Trio - [8]

‘Mammy, tell him,’ Megan pleaded.

But her mammy blinked. ‘Yer awful young.’

‘You were my age when you had me.’

‘That was different,’ her daddy announced.

‘Why was it? Mammy was pregnant when she married you. I can do my sums, you know. I wasn’t born three months premature, was I?’

He lurched towards her, anger furrowing the muscles in his face, his arm swinging back.

‘Anthony!’ her mammy barked. He had never hit them, none of them. It was something he prided himself on. But this was taking him to the limit.

‘Jesus wept!’ he railed and slammed his hand on the table. ‘You’ll not marry him, I’ll not give my permission.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s a clown. He’s got no prospects, no land. Nothing.’

‘We’re not back home now,’ she retorted. ‘I’m not after a farmer. He’s apprenticed. He’ll learn a trade. He’ll be a printer. We won’t need to wait half our lives for an itty-bitty strip of boggy land that won’t grow any bloody thing.’

‘Megan!’ Mammy snapped.

‘It’s not fair!’ she yelled.

‘When you’re twenty-one you can marry who you like, but until then you live in my house and you marry who I say.’

Six years! He was touched in the head. ‘It’s your grandchild,’ she protested. ‘It’s a bastard and you don’t want it, but I do and it needn’t be like that.’

Her mammy started at the sentiment. Megan knew if it was only her there might be some chance, but her daddy was the stubbornest man in the world.

‘I want it, Daddy.’

‘Oh, now you do.’

‘And Brendan does.’

‘I have no more to say on the matter.’ He clenched his jaw shut.

‘Mammy,’ she appealed for help.

‘You’re not the first, Megan, and you won’t be the last. I tried to raise you good, teach you right from wrong. If Brendan had an ounce of respect… You’ve gone to the bad and it must be put right. We’ll talk to the Catholic Rescue.’

‘I don’t want to!’ Her voice was high and childlike. She began to cry again. Her mother put her hand on Megan’s head. ‘It’s the best way,’ she cajoled.

‘Please, Daddy.’

‘Enough,’ he said shortly and she watched the feeling drain from his eyes and his look turn, the bright pain replaced by a dull grey stare, dead as stones. She couldn’t win. Another day, a different moment, perhaps he’d have said yes, hesitated in his decision long enough to hear her pleas and see the sense of it. But now, once he’d said it, that was it. No matter how wrong he might be, or what harm might result, he would be unmoving. She hated him for it. She would never forgive him, she told herself, never, never, not until they put pennies on her eyes.

Joan

‘I’ve got a new job,’ Joan announced to her family during their evening meal. Her stomach rippled with tension. ‘Down in London. Frances told me about it. And I wrote to apply and they’ve offered me it.’

She held up the letter. She had typed it herself earlier that day. Betty had gone to the post office for stamps and Duncan was out seeing a customer. It was the first chance she’d had. She’d invented an address in London. She’d never been there but had heard of Shepherd's Bush. It was easy enough to come up with 16 Market Street, Shepherd’s Bush. Her fingers flew over the keys, offering herself the position of secretary. She had signed it with a flourish. Arthur Bell Esquire. She found a used envelope with an illegible postmark and inserted the letter.

‘Good grief!’ Her mother froze in the process of dishing up the treacle tart. ‘It’s all a bit sudden, isn’t it? You never said a word.’

Her younger brother Tommy gawped, her father looked stunned. ‘What’s brought all this on?’ he asked her. ‘What sort of position?’ He held his hand out for the letter.

Her mother resumed sharing out the sweet, one eye on Joan.

‘Secretarial, small firm. You know I’ve been wanting to go for ages. Frances says it’s super there. Very lively. There’s a room coming up at her lodgings, so I won’t even need to find a place.’

‘And you’re leaving Harrison’s just like that?’ He frowned at the letter.

‘Daddy, I’ll work my notice and they’ll find someone else easy enough. I don’t want to work in the same office all my life.’

‘Don’t know you’re born,’ he muttered. ‘Pass the Carnation.’

Joan handed him the jug of evaporated milk. He held the letter out to her mother.

‘It’s a bit of a shock, Joan,’ her mother managed. ‘I wish you’d said something.’

‘I was going to but it’s all happened so quickly. This job at Bell’s is vacant now and if I don’t jump at it they’ll take someone else. Manchester is so stuffy,’ she said. ‘I want to see what London's like.’

‘When’s all this going to happen?’ Her father said. ‘How long’s your notice?’

‘A week. I thought I could get the coach next Saturday.’

‘You’ll miss Grandad’s birthday,’ her mother complained.

‘Grandad won’t mind.’

There was a pause. Joan listened to the clock ticking, to her father’s huffs and puffs as he ate.

‘Your mother’s right,’ he said. ‘You could have given the family a bit more consideration, springing it on us like this.’

She sighed. ‘I want you to be pleased for me,’ Joan tried. ‘It’s so exciting.’

‘We are, Joan.’ Her mother smiled. ‘It’s just so fast. But we are. Aren’t we, Ted?’