by Tara Hyland
For one moment she thought quite seriously about not taking the money. But then good sense overrode her pride. Maybe if she could have thrown the money in his face it would have been worth it, but Sean wasn’t around to witness her grand gesture, so she might as well keep it. After all, whatever happened now, she had a feeling she would need every penny in the future. So she tucked the letter into the front pocket of her skirt, and left the cottage for the last time, her troubles weighing heavily on her.
Franny couldn’t bring herself to tell Father Brian the full extent of her sins. So after she’d made her penance for what she had confessed – ten Hail Marys, four Our Fathers and an Act of Contrition – she headed back to the house. It was Friday, which meant fish for supper. As soon as she entered the hallway, the smell of boiled haddock struck her. It was bad enough at the best of times, but in her present condition she felt even worse than usual. That meant it was easy enough to plead illness still, so she didn’t have to eat any food or make conversation. She just sat quietly, eating a piece of dry bread and sipping her weak tea, as the rest of the family discussed their day.
Sean’s absence hadn’t registered on them yet. It was his day off, and often he took himself into Cork. When he hadn’t turned up for dinner that night, they had simply assumed he was still there. Franny made no effort to correct them. If they started asking questions about why he’d disappeared so abruptly she’d probably break down and tell them, and she couldn’t face that yet. As it grew dark, Maggie announced that she was going off to bed. Franny would have loved to lie down quietly too, and have some time to reflect on the day’s events, but unable to face her sister’s taunts, she opted to stay up instead.
Franny and her parents spent the next hour together in the small parlour, listening to the wireless. By the time the programme ended, the fire was almost out too, the soft red embers flickering and dying in the hearth.
Michael got to his feet. ‘I’m off up.’ He didn’t pause to give his wife a kiss goodnight, simply headed out of the door.
Hearing his retreating footsteps on the stairs, Franny stretched. ‘I think I’ll be heading up myself, Mam.’
Theresa didn’t look up from her knitting as she said, ‘Not so fast, my girl. Now we’re alone, I think it’s about time we had a little chat about what’s been going on between you and Sean Gallagher.’
Franny froze, her mind racing. Had Maggie told on her? It seemed unlikely. Which meant her mother was just guessing, and she could still brazen this out.
Trying to keep her voice steady, Franny asked, ‘Whatever do you mean?’
At that, Theresa’s expression tightened. She put the ball of wool and knitting needles down, and leaned forward in her armchair, her eyes flashing with anger.
‘Oh, don’t play me for a fool, my girl,’ she hissed. Her voice was low – anything above a whisper could be heard by the whole house – but she still managed to convey her fury. ‘I’ve known for weeks what’s been going on, but I turned a blind eye to it – more fool me.’ She shook her head, as though unable to comprehend her own stupidity. ‘I thought you were just fooling around out there with that . . . that tinker. But seeing you sick today . . .’
Theresa closed her eyes for a moment, as though hoping this would all go away. But when she looked up at Franny again, her expression was hard. ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘He’s got you in the family way, hasn’t he?’
Franny hesitated for a moment, and then slowly began to nod.
‘And he’s done a bunk, has he?’
Again, Franny nodded.
Now the full extent of the situation was known, Theresa looked at her beautiful, wilful child, who had always been so troublesome, and wanted to cry.
Seeing the disappointment on her mother’s face, Franny’s composure deserted her. ‘I’m sorry, Mam – really sorry. But I love him, and I thought he loved me, too. I know it was wrong to go to bed with him, but he said we’d be married.’
Theresa snorted dismissively. She couldn’t stand to hear her daughter trying to justify herself. ‘Do you not have a brain in your head? He’d tell you anything to get you into bed with him.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ Franny insisted, desperate to make her mother understand. ‘We made plans together. He was going to help me get out of Glen Vale. Maybe he’ll still come back for me—’
‘Don’t tell me you actually thought he’d stick around?’ Theresa said in disgust. ‘Men like that are after one thing. And once they’ve got it, they’re off. You can’t rely on them.’
‘And who wants a reliable man?’ Franny demanded. Suddenly everything she felt was pouring out. ‘Was it so wrong of me, to want some passion in my life? Because that’s what Sean gave me. I don’t want to live out my days in Glen Vale, never seeing anything of the world. I don’t want to slave away on a farm for years, with some brute of a husband expecting me to stay in the kitchen or the bedroom. I want more than what you’ve got.’
Listening to her life being criticised, something in Theresa snapped. Without warning, she struck her daughter hard across the face. ‘How dare you, you stupid little slut!’
There was a stunned silence. It was the first time Franny could ever remember her mother striking her. She’d had her fair share of beatings over the years, but they’d always been from her father. Finally the enormity of the situation hit home. All Franny’s bravado deserted her. Suddenly she was a child again, needing comfort from the woman she usually scorned. Burying her head in her mother’s lap, she started to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I wish I hadn’t done it. Oh God, how I wish I hadn’t.’
Hearing her daughter in pain, something broke in Theresa, too. She hadn’t meant to react like that – it was just that she was upset and disappointed. But now she couldn’t scold Franny any longer.
‘Hush. Don’t cry,’ she soothed, stroking the girl’s hair. ‘It doesn’t have to be the end of the world. We’ll sort something out, a leanbh.’
Hearing her mother calling her ‘my child’, Franny immediately felt better. It meant she had been forgiven. Franny raised her head. ‘Really?’ she said hopefully.
‘That’s right.’ Theresa smiled reassuringly, pleased to have brought some comfort. ‘I’ll tell your father what’s happened. Then first thing in the morning he’ll go down to Father Brian. The priest will speak to Conrad Walsh and his mother.’
For a moment, Franny was confused. What did Conrad and Mrs Walsh have to do with anything?
‘Conrad’s a good boy,’ her mother went on. ‘He’ll do right by you.’
Suddenly grasping what Theresa meant, Franny felt another wave of sickness wash over her – and this time it had nothing to do with being pregnant. Marrying Conrad might seem like a solution to her parents, but to her it was a life sentence. She would turn into her mother – condemned to childbearing and rearing. She would rather live with the shame and stigma than face that.
She wanted to tell her mother how she felt, but Theresa would never understand.
‘Now, go on up to bed with you,’ the older woman said, overly bright. ‘We’ll have this all sorted by tomorrow night, you see if we don’t.’
In a daze, Franny mounted the stairs to her room. Luckily Maggie was already asleep, snoring loudly, dead to the world. Lying on her bed, Franny made herself face facts. She couldn’t marry Conrad, of that she was certain. He was a nice enough lad, and his prospects were better than her parents’ had been – there was talk of him getting electricity and running water out to his farmhouse – but these additional comforts wouldn’t compensate her for a life without passion or excitement. She didn’t want to eke out an existence in Glen Vale. There was far too much still to experience. But how could she tell that to her parents? How could she tell them that she rejected their choices, everything that they toiled for every day? And what alternative did she have?
Instinctively, her hand slipped into her front pocket. She took out the note with the address that Sean had scribbled down.
/>
England. She could go to England.
No, the sensible side of her said; there was no way she could go. It would be better to stay here, where she had family to support her. She didn’t dare go out into the world, not in her condition, not on her own . . .
But Franny had never been one to listen to her sensible side, and desperation made her even more ready to act. She had the money that Sean had left her, and she had an address – a place to go. Maybe if she headed there, she might be able to find him and convince him to do right by her.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, Franny got up. Tiptoeing across the floor, she eased open the chest of drawers. Hastily, she threw a few items into a bag. She needed to go now, before her courage deserted her.
Chapter Four
Whitechapel, London, November 1946
‘Are youse gonna do something about that racket,’ Kevin Casey demanded, ‘or should I sort it meself?’
Annie Connolly looked up at the ruddy-faced giant standing in her kitchen and sighed. She could have done without this grief. The kids were finally asleep, and she’d been sitting at the kitchen table having a well-deserved cuppa and a rare moment of peace. Now that was blown out of the water.
She didn’t need to ask what Kevin’s beef was – she could hear it for herself. The girl was crying again. Given that she had the attic room, you’d think she’d be out of hearing, but the noise filtered down through the thin floors, uneven walls and badly-fitted doors. The crying itself didn’t bother Annie, she’d seen so many tears over the past few years that she’d become immune, but the other lodgers were beginning to complain. Kevin wasn’t the first. She didn’t blame the big man for being annoyed. He worked long, hard days on the docks, to send money back to his family in Ireland. The last thing he needed was some wailing girl disturbing his precious kip.
Annie got to her feet. ‘Go on back to bed with you, Casey. I’ll sort this.’ Much as she’d like to leave it to him, it was her duty as landlady to make sure everything ran smoothly. It was one of the many crosses she had to bear these days.
Before the war, she’d been doing all right. She’d come over on the boat in the early 1930s, and met her husband, Devlin, in one of the Irish clubs. Like Kevin, he’d been a docker, and after getting promoted to overseer, his increased wages had allowed them to buy a place of their own in Whitechapel. A red-brick Georgian house on Cannon Street Road, it was in the heart of the Irish quarter, built up by the influx of immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, who’d come seeking work in the nearby docks. The Connollys had made a good life for themselves there. Annie had given birth to two girls, Bronagh in 1937 followed by Maureen the year after, and the little family had been living happily and prosperously in the East End.
But then the war had hit.
Devlin hadn’t been the brave sort. As soon as conscription had been introduced, he’d headed back to Ireland, to hide out with relatives for the duration of the war. The irony was, a week before D-Day, he’d got into a bar brawl in Dublin and ended up with a broken bottle through his jugular. He’d bled out right there, on the dirty pub floor, leaving Annie alone at thirty-five years old, with three small children – the third, a boy called Daniel, conceived during a week-long trip over to see Devlin in 1943 – and without even the war widow’s pension to keep her going.
Luckily, she’d had the house. It wasn’t much – at four storeys high, it was tall and narrow, with two rooms on each floor, and an outdoor lav – but it was her only asset. Mercifully the building was on one of the few streets that had remained untouched by the nightly bombings, and so Annie had moved herself and the kids into the basement, and started renting out all the bedrooms. Kevin Casey was typical of the type who lodged here. A casual labourer, he followed the work, moving from place to place. He’d been here for a couple of months now, bedding down on a mattress in a room with two other men in a similar situation.
For people like Annie, post-war London was a grim, grey place. Once the initial VE Day celebrations were over, it had become apparent that other than an end to the bombing, nothing much else had changed. Rationing continued; rebuilding was slow. The likes of Annie still had nothing. She tried to treat her boarders fairly. A lot of her compatriots who had gone up in the world exploited their position, offering disgusting rooms to those who had no choice but to put up with it. Annie wasn’t like that. But, even though she strived to be fair-minded, she was no soft touch, as her newest tenant was just about to find out.
Along with making noise, the girl up in the attic had committed what was to Annie an unforgivable crime: she was behind in the rent. The landlady had been planning to have a word the following day, in case the girl was planning a moonlight flit, but the crying incident had brought the confrontation forward. As she mounted the stairs, Annie prepared herself for a blow-up. It wasn’t as if she was running a charity. She had her own mouths to feed. And that was something she’d need to remember now when dealing with this one.
Thump-thump-thump. Franny slunk down further on the bed, as though that would protect her from the woman outside.
‘Come on, now. Open up. I know you’re in there.’ Franny recognised the voice – a woman’s, with a strong Galway accent. It was the landlady whom she’d met when she first arrived here a month ago. A tall, large-boned woman in her mid-thirties, she’d looked as though she was a force to be reckoned with. When she was booking in, Franny had heard her telling off one of the navvies for the state he’d left the outside privy in, and had decided then that she never wanted to get on the wrong side of Annie Connolly. But now she was.
It was only four weeks since she’d left home, but to Franny, alone and lonely, it felt like for ever. It had been easy enough to get a boat over. There had been plenty of women travelling on their own, most of them heading to Kilburn or Cricklewood, places in North London that were bursting with factories and employment opportunities for newly arriving immigrants. Franny had envied them, wishing she was young and carefree, coming to England to start a new life. But pregnant and ruined she had other concerns.
After arriving in London, everything had got harder. Armed with Sean’s hastily scribbled directions, Franny had headed over to the East End. She’d got off the tube at Whitechapel, with the intention of finding somewhere to stay for the night, before starting to search for him the next day. But once outside, she’d quickly become lost in the overcrowded, filthy warren of streets that ran from the station down to the Commercial Road. It had been an eye-opener. They might not have had much money back home, but this was a different kind of poverty: an ingrained acceptance of being bottom of the heap. A country girl, used to wide open spaces and green fields, she’d found the noise and dirt disorientating.
Finding somewhere to stay hadn’t been easy. No blacks, Irish or dogs: it was an all-too-familiar sign in the windows of boarding houses. In the end, a tall, thin man with a dark beard and funny cap had taken pity on her. She was in the Jewish area, he’d explained, before kindly pointing her down towards the River Thames and Annie Connolly’s place, saying, ‘She’s an Irish, too; she’ll find a place for you if you’ve got the money.’ After that, it hadn’t taken long to find the lodging house. It hadn’t seemed like much, but Franny had felt relieved to be able to afford a room of her own; she’d heard plenty of stories of overcrowding on the way over.
But once she’d seen the little attic, she’d realised that she wasn’t as fortunate as she’d imagined. It was at best eight-foot square, and the ceiling sloped so steeply that the only place where Franny could fully stand up was in the middle of the room. Sometimes she preferred to wander the freezing streets than face coming back to such a depressing place – especially as it wasn’t exactly warm inside. It was almost December now, and so cold that she would wake in the mornings to find icicles hanging down inside the window as well as out. Franny couldn’t remember the last time she’d been warm. She had on all her clothes now, but still she was freezing.
And what was worse, it ha
d all been for nothing. She hadn’t been able to find Sean – she’d asked around, but no one had heard of him, and no one was interested in helping; they were all too busy with their own problems. So now she was stuck. Her money was running low, and she had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. She couldn’t go back home, not in her present condition . . .
Thump-thump-thump. The knocking came again, interrupting her thoughts, the thin door rattling under the strength of the landlady’s fist.
‘Just so’s you know,’ the voice broke through the door, ‘I ain’t leaving until you get out here.’
Something in the woman’s tone warned Franny not to test the threat. Reluctantly, she got up and went to let the landlady in.
When the girl opened the door, Annie was shocked by her appearance. The last time she’d seen Frances Healey was a month earlier, when she’d first arrived. Tenants came and went so frequently that the landlady hardly noticed them any more, but the pretty little Irish girl had stood out, with her rich auburn hair and large green eyes. Annie knew the girl had been avoiding her since then; in her two years of letting out rooms she’d seen every trick in the book. She’d let it go, thinking the younger woman might sort herself out, but seeing her now, Annie realised that whatever was going on with this girl couldn’t be good. Her lovely face looked strained, and she seemed to have lost weight. She could do with a good meal inside her.
Not that it was Annie’s problem. If this Frances Healey didn’t have the rent, then the landlady had no intention of letting her stay another night.
‘You’re a week behind.’ Annie didn’t mince her words. ‘I imagine, since you’ve been avoiding me, that you don’t have the cash?’
As Annie spoke, the girl moved forward a little into the dim landing light. Her eyes were red and tearful, reminding the landlady of why she’d come up here in the first place.
