Another Man’s Child

Also by Anne Bennett (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ONE (#ua3d88705-3cbb-5370-877f-26d91e3d1aaa)

It was Norah Mulligan walking alongside her sister, Celia, who noticed Andy McCadden first. It was the first Saturday in March and the first Fair Day of 1920 in Donegal Town.

It was a fine day, but March living up to its name of coming in like a lion, meant it was blustery and cold enough for the girls to be glad they were so warmly clad. They were still wearing winter-weight dresses, Celia’s in muted red colours and Norah’s muted blue, and they were long enough to reach the top of their boots so the thick black stockings could not be seen. Over that they were wearing Donegal tweed shawls, fastened by Celtic Tara brooches, and their navy bonnets matched the woollen gloves that encased their hands.

Celia knew Norah considered bonnets old fashioned and babyish but Celia was glad of hers that day and also liked the blue ribbons that tied so securely under her chin. ‘Anyway,’ she had reasoned with her sister when she had complained again that day as she got ready in their room. ‘You’d have to have a hat of some sort – and just listen to the strength of that wind. Any other type of hat you had today would be tugged from your head in no time and in all likelihood go bowling down the road, however many hatpins you had stuck in it. You running to retrieve it would cause great entertainment to the rest of the town and I doubt that would please you much either.’

Norah said nothing to that because she did agree with Celia that bonnets were the safest option that day, especially when riding in the cart with their father where the wind was even more fierce. Given a choice she wouldn’t have gone out at all, but stayed inside by the fireside; however, their mother, Peggy, had given them a list of things to buy as they were going in on the cart with their father who had some beef calves for sale. They did go in often on Saturdays because the Mulligans’ farm was just outside the town and Peggy always said her gallivanting days were over, so the girls each had a bulging shopping bag as they crossed the square – shaped like a diamond and always referred to as such – to the Abbey Hotel where they were meeting their father.

The beasts for sale were in pens filling the Diamond and the pungent smell rose in the air and the noise of them, the bleating and grunting and lowing and squawking of the hens, just added to the general racket, for the streets were thronged with people, the shops doing a roaring trade.

As usual on a Fair Day the pubs were open all day. Some might have their doors slightly ajar so the two girls might get a tantalising glimpse inside. That was all they would get though, a glimpse, and if any men were standing outside with their pints, they would chivvy them on, for respectable women didn’t frequent pubs and certainly not young ladies like Norah and Celia.

The cluster of gypsies was there too as they were every Fair Day, standing slightly apart from the townsfolk. They’d always held a fascination for Celia, the black-haired, swarthy-skinned men who often had a jaunty manner and in the main wore different clothes to most men of Celia’s acquaintance: light-coloured cotton shirts, moleskin waistcoats and some, mainly the younger ones, bright knotted handkerchiefs tied at their necks, and they were not above giving girls a broad wink as they passed. The women seemed far more dowdy in comparison, for they were usually dressed in black or grey or dark brown with a craggy shawl around their shoulders and more often than not there was a baby wrapped up in it, while skinny, scantily dressed, barefoot children scampered around them.

Suddenly, Norah gave her sister a poke in the ribs, taking her mind from the gypsies as she said, ‘Will you look at the set of him,’ and she jerked her head to the collection of people at the edge of the fair at the Hireling Stall who were in search of someone to take them to work on one of the farms or as servants in the house. As the Mulligans needed no outside help, Celia had never taken much notice of them and she cast her eyes over them now. There were, however, a few young men and she said, ‘Which one?’

Norah cast her eyes upwards. ‘Heavens, Celia,’ she cried. ‘Do you really need to ask? The blond-haired one of course, the one smiling over at us this very moment.’

‘I’m sure you’re wrong, Norah,’ Celia said. ‘It can’t be us.’

‘Celia, he’s looking this way and smiling so he must be smiling at someone or something,’ Norah retorted. ‘No one but an idiot would stand there with a wide grin on his face for no reason and I tell you he is the least idiotic man that I’ve seen in a long time. Quite a looker in fact.’

Celia stole a look at the man in question and did think he was most striking-looking and she took in the fact that he was tall, broad-shouldered and well-muscled and the sun was shining on his back, making it seem like he had a halo around his mop of very blond hair. She couldn’t see the colour of his eyes, but she did see that they were twinkling so much it was like light that had been lit inside him and she felt herself smiling back. She looked away quickly and felt a crimson flush flood over her face. She saw that Norah had noticed her blush and, to prevent her teasing, said sharply, ‘Mammy will wash your mouth out with carbolic if she hears you talking this way.’

‘Better not tell her then,’ Norah said impishly.

‘I just might.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Norah said assuredly. ‘You’re no tell-tale.’

‘All right,’ Celia conceded. ‘You’re right, I’d never tell Mammy. But talking of men, I was wondering the other day about you wanting to go to America and all. Whatever are you going to do about Joseph O’Leary?’

‘What’s Joseph O’Leary to do with anything?’

‘You’re walking out with him.’

‘Hardly,’ Norah said. ‘We’ve just been out a few times.’

‘Huh, more than a few I’d say,’ Celia said. ‘But it doesn’t matter how long it’s been going on, in anyone’s book that constitutes walking out together.’

‘Well if you must know,’ Norah told her sister, ‘I’m using Joseph to practise on.’

‘Oh Norah, that’s a dreadful thing to do to someone,’ Celia cried, really shocked because she liked Joseph. He was a nice man and had an open honest face, a wide generous mouth and his fine head of wavy hair was as dark brown as his eyes, which were nearly always fastened on her sister.

Norah shrugged carelessly. ‘I had to know what it was like. I am preparing for when I go to America.’

‘Does he know your plans?’

‘Sort of,’ Norah said. ‘I mean, he knows I want to go.’

‘Does he know you’re really going, that Aunt Maria said she’ll sponsor you and pay your fare and everything?’

‘Well no,’ Norah admitted.

‘Poor Joseph,’ Celia said. ‘He’ll be heartbroken.’

‘Hearts don’t break that easy, Celia.’

‘Well I bet yours will if you can’t go to America after all and Mammy could stop you because she’s great friends with the O’Learys.’

‘Mammy will be able to do nothing,’ Norah said confidently. ‘She has made me wait until I’m twenty-one and that was bad enough, but I will be that in three months’ time and then I can please myself.’

‘She doesn’t want you to go.’

‘I know that and that was why she made me wait until I was twenty-one.’

‘And that doesn’t worry you?’

‘It would if I let it,’ Norah said. ‘Now you worry about everything and in fact you would worry yourself into an early grave if you had nothing to worry about. You never want to hurt people’s feelings either and, while it’s nice to be that way, it could stop you doing something you really want to do in case someone disapproves.’

‘Like you going to America?’

‘Exactly like that.’

‘But I’d never want to leave here,’ Celia said, looking around the town she loved so much. She loved everything, the rolling hills she could see from her bedroom window dotted with velvet-nosed cows calmly chewing the cud, or the sheep pulling relentlessly at the grass as if their lives depended upon it, and here and there squat cottages with plumes of grey smoke rising from the chimneys wafting in the air. Their farmhouse was no small cottage however for it was built of brick with a slate roof and unusually for Ireland then, it was two storeyed. Downstairs there was a well-fitted scullery with a tin bath hung on a hook behind the door and leading off it, a large kitchen with a range with a scrubbed wooden table beside it and an easy chair before the hearth. It was where the family spent most of their time, for though there was a separate sitting room it was seldom used. The stairs ran along the kitchen wall and upstairs were three sizeable bedrooms; her parents had their own room, another she shared with Norah and Ellie and the other one was for Tom, Dermot and Sammy.

It was all so dear to her, familiar and safe and she couldn’t see why anyone would want to leave it. She said this to Norah and added, ‘I’d never want to go away from here.’

‘Never is a long time,’ Norah said. ‘And you’re only seventeen. I felt like that at seventeen. But by the time I was twenty I felt as if I was suffocating with the sameness of every day.’

‘But don’t you want a husband and children?’

‘Not yet,’ Norah said emphatically. ‘Why would I? I intend to keep marriage and all it entails at bay or at least until I meet and fall madly in love with a tall and very handsome man, who has plenty of money and will adore me totally.’

Celia burst out laughing. ‘Shouldn’t say there’s many of them about.’

‘Not in Donegal certainly,’ Norah conceded. ‘But who knows what America holds? The country may be littered with them.’

Celia laughed. Oh, how she would miss her sister for, since leaving school, she saw her old friends rarely. She’d meet some of them occasionally in Donegal Town, but it wasn’t arranged or anything, they would just bump into one another. They seldom had time for any sort of lingering chats because all the girls would usually have a list of errands to do for their mothers. The only other time to meet was at Mass on Sunday but no one dawdled after that because most of the congregation had taken communion and so were ravenously hungry, for no one was allowed to eat or drink if they were taking communion. So the two sisters had relied on each other – and Peggy wasn’t the only one to hope that Norah would change her mind in the months till her twenty-first birthday.

Celia opened her mouth to say something to Norah about how much she would miss her, but there was no time because they had reached the Abbey Hotel and their father, Dan, was waiting on them. Celia thought her father a fairly handsome man for one of his age; his black curls had not a hint of grey and he had deep dark brown eyes just like her eldest brother, Tom. Only his nose let him down for it was slightly bulbous, but his mouth was a much better shape. Tom was just like a younger version of him. Dan was a jovial man too and as they approached his laugh rang out at something someone in the crowd had said and it was so infectious that Celia and Norah were smiling too as they reached him.

He had told them on the way in that if he sold the calves early enough, they could wait on and he’d take them home in the cart, but if the calves were not sold, he might stay on and they would have to make their own way home. Celia wondered why he even bothered saying that because she had never known her father come home early on a Fair Day and his delay had more to do with the pubs open all the day and old friends to chat to and gather news from than it had to do with selling the calves.