by Maureen Lee
It was with almost a sense of relief that she realised she wouldn’t have to do that now; she and Chris weren’t married, the flat belonged to him and him alone. She, Maggie, was still a single woman who lived at home with her mam and dad. And, you never knew, there was always the chance, just the slightest chance, that she might not be pregnant.
She decided to go home at the normal time, as if she’d been at work, and tell Mam that Chris had telephoned the office saying he was unable to meet her. In a few days, she would reveal that she wasn’t seeing him any more. At least she hoped so. Everything was so unpredictable, including herself.
Next day at work she felt almost light-headed. ‘You had a nice time then yesterday?’ Iggy remarked when he noticed her extra-bright eyes.
‘Not really,’ she replied. How could she describe yesterday? As possibly one of the worst days of her life?
The following day was Good Friday. She went to St James’s church with Nell and they did the Stations of the Cross. Afterwards they went into town. The shops were closed but they looked in the windows, then walked down as far as the Pier Head, where they caught the ferry across to New Brighton and back again.
‘At the camp,’ Maggie remarked on the boat back, ‘Sundays and holy days were hardly noticeable. After all, the war couldn’t grind to a halt because it was Good Friday. I hate it when the shops and picture houses and theatres close down and everywhere is as dull as ditchwater.’
Nell was shocked. ‘But Maggie, Good Friday is the day Jesus died for us on the cross. It wouldn’t seem right to go dancing when you think of the way He suffered.’
Maggie sniffed. ‘I’m sure He wouldn’t mind, not now, nearly two thousand years later.’
When she woke the following morning, she discovered she’d started her period and had lost an unusually heavy amount of blood, which she continued to do for the rest of the day. It was accompanied by a dull pain in the pit of her stomach. For the remainder of her life, Maggie was convinced that on that day she had a miscarriage. Her feelings were confused: sadness if she was in fact losing a baby, yet wholehearted relief that she was no longer pregnant.
On the same day, a letter arrived from Chris. He pleaded for her forgiveness, claiming he’d only married Beryl Cameron because she said she was having a baby, which turned out not to be true. He loved her, Maggie. She would always be the love of his life. Could they please start again? He would instigate divorce proceedings that very day.
‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Maggie said under her breath as she ate her breakfast.
‘What was that?’ Ryan asked.
‘Nothing,’ she sang. ‘Absolutely nothing at all.’ She didn’t reply to Chris’s letter. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting her to, because a few days later he wrote another, asking for the return of his mother’s ring. He put in brackets that Betty had known nothing about Beryl Cameron. Maggie sent the ring back by registered post. He didn’t acknowledge it and she never heard from him again, so never knew if he was punished for attempting to get married a second time. A continental cinema didn’t open in Walton Vale, and she wondered if it had only existed in Chris’s imagination.
Over the Easter weekend, the O’Neills’ house had been as busy as a mainline station. Small meetings of the Labour Party were held in the front parlour and larger meetings in the party’s offices on the Dock Road. Phelim Hegarty had announced to the press his intention to resign as Labour Member of Parliament for the Bootle Docklands seat, by which time the party had chosen Paddy O’Neill as their prospective candidate. The by-election would be held in a few months’ time, before Parliament closed for the long summer break. A statement would be given to the press before the end of the week. The idea of a Conservative being elected to a seat in Bootle wasn’t even debatable, and only a fool with money to burn would have put a bet on Paddy not winning.
It was during this week that Maggie arrived home from work in the best mood she’d been in for a long time. It was only ten days since her life had been turned upside down and back again, but it felt like ages. The idea of her father becoming a Member of Parliament was like something out of a film or a novel, and she was really looking forward to it.
Only her mother was in. Bridie was having tea with her friend Shirley, who lived in Pearl Street; Dad and Ryan had yet to arrive back from work.
‘Hello, Mam!’ Maggie had burst into the living room full of smiles, unaware that the next hour would go down as the worst in her life. She bent to give her mother a kiss, but was none-too-gently pushed away.
‘Sit down,’ her mother said in a hard voice. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’ Maggie sat, too surprised to ask what was wrong. ‘Remember that friend of mine from school called Alice?’ her mother began. Without waiting for a reply, she went on. ‘She got married to this lovely young feller in the Merchant Navy at around the same time as I married your dad. His name was Felix, but they called him Faily – Faily Walters. Poor young man, he died within a few months of the wedding, washed overboard in the Barents Sea, or somewhere like that up in the Arctic. She never married again, did Alice.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Mam?’ Maggie was longing for a cup of tea.
‘Just shut up and listen,’ her mother snapped. Her skin was yellow, her expression sour. Her stomach was swollen to the extent that she could have been expecting two or three babies. Maggie had never seen her in such a state before. She wondered if her mind had slipped just a little bit because of the pregnancy. ‘Faily was already dead,’ she continued, ‘when Alice discovered she was having a baby. She had a little girl, Lily – isn’t that the prettiest name? I think I might well have called you Lily if Alice hadn’t taken it first. Anyroad, she had a hard struggle bringing up a baby on her own. When the war started, she moved to the other side of Liverpool and I haven’t seen much of her since.’
‘She came to our house the Christmas before I joined the army,’ Maggie said warily, worried that the words might irritate her mother, though they wouldn’t have done normally. But in this strange mood . . . ‘I remember her well.’ She was a tall, sad-faced woman with prematurely grey hair.
‘She remembers you well, too.’ Sheila O’Neill gave her daughter a look that could well have been described as one of dislike. ‘She came this avvy to tell me she saw you recently in the registry office in Brome Terrace with a very nice-looking young man who sounds very much like Chris Conway. It’s where she works. She thought you must have been guests at a wedding, never believing that you yourself were getting married in such a heathen place. And even if you were, that your mam and dad and all the rest of your family wouldn’t have been there as guests. It was only later she learnt that the young man was a bigamist and you hadn’t got married after all.’
‘He’s not a bigamist,’ Maggie said faintly, but her mother, this odd, unpleasant mother, wasn’t interested.
‘Are you pregnant, girl?’ she asked in a hoarse voice.
‘No, Mam. I just thought I was.’ She wasn’t sure if discovering she’d been thinking of getting married for that reason would make her mam less upset or more. On reflection, it probably made no difference.
‘You’re a bad girl, Margaret O’Neill.’
The tone was so bitter and unforgiving that Maggie shivered. ‘Mam,’ she said tearfully. ‘Don’t talk like that. I was wrong, but I didn’t know Chris was already married, did I?’
‘You should’ve thought of that before you were so free with your body.’ Tinker came and jumped on to Sheila’s knee, but leapt off straight away as if sensing he wasn’t welcome. ‘I expect in the army you made yourself available to any old Tom, Dick or Harry.’
‘Oh, Mam,’ Maggie cried, ‘I did no such thing. Honest. Chris was the first, the only one.’ She got to her feet. ‘Let’s make us a cup of tea,’ she said brightly. ‘It’ll do you good. You know you always say the world looks better after a cuppa.’
Her mother said nothing, so Maggie went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. She winced when she heard the hard
, brittle voice again, a voice nothing like her mother’s normally soft one.
‘You know what’s cut me up the most,’ the voice said. ‘I never realised before how much Alice hated me. I thought we were good friends all these years, but this avvy, when she was telling me about you, I could see she was enjoying it. Her eyes were all feverish like, as if she’d always resented me and your dad being so happy and she was really glad she was making me as unhappy as herself.’
There was a long pause. Maggie peeped into the room. Mam was staring at the empty fireplace. ‘I’ll not be telling your dad,’ she muttered. ‘And Alice won’t let on to anyone else. It was me she wanted to get at, her old friend.’ She leant back in the chair and her head fell to one side. ‘Oh, Paddy luv,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll really miss you.’
It was quite a few seconds before Maggie noticed that her mam was no longer breathing, and more seconds before reality dawned and she realised that her mother was dead.
Sheila O’Neill’s heart had been shockingly weak. The doctor hadn’t realised. No one had. The baby she’d been carrying turned out to be a boy, and he was dead in her womb.
Paddy O’Neill swore that once the funeral was over, he would never set foot inside a church again. He wanted no more to do with the God who had taken away his beloved wife, who’d never harmed a hair on the head of anyone in her entire life.
‘Where’s the fairness of it?’ he wailed. ‘My Sheila was a saint, a living saint.’ He cross-questioned Maggie as to what his wife had said during her last conversation on earth.
‘She talked about you and Bridie, about Ryan, the new baby, all of us,’ Maggie stammered. It tore at her heart having to invent her mother’s last words. Was it her own behaviour that had caused her mother to die? How could she ever forgive herself?
‘What else? What else?’ her father demanded, greedy to know everything, even the sound of Sheila’s very last breath.
When reminded of it, he announced that he wanted nothing to do with the by-election. He didn’t want to be a Member of Parliament without his wife at his side. ‘She was really looking forward to it,’ he claimed.
As for Maggie, she was storing up secrets: the almost wedding, the almost baby, and now knowing that these two things might well have been the cause of her mother’s death. The knowledge had literally broken Sheila’s fragile heart, and it was something her daughter would have to live with for the rest of her life.
She gave Iggy a week’s notice. ‘But I’ve got to take me mam’s place, you see,’ she told him when he said she could take as much time off as she wanted; she didn’t have to leave. ‘Someone’s got to make the meals and do the housework and look after Bridie. Me dad and our Ryan both earn decent wages; there’s no real need for mine.’
Auntie Kath was as upset as anyone that her beloved sister was dead, but the world didn’t stop turning no matter how much you had loved the person who had died. There was the serious matter of who would replace Phelim Hegarty now that her brother-in-law had turned the job down.
An emergency meeting was held and Auntie Kath was adopted as prospective parliamentary candidate for Bootle Docklands. She was well aware that many people, and not just men, didn’t approve of women meddling in politics, but she was determined to show them bloody politicians down in London a thing or two, particularly the Tory ones.
Chapter 5
Iris had never met Maggie’s mother, but she ordered flowers for the funeral; miniature daffodils and violets mingled with trailing ivy and tied with a blue satin bow.
‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Nell suggested. ‘I’m sure Maggie will appreciate it.’ Privately, she didn’t think Maggie capable of any feelings just now apart from grief, which Nell found surprising. Naturally she would be horribly upset that her mam had died, but she was the sort of person who would normally have subdued her grief and consoled her dad who had fallen apart. According to Ryan, who was holding the family together, Paddy O’Neill spent every evening in the parlour talking to his wife, who lay in her coffin with rosary beads threaded through her white fingers.
‘I never thought I’d say this, but I’ll be glad when me mam’s in her grave.’ Ryan made the Sign of the Cross in case the words sounded blasphemous.
‘I don’t blame you.’ Nell squeezed his hand, glad of the opportunity. Since she’d been able to tell the difference between men and women, she’d wanted to marry Ryan O’Neill. But she wasn’t pretty or glamorous enough. Ryan’s girlfriends always looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of a women’s magazine; perfectly made-up, beautifully dressed, drenched in expensive scent. Mind you, lately he’d taken up with Rosie Hesketh, who’d been at school with Nell and Maggie. Rosie had been a sturdy, argumentative little girl with ringlets, who’d done well in cookery and needlework and poorly at everything else, though if there’d been a prize for arguing, she would have won hands down.
‘I don’t know what he sees in her,’ Maggie had said flatly only the other day. ‘She hasn’t a brain in her head and she’s not exactly pretty.’
‘She’s got a determined chin,’ Nell pointed out.
‘Well, a determined chin isn’t anything to write home about.’
Nell, being no beauty herself, felt obliged to stand up for Rosie. ‘It was enough for your Ryan to ask her out.’
‘Humph!’ was all Maggie said.
Rosie wasn’t at the funeral, but she turned out to be in the O’Neills’ house when everyone went back for refreshments, having prepared sandwiches and baked cheese straws the night before. Bridie, Maggie’s little sister, was also there.
‘I would have helped with the refreshments,’ Nell said when they met in the O’Neills’ kitchen. Since leaving school, Nell and Rosie had done no more than nod at each other in the street.
‘S’all right, Nellie. I could easily manage on me own,’ Rosie said in a friendly manner. ‘Anyroad, Bridie here gave us a hand. Didn’t you, darlin’. She patted the little girl’s head. ‘Would you mind helping Nell take the sarnies around? Ryan’s seeing to the hard stuff,’ she remarked to Nell, ‘and there’s tea if folks want it.’
‘Me mammy’s gone to heaven,’ Bridie told Nell.
‘I bet she’ll be happy there.’ The poor child didn’t understand what had really happened, that her mammy was dead.
In the parlour, Iris was talking to Auntie Kath, congratulating her on being a candidate in the forthcoming by-election. ‘I do envy you,’ she remarked. ‘Being in Parliament must be incredibly interesting. I wish I could do something like that.’
‘Well what’s stopping you?’ Auntie Kath asked pugnaciously. She had Maggie’s dark curls and her pretty face sparkled with life and intelligence. She wore a black dress that was much too long, and clumpy-heeled shoes.
‘For one thing, I have a husband,’ Iris stammered, slightly taken aback by the woman’s attitude.
‘Does he keep you locked up or something?’
‘No, but he’s a doctor and I’m his receptionist.’
This was greeted with a contemptuous ‘Huh! Did you want to be a doctor’s receptionist when you were growing up?’
Iris was obliged to shake her head. In the manner of most little girls, she’d wanted to do all sorts of exciting things.
Auntie Kath seemed determined to prove her a total failure as a woman and a human being. ‘But your husband wanted to be a doctor and just assumed that you, his wife, would be his assistant. If you were the doctor, would your husband agree to being your receptionist?’
‘I doubt it very much,’ Iris was forced to concede.
‘It’s just so unfair,’ her tormentor raged. ‘Men automatically assume their wives will be on hand to provide free labour. It doesn’t cross their minds that women have ambitions too. And I bet your husband doesn’t even pay you a salary.’
‘No, he doesn’t.’ She would demand one as soon as she got home.
Auntie Kath was slightly more impressed when Iris told her she’d been a sergeant in the army, which was
how she’d met Maggie, her niece. ‘What did you do there?’
‘I was a driver.’ Iris wanted to laugh, but remembered she was at a funeral. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but all I ever did was chauffeur officers around, and not a single one was a woman.’ She finished by offering to deliver leaflets leading up to the election. ‘And I’ll put your poster up in our window.’
Auntie Kath thanked her kindly, and when they shook hands, Iris felt as if she’d made a friend.
Wakes never seemed to be all that sad, Nell mused as she carried round another plate of sandwiches, this time in the street outside the house, where the mourners had spread when it became too crowded indoors. There was no sign anywhere of Maggie or her father. At the cemetery, they’d stood by the grave, the despairing husband of the deceased, and the devastated daughter, drained of life, neither recognisable from the dignified man and laughing girl they’d been this time last week.
Now, hours later, conversations were animated. People who hadn’t seen each other for ages were catching up on old times, sharing experiences they’d had during the war. There was even laughter here and there. Sheila O’Neill was remembered with affection, and instances of her kindness were described with real warmth.
Perhaps it was only to be expected that someone would start to sing, starting with Oh, Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight, with people here working by day and by night . . .
Inevitably the sound carried and people from nearby streets came to join in. It’s a celebration of a life, Nell thought, much better than everyone weeping and wailing. If it had been her own funeral, she would have far preferred songs to hymns, and jokes to tears. She said this to Iris when she went back indoors and they came face to face.
