Light A Penny Candle (2 page)

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘I’m going to send you to Eileen.’

Eileen was a name on a Christmas card, it was a name associated with a small, cheap toy on her birthday. Last year, Mother had said she wished Eileen would drop the birthday gifts, it was silly to keep it up and
she
couldn’t possibly be expected to remember all the birthdays of Eileen’s dozens of children.

‘It seems the only possible solution.’

Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. She wished she knew what she could do to be allowed to stay. She wished hard that she could be the kind of girl that parents didn’t send away, or that they’d come with her.

‘Will you come with me?’ She looked at the carpet hard.

‘Oh, heavens, no dear.’

‘I was just hoping. …’

‘Elizabeth, don’t be so silly. I can’t possibly go to Eileen’s, to the O’Connors, with you. … Darling, they live in Ireland. Who would go to Ireland, Elizabeth, for heaven’s sake? It’s out of the question.’

Thursday was always a busy day because the farmers coming in for the market brought their lists into the shop. Sean employed a boy, Jemmy, who wasn’t ‘all there’, to help carry out the supplies from the yard. He didn’t want the children cluttering up the shop on a Thursday, he had said so a dozen times. He wiped a weary forehead with a dusty hand in annoyance when he saw Aisling and Eamonn escaping from the ineffectual grabs and shouts of Peggy and running into the shop.

‘Where’s Mammy, Da, where’s Mammy?’ shouted Aisling.

‘Where’s Mammy, where’s Mammy?’ repeated Eamonn.

Peggy, running and giggling, was just as bad.

‘Will ya come here, you brats,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll tan the backside offa you, Aisling, when I catch you. Your father’s after saying a hundred times, he’ll have yez locked up if you come in here on a Thursday.’

The farmers, busy men who hated having to take any time at all away from their deals and discussions on beasts, laughed at the sideshow. Peggy, hair escaping from a bun, filthy apron stained with the last twenty meals she had served, was loving the sensation she knew she was causing. Sean looked at her helplessly as she darted here and there, making even more of a game of it than the children were, with her bold winks at the farmers and the come-on glance giving encouragement to any of them that might want to come back and find her at the end of the market when the pubs were making them feel like powerful men. Johnny stood open-mouthed and delighted, with the planks in his hands that should have been loaded on a trailer.

‘Get those bloody bits of wood outside and come back in here,’ roared Sean. ‘Now, Michael, ignore these antics, I’ll deal with that lot later. How much are you going to need for the plastering? Are you doing all the outhouses now? No, no, of course you’re not. Far too much to take on at one time.’

Eileen had heard the commotion, and in small quick steps she came out of her little office and down to the shop. Her office, with its mahogany surrounds and glass windows on all sides, looked like a little closed-in pulpit, Young Sean had said to her once. She should really preach a sermon to everyone in the shop, rather than fill in books and ledgers. But if Eileen didn’t fill books and ledgers, there would be no shop, no house, no luxuries like Peggy, and Jemmy, who got a few shillings on a Thursday which made him important again in his family.

Her face was set in a hard line when she met the excited children and the flushed Peggy. Taking each child in a most uncomfortable place, just under the shoulder, she marched them firmly out of the shop; and after one glance from the Mistress, Peggy lost a lot of her bounce and followed quickly with her eyes down. Sean sighed with relief and got back to what he knew about.

Up the stairs of the house in the square, the children squealing and wriggling, Eileen was unwavering.

‘Put on some tea, please, Peggy,’ she said, her voice cold.

‘But Mammy, we just wanted to show you the letter.’

‘With the picture of a man on it.’

‘It came by the afternoon post. …’

‘And Johnny said when he was giving it that it was from England. …’

‘And the man was the King of England. …’

Eileen ignored them. She put them sitting on two dining chairs opposite her and faced them.

‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, on Thursday, on market day, your father doesn’t want to see hide nor hair of you in that shop and neither do I. As it is, he’s over there waiting on me to come back and do the bills, and write up the books for the farmers. Have you no idea at all of obedience? Aisling, a great, big girl of ten years of age? Do you hear me?’

Aisling hadn’t heard a word. She wanted her mother to open the letter, which she vaguely thought was from the King of England because of what the postman had said.

‘Aisling, listen to me!’ shouted Eileen, and seeing that she was getting nowhere, she reached out and slapped the bare legs of the two of them. Hard. Both began to cry. At the sound, Niamh woke up and began to cry in the cot in the corner of the living room.

‘I only wanted to give you the letter,’ wailed Aisling. ‘I hate you, I hate you.’

‘I hate you too,’ echoed Eamonn.

Eileen marched to the door. ‘Well, you can sit here and hate me.’ She tried not to raise her voice since she knew that little Donal would be sitting up in bed, listening to every sound. Just thinking of his little face made her heart move suddenly, so she decided to run upstairs and see him just for a few seconds. If she went in and said something cheerful he would smile and go back to his book. Otherwise she might see his face pressed anxiously to the bedroom window as he watched her crossing from the house to the shop. She peeped in at his door, knowing well that he was awake.

‘You’re to try and sleep, pet, you know that.’

‘Why is there shouting?’ he asked.

‘Because that bold sister and brother of yours came into the shop caterwauling on a Thursday, that’s why,’ she said, adjusting the bedclothes.

‘Have they said sorry?’ he asked, begging to be reassured.

‘No, they haven’t – yet,’ said Eileen.

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘Nothing too bad,’ she said, and kissed him.

Back in the living room, Aisling and Eamonn were still mutinous.

‘Peggy called us for tea, but we’re not going,’ said Aisling.

‘As you wish. You can certainly have my permission to sit here for as long as you like. In fact you can sit here for a long time. Because neither of you two will get to have a lemonade this Thursday evening after your behaviour.’

The faces were round-eyed with disbelief and disappointment. Always on a Thursday, with his order-book full and his cash-box bursting, Sean O’Connor took his wife and children down to Maher’s. It was a quiet place. There would be no farmers with manure on their boots sealing bargains in there. Maher’s was the drapery as well as having a pub and Eileen liked looking at the new jackets or boxes of cardigans with Mrs Maher. Young Sean and Maureen liked sitting up on high stools reading the notices behind the bar and looking like grown-ups; Aisling and Eamonn loved the way the fizzy red lemonade went up their noses, and how Mr Maher would give them a biscuit with icing on it, and their father would say they were spoiled. The Mahers had a cat which had just had kittens. Last Thursday the kittens’ eyes hadn’t been open, so this week, for the first time, they would be allowed to play with them.

And now it was all cancelled.

‘Please, Mammy, please, I’ll be good, I’ll be very good …’

‘I thought you hated me?’

‘I don’t really hate you,’ said Eamonn hopefully.

‘I mean, nobody could hate their mother?’ added Aisling.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Eileen. ‘That’s why I was so surprised you both forgot that, the way you forgot about coming to the shop. …’ She gave in. It was the only time in the week when Sean relaxed properly, that hour in Maher’s with the children nicely scrubbed and neat playing peacefully with cats or rabbits or caged birds. She picked up the letter and went into the kitchen.

‘I’ve the tea wet, Mam,’ said Peggy nervously.

‘Pour me the large mug, please. Keep those children in the living room and see to the baby.’ In a moment, she had her tea and, letter in her pocket, was striding back to the shop. It was an hour before she had time to open the letter.

In Maher’s that night, Eileen passed it to Sean to read.

‘My eyes are so tired I can hardly see it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, that writing’s like a spider half-drunk getting out of an inkpot.’

‘That’s italic script, you ignoramus, that’s the way the nuns in St Mark’s taught us to write. Violet remembers it, I don’t, that’s all.’

‘That Violet has little else to remember,’ said Sean. ‘Life of ease over there, she has.’

‘Not since the war started,’ Eileen pointed out.

‘No,’ Sean agreed into his pint. ‘No. Is her man out in the trenches? I suppose he’d be an officer, being in the bank and all. That’s the way the British Empire does things. If men have good accents they get good jobs and they get to be officers.’

‘No, George isn’t in the army at all, he had something wrong. I don’t know what, anyway he was medically unfit.’

‘Too cushy a life in the bank, I suppose he didn’t want to leave,’ said Sean.

‘Sean, it’s the child, it’s Violet’s child, Elizabeth. They’re all being sent out of London for fear of the bombs … you know, we read it in the papers. Violet wants to know will we have her here?’

‘This isn’t the country … they’re not evacuating them to Ireland, this is our country. They can’t make us join their bloody war by sending us all their children and old people … haven’t they done bloody enough already …?’

‘Sean, will you
listen
to me!’ Eileen snapped. ‘Violet would like to know whether we would take Elizabeth for a few months. The little school she’s in is closing down because all the children are being evacuated. George has relations, and so has Violet, but they … they asked if she could come here. What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a bloody liberty, a bloody cheek and typical of the British Empire. Unless you can be of some use to them they’ve no time for you, they don’t want to know you, not a letter, barely a Christmas card. Then when they get themselves into this stupid war they’re fawning all over you. That’s what I think.’

‘Violet is not the British Empire, she’s my friend from school. She was never a letter-writer, even this one is jerky and full of … I don’t know, brackets and inverted commas. She’s not used to writing to people, not twenty
or
thirty letters a day, like I am. That’s not the point. The point is will you have the child in the house?’

‘That’s not the point, the point is she’s got a bloody neck to ask.’

‘Shall I say no, then? Will I write tonight and say I’m sorry, no. Reason? Because Sean says the British Empire has a bloody neck. Will that do?’

‘Don’t be all bitter. …’

‘I’m not being all bitter. I’ve had just as exhausting a day as you have. All right. Of course I think Violet has a bloody neck. Of course I’m insulted when I think she hasn’t much time for me, if she doesn’t bother to write unless she wants something. That goes without saying. The point is, do we have the child or not? She’s Aisling’s age,
she
didn’t declare war on Germany, or invade Ireland, or attack De Valera or whatever. … She’s only ten, she’s probably lying there at night wondering will a bomb fall on her and blow her to bits. Now, do we have her or don’t we?’

Sean looked surprised. Eileen didn’t usually make speeches. And it was even more unusual for her to admit to a hurt or an insult from her precious friend of schooldays.

‘Will she be too much trouble for you?’ he asked.

‘No, she might even be a friend for Aisling. And what can one child eat more than we all eat already?’

Sean called for another pint, a port for Eileen and more lemonades. He looked at Eileen, smart now in her white blouse with the brooch at the neck, her brown-red hair pulled up at the sides with combs. She was a handsome
woman
, he thought, and a strong partner in everything he did. Few people, seeing her in her navy office coat, working out the credit and the cash for a growing business, would know what she was like underneath. A passionate wife – he had always been amazed that she should respond to him as eagerly as he turned to her – and a loving mother too. He looked at her warmly. She had such a heart it could include more children than she had herself.

‘Send for her, it’s the least we can do to try and keep a child away from all the madness that’s going on,’ he announced. And Eileen patted him on the arm in a rare display of public affection.

The letter from Eileen arrived so quickly that Violet believed it was a refusal. In her experience, people who were about to make excuses and justify their actions always wrote quickly and at length. With a heavy sigh she picked it up from the mat.

‘Well I expect we’ll have to smoke out your father’s relations after all,’ she sighed as she brought it back to the breakfast table.

‘Does this mean she says no …?’ began Elizabeth. ‘Maybe she says yes inside. …’

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full. Pick up your serviette and
try
to behave properly, Elizabeth,
please
,’ said Violet mechanically as she slit the envelope with a paper knife. George had already gone to work and there were just the two of them. Violet thought that if you let standards fall you were on the way to destruction, so the
toast
was served with the crusts cut off in a small china toast rack, and all three of them had their napkin rings into which the folded napkin must be replaced after every meal.

Elizabeth nearly burst waiting for Violet to read the news. It couldn’t have been more irritating. She would read bits aloud and then mutter.

‘My dear Violet … delighted to hear from you … emm … umm … very concerned about you and George and Elizabeth … emm … umm … many people here think that we should be in the war too … do anything we can … children very pleased and excited. …’

Elizabeth knew she had to wait. She screwed her table napkin very tightly into a little ball. She didn’t know what she wanted to hear: it would be a relief not to have to go across the sea to another country, a place that Father seemed to think was just as dangerous as London and a place that Mother dismissed as somewhere you couldn’t go except in dire circumstances. She didn’t want to go and stay in
an awful dump with dozens of children, and in a town full of animal droppings and drunkards
which was how Mother had remembered Kilgarret. Elizabeth didn’t want to be in a dirty place somewhere that Mother disapproved of. But still, Mother had said this was the best place for her to go. Perhaps it had got better. It had been years since Mother had visited it, long before she had married Father. She had said she would never go back again – she couldn’t understand how Eileen had been able to stand it.