had been in a privileged position all her life and any other way to live was alien to her.

‘There must be money in the bank.’

‘There isn’t, Norah,’ Joe said decidedly. ‘And that is why we will have to sell the factory, and this house, and so we can’t live here any more. In fact we no longer own it, because Brian borrowed against it. The bank now owns this house.’

‘I have never heard anything so absurd in the whole of my life, and I will not move from here and no one will make me.’

Joe could see that Norah was getting agitated and upset, and he left her and appealed to Gloria. ‘Talk to your mother,’ he pleaded. ‘I know she is fighting the inevitable because she’s scared. See if you can get her to understand.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Gloria said, though she too was frightened of the future and hated the thought of leaving her home. She knew there was no alternative, however, because Joe had written all the figures down for her. That was what she must make her mother see.

Gloria tried hard. For a long time she explained how bad the situation was for them all, but Norah wouldn’t listen.

‘Ignore her,’ Joe said eventually. ‘You have done your best. Pack up her stuff along with your own. Take none of your fancy dresses or ball gowns, though you can take any personal items and gifts you have been given, so you can take your jewellery and your mother’s. We may well have need of it yet.’

‘Can we take nothing else?’ Gloria said.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Joe said. ‘It has to be sold to pay off the creditors. The bank has agreed, however, that I can take the everyday crockery and cutlery from the kitchen, and a selection of cooking utensils.’

‘Cooking utensils will be wasted on me,’ Gloria said. ‘I told you before we married that I couldn’t cook and didn’t know the least thing about keeping house.’

‘It can’t be that hard,’ Joe said, ‘for there are plenty of people at it. Anyway, I should think not being able to cook a four-course meal will be the least of our troubles.’

Adamant to the last, even when the bailiffs entered the house, Norah sat on an easy chair in the drawing room and refused to move.

Outside, a man with a clipboard gave a perfunctory look over the truck that Joe had hired to ascertain they hadn’t squirrelled away the family silver. They were ready to go, but Norah wouldn’t budge.

‘Lady, if you don’t move then we will lift you up and dump you on the drive outside,’ one of the men told her eventually. Norah’s lips were clamped shut and she glowered at him. He went out to where Joe stood leaning against the truck and said, ‘By, but she’s one cussed old bird.’

‘She’s scared and saddened,’ Joe said. ‘Let me talk to her again.’

The man shrugged. ‘All right, pal,’ he said. ‘She’s all yours, but remember we haven’t got all day.’

Joe went into the drawing room and faced Norah. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘What’s this about now? Both Gloria and I explained it to you.’

Norah didn’t answer that. Instead, she said in an outraged tone, ‘He said – that man said – that he would pick me up and put me on the sidewalk.’ She gave an emphatic nod of her head and added, ‘He wouldn’t dare.’

‘He might well,’ Joe said. ‘He has a job to do.’

‘Then let him try,’ Norah said fiercely. ‘The audacity of it! Carrying me out of my own house.’

Joe kneeled down and, taking Norah by the shoulders, he looked her straight in the eyes. ‘Norah,’ he said. ‘Listen to what I am going to say. This is not your house, not any longer, and you have no right here. The bank owns it now, and you must leave it to them and come with me and Gloria. She is waiting for you in the truck.’

‘Joe, it will break my heart to leave this place,’ Norah said, and Joe’s own heart turned over in sympathy for her, but this wasn’t the time to soften.

‘No it won’t. You are stronger than that, Norah, and anyway, there is no alternative.’ He stood up and put out his hand. ‘Come on,’ he coaxed.

He saw the tears trickle down Norah’s lined cheeks, but she took Joe’s hand and he led her outside.

Joe was very proud of the furnished apartment that he now rented in Manhattan West Side. It was expensive, though, and he knew that he would have to find a job as quickly as possible to pay for it. It was on the fifth floor and had two sizeable bedrooms, a living room, a separate dining room, a roomy kitchen and bathroom, and a balcony.

Gloria could see that Joe was pleased with it and so she didn’t say that she thought it awful, cramped and squalid. She knew her mother felt the same, because she saw it in the disdainful curl of Norah’s lips and the set of her jaw. She said nothing, but then since the day she had been taken from her home she had said very little at all.

From the very first day in the apartment Gloria’s life changed beyond all recognition. She had to learn to wash dishes, launder clothes and clean the apartment, and though she found things extremely difficult, she complained little, knowing that it wouldn’t help. She also looked after her mother, who was so sunk in melancholy that she seemed unable to rouse herself at all and spent most of her time in bed.

In the early days, Joe showed Gloria how to cook porridge, bacon and fish, eggs, both boiled and fried, and how to make tea and boil potatoes. Apart from that they lived on sandwiches and pies they bought from the shop.

Gloria had no idea of budgeting either, in the beginning, for in her old world, if she had money she spent it on anything she wanted. Much of what she bought was put on her father’s account before her marriage, and Joe’s after it. Now Joe had to explain about putting aside the money for bills and rent, and saving any spare in case he had difficulty in finding work, and she found this very hard to take.

He thought he would find work with little trouble, but he soon realised there were few jobs to go around and many people after them. Men would cluster around the gates of one of the factories still operating, and that way might be picked for a day or two’s work. That work might consist of anything and whatever wage you were offered, however paltry it was, you took it, for if you didn’t someone else would.

Their poverty frustrated and angered him because it was the result of nothing he had done wrong. And the worry that he wouldn’t earn enough to keep them alive never really left him. He certainly wasn’t earning enough to pay the rent. Every week he had to dip into the biscuit tin and he knew things couldn’t go on like that indefinitely.

By 1930 more factories had gone to the wall and it was harder than ever to get work. The cold was intense throughout January and February, and there were many snowstorms. Joe was often soaked to the skin after standing for hours in the hope of employment, only to be passed over for younger, fitter-looking men. That was a real problem, for in March that year Joe was forty and since finding Brian in his study that time, and the dreadful days following it, he really did look his age.

Gloria, however, was still optimistic that their fortunes would improve and this seemed to be the case when Joe was taken on as a labourer in the building of the Empire State Building in March. She began to believe their troubles were over, but Joe told her to go easy, for the work would not last for ever. He was proved right too. The job was good for the months that he had it, but although the building was set to be the tallest skyscraper in the whole of America, it was going up far too fast for Joe’s liking and was finished by May of the following year.

Gloria felt engulfed in panic and misery when Joe told her that his job was at an end, because she knew he had nothing else lined up. He would be back to hanging around the factories, hoping to be picked for a job of work, and whether they ate or not depended on him.

So the following morning, when Joe got up a little later than usual, Gloria assumed that he was going to be doing a tour of the factories, as he had done before.

‘No, not yet,’ Joe said, when she asked him. ‘I am off to see the Empire State Building opened officially by President Hoover first. D’you want to come along with me and see it for yourself?’

Gloria stared at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears. What good was watching the opening of the Empire State Building – or any other building, come to that? It wouldn’t affect their lives in any way. They needed money and Joe hadn’t time to go gallivanting.

‘See it for myself?’ Gloria repeated scornfully. ‘I have no desire to see it and I am surprised that you want to. As you have no work, shouldn’t you be out looking for something?’

‘I will look for something,’ Joe said. ‘The opening shouldn’t take all day.’

Gloria, however, was dreading going back to the way they had lived before, and worry caused her to lash out at him. ‘Joe, I don’t believe that I am hearing this,’ she cried. ‘You know yourself that there is not a chance of a job unless you are out early. You have said so yourself. When you are watching the President cutting the tape, as if you are a man of leisure, just remember that.’

‘And when have I ever wasted time?’ Joe ground out.

‘Well, you are proposing to now,’ Gloria retorted.

‘Dear God, woman …’ Gloria saw the rage building up in Joe. His face was crimson and his eyes flashed fire. She waited for the onslaught, but it didn’t come. Joe didn’t trust himself to speak. He couldn’t trust himself to stay in the same room as Gloria either, and he wrenched the door open, then slammed it so hard behind him that it shuddered on its hinges.

Gloria sank onto a kitchen chair, and burst into tears. She knew how unjust she had been. Joe was out every day, in all weathers, and was willing to work his fingers to the bone for them. Why hadn’t she gone with him to see the opening of that magnificent building? He would have been so pleased if she had, but instead she had driven him out with her angry words.

Norah lay in bed and listened to her daughter weeping. She knew Gloria was very near breaking point, for she had heard it in her voice, and now she faced the fact that she was partly to blame. Instead of being a help to her – to them both – she had been more of a hindrance. True, the way they lived now was as far from her former life as it was possible to be, but it was the same for Gloria and she hadn’t crumbled, but had soldiered on, making the best of it, though she was now at the end of her tether.

It was time that she herself took an active role in the family again, Norah decided, and she threw back the covers.

Gloria heard her mother’s approach with surprise. She lifted her tear-stained face and said, ‘Are you all right, Mother?’ for Norah spent much of her time isolated in her room. ‘Is there something I can get for you?’

‘There is nothing you can get me, girl, and yet I am definitely not all right,’ Norah said. ‘I am selfish and self-centred.’

‘Oh, Mother …’

‘Hear me out, Gloria. I have watched you and Joe struggle for months and as yet have not lifted a finger to help you.’

‘Mother, we understand. What has happened was a terrific shock for you.’

‘It was a terrible shock for all of us and my withdrawing from life helped no one. Your father took the coward’s way out, Gloria, and yet I envied him. At one point it crossed my mind to make an end to it all when I realised that I had lost the house. I felt that I was in despair. But I have finally got over that nonsense now, and for all he seldom complains I imagine Joe gets as fed up as the rest of us.’

‘Yes,’ Gloria said. ‘And I have driven him away.’

‘You are under strain as well,’ Norah said. ‘And that is why you said what you did – because you know your man works himself to death for the pair of us.’

‘I know,’ Gloria said, ‘and I will apologise to him as soon as he comes in.’

Many hours later, when the early summer’s evening had a dusky tinge to it, Joe arrived home, worn out and footsore. His face was grey and lined with fatigue. Norah, looking from him to her daughter, felt that her presence wasn’t necessary and took herself off to her room.

Gloria said gently, ‘I was worried about you.’

‘Were you?’ Joe asked wearily. He looked at her steadily. ‘I don’t think you were. You probably just wanted to establish that I was out looking for work and not wasting time.’

‘No, Joe,’ Gloria maintained, ‘I was truly worried. I thought something might have happened to you and I couldn’t have borne that. I am so sorry about what I said to you this morning. I was wrong and I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.’

Joe’s face lightened a little, but still he asked, ‘Do you really mean that?’

‘Yes, Joe,’ Gloria replied earnestly. ‘I mean it from the bottom of my heart.’

‘That, my dear girl, is all I wanted to hear,’ Joe said, and as he held her closer she heard the rumble of his stomach.

She pulled away from him slightly. ‘Joe, you’re hungry.’

‘Well, I haven’t eaten all day,’ Joe said. ‘You can’t buy anything when you haven’t even a dime in your pocket.’

‘Oh, Joe,’ Gloria said, ‘I only have bread in, but I have milk and tea.’

‘Tea and bread is a banquet to a starving man,’ Joe said, giving Gloria a peck on the cheek. ‘Lead me to it. You must feed me up anyway, for I have at least a day’s work at the docks tomorrow.’

Gloria used to love the docks, she remembered, and would nag her father to take her as often as she could. It had all stopped when she was fourteen and Joe had put his life on the line to save her from greater injury or death. That, however, had been in her other life when she had been living, rather than merely existing. Now she said, ‘Oh, Joe, that’s wonderful.’

‘Aye, isn’t it,’ Joe said. ‘I would have hated to come home with nothing, and I only got this because I can drive.’

‘Oh? What are you driving?’

‘Trucks. One of the hauliers is a driver down, and I wish the man no harm, but I hope he takes a while to recover from whatever it is he is suffering from.’

‘Ooh, yes,’ Gloria said. ‘A whole week would be lovely.’

‘A week,’ said Joe. ‘That is nothing at all. I was thinking more of six months or so.’

‘And I would say you were tilting at windmills.’

‘You shouldn’t be saying anything at all,’ Joe said. ‘You should be putting food on the table before I start gnawing on the table leg.’

Two months later Gloria looked down from her fourth-floor window to the dusty yard below and thought she had died and gone to hell. She could see the doors to the communal lavatories sagging open on broken hinges, and the dustbins spilling onto the yard, and she wanted to die. She never in all her life thought that people lived like this, let alone that she would be counted as one of them.

She faced the fact that she was no longer a person in straitened circumstances, but part of New York’s poor, and that realisation was hard to take. They no longer had an apartment, for despite Joe’s semi-permanent jobs at the docks, they couldn’t pay the rent. Instead they had rooms in a tenement building. Her mother had the one bedroom, and in the other room the family had to live, Joe and Gloria sleeping on the settee, which opened up as a bed at night. Any basic cooking would have to be done in what was laughingly called ‘the kitchen’, which housed a battered table and four rickety chairs, a sink under the one cold tap, a couple of shelves and two gas rings. The lighting too was from gas. They had no bathroom, and the toilet was a shared one, with access to it across the dusty yard. Gloria bitterly resented Joe bringing them there.

She hadn’t really believed Joe when he told her in July that they were going to have to move to a cheaper place because the money in the biscuit tin was almost all gone and they could no longer afford the rent of the apartment. When Joe had taken Gloria to see this place she had been appalled. She couldn’t believe that he could possibly think she could live here. Now the apartment she had once thought of as small and squalid seemed like a palace in comparison.

Joe knew how she felt and he felt a failure because he could provide nothing better. In fact they were lucky to have anything at all, for many in the same circumstance as Joe lived on the streets. A man he worked with at the docks, named Red McCullough because of his shock of red hair, had told him of the vacancy, in one of the tenements in Ludlow Street, nearby where he lodged in Orchard Street.

As Orchard Street was where Patrick Lacey lived, before Joe went to look at the place Red had mentioned, he looked him up. He was, however, long gone, the neighbours said, and none seemed to know or care where.

Later, when he saw the rooms at the tenement in Ludlow Street, he realised that, with no indoor toilets, they were far worse than those in Orchard Street. The whole area was more run down and shabby, yet Joe knew he had to take tenancy on those rooms, though he guessed what Gloria’s reaction would be.

She didn’t disappoint him. Like her mother before her, she tried to pretend the move wasn’t going to happen. It was Joe who packed their few meagre possessions and he bore Gloria’s glares of resentment and barbed remarks, for he knew she was dying inside at the thought of moving to the place she had seen for the first time the previous day. He knew even the day they were leaving, as he was stowing their things away in the truck that he had hired with the last of their savings, she was hoping that Joe would relent, or something else would happen to prevent them leaving the apartment.

Nothing had happened, however, and as she surveyed the room that first day she looked at Joe, her eyes full of reproach and said, ‘What are you thinking of, bringing me to a place like this? Mother and I cannot stay here, Joe. You must find somewhere else. In the whole of the city there must be somewhere better to stay that we can afford. It’s just a question of looking, I’m sure.’

Joe had had enough. ‘Look, Gloria,’ he said, ‘there is nowhere. I know that this is not what you or your mother are used to, but I am doing my level best to stop us all dying of starvation or exposure. Just at the moment this is the best that I can do, for it is either this or the streets. Sorry if it isn’t good enough.’

Gloria heard the hurt in Joe’s voice and so did Norah. She was hiding her utter shock well, for even as Joe told her about the place she hadn’t been really prepared, but she heard his words and knew he spoke the truth. She knew that Gloria had taken almost as much as she could, and it was up to her to try to rally her daughter, and so she said, ‘Come, come, Gloria. The place won’t look so bad when it has had a thorough clean. And any day now Joe may get a regular job and we won’t be here that long.’

Gloria knew what her mother was about and she felt mean. Joe was trying so hard for them all. She felt a momentary flash of anger for the father she had once adored who had got them into this mess and then couldn’t stay around even to attempt to put some of it right.

‘It’s me that should be saying sorry, Joe,’ she said. ‘I know you are trying always to do the best for us. It’s just this place … It’s such a shock. Maybe, though, Mother is right and we won’t have to stay here for too long altogether.’

‘Perhaps,’ Joe answered. He didn’t believe that for a minute, though. He knew just how bad the unemployment was and he couldn’t see any let-up in the grip it had on the city.

Month after month passed and the recession worsened. In the winter of 1931 severe blizzards began to paralyse the whole city and early in 1932, a gold pendant of Gloria’s and a set of pearl earrings had to be sacrificed to prevent the family from starving or freezing to death.

By 1933 food became less freely available and more expensive, because a severe drought had followed the blizzards of the previous year, turning the farming areas into huge dust bowls. Farmers began leaving the land in desperation and seeking other forms of employment in the towns and cities, adding to the problems already there and causing a food shortage.

The country had elected Theodore Roosevelt President in 1932. He was a popular man and people said he would be good for the country, but even a president has no control over the weather, and Joe began to wonder seriously how much longer they could survive.

Eventually, the churches began to work with the poor and starving people. St John the Baptist, the church that Joe, Norah and Gloria attended every Sunday, was no exception and they operated soup kitchens. Each person was entitled to one bowl of thick, nourishing soup and one thick slice of coarse bread every day, which was dispensed from the streets to the homeless and destitute, and from the church hall to those in the tenements. For many that meal was a life saver.

Gloria also thought it was good for her and her mother to get out of their small rooms, where they lived on top of one another. As the summer passed and autumn brought the cold and the damp, it was good to gather in the warm church hall, thereby saving money on coal. They met some of the people who shared their tenement and the neighbouring ones. Norah and Gloria had never associated with such people, and though many cursed and swore worse than any rough man, Gloria enjoyed listening to the ribaldry and banter between them.

It gave them something to talk to Joe about in the evenings too, for though he had met many of the men as they roiled around the streets together looking for work he had had little to do with the women. ‘They are destitute, Joe, some even poorer than we are but many refuse to let life wear them down. You can’t help respecting an attitude like that.’

‘I agree,’ Joe said. ‘Sometimes life seems one wearying and never-ending struggle.’

‘And yet you wouldn’t think some of these people had a care in the world,’ Norah said. ‘Today for example a few of the Irish women lifted up their skirts and danced a jig for us.’

Gloria smiled at the memory and added. ‘Yes, and a boy, little more than a child, was there playing the tune for them on a battered old violin.’

Unbidden there flashed into Joe’s head the picture of himself and Tom playing the music for Aggie to dance to. He remembered her plaits bouncing on her back and her eyes alight with delight, for she adored Irish dancing and yet, in the end, dancing had been her downfall.

Gloria saw the shadow flit over Joe’s face and she stopped talking and said, ‘What is it, Joe?’

Joe shrugged. ‘Just memories. Nothing important.’

‘Important enough to put a frown on your face.’

Joe sighed. ‘Well, I suppose I might as well tell you,’ he said. ‘I was remembering a time when my brother and I would play the Irish music at home. He played fiddle or violin as you call it, and I would play the tin whistle and our sister Aggie would dance.’

‘I never heard you mention anyone called Aggie,’ Gloria said. ‘I thought you only had the one sister Nuala who worked for the Protestant people near your home in Buncrana. And then in the Troubles she went with them to their second home in England and never came back. You never said why not.’

‘I’ll tell you about Nuala another day,’ Joe said. ‘It was my elder sister, Aggie, that used to do the dancing and,’ he added grimly, ‘she disappeared off the face of the earth at fifteen years old.’

Gloria’s eyes grew wide with surprise. ‘Why did she do that?’

‘Because she was raped by the dancing teacher,’ Joe said simply. ‘When Aggie discovered she was expecting the man’s baby she knew she would have to leave her home, because for an unmarried girl to have a baby is just about the worst thing in the world to those over in Ireland.’

Gloria was incensed. ‘That is monstrous. What of your parents?’

‘They knew nothing,’ Joe said. ‘And they were never told. Tom is the only one who knew all about it and he told me just before I came here. The man McAllister said he would deal with things and Tom said he was sure that he was sending Aggie to his sister in a place called Birmingham in England. Aggie agreed to go to save the family’s shame. From the night Tom saw her being driven off in the man’s cart in the early hours of the morning, he hasn’t a clue what happened to her.’

‘What a perfectly dreadful story,’ Gloria said. ‘That poor, poor girl, driven to such lengths. I know such things go on and the man is seldom held responsible for anything, but I have never met anyone affected in such a way.’

‘And it gets worse,’ Joe said. ‘The dancing teacher died shortly afterwards and when the man’s wife contacted his sister to come to the funeral, the letter was returned saying she didn’t live there any more, so Aggie truly did disappear into thin air. That thought haunted Tom for years. He wonders if he could have handled things differently, but he was only thirteen himself.’

Norah noted Joe’s doleful face and she said gently, ‘However dreadful it is, Joe, you must put it out of your mind because all the fretting and worrying in the world cannot change what is past and gone.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Joe said. ‘And I really have got quite enough to worry about now without looking for other things I can have no control over.’

Gloria knew that was only too true for despite the daily soup ration, life was still a struggle, but she was glad that Joe had told her about his sister Aggie. It was good to share burdens. And so she would get him to tell her about his other sister, Nuala, too. There was another mystery there, she was sure.

October was drawing to a close when Gloria suddenly leaped out of bed one morning and just made the chamber pot in time, for the nausea had risen inside her as soon as she’d opened her eyes.

Joe looked across at her with his eyebrows raised. ‘What was that all about?’ he said. ‘It couldn’t have been something you ate. You eat so little.’

Gloria shrugged. ‘Could have been anything,’ she said. ‘I am fine now, anyway.’

In fact she felt far from fine, but Joe couldn’t afford to lose time from the job at the docks that he had had for three days now, and she waited till the door had closed behind him before she allowed herself the luxury of a groan.

Gloria was sick the next day and the day after that, and Joe was beside himself with worry. He was still at the docks and well liked because he worked hard and never refused to do anything. He would work till the job was done whatever time it was, so sometimes the hours were long. He knew that if he didn’t go in one day someone else would take his place, and yet he was so worried about Gloria he wanted to stay at home and have the doctor brought out.

Norah wouldn’t hear of it. ‘D’you think I can’t look after my own daughter?’

‘You’ll call the doctor out to have a look at her?’ Joe asked, as he hovered at the door, worry lines creasing his forehead.

‘I will if I think it necessary,’ Norah said. ‘Now, for God’s sake, will you go to work before someone else is given your job?’

The door had barely closed behind Joe when Norah looked at her daughter and said, ‘You couldn’t be pregnant, could you? I know you haven’t had your monthlies for ages.’

‘They have stopped before when I haven’t had much to eat for a while.’

‘But you have a big bowl of soup every day at least,’ Norah said. ‘And there is a sort of bloom to your face that wasn’t there before.’