Hazel said now, ‘Jimmy Mullen should be along any minute. Drink your tea quickly. It’ll be a long while before you have another.’ She regarded the silent, dead-eyed Annemarie tenderly. ‘Come along, darlin’, finish your tea.’ The girl obediently picked up her cup. ‘Has she lost the power of speech?’ Hazel asked.
‘Almost. Sister Francis came round from the convent, wanting to know if she’d taken a vow of silence: Annemarie had always been one of her best pupils. Before . . . before
it
happened, she never shut up.’
‘Ah, and don’t I know it. A proper little chatterbox she was, and if she wasn’t talking, then she was singing - or dancing,’ Hazel sighed. She turned her gaze on Mollie. ‘You’ll write the minute you get there, won’t you, Moll? A postcard’ll do, so’s I know you’re all right, otherwise I’ll worry meself to death over the pair o’yis.’
‘You’re not to worry, not in your condition,’ Mollie said sternly. She pulled her woolly hat over her ears, rewound her scarf around her neck, and reached for her gloves, while Hazel helped Annemarie do the same. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘Will your Aunt Maggie be there to meet you?’
‘Only if she gets my letter in time. If not, I’ll take a taxi to her house: I’ve plenty of money.’ By some miracle, a ship, the
Queen Maia
, was due to sail from Liverpool the day after tomorrow, arriving in New York in ten days’ time. Hazel had purchased two third-class tickets through a shipping agent in Kildare. They were tucked in Mollie’s bag, along with their birth certificates and the letters Aunt Maggie had sent over the years and Mollie had kept, to prove they had somewhere to stay and wouldn’t be a burden on the State.
There was silence in the warm, comfortable kitchen. In the distance, Mollie could hear the sound of hooves on the icy road. Jimmy Mullen, whom she’d never met, was taking them to Dun Laoghaire on his vegetable cart. They would catch the midday ferry to Liverpool from there. In a few hours, all hell would break loose in Dr Kenny’s house when it was discovered his girls were missing, but no one was likely to guess they were on their way to America. The reason they weren’t travelling to Dun Laoghaire on the bus and the train like ordinary people was so there’d be no trace of their departure. The doctor’s girls would simply have disappeared into thin air. Jimmy Mullen didn’t know what day it was, so there was no chance of him cracking on.
Hazel’s brown eyes misted with tears. ‘Look after yourselves, won’t you? I’ll be thinking about the pair o’yis all the while.’
‘Do I need to pay Jimmy?’
‘It’s already been seen to, Moll.’
The gate creaked, followed by a knock on the door. She threw her arms around the ample body of her sister-in-law. ‘’Bye, Hazel. Thank you for everything.’
‘ ’Bye, darlin’.’ Tears were streaming down Hazel’s rosy cheeks. ‘’Bye, Annemarie.’
They all trooped outside. Jimmy Mullen, not much older than Mollie and half a head shorter, was climbing back on to a cart laden with sacks of vegetables. He acknowledged the girls with a curt nod when they joined him on the wooden seat, cracked the whip, and they set off at a brisk pace, Hazel’s cries of ‘tara’ and ‘look after yourselves now’ gradually fading, until they could hear nothing except the clip-clop of the giant black horse and its occasional noisy sniff.
The moon continued to shine and the stars to twinkle. The ice became thicker and the air even colder, as Mollie and Annemarie Kenny began the first part of their journey to New York.
Mollie helped her sister on to the top bunk and tucked the bedding around her - she’d like to bet the first- and second-class cabins didn’t have such coarse sheets and hard pillows. Despite this, Annemarie promptly fell asleep.
Mollie dragged off her own clothes, replacing them with a thick, winceyette nightie, and climbed on to the bunk opposite her sister. Clothes had been thrown on the lower bunks, indicating they’d been taken, but there was no sign of their occupants. Anyway the tops ones were best, as you wouldn’t have someone’s bottom right in front of your eyes when they used the lavatory between the bunks. Her heart had sunk to her boots when she first entered the cabin and saw it. She hadn’t expected to use the lavatory in front of strangers. A dim light, barely enough to see by, illuminated the dismal scene.
She was so tired she expected, like Annemarie, to fall asleep immediately. After all, they hadn’t slept a wink the night before, sitting on the cart, stamping their feet to stop them from turning into blocks of ice, cuddling up to each other in a vain effort to keep warm. They’d arrived in Dun Laoghaire, more dead than alive, and had spent the next two hours in a café drinking endless cups of hot tea until they began to feel almost human again.
They had emerged to find a piercing wind had arisen, and the waters of the Irish Sea were spuming and frothing angrily when they boarded the ferry to Liverpool. Mollie had been looking forward to a restful journey, an opportunity to catch up on their sleep, but Annemarie had been sick the whole way and most of their time had been spent in the lavatory with her sister’s head buried in a sink. She prayed the same thing wouldn’t happen on the passage to New York.
When sleep refused to come now, she beat the pillow with her fist in an attempt to make it softer, but it had no effect. She did her best to think about nothing. When that didn’t work, she tried counting sheep, but that was no good either.
She wondered what the time was. It had been just after 5 p.m. when they’d landed in Liverpool. By then it was dark and the piercing wind had become a howling gale. The
Queen Maia
was moored by the landing stage, Mollie was told: they could board whenever they pleased. They did not set sail until the next afternoon. The landing stage was a short walk along a busy road crammed with horses and carts and hundreds of people of all different colours speaking strange languages she’d never heard before. Annemarie lagged behind, as pale as a ghost, while the icy wind penetrated their thick coats, and blew up their skirts and down their necks, making their eyes water and their ears ache. Mollie allowed her imagination to stretch ahead to when they would be living with Aunt Maggie in her apartment in Greenwich Village, ‘no distance from Washington Square’, according to one of her letters.
The
Queen Maia
, a great white vessel with three funnels, had rows and rows of portholes like little, black eyes that stared at them balefully. Annemarie had uttered a little, fearful cry and Mollie put her arm around her thin shoulders.
‘It’s all right, sis. It’s only a ship.’ She produced their tickets and passports, surrendered the suitcase to be delivered to their cabin, and was directed towards a gangplank level with the dock.
The floodlit quayside was frantically busy. Food was being taken on to another part of the ship: bags of flour and crates of wine, sides of beef and trays of leafy vegetables. Trolleys were pushed at a demonic speed, a giant crane transferred cargo to the hold, and people rushed to and fro - aimlessly, as far as she could see. An extremely elegant lady clad in white fur was negotiating a gangplank leading to the upper part of the ship, followed by a uniformed man carrying an assortment of parcels. There seemed to be an awful lot of unnecessary screaming and shouting.
A steward showed them to their cabin along a maze of narrow corridors, the motion of the boat gentle, almost soothing, considering the fierceness of the weather. Their suitcase was waiting for them.
The first, possibly worst, part of the journey was over, thought Mollie now as she lay in the bunk, tired out of her wits, but unable to sleep, having counted so many sheep she never wanted to see another for the rest of her life. Music came from some distant part of the ship. ‘I’m just wild about Harry,’ a woman was singing.
She pulled the clothes over her head when one of their fellow travellers came in, undressed, and used the lavatory with a great deal of grunting followed by a horrible smell. The bunk below creaked when she got in.
The other passenger arrived in what could have been hours later or might only have been minutes: Mollie’s head was swirling with clouds of tiredness and she couldn’t tell. A guttural voice from down below said, ‘I see you on deck with man. Is it what you do for living, get paid to go with man? Is why you go to America?’
‘Mind your own business, you nosy German cow. You’re only jealous ’cos no man’d go with you for a hundred quid.’
Mollie opened one eye. The light would appear to be permanently on and she saw a young woman with a pretty, heart-shaped face and bright yellow hair wearing a little cocked hat with a bent feather and a partially bald fur cape. With a series of dramatic gestures, she removed the hat and cape, kicked off her shoes, undid the buttons of her satin blouse and slipped out of a black silky skirt that was much too thin for the wintry weather, then slid into bed in her petticoat, leaving the clothes on the floor.
‘Tomorrow, I report you to steward. Why you got no luggage? You not should be in cabin, you belong in steerage with immigrants.’
‘Oh, shurrup, Gertie. You’re keeping me awake.’
‘My name is Gertrude Strauss,
Miss
Gertrude Strauss.’
‘Nighty-night,
Gertie
.’
From then on, there was silence in the cabin, until Gertie began to snore, by which time Mollie had, at last, fallen asleep.
When she woke, a murky light was visible through the porthole, which was too high to see out of. Annemarie was dead to the world and the yellow-haired girl, already dressed, was sitting on the opposite lower bunk filing her stubby red nails. She smiled when she saw Mollie looking down on her. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said cheerily. ‘You’re awake. I’m Olive Raines from Deptford in London. Who are you and where are you from?’
‘Mollie Kenny. I’m from County Kildare in Ireland. That’s my sister, Annemarie, in the bed over yours.’
‘Annemarie’s a pretty name - and she looks pretty, too. Such lovely-coloured hair, sort of blue-black. What colour eyes has she got?’
‘Violet, and her hair almost reaches her waist. Everyone admires it.’
‘Really! Mind you,’ she added, almost as an afterthought, ‘you’re quite pretty, too.’
‘Not as much as Annemarie.’ Mollie, with her ordinary brown hair, ordinary brown eyes, and a face that was often described as ‘interesting’, had always known that she didn’t hold a candle to her beautiful sister. She lowered her head over the side of her bunk to introduce herself to Gertie, but the bed underneath was empty.
‘Miss Strauss has gone for a walk before breakfast.’ Olive rolled her eyes in an exaggerated fashion. ‘Have you met her yet?’
‘No, but I heard her come in last night. I heard you, too.’
‘Did you hear what she said?’
‘Yes.’ Mollie had known what Gertie had meant when she accused Olive of being paid to go with men. There was a woman who lived in a cottage just outside Duneathly who made her living the same way. Her name was Eileen. None of the women would speak to her and she never went to Mass - perhaps she didn’t dare. She’d often wondered why the Doctor hadn’t gone to Eileen, but perhaps he was worried his reputation would suffer and he’d sooner inflict himself on his daughters.
‘Oh, well.’ Olive gave her an arch look. ‘A girl has to earn a few bob the best way she can. What way do you earn a few bob, Mollie?’
‘I’ve never worked, not properly. My mammy wanted me to stay at school till I was sixteen and train for a career like my brother, Finn, but she died almost two years ago and I left to look after the Doctor and Annemarie and my two little brothers.’ It wasn’t as arduous as it sounded. Fran Kincaid came in daily to do the heavy work and Nanny, who’d looked after all the children from Finn downwards, took care of Thaddy and Aidan. Mollie’s main tasks had been to see to the meals, act as receptionist for the Doctor, and keep his records up to date.
‘The Doctor?’ Olive raised her arched black eyebrows, which were about an inch higher than eyebrows normally were. The roots of her blonde hair were dark brown.
‘My father,’ Mollie said abruptly.
‘That’s a strange way to refer to your pa - the Doctor. Anyway, Mollie,’ she put the nail file in a worn leather handbag, ‘would you mind looking the other way for a mo while I use the lavvy?’
Mollie disappeared under the clothes until Olive had finished, then requested she do the same for her. Afterwards, she got washed in the little corner sink, put on her clothes, twisted her hair into a thick plait, yanked it over her shoulder, and tied the end with a blue ribbon. ‘What time’s breakfast?’ she asked as she laced up her boots.
‘Between eight and ten.’ Olive was in the process of painting her lips vivid scarlet with the aid of a hand mirror. ‘Don’t ask me what time it is now, because I’ve no idea, though there’s plenty of people about so I reckon it must have gone eight.’ As she spoke, there were footsteps in the corridor outside accompanied by a child’s excited laughter. ‘How long are you staying in New York, Mollie?’
‘We’re going to live there with our Aunt Maggie in Greenwich Village,’ Mollie said shortly.
‘What about the Doctor - your pa? Don’t he mind? I mean, who’ll look after him now you’ve gone?’
‘The Doctor doesn’t mind, no, and he’ll soon find someone else to look after him.’
Olive’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re running away, aren’t you? That’s real spunky of you, Mollie. I’ve known people who’ve run away before, but never as far as America.’
There seemed no point in denying it, so Mollie didn’t bother. ‘What about you? Are you running away, too?’ Last night Gertie - Miss Strauss - had said Olive should be travelling steerage with the immigrants.
‘Me? No, I’m eighteen years old and off to start a new career on the stage. I can sing and dance, but haven’t had much luck so far.’ She stood and kicked her leg so high it was almost level with her shoulder. ‘I bet you can’t do that.’
‘Indeed I can’t,’ Mollie admitted.