Walking Back to Happiness

Arthur disliked the travelling and staying at indifferent guesthouses. He’d done it for years and he’d been complaining to Gloria about it yet again one day when she seized her chance. ‘My boss, Mr Banks, is a family man himself, you see,’ he’d told Gloria. ‘He likes married men in the firm. Says you can rely on them. It’s all the married men who work in the offices and seldom have to go on the road.’

‘Maybe you should think about marriage yourself then?’ Gloria had suggested.

‘I never thought to marry,’ Arthur had said. ‘Anyway, I know no one suitable.’

‘What about Hannah?’

‘Hannah!’ Arthur had noticed Hannah of course, he couldn’t have failed to. Everyone who came to the place noticed Hannah.

‘Well, if you’ve got to be married, you could look further than Hannah and fare worse,’ Gloria had said. ‘She’s a well set-up lass.’

‘I know that all right,’ Arthur had said. ‘But I know my faults, none better. I’m a dull sort of chap for someone like Hannah.’

‘She’s not in the full flush of youth,’ Gloria reminded him.

‘I know that and I’m surprised. I thought someone would have snapped her up before now.’

‘Aye, well there’s been a war on, you know. The one who might have married Hannah never came back from it.’ No harm, Gloria thought, in telling him that much. ‘Ask her,’ she urged.

She wasn’t worried about Hannah’s reaction. She’d already talked her round and she knew what her answer would be and hoped fervently that she’d done the right thing.

Arthur was overjoyed that Hannah had agreed to marry him. In the early weeks of their courtship, however, Hannah had often doubted her decision, even with the house that Gloria saw as such a prize, and it was always the thought of one day having her own baby that held her on course. Arthur Bradley wasn’t a demonstrative man, nor one, as even Gloria was heard to say, to flash his money about overmuch.

He seldom took Hannah out and whenever he did, even when they were alone, he was so respectful, he appeared aloof and cold. There had been no snuggling for them in the back row of the cinema the odd times they’d gone together. There were no stolen kisses in the entries in the darkening winter nights, or cuddling on the sofa in Arthur’s front room and taking comfort in one another. No further than that of course, but Hannah would have welcomed being held and caressed and kissed. That wasn’t Mr Bradley’s way, though, she told herself and anyway, she didn’t need such things, after all she was no lovesick teenager.

A few weeks after their engagement, Arthur came to see Hannah in an ecstatic mood. He told her that they’d both been asked for dinner with his boss and his wife, Mr and Mrs Banks. Such a thing had never happened to him before.

The evening was a success. They all got on remarkably well, so well in fact that the Banks insisted Arthur and Hannah call them Reg and Elizabeth. Arthur could see how Hannah had charmed his boss and his wife. In fact, Hannah and Elizabeth had seemed like old friends together.

He knew some of his colleagues couldn’t imagine what Hannah saw in him. He’d seen the looks of puzzled envy on their faces when he’d taken Hannah to the annual dinner-dance, just after she’d agreed to marry him. He’d thought himself a lucky man. If he had to have someone looking across the table from him every day, then Hannah he felt could do the job better than most. Added to her looks, she was compliant, eager to please and had never opposed him in anything.

And now … now she stood bold as brass and told him not only that she’d defied him and brought her sister’s child home, but that she was to live with them and that she’d promised her sister on her deathbed that she’d look after her.

‘You had no right to promise such a thing without consulting me.’

‘Arthur, she was dying,’ Hannah said, her voice rising in distress. ‘Not long after that first day, she was having so much morphine she didn’t know where she was and could recognise no one. Should I have asked her to wait while I wrote you a wee letter?’

‘Don’t shout, Hannah.’

‘I feel like shouting,’ Hannah snapped. ‘Have you no feeling, even for the child? How do you imagine she feels, her parents both dead, her brothers and sisters scattered to the four corners of the world? She is alone, Arthur.’

‘The authorities would …’

‘I wasn’t leaving her with any authorities,’ Hannah said. ‘How could you expect me to do that after promising my sister I’d see to her?’

‘Well, I don’t want her here and it’s my house.’

‘Then she won’t come and neither will I,’ Hannah said angrily, astounded at Arthur’s uncompromising attitude.

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

‘Yes, I do. I won’t bring her here under sufferance,’ Hannah said. ‘She’s gone through enough. You were lucky to have your mother until you grew up. I never knew mine and without Frances and her abiding love for me, I would have been lost. I owed her so much and if you want to know I’m glad I have the opportunity to pay back some of it. If you can’t see it that way, you’re not the man I thought you were and maybe we’d better call the wedding off now before it goes any further.’

She removed her ring as she spoke and laid it on the sideboard. She’d not removed her coat and hat and without another word she turned and left, slamming the front door behind her.

On the way home, though, she wondered what she’d done. Gloria had agreed Josie could stay till the wedding, but she didn’t know if she’d want her staying there for good. And if she didn’t, Hannah would be out of a job and a place to live.

Back in the house, Arthur, too, was having second thoughts. What Hannah had said about his mother had hit home for he’d been devastated when she’d died. Then he thought of his work colleagues when he told them the marriage was off. He imagined the nudges and winks. ‘Knew it wouldn’t last. She was miles too good for him.’

And what of his boss? He’d think Arthur a failure for not hanging on to Hannah. And if they should ever find out the reason that Hannah had walked out on him, he had a horrible feeling that they’d see and understand her point of view, not his.

He was a devout man and eventually he walked along to the Abbey, his parish church, to ask the advice of one of the priests there. There were confessions every night till eight o’clock, so he knew there would be someone about.

Father Fitzgerald was pulling his coat about him as he stepped out of the church, for there was rain in the air, when he saw Arthur coming up the path. ‘Can I walk with you, Father? It’s advice I’m after.’

The priest’s heart sank. He hoped Arthur Bradley wouldn’t keep him long; the church had been chilly and he was also very hungry. But then, he told himself, Arthur wouldn’t have known that. ‘Talk away then, Arthur,’ he said.

Arthur told the priest everything and though he told him of his own misgivings, he also told him the truth about Hannah’s promise to her sister and the debt she felt she owed her and the priest listened without a word.

They’d reached the door before Arthur had finished and they stood with the wind gusting around them and yet the priest felt himself going hot with anger at Arthur’s words and actions. He told him he’d been less than charitable and whatever his feelings, he should honour Hannah’s promise.

‘We have just fought a war of unparalleled magnitude,’ he said. ‘A time when there was much grief and loss of life, but also when there was more neighbourliness and helping one another. I’m ashamed that you even hesitated to take this poor orphan child in. You have a good job and a fine house, many have far, far less and yet would welcome that child. Your inability to share shows a serious flaw in your character and one that should be attended to.’

Arthur was shaken by the priest’s condemnation of him, there was no doubt about it. But he was a man of honour and knew there was only one thing to be done. He went straight round to the guesthouse after leaving the priest. Gloria opened the door. ‘Can I see Hannah?’ he asked.

But Gloria had already heard an account of the quarrel from an indignant Hannah and she said sternly, ‘I’m not having Hannah any further upset.’

‘I’m not here to upset her.’

‘Well that’s as may be …’

‘Please,’ Arthur said earnestly. ‘I’m here to apologise.’

Well, thought Gloria, that’s more like it. She asked him to step into the dining room, all the guests having now finished their evening meal, and that was where Hannah faced him a few moments later.

Arthur saw that two spots of colour stood out in Hannah’s cheeks and her whole manner suggested that she would stand no nonsense. But Arthur wasn’t there to spout nonsense. What the priest had said had wounded him deeply and had made him ashamed of his behaviour at the house. Though he made no mention of the priest, this shame is what he told Hannah as he asked for her forgiveness.

Hannah’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Why the sudden change of heart?’

Arthur still didn’t mention the priest. He had the feeling it wouldn’t help his case. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘When you’d gone, I thought about what you said. I was wrong and I’m sorry, truly sorry, and sorry too if I upset you.’

In spite of herself, Hannah was impressed. It took courage for a person to admit they were wrong about something and ask for another’s forgiveness.

‘Please, take back the ring?’ Arthur said, holding it out to Hannah.

But she had to be certain. ‘And Josie?’ she said. ‘How do you feel about her now?’

Arthur was a truthful man. Eventually he replied, ‘You must be patient with me. I know nothing about children, I’ve never had dealings with any.’

‘I don’t expect you to be a natural father,’ Hannah said. ‘I expect you to be welcoming, to be kind to her.’

‘I’ll do my best, I can’t say fairer than that.’

‘No,’ said Hannah, slipping the engagement ring back on her finger ‘No, you can’t.’ But though she spoke the conciliatory words, Arthur’s earlier attitude had shaken her. Despite her longing for a child, she knew if she hadn’t got Josie’s welfare to consider, she’d have probably called it a day with Arthur Bradley there and then and to hell with his fine house and steady job.

Chapter Three

Arthur and Hannah were married the second Saturday in September and everyone said it went off a treat. Gloria sat in the pew watching Hannah walk down the aisle on the arm of Tom Parry, the husband of her best friend and neighbour Amy, and thought it hard she had no one belonging to her but Josie at her wedding.

Why couldn’t the two off to America have delayed their departure until after the wedding? Or the one she said was living with the grandparents, or the one that wasn’t long married come over for a few days? Then she had to walk down the aisle on the arm of a comparative stranger when her own father was apparently alive and well. And it wasn’t that he hadn’t been asked. Hannah had written and asked him did he want to come and would he like to give her away, but his refusal had been brief to the point of rudeness.

It had been the same with her brothers and sisters. They were all in America except the one and he said it was a bad time to leave the farm, claimed he was up to his neck in the harvest and had a couple of cows ready to calve.

‘It’s a crying shame, that’s what,’ Gloria said angrily to Josie.

‘Sure, she hardly knows them anyway,’ Josie said. ‘It’s my family she grew up with.’

But deep down, she knew it had hurt Hannah. She’d heard her muffled crying in the attic room they shared when she thought Josie was asleep. She hadn’t comforted her then, though she wanted to, because she had the feeling Hannah wouldn’t want her to know. In the same way she wouldn’t tell Mrs Emmerson she’d been upset, because she thought she’d be letting her down in some way.

In the time they’d been living together at the guesthouse, Josie had drawn even closer to Hannah. She knew she’d taken her in because she’d been almost forced to, but she’d never shown her that. She’d always been kind and considerate. In those first early weeks, sometimes Josie had been so homesick, she could neither eat nor sleep. It had been Hannah then who wrapped her arms around her and promised things would get better, or sat by her bed, often for hours, stroking her forehead to relax her enough to drift into sleep.

Josie knew she’d never forget that. She wished, though, she wasn’t marrying Arthur Bradley. Not that he bothered about her much, he mainly ignored her, and as the youngest in a large and busy family, she was used to being ignored, especially by men. Her father and her brothers were always either too busy to bother about her or off on business of their own and would hardly give her the time of day.

No, it wasn’t the way Arthur was with her that bothered Josie about the marriage, it was the man himself. Hannah was beautiful, truly beautiful, but much of her beauty came from the light that danced in her eyes that lit up her whole face. She’d seen heads turn when she’d gone into a room. Every guest who came in had been almost mesmerised by her and she’d even seen people turn to look at her at Mass.

And yet she’d bothered about none of them and certainly didn’t encourage attention. In fact, there was a certain something Hannah had, a certain aloofness with men, that put them off slightly, though she was always polite. She’d wanted to ask her about it, but could never seem to find the right words, or the right time to say them. Still, Josie had the feeling that with the slightest encouragement, the men would be falling at her feet.

She knew all about the soldier Hannah had been engaged to who died on the beach in Normandy around D-Day. She’d heard it from Mrs Emmerson and it had been the first time she’d known it, for in the letters Hannah had written to her mother, she’d not mentioned a word of it. ‘I think he took part of her heart with him and that’s the truth,’ Gloria said. ‘That’s why she wants no other.’

So why then did she pin the rest of it on Arthur Bradley? Josie thought. ‘She doesn’t love him,’ she’d cried in protest to Gloria. ‘She can’t love him.’

‘What’s love, pet?’ Gloria asked sadly. ‘I didn’t love my husband, but we got along all right. No children, and that was a blow to take, but it meant we were able to work hard. He had a shop then and it did all right. But when he dropped dead of a heart attack when we’d been married just ten years, I sold the shop, lock, stock and barrel and bought this place.

‘I could have married a man I loved and one that loved me,’ she went on. ‘And there was one. But with him, I’d probably be living in some back-to-back slum with a squad of children and not a half-penny to bless myself with. I did what I had to do for me and Hannah’s doing the same.’

‘What happened to the other man – the one you loved?’ Josie asked, intrigued by Gloria’s revelations.

‘He went to America,’ Gloria said with a shrug, and a flush of shame coloured her face for a split second as she went on. ‘Told me I’d broke his heart. Stuff and nonsense, of course. Don’t you worry none about Hannah. She wants a home of her own and someone to care for her.’

But did he care for her? Privately, Josie doubted it. They didn’t match somehow either. It was like a snail getting married to a butterfly.

Still, a wedding was a wedding. And something to write to Eileen Donnelly about. She’d been her friend at school in Wicklow. When she’d been so homesick, Hannah had advised her to write to someone and tell her how she felt. She said it might help.

And it did. Josie wrote reams and reams, covering page after page with how depressing the place was, the noise, the traffic, the squashed-up houses, the stinking factories that tipped their filth and waste into the sluggish brown canal. She told her of the greyness, the drabness, the absence of green meadows and mountains and streams, and she begged for news from home.

When Eileen’s reply had arrived, Josie had been so disappointed that she’d cried. Eileen said everything was just the same and her mother was having another baby.

There was so much Josie longed to know. So her next letter was full of questions which Eileen answered, but briefly and without elaboration in any shape or form.

By that time, Josie was well settled into the Abbey school. She’d thought her accent might have made her the butt of jokes, but she found many of the children were Irish, or from Irish families, and she was soon settled in. She got on well with the girls in her class and made a special friend of a girl called Mary Byrne who also lived nearby. She found the teachers very strict, not at all like the sleepy easy-going village school she’d gone to.

Her sisters always said she could count herself lucky, for there had been no village school for them and they were taught at the convent, almost three miles away, while the boys went to the Brothers’ almost as far away.

But it wasn’t the distance alone. They’d always told her that the nuns were the very devil and they’d beat the hands off you for the merest thing. The village school had come to Josie’s rescue and although they might have been shouted at, Josie never saw anyone struck.

That wasn’t the case at the Abbey school and she knew her sisters had been right about the devilish nuns that taught them being hot on punishment, for the headmistress at the Abbey was a nun from the nearby St Agnes Convent. She wielded a cane to help exert her authority and had no hesitation in using it. Sometimes, after playtime was over, there was a line of children, who’d been sent in by the dinner ladies, waiting outside the headmistress’s room, to be ‘dealt with’.

So far, Josie had never had the cane, but the prospect of it was held over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. But school didn’t occupy her whole life and with the homesickness receding and with Mary at her side, she was finding out some of the advantages of city living and she wrote to Eileen and told her all about it.

Erdington village is no distance away. Soon, after Hannah’s marriage, it’ll be just at the end of the road. There are so many shops you wouldn’t believe, and crowds of people, like the town on a fair day. But even better, they have a cinema. They do dances there as well, but that’s for older people. They have special films for children on a Saturday morning and it costs sixpence, but most Saturdays Hannah lets me go.

If not, we can go swimming because they’ve got a proper baths and Hannah has bought me my first bathing costume. She says if you have no choice about a place then you must make the best of it and so I am. There’s a library here too, a massive place with a proper children’s part, and you can borrow two books and keep them for a fortnight.

She posted that letter with relish, hoping Eileen was consumed with envy on reading it for she was proving a great disappointment as a correspondent.

And now there was the wedding to brag about. She wished Hannah would be married in a white floor length dress made of silk and decorated with lace and little rosebuds so that she could describe her looking like a princess to Eileen. But she wasn’t wearing white, nor a dress either. ‘It wouldn’t be seemly with everything in such short supply and a wicked waste of clothing coupons,’ Gloria told Josie. ‘That navy costume trimmed with cream is much more practical and it can be worn again. It will look nice enough, especially now Amy’s decorated her hat to match the cream shoes and handbag Hannah has.’

Hannah looked more than just nice, she looked lovely, but then she always looked lovely. She didn’t look like a bride, that was all. Josie supposed it was more practical, but did you want to be practical on that one day of your life? She did take on board the bit about clothing coupons, though. She knew they were a headache and one of the first things Hannah had to see to after her arrival was to fit her out with a ration book and a set of clothing coupons.

Josie, coming from the land of plenty in comparison, had imagined that now the war was over, everything would be back to normal, but it was far from that.

And yet Hannah had used some of those precious clothing coupons to get material for a dress for her that had been made up by Amy. It was pale blue and in shimmering satin that fell from her waist in soft folds. It was the nicest and prettiest dress that Josie had ever owned and she had an Alice band covered in rosebuds holding back her hair and pure white socks and black patent leather shoes.

That was another thing, her hair. Gloria had given her a hairbrush and said she must brush her hair one hundred times every night to make it shine and after a month or two, when it had got long enough, she rolled rags around it after her bath on Saturday, so that it would be wavy for Mass on Sunday.

Josie never skimped on the hundred brushes after she’d overheard Amy telling Gloria that Josie’s hair was shining like burnished copper. Burnished copper! Josie said the words to herself, liking the sound of them.

Amy went on to say that her hair was her best feature, for she was a plain little thing, not a patch on her aunt, but if she made the most of herself as she grew up she’d make a quite presentable turn-out in the end. Josie hadn’t been a bit offended by Amy’s remarks for she knew she only spoke the truth.

She had no illusions about her looks and if she’d ever had, they’d have been dispelled the day her mother took her as a small child to visit her great-granny, who lived in the hills, and was ill in bed. She’d been taken by the hand into the bedroom where an old toothless lady with a bonnet covering her head had peered at her with small gimlet eyes in a face screwed up in a scowl. ‘Is this the one?’ she said. ‘The afterthought?’

Then she’d turned her gaze from Josie and looked Frances full in the face and said, ‘Well girl, I don’t know what you’ve done with this one, but she’s as plain as a pike staff.’ And so, at the age of three or four, Josie had learned what she looked like. She knew her eyes were too big for her face, although they were deep brown and could have been attractive in anyone else, her mouth was too big as well, and her skin had a sallow look to it.

But then she’d learned that her hair, which no one had ever bothered much with before, was her best feature and that she might make a good turn-out after all, and for someone who’d thought she was plain as plain could be, that prediction was a soothing one.

So she’d walked behind Hannah down the aisle of the long church, filled with pride as she noted the numbers of people crowding the pews on either side. There was not a relative amongst them, but many of the neighbours and the friends Hannah had made in the area and in the church were there for her special day and Gloria had invited friends of her own to make the day more of an occasion.

Arthur seemed to have few friends and no relatives either. But he’d invited some work colleagues and his boss, Reg Banks, and his lovely wife Elizabeth, and with them all the church was almost full.

At the altar, Josie had taken the bouquet of roses and carnations from Hannah and slipped into the pew beside Gloria, who’d squeezed her arm in support, even while she dabbed at her eyes with a screwed-up lace hanky she held in her hand.

Hannah knelt at the altar beside Arthur, letting the Latin words of the Mass wash over her, soothing her, telling her she was doing the right thing. She didn’t love Arthur, but she’d not deceived him. She’d never said she loved him, nor had he said those words to her. She’d known his reason for marrying her, he’d done it primarily to please his boss.

The boss’s wife, Elizabeth, who Hannah had taken to straightaway, had confided in Hannah as they’d washed up in the kitchen the first time they’d been asked to dinner. ‘Reg thought Arthur a bit of a cold fish. The sort of man married to his mother, you know the type?’

Hannah had nodded. ‘He was very fond of her,’ she said. ‘It upset him greatly when she died. He told me all about it.’