by Maureen Lee
She felt as if she were mending in a hole in her life when she shook hands with Billy Adams in the butcher’s and Roddy Egan in the baker’s. Two girls she’d been to school with came rushing out of Ye Old Tea Shoppe when they saw her pass. They kissed extravagantly and exchanged their life stories within a matter of minutes. Mr O’Rourke, the solicitor, opened his window and shouted he’d come across and see her in his lunch-hour.
She’d left the village and the people in it so abruptly, not saying goodbye to a single soul and leaving loose ends all over the place, but most were now neatly tied. She had a whole week to tie the rest.
Everyone asked after Annemarie. ‘She’s in America. I don’t hear from her all that often,’ Mollie replied over and over again. It was what Hazel had told her to say, what she and Finn said to people when they were asked the same question. Hardly anyone mentioned the Doctor.
She called on Nona in the post office and asked for a kitten. The girls were thrilled to pieces and Megan wanted to take home all five. But there were only two males left and Mollie chose the one identical to Bubbles. ‘We’ll collect him on Saturday,’ she told Nona.
The other male was black and smooth, not nearly so pretty as his brother. She felt convinced she could see tears in the tiny creature’s eyes. ‘He looks so sad, he knows no one wants him,’ she murmured. She shooed the girls out of the shop before she could say she’d take them both.
Megan suggested they also call their kitten Bubbles, but Mollie said she’d sooner they thought up a name of their own. ‘What about Winnie, like in Winnie the Pooh?’
‘Winnie stinks,’ Megan said scathingly. ‘Anyroad, Winnie the Pooh is a bear.’
‘Tiddles?’
‘Tiddles stinks worse.’
‘Dandelion, Mammy,’ Brodie piped up. ‘Our kitten is like a dandelion.’
‘Dandelion is a lovely name.’ Mollie clamped her hand over Megan’s mouth before she could say how much Dandelion stank. ‘Let’s see what your dad has to say about it, shall we?’
‘Will Patrick be home when we get there?’ Megan enquired. She’d fallen head over heels in love with her cousin at first sight.
‘No, he’s at school.’
‘Next year, can I go to the same school as Patrick?’
‘No, love. It’s too far away.’
‘If I came to live with Auntie Hazel and Uncle Finn, could I go to school with Patrick then?’
‘If that’s what you want, Megan, yes.’ She felt like giving her daughter a quick blow to the head to shut her up.
After earnest consideration, Megan decided it wasn’t what she wanted after all. Perhaps she’d been taken aback that her mother appeared so willing to let her go. ‘I’d feel sad without you and Dad and Brodie - and our Joe,’ she said.
‘That’s good, love, because we’d prefer you stayed with us.’
‘And I think we should call our kitten Dandelion.’ She could be so sweet when she was in the mood.
‘That’s good, too. Clever old Brodie.’ She patted her small daughter’s head. ‘Dandelion’s perfect.’
Hazel set an extra place at the table when Mr O’Rourke turned up at lunch-time. They sat down to cheese and onion pie followed by fruit salad and cream. Megan, usually so picky with her food, ate every mouthful, and Brodie, who rarely opened her mouth in company, described Dandelion to her father. ‘He’s striped all over, Dad, like a jumper, and he’s got big hairs growing out of his mouth.’
‘Whiskers, luv,’ Tom said fondly. ‘They’re called whiskers.’
‘Everyone knows they’re called whiskers, Dad,’ Megan said in a haughty voice.
‘Brodie didn’t, and neither did you when you were two,’ Tom pointed out.
‘I bet I did.’
Tom didn’t answer. Sometimes, the best thing to do with Megan was ignore her.
Mollie went to the door with Mr O’Rourke when it was time for him to return to his office. ‘I’m pleased everything’s turned out well for you, Mollie,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘There were all sorts of dark rumours floating around after you and your sister left. But that husband of yours is a fine young man and I’m sure he takes good care of you.’
‘The very best, Mr O’Rourke,’ she assured him.
That afternoon, she took the children to the convent to show the nuns, who fussed over them in the way women did when they didn’t have children of their own, kissing them and stroking their arms, exclaiming that the girls were the prettiest they’d ever seen and Joe the bonniest baby.
Brodie, scared, hid behind her mother’s skirt, only emerging when Sister Francis produced a doll she’d knitted for the Christmas bazaar. Megan refused a doll, saying that she’d grown out of them, causing shrieks of amazed laughter and comments that she was old long before her time.
Eventually Mollie left, exhausted. Patrick was home from school when they got back to the house and Megan was struck dumb for the rest of the day, much to everyone’s relief.
Tom and Finn were getting on like a house on fire. Whatever hostility Finn had felt for his brother-in-law had gone. He merely smiled when Tom continued to boast about his triumphs in the police force.
On their third day in Duneathly, the men offered to look after the children while their mothers went to Kildare to do some shopping. Mollie made a bottle for Joe and left it in the larder, and she and Hazel caught the half past eight bus.
‘I feel desperately odd without the kids,’ she admitted to Hazel, as the little single-decker made its winding way towards Kildare.
‘Me, too. I feel as if vitally important parts of me are missing, like me arms and legs.’
‘Will we ever feel any different, I wonder?’ Mollie mused.
‘I hope so. I’d hate to feel like this when I’m eighty.’ Hazel began to laugh. ‘I expect the time will come when they’ll grow away from us and won’t need us any more, then we can do things like swim the English Channel. Some woman did a few years ago.’
‘Or get elected to Parliament.’
‘Learn to fly an aeroplane.’
‘Climb Everest. Some other woman did that.’
‘Today, let’s forget we’re mothers with hordes of small children,’ Hazel said firmly, ‘and think of no one but ourselves, after we’ve bought the kids a few sweets, that is. Me, I’m going to buy a hat, a winter one: the old one’s got moths in it.’
‘And I’ll get the wool to make myself a jumper with a Fair Isle yoke.’
It was a lovely day out. They stopped for morning tea, then stopped again for lunch: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and apple charlotte and cream for afters. Hazel insisted on paying for the meal, so Mollie bought her a pair of knitted gloves to match her new blue hat.
They caught the three o’clock bus back to Duneathly, earlier than planned, neither prepared to admit they were worried about the children - rightly, as it happened.
Joe had positively refused to touch his midday bottle and hadn’t stopped crying since. Bubbles had scratched Megan and she no longer wanted a kitten, particularly one called Dandelion, upsetting Brodie, who’d had her head buried in a cushion ever since. Kieran had got stuck up a tree in the garden and refused to come down until his mother came home, and Eoin had hurt his leg trying to join his brother up the same tree.
‘Thank God you’re home, Moll.’ Tom’s normally neat hair looked as if he’d been trying to tear it out and Finn had aged twenty years in the matter of hours. They flatly refused to believe that, for their wives, it would have been a perfectly normal day.
‘I think it’ll be a while yet before we get to swim the English Channel or climb Everest, don’t you, Moll?’ Hazel muttered with the suspicion of a grin.
‘A long while.’ Mollie grabbed her screaming son and took him upstairs to feed. She’d sort Megan and Brodie out later, then she’d see to Tom.
It was a lazy holiday, if not exactly quiet. Mollie looked up more old friends, and spent as much time with Thaddy and Aidan as she reasonably could. Tom and Finn visited
the pub every night, leaving her and Hazel to discuss life and all its ups and downs and twists and turns. Inevitably, they talked about Annemarie and the Doctor. Mollie said that, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t imagine what her sister was doing in New York: ‘That’s if she’s in New York: she could be anywhere by now.’ As for the Doctor, she didn’t know what to feel. ‘He wasn’t a bad father,’ she confided, ‘though he never petted us or played with us the way Tom does with our children and Finn does with yours. Perhaps Mammy dying was a terrible blow that he never recovered from.’
‘You’re too forgiving, Mollie,’ Hazel said harshly. ‘What the Doctor did to you and your sister was a crime. If I’d had me way, he’d have swung for it.’
‘Is it possible to be too forgiving? Didn’t Christ say, “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do?”’
‘He also said, “Vengeance is mine.”’
The next day, Mollie went alone to visit the Doctor’s grave. She knew that Finn, after much soul-searching, had decided not to put him in the family grave with Mammy, which must have provoked much speculation in the village.
The graveyard lay behind St Saviour’s church, where Mollie had made her First Holy Communion and been Confirmed (she’d chosen Theresa as her Confirmation name). She found the simple white stone with just the Doctor’s name, the year he was born, and the year he’d died engraved in gold: there was no message like ‘Sadly Missed’ or ‘A Dearly Loved Father’. Weeds had spurted through the smooth, white gravel and she plucked them out, then laid a single rose from the bunch she’d bought for Mammy. She tried to think of a prayer to say, but couldn’t. ‘Rest in peace,’ she said softly.
Mammy’s grave was very different. It was well cared for, with not a weed in sight, and there were fresh flowers in a stone vase. She wondered if Finn and Hazel looked after it, or one of Mammy’s friends from the Legion of Mary. The names of the grandparents she’d never met were engraved above her mother’s on the headstone: Padraic Cormac Connelly, who died in 1855, when he was only twenty-five; and Margaret Brigid Connelly, who’d lived on, a widow for almost fifty years, dying in 1904, the year that Finn was born.
She put the roses in the vase, but still didn’t say a prayer. She didn’t believe in visiting graves. Mammy was dead and she thought about her frequently, sometimes talking to her in her head. No amount of flowers would bring her back and she got no comfort from knowing her mother’s remains lay six feet under the soil. She made the Sign of the Cross and went home.
‘You know what I think,’ Tom said on Friday morning when they were getting dressed. They were due to return home the following day. ‘I think you and the children should stay for another week.’
‘Without you?’
‘I’m due back on Sunday, so I have to leave on Saturday, but you haven’t, luv,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’ll be a long while before we come to Duneathly again, at least a year. Why not stay? You’re obviously enjoying yourself, the kids are having a whale of a time, and it’d be nice to spend more time with your brothers.’
‘But I don’t want to stay without you!’ Mollie wailed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on her stockings.
Tom sat behind her, put his arms around her waist, and nuzzled her neck. ‘And I don’t want to go without you, but it’ll only be for seven days. The weather’s the gear, and you know mam will be only too pleased to look after me. She’ll feed me up and I’ll weigh another stone by the time you come home.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Tom.’ He was right, though. The children were enjoying themselves, the weather was lovely, and it seemed selfish to deny them another week. ‘But you can never tell; Finn and Hazel might be longing to see the back of us.’
But when Tom made the same suggestion over breakfast, Hazel looked only too delighted. ‘I’d love you to stay, Moll. Finn will miss Tom now they’ve become such good mates, but having you and the kids for another week will make up for that.’ Megan gave the idea her approval, putting a seal on the matter.
So, the next morning, after a week that had been only too short, Mollie and her daughters waved goodbye to Tom as he climbed into her brother’s car. Finn was taking him to the station in Kildare. His clothes were in an old carpetbag that had been found in the attic; it would save Mollie having to carry them. A nervous Dandelion had been placed in a cardboard box punched with holes so he could breathe.
Mollie knew she would feel sad to see Tom go, but hadn’t dreamed the sadness would be so intense as she watched Finn drive out of the square with everyone, Tom included, waving madly until the car disappeared. She could feel the pressure of his final kiss on her lips. It didn’t help when Brodie began to cry for her dad and Megan called her a cissy.
‘I’m not crying,’ she bragged. Seconds later she burst into tears.
‘What if the boat sinks and Daddy’s on it?’ Megan asked when she’d more or less recovered.
They were sitting on a bench in the big garden full of apple trees. Windfalls lay plentifully on the grass - Nanny had used to collect them and put them in a box outside the door for people to help themselves. Mollie thought she might do the same thing later if Hazel didn’t mind. Her sister-in-law was too busy to do it herself.
‘Ferries don’t sink, darlin’,’ Mollie lied.
‘The train might crash into another one.’
‘That’s most unlikely to happen. Trains hardly ever crash into one another.’
‘Where will our dad be now, Mammy?’ Brodie enquired tearfully.
‘He’ll just about be on the train and Uncle Finn should be back soon. Don’t forget, your dad’s going to ring from a phone box when he reaches Liverpool to say he’s arrived safely.’
‘Can I speak to him?’
‘Yes, Megan, and Brodie can, too.’
Hazel said it was a good idea about the windfalls. ‘Though be careful the wasps haven’t got at them,’ she added. Kieran and Eoin came to help and there was already a box by the front door with a notice saying ‘Please help yourself ’ by the time Finn returned. Nanny had always put ‘pleese’ but no one had liked to tell her she’d spelt the word wrong.
Finn confirmed that Tom had been alive and well when he’d got on the train. He disappeared into his office, saying he’d been neglecting his work lately and needed to catch up. Hazel made sandwiches for his dinner and he didn’t emerge until it was time for tea.
Every now and then, the telephone in the office would ring and Mollie and the girls would tense, waiting for Finn to call and say it was Tom.
They were sitting down to their tea when Tom rang. ‘Whose idea was it for me to come home on me own?’ he asked mournfully.
‘Yours, darlin’,’ Mollie told him.
‘Well, it was a daft idea and I wish I hadn’t had it. I’m not looking forward to sleeping in an empty bed in an empty house.’
‘It won’t be for long, only another seven days,’ she said tenderly.
‘Seven! Jaysus, I won’t be able to stand it.’ He sniffed. ‘I think I’m going to cry.’
Megan and Brodie were pulling at her skirt. ‘I want to speak to him,’ Megan demanded crossly.
‘Look, Tom. The girls would like a word with you. I’ll say goodbye for now. Perhaps you could call again tomorrow? Look after yourself, won’t you?’ She handed the receiver to Megan before she burst a blood vessel.
Megan wanted to know if Dandelion was all right. Apparently, Tom had taken him out of the box on the ferry and given him a cuddle. Brodie didn’t say a word, just listened, astounded, to her father’s voice saying how much he missed her. Then, all of a sudden, the line went dead: Tom must have run out of pennies.
On Sunday afternoon, not long after they’d come back from Mass, the sun disappeared behind a nasty black cloud, the heavens opened, and the rain came down in buckets. The downpour persisted for three whole days: it was no wonder the grass in Ireland was such a brilliant green. The temperature dropped and the house felt uncomfortably cold. In the worst of the winter, M
ammy used to have fires lit in every room.
All the children, Hazel’s included, grumbled because they couldn’t play outside. Mollie read to them until her voice became hoarse. She taught them how to play Snap, but they soon got bored, apart from Megan, who won every game. Hide and Seek turned into a nightmare, as it was such a big house with so many places to hide that finding people was well-nigh impossible. Joe was grizzly and she wondered if he was expecting an early tooth. Bubbles must have decided he didn’t like the rain: he stayed indoors and weed on the mats.
Tom telephoned every night to ask how they were. ‘Fine,’ Mollie said heartily. She’d wait until she got home to tell him that his idea they stay another week was the worst he’d ever had.
On Wednesday it was still raining lightly when she went into the kitchen and found Hazel propped against the kitchen sink, her face as white as a sheet. ‘Help us to a chair, Moll,’ she croaked. ‘I feel as dizzy as a top.’
‘It’s not the baby, is it?’ Resisting the urge to panic, Mollie grabbed a chair and helped Hazel to sit down.
‘No, it’s just me legs refusing to support me any more.’
‘I’ll fetch Finn.’
Finn came, took one look at his wife’s pale face, and telephoned the doctor, who came straight away. Dr Kavanagh looked no more than twenty-one, but had two children and a wife who was expecting another child at Christmas. He examined the patient, informed her she was doing far too much, and she was to go to bed and stay there for at least forty-eight hours. ‘Mrs Kavanagh is exactly the same,’ he complained. ‘She refuses to listen when I tell her she must rest.’
The doctor went, Finn helped Hazel upstairs, and Mollie took over the housework, cursing the ancient stove that was such a pain to use compared with her neat little gas stove in Liverpool. ‘This thing belongs back in the nineteenth century,’ she grumbled to Finn, giving it a kick. ‘No wonder Hazel’s tired.’ She shovelled more coal into the stove. ‘It’s like living in the Dark Ages.’