by Maureen Lee
‘I remember when you drank alcohol in the army.’ Maggie nodded. ‘Oh, but Nell, you should’ve told me dad what he’d done later.’
Nell threw back her shoulders, pulled herself together, as it were. ‘Not then, not now, not ever,’ she said firmly. ‘Imagine how he would have felt had I told him. He was out of this world, Maggie, making love to your mam for the very last time, not that he knew it.’
‘Oh Nell!’ Maggie burst into tears.
‘You must never tell him.’ She looked so kind, so earnest, so caring that Maggie almost wanted to genuflect to her friend. ‘You must promise me that, Maggie. And it’s time Iris and Tom told William the truth. He’s twenty-one and has a right to know the identity of his real mother and father. I know you’ll want to tell Jack, but no one else, please; not your girls, or Iris’s girls. I won’t breathe a word to me mam and dad. If mam knew William was her grandson, it’d be all over Bootle before the day was out. Red knows I’ve had a baby, but not the details. I’ll tell him now, though. So, only six people in the world will know: you and Jack, Tom and Iris, and me and Red. Oh, and William, of course.’
Maggie nodded. ‘I agree.’ When it came to Holly and Grace, she’d just have to think up a suitable lie.
‘It’s ages since the kettle switched itself off,’ Nell got to her feet, ‘and about time I made the tea.’
With her mother ensconced in the living room with Iris Grant, Grace attempted to eavesdrop, but the door and walls of the old house were too thick and all she could hear was a mumble. She wandered into the garden, where a young woman was swinging idly on a rope suspended from a tree.
‘Hello,’ Grace said. ‘I’m Grace Kaminski, Maggie’s daughter.’
The girl grinned and stopped swinging. She was small, neat, blonde and pretty. Grace liked her straight away. ‘I’m Louise Grant, Iris’s daughter. Why is it I’ve never seen you before, yet I’ve met your sister Holly?’
‘Because when we come to Liverpool Mum usually spends most of her time at Nell’s house, and she has these great sons, Quinn and Kev. I’ve always preferred to stay with them than come here. We’ve just been there now. Have you ever met the Finnegans?’
‘No. My mum isn’t a friend of Nell, but she talks about her sometimes.’
‘The Finnegan brothers are dead interesting,’ Grace said fervently. ‘I wish they lived in London or I lived here.’
‘I wouldn’t mind living in London either,’ Louise said wistfully. ‘It’s dead boring here. I was too young to experience the excitement when the Cavern opened and the Beatles came down to visit us on earth.’
‘Don’t you go to work? I mean, it’s Friday afternoon.’
‘I work as a receptionist for my Uncle Frank – he’s a doctor. I’ve got to back in a few hours for evening surgery. As I said, it’s dead boring.’
Grace made a horrible face. ‘I work in my father’s bank, and that’s dead boring too.’
‘Do you think it’ll be just as boring being married?’
‘Probably,’ Grace said gloomily. ‘Mind you, our mums and Nell weren’t bored when they were young and in the army.’
‘Could we start a war, do you think?’ the other girl suggested hopefully.
‘Oh don’t say that. Think of all the people who died – and the ones dying now in Vietnam. What we need is permanent peace. Why don’t we join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, they’re always having marches and some of them get arrested, or there’s Amnesty International?’
‘I’d do it if I had someone to join with. Oh, wouldn’t it be the gear to be arrested?’
‘We could join together. Be sent to prison and insist we share a cell.’
Louise raised her pale eyebrows. ‘That would be great, except I live in Liverpool and you live in London.’
‘One of us could always move.’
‘That would have to be me. My brother William lives in London in a really big house and there might be enough room there.’
‘And hopefully enough for me! I know I live in London already, but it’s about time I left home and took control of my own life,’ Grace said a trifle pompously. Raised voices were coming from the other room and she thought it wise not to discuss the subject with her mother today. It was obvious she had other things on her mind. ‘What a pity,’ she said, ‘that you have to work later. Otherwise you could have come back to London with me and Mum. The Finnegan lads have got a gig there tomorrow and I promised to go. They gave me two tickets, one for a friend.’ She grinned. ‘It would be nice if the friend was you.’
‘I could always ring and ask my auntie to take over my shift for once.’ Louise got to her feet, her face full of hope. She looked as if she’d just won a million pounds on the pools, Grace thought.
Maggie emerged not long afterwards, slamming the door behind her. ‘Come on,’ she said shortly to Grace. ‘We’re going home.’
‘Can Louise come with us, Mum? She can sleep in our spare room. It’s only for tonight – and maybe tomorrow night too,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘She’d better ask her mother first,’ Maggie snapped. She walked down the path and got into the Mini, which was parked in the road. ‘Come on,’ she shouted to Grace.
‘We’re waiting for Louise,’ Grace pointed out. Her mother had forgotten about Louise straight away. Gosh, something really big must have happened today.
Louise emerged, slamming the front door triumphantly, a paper carrier bag stuffed with clothes in her hand. Maggie climbed out of the car and suggested she get in the front with Grace.
‘I’ll sit in the back where I can think me own thoughts without interruption,’ she muttered, more to herself than anyone else.
So it was true! William Grant was Nell’s son. Not that she’d doubted it by then, but Iris confirming it had put a sort of stamp on it, like a bank acknowledging that a payment had been received or a legal document had been made official.
There were bits Maggie hadn’t known, that she hadn’t thought to ask Nell. It had happened, Nell becoming pregnant, at the big party, Tom’s parents’ wedding anniversary.
‘She wouldn’t tell us who the father was,’ Iris said. ‘Though she swore she hadn’t been raped. I’d often wondered if it was Frank, Tom’s brother, who was responsible. He was always keen on Nell.’
‘And I took for granted it was our Ryan when Nell told me last night,’ Maggie said. ‘But it turned out to be me dad.’
‘Your father!’ Iris’s jaw had fallen. ‘Paddy O’Neill?’
‘Exactly,’ Maggie had cried.
What was more, poor William didn’t know that Iris and Tom weren’t his real parents. ‘But that’s terrible,’ Maggie raged. ‘These days people are strongly advised to tell children if they are adopted.’
‘These days, yes, but not then. And William wasn’t adopted in a normal way,’ Iris pointed out. She was angry at the way the truth had come out. ‘My name and Tom’s are on his birth certificate. We are officially his parents and it never crossed our minds that anyone would find out that we weren’t. We trusted Nell completely. If William hadn’t formed a relationship with your daughter, then nobody would ever have known.’
‘It’s still not right,’ Maggie said tightly. ‘He should have been told. Imagine the shock it will be when he finds out now.’
Iris had blanched. She looked sick and awfully old, Maggie thought. A little overweight, very ordinary, yet she’d been quite beautiful in the army. ‘Why will he have to be told?’ she asked in a raw voice.
‘Because he and Holly are madly in love,’ Maggie said, exaggerating more than a little. ‘The relationship must stop here and now and they’ll want to know the reason why. They’ve arranged to go out again tomorrow.’ She recalled that Nell wanted as few people as possible to know. ‘I’ll tell Holly a lie,’ she said. ‘I’ll say William telephoned and doesn’t want to see her again. And Nell doesn’t want your girls to know.’ She hadn’t thought it possible for Iris to look even sicker, but she did now.
&n
bsp; ‘I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose it would be best if they didn’t.’ She rubbed her forehead tiredly. ‘It’s as if everything is collapsing around me,’ she muttered.
Maggie had wanted to ask more questions. Why had Iris and Nell fallen out? They’d been such good friends, but Iris hadn’t been invited to Nell’s wedding. She positively refused to think that it was Nell’s fault. Iris must have done something wrong – or Tom had.
She was so upset that she couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation all that clearly, but at some point she had walked out of the house. It would be a long time before she spoke to Iris Grant again, she thought as she sat in the back of the Mini, listening to Grace and Iris’s daughter chattering inanely. It felt like an entire lifetime ago since she’d felt that carefree.
Iris was writing a note to her daughters to leave on the kitchen table. Dorothy and Clare were due home at around five, and she was telling them that there was ham salad in the fridge. She had nearly addressed it to Louise too, but remembered just in time that she had gone with Grace Kaminski to London. The note was to tell them that their mum and dad were going to London too.
Something really important has come up, she wrote, thinking how formal that sounded. We might not be back until the early hours.
Tom came into the room; he had been to fill the car with petrol. ‘Are you ready?’ He looked terribly cross, not just with her, but with the entire world, furious to learn of Maggie’s visit and of Nell having revealed the truth about William’s birth after all this time. He slammed the petrol receipt on the table and his cross face crumpled. ‘He is our son, isn’t he, Iris? No parents could love him more than we do.’
‘Of course he is, darling.’ Iris put her arms around him for the first time in many years. William might not have come from her womb, but he would always be their dearest, darling son.
Chapter 14
William felt as if he was suspended in mid-air. There was nothing holding him up and any minute he might fall to the ground with an almighty crash. It made him feel very tense, yet he was floating. It was an altogether horrible sensation, his body all crunched up, yet unsupported.
The front doorbell rang. He jumped and discovered he was lying on the bed in his room in London.
His parents had not long gone, leaving a piece of paper with the name and address of his real mother on. Her name was Nell, and she lived in Waterloo in Liverpool. It would seem his parents were no longer his parents, just two people who had no real claim on him other than having brought him up.
‘Perhaps you’d like to write to her,’ one of the people had said, ‘your real mother, that is.’ William didn’t think he’d manage to come to terms with it for as long as he lived. His sisters weren’t his sisters, either!
‘You should have told me before,’ he’d said – or wailed or cried or something terribly dramatic and tearful, because the bottom had quite literally dropped out of his world, which was the reason he’d been floating. ‘You should have told me before.’
They’d only told him the truth now because they’d heard he’d fallen in love with Holly Kaminski and she and he were related, not through his mother, but through his father. It was vital the relationship be stopped before it went any further.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ his fake mother wept – she had cried non-stop the entire time they’d been there. ‘Nell, your mother, wouldn’t tell us who your father was, but apparently it’s Paddy O’Neill, Maggie Kaminski’s father.’
‘Then he must be really old!’ Old enough to be his grandfather. Oh my God, this was so awful. And what made them think he was in love with Holly Kaminski? Last night they had gone to the disco in Covent Garden and she had driven him insane with her silly chatter. At least this terrible, horrible, unbelievable thing that had happened meant he didn’t have to take her to Hampstead Heath tomorrow. Hopefully he would never see her again.
His mother – the woman who had been pretending to be his mother for the past twenty-one years – wanted to stay, but his father – Tom, Mr Grant, his pretend mother’s husband – thought they should go back to Liverpool. ‘Let William get used to the new, er, conditions,’ he said.
Conditions! William turned over and buried his face in the pillow, just as someone knocked on the door, then opened it.
‘Fancy going for a drink, Will?’ a voice asked.
‘Sod off,’ William snarled.
‘Are you all right, old man?’
‘Sod off,’ William shouted.
‘Oh, all right.’ The voice was hurt. ‘There’s no need to take that tone.’
The door closed. William staggered over and locked it. He couldn’t imagine talking to another human being again.
Holly fucking Kaminski! If it hadn’t been for her, he might never have been told that his parents weren’t his parents, that instead they were a woman called Nell and a really old man called Paddy O’Neill who probably had grey hair and walked with a stick.
He tried to calm his thoughts. He would have had to know sometime. It wouldn’t have been right to go through his entire life without knowing who his real mother and father were. In fact, his pretend parents really, really should have told him years ago, right from the start, not sprung it on him when he was a grown man and it would come as an appalling shock. He couldn’t visualise ever getting used to it, he thought fretfully.
He beat the pillow with his fist. What the hell was he supposed to do now?
Sunday afternoon. Nell had been to midday Mass, having slept in for a change. The bells were still ringing; she loved the sound of church bells.
Red was still in bed fast asleep, having travelled back from Ireland on the overnight boat. He and Eamon had entertained the passengers. Eamon hadn’t a piano, but he could get really haunting music that brought tears to the eyes out of a simple hornpipe. ‘Danny Boy’ sounded totally heart-rending.
Yesterday, Quinn and Kev had gone to London in Red’s van. They were meeting up with Grace Kaminski and Louise Grant, Iris’s eldest girl, spending the weekend together, the lads sleeping in the van.
Nell hoped there’d be no hanky-panky, or at least only mild hanky-panky, nothing serious. After all, Kev was only seventeen.
Bits of yesterday kept flashing through her mind: Maggie’s anger, her own refusal to be bullied, relief that the truth was at last coming out. She wondered when William would be told that Iris and Tom weren’t his parents.
She washed a few clothes and hung them on the line – not all that long ago, Sunday had been regarded as a day of rest, and it was frowned on for Catholic women to do housework, but fortunately those days had passed.
When she came in, she switched the radio on, turning the dial until she found music, any music, she didn’t care what sort. Since marrying Red, she couldn’t stand a silent house. It was a lovely sunny day – though one degree more and it would be too hot for comfort.
The kitchen clean and tidy, she put the kettle on for tea, wondering how many pots of tea most women made throughout a lifetime. Thousands and thousands, she reckoned.
There was a knock on the door and she went to answer it. A young man was standing outside and she knew who it was straight away. Ever since Maggie’s visit it had been on the cards that this might happen. Iris and Tom had told him that he wasn’t their child.
‘William,’ she whispered shakily. Poor lad, he looked at the end of his tether: red-eyed, white-faced, so obviously tired. She reached for his hand and pulled him inside. ‘Come on in, luv.’
The door closed, they stood staring at each other, Nell marvelling at how tall he was, how handsome, despite his drawn features, how desperately unhappy.
‘Didn’t you know?’ she asked, and he shook his head miserably. ‘It must have come as a terrible shock.’
‘It did,’ he mumbled. ‘Are you Nell?’
‘Yes, luv.’ There were pains in her stomach, contractions, the sort she’d had in Caerdovey the day he was born. But they were satisfying pains, pleasurable almost. ‘
Let’s sit down,’ she said.
They sat on the lumpy settee – she kept meaning to suggest to Red that they bought a new one. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea in a minute,’ she promised. The kettle was already on.
‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t suppose you know what to do with yourself. How did you get here?’
‘I caught the first Liverpool train from Euston.’ He sighed. ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night.’ He closed his eyes, and she thought he was about to drop off there and then.
‘Perhaps you’d like to have forty winks later. We have a spare room.’
‘I think I might,’ he muttered.
The estate agent had referred to it as a box room. Eamon slept there from time to time. There were hooks behind the door to hang clothes. She’d change the bedding later.
‘Did Iris and Tom tell you who your father is?’ she asked.
He sighed. ‘Yes, someone called Paddy O’Neill.’
She patted his arm. ‘It’s not fair, is it? People get up to all sorts, and years later other people have to put up with the consequences. Anyroad, luv, Paddy O’Neill is a really lovely man. And what happened was more or less a case of mistaken identity. I won’t go into more detail, if you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind,’ he said weakly.
‘Yesterday, Maggie and me, we agreed only to tell our immediate families, otherwise you’d have dozens of half-brothers and sisters wanting to get to know you.’
‘I see.’ He sighed deeply.
She got the impression it was a load off his mind, but realised if him and her lads came face to face she would feel obliged to tell them he was their half-brother. She hadn’t imagined him turning up here and all three were entitled to know the truth.