Tom, was nervous of his mother’s smile. It wasn’t an expression he saw often and it usually boded ill for someone, so he asked tentatively, ‘What did the garda want?’
‘He came to tell me the thing I have wished for many a year,’ Biddy said. ‘Your sister, Nuala, and her husband have both been killed in a car crash in Birmingham.’
Tom felt a momentary pang of regret and sadness. The eldest boy, he had been twelve when Nuala was born, had left school and was already working in the fields with his father from dawn to dusk. He well remembered the tiny, wee child and how she had grown up so slight and fine-boned she was like a little doll. Biddy had never let the boys play with their little sister, but she hadn’t needed to say that to him, he wouldn’t have dreamed of playing with her, he knew his hands were too big and too rough.
And now she was gone, killed in a car crash, and his mother saying it was what she had wished for years. His mother was a strange one, all right, but what she had said this time was just downright wicked.
Tom seldom argued with his mother, but this time he burst out, ‘Mammy, that’s a dreadful thing to say.’
‘She killed your daddy.’
‘You can’t be certain of that,’ Tom protested. ‘And even if it was her news that hastened Daddy’s death, she didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault.’
‘Well, I think differently and I am glad that she has got her just deserts at last,’ Biddy said with an emphatic nod of her head. ‘And if you have eaten your fill, shouldn’t you be about your duties and not standing arguing the toss with me?’
Tom knew there was no use talking to his mother when she used that tone – he would be wasting time trying – so with a sigh he went back outside. And when a little later, he saw her scurrying away from the house, he didn’t bother calling out to her and ask her where she was bound for because he knew she probably wouldn’t tell him.
And she didn’t tell him until he had finished the evening milking and was sitting at the table eating a bowl of porridge his mother had made for supper and then her words so astounded him his mouth dropped open. ‘You are going to Birmingham tomorrow,’ he repeated.
‘That’s right.’
‘But have you even got the address?’
‘Aye, the guard gave it to me. I suppose I can ask for directions when I am there. I sent a telegram for them to expect me anyway.’
‘But, Mammy, what are you going for?’
‘Why shouldn’t I go?’
‘Because you never did when Nuala was alive,’ Tom said. ‘Why go now when she is dead?’
‘I’m not going for her, numbskull,’ Biddy snapped, ‘but to see the set-up of the place.’
‘Set-up of the place?’ Tom queried. ‘What are you on about?’
‘There are children, more than likely,’ Biddy said. ‘And if there are children they are going to no Protestant to rear. They will come here to me and be raised in the one true faith.’
‘Here, Mammy?’
‘Well, where else?’
‘I know but … well you have never cared for children,’ Tom said, adding bitterly, ‘at least you told me that often enough when I was growing up.’
‘I don’t care for children much,’ Biddy said. ‘But I think I know where my duty lies.’
Tom remembered his life as a child and young boy in that house and the scant attention and even less affection he, his brothers and his elder sister, Aggie, had ever received from their mother. The only one petted and spoiled was Nuala. However, after the letter and his father’s death, bitterness against Nuala seemed to lodge inside his mother, where it grew like a canker, getting deeper with every passing year. Tom had little hope that any children Nuala had would receive any love or understanding from his mother. He could only hope there was no issue from that union.
Stan looked at the telegram in his hand and could scarcely believe that, after all this time, Nuala’s mother was coming here. Like Tom, he thought it a pity she hadn’t ever made the journey when Nuala had been alive.
However, he told himself maybe she was sorry now for the stiff-necked, unforgiving way she had been with her daughter. She must be indeed to want to show her respect by turning up for the funeral, set for Friday. It would be good too for the children to realise that he wasn’t the only living relative that they had. He loved them dearly but he had worried what would happen to them if he was taken ill.
Maybe this woman, their own grandmother, would be a comfort to them, especially to Molly. It was important, he thought, for a girl to have a woman’s influence in her life.
‘Any answer?’ the telegraph boy asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ Stan said, for he would not have the woman arriving without any sort of welcome, so in his reply he said that both he and the children were looking forward to her coming and if she gave him the time of her arrival he would be at New Street Station to meet her.
Molly too was pleased because it would be a link with the mother she still missed so very, very much.
‘D’you think she is sorry now about the quarrel?’
‘Aye,’ Stan said. ‘I’d say so. Why else would she be coming?’
‘Mmm, I suppose …’
‘What are you fretting about now?’
‘What will happen to me and our Kevin, Granddad?’
‘Why, you’ll stay with me of course.’
‘We won’t have to go to no orphanage?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Stan told her. ‘Why should you do that when you have a fit and active grandfather up the road willing and able to see to the two of you? And now you have other grandparents too and your uncles are probably living there as well don’t forget. Your grandparents live in the country, on the farm your own mother grew up on. Wouldn’t that be a fine place for you to go for a wee holiday?’
‘I suppose,’ Molly said again.
‘There is no suppose about it,’ Stan said firmly. ‘Now you get on your feet and give me a hand cleaning up the house. It would never do for your grandmother to find fault, and anyway that Mr Simmons said he would come to see me this evening.’
Stan was very impressed with Mr Simmons, even though he was slightly awed by such a fine gentleman bothering with the likes of them. He quite understood how it had been between him and Ted, though his son had said it didn’t work with many of the toffs at the front. They might be quite pally while they were in the trenches together, but once out of uniform, all that was forgotten and they’d hardly bid the ordinary soldier the time of day.
Stan knew that full well. That’s how it was with toffs, and he thought that with Ted dead, any debt Paul Simmons thought he had owed to him had been paid and well paid.
However, Paul didn’t see it like that at all. He had been terribly upset when he had heard of the double tragedy, and to honour Ted’s memory he felt he should at least show some care for his children. He knew that the family would now be in dire straits with only Stan’s pension and possibly the pittance given by the government to live on, and he was arranging for an allowance to be paid to the family, rising annually until the children should be twenty-one. That is what he told Stan when he called.
Stan was bowled over by such generosity, but too worried about how they would manage to think of refusing it. Now he knew financially, at least, they would get by and thanked the man gratefully.
Stan