Polly's Angel (47 page)

He had scarcely considered the motorbike as a means of rescuing Polly, however. He had known he would have to beg, borrow or steal a car or a gharry or, dammit, a perishing blood waggon, sooner than leave his Poll alone and afraid, miles from home. But no sooner had he stepped out of the mess than he had remembered the Sunbeam; remembered, too, that its owner was off in Suffolk or Norfolk somewhere . . . and had gone confidently off to the work shed.

He had not done much to prepare for the journey either, so worried was he by the state Polly had got herself into. He simply told Micky an old pal, a little WRN from his home town, was in trouble, explained her whereabouts, took Micky's advice and his map and got into the car and drove off. Now, after two hours of solitary driving through this wild night, he wished he had thought to fill a bottle with cold tea since he was parched with thirst, but it was too late for such might-have-beens. He was stuck in the car, driving steadily along black and winding roads, occasionally catching up with a military convoy.

He wished the rain would stop, though. The low grey clouds overhead and the driving rain, to say nothing of the howling wind, probably meant that there would be no activity in the air above him on such a night, but he could see very little through the slits in the car's headlights and was in constant fear of missing a turning – or finding a ditch – and so lengthening his journey still further. Once he had spotted a stream and had climbed out of the car and slaked his thirst, but that had been ages ago. Now he was thirsty again, his mouth dry as much with fear as with the long drive, and his eyes were beginning to feel tired, as though someone had thrown sand into them.

He glanced at his watch. Eleven o'clock! It could not be much further, surely? He had seen, against the cloud, the hill with the bite taken out of it, coming and going as the road wound and snaked and seemed to curve back on itself, but always there. It was appreciably closer now – surely he would arrive soon? He glanced apprehensively at the petrol gauge, but it was going to be all right. He had fine-tuned the engine and it was being gracious, sipping rather than devouring his precious juice. Of course, the slow speed at which he had been forced to drive for a good deal of his journey would have eased the petrol consumption. He grinned to himself in the dark, for it was now pitch black except for the tiny patches of light from his heads reflecting on the gleaming wet tarmac. Soon be there, he comforted himself, peering ahead. Soon be taking his Polly in his arms and hearing what had happened to her. At the thought of the fellow who had given her a lift, lied to her, deserted her, he ground his teeth with impotent fury. He hoped Polly had got his name, the number of his vehicle, anything, so that he, Tad, could find him and use his bleedin' guts for bleedin' garters just as soon as he'd settled his Polly safely back in her wrennery.

Tad slowed to negotiate a curve, glanced up at his hill and found it appreciably nearer. Grimly, he continued to drive steadily onward. At his present rate, he should be in Frodsham well before midnight.

It was not long after midnight that Tad found himself back in the car once more, but this time with Polly beside him. She sat quietly, very small and pale and huddled in one of the two rugs which Squadron Leader Pierce kept in the boot of his beloved car – a relic from pre-war outings, Tad imagined. He had found her slipping out of the pub and walking across the pavement towards him almost as he drew up. She stood in the rain for a second, glancing doubtfully at the car, and then, as he stepped out and went to meet her, she gave a strangled sob and hurled herself into his arms.

For a moment he had held her, but then she had disengaged herself briskly and returned to the pub door. She pulled it wide, called something softly – he thought it was to the effect that her pal had come – and then she closed the front door cautiously and returned to the car. Tad helped her in, noticing as he did so that she was shivering and went round to the driver's door, climbing in behind the wheel and starting the engine. After nearly four hours of difficult and tiring driving he felt strongly inclined just to sit where he was for a moment, to ask her just what had happened to her, to pull himself together, but instead, he engaged first gear, released the handbrake and turned the car in the wide road so that they were facing towards the mountains of Wales once more. It was not until they were several miles from the village that he chose a quiet stretch of grass verge and drew up on it. Then he turned to her.

‘Hadn't you better drive on?' she said. ‘Whose car is this, Tad?'

‘I borrowed it from a – a pal,' Tad said evasively. ‘Look, what wit' the rain and the wind and bein' so worried over you, Poll, I don't reckon I can drive and listen to what you're going to tell me, so why not tell me now? For a start, why didn't you catch the train?'

‘Because – because it seemed silly when I could hitch,' Polly said, her voice muffled. ‘And – and – I left in rather a hurry. It was all right, at first. I got a lift from the city right through the tunnel and beyond Birkenhead, but then the rain started. I walked for miles – well, it felt like miles – and then a man in a big lorry . . . Oh Tad, I don't want to talk about it! I don't want to remember!'

‘Did he hurt you?' Tad said bluntly after the silence began to stretch. ‘Did he get fresh wit' you, alanna?' He felt his teeth snap shut and all the muscles in his body tense at the thought of anyone offering any sort of unwanted attention to his Polly. ‘Just tell me what happened, as brief as you like.'

‘He
tried
to get fresh,' Polly said. ‘He was hateful, Tad. Only I remembered what the Chief WRN said to us when we were doing drill, and self-defence and stuff like that. She said if a feller got fresh to kick him where he joins, so I did and he shrieked like – like the bleedin' banshee, Tad, and then he flung me out of his horrible old lorry – not that I cared, I wanted to get out – and just drove off!'

‘Oh,' Tad said rather inadequately. ‘But he didn't hurt you, alanna?'

‘No,' Polly said firmly. ‘He tried to kiss me and put his hand up my skirt so I—'

‘Yes, I know, you kicked him,' Tad said hastily. ‘Where were you? Still in the lorry cab? How on earth did you—'

‘Yes, we were still in the lorry; he'd pulled over on to the verge, though,' Polly said. ‘When he tried to kiss me I thought maybe that was all right since he'd given me a lift and promised to take me right back to the wrennery, but when his hands started moving about –
you
know how they go on, Tad – I bit him as hard as I could on his horrible chin and then I tore a great lump out of his hair and then I kicked him in the—'

‘Well, you did right,' Tad said. He was beginning to feel almost sorry for Polly's assailant. Still, it would teach the feller not to give lifts to young girls in order to try his luck with them. And besides, he had abandoned Polly miles from anywhere on a filthy night in a rainstorm . . . no, he deserved all that Polly had handed out and more, Tad decided. ‘But another time, alanna, don't go hitching lifts unless you're wit' a pal because . . . Oh Polly, love, what've I said?'

For Polly was crying again, the tears chasing down her pale cheeks. ‘It – it's just that everything's so awful,' she said, fishing out her hanky and blowing her nose hard. ‘The feller in the lorry was a bastard, all right, but it – it weren't him that got me so upset, not really. Tad, did you ever think . . . well, that I wasn't meself?'

‘Sometimes, when we were kids,' Tad said rather cautiously. Sometimes, he remembered, Polly's temper had flared up at him and he had thought her a termagant and not the loving little Polly he knew so well. And he knew that Ivan had often grumbled at his sister's making him do more than his fair share of the housework. Was that what she meant, though?

‘You did?' Polly brightened for a moment, but then began to cry more dolorously than ever. ‘Well, I never even t'ought of it, but Tad, I'm not Polly O'Brady at all! Mammy and Daddy aren't me mammy and daddy, and the fellers aren't me brothers. And they've known all along, but never a word did they say until this afternoon . . . Oh, and they seemed to think I'd be quite
glad
to be told they just took me in out of pity, glad that I was really a child of one of the meanest, nastiest, rottenest families in the whole of Liverpool . . .'

‘Liverpool?' Tad said, thoroughly startled now. He wondered if the man's attack had knocked Polly clean off her trolley, because he could still remember the baby Polly sitting on her mother's hip, patting the head of any chiseller who came within reach, always smiling, always sunny. ‘But Polly me love, you were born and bred in Dublin, same as me!'

‘No, I wasn't,' Polly said drearily. ‘I was born in Liverpool . . . Well, I'll tell you how they telled me and then you'll know why I didn't much care, at first, if that feller upped and killed me, I was so unhappy. Why, if I'd not been crying half the time, d'you think that feller would have dared to put a hand on my – my chest, let alone up me skirt? If I'd been like I usually am he wouldn't have tried anything, I'm telling ye!'

‘Yes, I can see that,' Tad said slowly. He was beginning to think back, to remember. There was Polly's story, oft-repeated, that she could remember being born, being brought out of the doctor's bag and into a firelit circle of admiring male faces. Tad, with his superior knowledge of the facts of life – he was not eldest in a family of eight for nothing – had always found this scenario difficult to credit, but now he wondered whether Polly had, in fact, been remembering her arrival in the O'Brady home in Dublin, but as a child of twelve months or so instead of a new-born babe. He also remembered neighbours whispering, a rumour in the early days that Polly had come in from the country . . . but they were such vague rumours, and of so little interest to him, that he had never really taken them seriously. Polly was an O'Brady, her entire family worshipped her, and he, Tad, had quite agreed with them that she was a darling, and worthy of the love which folk gave her so readily. But she was still sobbing, so he put a gentle arm about her shoulders and gave her a bit of a squeeze. ‘All right, Polleen, suppose it's true, that you were adopted. Well, what's so wrong wit' that, then? You said
out of pity
but people don't take on an extra child in a big family out of pity. They do it out of love, alanna.'

‘Th-they wanted a girl,' Polly said, her voice still heavy with tears. ‘If I'd been a boy baby . . .'

‘Nonsense,' Tad said confidently. ‘Why, were you ever given love which belonged to Ivan, or Bev? Tell me truthfully, Poll, don't go making things up.'

There was a long pause before Polly said grudgingly: ‘No-oo, Mammy always loved us all and so did the daddy. And – and they were fair as well. Even when it made me mad as fire, I knew they were being fair.'

‘Well, there you are, then. Being adopted is – is a sort of compliment, I'm after thinking. Can't you see it like that?'

‘They should have told me,' Polly said, after another silence had stretched until Tad had begun to wonder whether she intended to reply at all. ‘Me brothers
knew,
Tad – the older ones, anyway – and they never said a word. Why, it was Brogan who brought me home, in the front of his donkey jacket, but never a word out of him to explain to me that I wasn't his little sister at all, that I wasn't even Polly!'

‘But, alanna, you are Polly O'Brady by adoption,' Tad insisted, giving her another squeeze. ‘So was that the reason you left home in a hurry, and hitched a lift? Because you'd flown into a temper and run out on your mammy and daddy? Alanna, they'll be worried to death, wondering where you've gone, what you've done. We can't telephone now, of course, but you must do so first thing in the morning. I suppose you didn't phone from the pub? It never occurred to me that you might have left them not knowing . . . Oh, dammit, Poll, how could you?'

‘Grace is still there,' Polly said defensively after a moment. ‘And don't you go tellin' me off, Tad Donoghue! And what'll I tell the WRNS? Because they've got me down as Polly O'Brady, so they have, and I'm really Mollie Carbery.'

Tad heaved a sigh. He was very tired indeed, and beginning to feel more than a little impatient with his Polly. But he tried to explain again. ‘You may have been born one thing, but when the O'Bradys took you on you became something different. It – it's a bit like marriage, alanna. You knew you wouldn't always be an O'Brady, didn't you, because you knew you'd marry some day, and go and live wit' your husband? Well, you'll be married as Polly O'Brady, not as Mollie . . . what did you say the name was? And what's this Grace girl got to do with it?'

Polly took a deep breath and launched into the story, this time starting at the very beginning, with the girl Jess – her sister – carrying the baby out of their strife-torn household and down on to the railway, to keep warm and safe in one of the gang huts until morning. At first the recital was punctuated by sniffs and gulps, sometimes even by sobs, but by the time she reached the climax Polly seemed to have got a hold of herself, and the story, a rivetting one, Tad considered, was told with considerable relish. She painted the Carberys so black, indeed, that Tad felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up with horror; from what she told him, she would have been unlikely to live had she been left with the likes of them. And Polly, having got Tad up to date, turned a soulful face towards him, clearly expecting sympathy.

‘Well, now I know what it's all about I can't help thinking that Brog did you just about the best service one person can do for another,' he told her. ‘With your big sister gone, what sort of a chance would you have stood of being brought up properly, alanna? Indeed, from what you've said, it's Grace who has a right to feel sorry for herself. She was really left out in the cold, wasn't she? You say you're ashamed of being a Carbery, incidentally, but Grace did well for herself, didn't she? And your big sister, Jess, sounds just lovely, alanna – very like yourself, in fact. So don't condemn all the Carberys because the parents were bad, wicked people. And probably, you know, your real mammy, Mrs Carbery I mean, was a good person until her husband began beating her up and draining all the goodness out of her. Are you beginning to feel a bit better, now? Shall I get moving again?'