A Sister’s Promise

‘That is neither here nor there,’ Biddy said. ‘The children had a Catholic mother and therefore they need a Catholic upbringing.’

Stan felt his heart plummet because he knew the power of the Catholic Church. Ted had refused to turn before marrying Nuala, and Stan had been proud of him for not bowing to the quite considerable pressure from the priests, but Ted had had to agree to marry in Nuala’s church and to bring any children up as Catholics. He had no bother with this, and supported Nuala in her faith, though he had very seldom darkened the door of the place himself.

‘They have had a Catholic upbringing,’ Stan protested desperately. ‘They have never missed Mass on Sundays or the Holy Days, and they have been baptised into the Church and attend Catholic schools. Last year Molly was confirmed, and has made her First Communion. What more do you want?’

‘She did that because Nuala was alive and Catholicism was drummed into my daughter from the day she was born,’ Biddy said icily. ‘What chance have they got to continue that, living here with you, a Protestant?’

‘I’m not a Protestant,’ Stan said. ‘Religion makes no odds to me. I went to Sunday school until I began work and then never went to church again until I married Phoebe, and we brought Ted up the same way.’

Stan was unaware that he had made things worse for himself, cooked his own goose, as it were.

An outraged Biddy spat, ‘It just gets worse and worse. You, Mr Maguire, are a heathen and I will not have my grandchildren growing up with a heathen. Whether you allow them to practise their religion or not isn’t the issue. It is a matter of example. Why should they go to church when you do not? No, I’m sorry, I would be failing in my Catholic duty if I left the children with you. I will have a word with the priest after the funeral and see what he says about it.’

Stan felt the blood in his veins turn to ice. He knew he could indeed lose the children if the priest backed Biddy. And why wouldn’t he? In his experience, Catholics stuck together over religious issues and the Church’s power was immense.

Molly, drying dishes in the kitchen, had no idea of the turn the conversation was taking in the living room, but she was disappointed enough anyway. She had had such high hopes of her maternal grandmother and hoped she would help her cope without the love and support of her parents. However, when Molly first saw her grandmother come in with her granddad, she thought that Biddy looked grim rather than sad.

But, she remembered her mother saying she shouldn’t judge people by the way they looked. She had also said that although her parents had been cross with her for marrying her father, before that they had loved her very much, too much perhaps. And so, when Molly met her grandmother, she told her quite truthfully that she was pleased to meet her at last.

Biddy just gave a grunt, which was hardly encouraging but Molly was sure she would feel better with food inside her and she was proud of the casserole dish she had produced with the help of Hilda. But Biddy seemed not to like it at all. She said the meat was tough and the vegetables stringy, the potatoes should have been on longer and the gravy was tasteless.

This was the tone of the conversation around the table, broken only by the way she was continually finding fault with Kevin. She ordered him to sit up straight, use his knife and fork properly, to eat his dinner, not just move it around his plate, wipe his mouth and definitely not to talk with his mouth full. Really, Kevin couldn’t seem to do right for doing wrong and it wasn’t just what her grandmother said, but the snappy way she said it. Molly wasn’t surprised to see her little brother’s eyes brimming with tears more than once and he had seemed quite relieved to be going to bed.

Molly too was relieved to be away from the woman for a while and had readily offered to wash and dry the dishes. But once in the kitchen, she tried to excuse her grandmother: she was likely tired because she had had a long journey. Molly finished drying the dishes and put the things away, made a pot of tea for the three of them and took it out on a tray.

She didn’t notice the uncomfortable silence, nor the stricken look on her grandfather’s face, for she decided she would try harder to get to know her grandmother and concentrate on the one link they had, the one thing she would like to know about.

As she handed her a cup of tea she said, ‘Can you tell me, Grandmother, what my mother was like as a little girl?’

Biddy’s lips pursed still further and she almost spat out, ‘Aye, I’ll tell you – not that you’ll want to hear it, for your mother was a bold and disobedient girl. She showed scant regard for her parents, was only interested in pursuit of her own pleasures and even went against the teachings of the Church and married a man of another faith, or as I have found out today, a man of no faith at all.’

The words were said with such malice that Molly recoiled. It was the very last thing that she had expected the woman to say, and she suddenly knew that her grandmother wouldn’t be one bit sorry she hadn’t made it up with her daughter before she died. She somehow doubted she had ever felt sorry about anything in the whole of her life.

‘Of course,’ Biddy went on, ‘we only have ourselves to blame for the way Nuala turned out for we both spoiled her. When she wrote that letter saying that she wanted to marry a non-Catholic, Thomas John was so shocked he dropped dead of a heart attack. So that is your fine mammy for you, the sort who kills her own father.’

Tears were now pouring from Molly’s eyes and Stan put his arm around her. ‘Here, here, the child doesn’t need this sort of carry-on. Have some compassion, woman. If you spoke the truth and what Nuala wrote in the letter caused your husband to have a heart attack, then I am sorry, but you must see that it was the last thing in the world that Nuala would have wanted or expected to happen.’

‘She knew he would be upset. She wasn’t stupid.’

‘She wasn’t cruel either,’ Molly burst out. ‘She wouldn’t mean that to happen.’

‘Your opinion wasn’t asked, miss,’ Biddy snapped. ‘Nor is it welcome, and I will thank you not to speak until you are spoken to. To spare the rod is to ruin the child totally and I see that that is what has happened to both you and that brother of yours. Well, there will be none of that with me, I’ll tell you. I will put manners on the pair of you if it’s the last thing I do.’

Molly stared at her. What influence could she have on either of them? After the funeral this horrible woman would go back to her own life on the little farm in Ireland and Molly would live with her granddad and gradually come to terms with her loss and help her little brother to cope too.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, almost challenging.

Biddy heard the tone and it annoyed her. She would soon have that temper knocked out of her, she thought. ‘I’ll tell you what I mean, my girl,’ she spat out. ‘When you come to live with me over in Ireland, you’ll find life no bed of roses.’

‘Come to live with you in Ireland?’ Molly repeated, managing to hide the shiver of distaste that ran through her. ‘I don’t know you. I’m not going to live with you. I’m staying here with Granddad and so is Kevin.’

‘No, that’s where you are wrong. You are a Catholic because of your mother, who at least started you off on the right road, and you must be reared as a Catholic.’

‘I don’t care about being a Catholic,’ Molly shouted at Biddy. ‘And there is no way I am coming to live with you,’ adding, probably unwisely, but too upset to care, ‘I don’t even like you very much.’

‘Your likes and what you want will not come into this at all,’ Biddy snapped. ‘And there is no good turning on the waterworks,’ she went on, as tears of helplessness squeezed from Molly’s eyes. ‘You will find they don’t work with me.’

Molly turned anguished eyes to her grandfather. ‘Granddad,’ she cried. ‘Say this isn’t true. We’re going to stay with you. You promised.’

Stan’s eyes slid from Molly’s to Biddy’s gloating ones and then back to Molly, and because she deserved the truth he said, ‘I may find my hands are tied in this.’

‘Oh, Granddad, no,’ Molly cried, and flung herself into Stan’s arms.

As he held the weeping child, he glared at Biddy and knew when she took the children from him she would also take away his reason for living.

THREE (#ulink_98152230-7c27-5137-ac0a-44932f5a30df)

Stan was astounded at the numbers who attended the funeral of Ted and Nuala on 26 April. Paul Simmons had helped him make all the arrangements and had insisted on paying for everything. He had closed the factory as a mark of respect, but even so, Stan was amazed by those from the workforce who attended. Ted, Paul said, was very well thought of by everyone who met him, and many of the men who’d shaken Stan by the hand and commiserated with him on his loss said similar things. So also, it seemed, was Nuala liked and the pews were packed with neighbours and special friends of hers, mothers she met at the school gates, and those from the Mothers’ Union she used to attend regularly. Many were in tears.

Added to this, all of Paul’s family came too – his father and mother, and two sisters and their husbands, all of whom still remembered what they had owed to Ted. They seemed genuinely shocked by his death and that of his young wife. Not that it was spoken of openly and certainly not in front of the children, who had both insisted on attending.

Molly had remained dry-eyed, her distress and sense of loss too deep for tears, though she held on to Kevin’s hand to take comfort from the child as well as to give it, as the tears dribbled down his cheeks ceaselessly.

As they stood at the graveside, they were warmed by the bright sun shining down from a sky of Wedgwood blue, and somehow this made the tragic deaths even more poignant. As the clods of earth fell with dull thuds on the coffins they seemed to reverberate in Molly’s brain. Dead! Dead! Dead! Kevin’s sobs became more audible and Biddy moved towards the child purposefully, but he pushed her away and turned instead to his grandfather. Stan held the little boy’s shuddering body tight. He didn’t urge him to stop crying either thinking he had a good enough reason to break his heart.

He envied him in a way because he would have liked the opportunity to go home now and lock the door and cry his eyes out. Instead, he knew he had to lead the mourners to the room at the back of the Lyndhurst pub which Paul Simmons had booked, and make small talk with the people who had come to pay their respects.

When he’d first been discussing the funeral arrangements with Mr Simmons, Stan, who had thought the mourners would only amount to a handful, said he intended to invite them back to the house. Mr Simmons had said he thought a room at a pub might be better and Stan, not up to arguing and certainly not with a toff, had agreed reluctantly.

He had thought though the few people he had anticipated coming would look silly and maybe feel out of place, but it wasn’t that way at all. He looked at the crush of people around him in the room the pub had allocated them and was glad he had agreed. Kevin still held tight to his hand as Father Clayton, who had said the Requiem Mass, approached them.

Father Clayton liked Stan, with whom he was not above sparring and joking, as he had liked Ted, and thought them fine men. He couldn’t understand for the life of him why they hadn’t turned Catholic and embraced the one true faith.

That day though, Kevin’s large brown eyes still swam with tears as he turned them on the priest and demanded, ‘What did God want with my mammy and daddy?’

Father Clayton didn’t have an answer that would satisfy the child. ‘We don’t understand the ways of God, Kevin.’

‘Not even you?’

‘Not even me.’

‘Well, then,’ Kevin said. ‘What’s the point of it all? That means that God can go round doing what He likes and you just say we can’t understand and that.’ He stamped his foot suddenly and cried in a high voice full of hurt and confusion, ‘I want to know. I think we needed Mammy and Daddy much more than He did.’

‘Kevin!’ The name was said like a pistol shot.

Kevin jumped and his eyes were full of foreboding as he watched his grandmother approach. ‘Now you see the level of my concern that I explained to you this morning when I called in to introduce myself and arrange an appointment?’ Biddy complained to Father Clayton. ‘The child has not even been taught how to address a priest correctly, and as for questioning the ways of our Good Lord, well, words fail me totally.’

Before the priest had time to reply, Stan burst in, ‘I think Kevin has a perfect right to ask what manner of God it was at all who allowed his parents to be taken away, and who else to ask but the priest? So you just leave him alone.’ He turned to Father Clayton and went on before Biddy could speak, ‘We’re taught that God loves us, aren’t we? Well, He sure as hell didn’t show much love to poor Nuala and Ted. That’s how I feel and so I know exactly what young Kevin means.’