A Week in Winter(9)

Only Mrs Cassidy, over in New York, and Miss Queenie believed it would happen and be a big success. Everyone else was humouring her and hoping it would take off but in the same way that they hoped for a long hot summer and for the Irish soccer team to do well in the World Cup.

Sometimes Chicky would go and walk the cliffs at night and look out over the Atlantic Ocean. Always it gave her strength.

People had had enough courage to get into small, shaky boats and set sail over those choppy waters, not knowing what lay ahead. Surely it couldn’t be too hard to set up a guest house? Then she would go back indoors where Miss Queenie would run and make them a mug of hot chocolate and say that she hadn’t been so happy since she was a girl, since the days when she and her sisters would go to a hunt ball and hope they might find dashing young men to marry. That had never happened, but this time it would work. Stone House was going to happen.

And Chicky would pat her on the hand and say that they would be the talk of the country. And as she said it, she believed it. All her worries would go. Whether it was because of the walk in the wild winds or the comforting hot chocolate or Miss Queenie’s hopeful face or a combination of all three, it meant she slept a long, untroubled sleep every night.

She would wake ready for anything, which was just as well because in the months ahead there was quite a lot she had to be ready for.





Rigger

Rigger never knew his father – he had never been spoken of. His mother Nuala was hard to know properly. She worked so hard for one thing, and she said little of her life in the West of Ireland in a small place called Stoneybridge. Rigger knew she had worked as a maid in a big house for three old ladies called the Miss Sheedys, but she never wanted to talk about it nor her family back home.

He shrugged. It was impossible to understand grown-ups, anyway.

Nuala had never owned anything of her own. She was the youngest of the family so any clothes she got had been well tried out on the others first. There was no money for luxuries, not even a First Communion dress; and when she was fifteen they had found her a job working for the Miss Sheedys in Stone House. Very nice women they were; ladies, all three of them.

It was hard work: stone floors and wooden tables to scrub, old furniture to polish. She had a very small room with a little iron bed. But it was her own, more than she ever had at home. The Miss Sheedys hadn’t a penny really between them, so there was a lot of fighting back the damp and the leaks and there was never the money to give the house any proper heating or a good coat of paint – both needed badly. They ate very little but Nuala was used to that. They were like little sparrows at the table.

She looked at them with wonder, as they had to have their table napkins each in its own ring and they sounded a little gong to announce the meal. It was like taking part in a play.

Sometimes Miss Queenie would ask about Nuala’s boyfriends, but the other sisters would tut-tut as if this wasn’t a suitable topic to discuss with the maid.

Not that there was that much to discuss. There were very few boyfriends around Stoneybridge. Any lads her brothers knew had all gone to England or America to find work. And Nuala wouldn’t be considered good enough for the O’Haras or some of the big families in the place. She hoped that she would meet one of the summer visitors who would fall in love with her, just like Chicky, and not care that she was in domestic service.

And she did meet a summer visitor, called Drew. It was short for Andrew. He was a friend of the O’Haras, and they had all been kicking a ball around the beach. Nuala sat watching the girls in their smart swimsuits. How wonderful it must be to be able to go into town and buy things like that, and lovely coloured baskets and coloured towels.

Drew came over and asked her to join the game. After a week she was in love with him. After two weeks they were lovers. It was all so natural and normal, she couldn’t understand why she and the other girls had giggled so much about it at school. Drew said he adored her and that he would write to her every day when he went back to Dublin.

He wrote once and said it had been a magical summer and that he would never forget her. He gave no address. Nuala wouldn’t ask the O’Haras where to find him. Not even when she realised that her period was late and she was most probably pregnant.

When this became more certain to be true, she was at a complete loss about what to do. It would break her mother’s heart. Nuala had never felt so alone in her life.

She decided to tell the Miss Sheedys.

She waited until she had cleared and washed up their minimal supper before she began the story. Nuala looked at the stone floor of the kitchen so that she did not have to meet their eyes as she explained what had happened.

The Sheedy sisters were shocked. They had hardly any words to express their horror that this should have happened while Nuala was under their roof.

‘What on earth are you going to do?’ Miss Queenie asked with tears in her eyes.

Miss Jessica and Miss Beatrice were less sympathetic but equally unable to think of a solution.

What had Nuala hoped they would do? That they might ask her to bring up the baby there? That they would say a child around the house would make them all feel young again?

No, she hadn’t hoped for that much but she wanted some reassurance, some pinprick of hope that the world was not going to end for her as a result of all this.

They said they would make enquiries. They had heard of a place where she might be able to stay until the baby was born and given up for adoption.