‘You shouldn’t,’ she yelled, ‘you shouldn’t!’
‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded upset too. ‘I thought you wanted . . .’ And then, stupidly. ‘I do like you, Caroline.’
She felt sticky and uncomfortable. The giddy mood from cider and whirling about was replaced by a heavy sense of guilt and worry. A burst of clapping rang out from the barn.
‘We better go back in,’ she said in a small voice.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said gruffly. ‘I’m not that sort of girl.’ She didn’t like to think about how nice the stroking had been.
‘I know. I never meant . . .’ He stuttered to a stop. ‘Oh, God.’
She scrambled to her feet, arranging her dress, brushing bits of grass and fragments of apple bark from her hair.
She didn’t dance again and left before the end of the evening too uncomfortable with the glances from Roy, who sat with his brothers across the other side of the hall.
The cloud was clearing as she walked back, more stars were visible, silver sparkles in an indigo sky. She saw a falling star and wished, wished that it would be all right. Though she couldn’t have explained what she was so worried about, not having any notion then that what Roy had done was go all the way and that you could get caught first time.
Megan
‘I’ll bloody swing for him! I’ll knock his ruddy block off! The weaselly fucking bastard!’
‘Daddy, no!’ Megan cried.
‘Anthony,’ her mammy admonished, hating his lapse into coarse language.
‘What were you thinking of?’ He rounded on his daughter, fists balled with frustration. ‘You silly, little eejit.’
Megan gulped, tried to stop crying. ‘He wants to marry me.’
‘Oh, no,’ Anthony Driscoll announced. ‘Over my dead body.’
‘Mammy, tell him,’ Megan pleaded.
But her mammy blinked. ‘Yer awful young.’
‘You were my age when you had me.’
‘That was different,’ her daddy announced.
‘Why was it? Mammy was pregnant when she married you. I can do my sums, you know. I wasn’t born three months premature, was I?’
He lurched towards her, anger furrowing the muscles in his face, his arm swinging back.
‘Anthony!’ her mammy barked. He had never hit them, none of them. It was something he prided himself on. But this was taking him to the limit.
‘Jesus wept!’ he railed and slammed his hand on the table. ‘You’ll not marry him, I’ll not give my permission.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s a clown. He’s got no prospects, no land. Nothing.’
‘We’re not back home now,’ she retorted. ‘I’m not after a farmer. He’s apprenticed. He’ll learn a trade. He’ll be a printer. We won’t need to wait half our lives for an itty-bitty strip of boggy land that won’t grow any bloody thing.’
‘Megan!’ Mammy snapped.
‘It’s not fair!’ she yelled.
‘When you’re twenty-one you can marry who you like, but until then you live in my house and you marry who I say.’
Six years! He was touched in the head. ‘It’s your grandchild,’ she protested. ‘It’s a bastard and you don’t want it, but I do and it needn’t be like that.’
Her mammy started at the sentiment. Megan knew if it was only her there might be some chance, but her daddy was the stubbornest man in the world.
‘I want it, Daddy.’
‘Oh, now you do.’
‘And Brendan does.’
‘I have no more to say on the matter.’ He clenched his jaw shut.
‘Mammy,’ she appealed for help.
‘You’re not the first, Megan, and you won’t be the last. I tried to raise you good, teach you right from wrong. If Brendan had an ounce of respect . . . You’ve gone to the bad and it must be put right. We’ll talk to the Catholic Rescue.’
‘I don’t want to!’ Her voice was high and childlike. She began to cry again. Her mother put her hand on Megan’s head. ‘It’s the best way,’ she cajoled.
‘Please, Daddy.’
‘Enough,’ he said shortly and she watched the feeling drain from his eyes and his look turn, the bright pain replaced by a dull grey stare, dead as stones. She couldn’t win. Another day, a different moment, perhaps he’d have said yes, hesitated in his decision long enough to hear her pleas and see the sense of it. But now, once he’d said it, that was it. No matter how wrong he might be, or what harm might result, he would be unmoving. She hated him for it. She would never forgive him, she told herself, never, never, not until they put pennies on her eyes.
Joan
‘I’ve got a new job,’ Joan announced to her family during their evening meal. Her stomach rippled with tension. ‘Down in London. Frances told me about it. And I wrote to apply and they’ve offered me it.’
She held up the letter. She had typed it herself earlier that day. Betty had gone to the post office for stamps and Duncan was out seeing a customer. It was the first chance she’d had. She’d invented an address in London. She’d never been there but had heard of Shepherd's Bush. It was easy enough to come up with 16 Market Street, Shepherd’s Bush. Her fingers flew over the keys, offering herself the position of secretary. She had signed it with a flourish. Arthur Bell Esquire. She found a used envelope with an illegible postmark and inserted the letter.
‘Good grief!’ Her mother froze in the process of dishing up the treacle tart. ‘It’s all a bit sudden, isn’t it? You never said a word.’
Her younger brother Tommy gawped, her father looked stunned. ‘What’s brought all this on?’ he asked her. ‘What sort of position?’ He held his hand out for the letter.
Her mother resumed sharing out the sweet, one eye on Joan.
‘Secretarial, small firm. You know I’ve been wanting to go for ages. Frances says it’s super there. Very lively. There’s a room coming up at her lodgings, so I won’t even need to find a place.’
‘And you’re leaving Harrison’s just like that?’ He frowned at the letter.
‘Daddy, I’ll work my notice and they’ll find someone else easy enough. I don’t want to work in the same office all my life.’
‘Don’t know you’re born,’ he muttered. ‘Pass the Carnation.’
Joan handed him the jug of evaporated milk. He held the letter out to her mother.
‘It’s a bit of a shock, Joan,’ her mother managed. ‘I wish you’d said something.’
‘I was going to but it’s all happened so quickly. This job at Bell’s is vacant now and if I don’t jump at it they’ll take someone else. Manchester is so stuffy,’ she said. ‘I want to see what London's like.’
‘When’s all this going to happen?’ Her father said. ‘How long’s your notice?’
‘A week. I thought I could get the coach next Saturday.’
‘You’ll miss Grandad’s birthday,’ her mother complained.
‘Grandad won’t mind.’
There was a pause. Joan listened to the clock ticking, to her father’s huffs and puffs as he ate.
‘Your mother’s right,’ he said. ‘You could have given the family a bit more consideration, springing it on us like this.’
She sighed. ‘I want you to be pleased for me,’ Joan tried. ‘It’s so exciting.’
‘We are, Joan.’ Her mother smiled. ‘It’s just so fast. But we are. Aren’t we, Ted?’
He raised his eyebrows and nodded, making it clear that any pleasure was tempered by reservations at how Joan had behaved.
‘You’ll need something to manage on until your first wages come through,’ her mother said.
‘I’ve got a bit in my savings.’
‘You’re dipping into your savings for this?’ Her father looked disapproving. Joan felt a wave of irritation which she fought to hide. The last thing she wanted was to lose her temper now. ‘It’s a week in hand,’ she lied. ‘I won’t need much.’
‘Things are dearer in London,’ her mother put in.
‘Frances will help me out, too. It’ll be fine.’ Joan wiped the sweat from her palms on her slacks and resumed eating. Lies all told. Relief lapping at the edges of her skull. Better than the truth. Why hurt them? They’d be disgusted, ashamed of her. They’d demand to know who the father was. There'd be scene after scene. She couldn’t do that. The tart was sweet and cloying in her mouth, the Carnation milk silky. She was ravenous and nauseous all at once. She wanted more. She’d go for chips later.
‘I’ll see the Tower of London,’ she said to Tommy, feeling a little giddy now it was done, ‘and Buckingham Palace.’
‘They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace,’ he sang, his eyes dancing, ‘Christopher Robin went down with Alice . . . Can I come and see it, too?’
‘One day,’ she told him, ‘when you’re bigger. London’s a long way away, hundreds of miles.’
Not a place any of them would visit on spec. No chance of them ever finding out that she wasn’t there.
Megan
The place gave her the heebie-jeebies. It looked like some old house out of a Dracula film with turrets at the corners and ivy all over it. Jesus, there were even gargoyles on the corners of the roof. She half expected Christopher Lee to answer the door, or Peter Cushing.
She’d seen it at its worst when they’d arrived, her mammy clutching her elbow and Megan holding a small, brown, boxy suitcase that had been a wedding gift to her parents. It had her Daddy’s initials on, A.C.D. – Anthony Christopher Driscoll. If everyone had their own, hers would have read M.A.D. – MAD. Megan Agnes Driscoll. Great, that. Hadn’t they thought of that when they picked the names? The kids had ribbed her endlessly at school, ‘Megan’s mad, just like her Dad.’ Could have been worse. Think of being P.I.G. or S.O.W. Whatever she called the baby, she would be very careful about the initials. Brendan’s were B.J.C. – Brendan Joseph Conroy. So her married name would be Megan Agnes Conroy. She wouldn’t be MAD then. One fella in Brendan’s school, the school in Donegal he was at before they came over, he was Terence Gough – T.G. – which everyone used as shorthand for Thank God. Thank God for Terence Gough. Excepting Brendan said he was a poor wee runt of a boy, cack-handed, and he stank, and no one would want to thank anybody for him.
Mammy rang the bell. There was a thick fog that afternoon. It was only four o’clock and already it was pitch black. Megan could taste the soot in the air, the flavour of bad eggs and the feel of chalk on her tongue. There were tall trees round the house, bare most of them in late February. She tried to imagine it in spring with sunshine, in May when the baby would come. And failed. The place seemed built for winter.
The nun who answered the door bore no resemblance to Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee and she was quite cheerful in spite of her surroundings.
‘Come in, come in,’ she chirruped when Mammy said their names. ‘I’m Sister Giuseppe. Matron’s expecting you.’
Megan wondered what on earth possessed her to take Giuseppe for her name? Sounded like the old woodcarver in Pinochio, though his was a bit different, Giuppetty, was it? And she'd a thought that one of the uncles at Granelli’s ice-cream parlour was a Giuseppe. But when you could be a Lucia or a Carmel or something pretty why go for a whiskery old man’s name? Maybe you couldn’t choose for yourself?
Sister Giuseppe showed them where to sit. There were three wooden chairs along the wall in the entrance hall. There was a side table beyond with a holy-water dispenser above it. Our Lady. An old-fashioned one, the paint dull on the plaster. You could get them that glowed in the dark now, crucifixes and all, made of some new plastic stuff.
Megan settled the box case on her knee. The entrance hall had a parquet wood floor with tiles all around the edge in a zigzag pattern. The walls were very plain, green below the dado and cream above. Bit like a hospital. The place was enormous. There was a staircase down the hall, like something from Gone With The Wind, splitting into two on the landing, a huge picture hung up there in a thick gilt frame, a picture of St Joan of Arc, seated on a horse, with temples and hills behind her. The place smelt of beeswax and coal. Megan wondered where all the girls were, the fallen women. She didn’t feel like a fallen woman. She felt very small and scared and she wished they could just go now. Take the box and go back home and have the baby and marry Brendan and make everything right.
‘Mrs Driscoll?’ Another nun. Older this time, with grey curls peeping from the edge of her wimple. Thick glasses and a rough, red complexion. ‘Good afternoon. I’m Matron. Sister Monica.’