by Rose Doyle
Mostly I like to see how it's changing, every day. Where there's change there's a future.
'You're right,' Clara stood beside me with the newspaper. 'It's not interesting. It's pathetic. It's scandalous. It's disgusting.'
Only yesterday she told me she has decided to study medicine. She will make a better doctor than I ever would have. The heart for all that went out of me when Daniel Casey died. Clara is fearless and will not be side-tracked. She also remembers everything I taught her from Gray's Anatomy that summer on the Curragh.
'It's all of those things,' I took the newspaper, folding and refolding until the story about the wrens had disappeared. 'Your brother will be coming home from school soon,' I looked at her, tall and serious, with her birth-mother's dark hair and strong shoulders. 'You might go down the hill to meet him.'
She looked over my head to the street. 'He's coming,' she said. She pushed up the window and leaned out, waving and calling. Her quick-fire mood changes are another thing she's inherited from her birth-mother.
James, rounding the corner, waved back, impatiently pulling his father with him. His father's leg gave him trouble on the hills. San Francisco was about the worst city in the world for someone with a shattered leg to settle in.
Clara went to meet them. Side by side, with their dark hair and long limbs, she and James might have been a natural brother and sister. Their father is a good-looking man still, even if he has less hair than he used to. He's taken to wearing a top hat because of the hair loss and, because of the leg, to carrying a cane. It gives him a distinguished air.
There was nothing distinguished about him the first time he came climbing the hill. He was scarecrow-thin then, wearing a woollen suit far too hot for the day and the climb. I was standing at this very window and recognised him instantly, even with the limp and his hair long and bedraggled in a way it had never been previously. Even without his army uniform.
That was seven years ago. To give myself time to think, I moved back and out of sight when he stopped in front of the house. He stood there, in the middle of the wooden sidewalk, dangerously close to a couple of missing planks, and looked up at the windows.
There are no planks missing today. This neighbourhood has climbed the social ladder with a dizzy speed in the years since.
But that day, seven years ago, I let him stand awhile on the sidewalk. As well as thinking, my heart needed time to slow down.
He was the first to move, taking a step nearer the house. He wasn't going to go away, that was clear. I wasn't sure I wanted him to. I pushed up the window, exactly as Clara did just now.
'Be careful,' I called, 'if you disappear through the gaps in that sidewalk you might never be seen again.
'You'd better let me come inside then,' he stared. It wasn't me he'd expected to see.
Standing beside me in the hallway he went on staring. Up close I could see the lines on his face and was glad that he'd suffered for what he'd done.
'Where's Sarah?' he asked.
'You know where Sarah is, Jimmy,' I said.
He sat on a step of the stairs and put his head into his hands. He sat for a long time without moving or saying a word. God knows how long he would have stayed there, or how I would have dealt with things, if it hadn't been for James. Left alone in the sitting room he called out to me.
'Mama!' He appeared in the doorway. 'Mama,' he said again, 'you didn't finish the story.'
'Hello, James,' his father said and the baby I'd made my own, the child I'd taught to walk and talk and for whom I'd lived every minute of the last three years, left my side and walked to his father.
'Hello,' he held out his hand as I'd taught him to. 'Who are you?'
'My name is James too. But people call me Jimmy.'
'Can I call you Jimmy?'
'You can.'
Later, when James was in bed, I told Jimmy Vance all that had happened. He'd put most of the pieces together in his head by then anyway.
'Sarah's was the grave I saw in Londonderry,' he said the words with difficulty.
I gave him a glass of whiskey and he drank it and turned away from me with tears in his eyes. He'd lost her, then thought he'd found her. Now he was having to accept that, finally and forever, he'd really lost her. I sat with him in this sitting room until long after it got dark. The light from the street lamps was making lonely shadows about us when he said, 'I didn't cross the Atlantic alone. I brought young Moll Hyland with me.'
'Moll,' I was glad of the dark. It hid tears I couldn't stop.
What had happened was simple enough. Jimmy had been less than two years in Kashima, India when a careless gunner had sent a bullet through his leg. Shipped home to England and discharged with a pension he'd gone immediately to Dublin and Henrietta Street. Bess Rooney had given him the letters and money he'd sent to Sarah and told him she didn't know where Sarah was, only that she'd gone to America.
Jimmy Vance had then gone to the Curragh, straight to the wren village. He'd hoped to find Beezy Ryan, or someone who could tell him about Sarah and James. He found only Moll to remember them, fending for herself since Clara's death three months before. Moll swore to him she knew where to find me and, as a consequence, Sarah. Jimmy, though certain she was lying, decided regardless to take her with him on his search for Sarah and his son.
'An atonement,' he said and I nodded, understanding.
In Londonderry Moll had been her resourceful self. With a tearful story she'd persuaded a McCorkell clerk to allow them go through the passenger lists of two years before.
And so they'd discovered that Mrs Sarah Vance and her son had sailed on the Minnehaha but that Alicia Buckley had not. Another clerk remembered the sad story of the young woman killed by a runaway horse and cart.
'It was an easy matter to find someone to take me to the grave after that,' Jimmy said. 'It's well tended, not overgrown at all.' He paused. When I said nothing he went on. 'In New York I . . . persuaded an official to let me look through the destination lists. San Francisco is small enough. It's taken me only two days to find you.’
Moll moved in to live with me and James straight away. She would be a daughter to me, she said, as long as I let her keep her birth-mother's name. And so Moll became Clara Vance.
Taking Jimmy Vance in was a different matter. He lived for three years on the Barbary Coast, playing the gambling saloons and living God knows what kind of a life there. He made a lot of money and he came to see his son three times a week without fail.
Four years ago he asked me to marry him, for James's sake.
'James does not need us to marry,' I said.
'He's nearly seven years old. He needs a father, a family.'
'He has a family. He has me, and a sister in Clara.'
'A boy needs a father,' Jimmy said. 'Sarah knew that. It was why she followed me to the Curragh. It was why she married me.'
'She married you for love.'
'That too,' he said.
We were walking in the Golden Gate Park on a Sunday, James and Clara ahead of us, a family in all but the legalities.
'You already have my name,' Jimmy pointed out, 'and there are many kinds of love.'
This was true. I'd loved, in different ways, both Sarah and Daniel Casey. I always would.
I'd grown fond of Jimmy Vance. He was a decent man, quick and able for the ways of this city and the New World. We shared memories.
Surely, put together, all of these things amounted to a kind of love?
'We might as well make things legal and respectable,' I said. We would grow together, the four of us, out of our shared memories. We would be a family, like any other. Truth, after all, is made and not born.
ALLIE AND SARAH. THROUGH LAUGHTER AND TEARS.
Nineteenth-century Dublin is a city riven by the greed of an emerging middle class and the unspeakable poverty of the poor. Alicia Buckley and Sarah Rooney, growing up there, embody that divide: Allie, whose coldly disapproving mother has social ambitions her daughter doesn't share, comes fr
om a prosperous family, while Sarah is a child of the tenements.
Despite their different backgrounds, the girls enjoy an extraordinary friendship. When Sarah falls pregnant, and is thrown out by her father, Allie doesn't think twice about joining her friend in exile. Neither woman is prepared for the deprivations she will face.
Pursuing Sarah's soldier lover, they make their way, with baby James, to Kildare. There they become part of a community of outcast women, known as the Wrens of the Curragh, who live rough, savage lives on the outskirts of the army camp. Their numbers include prostitutes, ex-convicts and alcoholics. The life is crude and poverty stricken, often drunken and wild, the women reviled in the local town and forbidden the camp except on market days. But there is also sharing and trust, and, through her work as the community's doctor, a liberation for Allie from the stifling expectations of her family.
The respite is short-lived. Tragedy and death force Allie and Sarah to turn their backs on Ireland to make new lives in America. But a final twist of fate means that only one woman will reach that brave new world.
Rose Doyle is a Dublin-based journalist who has written six previous novels for adults and three for young people. Her inspiration for FRIENDS INDEED comes from the true, untold, story of the remarkable women who were the Wrens of the Curragh.
Praise for Rose Doyl£:
'a novel written with sensitivity and a feeling for drama' EXAMINER
978034077133401099
'Ms. Doyle has a firm and skilled touch, pace is fast without careering out of control' Vincent Banville, SUNDAY PRESS
Jacket illustration: Bridgeman Art Library and Hulton Archive
Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN 0 340 77133 X
visit our website at www.madaboutbooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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