by Anne Bennett
Tom followed his gaze. ‘Dear, dear,’ he said, crossing to the hearth. He poked more life into the dying embers and threw some pieces of peat onto it. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea for now,’ he said, filling the kettle with some of the water in the bucket by the door, ‘and we will have some proper food when I have finished the milking. Is that all right for you?’
‘That’s fine, Tom,’ Joe said.
But his mother snapped, ‘Just tea, d’you see? No fatted calf for the likes of you, who only came home because there was no other place he could go to.’
Joe stared at his mother, then said, ‘And it is lovely to see you too, Mammy, and, as you see, I have not come alone.’
As he spoke, he crossed to the doorway where Gloria still stood with Ben, uncertain what to do, and put an arm around her. ‘This is my wife, Gloria,’ he said, and with a hand on Ben’s shoulder went on, ‘And this is our son, Ben, your grandson. Haven’t you at the very least a word of welcome for them?’
‘I have no need to give them any sort of a greeting,’ Biddy snapped, ‘because they are only here under sufferance. They are not welcome and never will be.’
Tom gave a sharp intake of breath and wondered what Joe was going to do about such an insult. However, he had no need to do anything because suddenly Gloria was furiously angry, far too angry to allow herself to be intimidated or cowed by some malicious old woman.
She burst out, ‘I think you are a very unpleasant and objectionable old woman and I wouldn’t stay under your roof another minute but for the fact that my husband, your son, needs to be here.’
Biddy was astounded at Gloria’s temerity. She had thought she would be easily handled, but Gloria hadn’t finished.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I don’t expect you and I will ever be the best of friends, and that suits me fine, but for Joe’s sake, I am prepared to put up with you. However, I will not tolerate rudeness and if you persist in being so insulting, my stay here will be very uncomfortable – and I mean for you, not me and mine.’
‘How dare you? You are under my roof.’
‘No, Mammy,’ Tom said. ‘As I said before, Joe and his family are under my roof and I am very glad to have them here. After the way you behaved and spoke, I think Gloria was justified in every word she said.’
Then seeing that his mother was for once in her life speechless, he continued, ‘Now the kettle is boiling, I will make tea for us all before I go to milk the cows.’
‘Can I help you, Uncle Tom?’ Ben asked.
‘Aren’t you tired out with all the travelling?’ Tom asked.
‘Yeah, I am,’ Ben admitted, ‘but it’s a sort of fed up, fidgety kind of tired. I shan’t mind helping with the milking one bit. I am not too tired for that, honest.’
‘All right then,’ Tom said. ‘I shall be glad of the help, and we will be off to collect up the cows as soon as we have finished our tea.’
THIRTEEN
Gloria found life on the farm just as dreary as she had anticipated. What she hadn’t bargained for was coping with such an embittered woman as Biddy Sullivan. However, she was a feisty young woman who had been to hell and back since the day her father had shot himself. She had coped with things that would have felled a lesser woman, and certainly one that had come from such a privileged background, so she was more than able to deal with a woman filled up with malice, resentment and spite.
She didn’t enjoy confrontation, though, but despite this, she stood against Biddy from the first, though she thought the old woman might have an apoplectic fit the day Gloria refused to churn for butter. She said the effort was not worth the amount of butter produced, and they could buy butter in Buncrana every week, like many people did.
Biddy ranted and raved, and Gloria watched her dispassionately, wondering if she were seriously deranged. She had certainly never met anyone quite so nasty, and she found living with her hard going. Not that she ever let her see that, knowing instinctively that that wasn’t the way to deal with such a person.
She found the only thing that worked when Biddy got in one of her rages was to stop what she was doing and say calmly, ‘I see you are not behaving well at the moment.
I will come back when you are in a better frame of mind,’ and then just walk away.
That was the last thing that Biddy wanted. She wanted to bully and browbeat Gloria, and it enraged her that she seemed unable to do that. Joe wasn’t the same man either. If she started a tantrum with him he would just look at her in a pitying way and say, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mammy, if you could only hear yourself. This is no rational way to go on at all. Now if you are prepared to talk to me, then I will listen.’
Their reaction totally took the wind out of her sails and she wasn’t sure how to handle it. Tom would marvel that Joe and Gloria could control his mother’s excessive behaviour so easily.
Gloria knew though it wasn’t so easy for Ben to cope with such an irascible and scary woman, and one day not long after they had arrived, she said, ‘Ben, does your grandmother bother you much?’
Ben shrugged. ‘I keep out of her way. Anyway, she can’t help it, Daddy said, because she’s mad. Least,’ he added more honestly, ‘he said that her mind didn’t work the same way as other people’s, that she was unbalanced. I mean that’s as good as mad, isn’t it?’
It was, and Gloria herself thought Biddy was mentally unstable. It just wasn’t normal to go on the way she did.
‘She doesn’t like me, anyway,’ Ben went on. ‘Dad said I’m not to worry about that because she doesn’t like a lot of people, but I wasn’t worried anyway.’
Just a few days after this, Ben had proof of how much his grandmother disliked him. His father was resting, his mother had gone to Buncrana, and he was helping his uncle in the fields. Returning to the cottage for a drink of water he dashed through the door, tripped on the mat and, in putting out his hand to save himself, knocked a dish from the table.
Ben gave a gasp of terrified shock as he gazed at the bits of broken crockery on the floor.
‘You stupid boy!’ Biddy cried. She crossed the room in seconds and gave him such a clout on the side of his head he nearly lost his balance.
Ben’s hand flew to his ear, ‘I’m s-s-sorry,’ he stuttered, scared rigid by the look in Biddy’s black and baleful eyes.
She seemed not to hear him, as she knocked his hand away, grabbed him by the ear, still sore from the original thump, and dragged him across the room.
His yelp of fear changed to cries of alarm as Biddy suddenly sat down, pulling Ben with her and in seconds she had him across her knee, pulled down his trousers and was paddling his bottom with the sole of her shoe.
Ben’s incensed bellows brought his father from the bedroom and his uncle from the fields. When Joe reached the doorway and saw his mother laying into his son, a malevolent smile playing about her mouth as if she was enjoying it, for a split second he really wanted to kill her. He ran across the room and plucked Ben from his mother’s arms, pulling up his trousers as he did so. Biddy had seldom seen Joe in such a towering rage. He was so angry that for a moment he couldn’t speak, and then he ground out, ‘All right, you old harridan, what was that all about?’
‘Don’t you call me—’
‘Tell me why you were knocking seven bells out of my son or I will shake it out of you,’ Joe demanded.
Biddy took one look at his enraged face and said flatly, ‘He deliberately broke a dish.’
Joe shook his head. ‘I know my son a sight better than you do and I don’t think that he would do that.’
‘He did, I tell you, and it was one that I was particularly fond of.’
‘Ben, Joe said, ‘did you deliberately break one of your grandmother’s dishes?’
Ben shook his head, and through the tears said brokenly, ‘N-no, Dad. It … it was an accident.’
‘I thought as much,’ Joe said. ‘And did you apologise?’
Ben was crying so hard he couldn’t speak, but he nodded vigorously.
Tom recounted all this to Gloria when he spotted her at the head of the lane.
‘And where are Joe and Ben now?’ Gloria asked.
‘Joe took the lad for a walk,’ Tom said. ‘He said it was to keep him out of Mammy’s way till you came home.’ He gave a rueful grin. ‘I also think he needed to put some distance between himself and Mammy for a wee while.’
‘Neither of us has ever struck Ben,’ Gloria said. ‘There had never been any occasion to.’
‘I have never been one to advocate beating children anyway,’ Tom said. ‘I had too much of it when I was growing up, and Joe the same. In fact I broke the cane Mammy used on us in two halves and threw it on the fire when she used it on Molly.’
‘Wasn’t she thirteen when she first came here? A bit old for that form of chastisement I would have thought.’
‘Of course she was,’ Tom said. ‘She had her one hell of a life here, though I did what I could, and eventually she learned to stick up to Mammy herself.’
‘I am sure that she soon became friends with you, though,’ Gloria said. ‘Look how Ben loves you. He used to trail after you from dawn till dusk, and I have you to thank for the way he settled so well and happily into his life here.’
‘I enjoy his company,’ Tom said. ‘So what I do with Ben is a pleasure not a hardship, and there is no need to thank me. In fact, he is a fine boy altogether. I envy Joe two things and that is a wife and child.’
‘Why did you never marry, Tom?’ Gloria said. ‘You have so much to give, and you would have made a wonderful husband and father.’
‘You have met my mother and can still ask that question?’
‘Your mother!’ Gloria exclaimed. ‘You mean you didn’t marry because your mother wouldn’t have approved?’
‘Not totally, no,’ Tom said, and then added with a note of relief in his voice, ‘Here’s Joe and Ben coming along the road. I’m sure they will want to talk to you, and I’d best get on with the hay.’
Gloria watched him go, wondering what the other reason was that he hadn’t married. Then she turned to face her husband and son and saw that Joe had walked the bad humour out of him and was smiling. She said, ‘Hello, you two. Tom has been telling me there were high jinks up at the house today.’
‘There was, Mom,’ Ben said in a high indignant voice. ‘Wait till you hear.’ And all the way down the lane, he regaled her with the tale she had already heard from Tom.
Gloria found Biddy very subdued when she went into the house and she set about preparing the dinner, knowing that the old woman would have done nothing towards it.
Later, as they ate, Gloria said, ‘I met Helen Mortimer in the town today. You know, she used to be McEvoy?’
‘Did you?’ Tom asked. Helen’s mother, Nellie McEvoy, was the postmistress, and she and her husband, Jack, were great friends of his. ‘Terrible business with Helen’s husband never coming back from Dunkirk.’
‘Yes, especially when they only had two days together first,’ Gloria said. ‘I felt really sorry for her, and then for his family to be completely wiped out just last year. Dreadful time the girl has had.’
‘Nellie thought she had died too when there were no letters, and her sister, Margaret, who moved to England with her, couldn’t find her at all either,’ Tom said.
‘Yes, Helen had had a complete nervous breakdown,’ Gloria said, ‘and little wonder. She said it was ages before she could even remember who she was. Anyway, the psychiatrist suggested that she come here to get away from the bad memories.’
‘Wasn’t it Birmingham where she was?’ Joe asked.
‘Yes, and for years,’ Gloria said.
‘Used to city life, she will probably find Buncrana a little slow and sleepy now, like you do,’ Joe said. ‘Maybe the pair of you will be company for one another.’
There were plus sides to living in Ireland, Gloria decided, as the days passed. She had never seen Ben as happy as he was that first summer in Donegal, particularly after his father had put his grandmother in her place. Gloria had also seen a steady improvement in her husband week by week, and towards the end of August he had begun to help Tom around the farm again, happy to do it because idleness had never sat easy on his shoulders.
Gloria was very pleased to have the friendship of Helen Mortimer. She had been very lonely before she had met her because she had little in common with most of the women in the town. She hated their insular provincialness, and it showed, and the inconsequential, small-minded gossip both bored and irritated her. There had been suspicion amongst the townsfolk about her from the beginning because she was American and therefore ‘foreign’, whereas Joe had been accepted back into the fold as though he had never been away.
Helen, despite being born and raised in Buncrana, had been away from it for some years and had seen and done other things, and so now she was almost as different from those living there as Gloria was. The two women gelled from their first meeting. They met at Mass each Sunday morning and would often arrange to go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon if the day was a fine one. Every Saturday, when Gloria went to Buncrana, she would call into the post office for a cup of tea and chat with Helen and her mother, Nellie, and sometimes her younger sister, Cathy.
‘They’re very alike, the two girls,’ Gloria said one Saturday as the Sullivans sat eating dinner. ‘They have the same shape to their faces and the same deep brown eyes and hair. Helen, I suppose due to city life, combined with what happened to her, hasn’t the rosy cheeks of her sister, but both despair of their freckles.’
Tom chucked. ‘Those freckles have always been the bane of Cathy’s life. Molly told me many a time that she was always on about them.’
‘Oh, yes, Cathy said she used to be such a friend of Nuala’s daughter, Molly,’ Gloria said.
‘They were,’ Tom said. ‘They were thick as thieves, the pair of them. And now Cathy is engaged to one of the Guardsmen stationed here, and I don’t know whether Molly is alive or dead.’
‘They speak of her with such fondness, despite the fact that she hasn’t written to them either,’ Gloria said.
‘It would be hard to talk of her in any other way,’ Tom said with a sigh. ‘She was a lovely girl and as pretty as a picture.’
‘Lovely girl my arse!’ Biddy spat out. ‘She was the Devil’s spawn, that one, and gone to the bad like her mother before her.’
‘I have had just about enough of this,’ Joe thundered, banging his fist on the table so hard Ben nearly jumped out of his skin. He pointed at his mother and said, ‘You sit there all day like a venomous snake spitting your poison over everyone.’
‘You have no right to speak to me that way.’
‘I have every right,’ Joe said more quietly. ‘And it should have been said years ago.’
‘You have no respect.’
‘Your attitude negates any respect I might have had for you, Mammy,’ Joe said. ‘Let’s examine what Nuala actually did that has caused a canker of resentment to grow inside you, because as far as I am concerned she didn’t go to the bad at all. That girl hadn’t a bad bone in her body. All she did was fall in love.’
‘And who with?’ Biddy screeched. ‘A man of another faith. And that news killed your father.’
‘No,’ Joe said. ‘The two things might be totally unconnected. Daddy was on borrowed time – the doctor had told him that – but he never took it easy like he was told to. He could have died in the fields alongside me and Tom. Would it then have been our fault?’
‘Of course not,’ Biddy snapped. ‘But Nuala—’
‘Didn’t even know that Daddy had a bad heart,’ Joe said, cutting across hi
s mother. ‘If you hadn’t insisted on protecting her as if she was a child then the outcome might have been completely different. So, maybe you’re to blame for Daddy’s death.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’
‘Why should anyone be to blame?’ Gloria asked. ‘People die all the time. When my mother died it was no one’s fault. Should I have said, my father’s suicide contributed to it, or the precarious way we were living?’
‘When I want your opinion, I will ask for it,’ Biddy snapped, looking contemptuously at Gloria.
Gloria met her gaze levelly as she countered, ‘And I was under the impression that Ireland was a free country and that anyone can express an opinion without approval being sought first.’
Biddy was completely flummoxed and had no reply ready and Joe almost laughed at the expression on her face, but Tom put in, ‘You’re right for the moment, Gloria, but whether we stay free or not is out of our hands. If England loses this war, the six counties too will be under German control. What chance do you think Ireland will have then?’
‘Bugger all!’ said Joe. ‘That’s what.’
Gloria shivered suddenly. Here, in this little backwater of Ireland, it was hard at times to remember that there was still a war being fought on numerous fronts and that the survival of them all depended upon Britain’s success.
It was only a couple of weeks after this that Gloria thought that Biddy might be ill, though her voice was as vitriolic as ever, as Joe said when Gloria mentioned her concerns to him.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘that is no measure. I think when they are nailing her coffin lid down she will be letting rip to someone or other.’
‘Aye,’ said Joe with a grin. ‘Probably Tom.’
‘Almost certainly Tom,’ Gloria replied grimly. ‘And that means that you have drawn the short straw because it is you that must talk to your mother.’
Now that Gloria had brought it to Joe’s attention he had to admit that his mother didn’t look right, but she refused to acknowledge she was ill and said firmly that she had no need of a doctor.