“Ah, Mrs. McHugh will be along this afternoon,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” the girl said, and she moved a bit closer to me. Her eyes watched me sucking on the pipe, and I could see, in that half brain of hers that she was thinking about whether she should tell me something or not.
“What’s wrong? Spit it out, girl!”
She looked at the smoke circling round my head, then back to my face.
“I have some bad news, Betty. It all happened over the weekend, but you were too sick to let you know. I’m very sorry to have to tell you.”
I felt the pit drop out of my stomach, the way it always did when someone warned they were about to deliver bad news. The dread – searching through a thousand possible situations while you waited on them to open their mouths and announce what the truth of the matter was.
“Mick McHugh is dead. He died on Sunday. He was buried this morning.”
I held the pipe, suspended, in between my thumb and forefinger.
“You’re joking,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say because why would the girl ever joke about something like that?
She shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Betty. Poor Mrs. McHugh. She was in a terrible way. They had to hold her up at the funeral and everything.”
My poor, poor friend. She loved Mick, the way I loved Jimmy. And I knew how much losing Jimmy hurt.
I shook my head. I had nothing to say, not to the girl. She looked at me for a minute and asked me if she could do anything for me.
“No,” I said.
“She’s gone from Number 43 too. She got the sack.”
“What?” I roared. “What did you say?”
She leaned in even closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Something to do with stealing so the word goes.”
Well, I nearly fell back into my stupor. Mrs. McHugh stealing?
I looked out the window, trying to gather my thoughts. All the talk from Mrs. McHugh about the Nanny. She must have had something to do with it.
And now Mick dead.
I felt terrible for my friend and for the past few days she’d had and for the days that she had ahead of her now. I’d write her a note, get the girl to deliver it for me, tell her to come and see me, to tell her I was sorry I’d been sick and had been no benefit, no comfort to her at all.
I needed to tell her about my discovery too. About the Nanny, about Mad Maggie.
When the girl had gone downstairs, I took out my notepaper and started to write. I always turned to writing when I didn’t know what else to do.
I thought about Mick as I wrote. I remembered him coming in off the dock back in the day, the sweat still wet on his back, his muscles bulging under this shirt from all the lifting and dragging. He said it was all he was good for, that he knew nothing else.
But he was an intelligent man, was Mick. I always thought it was a pity that they’d never managed to have the family they wanted. He would have been a lovely da. Just like Jimmy would have been too, I suppose.
I rubbed the little nub on my middle finger, formed from where the pen rested. I always kept the nib clean, but still ink leaked into that nub, making a navy-blue swirl on my skin. I looked out the window, over at Number 43, thinking about my friend and all the hours she’d put in. All the mornings she’d arrived, to organise the breakfast, the lunch, the dinner, the cleaning, the shopping, the welfare of the Thomas family, the confidante of each and every one of them.
I folded the paper into the envelope.
I roared for the girl. If she went now she could get it up to Mrs. McHugh and she might come down in the afternoon.
How I wanted to talk to Mrs. McHugh! I felt as if I’d been at sea for a month, stuck in this sick bed, cut off from the world. All I wanted was to be able to get out of this bed, to go to her, to tell her I was sorry for everything that had happened to her.
As I heard the girl’s footsteps on the stairs, I felt an awful wave of nausea come over me. It seemed to come from my toes and swept through me, rendering me quite dizzy. I put the pipe on the locker.
I went to lift the covers, but my hands were so weak that all I could do was slump down in the bed and lay my head back on the pillow.
The girl came in and right over to the bed. The envelope slipped out of my hand, falling to the floor.
“Betty!” she said.
I touched my shoulder, which was paining me, a terrible ache running all the way down my arm, rendering me useless.
“Betty!” I heard the girl cry again and now she was shaking me, but it was no use.
I couldn’t respond. I could hear her, but it was mixing with a light, a bit like the dreams I’d been having all week.
And then I saw him.
Jimmy. He was smiling, and he looked younger, back in our good days, when we were newly married and fresh and every day was a wonder.
He didn’t say anything – he just held out his hand for me.
He wanted me to go with him.
I closed my eyes and the girl’s words faded right out of my ears.
And so I went. I didn’t look back. There was nothing to look back at.
The bed I’d shared with Jimmy. The bed where my baby was born. The bed where my baby died.
I felt sure that he was up ahead, that all I had to do was walk towards him, sail, sure I was floating almost, it was wonderful.
It was absolutely wonderful.
Angels. The whole lot of them.
Chapter 19
The Nanny
Within days of Mrs. McHugh’s departure, Number 43 Laurence Street started to show signs of her absence. Groceries had not been bought in. Stains were not scrubbed down. Towellings and clean binders for the baby were not stacked in the nursery like they had been.
Ethel tried her best but, with her workload now doubled and no direction, she struggled.
The Nanny suggested to Mr. Thomas that they would need to fill Mrs. McHugh’s position and quickly.
“Yes,” he said, but his voice was unsure.
“Would you like me to help with finding someone?” she asked.
He was silent, brooding almost.
“Part of me thinks she’ll be coming back,” he said. “That we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’m going to travel to Dublin this week to collect the ring.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t like his inference that Mrs. McHugh would be reinstated. That was not part of the plan. And she hadn’t expected him to travel to Dublin either, to question the jeweller, but no matter.
“Well, we do need urgent help, Mr. Thomas. Ethel is really struggling and with a baby in the house there is need for an extra set of hands.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll advertise this week.”
“If you like, I could take on more of the house responsibilities, the shopping and the orders, the bills if you like. If we hired another house girl then I expect we would manage just fine.”
He seemed to like this idea. And he cheered up after dinner when she surprised him.
“I have a present for you,” she said.
“For me?” he said, looking puzzled.
She rose from the table and fetched a brown-paper parcel tied with string from a drawer in the dining-room dresser and placed it in front of him. She sat back down and watched him open it, his eyebrows raised in anticipation.
He unwrapped the package to reveal a journal, a hard-covered book with pages of cream paper to be filled in.
“I thought you could use it as a fishing journal,” she said. “I know how much you love to fish. Perhaps you could make more time to do it, now that you have some new equipment.”
He pushed back the paper further and found a bait box with room for fishing hooks.
“Thank you,” he said. “I am touched. It’s a very kind gesture.”
She was starting to earn his trust.
On a few occasions, they had got into such pleasant conversations over dinner that he asked her into the sitting room after pudding, and they sat opposi
te each other, finishing their wine, enjoying the fire.
She always allowed him his silence, not talking when she felt that he just wanted to sit. When the time was right to speak, she told anecdotes and laughed, anything to keep the mood pleasant and show him that she was good company.
She found that when he poured wine at dinner he relaxed and she always encouraged it, getting Ethel to put out the carafe at every meal, telling her to go and get it if she forgot.
They didn’t dine together every night. Sometimes, he didn’t want dinner at all, and he took to his room, not even seeing Anna Genevieve some evenings.
He was missing his wife. And, she knew, the absence of the housekeeper was affecting him too.
“Maybe we could go with you on one of your fishing trips,” she said. “Anna Genevieve and I – I think the fresh air would do her good.”
“Yes,” he smiled. “Yes, you’re right. The next fine day we will do it.”
She folded her ankles, coquettishly, and touched her face, smelling the perfume on her wrist, the one she’d been dabbing on liberally from the open bottle on Anna Thomas’s dressing table.
“First week in May,” he said, “the cruises start on the Boyne. Let’s go on a day trip, and take our fishing gear.”
“That sounds lovely,” she said and smiled.
She would write to Christy that evening.
Everything was going to plan.
She had William D. Thomas exactly where she wanted him.
She thought of nothing but Christy. Now that she had an escape route through the back wall, she didn’t have to live for fleeting gropes in the corridor at the back of the wringing wet laundry rooms. The access to him made her think about him even more; she had to get her fill of him, as often as she could.
Kitty was starting to miss her at night. She was wakening now, looking for her, crying. Only that she had a bit of sense not to be making a racket, Maggie might have had to stop her outside visits.
“Where do you go, Maggie?” she asked.
“I go to see a man about a dog.”
It was what her mother always said when she was going out late at night and not wanting to tell them where she was really going.
“Are we getting a dog?” asked Kitty, her eyes growing wide.
“Yes, when we get out of here and we get our own house, we can get a dog.”
Poor Kitty. She knew when the girl woke and saw that she was gone, she’d fear the worst. That her sister had been taken away or had run away or was becoming their mother with the disappearing act.
“I will never leave you,” she whispered. “Even if you wake up and I’m not here, know that I’ll always come back for you, Kitty.”
They slept together that night, curled into the single bed, Kitty’s quick breaths growing deeper as she fell asleep cuddled into her arm.
She felt too, though she didn’t like to admit it, that Christy was growing a bit restless himself. She knew by his face when he pulled back the door, how it fell slightly, to see her standing there in her workhouse tunic, a smile on her face, but none on his.
He tried to make out that she should take a break from seeing him. Told her she’d been spotted by that meddling neighbour next door and he was in danger of losing his job over her.
She didn’t know what he was making a fuss over. If he lost this job he could get another one. Surely seeing each other was more important than that gossiping good for nothin’ next door?
“Will I come here when I get out, me and Kitty?” she asked.
“Here is too small,” he said. “We’d have to move somewhere bigger.”
“Yes, we could get a bigger house.” She smiled. A house, for the two of them and a room for Kitty too. That would be the nicest, warmest thing she could imagine.
And of course, they’d have to get married and live as a proper couple.
She would pester him about when it would happen. Before Christmas maybe. She thought she was about fifteen now, but probably when she was sixteen he’d marry her. That was a good age for marrying, everyone knew that.
She’d cut down on the nightly visits and persuade him over the next while to put their plan into place. After all, she’d been seeing him for a long time now.
It was well time to be getting married.
“Ethel, have you noticed droppings in the kitchen?”
“Sorry, ma’am?”
She had asked her to address her as ‘ma’am’, doing away with the ‘Miss Murphy’ that Mrs. McHugh had insisted was more appropriate.
“Mouse droppings, although they may be rat droppings.”
“I haven’t, ma’am. Why? Have you seen them?”
“Yes. I have. And what’s more I noticed a rat in the yard yesterday. I saw it scuttling out there along the back wall. Horrid things.”
“Oh, I hate rats, ma’am, hate them!” said Ethel.
“Will you go to Duffy’s today and pick up some poison. We’ll get it laid down. I couldn’t bear to think of them in here, running round the food. Especially with the baby.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you go this morning so we’ll get it laid out quickly?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And don’t say anything to Mr. Thomas – he has enough on his plate without worrying about rats in the kitchen.”
She nodded. “Of course, ma’am, I’ll go right away.”
The Nanny had learned the address off by heart – it wouldn’t be hard to find – she knew where the North Road was. She took the long way there, walking up Peter Street and down by Magdalene Tower instead of cutting across Bolton Square to lead her to the row of cottages.
She wore a shawl over her head and used it to shield some of her face. There was nothing unusual about a woman in a shawl, walking, carrying a basket. No one noticed her as she passed, on her way up the North Road.
Boys in short pants and bare feet kicked round a small leather ball stuffed with rags. Their shirts were open at the neck, their complexions ruddy from the hours spent on the road, playing. The girls wore their hair in pigtails, their pinafores grubby and, instead of football, they scratched out a crooked hopscotch and jumped about on one leg, like robins.
When she got to the house, she slipped a large black key from her basket and opened the front door quickly. She stepped into the cottage and closed the door behind her, leaning against it, while her eyes adjusted to the dim light.
The hallway smelled of baking and she could see a small sitting-room off to her right. She made her way to the back of the cottage, where the kitchen was, and saw the source of the warm aroma, where Mrs. McHugh had placed a loaf of brown bread, a loaf of soda bread and a set of scones on the table on wire trays that morning.
Baking before work. She must have been up before dawn.
The kitchen was bare, but neat. Two wooden chairs were tucked under a small table. A cupboard with sliding doors held a basin for the sink and beside it another cupboard lay with a small bowl stacked with salad vegetables and an enamel jug of milk.
Moving quickly, she opened the cupboard doors, searching the foodstuffs for the item she needed. Her eyes scanned the jars and tins stacked there. It was easy to spot the Colman’s mustard, standing yellow against the background.
My Mick loves his mustard. Keeps Colman’s in business he does. I never touch the stuff. I hate the taste of it.
She loosened the lid and peered inside.
Mick and his mustard sandwiches. I made them every day for this lunch and now I make them every day for his tea. Can’t get enough of them.
The jar was half empty. She took a spoon from her basket and scooped out two spoonfuls until there was just enough mustard for her purpose at the bottom of the jar. She wiped the spoon with a rag and put it in her basket.
Mick goes out for his walk every day at three o’clock, rain or shine. I think he does be sneaking down to the bookies, but sure he wouldn’t be telling me that, now would he?
From her basket she took a small ti
n, bright green, with the picture of a rat lying on its back displayed proudly on the front. She opened the lid and heaped three large spoonfuls into the mustard and mixed it through. The white powder disappeared into the yellow.
She looked over the kitchen to make sure nothing was out of place, and everything was just as she found it. She put the jar back into the cupboard and rearranged the items as they had been.
In the sitting room, she looked out the small window, moving the net curtain to see out. A woman was walking up the street and the playing children were still out the front, farther down. She waited until the woman had passed and then scanned the street again before quietly opening the front door, stepping out, and locking it behind her.
She continued her walk up the North Road, pulling her shawl tighter around her head. She would turn back on herself at the Crosslanes, making it a good stretch of a walk. A walk she had told Ethel she needed on account of a headache that had come over her.
“You don’t mind, Ethel, do you? Watching Anna Genevieve for just half an hour?”
The Nanny smiled at the thought of what was to come.
Tomorrow, she’d talk to Mr. Thomas, just before she was due to take her half-day.
The letter from the jeweller’s had already arrived but she had lain in wait, taken it and hidden it until the right moment to ‘deliver’ it. It had taken a bit of effort to line up everything just the way she wanted, but being in the midst of it now, halfway there, made her heart soar.
Mrs. McHugh could be gone from Number 43 by lunchtime, if things went well.
Mr. McHugh would be gone by the weekend, Sunday at the latest.
She wondered if she could keep it all a delicious secret. She should wait before writing the letter, confirming the good news.
But she couldn’t help herself. She might send a telegram. Telegrams always brought such urgent announcements.
And he had been waiting ten years for this.
Chapter 20
The Exhumation
An owl hovered, its wings silent in the cool evening air. It watched the gravel below for the movement of field mice who came into the graveyard to snuffle among the decaying flowers.
The Nanny At Number 43 Page 12