A Sister's Promise

by Anne Bennett

  ‘No need to go into the church now, Kevin,’ Mr Sutcliffe said. ‘The service will be halfway over.’

  Kevin had no intention of making for the church. He was going to the house where the bedrooms would be empty and where he could weep out his loneliness and fear of the future laid out like a black hole in front of him.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kevin spent a restless night. He had tossed and turned before eventually dropping off around midnight, then having a nightmare in which his sister had died and he was prevented from seeing her or going to her funeral because they said he wasn’t old enough. He woke up sobbing so loudly, his housemother, Mother Jenkins, came to comfort him and in the end took him downstairs, lest he disturb the others, not at all surprised he was upset. All the children had been told Kevin’s sister was in hospital when they returned from church, though they had been given no details.

  But Mother Jenkins told him she was in a coma, and that was the first time that Kevin had heard the word. As he sat in the kitchen, drinking the cocoa the housemother had made for him, he said, ‘What’s a coma?’

  ‘Like a deep sleep, Kevin.’

  To Kevin that didn’t sound so bad. ‘I sleep deep,’ he said. ‘Granddad was always on about it. Some mornings he had to shake me before I woke up proper, like. Have they tried that with Molly?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Kevin,’ Mother Jenkins said, feeling very sorry for the young boy. ‘Though, of course, I don’t know what treatment she is undergoing.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Kevin commented bitterly, and the housemother had a measure of sympathy with him. Kevin and Molly were tremendously fond of one another – anyone with half an eye could see that – and the over-twelve rule seemed incredibly harsh and inflexible. After all, the lad was turned eleven. However, she knew to say this would not help him and so she said instead, ‘Never mind, Kevin. Let’s hope she is fully recovered soon, eh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kevin said morosely. ‘That’s all I can do, hope.’

  It was the next morning, on the way to school, that the resentment caused him to rebel. ‘Tell them I was took bad on the road and went back home,’ he told the boy beside him.

  ‘You bunking off, Maguire?’ the boy asked. ‘You’ll get the cane if they find out.’

  ‘I’m going to see my sister.’

  Everyone knew that Kevin couldn’t see his sister because he wasn’t old enough. He had told them that himself. The boy said, ‘Thought you said they wouldn’t let you?’

  ‘I’m not going to ask them. I’m going to try and sneak in.’

  ‘They’ll murder you for this.’

  Kevin shrugged. ‘Don’t care. I want to see her. Don’t think it’s asking a lot. I mean,’ tain’t as if I’m a little kid or owt. Anyway, all you have to do is say I was took bad on the road. Afterwards, you can always say you really thought I was feeling ill. You won’t get into trouble for it.’

  ‘All right,’ the boy said. ‘And you needn’t worry, Maguire, I ain’t no sneak anyroad.’

  Kevin knew he had to take the train to Sutton Coldfield. He had the dinner money he had been given that morning, and he also had the two pennies he had been given to put on the collection plate the day before, which his housefather had forgotten to reclaim from him.

  He didn’t feel bad about spending that money, though he knew that certainly his houseparents and the superintendent would not view this in the same light and that he would probably feel the sting of the cane afterwards for his effort, but he really didn’t care. He wouldn’t have been driven to such extremes if he had been allowed to see Molly in the first place.

  He blessed the fact too that he was in school uniform and therefore not marked out as a boy from the Cottage Homes, especially when the stationmaster looked at him with a beady eye when he asked for a return to Sutton Coldfield.

  ‘And where might you be going this Monday morning when you should be at school?’ he asked.

  Kevin had semi-expected this, though it annoyed him that adults would question children as to what they were doing and where they were going as if they thought, just because they were older, they had some sort of right. However, he knew too he hadn’t to show his annoyance or be rude, which seemed to be one of the deadly sins, and he was amazed how easily the lies tripped off his tongue.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment at the Cottage Hospital in Sutton,’ he said. ‘My mom’s meeting me off the train.’ He remembered one of the boys saying before they were bombed out and his mother killed, she used to clean offices and be back home in time to get the breakfast before school, and so he went on, ‘She cleans offices in Sutton so has to leave the house real early.’

  The stationmaster accepted that, knowing that many more women were working now than before the war and so he passed over the ticket without further ado and Kevin settled to wait for the train with a measure of excitement, mixed with apprehension, because travelling on a train, especially alone, was a novel experience for him.

  However, he managed very well and alighted at the station at Sutton feeling quite proud of himself. A few minutes later he was looking down the hill of cobbled stone. He had asked directions of the stationmaster in Sutton Coldfield Station, and knew that once at the bottom of the hill he had to turn right and go straight on, way past the shops, and he would come to the hospital on his left-hand side.

  It was quite a hike before Kevin came to the two-storeyed, red-brick building, with ‘Sutton Coldfield Cottage Hospital’ written on a plaque above the arched front door. However, Kevin knew that he would be given short shrift if he went up the steps and through that door in the usual way. Luckily the hospital stood on the corner of another road called Farthing Lane, and that led to the back of the building.

  Once there, he didn’t know what to do next and he told himself it was worse than useless to stand in the middle of the small yard, where he ran the risk of being seen and evicted in short order. The door was firmly shut, but maybe he could have a peep in the windows, he told himself. But when he tried this, edging himself along from window to window, he could see little, due to the flimsy curtaining on the other side. Eventually, having scrutinised them all and being no wiser, he leaned against the wall, chewing his thumbnail and wondering what to do next. Although he stood outside the hospital that Molly was in, he felt as far away from her as ever.

  When a van turned into the yard, Kevin leaped behind a convenient bush. The van pulled up before the back of the hospital with a squeal of brakes. A nurse came out of the door at the side the same time as the van driver, another woman, leaped out of the cab.

  Laundry, Kevin said to himself, recognising the bundles they carried from the back of the van, for they had laundry delivered to the Cottage Homes too. He waited until the nurse and van driver had actually gone into the building before sidling out from behind the bush, sprinting across the yard and peering inside. A long corridor stretched before him with doors to his left, but to the right were other rooms, and from there he could hear the voices of the nurse and the van driver and so he went stealthily along the corridor.

  He hadn’t the least idea where Molly was and yet now he was inside he hesitated to open the doors and look. These were sick people – they had to be or they wouldn’t be in hospital. What if his sudden unannounced arrival in their room gave them heart failure? Would he be prepared to risk that?

  In the end, though, he had no time to think or worry about other people. When he heard footsteps on the stairs just to the right of him, he opened the nearest door and slipped into the room, intending to hide there until whoever was coming down the stairs had gone.

  He glanced around. He had thought the room empty, it was so quiet. He approached the bed cautiously, and there was Molly, looking for all the world as if she had lain down on the bed for a few minutes and dropped off.

  There was nothing scary or frightening, and so he said loudly, ‘Molly, wake up. It’s me, Kevin.’

  Kevin’s high-pitched voice pierced the black tunnel Molly lay
in, which neither the sombre tones of the police inspector nor the hushed voices of the nurses had disturbed.

  Kevin missed the slight flickering of her eyelids, though, because at that moment the door opened and two nurses came in, astounded to see a boy in the room of a patient that had only been left unattended for a few minutes.

  For a split second they stared at one another and then one cried, ‘What are you doing here, you bad boy?’

  Kevin shrugged. ‘Nothing.’ He felt deflated, completely flat. He had thought if he could see Molly and speak to her, then she would be all right again, but that hadn’t happened and now he had to pay the price.

  He wasn’t surprised when one of the nurses sprang forward and, grasping him by the shoulders, shook him so hard he thought his head would fall off, saying as she did so, ‘Nothing? I’ll give you nothing, you bold strap.’

  ‘Gerroff me,’ Kevin cried, struggling with her to get her to release the hold she had on him. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘If you have hurt her in any way—’

  ‘Course I haven’t,’ Kevin said, outraged. ‘She’s me sister. Why would I want to harm her?’

  The other nurse said. ‘Oh, I know who you are then. You’re the one the policeman asked about, aren’t you? They said you were too young to see your sister.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t think I am, see,’ Kevin declared. ‘I think that’s a stupid rule, that.’

  ‘Do you?’ said the first nurse. ‘As if anyone cares about your opinion. And how did you get in anyway?’

  ‘I sneaked in when the laundry van came.’

  ‘Oh, did you indeed? Let’s see what Matron has to say about all this. I’ll tell you, lad, I wouldn’t be in your shoes—’

  ‘No, wait,’ said the other nurse. ‘Look!’

  Molly had heard the distress in Kevin’s voice and her eyelids fluttered almost alarmingly with the effort of trying to open them, and then slowly and painfully, she forced them apart, though even this small action exhausted her.

  ‘Oh, Glory be to God,’ breathed the nurse.

  Molly looked at her in a blank and rather vacant way as she said, ‘You’re back with us again.’ She went closer to the bed and said, ‘Can you hear me? Blink your eyes once if you hear what I say?’

  Molly slowly shut her eyes and then peeled the lids open again and the nurse gave a small cry of pleasure, but it was Kevin that Molly’s eyes sought, and the nurse, seeing this, pulled him forward. ‘Hello, Molly,’ he said, and saw the answer in the recognition in her eyes.

  Then as she closed her eyes again, the nurse urged, ‘Talk to her again. Say something.’

  And what Kevin said was, ‘Don’t go to sleep again, Molly. You’ve been asleep for ages and ages. You can’t still be tired. Wake up, for God’s sake.’

  When Molly’s eyes opened again, tears seeped from them and trickled down her cheeks, and Kevin leaped away from the bed. ‘I’ve made her cry,’ he said, horrified.

  ‘No,’ the first nurse assured him. ‘Those are happy tears. See, her eyes are still glowing. It is a good sign, believe me, and I am away to tell Matron about this.’

  Because Kevin was the one who pulled Molly out of the coma, the doctor who examined her maintained he had to be allowed to visit his sister because it was good for her, despite his youth, and Mr Sutcliffe at the Cottage Homes was contacted so that this could be arranged. Kevin was quite nervous of this initially, because he thought he would be in trouble. The man did take him to task over both being absent from school without permission and spending his dinner money. Kevin knew, though, that the superintendent’s heart wasn’t in the rebuke, that he was just going through the motions, and Kevin wasn’t punished in any other way, though he was so happy he wouldn’t have cared if he had been.

  When Molly had first woke from the coma, she was disorientated and confused and quite frightened, and any memory she had of the reason she was in the hospital was hazy at first, floating in the recess of her mind. However, these images became firmer and more defined, until she recalled every detail of the terror of the attack. She had thought the men would kill her and when the doctor told her they nearly succeeded, that the blow to her neck had been intended to break it, she wasn’t surprised, but she worried what they would do when they found she was still alive. Likely they would try again, and she was filled with a terrible foreboding that she was living on borrowed time.

  When the doctor went on to say the police were anxious to talk to her, Molly sighed. She had no desire to speak to any policeman and relive the events of that night. She knew it had to be faced, however, and Inspector Norton was the one who came to see her.

  Molly knew that anything she said, or even hinted about that shadowy time, could easily implicate Will and so it seemed much safer to say that she could remember nothing. ‘My memory comes in bits,’ she said. ‘I remember arriving in Birmingham.’

  ‘Where you took lodgings in Aston?’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘That is what you told them at the Cottage Homes.’

  ‘Then it must be right.’

  ‘But you have no idea where it was?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Let’s take you back a little further,’ the inspector said. ‘Your brother said that after your parents died, you were taken to live with your maternal grandmother, Biddy Brannigan, but he didn’t know the address.’

  Molly hesitated for just a moment, and though she covered herself quickly, Norton noticed it. She knew exactly why Kevin had not told the inspector the real name and address of his grandmother and that was because he didn’t want her in any part of his life and he’d know she had a claim on him. She had the right, if she so wished, to take him from the orphanage, and though she had said she wanted nothing to do with him, he wasn’t prepared to take that risk. She didn’t blame him in the slightest.

  She said, ‘That’s right, and it isn’t odd that he didn’t know the address. He was only five when I went away and wasn’t even able to write then. He would sometimes do pictures for me, and Granddad would put them in with his letters. When Kevin was old enough to write little notes, my grandfather still addressed the envelopes. As for me, I lived almost in the back of beyond in Connemara.’ She remembered the place Bernadette McCauley had once told her her mother came from, and went on, ‘The nearest town was Kilvara and that was a good five miles away. My grandmother scratched a living of sorts, but she was getting no younger and was very glad I was there to help her, because there was no one else.’

  ‘She had no other family?’

  ‘None,’ Molly said. ‘She had had children, but they had all died. My mother was the last.’

  ‘And did you or your grandmother make any enemies there?’

  ‘Enemies?’

  ‘Miss Maguire, I believe the attack was meant for you,’ the inspector said. ‘It was planned. No one else has been attacked in that way. You were targeted and if we establish why, we have a good chance of catching the people who did it. Believe me, you very nearly died and might have done if it hadn’t been for Daisy and her young man.’

  Molly’s eyes opened wider. That was the first time she had heard about Daisy’s involvement. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What did Daisy do?’ and listened as the inspector told her. ‘I would like to see her,’ she said. ‘Thank her personally.’

  ‘We’ll see to it,’ the inspector promised. ‘What can you remember of that evening yourself?’

  ‘Nothing of any value,’ Molly said. ‘I remember walking up the lane and then nothing.’

  The inspector sighed, although the doctor had warned him that amnesia was common with a head injury.

  ‘I suppose it’s pointless asking you if you remember what happened to your handbag?’

  ‘My handbag?’

  ‘It’s missing.’

  ‘Sorry. I haven’t a clue where that is either.’

  ‘You did have it with you that night?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I had been out with Kevin.’
r />   ‘It can’t be found.’

  Molly shrugged. ‘I really can’t help you. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe the men who attacked me took it. Perhaps that’s what it was – a robbery that went wrong.’

  ‘Was there money in it?’

  ‘Very little,’ Molly said. ‘Even my savings book has little in it. I hadn’t been at the hotel long enough to save much.’

  ‘I honestly don’t think that people would go to such trouble to steal the handbag of a waitress,’ the inspector said.

  Molly didn’t either, and sincerely hoped her assailants hadn’t taken her bag because her ration book and her identity card had been in there and both had Ruby’s address on because that was where Molly had been living at the time. She didn’t want any of Collingsworth’s henchmen or police poking about around there, because if they did they might open a real can of worms. She thanked God she had kept the travel permit, which all Irish people had to have at the time, in the money belt that Ray had taken off her because there was a picture of her on it and her real address just outside Buncrana.

  The mystery of the missing handbag, though, was solved the next day when Daisy came to visit.

  ‘I just wanted to see you to thank you personally for what you did that night,’ Molly said. ‘The inspector said that you probably saved my life.’

  ‘Glad I was able to help,’ Daisy said, and then went on with an impish grin, ‘Maybe I am the one to thank you, for letting me keep my maidenhead a little longer.’

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘I mean we were very close,’ Daisy said. ‘Your screams put a stop to that, all right.’

  ‘Oh, Daisy.’

  ‘Martin said more than “Oh, Daisy”, I’ll tell you.’ Daisy smiled, and added, ‘You are not his favourite person of all time. But never mind all that now,’ she went on, diving into the bag she had at her feet. ‘Look what the chef has sent you,’ and she withdrew a large orange.