The Leaving Of Liverpool (23 page)

The doctor’s surgery had been turned into an office for Finn who’d had his own business in Duneathly as an accountant since Doric Kennedy, who’d done the job before him, had passed away. Another person who’d passed away was Nanny, dying peacefully in her sleep two years ago on All Souls’ Eve. And the Doctor himself, of course, had also gone to meet his maker, but whether it was by accident or design no one would ever know. Father Byrne had allowed him the benefit of the doubt and given him a Christian burial (suicides were forbidden to rest in consecrated soil).

Hazel cared for Thaddy and Aidan as if they were her own. ‘Five boys and possibly another on the way,’ she said to Mollie, smiling as she patted her bulging stomach. The new baby was expected in November.

Now ten, Thaddy hugged his sister as if she’d never been away. He was tall and brown-eyed, just like Mollie, a pleasant-faced boy, not exactly handsome, whereas seven-year-old Aidan was another Finn - good-looking and fine-featured, his blue eyes with a hint of mauve that reminded her of Annemarie. He was shyer than his brother, maybe because he was only two when Mollie had left and his memory of her had slowly faded.

On their first night there, Finn took Tom across the square to O’Reilly’s pub, leaving Mollie and Hazel at the kitchen table, the dishes having been washed and the tiny kitten, Bubbles, finishing the remains of the delicious lamb stew they’d had for their tea. Apart from Thaddy, who was in the dining room doing his homework, all the children were in bed. Ten-week-old Joe was due for a meal before Mollie went to bed herself.

‘Are you intending to have a fourth, Moll?’ Hazel enquired, once again patting her stomach. She lit the lamp on the dresser - Duneathly was still without electricity or gas, though telephone lines had been connected a while ago.

‘I’d quite like four children, it’s a nice, round figure,’ Mollie replied, ‘and I’d prefer a boy as a playmate for Joe, but I wouldn’t mind a bit if it were another girl.’

‘Me and Finn would like a girl, but we don’t mind if it’s another boy.’ Hazel laughed, happiness shining out of her rich brown eyes.

‘You’re lucky,’ Mollie said, ‘having Finn working on the premises. Tom’s out all hours. Sometimes he works nights and has to sleep the next day. Not that I’m complaining,’ she added hastily. ‘I knew what to expect when I married a policeman.’

‘I’m lucky all round,’ Hazel said simply. ‘You know I was brought up in an orphanage, don’t you?’ Mollie nodded and Hazel went on, ‘I was six when I first went, right after me mam married a feller who wasn’t prepared to bring up another feller’s bastard. For the first few years, I was punished every day for the fact I’d been born out of wedlock, but whenever they hit me I just laughed in their faces. Their weapon was a cane: mine was laughter. Oh, but Mollie,’ she said with a shudder, ‘I was so miserable. No one knew I cried meself to sleep night after night. After I left, I got a job in a hotel in Kildare where they worked me to death, washing and cleaning, carrying in the luggage, waiting on the tables. I laughed all the time, as if I were having a grand old time. That’s where I met your Finn. We were fighting over a suitcase that he insisted on carrying himself, him being a real gentleman, like, when it dropped on me foot. Instead of yelping and moaning about it, I laughed. By then, it had become automatic, but it made him laugh, too. He actually tried to pick up me foot and stroke it! I laughed again, but this time I meant it, possibly for the first time in me life. And that’s how it began with me and Finn. We haven’t stopped laughing since, and a day never goes by when I don’t count me blessings and realize what a lucky woman I am.’

‘I’m sure our Finn does, too,’ Mollie said gently. She gave a start when Bubbles leapt on her knee and began to wash. ‘Is it a boy or a girl cat?’ she asked.

‘A boy, else the house would soon be invaded with kittens that I couldn’t bring meself to give away.’

‘He’s pretty.’ Bubbles was a long-haired tabby, a miniature tiger of a cat. She stroked his thin, delicate back. ‘I wouldn’t mind us having a cat. The girls would love one.’

‘Bubbles has a number of brothers and sisters. You could take one back with you. Nona from the post office is desperately looking for good homes. You’d need a cardboard box for carrying after making a few holes in the top so he or she can breathe.’

‘He,’ Mollie said hastily. ‘I’d hate giving kittens away, too.’

Tom and Finn came home and, at the same time, Joe began his subdued little whimper. Hazel rushed round lighting lamps all over the place. Mollie fed the baby in the bedroom where later she and Tom would sleep, modesty preventing her from exposing her breasts in front of her brother, though Finn was so used to seeing his own babies fed he probably wouldn’t notice.

When Joe had decided he’d had enough, she took him downstairs so his father could bring up his wind, something Tom insisted on doing when he was around. Hazel had made a pot of tea and a plate of cold, lamb sandwiches.

They sat and talked until it was nearly midnight, while a deathly silence fell over the village of Duneathly, the sort that was strange to a place like Liverpool where there were always people about and traffic of some sort on the roads. A similar silence had reigned the night Mollie and Annemarie had crept across the icy square towards Finn’s cottage, never dreaming what might lie in store.

‘I like it here,’ Tom said when they got into bed. ‘I wouldn’t mind retiring to Duneathly when the time comes.’

‘Oh, Tom, that’s at least forty years off.’ She snuggled against him and he wrapped his arms around her so tightly she could hardly breathe.

‘Well, it doesn’t hurt to plan for the future,’ he whispered.

As she drifted into sleep, she could hear Finn and Hazel laughing in the bedroom next to theirs.

 

Monday was sunny, but with a slight nip in the air, as if autumn was sending a signal that it was on its way. Mollie toured the village with the children - Hazel had loaned her a pram for Joe - saying hello to old friends and meeting a few new ones. Ena Gerraghty had sold the dress shop and it now stocked more modern designs, though there was nothing in the window Mollie would have been seen dead in.

She felt as if she were mending in a hole in her life when she shook hands with Billy Adams in the butcher’s and Roddy Egan in the baker’s. Two girls she’d been to school with came rushing out of Ye Old Tea Shoppe when they saw her pass. They kissed extravagantly and exchanged their life stories within a matter of minutes. Mr O’Rourke, the solicitor, opened his window and shouted he’d come across and see her in his lunch-hour.

She’d left the village and the people in it so abruptly, not saying goodbye to a single soul and leaving loose ends all over the place, but most were now neatly tied. She had a whole week to tie the rest.

Everyone asked after Annemarie. ‘She’s in America. I don’t hear from her all that often,’ Mollie replied over and over again. It was what Hazel had told her to say, what she and Finn said to people when they were asked the same question. Hardly anyone mentioned the Doctor.

She called on Nona in the post office and asked for a kitten. The girls were thrilled to pieces and Megan wanted to take home all five. But there were only two males left and Mollie chose the one identical to Bubbles. ‘We’ll collect him on Saturday,’ she told Nona.

The other male was black and smooth, not nearly so pretty as his brother. She felt convinced she could see tears in the tiny creature’s eyes. ‘He looks so sad, he knows no one wants him,’ she murmured. She shooed the girls out of the shop before she could say she’d take them both.

Megan suggested they also call their kitten Bubbles, but Mollie said she’d sooner they thought up a name of their own. ‘What about Winnie, like in
Winnie the Pooh
?’

‘Winnie stinks,’ Megan said scathingly. ‘Anyroad, Winnie the Pooh is a
bear
.’

‘Tiddles?’

‘Tiddles stinks worse.’

‘Dandelion, Mammy,’ Brodie piped up. ‘Our kitten is like a dandelion.’

‘Dandelion is a lovely name.’ Mollie clamped her hand over Megan’s mouth before she could say how much Dandelion stank. ‘Let’s see what your dad has to say about it, shall we?’

‘Will Patrick be home when we get there?’ Megan enquired. She’d fallen head over heels in love with her cousin at first sight.

‘No, he’s at school.’

‘Next year, can I go to the same school as Patrick?’

‘No, love. It’s too far away.’

‘If I came to live with Auntie Hazel and Uncle Finn, could I go to school with Patrick then?’

‘If that’s what you want, Megan, yes.’ She felt like giving her daughter a quick blow to the head to shut her up.

After earnest consideration, Megan decided it wasn’t what she wanted after all. Perhaps she’d been taken aback that her mother appeared so willing to let her go. ‘I’d feel sad without you and Dad and Brodie - and our Joe,’ she said.

‘That’s good, love, because we’d prefer you stayed with us.’

‘And I think we should call our kitten Dandelion.’ She could be so sweet when she was in the mood.

‘That’s good, too. Clever old Brodie.’ She patted her small daughter’s head. ‘Dandelion’s perfect.’

 

Hazel set an extra place at the table when Mr O’Rourke turned up at lunch-time. They sat down to cheese and onion pie followed by fruit salad and cream. Megan, usually so picky with her food, ate every mouthful, and Brodie, who rarely opened her mouth in company, described Dandelion to her father. ‘He’s striped all over, Dad, like a jumper, and he’s got big hairs growing out of his mouth.’

‘Whiskers, luv,’ Tom said fondly. ‘They’re called whiskers.’

‘Everyone knows they’re called whiskers, Dad,’ Megan said in a haughty voice.

‘Brodie didn’t, and neither did you when you were two,’ Tom pointed out.

‘I bet I did.’

Tom didn’t answer. Sometimes, the best thing to do with Megan was ignore her.

Mollie went to the door with Mr O’Rourke when it was time for him to return to his office. ‘I’m pleased everything’s turned out well for you, Mollie,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘There were all sorts of dark rumours floating around after you and your sister left. But that husband of yours is a fine young man and I’m sure he takes good care of you.’

‘The very best, Mr O’Rourke,’ she assured him.

 

That afternoon, she took the children to the convent to show the nuns, who fussed over them in the way women did when they didn’t have children of their own, kissing them and stroking their arms, exclaiming that the girls were the prettiest they’d ever seen and Joe the bonniest baby.

Brodie, scared, hid behind her mother’s skirt, only emerging when Sister Francis produced a doll she’d knitted for the Christmas bazaar. Megan refused a doll, saying that she’d grown out of them, causing shrieks of amazed laughter and comments that she was old long before her time.

Eventually Mollie left, exhausted. Patrick was home from school when they got back to the house and Megan was struck dumb for the rest of the day, much to everyone’s relief.

Tom and Finn were getting on like a house on fire. Whatever hostility Finn had felt for his brother-in-law had gone. He merely smiled when Tom continued to boast about his triumphs in the police force.

On their third day in Duneathly, the men offered to look after the children while their mothers went to Kildare to do some shopping. Mollie made a bottle for Joe and left it in the larder, and she and Hazel caught the half past eight bus.

‘I feel desperately odd without the kids,’ she admitted to Hazel, as the little single-decker made its winding way towards Kildare.

‘Me, too. I feel as if vitally important parts of me are missing, like me arms and legs.’

‘Will we ever feel any different, I wonder?’ Mollie mused.

‘I hope so. I’d hate to feel like this when I’m eighty.’ Hazel began to laugh. ‘I expect the time will come when they’ll grow away from us and won’t need us any more, then we can do things like swim the English Channel. Some woman did a few years ago.’

‘Or get elected to Parliament.’

‘Learn to fly an aeroplane.’

‘Climb Everest. Some other woman did that.’

‘Today, let’s forget we’re mothers with hordes of small children,’ Hazel said firmly, ‘and think of no one but ourselves, after we’ve bought the kids a few sweets, that is. Me, I’m going to buy a hat, a winter one: the old one’s got moths in it.’

‘And I’ll get the wool to make myself a jumper with a Fair Isle yoke.’

It was a lovely day out. They stopped for morning tea, then stopped again for lunch: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and apple charlotte and cream for afters. Hazel insisted on paying for the meal, so Mollie bought her a pair of knitted gloves to match her new blue hat.

They caught the three o’clock bus back to Duneathly, earlier than planned, neither prepared to admit they were worried about the children - rightly, as it happened.