‘Colin?’ she said in wonder and surprise. ‘Little Colin?’
‘Not so little now,’ Colin replied. ‘I’m sixteen.’
She’d known he was sixteen, for hadn’t her mother written with news of the family? But in her mind Colin was still the wee boy of seven she’d left behind nine years before.
‘You’d better come in,’ Colin said.
Later the children told Maeve how pretty they thought the house was. It was low and painted white, with little windows all along the side of it and thatched with yellow straw, and grey smoke escaped from the squat chimney. The door was in two halves so you could open the top or the bottom. Both now stood open and Maeve led the children inside.
She had her heart in her mouth as she entered the dim farmhouse. It was just as if she’d never left. There was the press opposite the door containing all the crockery and a food cupboard to the side of it. Two pails of water stood on stools by the side of the bedroom door, while to the other side was the huge kitchen table before one of the windows with wooden chairs arranged around it. The settle and the armchairs were pulled up before the peat fire, and the curtained-off bed that belonged to Maeve’s parents was in the far corner.
The only difference was in the group waiting for her. There was no Tom, for he’d been married two years before, and no Liam, away in Dublin, and Kate too was living there, in the nurses’ home. Rosemarie was there, but Maeve knew she was engaged to be married, yet she’d been just twelve when Maeve had left home. Colin was still at home, and Nuala, no longer the wee child of just four striking out for independence, but almost a young lady of thirteen.
Her parents hadn’t changed. There might have been a few more grey hairs in her mother’s head, and more lines on her face and on that of her father, but they’d altered so little compared to the children. And across the room, in the silence that screamed around her, she saw them all staring at her.
Annie Brannigan waited for her daughter to speak, to explain to them why she’d done the disgraceful thing of leaving her husband and coming back home with her children.
Grace and Kevin were weary despite the snatches of sleep they’d had, and both were bone tired of getting on and off trams, trains, ships and rail buses. And now they were here in their mammy’s old home and no one seemed to welcome them at all. Maeve saw the wobbling chin of her daughter and the obstinate scowl of her son, and she licked her lips nervously and said in a voice little more than a whisper, ‘Hello, Mammy, Daddy.’
‘Hello! Is that all you can say after nine years and you descending on us like this, and the only notice a scribe of a letter that arrived this morning telling us so?’ Annie asked her daughter angrily.
‘I’m sorry,’ Maeve said. ‘I had to come. There were reasons.’
She saw Grace’s face pucker and the tears that had been threatening since she’d entered the farmhouse spilt down her cheeks. She sank to the flagged kitchen floor with a loud sob, crying, ‘I don’t like it here.’
The sight of the child crying smote Annie’s heart. Whatever was wrong it wasn’t the children’s fault, and she went forward and gathered Grace into her arms. ‘And you’re Kevin, I suppose?’ she said to the boy, who was scowling at her, and without waiting for him to answer went on, ‘Take that look off your face, boy, and come away to the fire. If I know weans, a little food won’t come amiss and will put a new complexion on the matter altogether.’
After that, it wasn’t so bad at all. No one spoke of their unexpected arrival in front of the children. Instead Annie began to prepare a meal for them while Rosemarie and Nuala laid the table and Colin carried the cases and haversacks into the bedrooms.
Maeve saw the children were fascinated by the peat fire that everything was cooked on, the frying pan with the sizzling ham and eggs at the side of it, and the potatoes in a large pot fastened to a hook on a black metal bar that swung out from the wall.
The smell tantalised them all, and Maeve and the children were glad enough to scramble up to the table to eat the fine meal. It was served with butter yellower than the children had ever seen – not that they’d seen much butter at all in their young lives – and slices of bread that Maeve explained was soda bread.
Maeve was grateful to her father for keeping the conversation going around the table that first night. He didn’t touch on the reasons for their being there, but instead asked the children questions about their school and friends, and told little stories and anecdotes of his own to put them at their ease. Maeve saw the children start to relax and open up to the kind man she’d always found her father to be. She saw his eyes light on her often and felt comforted, for she knew her father would be understanding and sympathetic when he knew the reason for her flight home.
Much later that night, Maeve sat and talked to her mother. They were alone. The children and young ones, Colin and Nuala, had all gone to bed, and Rosemarie had gone out with her young man, and her father was taking his last walk round the farm with the two dogs, as he was wont to do, checking on the beasts. Maeve had waited until she’d got her mother to herself before she began to explain, and once they were seated before the fire with a cup of tea apiece she began, ‘I’m sorry to land on you like this, Mammy, but really I had to come. Brendan is . . . isn’t the man I thought he was. I mean not like the man I married.’
‘Then he’s like many a one, cutie dear,’Annie said. ‘How has he changed?’
‘Well, Brendan earns good money, but I see little of it,’ Maeve burst out. ‘Sometimes I have barely enough to feed us. The weans go to bed hungry often. If it weren’t for Elsie next door—’
‘God, girl!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re telling your business to the neighbours?’
‘Mammy, the neighbours would know even if I didn’t say a word,’ Maeve explained. ‘It’s not like here. We live on top of one another. The whole street, the whole neighbourhood, knows your business. But Elsie’s not like that, anyway. She’s a friend and she helps me. God, there’s times I don’t know where I’d have been without her.’
‘Where is your husband in all this?’ Annie asked her daughter, tight-lipped.
‘My husband? Did you say my husband?’ Maeve asked crisply. ‘My husband, Mammy, is down at the pub every night, not caring if we go cold and hungry, as long as he has his beer money. Then, when he has his belly full, he comes home and takes it out on me, or wee Kevin.’
‘He hits you?’ Annie cried, at last incensed on her daughter’s behalf.
‘Aye, sometimes he just hits me. I can cope with that. It’s when he really lays into me so my body is bruised everywhere and my face a swollen mess, with my eyes blackened and my lips split, that’s what I find hard to bear.’
Annie’s mouth had dropped open in shock as Maeve spoke, and when she’d finished she still stared at her, while her lips formed words, but no sound came out.
‘I’m sorry, Mammy, for blurting it out like that,’ Maeve said. ‘But it’s how it is often when he has the drink in him. But other times he can be sober, or nearly sober, and yet he takes his belt off to Kevin.’
‘No!’ Annie cried. The rearing of her children had in the main been left to her, although there had been occasions when Thomas had sometimes seen fit to discipline his sons for some serious misdemeanour. He’d used nothing but the flat of his hand across their backsides and they’d grown up with respect for him because of it. But a belt on a wee boy . . .!
‘You’ll see the marks yet across his back,’ Maeve said. ‘Brendan’s been at him since the child was three years old. I get in between them and then I catch it. I think,’ Maeve went on, ‘he resents the weans and especially Kevin. Every time I tell him I’m pregnant, I know I’m for it.’
‘Oh, Maeve, why didn’t you tell us sooner?’
‘After I’d made