Authors: Helen Forrester
“Priest told me,” she added with a little chuckle, “that Nan would soon be with God; and, you know, it bothered me for ages that people had to be delivered to God in a box!” She chuckled again.
Maureen Mary looked shocked; it was improper to laugh at such a solemn time.
Daisy was immediately sobered by her daughter’s disapproval and she said despondently, “It’s going to be proper lonely without Nan, seeing as how you don’t live here.” And she glanced accusingly at her daughter.
Maureen Mary flushed under her heavy makeup. Her bright
red lips trembled weakly. She bent over Bridie, to pull up the tot’s knickers which had slipped down around her bare knees. Her leaving home after her marriage was a very sore point between Daisy and herself. Good daughters brought their husbands home to live with their mother, just as Daisy had brought her sailor husband, Mike, home; and they had children to cheer up the old house with their squabbles.
“Perhaps Dad could get a shore job next time he comes home,” she suggested hopefully.
“Himself? Swallow the anchor? That’s not likely. ‘Sides I couldn’t stand having him under me feet all the time.”
Maureen Mary was timidly silent for a moment, then she said, “Well, our Jamie and our Lizzie Ann will finish doing their time and come ’ome one day.”
“Humph,” grunted her mother. “Lizzie Ann’s got at least another eighteen months to do — and Jamie, poor love, has got about another five years.”
Silenced, Maureen Mary picked up Bridie and went home.
After she had gone, Daisy thought about this conversation, as she sat in a sagging chair and poked the coal fire in the iron grate, which took up nearly the whole of one wall of her living-room. From time to time she gave a great heaving sigh. Now she would replace her mother as the Nan, the grandmother to whom all the family would look for help and advice; but there was not much pleasure in that if nobody lived with you, she decided. And how was she going to survive sleeping by herself? The idea was scarifying. Whoever had heard of a decent Irish Catholic woman, who kept herself to herself, having to sleep in a house alone? It had been terrible when the district nurse had suggested that Mrs. O’Brien would sleep better if Daisy did not share her bed — Daisy had reluctantly removed herself to a bed in the landing bedroom, tucked against the wall of her mother’s room. But to be alone was to invite the Devil to come close.
As she sat forlornly by her fire, her plump figure looking somehow deflated in the flickering light, she received the con
dolences of neighbours and more distant relations. They slipped in from the street, not waiting for a response to their knock, to stand for a moment silently and with pinched lips; then they would say how sorry they were.
“She’ll be sorely missed, God rest her,” they invariably said. “She was proper kind, she was.” Then they shuffled their boots on the stone floor and examined the toes of them, and added, “Maybe it’s a blessing, God forgive us, that she had no pain.”
Daisy, her throat tight with misery and yet still unable to cry, nodded her head sadly and motioned them to go upstairs, where they would respectfully view the body, under the jealous glare of Great Aunt Devlin. They all came down again weeping softly into the corner of their aprons and assured Daisy, “She looks beautiful — so peaceful, like.”
Thankful for their company, Daisy then invited them to the funeral service. They went soberly out, and then rushed up the street to tell their families all about the corpse.
All available members of the family, including Daisy’s middle daughter, Sister Margaret of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who travelled from Manchester, came to the funeral. Afterwards, they crammed into Daisy’s little living room with some of the neighbours, who had come to pay their respects to the family and get a free drink. Everybody clutched a glass of rum or port in one hand and held a piece of currant cake cupped in the other.
With their mouths full, the members of the family argued in muffled tones about the division of the contents of the house, that being all that Mrs. Mary Ellen O’Brien had to leave.
Daisy was ignored. She downed a welcome glass of rum and listened, hand on hip, to the subdued babble of voices.
Through the conversation, she heard with anxiety the steady coughing of brother George’s wife, dear Nellie. She silently poured a bumper glass of port and handed it to seven-year-old iddy Joey, with the request that he pass it to his struggling mother. He winked at his dear Anty Daise, took a quick sip
from the glass and passed it over to Nellie.
The argument between the relations grew heated and voices began to rise. Part of the contents of the house belonged to Daisy and her husband, Michael; and when Daisy heard some of these named she would shift her cake to the other side of her toothless mouth and shout, “You can’t have that — it belongs to me.”
Nobody listened.
She was not disturbed by this lack of attention. The excitement of knowing she held a trump card had dulled some of the gnawing unhappiness she had been suffering. Her son-in-law, Freddie, had been brilliantly helpful. For the first time since Maureen Mary had brought home a neat, pin-striped nonentity called Frederick Brown, an English Protestant, and had announced to her enraged mother that she had married him, Daisy was grateful to him. She would never forgive him, she thought darkly, for being a bleeding Prottie or for taking Maureen Mary from her mother’s loving arms. He had put his pretty wife into a grand three-bedroomed row house near Princes Park, instead of coming to live with his mother-in-law, Daisy, as was customary; and this was unforgivable. Daisy had, however, voiced to Maureen Mary her fears of being left in an unfurnished house, if Mrs. O’Brien’s other children claimed a share of the furnishings. Maureen Mary had consulted Freddie, who, she assured her mother, knew all about laws.
As she watched Freddie standing solitarily with a glass in his hand at the back of the crowd, Daisy began to console herself about Maureen Mary’s desertion and to think that perhaps when Elizabeth Ann was released from training school, she would marry and bring her husband to her mother’s home, and so make up for Maureen Mary’s dereliction.
Grinning maliciously, she snatched up a tin tray and the poker, and banged them together like a gong. The shattering noise in the confined space shocked her relations into silence. Shawls remained half hitched over shoulders, union shirt buttons
about to be loosened because of the heat of the room remained buttoned. Children about to shriek in the course of a game of tag round the legs of adults paused with mouths open.
She drew an old butter box out from under the table and stepped up on to it. It creaked threateningly under her weight but did not split. From this elevation she looked even more ferocious than usual to her relations; her head with its neat plaits round each ear moved from side to side like that of a cobra, while she flourished the poker at them.
“Na, then, you pack o’ vultures,” she addressed them. “Our Mam not more’n an hour in her grave and you wanting to break up her home!” Her handsome face was spoiled by a deep scowl and her blue eyes flashed menacingly.
Daisy’s younger sister, Agnes, sniffled and rubbed her pug nose with the end of her shawl. “I never said nothin’,” she whined.
“Oh, shut your gob, Aggie,” ordered Daisy. “Always snivelling about somethin’”.
Agnes burst into tears and turned to her daughter, Winnie, a gangling twelve-year-old, to be comforted. The child put her arms round her mother and glared resentfully at Anty Daise.
Daisy’s middle daughter, Sister Margaret of the Little Sisters of the Poor, murmured a gentle remonstration against her mother’s sharpness. Daisy silenced her with a heavy frown.
Maureen Mary smiled encouragement at her hefty mother. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to be rendered homeless — she might demand to live with her daughter in Princes Park, something that even patient Freddie would not tolerate.
Daisy’s frown vanished. She beamed suddenly at the gathering until her toothless gums showed, and iddy Joey was reminded of the turnip he had made into a jack-o-lantern last All Hallow’s E’en.
“I want to tell you that our Nan left a will!”
“A will!” exclaimed Agnes’s husband, Joe, an unemployed
labourer. “Whatever for?”
Daisy’s square chin jutted out belligerently and again she scowled as she replied scornfully, “’Cos she knew the likes of you. ’Cos I nursed her. ’Cos I’m the eldest daughter and she wanted to make sure I got me rights. ’Cos this’s always been Mike’s and my home, too.” She pointed the poker at him and he flinched. “It’s only right.”
Meg folded her skinny arms across her flat chest, and asked crossly, “What’s right? It was my home, too, remember.”
Daisy smiled oversweetly at her sister. “Well, as of yesterday I been tenant of this house. Mam asked the rent collector to arrange it a couple of weeks ago, so it’s been passed to me like it’s always been passed down.” She simpered irritatingly at the other woman. “She didn’t mean me to have an empty house, so she left me everything.” Daisy crossed her shawl over her chest and the poker waggled suggestively from underneath the garment. “So there, Missus!”
“She never,” exclaimed Meg indignantly. “She promised her mirror to me — many a time she did.”
Daisy replied primly, “Mirror’s in pop. She left you her wedding ring. It’s on the mantlepiece by the clock.”
The news that the mirror was in pawn did not surprise anyone — so were most of the company’s more prized possessions.
Agnes raised her wet face from her daughter’s shoulder and asked plaintively, “What about me?”
“You got the photo of her and Dad on their wedding day. We had to sell the frame — but the picture’s still good.”
Agnes was shaken by a fresh sob. She again flung herself upon her daughter.
Daisy turned to her brother, George, Nellie’s husband. “You and brother Gregory, who couldn’t come ’cos he’s at sea, as we all know, she didn’t leave nothing to. She reckoned you could manage. You never came to see her anyway unless she sent for you. It was only your wife, our Nellie, what did.” And she bent
an approving glance upon her friend, who was looking a little flustered and unsteady after her large glass of wine.
George glowered sullenly at his bossy sister. From long unemployment, his mind and body had become equally flaccid, but he managed to ask, “Where is the bloody will?”
Daisy smirked in triumph. “Our Freddie’s got it.”
The company turned wondering eyes upon Freddie. Few had seen him before. As Meg bitingly remarked, in his neat readymade suit and striped shirt, he stood out like a sore toe.
“Smells like a bloody whore,” grumbled George.
Agnes remonstrated, “Now don’t you be using such language before the kids!”
George’s heavy red face returned to its usual sullenness. He did not reply.
Freddie coughed, partly with shyness and partly from the overwhelming stench of unwashed bodies catching at his throat. A path opened before him so that he could go to stand by Daisy.
Freddie’s relationship with his high-smelling mother-in-law was an ambiguous one. He had early in his marriage discovered that it was no good trying to cut Maureen Mary off entirely from her mother; Maureen Mary seemed unable to function at all without the support of regular visits to her. Gradually, mixed with his horror of Daisy had come a reluctant respect for her, and he sought earnestly to please her in the hope of keeping his adored wife with him. Daisy regarded him with contempt mixed with curiosity. She was surprised that anyone could earn as much as he did without getting his hands dirty.
Daisy had only once visited Maureen and Freddie in their home — she had never been invited, and pride kept her from calling again without an invitation.
They had been married in a registry office, because she was a
Catholic and he was a Protestant. Neither family had been present, in Maureen’s case because she had lacked the courage to inform them until after the fact; and in his case because his parents were outraged at his marrying a poor Irish Catholic girl.
Maureen Mary had been a pert little Nippie waitress at his favourite Lyons’ restaurant; he was a traveller for a sweet company. Neither had considered what the other’s family might be like.
Daisy beamed toothlessly at him as he turned and stood beside her. “You tell ’em, Freddie,” she encouraged.
“Proper fancy pansy,” George muttered out of the corner of his mouth to John, Meg’s husband. John nodded agreement.
George drained his glass and looked round for another drink. Daisy had, however, whipped the bottles away while there was still something left in them, and they were now reposing under the huge kitchen fender which her great-grandmother had brought from Ireland.
Taking small breaths so as not to be overpowered by the stink from Daisy, Freddie drew a long, narrow envelope from his inside pocket, an envelope which appeared to his experienced audience suspiciously like a summons from the beak.
It was not a missive from the magistrate which he took out, however, but a penny will form from the local stationers.
Though the preamble was almost incomprehensible to Freddie’s audience, the bequests were clear. There was a tiny gift for each of her daughters and for her daughter-in-law, Nellie O’Brien. In addition she left her rosary to her granddaughter by Daisy, Elizabeth Ann, who was at that moment scrubbing the dining-hall floor in the training home and was weeping into the grey soapsuds for her dear, dead Nan.
At the mention of Elizabeth Ann, Meg drew in her breath sharply. Her hollow cheeks darkened as she tried to suppress her rising anger.
“Why Lizzie Ann?” she asked. “Why not our Mary?”
Agnes lifted her woebegone face.
“What about our Winnie, if it comes to that?”
Freddie’s eyes were watering and his nose was beginning to run from the incredible effluvia emanating from his stout mother-in-law beside him. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his eyes before answering Meg.
“Mrs. O’Brien states in her will that Elizabeth always admired the rosary, and was allowed to carry it to her first Communion when she was seven.” He thrust his handkerchief back into his pocket, and added with sudden enthusiasm, “It is very beautiful. The beads and the crucifix are hand-carved. I understand Mrs. O’Brien’s grandfather made it as a gift to his wife. Perhaps Mrs. O’Brien felt that Elizabeth Ann would take special care of it.”
“Humph! So would our Mary.”
“Or our Winnie,” echoed Agnes.
Meg pointed a thin finger at Freddie and prodded him in the waistcoat. “I don’t see why Lizzie Ann should be the only granddaughter to get anything.”
Freddie moved back a step. “Mrs. O’Brien did not have much to leave,” he said conciliatorily.
Meg advanced and prodded him again.
“She could have thought of something for Mary,” she said savagely.
Daisy here interposed wrathfully and waggled the poker at Meg. “You shut up, Meg, and stop poking Freddie in the stomach.” She snorted. “You always was a jealous bitch!”
Meg threw off her shawl and turned angrily upon her sister, ignoring the threatening poker. “Don’t you call me names, you fat sow!” she screamed. “Always so bloody stuck up. Now Nan’s passed on you needn’t think you can throw your weight around, ’cos I won’t stand for it.” She raised her fist to strike her sister in the stomach, and Daisy teetered on the creaking butter box.
“Meg!” warned her quiet husband, John, shooting forward a fist like a prize fighter and grasping her bony shoulder.
She turned on him like an infuriated ferret, while at the same time Daisy stepped heavily down from the butter box and surged purposefully towards her, eyes flashing, huge arms akimbo, poker still clasped in one hand.
“Na, Daisy, na, Daisy. Meg didn’t mean nothing. She’s just hot-tempered. Come on, now, you know her.” John attempted to clasp his wife firmly round her waist to hold her back. He had a despairing feeling that he was going to be caught between two hellcats.
“Didn’t mean nothing!” Daisy paused, and her great bosom swelled. She thrust out her chin and screamed into the face of her small but determined sister. “I’ll fat sow yer, yer greedy bitch. Where was you when Ma needed help? Where was you of a night when I was up putting hot poultices on her? When our Lizzie Ann was home she was proper good to her Nan. She earned the rosary, she did.”
Daisy dropped the poker, and Agnes squeaked as it hit her ankle. She raised her fist to strike Meg, while John did his best to hold back his kicking, yelling wife.
“Na, Daise,” he cried, “Don’t you hit her. She didn’t mean it. Meg had to look after me Dad. How could she help you?”
The fascinated neighbours began to edge back to form a rough circle and give the combatants room. Iddy Joey climbed on to the table and stood with one foot on a loaf of bread to get a better view. But clear across the squawks of the women and the anxious murmurs of the rest of the family came Freddie’s voice, full of long experience of dealing with difficult customers and pathetically anxious to curry favour with his mother-in-law.
“Dear Daisy, restrain yourself.”
The crowd reluctantly made way for him as he came towards her with the calmness of the bishop himself. “You must be dreadfully tired. It is time people went home.”
Daisy stopped, arm still raised, fist still clenched. Nobody but Freddie had ever called her dear, and it seemed to her that only Freddie, and, of course, Nellie, had her interests at heart.
Meg, who hardly knew him, stopped in mid-shriek as if switched off. For a moment she gazed at him in dumb amazement and then she began to giggle. The giggle became a laugh. She threw herself upon John and howled with laughter. The other adults began to snigger and then to laugh. The children joined in with uncertain tee-hees.
Dumbfounded at the unexpected hilarity, Daisy dropped her threatening fist. She looked at Freddie. Didn’t he mind being laughed at? Apparently not, because he was calmly folding up the will and gave no indication that he was perturbed by the mirth he had engendered.
His wife, Maureen Mary, said with brittle brightness to the assembly, “Yes, it’s time for home — and I’ll take back me sheets and me candlesticks now Nan is laid to rest.” A tear trickled down her cheek as she picked up the bundle of linen from the back of a chair and took the candlesticks, encrusted with grease, from between iddy Joey’s feet on the table. She gathered up her little daughter, Bridie, a pretty picture in a pale blue satin dress and bonnet. She blew a kiss sadly to Daisy across the room and, her arms loaded with sheets and child, she nudged her aunt towards the door. “Come on, Anty Meg.”
John opened the front door and a still giggling Meg was shepherded into the street. As the other visitors flowed out Maureen Mary turned and tried to get back in, but it was too difficult, laden as she was, and she shouted with a little catch in her voice, “I’ll come tomorrow, Mam!”
Daisy who had been watching the sudden exodus with narrowed eyes, as she considered what she would like to do with Meg, smiled suddenly and nodded agreement.
When the crowd had thinned, Nellie get up unsteadily from the chair on which she had been sitting.
“Get down off that table, Joey,” she said ineffectually.
Joey danced around, to the further detriment of the loaf of bread. A few odds and ends fell off the back of the table.
George reached forward and caught his son by the back of
his clothes. He lifted him bodily on to the floor and gave him a sharp slap across the head. “Gerrout,” he said.
Joey howled as if he had been shot and fled to his mother, to hide his face in her black skirt and bellow like a young bullock.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Nellie reproached her husband.
“Och, he’s spoiled rotten,” retorted George. He picked up his jacket and swung out of the house after John.
Nellie bent over to console Joey. “Never mind, luv,” she said. “Never mind.”
Daisy, being more practical, reached over to the plate of cake still on the mantelpiece. “’Ere ye are, Joey,” she said, as she handed him a piece.
Joey’s wails ceased immediately. He emerged from the folds of his mother’s skirts, stuffed the cake into his mouth and danced over to the door, through which Daisy could observe him skipping happily across the road to look out over the river.
Nellie embraced Daisy lovingly. “I’ll come tomorrow,” she promised. Daisy smiled and kissed her, holding the tiny hands with their terrible, broken nails as if she could not bear to let her go. She led the frail little woman to the door, where Freddie stood running his trilby hat uneasily through his fingers.
“Goodbye, Mrs. O’Brien,” he said politely to Nellie.
“Goodbye, Freddie. Ta-ra, Daisy. See you tomorrow.”
Daisy stood with one hand on the door jamb as Nellie followed the little procession up the street. Freddie watched her uneasily. He knew he should suggest that Maureen Mary stay overnight with her bereaved mother; yet he feared that if he did so she would never return to him. His friends had all warned him how Irish Catholic girls had a tendency to go back to mother once they had a child or two, expecting their husbands to follow uncomplainingly. He knew that he could never live in this rough, bug-ridden home, the very idea made him shudder.
Maureen Mary wanted to stay the night; she had said so over breakfast, and only his argument that the house was so damp that little Bridie might get a chill there had dissuaded her. He
had not mentioned that he had a horror of her bringing back vermin from her mother’s home. He had been careful not to sit down during the wake, but he was convinced that he had gathered an unwelcome visitor — he itched all over.
“Be all right?” he asked Daisy lamely.
Daisy sighed gustily. “Yes,” she replied.
She stood outside the front door to watch the procession of guests and relatives along the road until they turned the corner. Then she stared glumly at the river for a moment. A shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds and gave a soft sheen to the gloomy, heaving water and lit up the Wallasey shore. Then the cloud closed over and the wind nipped playfully at Daisy’s loosely pinned-up plaits. She shivered, and stepped back into the deserted house.
Inside, she paused, reluctant to shut the door. The silence was oppressive. For the first time in nearly a hundred years there would be only one resident in the house; for the first time in her life she would be alone overnight. Through the residue of her anger at Meg and her annoyance that Maureen Mary had not stayed with her, loneliness began to penetrate painfully. It seemed to creep through her like a paralysis, and her softly rounded cheeks whitened, making the mauve mottles caused by sitting too close to the fire stand out like scars.
She stood, head bent, in the cold draught and breathed heavily, her shoulders drooping under her black shawl.
“I got to get used to it,” she muttered, “till our Lizzie and our Jamie finish doing their time.” She did not consider that Michael, her sailor husband, might also return. He was a vague figure in the background of her life who was more nuisance than help when he did have a spell at home. “And I got you, Mog, you old devil,” she added forlornly to the cat, which was sitting on the mantelpiece between two dusty china dogs.
She slowly shut the weather-beaten door behind her. “I’m the Nan now, Mog. Only there’s nobody here to be Nan over. It’s a proper queer life, isn’t it?”