Walking Back to Happiness. Anne Bennett

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      Frances was a little while answering. She battled with tears behind her own eyes at the unfairness of life. How she hated leaving this youngest child an orphan at such a young age. She’d have liked to have had a few more years till she was older, maybe married, certainly better able to cope. But it wasn’t to be. She knew it, everyone knew it, and it would be no kindness to allow Josie to harbour any sort of false hope. ‘I don’t know why I have to die, Josie. Aren’t we all in God’s hands?’

      ‘If you ask me, he’s not doing a very good job of it,’ Josie said fiercely and Frances didn’t chide her for she’d had many of the same thoughts.

      ‘If I have to go anyway, can’t I go with our Ellen?’

      ‘You know there will be no room for you there, child.’

      ‘Granny’s then?’

      But even as Josie spoke, she gave a shudder of distaste. She hated her grandparents’ farm high in the Wicklow hills. There was nothing cosy about the bleak, thatched cottage they lived in and no comfort to be had either in or out of it. She could never understand Sam liking the backbreaking work he had to do to scrape a living from the hills, or how he managed to live with his grandparents, their granda finding fault with everything and their granny not knowing what day of the week it was.

      ‘There’s no one to see to you there.’

      ‘I can see to myself,’ Josie retorted, bristling.

      ‘Aye, and you’d have to see to everyone else in the place,’ Frances said, adding bitterly, ‘I had my share of it and I don’t want it for you. Sam gets away with it for he’s a boy. Believe me, Josie, your childhood would be over the minute you stepped over the doorstep and you’d skivvy every hour of the day.’ She gave Josie a squeeze and pleaded, ‘Come on, pet. Don’t make this even harder for me.’

      After that what could Josie do? She looked at her mother’s saddened face and saw that her eyes were brimming with tears and knew that she couldn’t add to her distress by arguing further.

      Frances seemed to sink rapidly after her talk with Josie. Ellen and Siobhan took on most of the nursing of their mother, Margaret was released from the convent and Miriam was sent for. Josie, from the necessity of taking on many of the household jobs, often found herself working alongside Hannah. She wondered sometimes if Hannah had arranged this, but she didn’t care if she had or not. All she knew was that her mother was losing her grip on life and there was damn all she could do about it.

      Hannah tried to get her talking, asking questions about the farm and school and her friends and what she did with her free time, but Josie wouldn’t play. She always answered her questions, she was too polite to ignore her altogether, but she did so tersely. She never introduced a subject herself and seemed not a bit interested in her aunt’s life or the place where she lived.

      The tense atmosphere between Hannah and Josie changed a few days later. Josie had crept in to her mother’s bedroom, knowing for once she could see her alone. She intended to have one last try at convincing her Mammy that she couldn’t live in a stuffy, alien city with an aunt she didn’t know and didn’t like much either and that surely there was a friend or relative she could stay with.

      The Tilley lamp was turned low and the candle before the Sacred Heart of Jesus lent little from its flickering flame. The priest had been that day and the room smelt of the oils he’d used to anoint Frances. Awed and a little frightened, for Josie hadn’t seen her mother since she’d told her she was to live with Hannah, she soundlessly crept nearer to the bed. ‘Mammy!’

      Josie watched her mother dragging her heavy lids open as if they weighed a ton and she stared at her daughter through pain-glazed eyes and without a spark of recognition. ‘Mammy, it’s me, Josie.’

      Frances looked at her for a moment longer before letting her eyelids drop closed again and Josie stood in the room watching her, biting her thumb, while tears rained down her cheeks. It was if her mother was already dead. Josie fled from the room, hurtling down the stairs and out through the front door, avoiding everyone gathered in the kitchen.

      It was teatime before she was missed. By then, Ellen knew she had been into their mother’s room for she’d left the door wide open and none of the others would have done that. She said she’d have a few sharp words to say when Josie did come home.

      Hannah put two and two together. She knew that Frances’s drug dosage had been raised to try and give her ease from the intense pain, but Josie hadn’t been told. Nor had she been told that Frances, drugged and pain-riddled, seldom knew any of them anymore. She thought for a moment and then without a word to the others, she slipped out into the yard.

      She heard the muffled sobbing as soon as she opened the barn door and she followed it up the ladder leading to the upper floor, the very place she’d always made for whenever she was upset. Barely had her head pushed through the opening, than she saw Josie spread-eagled across the straw bales.

      But despite the stealth that Hannah had used so as not to startle the girl, Josie heard her. She raised her head, her face blotchy from crying, but her eyes flashed fire. ‘What d’you want?’ she spat out. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’

      Hannah ignored the anger in Josie’s voice, for behind it she heard the knot of raw pain. She eased herself through the hole and sat on a bale nearby, but not too near to Josie, who’d buried her head once more into the straw and refused to look at her aunt. ‘I used to come here too,’ Hannah said, conversationally. ‘There’s something comforting about the smell of straw.’

      There was no movement from Josie, but Hannah knew she was listening intently. ‘I’ll miss Frances too,’ she said. ‘She was the only mother I ever knew. And I might as well have had no father either,’ she added bitterly. ‘Frances said he was so mad with grief, he hadn’t even a name for me. The priest suggested Hannah. It was his mother’s name.’

      Josie knew the story. It had often been talked of in the family. ‘Your daddy was like my daddy too,’ Hannah went on. ‘He used to talk to me if I got upset. I loved him dearly.’

      Josie raised her head. ‘Then why didn’t you come to the funeral?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘Everyone was asking.’

      ‘I was ill.’

      ‘After, then. Mammy used to get upset and cry at night.’

      There was a silence between them and then Hannah gave a sigh. ‘There were reasons,’ she said quietly. ‘One day I may even tell you what they were, but what matters now is you and me.’ And then, because she’d sensed the girl’s antagonism towards her from the beginning, she asked, ‘Will you hate living with me so much?’

      Josie swung around and stared at Hannah and decided to be truthful. ‘Yes, I will. I don’t know you or anything about England and I don’t want to know either. I don’t want to leave here.’

      Hannah thought that now was not the time to tell Josie she wasn’t keen on looking after her either. ‘We can’t all have what we want, Josie,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to get to know you the last few days, but you … Look, pet, we must make the best of it for your mother’s sake. Give it a year? If after that you’re still miserable, I promise we’ll look at it again.’

      And then what? Josie thought. Maybe she could induce Martin or Siobhan to send for her to go to America, but would she like that any better? ‘At least when your Mammy died, you didn’t have to leave СКАЧАТЬ