‘It is.’ She stared at him before seating herself in the big padded chair standing to one side of the glowing range which he had indicated with a wave of his hand after he had spoken. ‘I didn’t know you were . . . well, that way inclined.’ That sounded ridiculous, and Polly hastily qualified it with, ‘What I mean to say is, I knew you were a Catholic, of course, but I wasn’t aware your faith meant that much to you – enough to enter the priesthood.’
Michael drew one of the hardbacked chairs from underneath the kitchen table and placed it opposite Polly’s on the other side of the range without replying immediately, and it was only after he had pushed the big black kettle further into the glowing coals and then seated himself that he said, his voice quiet, ‘It wasn’t my first choice, but then you know that.’
‘Oh, Michael—’
‘No, let me explain.’ He cut off her quick response with a raised hand, but then sat looking at her for some seconds more before he said, ‘Funnily enough, it was your old lodger, Miss Collins, who set me on this track originally.’
‘Miss Collins?’ She didn’t understand any of this. Michael, a priest!
She was more beautiful than the picture he had carried in his mind. Michael had to pull his eyes away from her before the urge to just sit and drink her in became embarrassing for them both, and he rose quickly, saying, ‘I’m sorry, what am I thinking of? Take off your coat and hat while I make a pot of tea and then we can talk before you go upstairs to see Mother, or would you rather see her first?’
Mother, not Mam. And his voice was different. Or perhaps it wasn’t his voice as such, but his choice of words and the way he articulated them. Polly took a deep breath and said, ‘I’ll see her later if that’s all right,’ before standing and divesting herself of her outdoor clothes, then sinking back in the seat she had vacated and sitting watching him mash the tea. She couldn’t get over the fact that Michael was only a few feet away from her, but never, in all the times she had imagined meeting him again – and she had imagined it in the darkness of the night with Frederick’s snores puncturing the air waves – had she thought it would be like this. ‘How . . . how is your mother today?’ she asked when the silence became unbearable. ‘Is there no chance at all she could pull round?’
Michael shook his head without looking at her. ‘She weighs less than nothing, and as I understand it from Dr Henderson, everything is shutting down. It’s only a matter of days, if not hours.’
‘I’m sorry.’ And then, as he turned and handed her a cup of tea before sitting down with one of his own, she said, ‘Luke said yesterday that Dr Henderson knew where you were all this time,’ and although she tried to keep the hurt out of her voice, a thread came through.
Michael leaned back in his chair. How did you explain to someone like Polly, someone who was intrinsically a fighter and who would move heaven and earth and never admit defeat, that you could be crushed to a point where living was a big black hole in which there was no shaft of light to penetrate the darkness? He had felt like that once; a breakdown, the doctor at the seminary had said. All he had known was that but for Father McTooley and Father Hogarth he would have lost what was left of his mind. And when, slowly, he had begun to get better, he had had to face the fact that he was an essentially weak man – like his father. But in the facing of it some things had clarified, one being the course his life would now take. Father McTooley had once said that men became Catholic priests for all sorts of reasons, but if they thought they were going to escape life they were in for a shock; priests saw more of life than anyone. He’d known what the good father meant, but he didn’t agree with him wholly. He had admitted that to his confessor, who hadn’t seemed unduly worried.
‘Michael?’ Or should she call him Father? The thought was like a slap in the face.
‘I thought it best there was no contact of any kind, Polly.’ His voice was low and steady and revealed nothing of the turmoil he was feeling inside. ‘When I left the farm that day I hardly knew what I was saying or doing, and when I met Miss Collins, well, she talked to me. Did you know she was a Catholic too?’
Polly nodded, and he continued, ‘She suggested I go and see my priest, but when I said I couldn’t, that I had to get right away from Sunderland within the hour or I’d do murder, she gave me a name of someone to go to down south. Someone influential within the Church.’ He didn’t mention here that he had always believed Miss Collins had an ulterior motive for her magnanimity, namely that she had had plans for Polly herself, and with him out of the way for good it brought them closer to fruition. ‘And that was the start of it. I . . . I was ill for a time, very ill, and when I began to get better it became clear what I should do.’
Polly had always felt Miss Collins had known far more than she had let on. She stared into Michael’s fine-featured face, which was too beautiful for a man’s, and was aware of a core of anger deep inside. It might be irrational – Miss Collins had helped him after all – but surely, if she had had any liking for her at all, the other woman would have told her where Michael had gone.
‘I’d always had a fascination with the ceremonial side of the Church.’ Michael smiled now, and Polly forced herself to smile back. ‘The beauty of the services, the chanting of Latin at the Mass, the smell of incense, the order and purity of it all . . . And after I found out about –’ he hesitated a moment – ‘about my parentage, I felt filthy, unclean, for a long time.’
‘But it wasn’t your fault,’ said Polly quickly, appalled.
‘I know that, the good fathers helped me to understand the mechanics of fallen sinful nature—’ He stopped abruptly and then smiled again before saying, ‘That sounds very holy, doesn’t it? Father McTooley would be proud of me.’
She didn’t know what to say. However much she had suffered, he had suffered ten, a hundred times more, and all because of the woman lying upstairs and their father. ‘Are . . . are you happy, Michael?’ she asked softly.
Happy? That transient emotion wasn’t even in the order of things. Peace of mind was what he craved, and that came more frequently now. He had been right to leave Sunderland, though. He looked at her, his eyes veiled. She was still in his mind and his heart, but it was how his body had reacted at the first sight of her that told him he could never come back. That he dared not come back. His eyes roamed over her face and then he drained his cup, forcing his voice into an evenness that was all at odds with his churning insides as he said, ‘I’m doing what I was called to do, I believe that, so perhaps fulfilled would be a better description. But of course I am still training, I have a long way to go yet.’ And then, recognising the strength of his emotion and the longing that was sweeping over him to throw himself at her feet and clasp her to him, pressing his head between her breasts, he rose to his feet and walked across to the tall cupboard at the side of the range. Help me, God. Dear God, help me . . . And as though in answer to the silent prayer, he heard the back door leading into the scullery open, and a second later Elsie Appleby popped her head round the corner of the kitchen.
‘Eee, I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t know you had company.’ She was holding a steaming plate of tripe and onions and a small crusty loaf. ‘I thought you’d be ready for a bite.’
‘I am, Mrs Appleby, I am.’ Elsie had been in residence when he had arrived at the house the night before, and it had amused him then that her attitude had bordered on the reverential. This was the same Elsie Appleby who had skelped his backside when he was a bairn and she had caught him and Luke in her backyard, messing about with her husband’s pigeon cree. They had only been trying to feed the birds a piece of stale bread, but she had acted as though it was the crime of the century and scared them both to death. ‘This is my cousin, Mrs Weatherburn, by the way.’
So he knew she was married to Frederick. As Polly nodded at the bustling little woman who was now straightening the kitchen table’s oilcloth and setting the plate down with some ceremony, she found herself wondering what Michael had thought to the news.
> ‘Oh, aye, come to see your auntie, have you, lass?’ Elsie said sympathetically. ‘’Tis a cryin’ shame, an’ her still a young woman.’ Elsie was roughly the same age as Eva. She continued, turning to Michael, ‘This’ll stick to your ribs till tonight, Father, when Luke’s home. I’ve got you both a nice pot pie steamin’ for dinner. Do you want me to take your mam a cup of broth afore I go? She normally has one this time of day.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Appleby.’
As Elsie lifted the lid of the big kale-pot at the back of the range and ladled a couple of spoonfuls of rabbit broth into a mug, Polly said quickly, ‘I’ll take it, Mrs Appleby, and leave my cousin to eat his meal in peace.’ Suddenly she wanted to get the ordeal of seeing Eva over with.
Elsie, who had had no time for her neighbour in the past but was now already extolling her to sainthood owing to Eva’s imminent demise, was only too pleased to relinquish the mug.
Polly went straight to the stairs without glancing Michael’s way, although she knew he was looking at her, and as she heard Elsie start fussing about the meal again, she climbed the narrow treads quickly. Once on the small landing she glanced about her. She should have asked Michael which room his mother occupied, but it was too late now. She knocked cautiously on the first door and then opened it carefully.
The narrow iron bed was empty and she realised, with a little jolt to her heart, that this must be Luke’s room. Besides the single bed the room held, there was one tall, narrow wardrobe, the doors of which were closed, but the main bulk of the room was taken up with books. Seemingly hundreds of them. They covered an old battered bookcase along one wall and spilled out on to the floor in stacks several feet high.
Polly took a tentative step, and then another into the room, drawn by something stronger than herself. As she studied the bookcase she saw the main content was on the theme of politics, with volumes on the rights of the working man, women’s rights and trade unions alongside one another. There were no books of a fictional nature at all, as far as she could see.
Oh, Luke. She stood for some seconds – the mug pressed against her thudding heart – just staring at the books, and the pain in her chest told her something she had been trying to ignore for months, if not years. She loved him. She shut her eyes tightly, but the knowledge was out of her subconscious and into the forefront of her brain. Not as she had loved Michael, as a young, starry-eyed lass with her childhood sweetheart, but as a fully grown woman loves a man.
Her eyes opened and lowered instinctively to the floorboards, as though she could see the man below. She blinked, her heart racing still more. Quite how or when it had happened she wasn’t sure, but she knew now that she loved Michael as a sister did a brother. He was dear to her, he would always be dear to her, and she could have wept for him down there, and when she thought of the two happy, trusting bairns they had been and how cruelly the pair of them had been thrust into adulthood, she could weep still. But her tears would be for two distant, misty figures from the past, and the bairns they had been didn’t exist any more. They were different people now. How different she hadn’t known until she had seen Michael again.
She was still standing gazing downwards, aware of a strong element of relief in the racing confusion of what her mind was trying to absorb, when she heard Elsie call something to Michael and then a moment later the kitchen door bang. The noise galvanised her frozen limbs and she stepped out of the room quickly, shutting the door behind her and walking along the landing to Eva’s bedroom.
Her throat felt tight as she knocked gently on the door and she moistened her lips as she turned the handle. It had been five years since she had seen her aunt, and her last memory of Eva was of a big, heavily made, handsome woman, with a force of personality to match her build, weeping hysterically as Frederick had led her from the farmhouse to his horse and trap. The gaunt skeleton in the bed bore no resemblance to a living creature, let alone her aunt, and for a moment all Polly could do was to stare in horror at the sleeping figure. And then it opened its eyes and looked at her, and Polly forced herself to move forwards on legs that felt shaky as she said, ‘It’s me, Aunt Eva, Polly. I’ve come to see you as you asked because Gran is ill.’
The eyelids shut for a moment and then rose again, and now the gaze was tight and deep, fixed on her face. The whole bone structure of the skull was visible under the yellow skin, the once thick, vibrant hair sparse and wispy. Polly could hardly believe someone could be so emaciated and still be alive. She wished her aunt would say something, anything. And then her wish was granted when the mouth opened and Eva said, ‘Polly Farrow, or Weatherburn as you are now. Well, well, well. Come and sit by me, Polly.’
Polly felt herself beginning to sweat with an unknown dread as she approached the bed, partly because the voice was the same as it had ever been and all at odds with the skeletal frame whence it had emerged. But it was her aunt’s eyes that were freezing her blood and causing the goose-pimples to prick her skin. Their greenness was so dark as to be black and the power in them was riveting.
‘I’m sorry to find you so poorly—’
‘Don’t give me that.’ The tone was low but clear. ‘You hate me. You’ve been wishing me dead for the last five years.’
‘That’s not true.’ Polly hadn’t sat down on the straight, hardbacked chair at the side of the bed but had remained standing. Now she offered her aunt the mug of broth, and when it was refused with an irritable gesture from one claw-like hand, she placed it on the little table next to the chair, before repeating, ‘That’s not true, Aunt Eva.’
‘Well, I hate you.’ The words were steady and ominous. ‘All the trouble you caused, and then you calmly go and marry Frederick Weatherburn not six months later, you dirty little strumpet. I know all about you. Flaunted yourself at all of ’em, I know, but it was Michael who was daft enough to fall for your whoring.’
For a moment Polly could only gape at the figure propped on the pillows. Her aunt was mad. Her granny had always said Eva was mad, and she was right. ‘That’s not true, Aunt Eva, and you know it.’ Compassion for the remains of what once had been a bonny woman moderated Polly’s tone, but her stomach was heaving at the nastiness of the confrontation.
‘Spoilt you from the day you was born, me mam and da did. There was no one like you and yet they wouldn’t give their own daughter the time of day.’
‘Aunt Eva—’
‘And what are you when all’s said and done?’ The words were coming deep and guttural now, and they were coated with a bitterness that was tangible. ‘A dirty little trollop who’s living in clover because she opened her legs for money, that’s what. I’ve always hated me mam and da, for as long as I can remember, but do you know something, Polly Weatherburn? I hate you more, aye, I do, and that’s the truth. I wanted to tell me mam that I’ll die cursing her, but you’ll do even better. Aye, you will.’
‘Stop this now, you terrible woman.’ Although Polly didn’t shout, such was the quality of her voice that it brought Eva’s venom to a temporary halt, but she rallied almost immediately.
‘Me terrible?’ Her eyes were unblinking. ‘Well, maybe I am at that, but have you asked yourself who made me that way, eh? Your precious gran and grandda, that’s who. An’ I’ll see ’em in hell, and you an’ all.’ Eva had raised herself on the pillows with a strength born of hatred, her scrawny neck straining out of her calico nightdress as she shouted at Polly, who had turned and was leaving the room, and even when they heard Michael running up the stairs she still continued to rant on.
Polly passed Michael in the doorway and walked straight down the stairs and into the kitchen, more shaken than she had ever been in all her life. Thank goodness her granny hadn’t been well enough to come. That was the first coherent thought when the shock began to recede. And how incredible that a woman like her aunt could have given birth to someone like Michael. That was the second.
It was quiet now upstairs, very quiet, but it was a full minute before Michael came into the kitchen, and hi
s face was very white. ‘She’s gone into some kind of coma. I need to call the doctor. You’ll wait, Polly? You won’t leave before I get back?’
The pungent smell of the tripe and onions still sitting on the plate on the table was making Polly feel nauseous, but she nodded quickly. ‘Of course not. You go.’ She didn’t want to stay here with the personification of evil lying upstairs, but there was nothing else she could do.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Michael was gone for fifteen minutes, and Polly felt it was the longest fifteen minutes of her life. She busied herself clearing the table and washing the pile of dishes she found in the deep stone sink, before stoking up the fire in the range with more coal and filling the kettle to make a fresh pot of tea for Michael and the doctor. By the time they walked in the door she had stopped shaking and was able to converse quite naturally with Dr Henderson once he came downstairs after examining his patient.
‘She won’t come out of this coma.’ He was quite definite. ‘But exactly how long . . . I’m not sure. It could be tonight, or perhaps tomorrow, there’s no telling.’
The Stony Path Page 31