A Sister's Promise (3 page)

He castigated himself soundly. Here he was making judgements on this poor woman he had never met, who had travelled over land and sea to see her daughter finally laid to rest. What did he expect, that she would leap from the train with a whoop of joy?

He approached Biddy with his arm outstretched and a smile of welcome on his face. Biddy watched his approach with a cynical smile that twisted her lips into a grimace, but Stan didn’t see that, though he did note that the woman was very tall and very skinny. Everything about her was thin, so that her sallow cheeks, either side of her long, narrow nose, were sunken in. But it was her eyes that shook him, for they were as cold as ice. He plainly saw the malicious intent there and his heart sank. He doubted there would be any help forthcoming from this quarter.

She ignored Stan’s hand and instead, in the sharp, shrill voice that Stan fully expected her to have, snapped out, ‘Are you Stanley Maguire?’

‘I am,’ Stan said, extending his hand to her again. ‘And I am very pleased to meet you at last, though I would have preferred it to have been on a more pleasant occasion.’

Biddy looked at Stan’s hand as if it might be a snake that
would leap up and bite her, and Stan let it fall to his side as she said, ‘I have no pleasure in meeting you, Mr Maguire. Indirectly, you were the cause of all this. If you had exercised full control of your son, you would not have let him marry my daughter.’

Stan was irritated and annoyed by Biddy’s inference, but still he excused the woman and bit back the sharp retort that had been on his lips. She was likely tired, he told himself, and suffering still from grief. Certainly the lines running either side of her nose and pulling her mouth down in a sag of disapproval spoke of strain of one kind or another. And, he told himself, when a death occurs of a loved one, especially a death so tragic and unexpected, it is surely natural to want to blame someone. Anyway, it would hardly help things to have a slanging match with Nuala’s mother only minutes after her arrival.

And so instead of the counterattack Biddy might have expected, Stan said gently ‘Come now, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss such matters. Let us get you home, and rested and a cup of tea and a meal inside you, and then I will answer any question you wish to ask.’

Stan’s reply took the wind out of Biddy’s sails a little bit, for she had braced herself for an argument. She had no option but to follow Stan, because he had picked up her case and begun walking away with it. In actual fact, though she never would have admitted it, she was glad that someone had come to meet her. She had never gone further than her home town before and she’d been flustered by the throngs of noisy fellow travellers, strangers all to her, and the boat with its throbbing engines and hooters blasting out black smoke into the air, tossing about in the turbulent water until she had been dreadfully sick. And there were also the panting trains, with their screeching whistles and the noise of the wheels clattering along the rails and now she was glad to alight from the train and just as anxious to leave the noisy smelly platform.

However, once outside the station, Biddy was totally unnerved by the volume of traffic, the like of which she had never seen before, especially the clanking, swaying trams, careering up and down the road alongside the buses and lorries, vans and cars. And there was a smell – dusty, acrid, full of smoke and very unpleasant – that seemed to have lodged at the back of her throat.

The pavements too were filled with hurrying, scurrying people. She had told her son that she would ask for directions, but she knew she couldn’t have easily asked directions of these serious-faced people, who all looked as if they were in a rush to be some place.

No one took the slightest notice of her and Stanley Maguire either, but then this was a city, Biddy told herself, and strangers were not a novelty, not like back home where every strange face was noted and the person interrogated gently until the townsfolk had ascertained what he or she was doing there.

She was glad to get out of the mayhem and into the relative quiet of the taxi Stan had hailed, though she commented sourly as she climbed into it, ‘A taxi. Huh, you must be made of money.’

Stan said nothing for he wouldn’t be drawn into a sparring match. Hoping to engender some sympathy for the grieving children at least, he told Biddy all about Molly and wee Kevin, and how upset they had been; how they were looking forward to meeting her. But she made no response of any sort. By the time they reached their journey’s end, Stan was exhausted and filled with trepidation and knew he would feel happier when Biddy was making the return trip.

‘Now,’ Biddy said to Stan that night with the meal over, Kevin in bed and Molly left drying the dishes in the kitchen, ‘you’re telling me that this house is not yours at all?’

‘No,’ Stan said. ‘This was Ted and Nuala’s place. I moved
in to help Ted care for the children when Nuala went into the hospital. After the funeral, I am going to look into the legal position of keeping this on, transferring the tenancy while the children are dependant. I think it would be the best thing because my house has only two bedrooms, you see, and this has three. Apart from that, all the children’s friends are around the doors, and the neighbours have been kindness itself.’

‘You don’t need to trouble yourself with any of that,’ Biddy snapped. ‘And you definitely don’t need any more room, because I am taking both children back to Ireland with me.’

Stan felt as if the breath had suddenly left his body and he slumped back in the chair. It was the very last thing that he had expected and the very last thing he wanted. The woman didn’t seem even to like children and had reduced Kevin to tears more then once since they had met, because of both her sharp tongue and her total lack of understanding of what the child was still going through.

‘You can’t do this,’ Stan said. ‘I am their grandfather and have as many rights as you – more in fact, because I know the children, whereas they are strangers to you and that was through your own choice.’

‘That is neither here nor there,’ Biddy said. ‘The children had a Catholic mother and therefore they need a Catholic upbringing.’

Stan felt his heart plummet because he knew the power of the Catholic Church. Ted had refused to turn before marrying Nuala, and Stan had been proud of him for not bowing to the quite considerable pressure from the priests, but Ted had had to agree to marry in Nuala’s church and to bring any children up as Catholics. He had no bother with this, and supported Nuala in her faith, though he had very seldom darkened the door of the place himself.

‘They have had a Catholic upbringing,’ Stan protested desperately. ‘They have never missed Mass on Sundays or
the Holy Days, and they have been baptised into the Church and attend Catholic schools. Last year Molly was confirmed, and has made her First Communion. What more do you want?’

‘She did that because Nuala was alive and Catholicism was drummed into my daughter from the day she was born,’ Biddy said icily. ‘What chance have they got to continue that, living here with you, a Protestant?’

‘I’m not a Protestant,’ Stan said. ‘Religion makes no odds to me. I went to Sunday school until I began work and then never went to church again until I married Phoebe, and we brought Ted up the same way.’

Stan was unaware that he had made things worse for himself, cooked his own goose, as it were.

An outraged Biddy spat, ‘It just gets worse and worse. You, Mr Maguire, are a heathen and I will not have my grandchildren growing up with a heathen. Whether you allow them to practise their religion or not isn’t the issue. It is a matter of example. Why should they go to church when you do not? No, I’m sorry, I would be failing in my Catholic duty if I left the children with you. I will have a word with the priest after the funeral and see what he says about it.’

Stan felt the blood in his veins turn to ice. He knew he could indeed lose the children if the priest backed Biddy. And why wouldn’t he? In his experience, Catholics stuck together over religious issues and the Church’s power was immense.

Molly, drying dishes in the kitchen, had no idea of the turn the conversation was taking in the living room, but she was disappointed enough anyway. She had had such high hopes of her maternal grandmother and hoped she would help her cope without the love and support of her parents. However, when Molly first saw her grandmother come in with her granddad, she thought that Biddy looked grim rather than sad.

But, she remembered her mother saying she shouldn’t judge people by the way they looked. She had also said that although her parents had been cross with her for marrying her father, before that they had loved her very much, too much perhaps. And so, when Molly met her grandmother, she told her quite truthfully that she was pleased to meet her at last.

Biddy just gave a grunt, which was hardly encouraging but Molly was sure she would feel better with food inside her and she was proud of the casserole dish she had produced with the help of Hilda. But Biddy seemed not to like it at all. She said the meat was tough and the vegetables stringy, the potatoes should have been on longer and the gravy was tasteless.

This was the tone of the conversation around the table, broken only by the way she was continually finding fault with Kevin. She ordered him to sit up straight, use his knife and fork properly, to eat his dinner, not just move it around his plate, wipe his mouth and definitely not to talk with his mouth full. Really, Kevin couldn’t seem to do right for doing wrong and it wasn’t just what her grandmother said, but the snappy way she said it. Molly wasn’t surprised to see her little brother’s eyes brimming with tears more than once and he had seemed quite relieved to be going to bed.

Molly too was relieved to be away from the woman for a while and had readily offered to wash and dry the dishes. But once in the kitchen, she tried to excuse her grandmother: she was likely tired because she had had a long journey. Molly finished drying the dishes and put the things away, made a pot of tea for the three of them and took it out on a tray.

She didn’t notice the uncomfortable silence, nor the stricken look on her grandfather’s face, for she decided she would try harder to get to know her grandmother and concentrate on the one link they had, the one thing she would like to know about.

As she handed her a cup of tea she said, ‘Can you tell me, Grandmother, what my mother was like as a little girl?’

Biddy’s lips pursed still further and she almost spat out, ‘Aye, I’ll tell you – not that you’ll want to hear it, for your mother was a bold and disobedient girl. She showed scant regard for her parents, was only interested in pursuit of her own pleasures and even went against the teachings of the Church and married a man of another faith, or as I have found out today, a man of no faith at all.’

The words were said with such malice that Molly recoiled. It was the very last thing that she had expected the woman to say, and she suddenly knew that her grandmother wouldn’t be one bit sorry she hadn’t made it up with her daughter before she died. She somehow doubted she had ever felt sorry about anything in the whole of her life.

‘Of course,’ Biddy went on, ‘we only have ourselves to blame for the way Nuala turned out for we both spoiled her. When she wrote that letter saying that she wanted to marry a non-Catholic, Thomas John was so shocked he dropped dead of a heart attack. So that is your fine mammy for you, the sort who kills her own father.’

Tears were now pouring from Molly’s eyes and Stan put his arm around her. ‘Here, here, the child doesn’t need this sort of carry-on. Have some compassion, woman. If you spoke the truth and what Nuala wrote in the letter caused your husband to have a heart attack, then I am sorry, but you must see that it was the last thing in the world that Nuala would have wanted or expected to happen.’

‘She knew he would be upset. She wasn’t stupid.’

‘She wasn’t cruel either,’ Molly burst out. ‘She wouldn’t mean that to happen.’

‘Your opinion wasn’t asked, miss,’ Biddy snapped. ‘Nor is it welcome, and I will thank you not to speak until you are spoken to. To spare the rod is to ruin the child totally and I see that that is what has happened to both you and
that brother of yours. Well, there will be none of that with me, I’ll tell you. I will put manners on the pair of you if it’s the last thing I do.’

Molly stared at her. What influence could she have on either of them? After the funeral this horrible woman would go back to her own life on the little farm in Ireland and Molly would live with her granddad and gradually come to terms with her loss and help her little brother to cope too.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, almost challenging.

Biddy heard the tone and it annoyed her. She would soon have that temper knocked out of her, she thought. ‘I’ll tell you what I mean, my girl,’ she spat out. ‘When you come to live with me over in Ireland, you’ll find life no bed of roses.’

‘Come to live with you in Ireland?’ Molly repeated, managing to hide the shiver of distaste that ran through her. ‘I don’t know you. I’m not going to live with you. I’m staying here with Granddad and so is Kevin.’

‘No, that’s where you are wrong. You are a Catholic because of your mother, who at least started you off on the right road, and you must be reared as a Catholic.’

‘I don’t care about being a Catholic,’ Molly shouted at Biddy. ‘And there is no way I am coming to live with you,’ adding, probably unwisely, but too upset to care, ‘I don’t even like you very much.’

‘Your likes and what you want will not come into this at all,’ Biddy snapped. ‘And there is no good turning on the waterworks,’ she went on, as tears of helplessness squeezed from Molly’s eyes. ‘You will find they don’t work with me.’

Molly turned anguished eyes to her grandfather. ‘Granddad,’ she cried. ‘Say this isn’t true. We’re going to stay with you. You promised.’

Stan’s eyes slid from Molly’s to Biddy’s gloating ones and then back to Molly, and because she deserved the truth he said, ‘I may find my hands are tied in this.’

‘Oh, Granddad, no,’ Molly cried, and flung herself into Stan’s arms.