by Iris Gower
‘Anything wrong?’ he asked a little more aggressively than he’d intended and Travers leaned back, smiling to himself. After a moment, he shook his head, dragging on the end of his cigar, his heavy-lidded eyes half closed.
‘I was just thinking how fortunate it was meeting like this, I’m sure it will be to our mutual benefit.’
‘Aye, you could be right.’ Will was feeling lightheaded, he had eaten nothing all day and his belly growled with hunger. Shortly he would have to leave for home and eat the food his mother would have put on the table for him and after that he was to meet Katie.
There was a sudden stirring in his loins. Perhaps he would take her up onto the Town Hill, to the old, disused hut they had found that hid them from prying eyes. Katie was a lovely girl and liked what he did to her right enough but the trouble was she imagined that he was serious about her. It was easy to tell that she was hoping for a ring on her finger but girls like Katie Murphy from a family of poor Irish were for pleasuring, not marrying. He placed his empty mug on the table and leaned forward.
‘Landlord, another round of drinks over here,’ he called and when the man scuttled to do his bidding, he flushed with pride. It might be a good idea, he decided, to keep in with this man Travers, perhaps there were a few other little tricks he might learn from him.
Chapter Eleven
The moon lay low over the horizon, incandescent and magnificent, cutting a pathway of light through the inky seas. The wind drifted inshore, bringing with it the tang of salt as it ruffled the grass on the western slope of the hill above Sweyn’s Eye. Below in the valley, even the sprawling ugly copper works were beautified by the silver glow.
Katie sat beside William, her breathing ragged and uneven, for a few minutes ago she had been cocooned with him in the privacy of the old hut. He had held her so fiercely and so close to him that his heartbeat had mingled with her own. She had been one with him, lifted high on the wings of passion, her self doubts lost in the joy of the moment.
He had left her arms abruptly then, swinging open the creaking door of the shed and striding half clothed outside. Seating himself on a small tump of grass, he stared out to sea, a brooding dark look on his face.
Katie knew the bite of his rejection and it cut deep. She buttoned up her bodice, feeling like a street girl, for William had torn himself from her embrace as soon as his crisis had come, showing no consideration for her feelings. He had left her unsatisfied and strangely empty and tears she feared to shed trembled on her lashes.
It seemed unbelievable now that she had once boasted to Mali about her cleverness. She had flaunted her knowledge of how to avoid conceiving a child and now, like a punishment upon her, it was the thing she most wanted in all the world.
She gazed up into the sky and the stars were blurred by her tears.
‘Blessed Virgin if you can hear, please help me,’ she whispered.
Suddenly her thoughts crystallised and with startling clarity, she realised that all that she had valued so little – a home, children and a man to come back to her each night – were the very things she longed for. A son just like William to hold close in her arms. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she wanted the babby so much that she could almost feel him suckling from her breast.
A strange rebellious longing had come upon her when she knew William was coming to his moment, she had briefly held him fast, defying him to withdraw from her, but then she had been afraid, feared of his anger and scorn and more deeply of the fact that he might leave her should she demand too much of him. And so her arms had released him and had felt cold and empty.
She raised her head and looked up at him, he was buttoning his trousers, tucking in his striped flannel shirt, and he seemed oblivious to her presence. How wonderful it would be to lie beside him in a real bed, she thought wistfully.
He crouched down, tying the laces on his boots, and she reached out a tentative hand to touch his fingers. He smiled but his eyes were pools of darkness and she could see no expression in them.
She bit her lips, feeling the sting of tears on her lashes, for it seemed to her that once William had tasted of her flesh he almost despised her for what she had given him so willingly.
She wondered what he must be like when he was working in the copper, for sure his mind never strayed to her and yet she thought of him constantly as she packed sheets and wrapped them in brown paper and tied knot after knot. Even as she laughed and joked with Mali, William was there like part of her, influencing everything she did.
When she thought of him working in the heat and stink of the sheds, she died a hundred deaths. Her vivid imagination saw him labouring before the terrible, gaping mouth of the furnace and sometimes in the night she could awake in terror having dreamed that the copper, molten and cruel, had spewed forth to smother him.
The grass beneath her felt soft now, like a bed, and she wished that she could lie here in William’s arms all night. In spite of the darkness, the hour was not late and in the public bars the men would still be drinking ale, singing out their misery and pain and then groping beneath the skirts of fancy women who opened their legs for a few pennies.
She wondered if she was as sinful as they, letting William have his fill of her before she was properly betrothed to him. Did he think of her as a side piece or did he love her, just a little? These were questions she could never ask for William was a man who kept his own counsel.
Katie pushed back her long flowing hair that shone like red silk in the moonlight. She had no idea that her beauty was rare and fragile and it was a source of wonder to her that a man like William should desire her.
He leaned towards her now, his mouth warm against the column of her throat and she clung to him, grateful that he had come back to her from the lost world of his own thoughts. She took his face in her hands wanting to kiss his mouth, but he was unresponsive and after a moment, he drew away.
‘We’d better go.’ He rose to his feet in one swift movement and stood tall against the backdrop of the sea and sky. Below them, the waves washed softly against the silvered beach and in the silence of the night, Katie could almost imagine that the two of them were alone in the world.
‘I don’t want to go home, not yet.’ She spoke softly, pleadingly, but William reached out his hand, drawing her to his side. She brushed down her skirts and pulled her shawl around her shoulders, head bent to hide her tears. It was difficult to push her feet into her boots and William, impatient with her, strode away down the hill, hands thrust deep into his pockets, head back, whistling a thin tuneless melody that fell coldly on the night air, and Katie was bereft.
Hurriedly, she caught him up and in silence they continued the trek down the grassy slopes of the Town Hill which, being high above the town, had escaped the virulent copper smoke and was not barren of verdure as was the Kilvey Hill on the opposite side of the valley. Katie skirted a prickly gorse bush and followed William as swiftly as she could for he was taking long strides and was outpacing her.
She stared at his back and knew deep within her that theirs was no love union for William despised the background from which she’d come. He had been unable to conceal his disdain when he’d first taken her home, standing outside the small cottage in Market Street over which hung the continual smell of fish.
He himself had been given a good chapel upbringing and his mother was the widow of a copperman, a ’finery worker who was paid top money and this was something that Katie was not allowed to forget. William did not put his feelings into words, he did not need to, but his intolerant attitude to the Irish Catholics in the Green Hill district bruised and hurt so much that she sometimes retreated into a well of silence.
‘You’ll be all right if I leave you here, won’t you?’ They had reached the corner of Market Street and Copperman’s Row now and he was moving from one foot to the other as though impatient to be gone. Looking at him, Katie found it hard to believe that on occasions he held her close and whispered words of love into her ear. He was like two people,
so changeable that she felt she did not know him at all.
‘Of course I’ll be all right,’ she replied but her heart was heavy as she watched him stride away. He had made no mention of when they would meet again. His manner towards her was becoming more and more casual and it troubled Katie, for she liked to know where she stood. But she had learned a sharp lesson right at the beginning of her relationship with William, he was a man who did not like to be pinned down.
‘And where do you tink you’ve been until this hour?’ Katie’s father stood in the doorway under the slanting light from the gas lamp on the pavement. He was bare to the waist and his red hair gleamed with droplets of water and she knew he had been trying to wash away the interminable smell of fish.
Katie slid past him into the warmth of the kitchen and moved towards the fire that burned low in the grate. Alongside the hearth, in his pram with no wheels, baby Sean lay grizzling, his face red, his small fists waving in the air as though in protest.
‘I’m talking to you, girl, where have you been?’ Tom repeated his question and Katie took a deep breath before answering him.
‘I’ve been walking up in the hills.’ She put her shawl carefully over the back of a chair, hoping that no telltale pieces of grass would shake loose from its folds. ‘And I’ve been down near Mount Pleasant where the houses are tall and posh, and thinking I was how much I’d like to live in one of them. Blessed Mother, is that wrong of me now?’
Her father gave her a sharp cuff across the head. ‘Don’t you go taking the name of the Virgin in vain for I’ll not have it. Now will you stop that babby’s noise, for his crying fair destroys me?’
‘Where’s me mother?’ Katie lifted Sean in her arms and he lay against her sweet and heavy. Tom jerked his head in the direction of the stairs.
‘Gone up to bed, she’s settled the other childer down for the night and was waiting for you to come home to see to Sean.’
‘Well I’m here now.’ Katie felt guilty at the reproach in her father’s voice for he was useless with the little ones. ‘And all the boy needs is washing and changing.’ She rested Sean on her knees. ‘Then he’ll go off to sleep for he’s a peaceful enough child.’
The baby gulped into silence, his chin quivering with the prolonged effort of his crying. His small plump arms with bracelets of flesh around the wrists were still now as he lay quiescent, seeming to know instinctively that he was being cared for by loving hands.
Katie smelled the acrid tang of the boy’s urine as she dropped the sodden cloth from his loins onto the floor. ‘Poor babby, you only want to be clean and dry don’t you and sure that’s not much to be asking from life.’ She kissed his round cheek and his searching mouth turned as though seeking succour.
‘There, I’ll put some egg white on your little sore backside and soon you’ll feel much better, my babby.’
When she had dressed Sean in his nightclothes with the long overgown, the end of which was pinned up over his feet, she rose reluctantly from her chair. There was nothing more she could do for the little one now except give him to her ma to suckle.
‘I’ll take him up then Dad,’ she said. ‘Are you going to kiss him good night?’
‘I’ll kiss him sure enough, glad to have some peace from the boy so I am.’ Tom’s arm rested on his daughter’s shoulder for a moment. ‘Such a fine little mother you’d make yourself, Katie girl, when are you going to bring a fine young buck home to meet your ma and me?’
‘Oh go away with you, Dad.’ Katie brushed his arm aside. ‘Sure there’s plenty of time for that.’
When Katie entered the bedroom, her mother was fast asleep. Jess’s cheeks were sunken for she had lost most of her back teeth and yet there was still an air of prettiness about her as, with her dark hair loose about her face, she relaxed against the pillows.
‘Mammy, wake up,’ Katie said gently. ‘Sean wants feedin’ so he does.’ She sat at the side of the bed waiting as her mother rubbed her eyes sleepily.
‘Oh give the boy here, ‘tis only a moment since I closed my eyes.’ Jess put the baby onto her thin breast and waved her daughter away.
‘Go and make me a cup o’ tea, there’s a good girl,’ she said, her hand resting on her throat. ‘I’m that parched I could drink the sea dry so I could.’
Katie left her mother and looked into the small box-like bedroom next door and saw that her brothers were asleep. Kevin and Michael were like two peas in the same pod and with scarcely a year between them they were almost like twins. She sighed, it might have been good to have one other girl in the family, a sister in whom she could confide her feelings and doubts about William.
She paused in the darkness of the landing, looking down into the well of the stairs. She could feel again the way William’s strong body had taken possession of her own and love flowed through her like fire. She felt sure that the Holy Mother would forgive her the sins of her flesh even if Father O’Flynn would not.
When Katie returned to the kitchen, her father was sitting before the fire, his long legs stretched out towards the dying embers. He looked tired and Katie noticed that there was a hole in the toe of his sock. She rested her head against his shoulder.
‘Sure an I’ll have to do some darnin’ round here,’ she said. ‘Just look at you with your big feet showin’ for all to see, it’s ashamed I am.’
Tom smoothed the hair back from her face. ‘You’re right girl, but you won’t do any darnin’ on these socks – not tonight at least, for I’m off down the Mex’ for a pint before the public closes.’ He drew on his boots and Katie watched him in silence for a moment.
‘Do you have to go out, Dad?’ she asked at last. ‘It’s gettin’ that late, you should be in your bed by rights, you look tired.’
‘Ah but a few pints of ale will liven me up,’ he smiled. ‘An’ since when do I have to answer for my doing to me own daughter?’ He opened the door and a rush of cold air swept into the kitchen.
‘Look tired yourself, so you do, there are shadows beneath those eyes of yours that I don’t like to see so get off to your room now, do you hear?’ He left, closing the door with a loud bang and Katie sank into a chair, staring into the almost dead fire.
Soft footfalls sounded on the stairs and Jess poked her head into the room, staring round her with wide eyes.
‘Has himself gone out then at this time o’ night?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she came into the kitchen, hugging a thick knitted shawl around her thin frame. The nightgown that trailed over her bare feet had been patched so many times that it had the appearance of a quilt.
‘Dad’s only gone for a pint or two,’ Katie said in her father’s defence. She watched as her mother rubbed her eyes sleepily and a great sadness filled her. She wondered if her mammy had ever loved Tom or he her, at any rate they were almost indifferent to each other now, like strangers sharing the same house.
‘I think Dad only drinks so that he can sleep soundly in his bed at night.’ She didn’t know why she felt it necessary to defend Tom and she wasn’t surprised when Jess sniffed derisively.
‘There’s more on your dad’s mind than sleep when he’s in his cups, girl,’ she said softly. She sighed long and hard. ‘And I’m far too tired to put up with his pesterin’ tonight.’
Katie was embarrassed to hear her mother talk that way and she rose, placing a few sticks on the fire, bending over the embers to blow on them and bring them into life.
‘Do you want that cup of tea now, Mammy?’ she asked and her mother’s chair creaked as she rocked herself to and fro, hugging her shawl around her shoulders.
‘I do that.’ Her mother pulled at the back of Katie’s skirt. ‘Look at me girl, you’ve been out with that young pup William Owens haven’t you? Tell me the truth now, ’cos I know it sure enough when you lie to me.’
‘Yes, I’ve been out with William, so what about it? I haven’t been doing any wrong.’ The words almost burnt her lips but she had to say them. Her mother wasn’t convinced.
‘Look, girl, don’t go bringing trouble home here now will you? Your father thinks the sun shines out of your ass, he’d kill you for sure if he thought you was playin’ around.’
Katie’s mouth was dry, she didn’t know what her mother expected her to say and so she remained silent, edging the kettle over the small flame, hearing the welcome sound of the water singing to the boil.
‘Take a lesson from your own mother,’ Jess continued remorselessly. Her hand gestured to the drabness of the room with its meagre furnishings. ‘I don’t want you to end up like this, you can have better, believe me, but you must hold out on a man, don’t give him nothin’ until he puts a ring on your finger. Please Katie, listen to your mammy, I only wants what’s good for you.’
The urgency of Jess’s voice surprised Katie. She watched her mother lean forward, the shawl slipping from her thin shoulders. ‘Be good, Katie, that’s all I’m asking you, for the joys of the body don’t last.’
Katie hung her head and her glowing hair fell like a curtain of silk over her face, a shield between herself and her mother’s probing eyes. Surely her mother’s words were not true, life could not turn sour, not while she had William to love.
Jess sighed again, heavily. ‘From what I know of this William Owens, he’s not the sort for marryin’. Seen his kind before, burnin’ with a fever he is, wishin’ only to leave this place behind him and look for better things, he’s not for you, my little Katie.’
Pain raged low in Katie’s belly, she felt that she would explode with the anguish rising inside her. ‘What are you trying to do, Mammy, destroy me?’ she asked and the tears slipped soundlessly down her cheeks. In a moment, Jess had gathered her into her arms, holding Katie to her thin breast.
‘’Tis to save you hurt I’m speakin’ so,’ she said, her voice harsh. ‘And lettin’ a man take his pleasure o’ you does not bind him, beast gives as much to beast.’
For a long moment, Katie clung to Jess knowing instinctively the truth of her words. At last, uneasily, she drew away from her mother.