The Mersey Girls (44 page)

‘Who’s been talking to you?’ Lucy said suspiciously. ‘You know nothing about it, not yet.’

Linnet laughed. ‘Do I not? These walls are thin as paper, dear sister, and you talked in your sleep for hours last night! I don’t want you worrying, because it isn’t worth missing a night’s sleep over. Half a farm sounds good, but it’s much more than Roddy and I need, or expect, or deserve. You were the one who nursed Grandad, you worked on the farm, you managed it all for him. You should have the farm . . . and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.’

Lucy put her arms round her sister and gave her a hug. ‘You’re kind and generous, but we won’t talk about it yet,’ she said huskily. ‘We’ll go to bed and sleep well – both of us – and let decisions wait until we get home to Cahersiveen.’

When Linnet simply assumed that they would sail from Liverpool instead of catching the train to Holyhead, Lucy was dismayed.

‘Tis a longer voyage,’ she said apprehensively. ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea at all at all.’

‘Oh, you’re a little longer on the sea, but it saves absolutely
hours
of messing about on trains and things,’ Linnet assured her. ‘I’ll book us on an early morning departure though, so we won’t arrive after dark.’

What could Lucy do but agree? The weather seemed set fair. So on their last morning she and her sister said their goodbyes and made their way to the docks.

‘It’ll be me first time on a big ship,’ Linnet said excitedly as they made their way up the gang-plank. She squeezed Lucy’s arm. ‘Oh, isn’t it thrilling? I’d be scared stiff if I was on me own, mind, but because you’re with me it’s just an adventure.’

‘Hmm,’ Lucy said doubtfully. The sea, even here in the dock, was
moving
. She did hope it did not intend to behave like that all the way from Liverpool to Ireland or Linnet might well end up wishing she was on her own!

It seemed strange to Linnet to be aboard the big Irish ferry instead of the very much smaller one which chugged several times a day across the Mersey between the Pier Head and Woodside. But that little ferry would always wear a special aura for her, because that was where she and her sister had first met. Mrs Sullivan had called them the Mersey girls – she wondered what name they would be given in Ireland.

But right now they were saying goodbye to Liverpool, watching the familiar, much loved skyline becoming smaller as they stood at the rail and waved to the tiny figure of Mrs Sullivan standing on the quayside surrounded by little Sullivans, all of them waving vigorously back.

‘Look at Freddy, jumping up and down,’ Lucy said in her ear. ‘Or is it Toddy?’

‘I don’t know, they’re too far away to say for sure,’ Linnet said. To her horror her voice sounded shaky. ‘Oh, isn’t it awful, Lucy, I think I’m going to cry! And I’m only off on a lovely sort of holiday, but I never could bear saying goodbye.’

‘Nor me,’ Lucy said. Her voice, if anything, was shakier than her sister’s. ‘And I’m saying goodbye for much longer than you are, so I am. Your friend Mrs Sullivan’s lovely so she is, and I don’t like saying goodbye to her one little bit.’

‘Let’s go below and get a drink of coffee,’ Linnet suggested. ‘It will make us feel better. How stupid we are, standing here crying, when we’re together! Come on . . . I could do with a bite, as well. They have doughnuts, I could smell ’em when we came aboard.’

‘Oh, I think I’m best on deck,’ Lucy said doubtfully. She remembered her last voyage on a ship and shuddered. ‘We’re coming out of the mouth of the Mersey now . . . here come the waves!’

‘I can’t see any,’ Linnet said, leaning over the side and gazing down at the heaving, white flecked water below them. ‘I’ve never been on a ship before, not at sea. Oh yes, that was a wave . . .’ she turned to her sister. ‘You’re a bit pale, are you sure you wouldn’t like to come below for a coffee and doughnut?’

‘I’m going to sit down and look away from the sea,’ Lucy said. She headed for a deckchair and subsided into it. ‘You go if you want, I’ll be all right up here.’

‘I’ll bring you something up,’ Linnet offered. ‘I shan’t be long.’

Lucy closed her eyes. ‘If you like,’ she said wearily. ‘Just a coffee, though, not a doughnut. I don’t think a doughnut would be a good idea at all!’

Linnet enjoyed the voyage, though she felt terribly sorry for her sister. Lucy, pale green in the face, could neither eat her doughnut nor drink her coffee, so Linnet finished both off for her. And quite soon after Linnet had drunk the two cups of coffee and eaten the two doughnuts Lucy lost her breakfast, noisily, over the side.

‘It’s odd that one of us should feel splendid and the other so dreadful,’ Linnet said at one point, holding her twin’s head as Lucy tried in vain to turn her stomach inside out, or so at least it appeared. ‘You’re being iller than you need, though, queen. If you’d only eat something . . .’

A groan answered her. Lucy waved a pallid hand in the air and then subsided onto her deckchair once more, having for the moment, at least, given up the thought of being sick again.

‘Yes, I know it sounds cruel, but if you’d just have a couple of plain biscuits or some seltzer . . .’

‘They tried that on the way over,’ Lucy quavered. ‘Oh, if only the sea wasn’t so rough! If only the weather would improve! Is it long before we dock?’

Linnet gazed out over a blue sea flecked with gentle white horses. Rough? This, rough? ‘We dock in an hour,’ she said, tactfully not mentioning the calmness of the sea or the blueness of the sky. ‘Just you lie still, queen, with your eyes closed. That way you might drop asleep and sleeping helps to pass the time.’

‘I’ll never go aboard a ship again,’ a sepulchral voice from the deckchair announced with bitterness. ’Tis clear I bring on hurricanes just by lookin’ at a ship. If I’m spared I’ll stay at home for the rest of me life so I will. I’m a home-girl, so I am, I don’t travel well at all at all.’

Linnet made soothing noises and presently she realised that her sister had indeed fallen asleep so she sat quietly down beside her and despite her best intentions, dozed herself.

‘Isn’t it good to be on dry land? And isn’t it strange that the moment there’s firm ground beneath me feet I’m a different person?’ Lucy demanded as the two of them stepped ashore at Dun Laoghaire. ‘I’m starving hungry so I am – where’s a café?’

‘We’ve no time if we’re to catch the train,’ Linnet said doubtfully, but her sister was firm.

‘I must eat or sure and I’ll die,’ she said simply. ‘It’s as empty as a drum I am and if I’m not fed I’ll keel over. Come on!’

They found a down-at-heel little eating place where the food was cheap; they had floury potatoes boiled in their jackets and some sort of fish. They drank tea with it, and afterwards ate brack, which looked and tasted similar, Linnet thought, to what the Welsh call
bara brith
. Linnet, who had enjoyed the doughnuts on the ship, ate sparingly but the empty and drumlike Lucy squared her elbows and ate like – like a starving navvy, Linnet thought She also drank huge quantities of tea . . . and then, of course, when they should have been catching the next train, having missed the one they should have caught, they needed to find a ladies’ lavatory, so they missed the following train, too.

‘It’ll be midnight and gone before we catch a train at this rate,’ Lucy moaned as they tumbled out of the lavatory and raced for the station. ‘But at least no one’s meeting us.’

‘Then shall we get a bed for the night in Dublin and get a train in the morning?’ Linnet said hopefully. She was worn out and wanted nothing more than to sleep. ‘Come on, it won’t cost the earth, and I’ve got some spare money.’

Mr Cowan’s cheque, which was made out for a much larger sum of money than he had owed her, even for a month, had startled and amused Linnet. But she had cashed it quite merrily.

‘He’s paying me off, the old terror,’ she said cheerfully, showing the cheque to Lucy. ‘Just because he doesn’t want to marry me any more! Well, since I was about to turn down his proposal he might just as well have saved his money, but he won’t miss it and it’ll come in handy for us.’

And now it really was coming in handy, for Lucy’s money had run out. ‘I feel awful mean, letting you pay,’ she said now, following her sister across to the nearest bus stop. ‘But it’s worn out I am as well as penniless. We’ll settle up when we’re back in Caher, I promise you.’

They found a lodging house in Dominic Street and got themselves a bed for the night. It was a double bed in a tiny room, and they both fell into it in their underwear, having failed to find a lock on the rickety door.

‘If anyone comes we’ll crack him over the skull with our boot-heels and scream blue bloody murder,’ Linnet said, shoving a chair up against the door and wedging the back of it under the handle. But Lucy was not impressed.

‘This is Ireland, not Liverpool,’ she mumbled, climbing into bed and heaving the covers up round her shoulders. ‘Sure I am no one will come in here this night.’

‘Ireland’s not heaven; there are good and bad everywhere,’ Linnet said rather reproachfully. ‘We’d be safe enough in Liverpool from Liverpool fellers, I daresay, but there’s all sorts roaming the docks.’

Both girls were proved right in a way since someone did try their door in the early hours; but what with the wedged chair and Linnet repeating some of the nastier threats she had heard Roddy using on his brothers, the door rattler decided to move on and troubled them no more that night.

The girls arrived back at Ivy Farm just as Caitlin was setting down the tea baskets on the verge of the hayfield. The men were carting hay today from the long, sloping meadows which led to the lough and Lucy stopped by the gate and set her suitcase down.

‘They’re our workers, and some neighbours who are helping with the haymaking,’ she told her sister. ‘And that’s Caitlin, the girl putting the baskets down in the shade. Haven’t they a grand day for it? And we’ve arrived at the right moment – just in time to share their meal.’

The scene before them was enough to impress anyone, Lucy thought, with the sun beating down on the workers’ heads, and everyone flushed from the heat and sweating from their toil, and the enamel buckets of tea and the loaves of buttered bread, the slices of fruit cake, the cold apple pie, spread out on the cloth in the shade of a great oak looking so appetising that she quite envied the hay-makers.

The two girls leaned over the mossy five-barred gate.

‘It’s grand to be home so it is,’ Lucy said quietly. ‘It’s your home too, Linnet. Do you like what you see?’

It was a fair scene indeed. The hayfield, pale gold beneath the sun, the workers sun-tanned and smiling, the trees in their summer finery casting a shade and the lough blue as the sky above and calm enough to reflect the towering hills and the little town nestling at their feet

‘I think it’s beautiful,’ Linnet said, her voice small and awed. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful country, Lucy! I can’t imagine why our mammy left, can you?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘Fame and fortune, I suppose. Ah, Caitlin’s turned . . . she’s coming up to meet you, the word will soon go around that we’re home!’

Caitlin arrived at the gate at a run. She beamed at both girls and hugged Lucy over the top of the gate. Then she stood back and held out a hand, her face wreathed in smiles. ‘Welcome,’ she said warmly, shaking Linnet’s hand. ‘You’ll be Linnet – I’m glad to meet you at last. Welcome home to the both of you!’ She turned to Lucy. ‘Are you comin’ in for a bite here, Luceen, or will you go back to the farm first? There’s the kettle singin’ on the hob in the kitchen and a fine cake waitin’ for the first cut.’

‘I think we’ll go back to the farm, alanna,’ Lucy said. ‘Me sister’s not seen it yet and we’re hot and weary. But we’ll come down to the meadow when we’ve rested up a bit.’

‘Never worry,’ Caitlin said. ‘We’ll be done here in good time, the men have worked like slaves to get the hay in before the weather breaks and we’ve only one more meadow to clear. Get off wit’ you now then, and I’ll start the tea.’ She turned back to the meadow. ‘Tea!’ she hollered. ‘Come an’ dig in, fellers!’

They walked up the little, narrow lane, their feet scuffing tiredly in the white dust. Wild roses and honeysuckle sent their perfume into the warm air and birds sang and rustled in the hedgerows.

They rounded a bend in the lane and they were on the home straight, Linnet knew it without Lucy having to say a word. Here the lane wound between tall banks, mossy and cool, the trees arching over their heads to mingle branches, plunging the walkers into a sweet, dappled shade. They walked on, Linnet staring about her with wondering eyes. This was the lane down which her mammy had carried her years ago – she was about to set eyes on Ivy Farm for the first time . . . no, not the first time, for the baby she had once been must have known it.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Lucy turned right, between two huge, mossy stone pillars, then stopped short. She turned to her sister, her face bright with excitement. ‘Well? What d’you think of it?’

The house, the farmyard, the outbuildings, lay before them. Ivy Farm was built of grey stone and ivy massed along its walls, reached out curly tendrils as far as the slates of the roof. There were two doors, one with a porch, around which the ivy had been cleared to allow another creeper to take a hold, a creeper which was covered in pale purple blooms which hung like bunches of grapes amidst the light green, ferny foliage. The second door was ajar and within, Linnet glimpsed a wide room, the floor paved, the paving gilded with great slabs of sunshine. Outbuildings surrounded the yard on two sides and they were built of stone, too, but their slate roofs were much older, dipping and rising like the waves of the sea and covered with cushions of moss, yellow flowers, a white, waxy plant.

‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’ Linnet gasped. How could she tell her sister how she felt, how beautiful was the scene before her? But Lucy seemed to understand for she smiled and moved forward, into the yard.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The creeper round the front door is a wistaria, I’ve always loved it, and the plants on the roofs of the buildings are house leeks and stone crop. Follow me!’

In a dream, Linnet followed, across the yard and in through the door, to a big, untidy kitchen. Lucy dumped her bag on the floor and turned to her sister.