A Daughter's Secret (30 page)

‘Of course, my dear, when you earn it.’

‘Tony, I really can’t go out on the streets,’ Aggie said. ‘Please don’t make me do this.’

‘I am not making you do anything, my dear,’ Finch said with an evil smile. ‘You just don’t eat or drink until you do. And get away from me. You disgust me.’ He gave her a push and so she lay spread-eagled on the floor.

Aggie could scarcely believe that he had left her like that. She hammered on the door till exhaustion overcame her and she sank to the floor and slept.

By the evening of the second day she knew she couldn’t take any more. She would do anything to have the drink and opium her whole innards
were craving for, but no one came, though she hammered the door and shouted.

When Finch came in the following day she was almost hysterical. She flung herself at him.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said, ‘anything, but please let me have a drink first?’

Finch detached Aggie’s arms from his clothes and brushed himself down fastidiously. ‘I am glad you have seen sense at last, Aggie, but at the moment, no one with any sense would go within a hundred yards of you. I will have water sent up and clothes for you to change into after your wash.’

‘And a drink?’

‘Not until you have earned it, my dear,’ he said with a leer.

Aggie was taken in Finch’s car to one of the roughest areas of Birmingham, where there were three pubs close together.

‘Plenty of trade,’ Finch said, almost rubbing his hands with glee. ‘You will open your legs a good few times tonight, I think.’

Aggie felt as sick as a pig when the first drunk nearly stumbled over her on his way home. In the lamplight she saw his eyes gleam when he caught sight of her, knowing immediately what service she was offering.

When he leaned towards her the stink of beer nearly knocked her on her back, and the sight and
smell of the brown rotting teeth when he opened his mouth caused the nausea to rise in Aggie’s throat. She wanted to push the man away from her, but of course she couldn’t do that.

‘How much?’ the drunk growled out.

‘Half a crown.’

‘Half a crown? Better be good for that. I like to get me money’s worth. Come around the back so we’re not disturbed, like.’

Aggie thought she would die with shame when she allowed that vile, smelly man to pull down her drawers. Then he expected her to take his throbbing member in her hand and rub it a bit to get him in the mood. Suddenly he spread her legs wide with his hands and she lifted her skirts. When he entered her she bit her lip to prevent a cry escaping because she thought that she had been ripped in two.

Finch was right. When the news filtered through the pubs that there was a whore outside ready and willing, she had a steady stream of customers. By the end of the night, Aggie’s degradation was complete. She knew her life was effectively over now, for she could no longer do without the gin and the opium, and would do anything it took to get hold of it.

Finch pocketed her earnings as they went back in the car. As he passed her the gin bottle he said, ‘Not bad for an evening’s work. Now you listen to me, Aggie. You do this every night and if you earn enough then you will get fed and have as
much gin and opium as you want, but if you don’t earn enough, you will get nothing. Do we understand each other?’

Aggie understood, all right. She understood that Finch owned her, body and soul. He had been right at the outset: she now belonged to him.

Tom too thought his life had ended. Every day was just one long line of chores with no let-up at all, and he could see the same life going on year after year. This was against the background noise of his mother’s incessant whining and complaining voice. Nothing he did seemed to please her, and in the end he accepted that that was the way it was going to be. If he retaliated then his mother would be even worse. He knew many of the townsfolk thought him weak and spineless and he could hardly blame them.

He lived for his brother’s letters, glad, as the years passed, that one of them at least was doing well. On reaching New York, Joe had almost immediately got a job at an engineering works owned by a man called Brian Brannigan, a former Irish immigrant himself, who had made good.

‘Good God!’ Tom said when he read Joe’s account of this. He was sure if Joe had fallen in a dung heap he would have come up smelling of
roses. His good fortune did not just end there, either. Over the years he had risen through the firm in a most spectacular way, and ended up marrying the boss’s daughter, Gloria.

However, in 1929 came the Wall Street Crash and Joe’s father-in-law, bankrupt, killed himself because of it. Joe was left almost penniless and destitute, with both a distraught wife and mother-in-law dependent on him.

He tried to get a job, but it wasn’t easy, for America was sunk in a deep depression. Tom urged him to come home, but he said that his mother-in-law would not leave the land where her husband lay buried and so they were stuck in America for the time being.

Then in the autumn of 1934, Gloria gave birth to a son they called Benjamin Joseph, and Joe’s joy was muted by the responsibility of another mouth to feed.

Biddy was almost gleeful that his household seemed closer to starvation. Tom felt quite helpless. He would willingly have sent Joe his last halfpenny, but he was never given money of his own. All he could do was write encouraging letters to Joe and Gloria, and hope and pray that their lives would improve before too long.

The day was a fine one and just one of many that spring, Tom thought with satisfaction as he sat and ate his dinner. It was 24 April, and already the crops were ripening in the fields and the two
new calves and the litter of pigs growing up fit and healthy. Suddenly, through the window his eyes caught a movement in the lane and he turned to his mother, who was at the other side of the table. ‘There’s a garda coming here.’

‘Here?’

‘Aye. Shall I see what he wants?’

‘No,’ Biddy said, getting to her feet. ‘I will.’

Tom shrugged and returned to his dinner, and Biddy opened the door to the young and nervous garda and stepped into the yard to find out what he wanted. The voices were muted and Tom could not distinguish what was said, but he thought he would know all soon enough.

The garda however was quite appalled by Biddy’s reaction to the news he had just given her. When he got back to the station he said to the garda behind the desk, ‘My mammy always said that Biddy Sullivan isn’t right in the head and, honest to God, it makes you wonder. I mean, I have just given the worst news ever to a mother and she looked … well, she almost looked pleased.’

‘Maybe she was in shock?’ the other policeman suggested. ‘That can affect a body in all sorts of strange ways.’

The young garda shook his head. ‘She didn’t look in shock to me,’ he said. ‘She had a smile on her face as if was good news I had given her.’

And Biddy considered it to be good news. When she turned to face Tom, the expression on her face unnerved him, for she was smiling. Tom hadn’t
seen that very often and he watched the light dancing in her cold eyes as if she was truly delighted about something.

‘What did the garda want?’ he asked tentatively.

‘He came to tell me what I have wished for many a year. Your sister Nuala and her husband have been killed in a car crash in Birmingham.’

Tom was stunned. He felt a pang of loss for he had loved his sister dearly and missed her dreadfully when she had first gone to England.

And now she was gone, her young life snuffed out along with that of her husband, and his mammy was saying it was what she had wished for. He met her gaze and said steadily, ‘Mammy, that’s a dreadful thing to say.’

‘She killed your daddy,’ Biddy spat out, and she remembered the overpowering grief she had felt the day that Thomas John died. From that moment she had prayed for something bad to happen to Nuala.

‘You can’t be certain of that,’ Tom answered, ‘and even if you are right and the news in the letter did hasten Daddy’s death, she didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault.’

‘Well, I think differently,’ Biddy snapped. ‘And I am glad that she has got her just deserts at last. Now if you have eaten your fill, shouldn’t you be about your duties and not arguing the toss with me?’

Tom was only halfway through his dinner, but both the news and his mother’s response to it had
taken away any appetite he might have had. Without another word, he returned to the fields. But as he toiled that afternoon, memories of his beautiful sister kept invading his mind.

Everyone had been Nuala’s willing slave and Tom always admired the dainty loveliness of her as she grew up. Little did he know when he had seen her off on the train in Derry so many years ago that he would never see her again. Tears ran down his face, not just for the death of her, but for the wasted years when he could have made contact with her and yet he had taken the coward’s way out rather than risk upsetting his mother.

Then he saw his mother come out of the cottage and scurry up the lane. Tom stood up, easing his aching back and shading his eyes from the sun, watched her heading off towards Buncrana. Now what is she up to? She never went to Buncrana on a week day. Whatever it was he knew he would only find out about it when she was willing to tell him.

He had always known she had funny notions, different from other people’s. However, from her reaction that morning he had to acknowledge that she was a very wicked woman. He truly hoped, though, that with Nuala dead and gone, Biddy would at last get rid of the resentment she had carried around with her for so long.

That same evening, as they sat before the fire, Biddy told Tom that she was going to Birmingham the following day for Nuala’s funeral, and that she
had sent a telegram to those in Birmingham telling them this. Tom’s mouth had dropped open in shock for he could hardly believe his ears. He hadn’t thought either of them would actually attend the funeral service, knowing how his mother had felt about Nuala. He would have been surprised if she had sent flowers or had a Mass said for her, but this …

‘Why go now, when she is dead?’ he asked in genuine amazement.

He was further staggered by Biddy’s reply. She said she was going to see the set-up of the place.

‘There are children, more than likely, and they are going to no Protestant to rear. They will come to me to be raised in the one true faith. I know my duty.’

Tom knew that his mother didn’t like children. It was clear now that her resentment against Nuala was as deep as ever, and any children Nuala might have had would receive little love or understanding. He couldn’t help hoping the marriage had been a childless one.

However, Nuala had two children and, once in Birmingham, Biddy wrote to tell Tom all about them. Molly was thirteen, and even more bold and disobedient than her mother. Her brother Kevin, at five, was just as defiant as his sister, as well as being totally spoiled. But she would put manners on the pair of them before they were much older.
Tom had shivered in apprehension for the offspring of Nuala.

The townspeople of Buncrana mourned the passing of Nuala and her man, and felt sorry for the poor wee orphaned children. The Mass Tom had said for them was attended by half the town. Tom told the townsfolk that his mother was bringing the children back with her and he saw that many were surprised. As they said later, out of Tom’s hearing, they didn’t know that Biddy had a charitable bone in her body.

However, the whole business took longer than Biddy had imagined it would, and Tom thought he had never known such peace as he did in those few weeks when his mother was away. He could cook enough to keep body and soul together, and he washed things as he needed them, so he got by all right without help, though many offered it.

In the meantime, letters and telegrams were flying backwards and forwards. Soon the townspeople were aware that the wee boy had been ill and it had been decided to leave him in Birmingham with his grandfather. However, Biddy was bringing Nuala’s daughter, Molly, back to the town where her mother was born and bred.

When Tom saw Molly alight from the train at the station in Derry, he felt his stomach tighten as he gave a small gasp, for it was like his poor, dead sister had been returned to him, her daughter was so like her. Tom’s gentle heart turned over in
sympathy, for the suffering of his poor niece was so very evident and he saw too that his mother disliked the girl intently.

Tom was soon aware that his mother intended to make no allowances for Molly, and yet as well as coping with the loss of her parents he knew everything would be strange to her. A farm on the edge of a market town was a long cry, he would imagine, from Molly’s home in a bustling city. And she had left all that behind, and the friends and neighbours she had had, not to mention her grandfather and little brother.

What had she come to instead? A malicious old woman, who seemed determined to punish Molly for the sins she imagined Nuala had committed, and an uncle afraid of his own shadow.

Biddy continued to heap humiliation and condemnation on Molly’s head, for whatever she did wasn’t right. This was apparent to the townsfolk, who had seen plainly how harsh she was with the girl that first Sunday at Mass. In the end Molly began to look forward to the quiet peaceful times in the byre with her Uncle Tom, finding it soothing to lean her head against the velvet-flanked cow and see the bucket placed between her knees fill with the white foamy milk.

It was in the byre with her uncle that Molly heard what had happened to the family over the years. Finn had died before Nuala had left Ireland, but she hadn’t known that Joe had emigrated to America, and Tom told Molly all that had happened
to him there. He also told her just how his own father had died and about his bad heart. He said her mother was not to blame, and saw that Molly was relieved by his assurance.

Tom and Molly got on very well and yet Tom knew his company was not nearly enough. The point was, as his mother well knew, Molly should have been at school every day. Biddy, however, had decided she had more than enough book learning, and instead the woman kept her at it from morning till night. In fact, from the moment Molly stepped over the threshold of the cottage, his mother had seemed to lose the use of her limbs, for it was Molly who did everything, while she presided over her and found fault with every damned thing she did.

There was the matter of the letters from Molly’s grandfather and the next-door neighbour that Biddy destroyed. She not only forbade Molly to write to them any more, she wrote to the people concerned in Birmingham and said that there was to be no communication between them and Molly.

The way Molly stood up to Biddy over that shamed Tom for she was just a slight, wee thing and so many tragic things had happened to her. Yet she had stood stoically before the woman who had always frightened the life out of him. Molly eventually lost that fight when Biddy would not back down.

Tom felt that he had let her down, and it didn’t
make him feel good about himself. He was determined to make amends and he spoke to the postmistress in Buncrana, Nellie McEvoy. She of course knew all about the letters that had arrived and she had even tried remonstrating with Biddy about the letters she sent to Birmingham, forbidding Molly’s grandfather and the neighbour, Hilda, writing to her.

‘I told her I thought it hard,’ Nellie said, ‘and got my head bitten off for my trouble. But I do think it is a dreadful thing to do, Tom, to cut the poor girl off from all she holds dear, even her wee brother.’

‘So do I,’ Tom said grimly. ‘And this has decided me anyway. I know that you have asked Molly up to tea tomorrow afternoon and I am determined that she will go, but I know too that I may have to stand against my mother to do that.’

‘And will you be able for that?’

‘I won’t like it one bit,’ Tom admitted. ‘But I will do it for Molly’s sake. God, Nellie, the child is desperate for company and your youngest, Cathy, and she are the exact same age, aren’t they? All things being equal, they would have met at school and it is my mother’s doing that they don’t.’

‘But we won’t waste any more words on her,’ Nellie said. ‘We’ll see Molly tomorrow then.’

That was the beginning of a deep friendship that Molly developed with the whole McEvoy family. She and Cathy were soon close friends.
Nellie became like a pseudo mother to her, and Cathy’s big, burly father, Jack, acted as the father Molly also missed so much.

Tom insisted on coming over every Sunday evening to walk home with Molly from the McEvoys’, and he took to sinking a few pints with Jack in Grant’s Bar in the town, which he had never done before.

Tom had just never got into the habit of socialising, but now he decided a man could be too much on his own and he enjoyed the pints and the company of the men in the town on Sunday night.

He had also taken to having a pint or two on Saturday while he was collecting the fish from the harbour, like most men did. One Saturday the Guinness Tom consumed gave him the nerve to demand a wage for his work, and for the first time he had money in his pocket to spend as he wished. Biddy approved of none of it, of course, but then, Tom asked himself, when did his mother approve of anything?

In fact one of the things he enjoyed most about those walks home on Sunday night was the opportunity to get to know Molly better, when the friendship begun in the byre could be expanded on. She told him lots about her father, who had had a fine job in that depressed city. ‘It was because of the Great War,’ she told Tom. ‘Dad was a hero. Mom used to say that any who fought in that war was a hero like her brother Finn, but Dad was a real hero. He got a medal because he crawled into
the battlefield to rescue an injured officer, a man called Paul Simmons.’