The Liverpool Basque (16 page)

Vaguely puzzled, he returned to his notes.

Without Auntie Maria presiding from the sofa, the kitchen-living-room seemed empty, though his grandmother was being wonderfully comforting. He wondered if she missed Auntie Maria as he was doing; yet, she was still in the house – in the parlour – and Grandma was, he realized
with relief, still strong and well, even if she did have to feel her way round the house.

What a frightful twenty-four hours it must have been for the women concerned, mused Old Manuel, feeling very tired himself. A painful death with a subsequent laying-out with all its grief, to be followed almost immediately by a premature birth.

His grandmother must have summoned all her courage to make that evening seem cosy and normal to him; inside, she must have been storming with grief at the loss of her elder daughter. She had heard his prayers there, by the fire, ordering him to include Auntie Maria, as well as Little Maria. As if I would forget Auntie Maria, the little boy had thought indignantly, as he got up off his knees.

Because she had a chronic disease, Burial Insurance for Maria was unobtainable, so she had a pauper’s funeral. No men followed the coffin, except for Father Felipe and the undertaker and his employees. It was a sombre, black-clad procession of women, carrying small bunches of flowers, who piled into the tram that would take them to the cemetery. Only Grandma, Rosita, with Little Maria in her arms, Manuel, Francesca and Father Felipe rode in a carriage kindly provided free by Ould Biggs. It was a bitter, frosty day and all the mourners were thankful when it was over, and they could crowd into the Barinèta home for tea and cakes and a good warm.

Unlike Francesca, who had been a placid, contented baby, Little Maria filled the house with steady yelling for some months after she was born. Even a neglected Manuel was sometimes pressed into service to sit in a chair and rock her. All the women visitors, who came in to admire her, laughed knowingly and said she was colicky, whatever that was, and that she would grow out of it. Manuel wished
intensely that she would simply shut up. He would wake in the night to hear her screaming; and his mother looked daily more tired and sounded ever more irritable with young boys.

The frazzled mood of the family was lifted somewhat by an unexpected visit from Uncle Agustin. His ship had docked in Birkenhead, across the River Mersey, and he had begged shore leave to see his family, because of the loss of his father and sister.

When Manuel came home from school and found his uncle sitting at the kitchen table, he had not, at first, recognized him; Agustin had been at sea during their last visit to Bilbao, and he had not docked in Liverpool for some time before that. Then, when the thin, saturnine man had greeted him by name and grinned at him, the boy said delightedly, ‘Uncle Agustin!’ His relief at having a male relative sitting in his home was so great that he laughed aloud.

Though Agustin had not lived with his parents for years, he had felt keenly the loss of his father and his sister, and when he entered Rosita’s house, he was very downcast. His arrival caused a fresh burst of grief to well up in his mother and Rosita, which he tried hard to alleviate by delivering affectionate messages to them both, from aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, of whom Manuel had little recollection. He told them, also, that he had just married his sweetheart – very quietly because of Juan’s death. The news about Maria had reached them two days later.

He spoke in Basque, and Manuel immediately felt a close fellowship with him and with his relations in Vizcaya.

After Agustin had returned to his ship, Grandma sat wrapped in thought for some time. Manuel had heard her
beg Agustin to write to her from time to time, and he had said he would.

‘But he never will,’ Grandma said later to Rosita. ‘He never was any good at learning his letters.’ Then, perhaps feeling that she was being unfair to her eldest child, she added, ‘But your father always said he was a born seaman.’

As Agustin left the house, he dropped some silver coins into his mother’s apron pocket. It was the first money that she had received, which she felt she could call her own, since the Prudential man had brought her husband’s burial money. She knew Agustin could not spare it; but she carried it for several days, jingling it comfortably in her pocket, until Rosita suggested that she buy a new, much-needed pair of winter boots with it. After some persuasion, she did this, and Manuel remembered her smiling down at their shiny, laced-up newness.

Rosita wrote to both Leo and Pedro about Maria’s death and the premature birth of the new baby. Without much hope, she addressed Leo’s letter to Nevada, but again there was no response. Her letter to Pedro, however, did catch up with him, and some weeks later both Micaela and Rosita received kindly letters of real sympathy. He also said how he himself would miss Maria, who had, he wrote, always been so easy to talk to – and to please. He was glad the new baby had been called after her. Although Rosita had not told him how difficult the birth had been and how weak she still felt, he must have sensed something was wrong, because he inquired anxiously after her own health, which he rarely did.

By late January 1915 Little Maria’s shrieks had been reduced to occasional spasms, and her mother began to think that, after all, she would not go out of her mind for lack of sleep.

‘There’s nothin’ more exhausting than a colicky baby,’
agreed Micaela. ‘Now she’s napping a bit in the afternoon, you must rest, too.’

So Rosita retired to bed for an hour with a battered novel from the second-hand shop whenever Little Maria closed her eyes in the afternoon. As her mother said, ‘The front steps won’t hurt, if you scrub them only every other day, instead of every day.’

In the middle of a blizzard carrying heavy sleet, Pedro thankfully docked in Liverpool, to unload a cargo of raw cotton. Though they had not been attacked by German submarines, the whole crew had once again been drained by the tension of crossing the Atlantic in a slow tramp, unable to keep up with a convoy. The men were irritable and on edge, longing to get ashore as soon as they could: to get thoroughly warm in dry clothes, and eat a well-cooked meal.

Rosita met him with her usual hugs, and yet there was a restraint about her. She was not her former bubbling self.

He dropped his suitcase and kitbag in the narrow hall, and held her pallid face between his wind-chapped hands. His own weariness was forgotten. A spasm of fear hit him. In nursing Maria, had she caught the same dread disease?

She smiled weakly at him.

‘You look ill,’ he said gently. ‘Are you OK?’

She sighed, and enclosed one of his hands against her cheek. ‘I’m not sick,’ she assured him. ‘I’m tired, that’s all, what with Maria being so ill, and Little Maria screaming her head off, night and day.’

He dropped his hands from her face and put one round her waist, as they went into the back room, where Micaela had discreetly waited, sitting in her rocker, to give the young couple a chance to greet each other.

Pedro went straight to his mother-in-law, and put his arms round her as if she were his own mother. ‘I’m so sorry about Maria, Mother,’ he said. He was shaken
to see how Micaela had, in a few short months, aged so much; and he realized from the slightly fumbling way in which she sought to clasp his hand that her sight was nearly gone.

Both the women were quick enough, however, to prepare a fish meal for him, which, with the bottle of wine he had brought in his suitcase, cheered them all up considerably.

When Manuel came home from school, he was ecstatic to see his father. Pedro had Francesca on his knee, and the boy stood in front of him, grinning from ear to ear, scrubbing one boot against the back of the other. He longed to dislodge his sister but had learned from experience not to try to – if she were thwarted, she had a scream which would outdo Little Maria’s best efforts.

Pedro laughed and caught the boy in his free arm, and Rosita said suddenly, ‘You’re the spitting image of each other, except for Manuel’s dark hair.’

It was true, considered Pedro. As the boy lost his baby nose, he was acquiring a slightly flattened one with wide nostrils, exactly like his own, and the child’s face was already longer and narrower, with flatter cheekbones than most children round the neighbourhood. He
looked
Basque, and Pedro swelled with pride in him.

Once Little Maria had been persuaded to go to sleep in her cot in the corner of their bedroom, and Micaela had retired to her own room, Pedro lay naked beside his wife, and grinned wickedly at her. Her hair on the pillow was a flaming background to her pale face. The blue eyes were shadowed, however, as if she did not want to look at him. He began to caress her and tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned her face away.

‘What’s up?’ he asked surlily. She had never behaved like this before. Then, in the candlelight, he saw tears glisten on her long golden lashes. ‘Is something wrong, love?’

She opened her eyes and really looked at him. She said
hoarsely, as if forcing herself, ‘I’m scared. I don’t want another kid.’

He stared at her bewilderedly, and she hastened to say, ‘I love you. I want to make love. But I’m afraid of what happened with Little Maria happening again – and killing me. You’d never believe the pain I had.’

He stirred uncomfortably, some of the desire going out of him, with the unexpected disappointment. Then he shrugged. ‘Kids come from God,’ he said.

There was a sudden twinkle in her fine eyes, as her sense of humour began to surface. ‘They come from men, you old rogue.’

He nodded. ‘I suppose.’

She turned towards him, and her long generous curves so close to him roused him again. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her; he was her husband, wasn’t he? He wanted what was his God-given right. But she was speaking again. ‘I’m tired to death, what with being so torn with the baby, and nursing Maria – and no sleep – and Mother not able to help so much now. And then Mannie and Frannie. I couldn’t face another baby.’

He kept a hold on himself, torn between his own needs and her obvious distress. He closed his eyes, while she spoke again.

‘I want to ask you something. You know Mary Challoner – lives in Park Lane – she’s a Prottie, but she’s a decent woman for all that. She was sitting next to me the last time I took Maria to the doctor. She thought she was pregnant, she told me. Then she said, “But I’ve had a good run for my money – four years since the last one.”’

It took all his patience to make himself listen, but he did.

‘When Maria had gone into the surgery,’ Rosita continued, ‘and there was no one else in the waiting room, I
asked her what she meant – and she said her hubbie did his best to see she wasn’t left with a kid.

‘He covers his you-know-what with a rubber cover – buys ’em in London and in France, when he goes there. She says they still have a good time – but no baby.’ She propped herself up on her elbow, and added earnestly, ‘It’s not like aborting a kid – I know women who’ll do that for me – but it’s terribly dangerous – and it’s wrong.’

Her husband responded bitterly, ‘Priests think any kind of birth control is wrong. Fat lot of practice they get – they’d change their minds if they had a horde of kids – I know what you’re getting at.’

‘Couldn’t we do like Mary’s hubbie?’ Her eyes were imploring now. She badly wanted to please Pedro, to enjoy herself.

He whistled to himself, and the candle danced in the small movement of the air, as he silently considered wife versus church. What did he really believe himself, amid the welter of teachings handed down by a celibate church hierarchy? He knew he had never, until this moment, questioned their teachings. But one thing he knew from the society around him – it was deadly easy to lose a wife in childbirth. He would, he knew, sell his immortal soul rather than lose his lovely wife, if it could be avoided.

He nodded, and ran his hand down her thigh. ‘I’ll go shopping,’ he promised. ‘But not a word to anyone, remember. Promise?’

She smiled her old, seductive smile. ‘I promise,’ she said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she asked, ‘What do we do now?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, as he pulled her close. ‘I won’t go in. And I’ll try to make it good for you.’

Before he sailed again, there was a lot of earnest conversation between him and his wife and mother about giving Manuel a better education. They spoke volubly in Basque.

‘Jean Baptiste wanted his youngest to go to St Francis Xavier’s, but he had a good spell unemployed, and they couldn’t do it. Manuel could be a doctor or a solicitor, if he went on into university,’ Rosita told him.

‘University?’ Pedro looked at her incredulously. ‘A kid from Wapping Dock?’ He had had in mind keeping the child in school until he was sixteen.

‘Why not?’ demanded Rosita. ‘By the time he gets his Matric, there might be some way he could get there. Madeleine says there are a few scholarships, even now.’

Pedro was not too sure what a Matric was. While he considered this lofty ambition, he sipped his mug of tea. If you went to university, he knew you could become a doctor or a lawyer and have a good house in West Derby. It seemed like a pipe dream to him. His own father had scraped money to keep him in school until he was fourteen, and had helped him to take time out from going to sea while he studied until he had got his Master’s Certificate; and it had made a world of difference to his life.

But an economic downturn meant he could be out of work very easily – any seaman would tell you that – and, since his father-in-law’s death, Pedro had done what he could to quietly put away a little in his own private Post Office savings book, to help tide him over such bad times.

‘He could go into the Navy – that’s regular. Twenty-one years, you can do.’

‘Humph,’ responded Rosita doubtfully. ‘If ever he’s going to be an officer, he must go to grammar school, and he must learn to speak good English. Tell me, where will he learn to do that except in a better school?’

Pedro was not sure that he wanted a son who was an officer and spoke like one. Wasn’t his own English good enough?

‘We speak English,’ he said defensively. ‘And the lad was born in Liverpool – not like me – so he’s eligible to serve
in the Navy. He could work his way up a bit – they’d train him.’

She replied stubbornly, ‘He’s got to speak English – like Father Felipe talks.’

‘That bloody Spaniard?’

‘Tush!’ interjected Micaela. ‘How can you speak like that? He’s a priest!’

After the last few nights with his wife, Pedro was feeling resentful of the Church and all its works, and Father Felipe’s exquisite, carefully learned English seemed patronizing to him; even his poor attempts at Basque were annoying, as if he were trying to descend from his lofty position as a Castilian to hob-nob with nobodies. What did a priest know about real life? Pedro wondered, with all the antagonism of a Basque for a Spaniard.

Poor, overextended Father Felipe would have been sorely hurt, if he had been aware of his parishioner’s lack of esteem. He would, however, have earnestly encouraged young Manuel’s further education. He had already suggested to Micaela that the boy should be given to the Church; and Micaela knew that a child in the Church brought his family instant prestige.

Micaela now spoke up. ‘He’s the eldest boy – the only boy, up to now. We should try our best for him.’

Manuel, sitting at the table carefully boring holes in the last of his conkers, preparatory to drying them out on top of the oven, was dreaming of being able to smash Andrew Pilar’s best one, and only half took in the conversation of his elders. He assumed that if he were sent to St Francis Xavier’s, all the other children he knew, like Joey and Brian, would be going, too.