A Week in Winter(10)

‘Oh, I’m not going to give the baby away,’ Nuala said.

‘But you can’t keep the baby, Nuala,’ Miss Queenie explained.

‘I never had anything of my own before, apart from the room you gave me and my bed here.’

The sisters looked at each other. The girl didn’t begin to understand what she was taking on. The responsibility, the fuss, the disgrace.

‘It’s the 1990s,’ Nuala said, ‘it’s not the Dark Ages.’

‘Yes, but Father Johnson is still Father Johnson,’ Miss Queenie said.

‘Would the young man in question perhaps . . .?’ began Miss Jessica tentatively.

‘And if he’s a friend of the O’Haras, he would be an honourable person and do his duty . . .’ Miss Beatrice agreed.

‘No, he wouldn’t. He wrote to say goodbye; it had been a magical summer.’

‘And I’m sure it was, my dear,’ Miss Queenie clucked kindly, not noticing the disapproval from the others.

‘I can’t tell my parents,’ Nuala said.

‘So, we’ll get you to Dublin as quickly as possible. They’ll know what to do up there.’ Miss Jessica wanted it off her doorstep soonest.

‘I’ll make those enquiries.’ Miss Beatrice was the sister with contacts.

Nuala’s eldest brother Nasey was already living in Dublin. He was the odd one in the family, very quiet, kept himself to himself, they would always say with a sigh. He had a job in a butcher’s shop and seemed settled enough.

He was a bachelor with a home of his own, but he wouldn’t be anyone she could rely on. He had been too long left home to know her and care about her. She did have his address for an emergency, of course, but she wouldn’t contact him.

The Sheedys had found a place for Nuala to stay. It was a hostel where several of the other girls were pregnant also.

A lot of them had jobs in supermarkets or cleaning houses. Nuala was used to hard work, and found it very easy compared to all the pulling and dragging at Stone House. She got jobs by word of mouth. People said to each other that she was very pleasant and that nothing was too much trouble for her. She saved enough to rent a room for herself and the baby when it was born.

She wrote home to her family telling them about Dublin and the people she worked for, but saying nothing of the visits to the maternity hospital. She wrote to the Sheedy ladies telling them the truth, and eventually giving them the news that Richard Anthony had been born weighing six and a half pounds and was a perfect baby in every way. They sent her a five-pound note to help out, and Miss Queenie sent a christening robe.

Richard Anthony wore it at his baptism, which was in a church down by the River Liffey at a christening of sixteen infants.

‘What a pity you don’t have any family there with you at this time,’ Miss Queenie wrote. ‘Perhaps your brother would be pleased to see you and meet his new nephew.’

Nuala doubted it. Nasey had always been withdrawn and distant from what she remembered.

‘I’ll wait until he’s a little person before I introduce them,’ she said.

Nuala now had to get jobs which would allow her to take the baby with her. Not easy at first, but when they saw the long hours she put in and how little trouble the child was she found plenty of work.

She saw a great deal of life through the households where she worked. The women who fussed about their homes as if they thought life was a permanent examination where they would be found wanting. There were families where husband and wife were barely civil to each other. There were places where the children were spoiled with every possession possible and still were not content.

But also she met good, kind people who were warm to her and her little son and grateful when she went the extra distance and cooked them potato cakes or made old dull brasses shine like new.

When Richard was three it was getting harder to take him to people’s houses. He wanted to explore and run around. One of Nuala’s favourite ladies was someone they all called Signora, who taught Italian classes. She was a most unusual woman: completely unworldly, wore extraordinary flowing clothes and had long hair with grey and red and dark brown in it all tied back with a ribbon.

She didn’t have a cleaner for herself, but paid Nuala to clean two afternoons a week for her mother. Her mother was a difficult, hard-to-please person who hadn’t a good word to say for Signora except that she had always been foolish and headstrong and no good would come of it all.

But Signora, if she knew this, took no notice. She told Nuala about a marvellous little playgroup. It was run by a friend of hers.

‘Oh, that would be much too expensive for me,’ Nuala said sadly.

‘I think they’d be very happy to have him there if you could do a few hours’ cleaning in exchange.’

‘But the other parents mightn’t like that. The cleaner’s child in with theirs.’

‘They won’t think like that, and anyway, they won’t know.’ Signora was very definite. ‘You’d like playschool, wouldn’t you, Richard?’ Signora had a great habit of talking to children as if they were grown-ups. She never put on a baby voice.

‘I’m Rigger,’ he said. And that’s what he was called from then on.

Rigger loved the playschool, and nobody ever knew that he arrived there two hours before the other children while his mother cleaned and polished and got the place ready for the day.