A Mother's Spirit

by Anne Bennett

  ‘No he won’t,’ Ben said. ‘And you know he won’t. You can’t leave him like this. It isn’t right.’

  He had upset his mother, he knew, because her face had a crumpled look, as if she was going to cry, but Ben didn’t care. He was glad that she was upset. She deserved to be. He wanted to scream and shout at her that she had to stop all this and go back home where she belonged, but there was no time because they had reached the dockside.

  It was extremely noisy, heaving with people laughing and shouting and weeping and hugging one another, and porters with laden luggage trying to get through the crowd. Children ran about shrieking and screaming, either in excitement or fear, and babies wailed at the strangeness of it all.

  Philip helped them unload everything from the car, and Colin went off to park it while Philip organised a porter. Ben thought of darting away and losing himself in the crowds, but he knew they would soon root him out. He had to be cleverer than that. Anyway, his mother had a hand on his arm as they followed the porters, who had their luggage piled high.

  Ben remembered Kevin saying that you had to play adults at their own game. ‘When you are a kid,’ he’d said, ‘they can make you do things you don’t want to do because they are bigger and stronger, and everyone believes them over you, so kids have got to learn to box clever.’ So Ben knew that if he didn’t want to find himself in America, he had to get off the boat, and to be given the freedom to do that meant convincing his mother that he had accepted the fact that he was going to the States to live with her.

  When they eventually got through the crowds and he saw the troopship bound for America moored at the dockside, he was impressed enough to say, ‘Wow!’

  Gloria smiled at him. ‘Some ship, isn’t it?’

  ‘You bet. Look at all those decks!’ Ben cried, pointing at them towering one above the other, with three black funnels on top of that.

  There were two officers at the top of the gangplank checking the marriage lines of all the women going on board, and Gloria was mightily glad that Ben was so fascinated with the ship that he didn’t notice this or he would certainly have something to say on the subject.

  They were sharing a neat little cabin and Ben thought that if he really did want to go on this trip to America, he would have enjoyed living and sleeping in it for the time that they would be afloat. The cabin had four bunk beds in it, and beside each one was a set of drawers and a tall cupboard. They put their things away quickly and went out on deck, where Colin joined them.

  Gloria looked at her son and said, ‘We’re going home, Ben. Aren’t you the tiniest bit excited too?’

  Ben nodded. ‘A bit, yeah,’ he said. ‘It will be nice, I suppose, to see the place where I was born. Anyway, I haven’t got a lot of option, have I? I still feel sorry for Dad, though.’

  ‘You can write to your father as soon as we get to New York,’ Gloria promised.

  Yeah, Ben thought sarcastically, that will really help him. But what he said was, ‘Can I explore the ship a bit?’

  Gloria looked at all the people. She didn’t really want Ben leaving her side. On the other hand, she wanted to spend the last few precious moments with Philip and was desperate to tell him before he had to leave the ship, that he was going to be a daddy, and so she said to Ben, ‘All right, but don’t go too far and for heaven’s sake don’t get lost.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Ben assured her, moving away, but with the number of people aboard he was soon hidden from her.

  She opened her mouth to call him back, but Philip said, ‘He will be all right, you know. He’s a big lad now and it is natural to want to explore.’

  ‘I know,’ Gloria said. She glanced across at Helen and Colin and, seeing them absorbed in each other, she said, ‘I’m glad Ben is out of earshot for a few minutes, actually, for I have something to tell you that is for your ears alone, at least for now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ Gloria said, and then, seeing Philip’s consternation, she gave a little laugh and said, ‘I have good reason to believe that I am carrying your child.’

  She watched the incredulous joy flood over Philip’s face and then he said anxiously, ‘Is it mine?’

  ‘Of course it’s yours,’ Gloria said. ‘I told you, sex between me and Joe stopped a long time ago. But even if he had tried, how could I have let Joe make love to me when my heart belonged to another? You must have no doubts, my darling. This is your child that I am carrying.’

  She looked into his beautiful deep brown eyes as she spoke and saw them moisten with tears at her words, and her heart turned over with love for him. He reached out for her as he said, ‘Oh, my darling girl, that is probably the best news that I have ever received in my life. I never dreamed … Oh God, darling. It really is the icing on the cake as far as I am concerned.’

  Gloria was glad that Ben was away as she allowed herself to be hugged tight, and laughed when Philip planted little kisses all over her face, and then was transported to Paradise as Philip kissed her properly. She knew she would have felt constrained with Ben watching.

  Ben had seen enough, however. He watched them laughing and hugging and kissing, and knew it was so terribly wrong. He began traversing the ship while thoughts tumbled around in his head.

  He wondered how long his mother had been seeing this man Philip. From what he had witnessed the night of the Christmas party, it had been going on from then, at least.

  He imagined his father alone in the little whitewashed cottage and tears burned in the back of his throat. Somehow he had to get off that ship and go back to him. He didn’t want to leave his mother either, because he loved her too, but she wasn’t acting like a mother because mothers stay with their husbands and she was prepared to walk away. She wanted a new life with a new man and he wanted no part in that, he decided.

  In the end he had found what he wanted, and that was a gangplank as far away from his mother as it was possible to be. It was on the lower deck too, and used only by the sailors to load the ship with cargo. He smiled to himself, then went back to his mother.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Gloria asked.

  ‘Right on the highest deck,’ Ben said, the lie tripping easily off his tongue. He didn’t mind lying to her. She had been lying to him long enough, and he frowned at the casual way that man had an arm draped around his mother’s shoulders. ‘You can see for miles,’ he went on. ‘That’s where I want to be when the ship pulls out, when I say goodbye to Ireland.’

  Gloria heard the sadness in her son’s voice and she said, ‘You do that, Ben, though it isn’t goodbye for ever. I’m sure you will come back one day on a visit.’

  Ben didn’t answer; there wasn’t time, for the hooter had sounded the signal for those not travelling to leave the ship. Gloria suddenly realised that she wouldn’t see Philip for maybe months and her attention was all for him.

  ‘Can I go now then?’ Ben asked, and Gloria gave him a perfunctory wave.

  ‘Yes, but come back here afterwards. I’ll wait for you.’

  Ben gave a nod and watched his mother in the American’s arms again, clinging to him as they kissed.

  He melted into the crowd and then, once out of his mother’s sight, hurried as fast as he could, jostled by the disembarking passengers. From his hiding place he watched the quayside fill with those leaving the ship and saw the sailors beginning to unwind the hawsers.

  Soon he knew they would raise the gangplanks and then it would be too late. He leaped up and ran down the short plank. One of the sailors shouted at him, but he paid no heed, and when another on the dockside tried to grab him, Ben twisted out of his grasp and was soon lost to view.

  Joe was finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that his wife, his Gloria, had run away from him with another man. As the car sped on its way to Belfast, he examined his behaviour over the last months and knew that he was partly to blame for Gloria’s dissatisfaction, which had eventually driven her into the arms of another.

  ‘I refused to
see how hard she was finding things,’ he said. ‘When she started working at the camp she made me a laughing stock, and yet we needed her money to survive. That I couldn’t provide properly for her and Ben cut me to the quick.’

  ‘I knew there was something the matter,’ Jack said. ‘I said to Nellie that you were nothing like the Joe I remembered, or the Joe that first returned, even taking into account the injuries you were suffering from. But even so, you can’t take the total blame for this, you know.’

  ‘I agree,’ Tom said. ‘It isn’t your entire fault, Joe.’

  ‘You know her, Tom,’ Joe said. ‘Would you say that Gloria would ever have done this without provocation?’

  ‘I have to admit this is the very last thing that I expected Gloria to do,’ Tom said. ‘I knew she disliked the country and everything, but I would have said she loved you totally.’

  ‘That is what I am saying,’ Joe said morosely. ‘I killed that love. You saw how it was between us and I spoke of this before to you. I wanted her to be more like the women in Buncrana. Just how crazy is that? She was a free and independent spirit and I choked the life out of her. I see it all now. Tom, you know that we have been unhappy for months. Maybe this man, whoever it is, made her feel more valued than I did.’

  ‘Many of us are only truly valued at our funeral,’ Hughie the taxi driver commented. ‘That’s life. Don’t give you the right to run away when the going gets tough.’

  ‘But that’s it. She didn’t,’ Joe said. ‘You wouldn’t believe how bad it was in the tenement of New York and then the blitz in London.’

  ‘What about bringing you here and managing Mammy the way she did?’ Tom said. ‘Giving credit where it’s due, she was truly amazing then. Huh, I’d say if anything was going to send her into the arms of another man, then that would have been it.’

  ‘If I had my time again I would do it all differently,’ said Joe, ‘and realise, as she did, that us two were the important ones, and how we handled our family was our business, and the townsfolk’s opinion shouldn’t matter a jot.’

  ‘That was easier for Gloria to do,’ Tom said. ‘She came in as an outsider and didn’t know the people. You were hailed as the returning hero to the place where you had been born and reared, where you had friends.’

  ‘Is it too late?’ Jack said. ‘Could you not put it to her, as you have to us here in the car, and say you’re sorry? I wouldn’t have said that Gloria bears grudges.’

  ‘And I have the flat in Birmingham going begging,’ Tom put in.

  Joe shook his head. ‘This is what I should have done months ago. I should have explained how I felt and why, told her how sorry I was, and supported her and valued the contributions she was making to the family’s finances. Now I fear it is much too late for Gloria and me.’

  ‘Well, regardless of whose fault it is, I think the important one at the moment is Ben,’ Tom said.

  ‘Yes,’ Joe agreed. ‘She can’t take the boy. If she wants to leave me that is one thing, and one I will deal with. But there would be no point in going on without my son.’

  Tom heard the despair in his brother’s voice and he sighed. ‘Let’s hope we are in time then to get him off that damned ship before it sails.’

  However, they hadn’t even found a place to park the car when they heard the hooter, and Joe knew he had failed and he would not see his son again for many years. He felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart.

  He got out of the car, stumbling like an old man, and Tom turned away from the agony etched on his face.

  ‘Sorry,’ Hughie said, though Tom and Jack knew he couldn’t have done any more; as it was, he had driven like a madman.

  Joe didn’t even hear him, nor feel the hand that Jack put on his shoulder as a gesture of support. He wandered away from them all onto the dockside as if he were in the throes of drink.

  ‘Go after him, Tom, for God’s sake, lest he do something stupid,’ Jack said. ‘The man’s not in his right mind at all.’

  Tom knew that as well as anyone. Joe’s eyes were trained on the ship moving, as yet quite slowly, away from the harbour.

  On board that ship Gloria and Helen were waiting for Ben to join them. ‘I don’t expect him to come back until the shores of Ireland are just a blur in the distance,’ Gloria said. ‘Did you tell him to come back here?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Gloria said. ‘It seemed the wisest plan.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ agreed Helen, and when they had waited another few minutes, she wandered over to the rail. The ship was gathering pace now and the dockside emptying fast. ‘Can you still see Colin or Philip?’ Gloria asked, joining her.

  ‘No,’ Helen said. ‘But they hadn’t time to hang about. They were due back at camp.’

  Then Gloria, scanning the dockside, caught sight of the lone figure staring, staring out at the disappearing ship. She knew immediately who it was. ‘Look,’ she said to Helen, ‘that’s Joe!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Gloria said emphatically. ‘I have been married to him for long enough to recognise that stance, and there’s Tom beside him.’

  ‘How did they know where we were?’

  ‘No idea,’ Gloria shrugged, turning away, because the sight of Joe had filled her with guilt. ‘I wish Ben would hurry up. I want to see if I can get us a meal somewhere. I’m famished.’

  ‘Oh my God! Look!’ Helen cried suddenly.

  Gloria turned, and to her horror saw that another, smaller figure was approaching her husband. ‘Dear God!’ she cried and turned anguished eyes to Helen. ‘What am I to do?’

  Helen shook her head helplessly. There was nothing they could do.

  ‘What has he done?’ Gloria cried. ‘How did he get off the ship, and why?’

  ‘I don’t know, Gloria.’

  ‘But I can’t go to the States and leave my son behind.’

  ‘You can do little else just now,’ Helen pointed out. ‘I would think the captain would take a very dim view of turning this big ship round to pick up one young boy who doesn’t want to travel to America anyway. He told you that plainly, and had he wanted to go he wouldn’t have left the ship in the first place.’

  Although what Helen said made sense, Gloria barely heard her. She felt an actual pain in her heart that was so powerful she fell to her knees with a heartbreaking cry, and Helen kneeled beside her and held her friend as she wept.

  Ben hadn’t been able to believe his eyes when he saw his father just standing there. He had thought that he would have to hitch all the way home and so he stepped from his hiding place and said, ‘Hello, Dad. What’re you doing here?’

  Joe spun round in total shock at seeing the son he thought he had lost standing in front of him. ‘Ben?’ he cried. ‘I thought you were on the ship.’

  ‘I was, but I don’t want to go to America and have a new father. I want to stay with you and so I got off.’

  Joe put his arms around his son and held him tight. Tears ran down his face and his heart felt lighter than it had done in ages. Suddenly, he felt Ben stiffen and he followed his gaze. A little way from them was a naval officer staring fixedly at Ben as if he couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes.

  Joe stepped away from his son and faced the man. ‘Are you Philip Morrisey?’ he asked, and the man nodded. ‘I am Joe Sullivan,’ Joe said. ‘And you are my wife’s fancy man. I should knock you to the floor for what you have done, but I won’t do that because I want to know how you secured a passage for Gloria to travel to America. I understood only wives could travel on that ship, and she is still married to me.’

  There was no point in lying, and Philip said, ‘We went through a civil ceremony in Belfast.’

  That shook Joe. Even though he knew that she would have had to do something like that to get on the ship in the first place, the fact that she had actually gone through a marriage ceremony when she was still married to him shocked and hurt him. It showed him just what lengths she was prepared to go to for this America
n sailor. It wasn’t the behaviour of the Gloria he knew, the one he had been married to for years. That Gloria had been as straight as a die and would never do anything underhand.

  Philip saw the look in Joe’s eyes and, despite his strong and ardent love for Gloria, he felt such sympathy for the man whose eyes were pain-filled.

  ‘I could make things very difficult for you both if I had a mind,’ Joe said. ‘No one would blame me, for bigamy is a crime that carries a prison sentence. Many would say that you have stolen my wife away, but that isn’t true, for I know the decision to leave had to be her own and I know she hasn’t been happy for some time. However, Ben doesn’t want to go with her and he has made that patently clear, and so he will stop with me. If you make trouble for me, or try to take Ben through the courts, then I will whisper into someone’s ear. If you agree to leave Ben in my custody, then I will say nothing and if Gloria wants a divorce then she can have one. Perhaps when you are writing to her you will tell her this.’

  Philip knew that Joe was right. He had the potential to make a great deal of trouble for both of them. But Philip knew Ben’s place was with his father and he had to make Gloria see that. ‘I’m sure that Gloria will see leaving Ben with you as the best solution,’ he said.

  Ben tugged on his father’s arm. ‘Let’s go home, Dad.’

  Joe turned away from Philip and his moist eyes softened as they lighted on the son he loved so much. Despite Ben’s age, Joe lifted him into his arms and said, ‘We will go to the cottage, Ben, and pack up all our things and move them to Tom’s flat in Birmingham, and that will be our home now. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Oh, you bet, Dad,’ Ben said. ‘That is just terrific.’

  ‘And as soon as I get rid of the farm I am coming to join you,’ Tom said, stepping forward as Philip walked away.

  Ben put one arm around his father’s neck and one around his uncle’s, and said, ‘That will be better still.’