‘We were on the top of the stairs when she came in that night,’ Annie said quietly.
‘Right. I see.’ Mammy was quiet again. ‘I’m so sorry ye had to hear that, I was wrong to get so cross with Daddy. I know people are saying he went off with her, but your father is a decent and honest man, who never told a lie in his whole life. I should have believed him right away. I did believe him, but I was annoyed with him for being kind to her. She read something into nothing, and I should have...I’m sorry, I wish...’ She wiped her eyes on the corner of her apron. ‘I received a letter from him saying that there might be some work in the new tyre factory coming up soon and if there is, he’ll be home the minute he gets a new job. He misses us all, and he really wants to come home. We want him home as well, don’t we? Now, I know it’s hard to listen to gossip about your family but you know the truth so do what Daddy would want if he were here, hold your head up and just ignore it. Can ye do that? Daddy did nothing wrong, nothing at all, but people might be saying bad things.’
Again Mammy looked uncomfortable. ‘Now I don’t know what you’ve heard at school, Liam...’ she began.
‘I know all about babies and where they come from and all that,’ Liam proclaimed proudly.
‘Well, you wouldn’t want to put too much store by what big eejits above in the brothers have to say about anything...’ she began.
‘No, it was Daddy who told me,’ Liam said confidently.
‘Right,’ she said again, struggling to digest yet more new information.
‘So, as Father Aquinas told Liam and Con today, Mrs Kinsella isn’t right in the head. She thought she was in love with your father and he with her, but it was all in her head. Now I think she is in a hospital for people who believe things that aren’t true, and they’re going to make her better.’ Her voice was hard to hear as she was speaking so quietly.
‘Is that why Daddy’s gone to England?’ Con asked. For once, he wasn’t trying to be the know-it-all man; he wanted to know what was going on as much as everyone else did.
‘No, pet, of course not. He went to England for work, you know that,’ Mammy looked heartbroken.
‘But he didn’t have work before Mrs Kinsella said what she said, and he stayed here, so how come he went after she came in here that night?’ Molly wasn’t going to let it go.
‘Look, there’s no point in lying to ye. Maybe if we hadn’t had that fight, I could have convinced him not to go, but he was talking about going for a long time and I always said no. He was cross with me afterwards, and he was right to be, but I’ve apologised to him and he’s forgiven me. I suppose I was hoping something would turn up but things were just getting worse and worse. Sure ye know how little money there was. Your father was not a man for signing on the dole but it was going to be inevitable if he stayed, we had no money at all. We were trying to keep it from ye, how bad things were, we didn’t want ye worrying, but maybe we should have explained. Ye are growing up so fast,’ her eyes rested on Liam. ‘But anyway, what happened happened, and your dad and I are fine. I’m praying so hard that the job will come up in the tyre factory, and we’ll have him home. Daddy loves you all very much, he’s always saying it, and there’s a letter on the sideboard for each of you, they just arrived today.’ Liam was delighted at the thought of a letter just for him from his father but his mother’s voice was worrying. She sounded sad.
Con and Kate exchanged glances; clearly they blamed their mother a bit. A part of them still believed that if the fight never happened, he’d never have gone.
She went over to the sideboard and opened a big envelope addressed to herself, taking from it five letters.
‘Where’s yours, Mammy?’ Liam asked as each of the Tobin children took their letter.
‘I read mine this morning when the postman came,’ she said, rubbing his cheek as she handed his over.
‘Take it out to the yard to read it in peace if you want to. I’m just going up to Murray’s to get carrots.’
Liam sat in the yard and stared at the letter with his name on it. He never got a letter before and though this one wasn’t strictly written to him with his full name and address—it just said Liam in Daddy’s straight writing—it still felt very important. He sat on an orange box beside the hen run and opened the envelope.
Dear Liam,
I hope this letter finds you well and in good spirits. I miss you very much. I’m working over here in a car factory, making new motor cars. I’ll send you a picture of them in my next letter if I can get one. There are loads of men from Cork here so I’m not too lonely. Actually, that’s not really true; I’m very lonely for my family. I live in a house with ten other men and there’s a woman who owns it called Mrs Keyes—she is kind but a terrible cook. I’m used to Mammy’s lovely cooking so I’m nearly being poisoned here!
I know this situation must be confusing for you, Liam, but I need you to understand that no matter what anyone says about me, I did nothing wrong. Mammy knows it too, but people will gossip all the same. I miss going to matches with you and Con, and slagging Kate about Elvis, and testing the twins on their homework. I miss it all. I hope and pray we will all be together soon. I never stop looking for jobs in Cork.
Take care and be a good boy and help your mother,
Love,
Daddy
Liam sat on the box and cried. Daddy sounded so sad. Something was very wrong in his family, but he had no idea how to fix it. The back door opened and Con came out.
‘Well, what did yours say?’ he asked.
Liam didn’t want to tell him. After all, it was his letter, sent to him privately, but he felt he had to.
‘He said he missed us, and he missed going to matches, and that he was working in a car factory. He never said when he was coming home but that he was looking for jobs here all the time. What about yours?’ Liam hoped that Con’s letter might shed some more light on the situation.
‘More or less the same,’ he said, picking up a hurley and pucking the sliotar off the back wall. The leather ball made a thud as it hit the various Xs Con had put on the wall to get his shooting at goal more accurate. It had been Daddy’s idea.
‘How much longer do you think before he comes home, Con?’ Liam asked.
His brother shrugged. ‘I think he wants to come home but now he’s got work over there, he’ll be slow to give it up. Things were getting bad here, moneywise. I’m only an apprentice, and Kate hasn’t much to spare either. Daddy wants to provide for us.’
‘Do you think he would have gone anyway or was it because he was cross with Mammy?’ Liam sensed that this was the only conversation Con would have with him about it.
‘I don’t know. I suppose Mammy blamed him at the time for the business with that mad tart next door even though he did nothing wrong, but he thought Mammy held him responsible or something, said that if he wasn’t in and out to her the whole time, none of this would have happened. That’s what Kate reckons anyway, I dunno.’
Liam was unaccustomed to talking as equals with Con and was afraid that anything he might say would relegate him into the baby category again, but he had to know more.
‘Was there something going on, do you think?’ He prayed silently for the right answer.
‘Nah, he’d never do that. And anyway, your wan is half-cracked, she made the whole thing up, but she,’ he gestured with his head towards the kitchen, ‘should have given him a chance. She should have backed him, not blamed him.’
Liam sat on the box, watching as his brother swung the hurley and hit the small leather ball off the brick wall of the yard.
Chapter 6
The following weeks were spent in a haze of study. Things were better at home now that everything was out in the open. The new tyre factory was going ahead and so there was an optimistic air in the Tobin household for the first time in months. Liam was working every chance he could even though the others were perplexed. He decided he’d have a go at the scholarship. If Father Aq
uinas thought there was hope, maybe it was worth a shot, but he decided to keep it quiet from the rest of the family. There would be enough time to tell them if he got it.
‘It’s only the auld summer test, ya big dope, and aren’t you going into the hospital with Kate soon? You’ll be running around the place with files and letters and all that stuff, so nobody’s going to give a tuppenny damn about the tests of sixth class,’ Con would say regularly, often dumping his books on the floor, or throwing bits of paper at him while he was trying to study.
Father Aquinas gave him extra lessons after school and the exam was a week after school broke up. Mammy was making do with the money Daddy sent from England. Things were certainly better, but there wasn’t enough for school fees. Liam was afraid if his father heard about his plans to stay at school, he might put off coming home, thinking he could make more money over there. On top of that, he knew how disappointed Mammy was when Con left school, so he didn’t want to get her hopes up only to have them dashed once again.
His siblings were totally caught up in their own lives and hardly noticed him and if Con found out, well, he’d get an unmerciful slagging, so he just pretended all the study was for the end of term tests. Mammy still said the rosary every night, but Liam sometimes saw the twins secretly reading a magazine while absentmindedly answering the prayers. Mammy was shattered by everything that had happened, and she knew the others still blamed her a bit for Daddy leaving, so she didn’t correct them as often as she used to for fear of starting another row and a round of accusations. Daddy was gone six months now.
Kate had convinced Mammy to let her go nursing in England where there was more money to be made, better experience, and better everything, according to Kate. In the end, Mammy just gave in. She left Cork without a backward glance. Liam remembered Mammy hugging Kate tightly at the quayside and his sister joking that she was only going to England not to the moon. Kate couldn’t wait to get away, the bright lights of London were calling and all sorts of adventures awaited her. Mammy was quiet all the way up the hill afterwards. ‘It looks like it’s just you and me now, Liam.’ She sighed.
Con was at work and the twins were doing a secretarial course—they were the fastest in the class at shorthand and typing and had been offered jobs already even though they were just fifteen. Molly was going to the civil service, which was a brilliant job apparently, and Annie was going to work in the Harbour Commissioners. Liam was surprised they agreed to work in two different places; he assumed they would insist on being together like they were since birth. Kate joked that they could have great variety if they wanted since they were impossible to tell apart. Molly could easily go to Annie’s job and vice versa. They giggled at the idea over the dinner table the other night. Though Liam thought it was a stupid idea, he joined in; it was the first laugh they’d had in ages.
The day of the exam dawned bright and sunny. He got out of bed and knelt beside it. Con had gone to work early—he and Willy were in with a local builder who had the contract to build loads of new houses outside the city. Liam couldn’t understand anyone who would want to live so far out, but it seemed that they did.
He blessed himself and thought about what prayers he would say. He began with Our Father followed by the Hail Mary and the Glory Be as he usually did. He then said the Memorare—a special prayer to Our Lady that was to be used sparingly since it was really a begging prayer. Then he said a prayer to St Joseph of Cupertino—never known to fail in an exam. He tried one to St Jude, as well—patron saint of hopeless cases—and eventually resorted to pleading directly with God to let him get the marks.
He knew it was stupid but he decided that if he got the scholarship, he would write to his father and he’d come home to see him go to secondary school, even if he didn’t have a job.
He got a sudden pang of guilt about lying and thought about telling Mammy about the exam as he was leaving the house but decided against it. It was Saturday morning and school was broken up for the holidays. He told her he was going to a match with some of the lads from his class so she wouldn’t worry, but he hated deceiving her.
All the way up the road, he went over his revision notes in his head. Algebra, quadratic equations, sin, cos and tan, geometry. Then Latin declensions, the Irish short stories, the poetry of John Milton, Hamlet—the list of things to remember was endless. The idea that he could write four A-standard papers one after the other over an eight-hour period seemed an insurmountable obstacle. Maybe he was wasting his time, he thought as he walked in the gate. He opened the door of the exam hall and took his seat.
The priest announced that every boy was to place his bag at the back of the hall and bring two pens and a mathematical set to the allocated desk for the exam. Maths was first, which Liam was relieved about since it was his weakest subject. He glanced around the room to size up the competition. The priests never made it clear how many scholarships were available but surely some of these boys were going home empty-handed. There were at least thirty fellas in the room, some he recognised from his class and even from last year’s class, but a lot of them were faces he’d never seen before. He assumed it was only open to his primary school, but he must have been wrong.
Sitting in the desk beside him was Patrick Lynch, his neighbour. He finished school last year and was working in a warehouse of a big shop downtown. Mr Lynch definitely couldn’t pay for secondary education since every penny he earned continued to be handed over the bar of the Glue Pot. Mrs Lynch did her best, she did a bit of cleaning in the big houses in Sunday’s Well and she took in laundry, but things were very tight in their house. Mammy always said she and Mrs Lynch were great friends. She always gave her the twins’ clothes and shoes when they outgrew them. Mrs Lynch had a two-year-old girl called Connie and another on the way. He hoped Patrick got a place; he was a nice fella and was on the same hurling team as Con. He was really good, and he never got much of a chance with his dad being like he was. All the girls were mad about Patrick, Con told him, especially all the shop girls he met at his work. Even though he was only a year older than Liam, he looked much older. Daddy always said that Joe Lynch was a fine looking man too in his time—something he found hard to believe, bloated and scarred as Patrick’s father was now.
Daddy always defended Joe, which surprised Liam given how abstemious his father was compared to Patrick’s.
‘You shouldn’t judge a person until you’ve walked in their shoes, lads,’ he’d often warned as he dried the dishes after dinner. ‘Joe was a nice lad and a gifted hurler, but the demons of his childhood caught up with him. The only place he got any relief was in the bottom of a glass.’
Liam got a lurch of loneliness for his Daddy. He’d love to have had him there to walk him up to the gate this morning.
‘Good luck,’ he whispered.
Patrick half-smiled back. He looked pale, like he was going to vomit. ‘You too, Liam,’ he replied.
A priest Liam never saw before rang a bell and a group of older fellas started giving out the papers. Liam looked down and glanced over it. Thank God, it was all things he had revised and he felt confident starting it. The time flew by, and he managed to finish the entire paper. He thought most of it was right; if it wasn’t, he didn’t know any better, so with relief, he handed it up.
‘There will be a thirty-minute break before the Latin paper. Please reassemble in your allocated seat at 11:30. There will be Mass after the Latin exam in the school chapel at 1:15. Attendance is expected.’ The priest left the hall and the level of chatter rose instantly.
‘How’d you get on?’ Patrick asked as he gathered his pencils and mathematical set.
‘All right I think. I thought question six, the angles of the triangle, was hard though. How about you?’
Patrick seemed more relaxed than before the test. ‘Was it a scalene triangle?’ Patrick asked.
‘Yeah, that’s what I said, anyway.’ They chatted easily as they left the hall into the bright sunshine.
&nb
sp; Liam turned over the shilling in his pocket his father had sent with his last letter. He never had money, but Daddy had taken to sending them each a shilling when he wrote. Even better than the money was that Daddy always asked about Mammy and urged him to help her and be a good boy. Whenever a letter would come, she would hand each of the children their own and then slipped one into her apron pocket with a smile. He prayed each letter would tell them when he’d be home.
‘I have a shilling, my dad sent it to me,’ Liam began. ‘Do you want an ice cream?’ He reddened immediately as he said it; maybe Patrick would think he was showing off. Though they were neighbours and had known each other all their lives, they didn’t mix in the same group. Patrick was older and played on the under-sixteen hurling team where most of the others were fifteen or even sixteen so he always seemed a bit more sophisticated than Liam.
Patrick smiled broadly, ‘But you should keep that money for yourself, maybe for books if you get the scholarship.’
‘Books are included in the scholarship, I asked Father Aquinas,’ Liam replied. ‘So, what do you think? A penny wafer each in Murray’s to celebrate the fact that we can identify a scalene triangle?’
‘If it was a scalene triangle.’ Patrick laughed. ‘Right so, two ice creams it is. But I won’t be able to get you one back.’
‘That’s grand,’ Liam replied. ‘I never have money usually, it’s just my dad sent it.’
They walked companionably down the hill to Murray’s, chatting about the maths paper and the upcoming Latin. Mrs Murray was quiet in the shop so she asked them what they were doing. Mammy always said Mrs Murray was silent as the grave if you told her something. Nobody ever knew who got stuff on tick or whose line of credit had run out. She was the soul of discretion. When they told her about the exam and warned her to keep it to herself, she gave them extra big ice creams. They explained that they didn’t want everyone knowing they went for it since there were loads of fellas trying and they probably wouldn’t be picked. Normally, Liam wouldn’t dream of telling the neighbours anything he didn’t want repeated over the whole street, but everyone knew Mrs Murray was discreet. Daddy always said it was the sign of a great business person to be able to keep their gob shut.
Jean Grainger Box Set: So Much Owed, Shadow of a Century, Under Heaven's Shining Stars Page 81