The Mersey Girls (30 page)

She would miss Rose, though, and the companionship of the tall house on the Boulevard: scatty Margaret, prim Ellen, Mr and Mrs Prettywell and their horrid little sons, she would miss them all in different ways. And there was her room, which she had lovingly furnished, and her visits to the Sullivan family, still living in Peel Square. But nannies do get time off, she remembered, just in time to stop herself starting her arguments all over again. I can visit the Boulevard, Rose and the offices on Exchange Flags, and the Sullivans in Peel Square. If Roddy and I are friends again soon I can even take my days off when his ship docks so we can go out together.

Sleep came at last with the problem, Linnet would have said, unresolved. But when she was woken by Mollie climbing into bed with her next morning her mind must have made itself up whilst she slept for the first thing she said was, ‘I’m staying here, Mollie, I
am
going to be your nanny!’

Mollie, enthroned upon her friend’s stomach, simply leaned forward until their foreheads touched and gazed at Linnet out of eyes which looked, at such close quarters, as big as ponds. ‘Buttie kiss!’ she demanded. ‘Give Mollie buttie kiss!’

‘Butterfly, silly Mollie,’ Linnet said, giggling. ‘Put your cheek near my eye, then.’

Mollie complied and gurgled with delicious amusement as Linnet slowly batted her eyelashes up and down the child’s soft cheek. ‘More!’ she said immediately Linnet stopped. ‘More butti
efly
kissings!’

‘Not now, chick. I want to catch your daddy before he. goes off to work. We won’t wait for our tea to arrive, we’ll get ourselves dressed and go down to the breakfast room at once.’

‘And that is a firm decision, Miss Murphy? You will stay with Mollie and me? I’m delighted, absolutely delighted – it is a great weight off my mind. And since you’re sure you’ll do the job, do you think it would be best to ring the agency and tell them that we no longer require Miss Alcott? She was, after all, only an insurance policy against a bad nanny or a period during which I might have had to manage without a nanny at all.’ Mr Cowan smiled at Linnet. ‘With you in charge of the nursery, Miss Murphy, I shall have no qualms,’ he finished.

Linnet had sat down opposite her employer at the breakfast table without getting her breakfast, eager to tell him that she had decided to stay before she did anything else, but now she stood up and walked over to the sideboard. She lifted the lid from one of the silver tureens and helped herself to scrambled egg, then kidneys.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll ring the agency as soon as they open, and then I’ll catch a tram into the city and do all that has to be done. What about giving in my notice at work, though?’

‘I’ll handle that,’ Mr Cowan said at once. ‘If you just write a little note I’ll see to the rest.’ He stood up as Linnet returned to the table and leaned across it, a hand outstretched. ‘Welcome to my home, Miss Murphy,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I hope you’ll be very happy in your new job and I know that Mollie and I are happy with your decision!’

Lucy was in the kitchen getting breakfast when the back door opened with caution and Caitlin came quietly into the room, her face anxious.

‘How’s Granny, Lu? I went down to the castle early, before the sun was up, but there was no sign of Finn and I just can’t think of any more ways to get in touch wi’ him. He won’t be with the tinkers, he’ll be at a farm somewhere, he could be ten miles up the road or a hundred!’

‘Oh, well, you’ve done your best, Cait, which is all anyone can do. But she’d dearly like to speak to Finn one last time and well we both know it. She’s goin’ down quite fast, now. I wish I could think of something, but haven’t I tried and tried until me brain nearly burst with it? As you say, he could be anywhere, curse the feller!’

‘I told Amy Aniseed when he came by days and days ago to put the word around for Finn,’ Caitlin said discontentedly. ‘I made sure Amy, gossip that he is, would do the trick. It makes me wonder if Finn’s further off than we think, alanna. I pray to God he’s not hurt, lyin’ in a hospital bed somewhere not knowin’ his own name.’

‘Now why on earth should you think that, you foolish girl?’ Lucy asked irritably. The fact that the same fear occurred to her nightly did not make Caitlin’s voicing of it any more acceptable. ‘Will you not go putting daft ideas into me head – I’ve worries enough without that.’

‘I know, and sorry I am that I said it,’ Caitlin murmured, not sounding particularly sorry, however. ‘But facts must be faced – is she in her right mind, still?’

Caitlin’s own grandmother had gone senile towards the end but Granny Mogg, though failing fast, was still bright as a button mentally and, in fact, was quite an awkward patient. She had been living at the farm for six months now, ever since the girls had gone down to the castle with a basket of goodies for her – very like Red Riding Hood, as Lucy had remarked – and found her collapsed at the foot of the stone stairway. She had clearly fallen but how far or how badly she was hurt they could not say. They had hurried home, fetched the farmhands and a gate to carry her on, and brought the old lady back to Ivy Farm, where she had been, at first, put in bed upstairs in the best spare bedroom.

But it had been terribly hard work traipsing up all those stairs whenever Granny shouted – which was often – and besides, once she came to herself she announced that she’d acted like an owl and roosted in an old tower for years, but that she was a tinker and tinkers preferred to die at ground level.

‘You aren’t goin’ to die, Granny Mogg,’ Lucy had said comfortingly. ‘The doctor says it’s just a little concussion, so he does, with a poor old busted leg thrown in for good measure. You’ll be right as rain when the bone mends.’

‘No I shan’t,’ Granny Mogg said obstinately. ‘I’m a tinker, amn’t I? I telled fortunes round the fairs and the ceilidhs for years, d’you not t’ink I know me own fate? Anyhow, man born of woman is bound to die, same’s pigs an’ sheep an’ all other earthly critturs. What makes you t’ink I’s any different?’

Put like that it was a hard argument to beat so Lucy and her grandfather made up a bed in the small parlour and they carried Granny Mogg down and laid her tenderly between the sheets. And there, for six months, she had remained, frequently grumbling, occasionally escaping, to be found wandering the meadows with the enormous white nightgown they had found for her hiked up indecently high and someone else’s gumboots on her skinny little legs.

She always came back willingly, however, having merely wanted, she said, to ‘breathe real air an’ feel the touch o’ rain an’ smell the sweetness o’ the ’edgerows’. Lucy never pointed out that the window in the small parlour was open all day if the weather was clement enough and that she picked any wild flower she could find for the little green glass vase on Granny’s bed-table. She knew that Granny, who had never lived under a roof until Finn ensconced her in the ruined castle, found having four stout walls around her irksome and secretly sympathised with her desire to simply escape from it all for a while.

Because a couple of years ago Maeve had finally come home with her friend Mr Caleb Zowkoughski, only to announce that she and Caleb were now man and wife. Lucy, cheated of a wedding, had probably looked sour, but Maeve had explained that she was not getting any younger, that she and Caleb were very much in love, and that they wanted a family.

‘We felt we’d waited long enough,’ Maeve had told her father and niece, sitting in the kitchen mending linen, for Lucy had saved her a pile of worn sheets and torn shirts. ‘We knew we loved each other so we married. And as you know Caleb is an attorney and a very successful one, bless him, so when our little holiday here is over we’re goin’ to return to New York because that’s where Caleb’s business is.’ She had looked lovingly at Lucy. ‘My dear girl, in a year or two you’ll be after meetin’ a young man, after fallin’ in love, after leavin’ home. So I don’t feel I’m lettin’ you down, d’you see? You’d go from me soon anyway. But if you’d like to come home with us, to New York, and meet some young men . . .’

Home! She had used the word without a second thought and Lucy knew, then, that Maeve was lost to them. And as for leaving Ireland to go chasing across the Atlantic looking for romance, wasn’t that just the sort of silly thing her mammy had done, and wasn’t her main aim in life to prove that she was not at all like little Evie? Even her fleeting urge to be an actress had died a natural death now that she had to run Ivy Farm. So she kissed Maeve and shook Caleb’s hand and wished them well, but refused to go back to the States with them.

‘Sure an’ aren’t I just as happy as a bird here, in me own place?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve me friends, me work here on the farm, everything I could want. And I’ve mebbe met the man I’ll wed one day already, so no point in searching further, Maeve. But I hope you’ll come back and dance at me wedding and wish me well.’

Maeve hugged her and said she’d miss her, promised to come back for the wedding, hugged her father, hugged Caitlin, wept bitter tears . . . but went, left them to get on with it. Her letters came regularly, but it seemed to Lucy as though they said less and less. She had borne a son, they called him Padraig after her father, she hoped for a girl next so she could name the child Lucy, after her dearest. She had a nice house, she called it a ‘brownstone’, which seemed a strange thing to call a house, and a big yard, which apparently meant back garden. She held coffee mornings – Lucy and her grandfather exchanged puzzled glances – in aid of various charities and went to sewing bees and fourth-of-July parties. She lived, in short, a life which was so foreign to the Murphys that they simply stopped reading the letters properly and were just glad that their Maeve was so obviously, patently, happy.

Lucy wrote letters back, of course, but because she suspected that her news was not important to the new Maeve, they were always a little stilted, a little artificial.

But right now, Caitlin had asked a question and Lucy, after a moment’s thought, answered it. ‘Granny Mogg’s completely, totally, sane, if that’s what you’re meanin’ when you say is she in her right mind. But she’s livin’ in the past today, and she wants Finn mortal bad. If only, if
only
we knew where he was and could get a message to him!’

‘Why don’t you get her to look in her seeing bowl?’ Caitlin said suddenly. ‘If she’s in her right mind but livin’ in the past she might pick him up easier.’

Lucy would have liked to scoff, but it was the first suggestion which, she thought, really might stand a chance. Of course she didn’t believe in what Granny Mogg said she saw in the sweetie jar, but she had been right last time. Little Evie had died a violent death, Maeve had confirmed it, and though Maeve had looked and looked for Linnet, even going round to the address in Juvenal Street where her sister and the child had once lived, on her way back to Ireland, she had been unable to trace her niece.

‘They did used to live ’ere,’ the landlady had said, glowering sullenly at Maeve. ‘But they left – went off to Americky. Never heard a word from either of ’em since, nor want to. They left owin’ me money,’ she added crossly.

So Maeve had admitted defeat, and had told Lucy that although she hoped the two sisters would meet up one day, it clearly wasn’t going to be just yet. And Lucy had never mentioned that she was sure Linnet was in Liverpool and not the States because hadn’t Maeve tried Liverpool and hadn’t that sour old landlady told her the Murphys had gone to America? So she salved her conscience and put her sister right out of her mind once more.

‘Well? What d’you think, Luceen?’ Lucy broke a couple of eggs into the hissing fat and was about to answer when the back door rattled open and the men trooped in. Caitlin raised her voice. ‘If you think the seeing bowl might have a chance we could do it after breakfast.’

‘I’ll take her through some tea and bread and butter in a minute and see what she says,’ Lucy said, skilfully lading sausages, bacon, fried bread and two eggs onto a plate and handing it to her friend. ‘It’s a good idea, alanna, and it might just work. She’s a clever old gal, our Granny Mogg. Give this plateful to your da’ whilst I dish up for the rest, would you?’

And as soon as the men were sitting at the table, elbows squared, eating the food, she poured Granny Mogg a cup of tea, buttered a thinly sliced round of bread, and carried the tray through to the small parlour.

Granny Mogg was lying back against her pillows, her eyes closed. Her small, thin little face was pallid and there was an ominous shine on her brow and a blue line round her sunken lips. But she opened her eyes when she heard Lucy take the chair by the bed and gave both girls the ghost of her old, warming smile.

‘Ah, tis good to see ye both together,’ she said faintly. ‘Was ye goin’ to bring me me seein’ bowl, then?’

In the astonished silence which followed you could have heard a pin drop. Lucy broke it. ‘Yes, Gran,’ she said baldly. ‘How did you know? You couldn’t have heard us talkin’, surely?’

Granny’s shoulders moved in the slightest of shrugs so Lucy held the cup of tea to her lips and jerked her head at Caitlin.

‘Go and fetch it through,’ she whispered. ‘And try not to let me grandad see what you’re doin’. Take a sip o’ tay,’ she urged Granny Mogg in her normal voice. ‘Caitlin won’t be long, alanna, she’ll be back be the time you’ve drunk up.’

But Granny Mogg couldn’t take more than a couple of tiny bird-sips. Then her head fell sideways on the pillow. ‘Savin’ me strength for the seein’ bowl,’ she whispered. ‘Oh I does want Finn bad, alanna, I wants him wi’ such a gnawin’ hunger!’

‘If you can tell us where he’s at you shall have him,’ Lucy promised. ‘Ah, here comes Caitlin with your – your bowl.’

Caitlin had filled the sweetie jar with water and brought it in on a tray which she placed carefully across Granny Mogg’s tiny, bony knees. ‘There y’are,’ she said bracingly. ‘Want the curtains drawed across?’

The old head shook, then the old hands reached out and cupped the sweetie jar and through the almost transparent fingers the pale September sunshine seemed, suddenly, to fill the water with a thousand reflections, a thousand tiny pictures. The room, the girls’ faces, the old woman’s burning eyes . . . and something else, another scene, another face . . .