He arched an eyebrow, curled his lip. ‘He is preparing for your arrival, no doubt. We shall go now. The service cannot begin without you.’ In Thomas Murphy’s book, a priest should not be kept waiting, particularly when the church was being used for a specially arranged evening service. ‘Will you move?’ he bellowed. ‘Or will you get back on that boat and live with me in my house? We can go home when the tide turns. But if you do return, you will keep my grandchildren away from the O’Briens and their God-forsaken excuse for a religion.’
Bridie inclined her head. The ‘you wills’ and the ‘you will nots’ formed a litany that tripped loudly and often from her father’s acerbic tongue. Even the landing stage had become a quieter place during Thomas Murphy’s rantings. People stood and stared at the wild-looking man who raved at his quiet daughter.
Bridget heaved Shauna into a more manageable position and followed her father, noticing that a knot of men simply melted away to make a path for her furious parent. Sailors, dock workers, sellers of hot cocoa and tea backed off when they saw the towering figure.
On the cobbled square, Thomas Murphy stopped and grabbed his daughter’s arm so tightly that she flinched. ‘When I’m dead, who’s to save these two mites from Protestantism and perdition?’ he asked.
‘I am,’ she replied, her face twisted with pain.
‘You? You’re just a woman, a woman who was too weak and stupid to wait and marry a man of her own kind. Oh no, you had to have it all your own way, Bridget. Your mother must have spun in her grave the day you gave yourself before marriage to that heathen. May God have mercy on that good lady’s soul.’
Bridie, who remembered only too well how her mammy had suffered at the whim of Thomas Murphy, merely sighed with relief when her arm was freed. She would be rid of him, at least. No matter what kind of a creature Sam Bell turned out to be, he could not possibly be as wicked as this man she called Father.
There were ponies and traps ready for passengers, but the tall Irishman strode past them. ‘We’ll wait here for the boy,’ he told his daughter. ‘No point in paying out good money for a fancy carriage when there’s a cart we can use.’
Cathy stood on the cobbles, her face lifted upward. ‘Look, Mammy,’ she cried. ‘A train in the sky.’
Bridie glanced at the overhead engine, listened to the noise of it. A tram rattled past, then a ship’s horn blared into the heavy clouds of winter. She had never heard such a racket. The lowing of cattle, the frantic snortings of an unbroken horse, the boom when quarry-men mined the Galway stone – all those things were nothing compared to the hellish din of Liverpool’s docks. Home? Should she go back now? Should she take Shauna and Cathy back to sweet pastures and soft, kindly voices?
‘Move, woman!’ roared Thomas Murphy. ‘See, the boy’s coming just now with the cart. Or is this where you want to stay, in the middle of a busy road, while a priest waits on your whim for the starting of a wedding?’
Bridie put her head on one side and looked quizzically at the man who had fathered her. For a moment or two, she felt a stab of terror, but it passed over as quickly as the overhead carriages. ‘I was thinking just now, Father, of the lovely people in Ballinasloe. I was conjuring up the sound of their voices at mass, remembering how gentle they are.’ She straightened, shook her head. ‘But you roar like a bull. I cannot raise my children near a man who screams all the time.’ A corner of her mouth twitched when she saw his astonishment. ‘I will not come back, Father. We shall stay here and make the best we can, so. If I never see you again, I’m sure I won’t care.’
The tall man closed his mouth with an audible snap. This bold upstart of a daughter was daring to upbraid him in a public place. He opened his mouth again, found no words. The expression on her face reflected no anger, no emotion of any kind. He looked around, wondered if anyone had heard Bridie’s speech. But his daughter’s words had been spoken so softly. It was the softness that made the brief soliloquy all the more meaningful.
Bridie pulled at Cathy’s hand, guided her towards a slow-moving cart on which the boy sat with a grim-faced driver and the luggage. ‘Right, Cathy,’ said Bridie, a determined edge to her tone, ‘let’s go and find out what the future holds, shall we?’
Cathy’s shorter legs worked double time to keep up with her mother’s pace. When her hand slipped out of her mother’s grasp, she howled piteously, panic almost choking her as she imagined being lost in such a noisy town. Children ran about in the gloom, dresses, coats and shawls hanging from slender shoulders, trousers torn, bare feet slapping wet cobblestones. Cathy remembered bare feet, remembered the feel of grass against her toes, the smell of new-cut hay drying in the sun. She breathed deeply, sent forth another howl.
‘That is enough, now,’ said Thomas Murphy. He placed the case on the ground, bent over the child. ‘Look, I’ve had to come back for you. Mammy is tired. See – she’s leaning on the cart over there waiting for you. You must behave yourself, Caitlin O’Brien.’
She sniffed, stared at him. ‘Don’t want to be here,’ she announced.
A few children stopped running, watched the scene with undisguised interest.
‘You will do exactly as I say,’ spat the impatient man. ‘Now, come along while your mother gets married.’
Cathy wasn’t completely sure about what ‘married’ was, but she had a vague idea that it might be connected to somebody called Sam who had a shop in Liverpool. Sam was supposed to be her new daddy. ‘Don’t want to,’ she whimpered. This wasn’t her place. Her place was on a farm on the outskirts of town. Her place was the market and the castle overlooking the river Suck and the quarrymen walking home at night and waving to her. ‘I don’t want to,’ she repeated angrily.
‘She doesn’t want to,’ echoed a girl in a filthy dress. ‘She wants to stop here and play alley-o.’
Thomas, whose dignity was important, ignored the dirt-spattered urchin. ‘Come along,’ he urged his granddaughter. ‘Or you’ll have everybody late.’
No-one spoke, yet Cathy could feel the support of those around her, as if they were reaching out to give her strength. They understood. Without knowing her, these comrades sensed her trouble. ‘I want to go home,’ she told her grandfather.
Thomas glared at the small gathering. ‘This is home.’
‘Don’t want here,’ she answered boldly. ‘Want my garden and Chucky and Bob.’ And she did miss the chicken she had helped to rear from a ball of yellow fluff into a big, brave producer of eggs. ‘Want Bob,’ she declared, her feet planted apart. Bob was a sheepdog who could speak. His language was difficult to decode, but he had a special word for dinner, a guttural howl that announced his hunger. And Bob had always guarded her, had always—The smack sent her reeling into the arms of a girl.
‘You shouldn’t do that, mister,’ advised the nearest young stranger, placing her thin body between the large man and the dumbstruck Cathy. ‘My dad’ll kill you if he sees you hitting her like that.’
Thomas froze, his hand stopping mid-air. ‘And who asked you the time of day, miss? Shouldn’t you be inside the house cleaning the dirt off your face? Isn’t it past your bedtime?’
The streetwise waif gave Thomas Murphy the onceover. She wasn’t afraid of him. He was big and ugly, but her dad was bigger and uglier than anybody the length and breadth of Liverpool’s docks. ‘Me ma shouts me when she’s ready,’ she replied smartly. ‘I’m going back to Scottie now, and I’ll hear me ma shouting.’
‘And what does she shout?’ There was a mocking edge to the Irishman’s words.
‘She shouts me name, and me name’s Tildy Costigan.’
‘Then mind your business, Tildy Costigan.’
Tildy placed a dirt-streaked hand on Cathy’s shoulder. ‘If you ever need me, girl, just send somebody for Tildy Costigan. Everybody knows me, even the Mary Ellens. I’ll be there in a flash,’ she added. ‘With me brothers, me dad and half our street.’ She stuck out her tongue, satisfied that the little girl’s grandfather had seen the full length of i
t. It was nice and black, too, as the result of two spanishes for a halfpenny from Dolly Hanson’s shop.
After an uncomfortable second, Thomas grabbed the case, then pulled Cathy along behind him. ‘Such foolishness,’ he told his daughter. ‘Did you see the cut of that? The only clean bits were where the child had been rained on. You must be careful, Bridie. Keep Cathy away from these ragamuffins.’
Bridie, who felt that she might as well hang for the full sheep, allowed a few raw words to slip from her tongue. ‘She would have been as well at home in Ballinasloe,’ she informed her father. ‘As I told you before, I could have rented a cottage and found some work.’ She raised her chin. ‘Also, I allow no-one to smack my daughters. They will not be hit. Ever.’
Thomas’s patience was wearing to a state of transparency. ‘We shall not stand here and discuss family business in the open,’ he snarled. ‘And you’re here for a reason, Bridie. There’s not many a man would take on a young widow with two daughters. We were fortunate to find a good Catholic widower to step into the shoes of their Protestant father.’
Bridie heaved the sleeping Shauna into a more comfortable position. ‘Aye,’ she replied, amazed at her own continued audacity, ‘and I’ve never even seen the man. Why didn’t he come to meet us? Could he not have made an effort to pick us up from the boat? What sort of a creature leaves small girls out in wind and weather?’ She bit her tongue, told herself to hush. It was panic that had forced her to speak up. She had a reputation for forbearance, but she was scared out of her wits. This was a strange city in a strange country and she was going to marry a stranger this very evening.
Thomas gritted his teeth, wished that Cathy would stop snivelling. He yanked at the child’s hand, felt the resistance in her fingers. ‘Sam Bell is a busy man,’ he pronounced. ‘He’s a business to run. In this day and age, shop hours are long. He’ll have been up and about since daybreak, at the beck and call of customers. There’s no time for meeting boats, not when there’s a community wants serving.’
‘He could have sent someone in his place,’ breathed the fatigued woman.
‘Huh,’ spat her father. ‘He’s not a man to waste hard-earned money on foolishness. Come away now,’ he insisted. ‘We’re expected at St Aloysius Gonzaga’s. You must be married before you spend the night in Sam’s house. We have not come all this way to start a scandal.’
Bridie bit her lip. Her father was a man beyond reproach, a pillar of the Church and of the community. He was also a disgrace, though few at home in Galway would ever know his secrets. The cold and subtle cruelties of Thomas Murphy had always been discreet, hidden behind the door of his house. ‘As you wish, Father,’ she replied before passing Shauna to the boy on the cart. She turned, helped Cathy to climb aboard. ‘We’ll be on the pig’s back,’ she whispered to the hysterical girl. ‘And, as well you know, there’s plenty of meat on the back of a pig.’ For a split second, Bridie heard her own mother’s voice. ‘We’ll be great, Bridget. We’ll be on the pig’s back when himself sells a couple of horses.’ Bridie glanced at ‘himself’, then gave her attention to Cathy. ‘We shall have a grand house and plenty to eat.’
Cathy placed herself next to the boy. Sobs continued to rack her body, but they slowed when the lad started to talk. ‘That was me sister,’ he announced, jerking a thumb in the direction of Tildy Costigan’s angry face. ‘I’m Cozzer. The whole family gets called the Cozzers, like, only I’m the real Cozzer. Our Charlie’s older than me, so he should be Cozzer, only he’s special – different, like. Clever in his own way, but still different. Me ma’s called Big Diddy. She’s the boss of our street, me ma. She does all the laying-outs and brings babies. Me dad’s a docker.’ The words were spat out like rapid gunfire, no pause for thought or breath.
Cathy sniffed back the last of her tears, tried to make sense of her first encounter with this new language. ‘We’re going to live with Mr Bell,’ she ventured.
Cozzer shook his head. ‘Could be worse,’ he informed her. ‘Me ma says he’s a miserable bugger, but he’s not much of a drinker. He’s tight with his money, like. Still, you’ll be all right,’ he added by way of comfort. ‘Come and meet our ma. She’ll look after yous all.’
The cart stank of mouldy vegetables and fish. Under different circumstances, Bridget O’Brien might have worried about going to church in a smelly, travel-creased dress, but she was beyond such trivial concerns. She listened numbly while the boy pointed out St Nicholas’s ‘Proddy’ church, Exchange Station, shops, public houses. There were more people on Chapel Street than in the whole of her home town.
Bridie held onto her younger child, heard Cathy’s diminishing sobs, tried not to notice Thomas Murphy’s curled lip. Fish scales and vegetable matter would not sit well on da’s best clothes. Still, he should have paid for proper transport, should have insisted on Sam Bell’s attendance at the landing stage.
‘This is Scotland Road,’ the boy announced proudly.
Bridie allowed her eyes to wander past horses and carts until they rested on a larger than average corner shop in the near distance. BELL’S PLEDGES was emblazoned in a curling script above three brass orbs. Lights inside the shop announced that trade continued in spite of the imminent wedding. Resolutely, Bridie attempted to concentrate on the building, but the distractions proved too much for her. ‘What kind of a place is this?’ she muttered to herself.
‘ ’Tis a city,’ replied her father. ‘With all kinds of creatures in it. No place for weaklings.’ His mouth widened into a mocking grin. ‘Still, you’ll make the best you can, so – isn’t that what you said earlier?’
Cathy clung to her mother’s arm. ‘Will it kill us?’ she asked, her eyes glued to a monster that clattered along beside their hired cart.
‘It’s just a tram,’ said Bridie. She watched while children cavorted along in front of the menacing vehicle. ‘Give us a penny,’ shouted a boy after walking on his hands just inches from death. A girl ran out into the road and began to play leapfrog with several more daredevils. Each time a child bent over in the foolish game, the tram got nearer.
‘They’ll be flattened,’ breathed Bridie.
Cozzer Costigan laughed. ‘No, they won’t.’ He pointed to the open upper deck. ‘See them up there? They’re posh men from Seaforth Sands and Waterloo. They’ll throw some money in a minute. Nobody gets hurt, missus.’
A barrel organ groaned, its owner red-faced as he stirred the ageing mechanism to some semblance of life. On his shoulder, a monkey yawned and picked at his master’s thinning hair. Women scuttered along with shopping baskets, babies, older children in their wake. A youth emerged at speed from a side street, the tails of his ragged coat flapping behind him as a gang of ruffians chased him.
Bridie shuddered. Perhaps they should have stayed with Da after all. She didn’t want to be married, least of all to a total stranger. And this place was so wild, so alien. She clenched her teeth, hung on to her resolve. In Ireland, Thomas Murphy would have made their lives a misery. And although Eugene’s parents had paid lip-service, she feared that they might have stepped into the arena at some later date to quarrel with their daughter-in-law on the subject of religion. There were no choices, Bridie told herself. None at all. She was here and she must just get on with it.
A gypsy caravan idled past, its wooden frame painted gaudily in yellow, blue and red, the horse almost comatose between the shafts. Romany infants danced along the pavement, sun-browned hands reaching out to beg for money. Two policemen raced after the gang of lads who had disappeared into a picture house, while some men scuffled and cursed outside a public house called the Throstle’s Nest.
‘I want to go home,’ wailed Cathy.
‘Shush now.’ Bridie’s heart heaved as if trying to escape from her body in order to find a separate and more acceptable way of life. ‘You’ll be used to it in no time at all,’ she told her daughter. Really, Bridie herself needed reassurance. Children, she thought, adapted more easily than adults. Then Shauna began to wail. Dea
r God, would this filthy English city be a fit place in which to rear a sickly three-year-old?
The shabby vehicle stopped opposite Bell’s Pledges. Cozzer jumped down and began to remove luggage from the cart. Shauna, fully awake now, screamed piteously.
‘Now or never,’ spat Thomas Murphy. ‘Will you stay or come home?’
Bridie listened to her sobbing children, looked into the devilish eyes of her father. ‘We stay,’ she said. Anything, anything at all would surely be better than living in the same country as himself?
‘Right.’ He strode across the road and threw open the door of Sam Bell’s pawnshop.
Bridie stepped onto the cobbles, lifted her children down and took their hands. For better or worse, they were here to stay.
Elizabeth Costigan, commonly known as Big Diddy, stood arms akimbo and with her back to the fire. ‘You look like the dog’s dinner after next door’s cat’s been at it,’ she informed her victim. ‘Stand up straight. It’s supposed to be a wedding, not a bloody wake.’
Sam Bell sighed, shrugged narrow shoulders. The huge woman seemed to fill the room – and not just physically. There was so much energy about her person that it almost shone around her like a colourful aura. ‘It’s not as if this is my first,’ he told her. ‘I have been married before.’
Big Diddy Costigan fixed a gimlet eye on Sam Bell. He was about as much use as a rubber penknife when it came to the niceties of life. The Costigans might be poor, but they knew about dressing up for an occasion, even if all the clothes had to be borrowed or bought on the club card. She’d washed and ironed many frocks and shirts to be returned to the shops as unworn and unsuitable. ‘You could have got a suit with a cheque,’ she informed him. ‘I’d have sponged it to send back.’
‘I don’t buy from clubs,’ he answered.
Big Diddy bristled slightly. He didn’t need cheques. He had enough money salted away to retire and live off the interest for several hundred years. ‘Scrooge,’ she muttered, though there was little malice in her tone. Sam Bell was a mild-mannered fellow who elicited no strong emotion from anyone in the district. He was fair, uncaring and honest. He was also the most boring chap Diddy had ever encountered in all her thirty-eight years. ‘You could have bought a new suit, Sam. And some proper shoes.’
The Bells of Scotland Road Page 2