by Anne Bennett
‘All I’m saying is, I have got right fond of you and you can stay here as long as you like—’
‘Oh, but—’
‘Hear me out,’ Ada said. ‘If you want to stay on here and get a job or summat then I will see to Finn for you.’
‘Ada, you have given me a lifeline,’ Bridgette said. ‘I hate being beholden to people. I would have preferred to have looked for a job in Paris, to support myself and Finn. And it would have worked because my aunt would have loved to have a free hand to spoil Finn totally, but I never mentioned it because my uncle would have been scandalised. He wasn’t an ogre or anything, and agreed in principle with women working, but he thought it was his place to look after me and he would have felt shamed if I had insisted on finding a job. So, I thank you for that.’
‘It’d be no skin off my nose to do it, bab,’ Ada said. ‘In fact, it might give me a new lease of life to have the care of a little one again.’
‘You wouldn’t find it too much for you?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Ada said. ‘Not with a child like Finn anyroad, who is as sunny as the day is long.’
‘All right then,’ Bridgette said. ‘Shall we leave it another week and then if I have had no reply to the letter, I will give up the search for the family and start looking for a job somewhere.’
‘If that’s what you want, bab.’
‘It is,’ Bridgette said with an emphatic nod. ‘I can’t spend my life looking for elusive family members. For Finn’s sake as well as my own, I must settle somewhere, and Birmingham seems as good as any other place.’
The following day in Buncrana, Nellie McEvoy received a strange letter, so strange that when she shut the post office that evening, she told her husband, Jack, about it as they ate dinner together.
He looked at her in total amazement and then said, ‘You are telling me that young Finn Sullivan was supposed to have married a French girl and he is the father of the young woman that has written to you?’
‘That’s what this Bridgette Laurent claims.’
‘Do you believe it?’
Nellie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It is almost too incredible to believe.’
‘Wouldn’t people have been informed if such a thing had happened?’ Jack said. ‘His family would have been told, surely to God. One of them would have said.’
‘Maybe in wartime communications were more difficult, certainly in the Great War,’ Nellie said. ‘This young woman said that she has only found out that Finn was her father because her mother, who was called Gabrielle, told her almost on her deathbed. I can’t help feeling that unless she believed that to be true she wouldn’t have bothered to write. She is a widow now with a young child and, if Finn is her father, I would say that she is searching for her roots. I feel a bit sorry for her. Maybe it was just something her mother said, because why would she keep quiet all these years if she actually married Finn?’
‘You’re right.’ Jack said. ‘And another thing. If they had been married, as she claimed, it would have been she, not the family here, that received the telegram telling them of his death.’
‘Yes,’ Nellie said. ‘So they couldn’t be married, and that would explain this Gabrielle’s silence over the years. Mind you, Bridgette Laurent might still be Finn’s daughter. She believes it, anyway. She mentions Christy Byrne. He told her that some of the family was in Boldmere and she hightailed it off to England to seek them out. She said that Christy advised her to write to get the addresses of all the family before she left, but she didn’t. But she won’t find any of the family in Boldmere now.’
‘God, I haven’t seen Christy in ages,’ Jack said.
‘Well he seldom leaves the farm,’ Nellie said. ‘It’s hard for him, poor fellow.’
‘Maybe I should go out and see him?’ Jack said, ‘And see what he has to say?’
‘Why worry the man over it?’
‘Well, the letter could be genuine.’
‘I’m not absolutely sure if it is or is not,’ Nellie said with a sigh. ‘What I do know is that I do not feel right sending addresses to a perfect stranger.’
‘You can’t just ignore it, though,’ Jack said. ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to write to Tom,’ Nellie said, ‘and I will enclose this Bridgette’s letter with my own. The girl is in England at the moment, so Tom can go along and check it out.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘I think that’s the best thing that you can do.’
TWENTY-SIX
On Thursday morning of that week, Ada said to Bridgette, ‘Why don’t you go and ask at Paget Road School? If Kevin Maguire didn’t pass the eleven-plus then that’s where he well might have gone. I hear what you say about him being Catholic and everything, but there could be a hundred and one reasons why he was at a normal school. Wouldn’t do him any harm to check, would it?
‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘And give you summat to think about other than a letter coming from that Irish place. If he was never at the school, you have lost nothing. I’ll mind the nipper for you.’
Bridgette knew now how Ada could go on if she had a bee in her bonnet about something, though she did have a point about the school. It was better not to leave any stone unturned and yet when she left the house later she thought it would be another wild-goose chase. Ada said Paget Road School was in the middle of a council estate called Pype Hayes, and she drew her little map and so she found the school easily.
It was a very large square building. The windows were rather high and some were open. She could hear the noise of the children inside, and as she walked up the drive to the entrance, she felt her stomach quail. This, she knew, could be the end of the road as far as her search was concerned. Everything hinged on the people in the post office giving her the addresses she had asked for, she now believed.
The secretary at the school was very pleasant and Bridgette sat on a chair facing her across the desk and explained who she was and the quest to find her family. The secretary listened politely and with a measure of sympathy because she knew the young woman before her was not the only one whose family had been split asunder by the war. However, when she mentioned the name, Kevin Maguire, she took more interest. ‘How old would he be now, this Kevin Maguire?’ she asked.
‘That I don’t know,’ Bridgette said. ‘The men who travelled to England with my uncle Tom just said he was younger than Molly, who had been thirteen in 1935. I got the feeling that he was much younger and that was why he stayed here with his grandfather, but I don’t really know.’
The secretary had got up while Bridgette had been speaking to search a filing cabinet behind her. She withdrew a file and laid it on the desk. ‘We had a Kevin Maguire with us until last summer,’ she said. ‘I think this is the Kevin Maguire that you are after, for Molly Maguire is stated here as his guardian.’
Bridgette’s stomach was doing somersaults and her face was a wreath of smiles as she said, ‘You don’t know what this means to me.’
‘I think I do, my dear,’ the secretary said. ‘Your eyes speak for you. They live on the Kingsbury Road. Do you know the airfield?’
‘Yes, I have been up to it,’ Bridgette said. ‘Molly worked there during the war.’
‘Yes, she did,’ the secretary said. ‘Anyway, the house is this side of the airfield, one of a cluster set back from the road called The Copse, and the Maguires live in number eight.’
Bridgette felt almost breathless with excitement. All that searching had paid off and soon—very, very soon—she would meet up with members of her family.
After shaking hands warmly with the secretary, she almost floated home and told Ada excitedly what had transpired.
‘It was all your doing,’ she said, throwing her arms around the older woman and kissing her soundly on both cheeks. Then she snatched Finn from where he was building a tower of bricks and danced him around the room. ‘Who’s going to meet his new cousins then?’ she cried, and though Finn didn’t understand a wor
d, he caught the excitement, and shouted and waved his arms in the air, which made both women laugh even more.
When their hilarity was spent and Bridgette had come back down to earth, Ada said. ‘So when are you going to go up to the house?’
‘Ooh, Ada, I would like to go now this minute,’ Bridgette said, ‘but the secretary told me that Kevin had left school last year so he will probably be working somewhere now, and Molly might be working too. It will kill me to wait but I think late afternoon will be the time to call.’
‘And are you taking the babby with you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Bridgette said. ‘They are his relatives too.’
‘Let’s have a bite to eat then,’ Ada said. ‘And what I am going to do with you until it’s time to set off I don’t know.’
Bridgette didn’t know either—the clock had never turned so slowly—but eventually she was ready with Finn strapped in his pushchair. ‘Don’t forget it’s the number twenty-eight tram and it goes right down the Chester Road,’ Ada said.
‘I know, you have told me this already.’
‘Doesn’t hurt to go over it again,’ Ada said. ‘Don’t forget to ask the conductor to tell you when you get to the Tyburn pub. The houses are only a step away from there.’
‘We were so close the other day! I feel like I have a whole lot of butterflies in my stomach.’
‘Go on with you,’ Ada said. ‘You’re like a big kid.’ But when she gave Bridgette a hug at the door her eyes were very bright. She watched her walk down the road and hoped that something would go right for her for once. And that when she found the family she had set such store by they were kind and welcoming to her.
Bridgette got off the tram and controlled the urge to run down the road, pushing Finn before her. She forced herself to walk sedately though the churning of her stomach was almost uncomfortable. She found the house with ease, a nice solid red-brick house, and she walked up the path almost apprehensively because she knew whoever opened that door wouldn’t know a thing about her.
‘This is it then, Finn,’ she said, as she lifted the knocker, and he just laughed.
No one came to open the door, though, and Bridgette had knocked again before the woman in the adjoining house came out.
‘Ain’t no good you knocking there,’ she said.
‘Are they at work?’
‘No,’ the woman replied. ‘They’re gone.’
Disappointment hit Bridgette like a piece of lead and she repeated, ‘Gone?’ as if she couldn’t quite believe it. ‘Do you know where?’
‘Back down to her sister’s near Hereford somewhere,’ the neighbour said. ‘I don’t know her address or owt.’
‘Back to her sister’s near Hereford,’ Bridgette repeated.
The neighbour looked at Bridgette shrewdly, wondering if she was quite right in the head and then she said, ‘Who you looking for anyroad?’
‘Molly Maguire.’
‘Oh, they just lived here through the war,’ the woman said. ‘It was never their house. It belonged to the Salingers, and her and the two younger girls went to stay with her sister through the war when her son, Terry, went into the RAF. It was him let the house out.’
‘So where did the Maguires go after the war?’
The neighbour shrugged. ‘Search me. Molly got married, but I don’t know where they went after that. First thing I knew was Molly and her brother was gone and Carol Salinger was back. Anyroad, it didn’t last because the kids couldn’t settle and she wasn’t here quite six months and they went back again and the house is up for sale now.’
‘What about the son? Did he go with them?’ Bridgette asked, thinking if she could trace him he might have more information about the people he had let the house out to.
The neighbour shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Don’t really know what happened to him. Someone said once they’d heard he’d started up his own business, a garage or some such thing, but I don’t know. I never saw him again after he left here.’
‘So there is no one that can tell me what happened to Molly Maguire, or whatever she is called now, or her brother?’ Bridgette said her voice sounding so bereft that even the neighbour noticed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there is. Is it important?’
‘To me it is probably the most important thing in the world just now,’ Bridgette said sadly.
She turned the pushchair round and began walking back up the path, anxious to be away from the woman lest the urge to throw herself on the ground and howl out her frustration should overcome her. The neighbour watched her go, still not at all sure that she was all right in the head.
Bridgette couldn’t believe that she had actually been to the house where Molly and Kevin had lived through the war years, and that woman had lived beside them, and yet she’d had no curiosity about where they had gone when they left the house. She wasn’t aware when her tears began. She wanted to sink onto the pavement and weep out all her sadness and her desperate disappointment, to beat her fists at the unfairness of life. She would never find her family—she knew that now—and the realisation was like a hard knot in her heart.
She was unaware where she was pushing the pushchair except that it was in the vague direction of Ada’s. Not that she wanted to go home yet. Ada would be all caring and everything, but Bridgette felt she really had to get it straight in her own head before she could talk about it without giving way to the tears now clogging her throat. That would just upset Ada and Finn too.
Finn, she saw, was already disturbed. He was watching her, his large dark eyes solemn, and she knew that he had picked up on her mood. Poor little scrap, she thought. It’s hardly his fault. If all he was going to get in his life was her she had to take a grip on herself for his sake, and when they came out at Eachelhurst Road, she could see Pype Hayes Park across the road. She made an effort and said to Finn, ‘Shall we go to the park then?’
She wondered if he would recognise the word, for they had only taken him once before, but he obviously did because his eyes lit up again and he began bouncing in his pushchair. ‘I suppose I can take that as a yes,’ Bridgette said, and she even managed a smile for his sake.
Once in the park, Bridgette made straight for the playground. There was another young mother there with a little girl slightly older than Finn, and she was on one of the toddler swings. Finn could remember the swings too, and he began to shout and point. Bridgette lifted him into a swing next to the little girl. She looked very like her mother, she noticed, with gorgeous dark brown hair that fell around her head in curls, and deep brown eyes like Finn’s, though her eyes were dancing.
She reminded Bridgette of Leonie at about the same age, and then she turned and smiled and it was as if a light was turned on inside her face. Despite her innate sadness, Bridgette found herself smiling back.
‘Your daughter has a truly beautiful smile,’ she said to the young woman pushing the swing beside her.
She laughed as she said, ‘Which she uses to great advantage, and when she turns it on her father he would lift the moon from the sky for her. I have to be quite firm at times because the whole family would have her ruined if I allowed it. Still,’ she went on, ‘as my uncle says, better that way than the other way and I suppose he’s right. Yet I think it will be better when she has a brother or sister. Is yours an only one?’
‘Yes,’ Bridgette answered shortly. ‘And he will always be because I am a widow.’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ the young woman said.
Bridgette shrugged. ‘There are many of us after this war.’
‘Yes,’ the woman agreed. ‘But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to bear I should think.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Bridgette said. ‘Nothing really helps, and yet I’m glad I have his child. He is my consolation.’
‘Yes,’ the woman said gently. ‘If anything had happened to my husband I would have wanted his child. He was worried about that very thing when I became pregnant, but when you lov
e someone you want to raise their child. It’s part of them, after all. And you’re foreign too, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I come from Northern France,’ Bridgette said.
‘My word,’ the woman said in admiration. ‘Your English is jolly good.’
‘Thank you,’ Bridgette said. ‘I have been learning it since I was a little child. I think that makes all the difference.
‘My husband said France had a terrible time in the war,’ the woman said. ‘He was a pilot and he used to fly over it and see the destruction. Were you in France throughout the war?’
‘All through,’ Bridgette replied. ‘Our town was occupied by the Nazis. That was a terrible time.’
‘Oh, it must have been,’ the woman said sympathetically. ‘I would have hated that.’
Suddenly the little girl started to gabble and the woman gave her swing a hefty push as she said with a wry smile, ‘I don’t know, even when they can’t say much they make their wishes known.’
‘I think we become attuned to them,’ Bridgette said. ‘I always seem to know what Finn wants.’
‘Finn’s an unusual name, isn’t it?’ said the woman, and she pushed the swing again.
‘I don’t really know,’ Bridgette said. ‘He was called after my father.’
‘Oh, my little girl was called after my mother,’ the other woman said. ‘Her name is Nuala.’
The name resounded in Bridgette’s memory. Her heart was thumping hard against her ribs and there seemed to be a roaring inside her head. She remembered that the young woman had said her husband was a pilot and she said, ‘This may seem an odd question, but what is your husband’s name?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Please,’ Bridgette pleaded. ‘Is it Mark?’
The woman looking totally confused said, ‘Yes, Mark Baxter.’
