The Leaving Of Liverpool

by Maureen Lee

  ‘I’ll get someone in to give her a hand,’ Finn promised. ‘She’s always refused to have help, but it’s a big house, she’s got five lads to look after, and she’s pregnant. From now on, I’ll make her lie down every afternoon, even if I have to carry her upstairs and lock her in the room.’

  Two days later, Rosie Hume came to work for Hazel and Finn. She was a big, red-cheeked woman with heavily muscled arms and a willing manner. Her husband worked the land, she told Mollie, and she had thirteen children, four of whom were married: the other nine still lived at home. In no time, she’d made fires in Finn’s office and Hazel’s room, while Finn was still struggling to make one in the living room, then started on the dinner, peeling the potatoes twice as fast as Mollie had seen them peeled before. It made her feel very inadequate.

  Hazel felt well enough to come down for dinner, looking almost her old self again, and grateful for Rosie’s help. ‘I had been doing too much,’ she confessed, ‘but I’ve promised Finn I’ll take things easy from now on. But this week hasn’t been much of a holiday for you, Moll, what with the weather the way it’s been, and me stuck in bed half the time.’

  ‘I haven’t minded,’ Mollie assured her stoutly, though she was glad the week was almost over and tomorrow they would all go back to Tom.

  The children were as good as gold on the way home. Megan was already missing Patrick and gave a little sniff from time to time. Brodie couldn’t wait to kiss Dandelion and her dad. Perhaps Joe understood he would shortly see his father and didn’t grizzle once.

  Tom had said he’d meet them at the Pier Head if he could get away, but there was no sign of him when they got off the ferry. It meant he was unlikely to be at home when they arrived. Mollie caught the number eight tram to Allerton, no easy task with a baby, two small children, and a suitcase. By now, Megan seemed to have forgotten about Patrick, and both girls were in a state of high excitement at the idea of being back in their own home.

  They danced alongside her as she walked up the path and unlocked the front door. ‘Dandelion,’ Brodie called, ‘we’re home.’

  ‘Mind he doesn’t get out,’ Mollie warned. ‘Come on, everyone: in we go.’ Leaving the suitcase on the step for now, she carried Joe inside, longing to get the weight off her feet. The minute he was fed, she’d make the girls their tea. They must be starving and she wouldn’t mind a bite to eat herself.

  At the door of the living room, she stopped, convinced she must be seeing things; the room was full of people, who were staring at her as if she were a ghost. For several seconds, no one spoke, until one of the people - it was Irene, her mother-in-law - burst into tears. ‘Mollie! Oh, Mollie, girl,’ she wept, ‘we didn’t know how to get in touch with you. All we could do was wait for you to come home.’

  ‘Why?’ Mollie wanted to laugh. Tom’s three brothers were there, their wives, and a young policeman in uniform whom she’d never seen before. They all looked so ridiculously solemn you’d think the world was about to end.

  Gladys darted forward and seized Mollie by the arms, waking Joe who began to cry. ‘Mollie, luv. I’m ever so sorry, but Tom is dead.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Mollie snorted. What a terrible thing to say! ‘I only spoke to him last night on the telephone.’

  ‘I’m afraid he is, luv. It happened in the early hours of this morning. He was shot.’

  ‘Shot!’

  As if the word had been a signal, the room sprang to life. Someone took Joe away and half a dozen arms helped Mollie to an armchair where she was patted and kissed, her hair stroked, and told to cry as much as she liked. ‘We’re all here for you, luv,’ a sickly voice said.

  Mollie seemed to be the only person there who wasn’t crying. She jumped to her feet, infuriated by the intrusive hands and the whining, cloying voices. ‘Tom’s not dead.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not true, is it?’ she demanded of the policeman, who was standing clutching his helmet and looking as if he’d sooner be anywhere else on earth.

  He nodded awkwardly. ‘I’m afraid it is, Mrs Ryan. Your husband disturbed a couple of burglars. He died in the line of duty. He was a very brave man.’

  Was. Tom was. Tom really was dead? She shook her head again. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded angrily.

  ‘The undertaker’s, Moll.’ It was Gladys again. ‘They’ll bring him home, if that’s what you want, and lay him out in the parlour.’

  ‘What I want?’ She wanted Tom - the real, live Tom - to kiss her and fold her in his arms, welcome her home, say how much he’d missed her and that they would never be parted again. She kept waiting for this to happen, for Tom to open the door and walk in, because she was finding it impossible to believe that she’d seen him for the last time.

  She ordered everyone to go away, to leave her alone with the children - her and Tom’s children. She needed to think, reason things out in her head, not listen to other people wail and cry. Her own tears were mounting and she’d sooner shed them in private, not in front of Tom’s relatives, who were only waiting for her to cry so they could pounce and start stroking and patting her again.

  ‘I think we should do what Molly wants,’ Gladys said sensibly. ‘If she wants us to leave her and the kids alone, then that’s what we should do.’

  ‘But she can’t possibly be left on her own,’ Pauline protested. ‘Not at a time like this.’

  ‘But it’s what she wants,’ Gladys insisted.

  Lily bridled. ‘Who are you to tell us what to do?’

  ‘Don’t argue,’ Mollie screamed. ‘Just go!’

  At that, they went, shuffling out uncomfortably, glancing at her doubtfully, as if expecting her to change her mind and ask them to stay.

  The front door closed and then only Mollie and her children were left.

  Someone had put Joe in his cot upstairs. She fetched him down, sat on the settee nursing him, and indicated to the girls to sit each side of her. ‘Do you understand what’s happened?’ she enquired, unsure if she understood herself.

  ‘Grandma said our dad’s gone to heaven and we won’t see him again, not ever.’ Megan’s face crumpled. ‘But I want to see him again, Mammy. I’d sooner he’d stayed with us.’

  ‘So do I, sweetheart. So does everyone, but I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.’ She found it hard to believe her own words. ‘But your dad will be happy in heaven, I know he will. For the rest of our lives, he’ll be keeping an eye on us, making sure we’re all right, because he loves us more than words can say.’

  ‘And we love him, Mammy, just the same.’

  At this, Mollie broke down and the tears she’d been suppressing came in a flood that threatened never to stop. Megan cried just as hard and eventually so did Brodie. Mollie wasn’t sure if her two-year-old daughter actually realized her dad had gone for good.

  After a while, they were too tired to cry any more. Brodie asked if Dandelion had gone to heaven, too. Mollie had completely forgotten about the kitten. She despatched Brodie to look for him and he was found in the kitchen, fast asleep in a basket that Tom must have acquired from somewhere, along with a little blue collar that had a bell attached. He woke up and regarded them sleepily with his round blue eyes, then jumped out and began to rub his tiny body against their legs, the bell tinkling all the while, as if a fairy had come to stay. The girls took him into the garden while Mollie made the tea.

  There were two eggs and a few slices of bacon in the larder, enough for the girls. She couldn’t have eaten a thing to save her life. She scrambled the eggs and fried the bacon, but Megan must have felt like her because she left most of the food. Mollie cut it into little pieces and gave it to Dandelion - there was a Bakelite dish by the basket - amazed that she could do these simple, everyday tasks knowing that Tom was dead.

  She fed Joe, tidied the room, put the dirty washing she’d brought back from Duneathly in the boiler to soak, read to the girls, helped Brodie get undressed and into her nightie. The house felt uncommonly, eerily quiet: twice someone knocked on the door, but she
ignored it. Tomorrow, she must let Finn and Hazel know about Tom.

  At eight o’clock, with both girls and Joe sound asleep, Mollie went to bed herself, knowing that sleep was impossible, but it was the place where she would feel closest to Tom. She lay nursing the pillow where his head had lain. It smelled faintly of soap and of Tom himself.

  He’d died a hero, the policeman had said. He’d finished his shift, gone for a drink with his mates, and told them he intended to walk home because his missus and the kids were away so there was no point in hurrying. Along the way, he’d noticed a window open at the side of the Westminster Bank on Woolton Road and, like the brave man he was, had decided to wait for the burglar to appear. It turned out there were two of them: one had been armed and shot him in the head. He’d died on the spot.

  He’d always hoped to interrupt a bank raid, Mollie recalled. And he wasn’t brave, but downright stupid. Why had she listened when he’d suggested she and the children stay another week in Duneathly? Had they come home when they’d planned to, right now he would have been lying in bed beside her.

  The door opened and Megan came padding in. She climbed into bed without saying a word and fell asleep immediately. A few seconds later, Brodie did the same. Mollie lay listening to their quiet, even breathing, conscious of their warm bodies pressed against hers. Joe whimpered in his sleep and she reached through the bars of the cot and stroked his cheek. She felt as if she and her children were stranded on a desert island and would never be found. With this thought in her mind, she eventually dozed off.

  At some time during the night she woke with such an ache in her heart that she could scarcely breathe. She sat up, remembered what had happened, and the ache got worse. She began to cry then: huge racking sobs that threatened to tear her apart. A feeling of emptiness fell over her. From now on, it would always feel like this; nothing would change.

  In a bedroom thousands of miles away, Annemarie woke with a similar ache. She too sat up in bed and began to cry, nursing the ache with her arms. Something terrible had happened to Mollie. She could feel it.

  At that moment, she remembered her old life with the utmost clarity. It rolled in front of her eyes like a silent film, starkly black and white: the house in Duneathly with apple trees in the garden; Mollie, not just her sister, but her best friend in the whole wide world; Finn, who’d taught her how to skim stones on the pond behind O’Reilly’s pub; Thaddy, whom she’d taught how to draw. Then there was Aidan, born at the same time as her darling Mammy had died and gone straight to heaven. She recalled the convent where she’d gone to school, the shops in the square, and the dirt-poor people she’s always felt so sorry for who worked on the farms. They were always included in the prayers she’d said every night before she went to sleep.

  Smiling now, she watched the record of her life roll by, but then the picture began to get murky and she didn’t like it any more. She put her hands over her eyes, not wanting to see, but still the film rolled on, and she witnessed the Doctor commit a mortal sin against her, saw herself and Mollie tiptoe through the moonlit village on their way to Finn’s cottage. She remembered the ship, the Queen Maia, and the reason Mollie had missed it.

  Suddenly, without warning, the film finished, the end flapping noisily around the spool like a bird trying to escape its cage.

  She got out of bed and sat by the window. Right now, she wasn’t quite sure where she was. Was that a forest across the road lit by the occasional lamp? Cars drove by and she wondered what time it was. What was she doing here? Whose house was this? What had happened to Mollie?

  ‘My name is Annemarie Kenny,’ she said aloud. ‘I have a sister and three brothers and I come from a village in Ireland called Duneathly.’ She shivered and felt desperately cold.

  After a while, she returned to bed. When next she woke, it was daylight, she was Anne Murray again, and had no memory of the previous night, just a slight pain in her chest that had gone by the time she sat down to breakfast.

  Chapter 9

  The letters arrived together, both from Liverpool Constabulary. The first advised her that, as Tom had died in the line of duty, she was being awarded a pension of twelve and sixpence a week: the second requested that she vacate the house in Allerton by the end of December. It was merely official confirmation of what Elsie Hardcastle had warned her about. Tom had hardly been in his grave a week, but Elsie thought it best she be prepared.

  ‘These houses are for policemen, not the widows of policemen,’ she said ruefully. ‘You’ll be allowed three months to get out. Me and Charlie will have to leave when he retires.’

  Mollie and the children were going to live with Irene in Turnpike Street. The furniture she and Tom had bought together was to be sold. Everything was being left until the very last minute because Mollie wanted to spend one final Christmas in the house where she and Tom had lived for five blissfully happy years.

  Lily and Pauline, agreeing for once, thought she should leave straight away, only too pleased to see the back of the place that was so full of memories of Tom. Mollie couldn’t be bothered to explain that was precisely why she wanted to stay. She felt convinced that Tom’s spirit was still there, keeping his family warm at night and safe during the day. Also, she wanted to delay going to Turnpike Street for as long as possible: she wasn’t looking forward to it in the least.

  Finn, who’d come to the funeral, had tried to persuade her to return to Duneathly with him - not for the first time. ‘There’s loads of room, Moll, and the girls loved it there. Hazel insisted I try to talk you into it.’

  Mollie firmly shook her head. ‘Hazel’s already got Thaddy and Aidan to look after as well as her own three. And soon you’ll have four. You can’t burden her with more children, Finn. I’d do my share and Rosie Hume will help, but the responsibility for running the house will still fall on Hazel.’ What’s more, she’d feel in the way. Hazel and Finn were entitled to some privacy and where would she put herself during the evenings and at weekends? ‘Anyway, Irene expects us to move in with her. She’s really broken up over Tom: he was her baby and her favourite. I’d feel awful taking his children away. Anyway, I love Liverpool and I don’t want to leave.’ She was a Ryan now and felt her place was with Tom’s family rather than her own.

  Finn had kissed her on the forehead. ‘Life’s unfair, sis. If ever anyone deserved to be happy, it’s you.’

  ‘Nobody could have been as happy as I was with Tom, and it lasted for five whole years. I’ve been lucky, Finn. Even if I never smile again, I’ve been a very lucky woman.’

  The words were said purely for Finn’s benefit. She didn’t want him sitting in Duneathly worrying and feeling sorry for her. Mollie couldn’t describe exactly how she felt, but in truth ‘lucky’ was the last word she would have used. As the weeks passed and Christmas approached, she felt only half alive. There seemed no point to anything any more apart from taking care of the children. She fed them, kept them and the house clean, and managed to do the same with herself.

  With December came the realization that she was expecting another child. For some women, this might have been the last straw, but it lifted Mollie’s spirits just a little. She just knew it was going to be a boy and she would call him Tom. It rather upset her plan to get a job of some sorts when they moved in with Irene, but that would just have to wait.

  Irene came daily, upsetting the girls with her mournful face and noisy tears, her son’s death as fresh and raw in her mind as if he’d only died the day before. Mollie didn’t know what to do with her. She didn’t have the capacity to comfort her mother-in-law and preferred to grieve alone. Lily and Pauline considered her very hard. They told her she’d taken the loss of her husband extremely well. ‘You hardly seem upset at all,’ Lily said with one of her irritating sniffs.

  She saw little of Gladys, whose sons had come down with mumps, followed shortly afterwards by her husband, Enoch, then Gladys herself. ‘I’m keeping well out of the way of your kids, Moll,’ she said. ‘That last thing you’ll wan
t is a house full of invalids on top of everything else.’

  Agatha came two or three nights a week. She’d taken up dressmaking and usually brought her sewing with her. Mollie helped with the hems. Her friend made her realize that a world existed outside the house in Allerton, a world where it was possible to be happy and enjoy yourself, something she forgot a lot of the time.

  One night Agatha brought her a piece of material. ‘A remnant,’ she claimed. ‘I thought you might like to make yourself a new frock for the summer. One of those shifts, completely straight. You wouldn’t even have to bother with sleeves.’

  The material was dark-blue linen and, as Mollie sewed, she imagined herself wearing the frock in another seven or eight months when the weather was fine. There would be no Tom around, but it was evidence that life went on, that summer would come, followed by winter, then summer again, and so on until the end of time. She thought about it while she patiently embroidered a row of tiny white flowers around the neck of the frock, remembering how much Annemarie had hated embroidery or stitching of any kind because it was so slow. She preferred to draw and could dash off a picture in five minutes. Agatha declared the flowers made the frock look dead expensive.

  ‘You could make a hat out of the bits left over and wear it to our Ellen’s wedding next July. Your baby will have been born by then and you’ll be the star of the show.’

  By now, all Agatha’s sisters were engaged or married. She was an aunt twice over, though showed no sign of settling down, despite being the eldest. Even Mrs Brophy had married again: the bridegroom an old friend of her late husband.