A Mother’s Spirit

‘Oh, Daddy, you’re funny,’ Gloria said. ‘Most skirts are short now.’

Gloria was right: nearly every outfit she owned was like that, the skirts with gathers, pleats or splits in them. She seemed oblivious to the disapproval of her parents, and the day she came home with her hair bobbed in the Eton crop Joe thought Brian was going to have an apoplectic fit, but Gloria was unabashed at the furore.

‘Stop roaring at me, Daddy,’ she commanded. ‘And stop glowering at me in that way. I don’t know why you are so cross or, indeed, what it has to do with you either. Since it is my hair on my head, surely I should be the one to decide how to wear it, and anyway, with long hair how could I put on my new cloche hat?’

‘That’s hardly a good enough reason for having all your hair cut off like that,’ Norah said.

‘On the contrary, Mother, it is a perfectly good reason,’ Gloria retorted. ‘Louise Brooks looks divine in hers and everyone wants to copy her. And she has her hair cropped too. Many girls do these days, Daddy. I am afraid you and Mother are very behind the times.’

That wasn’t how Brian saw it at all, but the deed was done now and he could do nothing about it, especially as all Gloria’s friends had had their hair bobbed too and were similarly unashamed about it. They seemed remarkable close, the friends Gloria had made at the convent, and when they weren’t meeting up, Gloria would be having long and involved conversations with them on the telephone.

Gloria’s friends’ parents seemed incredibly lax and lenient with their daughters, which Brian found hard to accept. Not that the girls cared a jot for how he felt. They visited often, and the rooms rang with their laughter, jazz would reverberate all over the house, and the girls would be dancing together or else trying out Gloria’s cosmetics. A couple of them actually took up smoking.

‘It’s so different from when I was growing up,’ Norah said one day as she sat down to dinner with Brian and Joe. ‘You had to wait first to be introduced to a young man, and then if he asked permission from your parents to walk out with you, then that was the young man that you would become engaged to and eventually marry. This way … well, there are so many men, but when I cautioned Gloria that she would make a name for herself, she laughed.’

It was the men that bothered Joe too. Brian always worked shorter hours when Gloria was at home – that is, if he went in to work at all – and so Joe often saw the young men, sometimes known to the Brannigans in only the vaguest way, who would come scorching up the drive in their sports cars. They would stop suddenly with a squeal of brakes and a spray of gravel, and Gloria would come running from the house and be spirited away to some venue or other, from which she might not return for a day or two.

But what really disturbed Joe were the languid young men who turned up to play tennis. He considered the girls’ attire almost indecently short, and these people were so easy with one another that a young man seemed to think nothing of throwing a casual arm around Gloria’s shoulders, or even embracing her if he felt they had played well together.

And yet as the summer passed, Joe sensed that Gloria was not truly happy, that her gaiety was forced. Eventually the frivolity and freedom would end, and when that happened, he imagined Gloria would probably have chosen one boy over all the others. That was the one she would marry, and the day she did that would be the day that he would leave the Brannigans’ household. He couldn’t have stayed and watched her married to another.

Summer gave way to autumn and then winter, and the dresses were swapped for thick skirts in bright colours, lurid jumpers and multicoloured scarves, which the girls wore with their ‘up-to-the-minute’ checked and baggy coats.

Joe watched Gloria anxiously. She seemed more dejected than ever. The frenetic pace of her social life had slowed somewhat as the colder weather settled over the city, but when she didn’t pick up in the early spring either, and was still listless and eating less than a bird, Brian and Norah were all for calling out the doctor to her, though Gloria wouldn’t hear of it.

And then just a week away from her nineteenth birthday she went to her room even earlier than usual. Joe had watched her moving her dinner around her plate and fully understood her parents’ concern. He decided that he would seek her out at the first opportunity and try to get to the bottom of what was wrong with her. So engrossed was he that he didn’t notice that Gloria’s door was unlatched as he passed her room on the way to his own further down the corridor.

He’d hung his jacket over a chair and had removed his tie and loosened his top button when the knock came to the door and he was stunned on opening it to see Gloria there.

‘Are you all right, Miss Gloria?’

Gloria didn’t answer. Instead she said, ‘Can I come in?’

It was the last thing that Joe expected her to say, and he looked down the corridor to see if there was anyone about who might have overheard her, before replying, ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’

‘I need to talk with you privately and I can’t think of any other place where we can do it,’ Gloria said. ‘Please let me in?’

Joe was in a quandary, but he couldn’t leave Gloria standing there and so he opened the door and she walked past him and sat on the bed. He sat on the dressing-table chair opposite her, and for a second or two they stared at one another.

Gloria looked terrible, Joe thought, and with his heart in his boots he asked tentatively, ‘Are you in trouble of some sort?’

Gloria shook her head. ‘No, it’s nothing like that,’ she said, and Joe let his breath out in a sigh of relief.

He was totally shocked when Gloria went on, ‘It’s just … Joe, what do you really think of me?’

‘What tomfool question is that?’ Joe got to his feet. ‘I really think it would be better to return to your own room now, Miss Gloria.’

‘Hear me out,’ Gloria pleaded. ‘Please sit back down, Joe, and let me finish.’

Joe sat down heavily, aware that the hairs on the back of his neck were prickling with apprehension and his palms felt clammy. He said almost gruffly, ‘Miss Gloria, why are you asking me this question?’

‘Because I need to know,’ Gloria said. ‘I don’t want you to think of whether it is right or wrong and whether it’s your place to say anything about it. I just want to hear what you really think of me from your own lips.’

Joe couldn’t trust himself to speak and eventually, when the silence had stretched out between them, Gloria went on, ‘All right then. I guess it is up to me to bare my soul.’

‘Please, Miss Gloria,’ Joe pleaded, ‘don’t say anything that you are going to regret.’

‘Will you shut up, Joe?’ Gloria retorted. ‘I must tell you. I think that I have fallen in love with you.’

Joe just stared at her. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach by a mule. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard. The words he never imagined would be said to him had been said, and by the young woman he loved with all his heart and soul. Yet he had to reply. ‘Miss Gloria, don’t be cross at what I am about to tell you. You are young still, and the young often get crushes on people. You will probably fall in love many times before you are ready to settle down.’

Gloria leaped off the bed and stamped her foot. ‘Don’t you dare patronise me, Joe Sullivan!’ she cried. ‘I have loved you all my life, since that day on the docks when you opened the carriage door and asked me if I was all right.’

‘Miss Gloria, you were a child then.’

‘I know that,’ Gloria snapped. ‘And then I loved you as a child, but that love has changed as I have grown. Now I love you like a woman, and for God’s sake will you stop calling me Miss Gloria?’

Joe just stared at her without a word and when the silence got uncomfortable Gloria sighed and said sadly, ‘All right then. You can’t blame yourself for not being able to love me in return. At least now I know where I stand.’

Joe felt as if he was breaking up inside at seeing Gloria so upset. As she reached the door, he cried, ‘Wait, please …’

Gloria turned. ‘What for? More humiliation?’

‘No,’ Joe cried. ‘Oh God, I have no wish to humiliate you or hurt you in any way, for you are dearer to me than anyone, and that is why I cannot take what you offer. A fortnight ago I was thirty-six and you aren’t quite nineteen yet.’

‘I don’t care how old you are.’

‘You must care. I care. And I am also employed by your father. I am a working man, Mi—Gloria.’

‘And none the worse for that,’ Gloria said. ‘But none of this – your age or what you do for employment – has any effect on one’s love for another.’

‘Gloria, I cannot return your feelings because I will not allow myself to,’ Joe said. ‘You know many young men, who move in the same circles as yourself, who speak the same language. Any of those—’

‘All of those young men were measured against you and found wanting,’ Gloria said. ‘I was hoping that being in their company would help me to get over the feelings I had for you, but in fact seeing them made me value you more.’

Joe felt as though all his limbs had turned to jelly, but there was a pain around his heart.

Gloria, watching his face, suddenly said in a voice that shook slightly, ‘You said that I am dearer to you than anyone. D’you think you could ever come to love me?’

Joe looked at the face of his beloved, at the tears now seeping from her eyes and trickling down her cheeks, and knew she deserved the truth, even if he was to go no further than this. ‘I love you with all my being,’ he said gently, ‘and have done for a long time. I love you so much it hurts.’

‘Then, Joe, if we love each other, together we can conquer the world.’

Joe smiled. ‘It would be nice to think so. But there are numerous obstacles in our path. Your parents will never agree to any sort of match between us. They will have a much better marriage planned for their only child. In fact, they might send me packing for even considering it.’

‘No,’ Gloria declared. ‘I won’t let them. No one will part us. I will speak to my parents – not now, for they have probably retired for the night, but certainly in the morning.’

Joe nodded, but he was certain that they wouldn’t stand for any sort of union between their daughter and Brian’s secretary, but he didn’t say this, for he couldn’t bear to dim the light that was setting Gloria’s face alight. When she asked, ‘Will you kiss me, Joe?’ he could no more have stopped his arms going around her than he could have stopped the sun from shining, but he knew that for him it was the end of the road for his career with Brian, which had once seemed so promising.