Letters From a Patchwork Quilt

by Clare Flynn

  Jack didn’t want to think about what was happening upstairs. Leaning on the counter, he engaged the patrons in conversation and hoped that no one could hear Mary Ellen’s yelling. It struck him as theatrical, exaggerated, unnecessary. He had twice heard his own mother giving birth: he and his brother secretly creeping up to the back door to listen after his father had banished them from the house to stay at their aunt’s. His mother had cried out in pain, but it bore no comparison to the cacophony of blood curdling screams that Mary Ellen was producing. Perhaps he was being unkind and unfair to Mary Ellen. She had seemed so unaware of what her pregnancy meant and the pain must have taken her by surprise. It was also her first birth whereas his mother had already produced nine babies by the time he witnessed the birth of the two youngest.

  The screams got louder and people started to notice. Jack called out to a small boy who had arrived to collect a pitcher of ale to carry home for his father, and told him he’d give him a penny if he’d run round to the house of the pub pianist. Paying for an extra shift was worth it to keep the tavern crowded and drown out Mary Ellen’s screams. Music was not normally a feature of week nights and within half an hour the place was packed, as everyone gathered around the piano, joining in the singing. Jack reflected that whatever else happened, the takings would be good for a week night, even after he’d allowed a shilling for the pianist.

  Since taking over the public house, Jack had started to drink the odd beer. He confined himself to just a pint a night, mindful of what he’d said to Mr Bellamy about getting the balance right between encouraging the drinking and being sober enough to restore order if necessary. At first he hadn’t liked the bitter taste of the beer and made a pint last several hours, sweetening the sour taste in his mouth by sucking barley sugars. But it was not long until he grew accustomed to the flavour and began to enjoy it, relishing the way it quenched his thirst, liking the bitterness of the hops and the smell of the malt and barley as he swigged it down. He also liked the way that by the end of an evening’s drinking, he stopped thinking or caring about what had happened to him. The pain of the loss of Eliza and his dreams of being a teacher was numbed a little, if not wholly forgotten.

  It was approaching ten that night when the harassed midwife came downstairs and stuck her head into the bar. She signalled to him, frantically.

  ‘It’s not going well, Mr Brennan. The baby’s stuck. I’ve tried to turn it around but I’ve not managed it. I need some help. You must go for the doctor. And quick. Mrs Brennan’s not in a good way, poor lamb.’

  Jack stared at her blankly, not fully comprehending her words.

  She snatched at his arm and shook him. ‘Did you hear me, Mr Brennan? You must fetch the doctor. Immediately!’

  When he still didn’t move, she shook her head. ‘Men – you’re all clueless.’ Her eyes scanned the bar and she called out to one of the drinkers, ‘Ollie Watson, run and tell Doctor Finch to get himself here as fast as he can manage. Tell him I need help with a delivery.’

  The woman looked around the room at the crowd of men still singing their heads off around the piano, then she shook her head again and disappeared back upstairs.

  A couple of men at the bar had heard the exchange.

  ‘Your missus squeezing one out, Jack?’ one of them said, nudging the other.

  ‘First one isn’t it, lad?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘We’ll need to wet the baby’s head when it’s here,’ the first man said.

  ‘Aye,’ said his companion, ‘But you look like you’ve seen a ghost, Jack, me lad. What you need is a nice big whisky. That’ll calm your nerves quick enough. Difficult business having a bairn. I felt like I’d gone through every minute of it with the missus, with our first ween. She did that much bloody screaming. Put me off me beer it did.’

  ‘That’s right. Pour yourself a large whisky, man.’

  Jack was still trying to take in the import of the midwife’s words. His mind was racing. The look on the woman’s face and the panic in her eyes had made him realise that Mary Ellen was in danger. He knew little enough of childbirth but enough to know it could be a dangerous business. A woman two doors down from them in Derby had died trying to be delivered of a pair of twins. They’d died with her, strangled by their umbilical cords. For a moment he contemplated the possibility. He reached behind him and found the bottle of whisky and with unsteady hand poured a large measure. He’d never touched spirits before, but he had to calm his nerves and steady his brain, which was already running away with the possibility that Mary Ellen might die and he might at last be freed from marriage and his responsibilities. Free to run away to America and try to find Eliza. For a moment he felt guilty for even thinking it, then the guilt was washed away as he drank.

  The first slug of the scotch burnt his throat. He felt the hot fire searing its way down into his stomach, sending warm waves through his body. The taste was harsh, biting, alien, but the after effect was like being wrapped in a warm blanket that sent heat to every extremity and a calming balm to his fevered brain. He took another gulp, then swirled the amber liquid around the glass, holding it up so the candlelight illuminated the clear spirit: bright, pure, like topaz. He drank down the rest of the measure and reached for the bottle again.

  ‘Steady on, Jack, lad,’ said one of the drinkers.

  ‘Leave him be. He needs a drop of the hard stuff. No easy business becoming a father for the first time.’

  He’d never tasted anything like it. Cold yet hot, bitter, yet like balm. Calming. Enveloping. Wrapping him up and easing his pain. Helping him forget the woman upstairs. Helping him forget what a mess he’d made of his life so far.

  It was six in the morning when Jack came to. Bob Mintoe was shaking him. His head was being smashed by a dozen hammers and his mouth felt as though a squirrel had taken up residence and died there. A shaft of sunlight came through the window and shone in his eyes. He was lying on the floor behind the bar. He struggled to remember the events of the previous night. The doctor’s arrival. The continued screaming and then quiet. The eventual return of the doctor, who had laid a hand on his shoulder and told him his wife was delivered of a healthy daughter. He had a vague memory of standing drinks for the whole bar and finishing the rest of the whisky bottle himself in a fruitless quest to bring on permanent oblivion, to wipe out the life sentence that he had just received after the hope of liberation that had been dangled in front of his eyes.

  As he struggled to his feet, the nausea hit him and he threw up the contents of his stomach into the bucket that Mrs Mintoe had taken out ready to fill after she had swept the floor. As the vomiting gave way to dry retching and bile, he could hear her consternation – her angry threats to leave were directed at her husband.

  When he was done, he dragged his hand across the back of his mouth and went outside into the yard at the rear of the tavern, carrying the bucket. He sluiced it clean under the pump, refilled it with water, then bent over and poured the cold bucketful over his head. There was no way out now. He must go up those narrow wooden stairs to the bedroom and see Mary Ellen and the baby. The brief exhilaration he had felt that she might die was replaced by a mixture of disappointment and guilt that he had even entertained such terrible thoughts. He knew they were too terrible to share in the confessional.

  It was a long, thin baby with a head that looked disproportionately large to the rest of her body. She was lying, asleep, in a wooden cradle beside the bed, where his wife was propped up against a pile of pillows, sipping a cup of tea. The midwife, who had returned to check up on mother and baby, turned to Jack. ‘Can I see you outside, Mr Brennan?’ Her voice was a hiss.

  He nodded and stepped out of the room, feeling the floor rising up to meet him as his head continued to throb.

  She followed him onto the landing. ‘So you’re back on your feet again? Shame on you, Mr Brennan. Passed out cold before you’d even clapped eyes on your baby and thanked your poor wife for going through torment to have her. Shame on
you, indeed. You’ve no idea what that poor woman suffered and her having to do it with a pub full of men bellowing away like it was the greatest party on earth. She had such a hard time and so much pain. She could barely hear what the doctor and I were saying to her, poor lamb.’

  Jack just wanted to see the back of the woman. All he wanted now was to lie down himself and sleep again. Sleep forever and never wake up. He said nothing but just hung his head.

  ‘You men are all the same. A bunch of drunken wretches. That woman is worth ten of you.’ She shook her head and went down the stairs and he could hear her tutting until the door slammed behind her.

  He went into the bedroom and flung himself face down on the bed beside Mary Ellen.

  ‘Aren’t you going to look at the baby?’

  ‘No. I’m going to sleep and I’d be obliged if you’d stop talking. The midwife says you need to rest anyway.’

  ‘I’m going christen her Marian. I don’t want any arguments about it. It’s what my Mama was called.’

  ‘Call her what you like. I don’t care. She’s not my child.’

  Mary Ellen seemed not to hear him and prattled on. ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. We can play with dollies together when she grows a bit. It will be such fun.’

  Something had died inside Jack the night before. He put his hands over his ears and fell into a deep sleep.

  22

  Motherhood

  Since the change in the licensing laws a few years earlier, the risk to landlords of having their patrons drunk in public was heightened and should a landlord himself be found in a state of intoxication it was a certainty that he would lose his licence. The Temperance movement was gaining ground all the time in Middlesbrough and looking for any excuse to shut down a public house or strip a landlord of his licence.

  After his drunken collapse during the birth of Marian, Jack stayed off the bottle. He was ashamed of what the drink had done to him. He hated the loss of control and was mortified that he had been reduced so low, bent over a bucket puking his guts up. The pounding head, nausea and exhaustion had lasted long enough to convince him that the after-effects of alcohol were not something he wanted to experience again. He shuddered at the thought of Eliza seeing him like that. Lately he had taken to using her as an extension to his conscience.

  He reverted to making one tankard of beer last him all evening and when anyone offered to stand him a drink, he slipped the money in a glass behind the bar. Every night, when he cashed up, he would take the few coppers and add them to the growing stash that he kept in the little marquetry box Eliza had given him. He traced the image of the Clifton Suspension Bridge with his finger and told himself that it would mount up and one day be his means of escape from Middlesbrough to find and reclaim his love.

  He thought of Eliza all the time. He had sanctified her memory, raised her onto a pedestal like the Virgin Mary in the priest’s parlour. She was pure, unsullied, virginal, good – the way he liked to think he had been before Mary Ellen destroyed his soul. And yet at night his obsession for Eliza was also physical. He lay in his bed tormented with longing, imagining her body beside his, thinking thoughts about what they would do, and then feeling ashamed that he was despoiling her memory. He kept away from Mary Ellen, using the presence of Marian as an excuse to sleep in another bedroom. There he sated his hunger for sexual gratification on his own, knowing that in doing so he was committing another sin. When he was thirteen his father had sent him to talk to the priest about such matters. The kindly old fellow had winked at him and said, ‘If you should wake up with an erection, Jackie lad, just say one Our Father and three Hail Marys and it will go away.’ Jack had found that advice to be erroneous.

  He turned to poetry again. He had not had the stomach to write anything after he had been separated from Eliza but now he devoted himself to pouring out his feelings for her in verse. He remembered every tryst they had enjoyed and captured each one in a poem. The critic in him knew they were overly sentimental, but turning those feelings into words on paper gave him comfort. He would sit at a table in the corner of the bar when the pub was closed, scribbling away undisturbed – Mary Ellen avoided the public rooms, complaining of the stink of stale beer. When the weather was fine he would sometimes walk, leaving the town and heading for the hills, strolling through Albert Park or wandering along the shore away from the grinding and smoke of the iron works. He would find a sheltered grassy spot and sit, smoking and filling notebooks with his poetry, scratching out lines and rewriting in a constant pursuit of perfection, trying to pin the memories of Eliza onto the page.

  Sometimes I fear, how slender is the thread

  That holds me anchored here upon the ground

  And now my love that you will ne’er be found

  I long to cut it and the marriage bed.

  I feel you near, that with outstretched hand

  I might reach out to catch you ere you fall,

  Press you to me, needing no words at all

  Then have you join me in this empty land.

  Mary Ellen did not take well to motherhood. Her hopes that the baby would be a living doll for her to play with evaporated as soon as she realised she was expected to feed, wash, change and comfort the child. Marian cried incessantly and suffered from colic but was resilient and robust and thrived despite her mother’s neglect. The parish was supportive and there were always other mothers and parish do-gooders on hand to help Mary Ellen, stepping in and taking over when she forgot something or couldn’t be bothered.

  Mrs Mintoe threatened to withdraw her services as a cleaner when she realised Mary Ellen expected her to empty the bucket full of soaking nappies that she kept in the corner of the bedroom.

  The cleaner confronted Jack in the public bar, before opening time. ‘I’m not cleaning up after a baby. I’m employed to keep the tavern clean and do some light cleaning upstairs. I didn’t mind helping out while missus was still abed but I’m a cleaner, not a skivvie or a nursemaid. I don’t do washing and I’ll not empty that stinking bucket of baby rags in the bedroom. You can tell her upstairs that from me. She left the lid off the pail again yesterday and the pong carried all the way down here. Not right, it isn’t. And in this hot weather. Not healthy. It’ll bring a miasma. My Bob and I have to live here too and I don’t want to catch some horrible disease from breathing in bad air from a baby’s business.’

  Jack was annoyed and impatient, but couldn’t risk losing the services of the cleaner, especially as it would mean the departure of the tap-man too. He tried to be conciliatory. ‘Mrs Brennan is taking a while to adjust to having a child. I’m sure –’

  The woman interrupted him before he could finish. ‘Taking time to adjust? I’ll be kicking up the daisies before she adjusts. You need to hire some help. A nursemaid. Someone to care for the baby because she certainly isn’t going to.’

  ‘I’ll think about it, Mrs Mintoe.’

  ‘You’ll do more than think. Otherwise my Bob and I will be seeking alternative employment. Then see how you’ll get on!’

  Jack bowed to the pressure and hired Sally, a cheerful sixteen-year-old, who seemed delighted to take on the care of one small baby instead of her eight siblings in exchange for two shillings a week.

  The entry of Sally into the household eased things. As soon as she arrived and was confronted with the urine-drenched sheets in Marian’s cot and the overflowing bucket of unwashed nappies, she assumed control.

  ‘Let’s get this cot stripped and the sheets washed. Me Mam lays our babbies on straw. Much easier. We can just throw the mucky straw out and no washing.’

  The girl was even sanguine about the red-raw nappy rash that covered the baby’s nether regions. ‘A nice dollop of lard’ll sort that out in no time, Mrs Brennan.’

  Sally took over the care of the baby completely. Mary Ellen would ask for the child to be brought to her in the early evening and dandled her on her lap for a few minutes before bedtime, but otherwise delegated all aspects of her care to the girl. She took
little interest in anything other than playing the pianoforte, which she did without any flair, going to Mass, which she did most days of the week, and reading penny dreadfuls, which she devoured, even though they often gave her nightmares.

  One night, when the child was about six months old, Jack lay in bed worrying. It had been quiet lately and the pub’s takings were low. The Temperance people had been out campaigning. Several days had passed since he’d had any money to add to the marquetry box. He needed to do something to drum up custom.

  The door creaked open, then closed again quickly and he made out his wife’s shape in the darkness of the room.

  ‘Go back to bed, Mary Ellen, the baby might wake up. She’ll be needing you.’

  ‘She won’t wake. I put a few drops of Mrs Winslow’s Syrup on her tongue. She’ll sleep through till morning.’

  Jack drew himself up the bed and clutched at the covers, drawing them around him protectively. Mary Ellen had not been near him since the child was born.

  She reached down and jerked the bedding back. Before he could react, she cupped a hand around his balls. ‘Move over. Make room.’ She began stroking him.

  ‘Stop that will you?’ His voice was faint, half choked, his mind trying to exercise control over his body. ‘Go back to bed, woman.’

  ‘I want to sleep with you. You’re my husband. It’s your duty. You’re supposed to sleep with me. And anyway, you know you want to, Jack.’

  He was hard now. He groaned then let his body take over, moving on top of her, thrusting into her, pumping into her, full of anger. Her face under his was distorted and her breath came out in little gasps that turned into grunts. He thrust harder, trying to hurt her, inflict pain on her for wanting him, for making him want to do this, but instead she became more excited. She tangled her hands in his hair, pulling his head down, pressing her mouth onto his, but he moved his head to one side. Not that. Never that. He pushed his face into the pillow beside her as his hips continued to jerk up and down on her, trying to punish her, damage her, wanting to kill her.