Till the Sun Shines Through (20 page)

Bridie had to concentrate hard to understand all Jean said, she spoke so fast and the Birmingham accent was still tricky for her, but she was friendly enough and anyway listening to Jean was good practice for most of the customers spoke the same way. The Woolworths girls were quite interested in the pretty and petite Irish girl in their midst, but Bridie gave them little encouragement to find out any more about her. She didn't want them to know her past and anyway, didn't think she deserved to have friends.

Bridie was unaware that in trying not to give anything away, her answers were terse enough to be rude. When she'd been there a few days, Jean realised Bridie had told her little about herself and so in the canteen, she asked her directly, ‘So where in Ireland you from then?'

‘The north.'

‘The British bit?'

‘No, just outside that.'

‘What you doing over here then?'

‘My sister asked me over. She lives here.'

‘Where's that then?'

‘Edgbaston way,' Bridie said. She didn't say that she lodged with her aunt not her sister, nor offer any further information either. No one asked her because it was, as Jean said, like pulling teeth to get her to say anything at all. ‘Maybe she has some dark secret in her murky past?' someone suggested.

‘Oh give the kid a break,' said another. ‘She's probably just shy. She might be a bit homesick too. Ask her out with us, why don't you.'

And Jean, feeling guilty because the other girl was probably right, did just that later that week. ‘D'you want to come to the flicks with us Friday?' she asked.

‘Flicks?' Bridie queried.

‘Picture house, cinema, you know. There's a crowd of us go every Friday, it's a laugh.' Bridie couldn't imagine why anyone would want her in their company. She wouldn't go. ‘I'm afraid I can't. Thank you for asking, but it's out of the question.'

She was unaware how formal and unfriendly her voice sounded, but Jean was not easily dashed ‘Why,' she asked, ‘summat else on?'

‘Aye, yes.'

Bridie didn't say what and Jean didn't ask. She just went on, ‘What about Saturday night then. We're going down the Alex to the variety show, then along to the Bull Ring after. What d'you say?'

Bridie wanted to say yes, she'd love to go, but she shook her head regretfully.

She reacted the same way when Jean asked her out the middle of the following week. ‘It's Alice's big night, see,' Jean explained. ‘She's been singing down this pub for flipping ages and she's just heard a bloke what gets jobs and that for singers has heard about her and is coming down this Thursday. We want to give her a bit of support, like.'

‘I … I've never been in a pub in my life,' Bridie said.

‘It ain't a rough place,' Jean assured her. ‘It's a good night. They has this old Joanna – even when Alice ain't working we have fun there, singing around it and that.'

‘I'm afraid I couldn't go to something like that,' Bridie declared stiffly.

‘Say what you like about her being shy,' Jean said angrily in the canteen the following day, ‘I know what she is all right, she's a bleeding snob, and thinks herself too good for the likes of us. She wouldn't even get off her bleeding high horse to cheer Alice on. Well, it will be a long time before I ask her out again.'

There was a murmur of agreement around the canteen; no one was going to rush to be friends with someone like that.

Another nail in her coffin, as far as the other girls were concerned, was that Bridie was a favourite with the supervisors and many considered she was sucking up to the bosses and making them look bad.

Bridie had been at Woolworths just over a fortnight when she jumped off the tram in a buoyant mood one Friday evening. She'd had to work a week in hand, but now she had her first pay packet in her pocket and she couldn't wait to show her aunt and begin to pay her way at last. Added to that, the boss was pleased with her diligence and hard work and said there was a good chance the job could be made permanent.

She was running up Bristol Passage and had reached the top of it when she came face to face with Peggy McKenna. ‘Finished your week's work then?' she sneered. ‘Your aunt was after telling me you had a fine job in Woolworths.'

‘Yes, I have.'

‘Money in your pocket then?'

Bridie, seeing the way the conversation was heading, felt sick. ‘Not much,' she said. ‘And I must give some of it to Aunt Ellen for my keep.'

‘But you can spare a bob or two for me to put food before the weans, surely?' Peggy wheedled. ‘I'm sure you'll see your way to do that when you remember what I know.'

With a sigh, Bridie opened her bag and extracted two shillings. ‘I can give you no more,' she said, ‘so don't ask me.'

‘This will do for now,' Peggy said, and adjusted her shawl more tightly around her before hurrying away. Bridie followed, her earlier happiness wiped out as if it had never been.

When Bridie reached home, Ellen couldn't understand why she was so miserable. She thought that maybe she was missing her parents. Her first job, first wage packet, was something perhaps she'd want to share with them. ‘Why don't you write to your parents and tell them all about your job?' she suggested later that evening.

‘D'you think they'll answer if I do?' Bridie asked, and Ellen felt a lump in her throat at the wistful note in Bridie's voice. ‘I don't know, pet,' she said. ‘But you never will unless you write to them.'

Still Bridie's expression didn't alter so Ellen put her arms around her and held her tight.

On the face of it, Bridie had settled well into life in Birmingham, and was content with her job and family. But inside she was deeply unhappy. She knew she'd carry the guilt of what she'd done to that wee baby she'd been expecting all the days of her life. Peggy McKenna took two shillings or occasionally even a half a crown from her wages most weeks, which sometimes meant she had to walk to and from work and often did without her dinner in the canteen at lunchtime.

And yet she didn't mind the money as much as the things Peggy said to her. She told her she'd never find a man for she was bad through and through, anyone would see that, and she'd never have a family of her own and it served her right.

Bridie never contested any of the things she said, for she believed them and felt in a way it was right she should suffer like that – it was a form of penance. Ellen and Mary noted Bridie's despondency, but put it down to the fact that Sarah and Jimmy never wrote her the scribe of a letter in answer to the ones she sent them.

Sarah was as angry and hurt as ever and wrote to Ellen about Bridie's attempts at reconciliation:

If I'd had my way, I'd have thrown her letters away unread, but Jimmy said we had to hear what the child had to say. Child. By God, she's no child to do this to us, but then Jimmy was always soft with her
.

And not the only one, Ellen thought. Maybe if she hadn't been so much the centre of their lives, they could eventually have got over her running away from them, but as it was she doubted it.

Bridie had also stopped writing to Rosalyn, primarily because she was the daughter of the man who still haunted her dreams. She explained it away to Ellen, however, by saying that she had little in common with Rosalyn anymore, that their lives had veered in different directions.

She didn't reply either to the slightly censorious letters that came from Seamus and Johnnie. Her mother had obviously written to them to put them in the picture. Bridie didn't much care what they had to say: they couldn't know about her life or their parents and so didn't even consider their opinions as valid.

Terry, who Sarah had also written to, didn't blame Bridie in the slightest.

I'm surprised you stuck it so long, especially after you wrote and told me about Mammy's arm. No wonder you just upped and left one day. It would have been better if you'd told them, but I understand why you didn't. You saw the pressure they brought down on me; with you it would have been even worse and you might have ended up staying. Mammy will probably get over it soon enough and if she doesn't, what odds? You have your own life to live so stick to your guns, Bridie, and the best of luck to you
.

Terry's letter reduced Bridie to tears, but she brushed them away before Ellen spotted them. She was glad that at least one of her brothers was on her side and so she sat down and wrote Terry a long letter about the job she had in Woolworths.

She told him about the Bull Ring and how wonderful it was with the array of shops and stalls that sold absolutely everything. She didn't tell him of the old lags, usually blind or lame veterans from the last war who sold matches or razor blades or shoelaces from trays hung around their necks and the old lady selling carrier bags. She'd become inured to them now, as she had to be to the ragged barefoot urchins who roamed around the market, especially on Saturday when there was no school.

She felt sorry for them, but when she said this one day at work one of the other girls told her not to waste her pity. ‘Little tea leaves, the lot of them,' she said. ‘Pinch anything not nailed down, them lot.'

Bridie said nothing. She knew the children were hungry: their large eyes and wasted bodies with stick thin arms and legs spoke for themselves and she often saw them fighting over the bruised fruit that had fallen from the barrows. The Bull Ring was where bargains could be bought and on a Saturday night a place of great excitement. Woolworths and the other shops would be closed, but the market was still operating and Bridie would see the shawl-clad, often barefoot women in the shadows of the gas flares. Many had a baby tucked inside the shawl and a clutch of children with them as they searched and begged for over-ripe vegetables and meat on the turn so that they could make a meal of sorts to feed their families.

Terry didn't want news like that, Bridie thought. In America, the land of plenty, he couldn't know how this place sometimes reeks of poverty.

But Terry could have told Bridie about the lines and lines of unemployed men there, and those who'd work a whole day for a loaf of bread. He could have told her of the beggars on the streets and the homeless who often froze to death in the sub-zero temperatures of a New York winter, and the soup kitchen and clothing banks set up to try and relieve the extreme suffering of the people.

But Terry told her none of this. He told her only of his job, his apartment and his new girlfriend, a girl called Jo who was as Irish as himself.

Mary was worried about her young sister, particularly as she seemed to have made no friends. ‘She seems to get on with the girls she works with well enough and is never away from the church with Benedictions and Devotion and all,' she told Ellen. ‘She must meet young people like herself there and yet she never goes anywhere.'

Bridie went to everything the church had to offer, for God alone knew she needed all the prayers she could get. She wondered at first if Father Fearney looked at her in a funny way, or if she was just imagining it. Maybe that scornful, disapproving air was just the way he had of looking at everybody. Surely if he'd found out what she'd done, which he could have if Peggy McKenna had wished to be really vindictive, he'd have said. He wasn't the sort to keep quiet about such a thing, not him. God, he'd be more likely to publicly shame her from the pulpit.

Then she noticed he had the same expression the one time she'd been home when he'd called at Ellen's. Ellen offered him tea, of course, while the priest looked disdainfully at the armchair till you almost wanted to apologise that you were expecting him to sit in it. Did the priest want a wee sandwich, Ellen had asked, or a few biscuits? He accepted everything offered, though looked far from grateful and never said thank you. He asked Bridie questions about her home in Ireland, her job at Woolworths, what she thought of Birmingham and how long she intended to stay, as if he was interrogating a suspect, and didn't seem greatly pleased with the answers either.

‘What is it with that man?' Bridie asked when he'd gone. ‘He's not exactly filled with Christian joy, is he?'

‘He's not filled with much other than his own importance,' Ellen said angrily. ‘D'you see the food he took off me? Well, I gave it to him to save some other poor beggar. I can afford it, but I've seen him accept hospitality from those not able to put food on the table. He's pompous and unfeeling and would take the bread from a baby's mouth and think the action quite justified.'

Bridie found out that Ellen's views were shared by most in those mean streets, though few were as open in saying so. Priests had influence and power and were well in with God and you can't afford to upset a person like that.

She continued to go to the church services, however, but she managed to slip in and out of the church without making contact with anyone, feeling sure that no one would want to know her if they had any idea of what she'd done.

Bridie's nineteenth birthday came and went without any acknowledgement from Ireland. Mary and Ellen tried to make the day a bit special and Bridie was tremendously touched by the card which arrived from Terry with ten dollars tucked inside. That evening Ellen tackled Bridie over the meal. ‘Did you tell them at work it was your birthday?'

‘No,' Bridie said. She knew that the girls were cool with her, but also that it was her own fault and maybe only what she deserved.

‘I thought you might have been going out somewhere? Have something planned?'

‘No. No, nothing like that.'

‘Oh,' Ellen said. ‘Is there none you work with you'd like to make a friend of?'

‘No, not really,' Bridie mumbled.

‘She's got out of the way of making friends,' Mary said when Ellen recounted the conversation. ‘Stuck away on that farm for years. The only one she saw besides Mammy and Daddy was Rosalyn.'