A Kiss and a Promise (11 page)

Presently, his mother finished her tea and went over to the low stone sink. She must have been scrubbing potatoes for the midday meal when she heard Danny’s welcome, for now she eyed the vegetables in the pan, then reached into a sack beneath the sink and added a couple of generous handfuls to those already in the bowl. ‘This was for supper when your daddy’s home,’ she told him over her shoulder. ‘But I reckon I’ll make a meal just for the two of us now, so what do you fancy? The hens don’t lay well at this time of year but I’ve three eggs, plenty of spuds and cabbage and a piece of salted cod.’

‘A fried egg and a few fried potatoes would be grand, so they would,’ Michael said yearningly. Fresh eggs were almost unobtainable in Liverpool, or had been up to the time he had left; in fact food shortages were endemic. Mrs Bennett had told him that, a few months earlier, King George himself had urged his subjects not to eat so much bread since wheat was having to be brought into the country from abroad. Apparently, the King had also said that his own family was strictly rationing the food they ate, though Michael had taken that with a pinch of salt. Many, many times, he had heard his father talking of rich landowners who preached propriety to their tenants whilst keeping two or three mistresses tucked away somewhere and he knew, from personal experience, that the rich in Liverpool would demand that the poor should make do on a loaf per family, per week, whilst themselves living off the fat of the land. Marie Antoinette’s much quoted remark, ‘Let them eat cake,’ was as true today as it had been then, because the rich simply had no idea how the poor fared. Nor how totally impossible it was for them to deny themselves bread and eat cake in its place.

However, his mother was reaching up to the smoky rafters overhead and bringing down – Michael’s mouth watered – a flitch of home-cured bacon. ‘I’ll cut us a couple of slices of this as well,’ she said triumphantly, clearly reading the greedy look on his face and enjoying it. ‘They say bacon’s rationed in cities but Daddy killed a pig last autumn and there’s still some fine meat salted or smoked to see us through the winter. Sure and we don’t have shop bought clothes or shop bought food out in the country here, but we eat better’n town folks, I’m sure o’ that.’

Michael was sure of it too and, for a moment, he thought uneasily of the odd little red-haired child who was going to be brought up in a dirty house in a dirty court by a dirty old woman who seldom did a hand’s turn if she could avoid it. He looked around the shining kitchen. It had an earth floor and an open fire, but there were rag rugs underfoot and the delft on the press sparkled with cleanliness. Hanging from the rafters overhead were strings of onions, bunches of dried herbs and, of course, the flitch of bacon. Despite the fact that it was January, a row of geraniums bloomed on the window sill and though the wooden chairs had been carved by his father years before, out of cast-up driftwood, they were made comfortable as well as attractive by a number of bright cushions. These were stuffed with feathers from the ducks and hens, which his mother plucked and saved whenever she killed a bird for the table, and added a great deal to the ease of anyone sitting in those chairs for long.

Lazily watching as his mother began to slice potatoes, Michael thought of the other rooms in the cottage. If you went out of the kitchen door and turned to the left, you would reach the bedrooms; one quite large, one medium sized and one very small. The large room was used mainly for storage and Michael remembered, with a pang of real pain, how he had planned to install himself, Stella and the child in that room, just as soon as he had enough money to buy a double bed and a bit of furniture. He rarely entered his parents’ room but knew his own very well indeed, for until he had joined the Navy he had never slept a night away from it. Like the kitchen, it was earth-floored and extremely clean, the gingham curtains at the window faded and patched but still capable of keeping a good deal of cold out. His bed had been too small for him for some years but he thought, wistfully now, of the sheer comfort of it. His mammy had made the feather mattress into which he sank each night, just as she had made the patchwork quilt which covered him.

If you turned to the right when you left the kitchen, you would enter the parlour, the ‘best’ room. On Sundays, his mother served tea and sandwiches at four o’clock and this unlikely meal was always taken in the parlour, for before her marriage Maeve Gallagher had worked as a maidservant in a big house outside Limerick. There, every day of the week, she had served the rich family with tea, dainty cucumber sandwiches and tiny cakes in their ‘white drawing room’, and when she got a home of her own she had decided that she would carry the afternoon tea tradition from Limerick to Kerry. Clearly, it would be impossible to do so on any day but Sunday, and at first Sean Gallagher had laughed at his wife’s fancies, as he called them. But soon enough, tea in the parlour had become a Sunday tradition for the Gallaghers and though he had never said so, Michael thought that his father secretly approved and enjoyed the weekly ritual.

Maeve Gallagher had been thirty-five before she had given birth to a live child and Sean only a year older. In common with many other Irish couples, the two had had a very long engagement because they wanted some money behind them before they got married. They were to share Sean’s parents’ home, could scarcely do anything else since the old man could not have run the farm without his son’s help, and their savings had enabled them to build an extra room on the end of the farmhouse.

Maeve’s parents lived outside Limerick, many miles from the tiny holding where Sean had been brought up, but she, too, came from a rural background and was no stranger to the many and varied tasks demanded of a smallholder’s wife. When Michael had been small, his grandparents had been the owners of the property, his own parents merely working it for them. But both Sean and Maeve were hard and dedicated workers, determined to get on. They had gradually bought land, increasing the size of their property whenever they were able to do so. Sean bought stock but made sure he only bought the best, even if it meant temporary hardship for his family, and when his parents died he was astonished to realise that they had been putting money away for years in an old tin box, under their marital bed. He had used the money to buy fruit trees so that the stretch of ground in which he had previously grown cabbage and potatoes could become the orchard it was today.

‘Right you are then, Michael! Get outside of this and when you’ve ate it, we’ll have a walk around and I can show you the changes we’ve made since you’ve been gone.’

His mother’s voice startled Michael out of his reverie and he looked with real appreciation at the laden plate she was placing before him. She had always been a first rate cook, the sort of woman who can make a delicious dish out of almost nothing, but today she had used the best ingredients, for everything on the table was home-grown. Maeve’s plate was nowhere near as heaped as Michael’s own but the two of them finished the meal almost simultaneously, washing it down with tin mugs of tea. When they had done, Maeve took their plates over to the sink, then went to the back door and hooked down the serviceable old coat which she wore for outside work. It had once been Sean’s but she liked the roominess of it and refused to buy something more suited to her smaller stature. Michael pulled on his own duffel and followed her out of the cottage, smiling to himself at the odd picture she made with his father’s old coat almost big enough to wrap round her twice, and so long that she was continually lifting the skirts in order that they should not drag in the mud.

The two of them then proceeded to examine every foot of the property, and examine it minutely, what was more. Maeve’s flock of poultry had trebled in size since Michael had left and he thought there were probably more ducks on the pond his father had dug out from the stream which clattered under a tiny stone bridge. He supposed that the pond, or pool rather, was not actually on their property but on common ground; however, no one had ever disputed their right to the ducks. They could scarcely do so since the mallards had been wild but became tame after his mother had fed them throughout every winter. Sometimes the Gallaghers had duck eggs but this did not happen often since the ducks were not as obliging as the hens and tended to nest in a far more secretive manner.

Michael commented on the increase in the pig population – two enormous sows inhabited the stone-built sty at the end of the orchard, each with bonaveens nuzzling her fat sides – and remarked that he thought his father’s flock of sheep had also increased.

Maeve smiled with a touch of slyness. ‘Aye. When the inspectors came round, your daddy took some of the ewes and half the lambs off to the common beyond the village and didn’t bring them back till the nosy fellers had gone,’ she explained. ‘And we hid the second sow and her bonaveens in a cave down on the shore.’ She smiled reminiscently, her eyes slitting with amusement. ‘Sure and that was a business, so it was! I drove the sow and her little ’uns in the cart until we reached the cave mouth, but penning them up inside …’ she rolled her eyes expressively, ‘… it were the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The old sow took fright and kept chargin’ at me and tryin’ to herd her bonaveens out of the cave and back on to the shore, but I had your daddy’s old ash plant and she didn’t fancy a slap across the head with that, so I won, in the end. But she squealed loud enough to be heard ten miles off and wasn’t I mortal afraid that she’d give the game away and bring the Ministry fellers down about my ears.’

Michael laughed with her, though he felt a trifle guilty at so doing. He saw no reason why farming folk, who were never considered by their rulers to be of any importance whatsoever, should be forced to hand over beasts they had reared or crops they had grown, simply because there was a war on. But he did wish that he had been able to get home after he had met Stella. He had not really heeded how hard rationing had hit city people until after Stella’s death, when he had been in Liverpool for weeks. If only he had thought, he could have come back to the farm after he had first met Stella, and then returned to England, laden with good things – bacon, honey, butter, even eggs – and perhaps if he had done so Stella might have been strong enough to withstand the flu, might have been alive today.

But such thoughts led only to misery and despair and Michael dismissed them summarily from his mind. Instead, he asked how Maeve had got the big sow and her offspring back into the cart when the time came to return them to their home because he knew, from experience, how hard it is to load one reluctant pig, let alone a dozen or so.

‘It were a rare circus, to be sure,’ his mother said ruefully, her eyes still shining with remembered amusement. ‘Pigs is always contrary, and of course they’re mortal fond of shellfish, and certain sorts of seaweed, so once they were able to leave the cave, they didn’t fancy leaving the shore at all, at all. In fact Sheila – that’s the name your daddy has give to the sow I took to the shore – was a real devil and I could not get her back in the cart. I tried liftin’ the bonaveens in, hopin’ she’d follow, but would she? Not she! In the end, your daddy came down, wondering what was up, what with the din Sheila and the little ’uns were kicking up. We didn’t get her in the cart even then, but we drove them up the cliff path and round into the front garden, then down the side path by the peat pile and back to their sty. Then your daddy and I just stood and laughed because I looked like an old scarecrow, splattered wi’ mud and sand, my hair all down from its bun and my skirt wet to the waist wi’ seawater, for that wicked old sow thought nothin’ of chargin’ me into the waves to keep me from catchin’ her.’

‘How about if we go down to the shore now?’ Michael said presently as they returned to the cottage once more. ‘Are there still mussels on the rocks? If so, we could take a pail and get some, give us an excuse for a walk along the shore.’

Maeve agreed, though reminded him she would have to be back in time to milk their three cows, and presently mother and son were busily picking mussels off the rocks and, on Michael’s part at least, watching the sun sink into the Atlantic in a glow of rose and gold. He thought he had never seen anything more beautiful and realised that he had spent his whole life amid such breathtaking scenes and was appreciating them now, for the first time, because he was seeing them through the eyes of a stranger. As they clattered the mussels into the pail, Michael found himself beginning to tell his mother about Stella and the Bennetts, though he had not intended to do so quite so soon. He started at the very beginning, when he had come ashore and seen the young, white cat and been almost frightened by the slight, dark-clad figure of a young girl …

But though he told her more than he had ever told anyone else, he did not breathe a word about the baby, suddenly convinced that if he did so Maeve would insist that the child should be brought back to Ireland where she belonged. He had known all along, really, that his mother would love her, but the truth was, he felt nothing but resentment towards the tiny, redheaded brat. If Stella had not been breastfeeding, he was sure she would have recovered from the flu. Her mother had constantly boasted that her daughter had never ailed, never lost a day’s work through being sick. Why, then, should she catch the disease, let alone die from it? The baby would be a constant reminder that she had played her part in Stella’s death and what was more, as soon as his mother realised that the child was not at all like himself, or Stella, she might stop being sorry that his love had died; in fact, she might think that he had had a lucky escape. He did not doubt that she would bring Virginia up to the best of her ability, but there would always be the feeling that her son had been entrapped by a bad woman who only wanted a father for her illegitimate child. Michael knew that he could not bear that. Better that his mother’s picture of Stella should remain unsullied and that the child should stay in Liverpool.

‘Well, we’ve got enough mussels for a good supper,’ Maeve said breezily. She tried to lift the bucket then grimaced at him. ‘You can carry these up to the cottage, Michael me love, and start cleaning ’em while I bring the cows down to the yard for milking. Danny will give me a hand with herding them – not that they’ll need much herding – and you can drive them back again, when the milking’s over.’