A Sister's Promise

by Anne Bennett

  Tom, was nervous of his mother’s smile. It wasn’t an expression he saw often and it usually boded ill for someone, so he asked tentatively, ‘What did the garda want?’

  ‘He came to tell me the thing I have wished for many a year,’ Biddy said. ‘Your sister, Nuala, and her husband have both been killed in a car crash in Birmingham.’

  Tom felt a momentary pang of regret and sadness. The eldest boy, he had been twelve when Nuala was born, had left school and was already working in the fields with his father from dawn to dusk. He well remembered the tiny, wee child and how she had grown up so slight and fine-boned she was like a little doll. Biddy had never let the boys play with their little sister, but she hadn’t needed to say that to him, he wouldn’t have dreamed of playing with her, he knew his hands were too big and too rough.

  And now she was gone, killed in a car crash, and his mother saying it was what she had wished for years. His mother was a strange one, all right, but what she had said this time was just downright wicked.

  Tom seldom argued with his mother, but this time he burst out, ‘Mammy, that’s a dreadful thing to say.’

  ‘She killed your daddy.’

  ‘You can’t be certain of that,’ Tom protested. ‘And even if it was her news that hastened Daddy’s death, she didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘Well, I think differently and I am glad that she has got her just deserts at last,’ Biddy said with an emphatic nod of her head. ‘And if you have eaten your fill, shouldn’t you be about your duties and not standing arguing the toss with me?’

  Tom knew there was no use talking to his mother when she used that tone – he would be wasting time trying – so with a sigh he went back outside. And when a little later, he saw her scurrying away from the house, he didn’t bother calling out to her and ask her where she was bound for because he knew she probably wouldn’t tell him.

  And she didn’t tell him until he had finished the evening milking and was sitting at the table eating a bowl of porridge his mother had made for supper and then her words so astounded him his mouth dropped open. ‘You are going to Birmingham tomorrow,’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But have you even got the address?’

  ‘Aye, the guard gave it to me. I suppose I can ask for directions when I am there. I sent a telegram for them to expect me anyway.’

  ‘But, Mammy, what are you going for?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I go?’

  ‘Because you never did when Nuala was alive,’ Tom said. ‘Why go now when she is dead?’

  ‘I’m not going for her, numbskull,’ Biddy snapped, ‘but to see the set-up of the place.’

  ‘Set-up of the place?’ Tom queried. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘There are children, more than likely,’ Biddy said. ‘And if there are children they are going to no Protestant to rear. They will come here to me and be raised in the one true faith.’

  ‘Here, Mammy?’

  ‘Well, where else?’

  ‘I know but … well you have never cared for children,’ Tom said, adding bitterly, ‘at least you told me that often enough when I was growing up.’

  ‘I don’t care for children much,’ Biddy said. ‘But I think I know where my duty lies.’

  Tom remembered his life as a child and young boy in that house and the scant attention and even less affection he, his brothers and his elder sister, Aggie, had ever received from their mother. The only one petted and spoiled was Nuala. However, after the letter and his father’s death, bitterness against Nuala seemed to lodge inside his mother, where it grew like a canker, getting deeper with every passing year. Tom had little hope that any children Nuala had would receive any love or understanding from his mother. He could only hope there was no issue from that union.

  * * *

  Stan looked at the telegram in his hand and could scarcely believe that, after all this time, Nuala’s mother was coming here. Like Tom, he thought it a pity she hadn’t ever made the journey when Nuala had been alive.

  However, he told himself maybe she was sorry now for the stiff-necked, unforgiving way she had been with her daughter. She must be indeed to want to show her respect by turning up for the funeral, set for Friday. It would be good too for the children to realise that he wasn’t the only living relative that they had. He loved them dearly but he had worried what would happen to them if he was taken ill.

  Maybe this woman, their own grandmother, would be a comfort to them, especially to Molly. It was important, he thought, for a girl to have a woman’s influence in her life.

  ‘Any answer?’ the telegraph boy asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Stan said, for he would not have the woman arriving without any sort of welcome, so in his reply he said that both he and the children were looking forward to her coming and if she gave him the time of her arrival he would be at New Street Station to meet her.

  Molly too was pleased because it would be a link with the mother she still missed so very, very much.

  ‘D’you think she is sorry now about the quarrel?’

  ‘Aye,’ Stan said. ‘I’d say so. Why else would she be coming?’

  ‘Mmm, I suppose …’

  ‘What are you fretting about now?’

  ‘What will happen to me and our Kevin, Granddad?’

  ‘Why, you’ll stay with me of course.’

  ‘We won’t have to go to no orphanage?’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ Stan told her. ‘Why should you do that when you have a fit and active grandfather up the road willing and able to see to the two of you? And now you have other grandparents too and your uncles are probably living there as well don’t forget. Your grandparents live in the country, on the farm your own mother grew up on. Wouldn’t that be a fine place for you to go for a wee holiday?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Molly said again.

  ‘There is no suppose about it,’ Stan said firmly. ‘Now you get on your feet and give me a hand cleaning up the house. It would never do for your grandmother to find fault, and anyway that Mr Simmons said he would come to see me this evening.’

  Stan was very impressed with Mr Simmons, even though he was slightly awed by such a fine gentleman bothering with the likes of them. He quite understood how it had been between him and Ted, though his son had said it didn’t work with many of the toffs at the front. They might be quite pally while they were in the trenches together, but once out of uniform, all that was forgotten and they’d hardly bid the ordinary soldier the time of day.

  Stan knew that full well. That’s how it was with toffs, and he thought that with Ted dead, any debt Paul Simmons thought he had owed to him had been paid and well paid.

  However, Paul didn’t see it like that at all. He had been terribly upset when he had heard of the double tragedy, and to honour Ted’s memory he felt he should at least show some care for his children. He knew that the family would now be in dire straits with only Stan’s pension and possibly the pittance given by the government to live on, and he was arranging for an allowance to be paid to the family, rising annually until the children should be twenty-one. That is what he told Stan when he called.

  Stan was bowled over by such generosity, but too worried about how they would manage to think of refusing it. Now he knew financially, at least, they would get by and thanked the man gratefully.

  Stan knew he had to be strong and practical for the children. There was to be no more crying, at least in front of them. The terrible, dreadful thing that had happened to their parents had to be put behind them because they had their whole lives yet to live and he knew Ted and Nuala would want them to do that. However, even by now, their grief and Kevin’s dependence on him almost overwhelmed him. He looked forward to Biddy Sullivan’s arrival and hoped she might stay on for a little while after the funeral and help him with them.

  When he saw the woman alight from the train and stand uncertainly on the platform the following evening, Stan knew he didn’t like the look of her. She was dr
essed in black from the hat perched upon the grey hair to the old-fashioned button boots on her feet. Stan had expected that the woman would be in mourning, but what he didn’t much care for was the expression on her face.

  He castigated himself soundly. Here he was making judgements on this poor woman he had never met, who had travelled over land and sea to see her daughter finally laid to rest. What did he expect, that she would leap from the train with a whoop of joy?

  He approached Biddy with his arm outstretched and a smile of welcome on his face. Biddy watched his approach with a cynical smile that twisted her lips into a grimace, but Stan didn’t see that, though he did note that the woman was very tall and very skinny. Everything about her was thin, so that her sallow cheeks, either side of her long, narrow nose, were sunken in. But it was her eyes that shook him, for they were as cold as ice. He plainly saw the malicious intent there and his heart sank. He doubted there would be any help forthcoming from this quarter.

  She ignored Stan’s hand and instead, in the sharp, shrill voice that Stan fully expected her to have, snapped out, ‘Are you Stanley Maguire?’

  ‘I am,’ Stan said, extending his hand to her again. ‘And I am very pleased to meet you at last, though I would have preferred it to have been on a more pleasant occasion.’

  Biddy looked at Stan’s hand as if it might be a snake that would leap up and bite her, and Stan let it fall to his side as she said, ‘I have no pleasure in meeting you, Mr Maguire. Indirectly, you were the cause of all this. If you had exercised full control of your son, you would not have let him marry my daughter.’

  Stan was irritated and annoyed by Biddy’s inference, but still he excused the woman and bit back the sharp retort that had been on his lips. She was likely tired, he told himself, and suffering still from grief. Certainly the lines running either side of her nose and pulling her mouth down in a sag of disapproval spoke of strain of one kind or another. And, he told himself, when a death occurs of a loved one, especially a death so tragic and unexpected, it is surely natural to want to blame someone. Anyway, it would hardly help things to have a slanging match with Nuala’s mother only minutes after her arrival.

  And so instead of the counterattack Biddy might have expected, Stan said gently ‘Come now, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss such matters. Let us get you home, and rested and a cup of tea and a meal inside you, and then I will answer any question you wish to ask.’

  Stan’s reply took the wind out of Biddy’s sails a little bit, for she had braced herself for an argument. She had no option but to follow Stan, because he had picked up her case and begun walking away with it. In actual fact, though she never would have admitted it, she was glad that someone had come to meet her. She had never gone further than her home town before and she’d been flustered by the throngs of noisy fellow travellers, strangers all to her, and the boat with its throbbing engines and hooters blasting out black smoke into the air, tossing about in the turbulent water until she had been dreadfully sick. And there were also the panting trains, with their screeching whistles and the noise of the wheels clattering along the rails and now she was glad to alight from the train and just as anxious to leave the noisy smelly platform.

  However, once outside the station, Biddy was totally unnerved by the volume of traffic, the like of which she had never seen before, especially the clanking, swaying trams, careering up and down the road alongside the buses and lorries, vans and cars. And there was a smell – dusty, acrid, full of smoke and very unpleasant – that seemed to have lodged at the back of her throat.

  The pavements too were filled with hurrying, scurrying people. She had told her son that she would ask for directions, but she knew she couldn’t have easily asked directions of these serious-faced people, who all looked as if they were in a rush to be some place.

  No one took the slightest notice of her and Stanley Maguire either, but then this was a city, Biddy told herself, and strangers were not a novelty, not like back home where every strange face was noted and the person interrogated gently until the townsfolk had ascertained what he or she was doing there.

  She was glad to get out of the mayhem and into the relative quiet of the taxi Stan had hailed, though she commented sourly as she climbed into it, ‘A taxi. Huh, you must be made of money.’

  Stan said nothing for he wouldn’t be drawn into a sparring match. Hoping to engender some sympathy for the grieving children at least, he told Biddy all about Molly and wee Kevin, and how upset they had been; how they were looking forward to meeting her. But she made no response of any sort. By the time they reached their journey’s end, Stan was exhausted and filled with trepidation and knew he would feel happier when Biddy was making the return trip.

  ‘Now,’ Biddy said to Stan that night with the meal over, Kevin in bed and Molly left drying the dishes in the kitchen, ‘you’re telling me that this house is not yours at all?’

  ‘No,’ Stan said. ‘This was Ted and Nuala’s place. I moved in to help Ted care for the children when Nuala went into the hospital. After the funeral, I am going to look into the legal position of keeping this on, transferring the tenancy while the children are dependant. I think it would be the best thing because my house has only two bedrooms, you see, and this has three. Apart from that, all the children’s friends are around the doors, and the neighbours have been kindness itself.’

  ‘You don’t need to trouble yourself with any of that,’ Biddy snapped. ‘And you definitely don’t need any more room, because I am taking both children back to Ireland with me.’

  Stan felt as if the breath had suddenly left his body and he slumped back in the chair. It was the very last thing that he had expected and the very last thing he wanted. The woman didn’t seem even to like children and had reduced Kevin to tears more then once since they had met, because of both her sharp tongue and her total lack of understanding of what the child was still going through.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Stan said. ‘I am their grandfather and have as many rights as you – more in fact, because I know the children, whereas they are strangers to you and that was through your own choice.’

  ‘That is neither here nor there,’ Biddy said. ‘The children had a Catholic mother and therefore they need a Catholic upbringing.’

  Stan felt his heart plummet because he knew the power of the Catholic Church. Ted had refused to turn before marrying Nuala, and Stan had been proud of him for not bowing to the quite considerable pressure from the priests, but Ted had had to agree to marry in Nuala’s church and to bring any children up as Catholics. He had no bother with this, and supported Nuala in her faith, though he had very seldom darkened the door of the place himself.

  ‘They have had a Catholic upbringing,’ Stan protested desperately. ‘They have never missed Mass on Sundays or the Holy Days, and they have been baptised into the Church and attend Catholic schools. Last year Molly was confirmed, and has made her First Communion. What more do you want?’

  ‘She did that because Nuala was alive and Catholicism was drummed into my daughter from the day she was born,’ Biddy said icily. ‘What chance have they got to continue that, living here with you, a Protestant?’

  ‘I’m not a Protestant,’ Stan said. ‘Religion makes no odds to me. I went to Sunday school until I began work and then never went to church again until I married Phoebe, and we brought Ted up the same way.’

  Stan was unaware that he had made things worse for himself, cooked his own goose, as it were.

  An outraged Biddy spat, ‘It just gets worse and worse. You, Mr Maguire, are a heathen and I will not have my grandchildren growing up with a heathen. Whether you allow them to practise their religion or not isn’t the issue. It is a matter of example. Why should they go to church when you do not? No, I’m sorry, I would be failing in my Catholic duty if I left the children with you. I will have a word with the priest after the funeral and see what he says about it.’

  Stan felt the blood in his veins turn to ice. He knew he could in
deed lose the children if the priest backed Biddy. And why wouldn’t he? In his experience, Catholics stuck together over religious issues and the Church’s power was immense.

  Molly, drying dishes in the kitchen, had no idea of the turn the conversation was taking in the living room, but she was disappointed enough anyway. She had had such high hopes of her maternal grandmother and hoped she would help her cope without the love and support of her parents. However, when Molly first saw her grandmother come in with her granddad, she thought that Biddy looked grim rather than sad.

  But, she remembered her mother saying she shouldn’t judge people by the way they looked. She had also said that although her parents had been cross with her for marrying her father, before that they had loved her very much, too much perhaps. And so, when Molly met her grandmother, she told her quite truthfully that she was pleased to meet her at last.

  Biddy just gave a grunt, which was hardly encouraging but Molly was sure she would feel better with food inside her and she was proud of the casserole dish she had produced with the help of Hilda. But Biddy seemed not to like it at all. She said the meat was tough and the vegetables stringy, the potatoes should have been on longer and the gravy was tasteless.

  This was the tone of the conversation around the table, broken only by the way she was continually finding fault with Kevin. She ordered him to sit up straight, use his knife and fork properly, to eat his dinner, not just move it around his plate, wipe his mouth and definitely not to talk with his mouth full. Really, Kevin couldn’t seem to do right for doing wrong and it wasn’t just what her grandmother said, but the snappy way she said it. Molly wasn’t surprised to see her little brother’s eyes brimming with tears more than once and he had seemed quite relieved to be going to bed.

  Molly too was relieved to be away from the woman for a while and had readily offered to wash and dry the dishes. But once in the kitchen, she tried to excuse her grandmother: she was likely tired because she had had a long journey. Molly finished drying the dishes and put the things away, made a pot of tea for the three of them and took it out on a tray.