Danny Boy (35 page)

‘Rosie, I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you,’ Danny said humbly.

A lump filled Rosie’s throat and the look in his eyes meant she could barely speak and though she waved her hand dismissively as she managed to say huskily, ‘Away with you, you bletherer,’ but Danny had seen the glisten of tears in her eyes. He kissed her before bounding up the stairs to bid goodnight to his daughter.

It was mid-June before Rita and Ida noticed that Rosie was putting on weight, hidden from them previously by her thin frame. ‘It couldn’t be a babby,’ Ida said, ‘cos she’d have told us.’

‘Well, if it was, it would have to be a bleeding immaculate conception by all accounts,’ Rita said. ‘I mean, if she’s telling the truth about not letting Danny near her, how would she be pregnant?’

‘Could be a growth, that’s what I’m worried about,’ Ida said.

‘You’re right. Christ knows, she looks ill enough to have anything wrong with her. Here, Ida, I best be off or I’ll get the sack. You gonna ask her?’

‘I think I’ve got to. I don’t think she’ll say owt.’

‘Well, go easy. She’s as bad-tempered as a bear with a sore head these days.’

‘It’s all part of it, though, maybe,’ Ida said. ‘If she’s ill, like.’

Later, Ida was to say to Rita, ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather. Christ, I mean, I just asked her was there summat wrong or was she ill or owt and she said no, she weren’t ill, she were expecting.’

‘She’s having a baby!’

‘Like I told you, and nearly six months gone and she’s said nowt to anyone, not even to Danny nor his people.’

‘Don’t Danny know anyway?’

‘Not according to Rosie. She says she makes sure she’s in bed when he comes up, with the covers pulled up, and is up before him in the morning to get Bernadette off to school and so he ain’t noticed.’

‘Must have been that time at Christmas.’

‘Must have been.’

‘Ain’t she the slightest bit excited?’

‘No,’ Ida said. ‘You know what I think. She’s terrified. She says she doesn’t think of it as a baby, she can’t, cos she sort of expects it will die.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Rita said. ‘And the awful thing is, it could.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘I’m talking facts Ida,’ Rita said. ‘I know what the poor sod’s going through. She’s terrified of miscarrying again and there ain’t a bloody thing in the world we can do about it.’

‘Ain’t you going to tell his mother?’ Ida asked Rosie a few days later.

‘Ida, I’ve done that twice already,’ Rosie answered wearily. ‘You’re having a grandchild, I write, and they rejoice with me, and then a few months later I write to tell them there will be no grandchild. Instead of knitted jackets and bootees, I get condolence cards.

‘Anyway, Connie has enough on her plate at the moment, what with arranging Sarah’s wedding to Sam, and she’s worried to death that she’s hurtling headfirst into heartache but Sarah won’t listen and refuses to believe Sam has anything to do with that sort of thing any more.’

‘Maybe he hasn’t then?’

Rosie shook her head. ‘Ida, one of the reasons that we are here is because Danny tried to leave that organisation. It’s a
lifetime commitment in the IRA, so if Sam was involved then, he is now. The violence has gone up a level now that the Black and Tans are there with their love of brutality, bent on keeping law and order and on any terms.

‘Christ, you’d hardly credit the things Connie writes about, the people shot in their homes and in the street, the barracks ransacked. Catholics are attacked and beaten up in the North and Protestant houses set ablaze in the Free State.

‘And, of course, the retaliation follows. The Black and Tans will torch whole villages or haul all the men from a place and stand them against a wall and shoot the lot of them. I mean, Connie wrote only last week about the young boy shot in a Dublin school because they couldn’t get his brother. It’s like something you’d read about gangland America and she is having to live through that and knows her daughter will be involved in it through Sam.

‘The last thing I want to do is upset her further, upset any of them when there is no need for it. It will all be over any day now, I’m thinking, and none will be any the wiser.’ And that was the fear that dogged her every day and so when Danny caught sight of Rosie standing sideways she responded to his open astonishment with scorn.

‘So, now you know,’ she said. ‘You did your work well at Christmas.’

‘Christmas!’ But it had to be Christmas. It was July now and he hadn’t touched Rosie since. ‘You’ll be almost seven months?’

‘Aye, well done,’ Rosie said. ‘I can count to nine too, but I’ll never carry the child that far, nor do I want to any more. I don’t want this child. I feel nothing for it.’

Danny looked at Rosie and saw her fear and understood it. God, if the child were to die…But she’d never carried a child so far, except for Bernadette, and he began to hope. Maybe even if the doctor was right and Rosie had been poisoned by the sulphur at the munitions works, it had worked its way out of her system now.

So he said gently, ‘It’s part of us, Rosie. You must feel something.’

But the memory of that dreadful fear-filled night still sickened Rosie and she spat back, ‘Aye I do feel something. Revulsion, not for the baby, but for the way it was conceived. There was no love there, just carnal, alcohol-riddled lust.’

She felt sorry for her harsh words when she looked at Danny and saw the guilt and shame on his face. ‘Rosie, please forgive me that one lapse,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had the least desire to hurt you and I wouldn’t have done so that night if I had been in my right mind. If I could turn the clock back I would. I had no idea that there had been repercussions.’

Rosie sighed. ‘I know you didn’t,’ she said more softly, and then in an effort to get Danny to understand she went on, ‘Each time I have lost a baby, I die a little and I’m frightened that this time there will be nothing of me left and that I won’t want to go on anymore.’

Danny felt sickened by what he put Rosie through and he drew her gently into his arms. ‘What can I do?’ he asked helplessly.

‘Nothing,’ Rosie answered. ‘That’s the terrible thing, no-one can do anything.’

‘She’ll come around when it’s born, don’t fret,’ Rita told Danny when he’d been driven to ask her advice.

‘She won’t talk to me,’ Danny said. ‘I know what I did on Christmas Eve hurt her and upset her; I let her down, I’ve admitted it and said I’m sorry time and again, but she can neither forget nor forgive.’

And Rosie couldn’t. In fact she didn’t think much about Danny at all. Father Chattaway said a child was a gift from God. Some bloody gift that he snatched back before they’d taken their first breath of air, she thought. And now he’d given her another gift that she had no feelings for.

And despite the reassuring words spoken to Danny, Rita
and Ida were desperately worried over Rosie as one day slid into the next. Her eyes looked almost vacant and softened only when they alighted on Bernadette. ‘Have you thought of any names yet?’ Rita asked one day.

‘Names?’ Rosie repeated, her brow puckered in puzzlement. ‘What names?’

‘Names for the baby,’ Rita snapped irritably. ‘Wake up, Rosie, for God’s sake.’

‘I am awake, very awake, thank you,’ Rosie said. ‘And I have no names for this child. Don’t you understand anything?’

They did understand in a way. ‘I have a feeling she isn’t herself,’ Ida said. ‘She’s sort of ill. She may get over it when the child’s born.’

‘She might,’ Rita said. ‘And yet, oh God, if the child is to die, maybe this is the only way she’ll be able to deal with it.’

Danny, feeling unwelcome in his own home, spent any free time away from it, usually accompanied by his daughter. But, with the school holidays in full swing, if he took Bernadette to the park he often had half the kids in the neighbourhood tagging along too. Their mothers were only too glad to get them from under their feet and away from the dirt and grime of the yard or street, and they would pack them bread smeared with jam and bottles of cold tea to keep body and soul together and wave them off cheerfully.

Danny didn’t mind. The children were company for Bernadette, and if anyone had hold of a pig’s bladder for use as a ball he could have a knockabout with some of the boys. He never took an army with him when he went down the cut, though. Lots of young children and deep scummy water didn’t mix in his opinion, and he always kept a tight grip of Bernadette’s hand.

After the Christmas debacle he’d returned sheepishly in the New Year. ‘I’d just like to say sorry,’ he said to Ted. ‘Made a bit of a fool of myself Christmas Eve.’

‘Not at all, man,’ Ted said cheerfully. ‘Happens to the best of us. Mind, I bet your missus was mad. She looked fit to burst. Then, what am I talking about? If I’d gone home in a state like that, my old lady would have laid me out with a rolling pin.

‘’Course, funny creatures, women. My old woman can get like a raging bull over nothing at all. Or else she near drowns me with floods of tears. Mind you, the old girl’s not the worst and she was proper cut-up about our Len.

‘She’d have loved a little girl like yours, always had a hankering, and yet after Syd there was nothing. Funny thing, life, some families have half a dozen or more but we just had the two, and now with Len gone there’s only Syd and you know him, never stops carping and complaining. Len, now, was a proper boatie, and Syd, I brought up the same way and yet not liking the life at all. I tell you, Danny, kids would tear the very heart out of you. Wants his head examining, young Syd, because as I said, it’s a living and that’s more than a lot of poor souls have these days.’

‘You can say that again,’ Danny said fervently. He was glad, though, that Ted didn’t seem to think any the less of him for the state he’d got into on Christmas Eve, for he knew without the canal people he would be more lonely and dispirited than he was. The canal and it’s people was a favourite with Bernadette too, and Ted’s wife Mabel in particular loved to see her.

Mabel always had a little treat for Bernadette and few enough treats came her way for Danny to complain about it and she would watch her fondly and told Danny how very lucky he was. ‘God, I would have given my eye teeth for a wee girl like that,’ she said one day and added, ‘Funny thing, life. There’s some boats chock-a-block full of children, families of eight and ten. God alone knows where some of them sleep. But me and Ted just had the two lads and now Len is dead and gone. Daughters are more attached to their homes
somehow. It’s what they say ain’t it – “a son’s a son till he gets him a wife and a daughter’s a daughter for all, of her life”. It’s true and all, that is.’

Bernadette loved Mabel. She was like a substitute grandmother. She liked best to go aboard the narrow boat and Mabel liked nothing better than showing her round, delighted at her preoccupation with how the beds and tables were hidden away and so small it was like a house for a child to play in. Not that Bernadette ever played much in there but sometimes she helped Mabel make cakes or biscuits that she’d later eat, warm from the oven.

Ted told Danny the child was a godsend. ‘Poor old girl weren’t right over Len when Syd took off,’ he said, ‘and that really shook her, being the only one left, like. She was proper down, she were, and your little’un has put the spring back in her step again, right and proper.’

Danny was glad he was pleasing someone for he hadn’t a clue how to please Rosie these days. With each passing day she became more nervous and fearful and Danny knew it was those feelings that caused her to snap and lash out at him and yet it was hard to take. Had Ted but known it, the canal and the boaties, and in particular the Masons, were a godsend to Danny too.

Danny wanted to at least tell his mother about the baby, but Rosie would have none of it. He could have defied her, but he didn’t dare make the situation between them any worse than it was already, and anyway, he could understand her caution.

She never discussed the subject. She knitted nothing for the coming child either, though she would buy bedraggled woollies from the rag market if she had the few coppers needed and she’d unravel them and knit a jumper for Bernadette, or sew colourful squares together to make an extra blanket for her bed in the winter. But for the baby she made no preparation.

Danny told himself not to worry. Surely it would work itself out. In the meantime, he had plenty of things to fret over. He had another assessment in two weeks’ time. Each one made him nervous, for he was aware that the people behind the desk looked at him as if he’d crawled from under a stone, and that they held the survival of his family in the palm of their hands.

In their attitude too, and the way they spoke, they stripped a person of any shred of self-esteem they might have the audacity still to have. They always made the decision that they would continue to pay unemployment pay grudgingly. Danny felt ashamed and humiliated as he picked up his weekly handout from the Government. He’d be willing to do any job rather than take it, but there were no jobs to be had.

When Rosie ever let herself think of the birth of the child, she estimated it should be due in September any time from the middle onwards, and by mid-August she marvelled that this child had hung on for so long. Didn’t mean it would survive of course, and she wished she’d miscarried it earlier. It was only her stubborn determination that prevented her from having a faint hope of giving birth to a living child.

On Wednesday, 18th August, Rosie was alone in the house when she felt the first twinges. She wasn’t alarmed at first, estimating it would take some time before she’d have to call anyone. Rita was at work, but by the time she might be needed, Ida would surely be back from Cannon Hill Park where she had taken all the kids that wanted to go. ‘Your Danny has done his share of minding the nippers this holiday,’ she told Rosie. ‘And God knows, they’ll be cooped up long enough at school soon. A bit of fresh air might do me some good as well, and it will give you a chance to put your feet up.’

‘If you’re sure?’

‘Course I am. Where’s your Danny today anyway?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Off to some rally or other, for all the bloody good it will do,’ Rosie said without enthusiasm. ‘He comes home and tells me proudly he’s walked everywhere to save the tram fare and I have to use the saved tram fare and more to have his boots soled.’

‘Pity you don’t get yours done at the same time,’ Ida said.

‘I haven’t the money,’ Rosie replied testily. ‘Bernadette needed new boots for school, the other ones pinched her feet, and anyway they’d been cobbled so often there was nothing left of them.’