Anne Bennett 3-Book Collection: A Sister’s Promise, A Daughter’s Secret, A Mother’s Spirit

‘Well then, it’s old news you’re telling,’ Cathy said as her mother came into the room and beamed when she saw Molly’s empty plate.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ she said. ‘How do you feel now, Molly?’

‘Better,’ Molly said. ‘I don’t really understand why though, because nothing’s changed. To tell you the truth, I have dreaded this day arriving.’

‘That is quite understandable,’ Nellie said. ‘But I would say that it will never be quite as bad for you again as it has been this first year of that terrible, awful tragedy.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because I know you,’ Nellie said, ‘and I have come to know the strength of your character. I’m not saying that you will never miss your parents and that tug of loss will never leave you, but you have survived it and you should be proud of yourself.’

THIRTEEN (#ulink_8f1826ed-6248-534f-8cd3-f046a45c36da)

Molly took Nellie’s words to heart and they helped her cope in the days that followed and the next Sunday she was able to talk of it with just a hint of Sadness.

‘We used to make a big thing of birthdays,’ Molly told Nellie and Cathy the following Sunday afternoon. ‘On Dad’s birthday, the year before Mom was sick, we went to the Alex Theatre in Birmingham to see a variety show. Kevin didn’t go because he was too young, so Granddad looked after him and it was just me and my parents, and there was a man called Max Wall as the star of the show. What a comedian!

‘I remember laughing so hard my stomach ached and then to put the tin hat on it, though we’d had this party tea and all before we left the house, we bought fish and chips on the way home and ate them out of the paper. It was the perfect end to the perfect day, and nothing can ever erase my memory of that. What hurts me a bit is that Kevin won’t have many memories at all. I mean, what can you really remember clearly from when you were five?’

‘Not a lot,’ Cathy and Nellie admitted.

‘Sometimes I think because he was so young, eventually he will probably forget what our parents looked like,’ Molly said.

‘It must be terribly hard for him right enough,’ Nellie said with sympathy, ‘and I often think it was wrong to part you. You really needed each other and please God you will be together soon.’

‘There is still a part of me, like a nagging tooth, that asks why?’ Molly said. ‘That was the question Kevin asked the priest on the day of the funeral. But of course he didn’t know either. I think Kevin thought he had a sort of hotline to God and could come up with a host of reasons why He needed our parents more than we did at that time.’

‘I really understand your bewilderment,’ Nellie said. ‘And I haven’t any answers to give you either. It was a dreadful and terribly tragic accident. To be honest, there are many things in the world that I don’t understand, but I have to live life the way it is.’

‘I do see what you mean,’ Molly said. ‘And you are right. We all hear of horrible things happening to people every day of the week. And now that this has happened to me, and I can do nothing to change it, the only way to deal with it is to go on, look forward and live my life as my parents would want me to.’

Both Nellie and Cathy were astounded by Molly’s stoicism and courage. Nellie gave her hands a squeeze as she said gently, ‘Well done, my dear. Now, how about tea and cake all round?’

‘I’d say about time too,’ Jack said, coming into the room at that moment. He had a large grin plastered to his face as he went on, ‘And be quick about it too, woman. Tom will be here soon and we don’t want the Guinness spoiling.’

‘Don’t you “woman” me, Jack McEvoy,’ Nellie said in mock indignation, though she got to her feet as she spoke. ‘And as for the Guinness spoiling, you never leave it in the glass long enough to spoil. And I wasn’t talking to you, anyway. It was Cathy and Molly I was speaking to.’

Cathy raised her eyes to the ceiling, and Molly bit her lip to prevent a laugh escaping as they heard Jack’s indignant voice as he followed his wife out of the room, protesting, ‘Well, I like that, not talking to me, not considering me at all and me the head of the house …’

Molly felt a surge of happiness that she could count on this family, who were so at one with one another, as her friends. She said, ‘I do think your parents are lovely.’

Cathy pretended to consider this and then said with a grin, ‘They’re not so bad, as parents go. I think I have done quite a good job of knocking them into shape.’

Molly laughed. ‘I wonder what your mother would say about that, Cathy. Maybe we should ask her. Isn’t that her voice calling us now?’

Cathy left school that summer and began work in the shop full time. To mark the occasion, Nellie bought her new clothes, including a couple of brassieres to accommodate her quite large and pendulous breasts. Molly was so envious of the brassieres that Cathy showed her the Sunday after they were bought, but even more envious of the size of Cathy’s breasts, which would fit in them, for hers were small in comparison.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Cathy said, when Molly said this. ‘Anyway, with your build wouldn’t large breasts look a bit stupid?’

‘I suppose,’ Molly agreed, for she was very fine-boned.

‘They are not much use to me either,’ Cathy went on. ‘I mean, think about it. Look at the figure you have, and the skin and hair I would die for. It isn’t as if I can take out my breasts for everyone to have a look and remark on how big they are, is it?’ And then there was a slight pause before she said, ‘Not just yet a while, anyway.’

‘Cathy!’

‘Why are you so shocked?’ Cathy said. ‘Someone will be entitled to take a look at them one day. And,’ she added with an impish grin, ‘more than a look if I know anything.’

‘Do you ever think about things like that?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I asked first.’

‘Well, course I do,’ Cathy said. ‘It’s natural, isn’t it, to wonder?’

‘You don’t think it’s a sin?’

‘How could it be?’ Cathy said. ‘The priests would probably say it was but, God, don’t they see sin everywhere? If you got out of bed one morning and blew your nose, they would find probably find some sin in there somewhere.’

‘So you don’t confess it?’

‘I do not,’ Cathy said emphatically. ‘And you won’t either if you have any sense. What Mammy told us last month, did you think that a sin?’

‘No,’ Molly said definitely. ‘Anything but, and less than a fortnight later, I was more than grateful.’

Seeing the girls developing into young women, Nellie had taken them aside and explained about periods, and just a scant two weeks later Molly started. She knew without Nellie she would have thought she was dying. As it was, she had been able to go into the farmhouse without any fuss, and ask her grandmother did she have any cotton pads for she had started her periods.

If her grandmother was surprised by her calmness, she made no comment about it. All she did growl out as she passed her the pads was, ‘Period or not, there is to be no slacking. It happens to every woman every month and so there is no need to make a song and dance about it. Fill yourself a bucket of water to leave in your room to soak the used ones in and that should be all there is to it.’

Molly did as her grandmother told her and despite the messiness and the griping pains in her stomach, she welcomed her periods for they meant she was growing up, one step nearer to the time when she could leave this place.

The letters from Birmingham brought Molly up to date with things going on in the world beyond her narrow existence, like the civil war that had begun in Spain in the summer of that year, though Molly couldn’t see why Tom was so concerned about it.

‘But, Uncle Tom, Spain is miles away from us, and haven’t there always been little wars or rumours of wars happening in these types of countries?’ she said, as they walked side by side one bright and pleasant Sunday afternoon.

‘I have a very uneasy feeling about it, that’s all.’

‘But why?’

‘Molly,’ Tom asked, ‘have you ever stood dominoes in such a way that when you push the first one it knocks into the next and so on, until they all topple over?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Molly said. ‘I used to spend hours doing that for Kevin.’

‘Well, I can’t help feeling that what is happening in Spain is the first domino,’ Tom said. ‘Only time will tell if I am right.’

Molly, though, thought he was just being an old worry guts. She was more concerned with the Olympic Games in Berlin that summer, which she read all about in the papers at the McEvoys’. She was incensed by the fact that Hitler would not honour the black American athlete who beat all before him and, as Tom said, the action showed the whole world just how racist Hitler’s government was.

There were other things in the paper closer to home too, like the poverty in England, which even the Irish papers occasionally reported on.