Читать книгу Another Man’s Child - Anne Bennett - Страница 6

It was Norah Mulligan walking alongside her sister, Celia, who noticed Andy McCadden first. It was the first Saturday in March and the first Fair Day of 1920 in Donegal Town.

It was a fine day, but March living up to its name of coming in like a lion, meant it was blustery and cold enough for the girls to be glad they were so warmly clad. They were still wearing winter-weight dresses, Celia’s in muted red colours and Norah’s muted blue, and they were long enough to reach the top of their boots so the thick black stockings could not be seen. Over that they were wearing Donegal tweed shawls, fastened by Celtic Tara brooches, and their navy bonnets matched the woollen gloves that encased their hands.

Celia knew Norah considered bonnets old fashioned and babyish but Celia was glad of hers that day and also liked the blue ribbons that tied so securely under her chin. ‘Anyway,’ she had reasoned with her sister when she had complained again that day as she got ready in their room. ‘You’d have to have a hat of some sort – and just listen to the strength of that wind. Any other type of hat you had today would be tugged from your head in no time and in all likelihood go bowling down the road, however many hatpins you had stuck in it. You running to retrieve it would cause great entertainment to the rest of the town and I doubt that would please you much either.’

Norah said nothing to that because she did agree with Celia that bonnets were the safest option that day, especially when riding in the cart with their father where the wind was even more fierce. Given a choice she wouldn’t have gone out at all, but stayed inside by the fireside; however, their mother, Peggy, had given them a list of things to buy as they were going in on the cart with their father who had some beef calves for sale. They did go in often on Saturdays because the Mulligans’ farm was just outside the town and Peggy always said her gallivanting days were over, so the girls each had a bulging shopping bag as they crossed the square – shaped like a diamond and always referred to as such – to the Abbey Hotel where they were meeting their father.

The beasts for sale were in pens filling the Diamond and the pungent smell rose in the air and the noise of them, the bleating and grunting and lowing and squawking of the hens, just added to the general racket, for the streets were thronged with people, the shops doing a roaring trade.

As usual on a Fair Day the pubs were open all day. Some might have their doors slightly ajar so the two girls might get a tantalising glimpse inside. That was all they would get though, a glimpse, and if any men were standing outside with their pints, they would chivvy them on, for respectable women didn’t frequent pubs and certainly not young ladies like Norah and Celia.

The cluster of gypsies was there too as they were every Fair Day, standing slightly apart from the townsfolk. They’d always held a fascination for Celia, the black-haired, swarthy-skinned men who often had a jaunty manner and in the main wore different clothes to most men of Celia’s acquaintance: light-coloured cotton shirts, moleskin waistcoats and some, mainly the younger ones, bright knotted handkerchiefs tied at their necks, and they were not above giving girls a broad wink as they passed. The women seemed far more dowdy in comparison, for they were usually dressed in black or grey or dark brown with a craggy shawl around their shoulders and more often than not there was a baby wrapped up in it, while skinny, scantily dressed, barefoot children scampered around them.

Suddenly, Norah gave her sister a poke in the ribs, taking her mind from the gypsies as she said, ‘Will you look at the set of him,’ and she jerked her head to the collection of people at the edge of the fair at the Hireling Stall who were in search of someone to take them to work on one of the farms or as servants in the house. As the Mulligans needed no outside help, Celia had never taken much notice of them and she cast her eyes over them now. There were, however, a few young men and she said, ‘Which one?’

Norah cast her eyes upwards. ‘Heavens, Celia,’ she cried. ‘Do you really need to ask? The blond-haired one of course, the one smiling over at us this very moment.’

‘I’m sure you’re wrong, Norah,’ Celia said. ‘It can’t be us.’

‘Celia, he’s looking this way and smiling so he must be smiling at someone or something,’ Norah retorted. ‘No one but an idiot would stand there with a wide grin on his face for no reason and I tell you he is the least idiotic man that I’ve seen in a long time. Quite a looker in fact.’

Celia stole a look at the man in question and did think he was most striking-looking and she took in the fact that he was tall, broad-shouldered and well-muscled and the sun was shining on his back, making it seem like he had a halo around his mop of very blond hair. She couldn’t see the colour of his eyes, but she did see that they were twinkling so much it was like light that had been lit inside him and she felt herself smiling back. She looked away quickly and felt a crimson flush flood over her face. She saw that Norah had noticed her blush and, to prevent her teasing, said sharply, ‘Mammy will wash your mouth out with carbolic if she hears you talking this way.’

‘Better not tell her then,’ Norah said impishly.

‘I just might.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Norah said assuredly. ‘You’re no tell-tale.’

‘All right,’ Celia conceded. ‘You’re right, I’d never tell Mammy. But talking of men, I was wondering the other day about you wanting to go to America and all. Whatever are you going to do about Joseph O’Leary?’

‘What’s Joseph O’Leary to do with anything?’

‘You’re walking out with him.’

‘Hardly,’ Norah said. ‘We’ve just been out a few times.’

‘Huh, more than a few I’d say,’ Celia said. ‘But it doesn’t matter how long it’s been going on, in anyone’s book that constitutes walking out together.’

‘Well if you must know,’ Norah told her sister, ‘I’m using Joseph to practise on.’

‘Oh Norah, that’s a dreadful thing to do to someone,’ Celia cried, really shocked because she liked Joseph. He was a nice man and had an open honest face, a wide generous mouth and his fine head of wavy hair was as dark brown as his eyes, which were nearly always fastened on her sister.

Norah shrugged carelessly. ‘I had to know what it was like. I am preparing for when I go to America.’

‘Does he know your plans?’

‘Sort of,’ Norah said. ‘I mean, he knows I want to go.’

‘Does he know you’re really going, that Aunt Maria said she’ll sponsor you and pay your fare and everything?’

‘Well no,’ Norah admitted.

‘Poor Joseph,’ Celia said. ‘He’ll be heartbroken.’

‘Hearts don’t break that easy, Celia.’

‘Well I bet yours will if you can’t go to America after all and Mammy could stop you because she’s great friends with the O’Learys.’

‘Mammy will be able to do nothing,’ Norah said confidently. ‘She has made me wait until I’m twenty-one and that was bad enough, but I will be that in three months’ time and then I can please myself.’

‘She doesn’t want you to go.’

‘I know that and that was why she made me wait until I was twenty-one.’

‘And that doesn’t worry you?’

‘It would if I let it,’ Norah said. ‘Now you worry about everything and in fact you would worry yourself into an early grave if you had nothing to worry about. You never want to hurt people’s feelings either and, while it’s nice to be that way, it could stop you doing something you really want to do in case someone disapproves.’

‘Like you going to America?’

‘Exactly like that.’

‘But I’d never want to leave here,’ Celia said, looking around the town she loved so much. She loved everything, the rolling hills she could see from her bedroom window dotted with velvet-nosed cows calmly chewing the cud, or the sheep pulling relentlessly at the grass as if their lives depended upon it, and here and there squat cottages with plumes of grey smoke rising from the chimneys wafting in the air. Their farmhouse was no small cottage however for it was built of brick with a slate roof and unusually for Ireland then, it was two storeyed. Downstairs there was a well-fitted scullery with a tin bath hung on a hook behind the door and leading off it, a large kitchen with a range with a scrubbed wooden table beside it and an easy chair before the hearth. It was where the family spent most of their time, for though there was a separate sitting room it was seldom used. The stairs ran along the kitchen wall and upstairs were three sizeable bedrooms; her parents had their own room, another she shared with Norah and Ellie and the other one was for Tom, Dermot and Sammy.

It was all so dear to her, familiar and safe and she couldn’t see why anyone would want to leave it. She said this to Norah and added, ‘I’d never want to go away from here.’

‘Never is a long time,’ Norah said. ‘And you’re only seventeen. I felt like that at seventeen. But by the time I was twenty I felt as if I was suffocating with the sameness of every day.’

‘But don’t you want a husband and children?’

‘Not yet,’ Norah said emphatically. ‘Why would I? I intend to keep marriage and all it entails at bay or at least until I meet and fall madly in love with a tall and very handsome man, who has plenty of money and will adore me totally.’

Celia burst out laughing. ‘Shouldn’t say there’s many of them about.’

‘Not in Donegal certainly,’ Norah conceded. ‘But who knows what America holds? The country may be littered with them.’

Celia laughed. Oh, how she would miss her sister for, since leaving school, she saw her old friends rarely. She’d meet some of them occasionally in Donegal Town, but it wasn’t arranged or anything, they would just bump into one another. They seldom had time for any sort of lingering chats because all the girls would usually have a list of errands to do for their mothers. The only other time to meet was at Mass on Sunday but no one dawdled after that because most of the congregation had taken communion and so were ravenously hungry, for no one was allowed to eat or drink if they were taking communion. So the two sisters had relied on each other – and Peggy wasn’t the only one to hope that Norah would change her mind in the months till her twenty-first birthday.

Celia opened her mouth to say something to Norah about how much she would miss her, but there was no time because they had reached the Abbey Hotel and their father, Dan, was waiting on them. Celia thought her father a fairly handsome man for one of his age; his black curls had not a hint of grey and he had deep dark brown eyes just like her eldest brother, Tom. Only his nose let him down for it was slightly bulbous, but his mouth was a much better shape. Tom was just like a younger version of him. Dan was a jovial man too and as they approached his laugh rang out at something someone in the crowd had said and it was so infectious that Celia and Norah were smiling too as they reached him.

He had told them on the way in that if he sold the calves early enough, they could wait on and he’d take them home in the cart, but if the calves were not sold, he might stay on and they would have to make their own way home. Celia wondered why he even bothered saying that because she had never known her father come home early on a Fair Day and his delay had more to do with the pubs open all the day and old friends to chat to and gather news from than it had to do with selling the calves.

Norah knew that too, but both girls went on with the pretence. ‘Have you sold the calves, Daddy?’

Dan took a swig of Guinness from the pint glass he held before he said, ‘Might have. Man said he’d tell me this afternoon when his brother has a chance to look them over. So you must make your own way home. Tell your mother.’

‘Yes, Daddy,’ the girls chorused, though they knew their mother wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

They passed the Hireling Stall again on their way out of town and Celia saw the blond-haired man talking to Dinny Fitzgerald whose farm abutted theirs in many places. ‘Looks like Dinny’s hiring that chap,’ Norah remarked.

‘Well Daddy said he would have to hire someone after his son upped and went to America,’ Celia said and added, ‘Huh, seems all the Irish farms are emptying of young men going to that brave New World.’

‘Yes and I might want to nab one of those men for myself in due course,’ Norah said. ‘That’s why I have to practise on poor Joseph.’ And her tinkling laugh rang out at the aghast look on Celia’s face.

It was some time later when Dan Mulligan came home, very loud and good-humoured, which Peggy said was the Guinness effect. He brought all the news from the town though, including the fact that Dinny Fitzgerald had indeed taken on a new farm hand.

‘Must be no sign of his son retuning then,’ remarked Peggy. ‘America seems a terrible lure to the young people.’

‘Aye,’ Dan said. ‘But sure it’s hard for a man when he has only the one son who will inherit the farm and who has so little interest in it he is away to pastures new, and so Dinny has to have strangers in to work it with him.’

‘Maybe the lad didn’t take to the life,’ Norah said. ‘You know, maybe he doesn’t want to be a farmer.’

‘Take to the life,’ Dan said with scorn. ‘What’s whether he likes it or not got to do with anything? People can’t always do as they please and in this case there is no one else and it’s his birthright. Is he not going to come back and take it on board after Dinny’s day, let the farm fall to strangers and after it being in the family generations? Tell you, I’d find that hard to take.’

‘Well not every man has the rake of sons you have,’ Peggy said. ‘So if our Tom here didn’t want it, then Dermot might or even wee Sammy, for all he’s only seven now. Or Jim might come back from America and take it on if there was no one else. Mulligans will farm here for some time to come I think.’

Celia, listening as she washed the dishes in the scullery, knew her mother was right. She knew too most farmers wanted more than one son but the eldest inherited everything and the others had to make their own way. That’s what Jim had said when he left for America’s shores. It had been five years ago when he had decided. He had been twenty-three then, two years younger than Tom and, knowing his future was in his own hands, he had written to Aunt Maria who had sailed away to New York many years before with her new American husband and was quite a wealthy woman now, but a childless one. She had been delighted to hear from Jim, and agreed to not only sponsor him but also pay his fare and said she would do the same for all who wanted to follow their brother.

Peggy hadn’t liked to hear that bit and she watched the restless Norah growing up rather anxiously and was glad and relieved when she settled with Joseph O’Leary, but not as settled as she might be, because just a few months before she had claimed it wasn’t serious between them. There was no understanding, Norah had said and it was just as well because she wanted to follow Jim to America.

‘If you throw Joseph over you’ll get your name up, girl,’ Mammy had said at the time.

Norah had not been a bit abashed. ‘Maybe here I might,’ was her retort. ‘In America they wouldn’t care a jot I bet. According to what Jim says, it’s much freer there and you don’t have to marry a man you go for a walk with.’

Peggy’s sigh was almost imperceptible for she knew another child was going to cross the Atlantic.

Celia too wished Norah would fall madly in love with Joseph O’Leary and declare she couldn’t bear to leave him, but she had to admit that didn’t look the slightest bit likely and she knew Norah was every day more determined than ever to sail to America. She had marked her twenty-first birthday on the calendar in the room they shared with a big red circle and each day she marked another day off. Thinking about it now as she swirled the dishes in the hot water Celia felt very depressed and wondered if one by one they would all go away.

Two years before, her sister Katie had married a Donegal man but he was a wheelwright and had a house and business in Greencastle in Inishowan, a fair distance from Donegal Town, and that’s where Katie lived now. So they hadn’t visited her since the wedding, not even when she had her first child that she named Brendan.

Maggie might have stayed and married a local man for she was the prettiest of them all and had a string of admirers. Mammy would shake her head over her and said she would be called fast and loose, as she would accept gifts pressed on her by men, without any sort of understanding between them. She was in no hurry to settle down, she said, but Maggie had taken sick with TB a year after Jim had left for America. To protect everyone else she had been taken to the sanatorium in Donegal Town and died six weeks later when she was nineteen years old.

That had been a sad time for them all, Celia remembered, and for herself too because she hadn’t really had to deal with death before and certainly not the death of one so young and pretty and full of the joys of life. It seemed like the whole town had turned out for her funeral, but afterwards the family had been left alone to deal with the loss of her.

Time was the great healer, everyone said, and Celia wondered about that because for a long time there had been an agonising pang in her heart if she allowed herself to think of Maggie. She imagined it was the same for her mother for, though Peggy had never spoken about it, Celia had seen the sadness in her hazel-coloured eyes and the lines pulling down her mouth were deeper than ever and there were more grey streaks in her light-brown hair. Eventually, though, time worked its magic and they each learned to cope in their own way for life had to go on.

‘Have you not finished washing those pots yet?’ Peggy called and her words jerked Celia from her reverie and she attended to the job in hand.

Monday morning they were expecting Fitzgerald to send over his bull to service the cows, for their father had told them the night before, but as the cart rumbled across the cobbles outside the cottage door, Celia, peering through the kitchen window, was surprised to see Fitzgerald’s hireling driving the cart pulling the horse box.

‘Why should you be so surprised?’ the man replied when Celia voiced this as she stepped into the yard to meet him. ‘I have been doing farm work all my life and driving a horse and cart is just part of it.’

‘I saw you at the fair on Saturday,’ Celia said.

‘And I saw you,’ the man said with a slight nod in her direction. ‘And I was interested enough to ask someone your name so I know you to be Celia Mulligan. And mine,’ he added before Celia had recovered from her surprise, ‘is Andy McCadden and I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.’

He stuck out his hand as he said this and Celia would have felt it churlish to refuse to take it but, as their hands touched, she felt a very disturbing tingle run up her arm. It made her blush a little and, when she looked up into his face and saw his sparkling eyes were vivid blue, she found herself smiling too as she said, ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr McCadden.’

‘Oh Andy please,’ the man protested and he still held her hand. ‘And may I not call you Celia? After all, we are neighbours.’

Celia knew her father probably wouldn’t see it that way but her father was not there, so she said, ‘Yes I think that will be all right.’

There was a sudden bellow of protest from the bull and she said, ‘Now we’d better see to the bull? My father is in the top field separating the cows. I’ll show you if you get the bull out now.’

‘You’ll not be nervous?’ Andy said as he began unshackling the back that would drop down to form a ramp for the bull to walk down.

‘Not so long as you can control him,’ Celia said.

‘Oh I think so,’ Andy said. ‘Mind you,’ he said as they went out down the lane leading the bull by the ring on his nose, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t your own bull on a farm of this size.’

‘Oh we did have our own bull one time,’ Celia said. ‘It was long before I was born and my parents were not married that long and Mammy was expecting her first child. The bull pulled away from Daddy and charged at Mammy who had just stepped out into the yard. He gored her quite badly and she was taken to the hospital and there she lost the child she’d been carrying and nearly lost her own life too. Even after she recovered, the doctor thought she might be too damaged inside to carry another child. At least that has proven not to be the case, but she would never tolerate a bull around the place afterwards.’

‘Sorry about your mother and all,’ Andy said. ‘But I can’t help being pleased that you haven’t your own bull.’

‘Why on earth would that matter to you one way or the other?’ Celia asked in genuine surprise.

‘Because this way I get a chance to talk to you,’ Andy declared.

Celia blushed crimson. ‘Hush,’ she cautioned.

‘What?’ Andy said. ‘We are doing no harm talking.’ And then, seeing how uncomfortable Celia was, he went on, ‘Is it because I’m a hireling boy and you a farmer’s daughter?’

Celia’s silence gave Andy his answer and he said, ‘That’s hardly fair. My elder brother Christie will inherit our farm and after my father paid out for my two sisters’ weddings last year he said I had to make my own way in the world. He has a point because I am twenty-one now and there are two young ones at home for them to provide for and I would have to leave the farm eventually anyway.’

‘I know,’ Celia said. ‘That’s how it is for many. Tom will have the farm after Daddy’s day.’

‘Have you other brothers?’

‘The next eldest to him went to America where we have an aunt living.’

‘It’s handy to have a relative in America.’

‘It is if you want to go there, I suppose,’ Celia said.

‘You haven’t any hankering to follow him then?’

Celia shook her head vehemently. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘My sister Norah is breaking her neck to go, but Mammy is making her wait until she’s twenty-one.’

‘And is that far away?’

Celia sighed. ‘Not far enough,’ she said. ‘It’s just a few months and I will so miss her when she’s gone.’

‘Have you no more brothers and sisters?’

‘Yes,’ Celia said. ‘Dermot is over three years younger than me, so he is nearly fifteen and left school now and then there is Ellie who is nine and Sammy who is the youngest at seven.’

‘Not much company for you then?’

Celia shook her head. ‘I’d say not,’ and then she added wryly, ‘Mind you, I might be too busy to get lonely for I will have to do Norah’s jobs as well as my own.’

‘You can’t work all the time,’ Andy said. ‘Do you never go to the dances and socials in the town?’

Celia shook her head.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I don’t know why not,’ Celia admitted. ‘It’s just never come up, that’s all.’

‘Well maybe you should ask about it?’ Andy said. ‘No wonder your sister can’t wait to go to America if she is on the farm all the days of her life. There’s a dance this Saturday evening.’

‘And are you going to it?’

‘I am surely,’ Andy said. ‘Mr Fitzgerald told me about it himself. He advised me to go and meet some of the townsfolk and it couldn’t be more respectable, for its run by the church and I’m sure the priest will be in attendance.’

Celia knew Father Casey would have a hand in anything the Catholic Church was involved in – particularly if it was something to do with young people, who he seemed to think were true limbs of Satan, judging by his sermons. And yet, despite the priest’s presence there, she had a sudden yen to go, for at nearly eighteen she was well old enough and she wondered why Norah had said nothing about it. Tom attended the dances but she never went out in the evening and neither did Norah, not even to a neighbour’s house for a rambling night, which was often an impromptu meeting, spread by word of mouth. There would be a lot of singing or the men would catch hold of the instruments they had brought and play the lilting music they had all grown up with and the women would roll up the rag rugs and step dance on the stone-flagged floor. She had never been to one, but before Maggie died the Mulligans had had rambling nights of their own and she remembered going to sleep with the tantalising music running round in her head. She didn’t say any of this to Andy for she had spied her father making his way towards them across the field and saw him quicken his pace when he saw his daughter in such earnest conversation with the hireling boy.

So Dan gave Andy a curt nod of the head as a greeting and said, ‘Bring him through into the field.’ And as Andy led the bull through the gate Dan said to Celia, ‘You go straight back to the house. This is no place for you anyway.’ And Celia turned and without even looking at Andy she returned to the farmhouse, deep in thought.