by Cathy Kelly
Blair sat forward in her chair, diamonds winking in the overhead light.
‘Thank you,’ she said earnestly. ‘I thought this was going to be scary but my mother-in-law told me you’re the best and I should have the best, and—’
‘It’s not about the best,’ interrupted Faenia gently, thinking that she could be this girl’s mother. ‘It’s about finding out what suits you and makes you happy. People who say clothes don’t matter don’t understand how dressing feels to women, how it lifts us and gives us strength. How we can’t break down because when we got up this morning, we put on our favourite shoes and lipstick, chose a bag we earned with our own money, how we survived long enough to do that and will survive to do it again. Strong women wear what they love, not what they think other people will love.’
Blair’s little face lit up.
‘That’s so clever,’ she said.
‘A clever woman taught it all to me when I was much younger than you,’ said Faenia. She didn’t add, ‘When I had no hope whatsoever and wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life.’
When she’d met Beáta, Faenia had been been married to Chuck and living in a four-up, one and a half-bedroom apartment with the bath in the kitchen, a huge and hopeless air conditioning machine vibrating through the walls all summer, and a tiny bit of fire escape upon which Faenia often sat and cried because it had all gone so wrong. The irony of her life hurt so much.
She loved Chuck, he loved her and yet—
She couldn’t give him what he wanted and all that pain was crippling their marriage, creating a barrier neither of them could cross.
1969 The Bronx, New York
Isobel’s aunt opened the door to Fáinne and with one look at the drenched Irish teenager in front of her, and another quick look at the porches of the other houses around, pulled her in quickly.
‘Better if people don’t know our business,’ said Mary-Kate, who was twenty years older than Fáinne’s best friend, Isobel, back in Lisowen and had apparently provided solace for more than a few Irish girls in trouble over the years.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Fáinne, standing shaking, both from the cold and from nerves.
‘Here, I’ll take you into the back room and you can strip off those wet clothes. I’ll boil the kettle if you’re up to a drop of tea.’
‘Thank you,’ said Fáinne, which was all she seemed able to say.
She was here, in New York, safe from what the scandal would do to her family.
The journey had been something of a nightmare. First, the bus journey to Shannon, which had meant three separate buses, first the local one where the driver, a man named Micilín, considered it an insult if you didn’t converse with him during the entire ride.
Fáinne’s morning sickness, which she and Isobel had diagnosed with horror from the lack of her period, was not confined to morning and as Micilín chattered on, expecting answers and an equal amount of gossip, Fáinne had just about managed not to be sick or even look ill as she sat on the seat closest to the driver and pretended to have a cough to explain her sweating, white face.
‘A dose of cold, is it?’ said Micilín eventually.
Fáinne nodded.
‘Bad when you’re off to the town.’ Micilín looked cryptically at her small suitcase.
‘I’m going to see Edward in London,’ Fáinne lied, her heart breaking at the thought. Her big brother would have helped her, she was sure of it, but how? How could he get her out of this? There were ways to stop women being pregnant but she wouldn’t involve darling Edward in this, couldn’t bear the thought of the disgust in his face.
No, Isobel had told her she needed to go far away and then, and only then, she could deal with this.
American people were often coming to take Irish orphans away but the mothers were sent to places where no woman should ever be.
‘Magdalene laundries,’ whispered Isobel. ‘The nuns run them and the Church look over them. You’re there for ever, beaten and forced to work. Nobody ever gets out of them, Fáinne, all because you got pregnant.’
‘What about the man who got you pregnant?’ whispered Fáinne. ‘I wasn’t alone.’
She thought of how much she’d loved Peadar and how she’d thought – how could she ever have thought it – that if only she’d make love with him the way he’d wanted to for so many months, then he wouldn’t leave Lisowen to marry the rich, older woman further up the county, a woman with a farm. Peadar, last of four, would have no farm, no prospects, except building site work in Britain. Work on the lump, he called it, where men worked themselves to the bone and sent home a few pounds every week. It was not a life with prospects.
‘I have to go, Fáinne,’ Peader had said afterwards, when they lay on the hay bales, sated and skin damp with lovemaking. ‘I wish it was different …’
‘But it is, now!’ she’d said happily. ‘We’ve made love, we have to get married now.’
‘A ghrá.’ He used the old Irish word for love. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Peadar said with great sadness, stroking her lovely eighteen-year-old face and touching the freckles that no amount of buttermilk would ever remove.
Peadar had packed his bags and gone and even though all the Brannigans had been invited to the wedding, none had gone.
‘He wasn’t good enough for you,’ said Mick loyally.
Mam was sick then, thin as a rail and trying to keep it all together. Bad enough that her daughter had nailed her colours to the mast for a man who’d gone off to marry another woman, it would be worse in this small conservative place to have that same daughter pregnant and alone.
Being pregnant and unmarried in small town Ireland in 1969 was a crime like no other, a crime that spoke of a girl with no morals, a family with no morals.
If she stayed, and Fáinne knew her mother loved her enough to ignore the people with the rosaries and the harsh words, they would all be tainted.
No, leaving was the only way. She would not go into one of these hated homes. She would not destroy her beloved family.
Isobel had an aunt in New York: ‘She’s gone a long time. Has never forgotten us, still sends home the American boxes, though,’ Isobel said fondly, thinking of the cherished parcels that relatives in the US sent home with old clothes and shoes that were probably worn out to the US owners but were more beautiful and bright than anything new in the small Irish towns to which they were delivered.
‘Mam won’t tell me anything about Mary-Kate, which means there’s a lot to tell. I know, though I’m not supposed to, that she went pregnant. Went on the boat to save the scandal. Went with a man but he left her and there’s no talk since of any baby.’
Both girls had been quiet, thinking about how much worse it must have been in the fifties to have taken a boat to America to hide the scandal.
‘Why is having a baby and not being married so bad?’ said Fáinne. ‘The priest visits that man whom we all know beat his wife to death and prays with him, like he’s a good man. But have a baby without a husband and you are lower than low, far lower than a man who beats his wife to death. Why?’
Isobel put her arms around her friend. ‘They have a weird way of working out what’s bad in the world. If you’re a man, you can do what you want.’
Fáinne nodded.
‘Peadar shouldn’t have left,’ said Isobel in a rush.
Fáinne shook her head. ‘I should have known better.’
‘You could tell him you’re pregnant.’
‘No, he’s married now.’
Fáinne wasn’t stupid. She had been but not any more. Peadar had made his choice. ‘That dream is over. I’ll go. But I’ll miss you.’
They hugged, two teenagers who’d spent so much of their lives together, and now reality had come crashing into it.
‘But you’ll come back?’
‘Of course.’
Nine
‘There are years that ask questions,
and years that answer.’
Zora Neale Hurston
He spent too much time at his desk, Edward Brannigan thought ruefully, as he sat scrolling through the profits on-screen for the past month, and felt the dual surge of pleasure and power when he thought of all he’d achieved in his life. Few people knew what a battle it had all been: Eddie looked so urbane and self-assured. People were sure he’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and the best of education – in fact, Eddie had left school at fifteen to work on the meagre Kerry farm, a smallholding without much hope of supporting himself and three brothers. He’d emigrated at twenty to London and in his six years there he’d gone to night classes and had finished his education. When he’d returned to Ireland, and married the beautiful Charlotte Harrington, who’d been just a schoolgirl when he’d left, he’d seen the gap in the market for an engineering firm dealing with fine machinery parts. Nobody would give him a loan for the business.
‘You must be stone mad looking for a loan,’ Kit had said. ‘Who’d give out money to the likes of us?’
‘I’d help if I could,’ Mick had said sorrowfully, ‘but we haven’t a shilling to spare, Ed, or you’d have it, you know that.’
Edward knew he needed more capital, so he’d worked night and day, doing two jobs, to come up with it. He’d gone back to London to work on the building sites, doing the dangerous jobs for cash, risking it all for his dream. He’d worked in pubs, in a nice one in Chalford St Giles, where he’d found a better class of drunk along with nice people who tipped well. He’d worked in the electrical factory at nights for six months, nothing but nights so that when it was all over, he was white as the driven snow from never having seen the sun for that six months. But he had the money he needed. And finally, Brannigan Engineering had been born.
Sometimes Eddie thought that young people didn’t understand work the way his generation did: they’d come from nothing, had little education and had had to fight for every chance and every penny. Bess understood this about him in a way few other people did now.
‘Mrs Brannigan on line one for you, Eddie.’
Patricia Glasson didn’t call him Mr Brannigan. Eddie had no time for that sort of rubbish. She’d been with him for over thirty-five years, answering phones, typing, doing all jobs in the early days. A widow with young children when she’d started, Patricia was no stranger to hard work herself.
She could recall when he’d arrive into the office with his lunch in his briefcase, a wax-paper-wrapped ham and cheese sandwich made by Lottie because he had neither the time nor the money to go to the pub for lunch.
Patricia had heard him flatter a client on the phone, put it down, the earnest smile still on his face after saying, ‘Ah, next time, think of us, will you?’ and then curse because Brannigan Engineering had lost the business to a bigger competitor.
She’d heard him dissolve into tears, had been calmly there with the tissues, when Lottie had phoned, shocked, from the hospital to say the mammogram wasn’t turning out to be straightforward, a needle biopsy was needed and would he come in?
‘Hello, Bess, my darling, how are you?’ said Eddie now to his new bride.
The second Mrs Brannigan wasn’t one of those women who liked endearments, Patricia had thought at first. She was nobody’s ‘pet’, nobody’s ‘honey’. Woe betide the person in the business who tried the over-friendly approach with her. But incredibly, she let Edward say these things to her. Patricia didn’t need to listen in on the phone – she wouldn’t, anyway. She could hear it all from outside the office, the walls of which were not as soundproof as Edward seemed to think but she had no interest in Eddie’s love life as long as he was happy, because he was a good boss, had been good to her.
Patricia went back to her computer and left the Brannigans to their lovey-dovey-ness. Her own husband had been dead so long, she only thought of him at the family get-togethers when the children talked about him. The notion of marrying again had simply never occurred to her but then, she knew, men and women were different.
Women could survive on their own and men needed a woman in their life.
’I’m fine,’ Bess said to her husband. Formalities over, she got straight to the point because if she stopped, she might cry: ‘Edward, the replies are racing in for your birthday but—’
Edward tensed in his seat. He had a feeling about the ‘but’. Knew what it would be.
‘Jojo hasn’t replied.’
Jojo was both the image of his darling, dead Lottie and a woman who would be forever his little girl – though he would never say such a thing to Bess, not if he didn’t want his heart mounted on the brocade gallery wall in the hall beside the art Bess loved and which he, he had to be honest, hated. He liked modern stuff and Bess had gone for some mad thing with animals and jungle. But live and let live was his motto.
‘Edward, did you hear me?’
Bess waited for no man. But now that he loved her and had married her Edward knew that the Bess she showed to the outside world was very different from the loving woman she was on the inside. He’d broken down Bess’s carapace and he was so proud of that, like someone who’d tamed a wild cat at the zoo.
‘Give her time,’ was what Edward wanted to say. Lottie had been dead for three years now. It had been so fast: four months in total from the hideous diagnosis that undetected breast cancer, missed in a first, scheduled mammogram, had already metastatised to her liver, kidneys and bones.
Instead, he said none of this. All his marriage he’d held firm to the maxim of: do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Happy was infinitely easier.
‘I’ll phone her later,’ he said, adding a hint of cheerfulness to his voice, a sense of ‘I’ll sort this out, don’t you worry,’ when in fact, he knew nothing of the sort.
‘Good. Now, catering. I know you aren’t interested, Edward,’ Bess went on, managing to hide the anxiety in her voice with the minutiae of catering ‘but I think the squid in risotto with scallops is perfect for one of the starters.’
‘I love that stuff and yes, I am interested,’ he protested. ‘I’d eat that every day of the week.’
‘You’d have black teeth,’ laughed Bess and Eddie laughed too.
‘Listen to us – talking about squid ink risotto,’ he said fondly.
‘My mother would have been the first to say, “It’s far from squid ink you were reared, Bess!”’ Bess said.
They laughed again.
The tricky bit was over.
Bess and his daughter, Jojo, were like oil and water and so far Edward’s attempts to mix them had failed. So too had Bess’s and that was worse.
Because Bess did not like to fail. She wanted Jojo to know that she loved Edward, adored him.
Eddie was a complex, clever man when it came to business. But he was clever enough to know that he was not a genius when it came to emotional intelligence or dealing with human frailties.
Lottie had looked after all that with their two children. She’d been there for parent-teacher meetings for Jojo and Paul. Wise, funny and motherly to the nth degree, she’d known how to negotiate the teenage years, how to back off when the hormones raged, how to hug when hugs were required, how to be stern when they were in danger of going off the rails.
Eddie had sometimes envied his youngest brother, Mick, who had an amazing relationship with his two kids, well, grown-ups. Cari and Maggie were adults now, but still, they were always your kids, no matter how old they were.
Cari and Maggie thought the sun shone out of Mick’s rear end. But then, Mick hadn’t seen his wife die, hadn’t found someone else to love.
That made things different.
Eddie tried to console himself with a glance round his modern office with its wall full of awards, the honorary doctorate he was inordinately proud of because of his charity work and photos of himself with the rich and famous of Irish society at various events. Today, none of the bounties of his work helped.
He stared at the phone glumly. He’d rather phone anyone right now than Jojo.
&
nbsp; At lunchtime.
Lunchtime he’d phone. Beg Jojo to come. When all else failed, a bit of begging might work.
Bess looked at her lists with an unseeing eye. Despite her best efforts, anger surged up in her. She knew she should love her husband’s children. It made sense – you loved a man and you loved that he loved his children and then you loved them … but that simple theoretical maths did not work out so simply in real, non-theoretical life. Paul was easy to love: funny, happy, good-natured like his father but Jojo …
Jojo had grown up with two parents she loved, not like Bess’s poor Amy, who’d had to make do with just Bess and the odd contact with her father. Jojo had gone to the best schools, had a mother at home every evening to tend to all of her needs, not like Amy who’d gone home to her grandmother or alone when she was legally old enough and refused, in a rare act of defiance, to let Maura take care of her.
Yes, Jojo had suffered hugely by having her beloved mother taken from her – sometimes, in Bess’s darkest moments, she felt the curdle of jealousy towards Lottie and then felt the equal curdle of self-disgust of even thinking of such a thing because Lottie had died.
Everyone had loved Lottie Brannigan. Everyone.
Bess was not trying to be her, was not trying to be a mother. She was trying to be Edward Brannigan’s wife and he deserved that, she deserved that.
Except Jojo didn’t think so.
The ungratefulness of Jojo Brannigan made the red mist of anger cloud everything in Bess’s head.
This party would be glorious: a celebration of the man she loved, a man who’d come from nothing to run this highly successful company and who had, when heart attacks and all sorts of illnesses had decimated so many others, made it to seventy.
He deserved the celebration, he would have it.
Bess had shunned the services of a planning company: she’d run her own very profitable business for long enough and one weekend – albeit one with a large guest list – would hardly tax her.