Saturday's Child (6 page)

Ernest tried to snatch the beads, but his fingers closed around fresh air as Frank pulled the rosary out of reach. ‘I hate you,’ he informed his father, the voice not quite as gentle
as Dot’s had been. ‘For as long as I can remember, me and our Gerry hated you. You drove us to that.’

‘Get away with your bother,’ roared Ernest, ‘you’d have been nowt without me.’

Dot pushed past her older son, placing her bundle of possessions on the dresser. ‘Without you?’ she asked. ‘Without you, they would have had skin on their backs. Do you know
they’ve both got scars?’ She rolled up a sleeve to display black, brown and yellow bruising. ‘See them? Well, you made them marks. But you have hit me and mine for the last time,
Ernie Barnes. And if you need help, go to your lodge, see if any of your friends’ll give a hand. As far as I’m concerned, you can starve to bloody death.’

She bundled her belongings into baskets, picked up her coat, walked out of number 5 for the last time. Both men heard the door slamming shut in her wake.

Frank eyed his father. ‘You’ll have to shape now,’ he said, ‘no Mam to be running after you all the while.’

‘I’m a cripple – in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘I noticed,’ said Frank. ‘At least it slowed you down a bit. And who saved you, eh? Who got the horse’s head and calmed it down? Who risked getting a gobful of hoof? John
Higgins did.’

‘Well, he needn’t have bothered.’

Frank inclined his head in agreement. ‘That’s what we thought and all. He should have left you, should have let the horse dance on you. But no. My Rachel’s dad saved your life.
A bloody Catholic came to your rescue.’

Ernest said no more.

When his son had left, he reached for his other stick, crashed to the floor and stayed there for a good half hour. He would get no tea, no supper. The fire would die down. His breathing became
unsteady as he wondered how he was going to manage. For the first time in years, Ernest Barnes was truly afraid.

Slowly, he made his way through the panic attack. He had never been alone. He had gone from childhood home to this house, had not spent a single night in a place without other people. Of course,
he could have managed had he not been disabled. Couldn’t he? Could he?

It occurred to him then that he had seldom made a cup of tea, that he had never made toast, let alone a full meal with spuds and gravy. He had no idea about cleaning, polishing, ironing. The
house would deteriorate until it became like Nellie Hulme’s, an indoor rag-and-bone yard filled with grime and filthy clothes.

Self-pity took up residence in his mind. He did not deserve this, because he had worked hard all his life until that damned horse had bolted. Ernest Barnes had never sent his wife out to work,
not until he had become too disabled to provide for her. She had taken up a few hours’ cleaning, but their main income had come from interest on his savings and on the compensation paid out
by the brewery. Who would do his shopping now? Who would make sure that he had the basics – bread, milk, butter, sugar?

Anger moved in then, red-hot and fed by bitterness. It fuelled him sufficiently to stand up, his hands shaking as he held on to the table. This was all the fault of them across the road, that
teeming, senseless family whose members succeeded in being happy even on bread and scrape. Eight ragged girls, and his son was about to marry one, was training to be a Catholic. Oh, the shame of it
– he would never live this down.

With difficulty, he retrieved his walking sticks. Normally, she would have fetched them, would have helped him up, all the time wishing him dead. That quiet, docile woman had been a traitor, an
invisible knife poised and ready to plunge into his flesh. ‘I’ve prayed for you to die,’ she had said. And now, by depriving him of her help, she had condemned him to total
uselessness.

He stumbled to the front door, opened it. The house opposite was quiet for a Saturday evening; well, he would disturb their peace soon enough. Stepping cautiously, Ernest Barnes crossed the
narrow street, cursing under his breath each time his sticks made poor purchase on damp cobbles.

When he achieved his goal, the door was already open.

‘So you’ve been told,’ said John Higgins.

‘You know I have,’ came the terse reply.

‘I got wind of you being told while I was up on the road,’ said John, ‘so I’ve been half expecting to see you.’

Ernest’s leg felt as if it were on fire.

‘Will you come in and sit?’ asked John.

‘No.’

‘Then the mountain must be fetched.’ John Higgins disappeared, only to return moments later with a chair. He placed it on the pavement, then stepped back into the doorway, a sentry
set there to guard his castle.

Ernest sat. ‘Are you telling me you knew nowt about my son and your girl?’

‘No, I am saying no such thing,’ replied John, his voice steady as a rock. ‘Sure, we knew about Frank and Rachel, but we found out just today that you were about to learn the
good news. He’s a fine man.’

‘He’s a Protestant,’ spat Ernest.

John decided to make no reply. His faith was simple; he differentiated between good and evil, but left room for all Christians to choose their own way through life and into the hereafter.

‘She’s too young for him,’ continued Ernest.

‘I’ve never thought age differences to be that important,’ answered John, ‘and as for religion, had she wanted to marry out, we would have supported her.’

Ernest drew a deep breath. ‘My wife has gone,’ he stated baldly. ‘She knows my opinion, and she has taken off with Frank, to live with him and your daughter, I
suppose.’

John nodded. ‘Aye, that’ll be the truth of it.’ He cast an eye over the man on the chair. ‘This’ll leave you in a merry pickle, I expect.’

‘Nothing merry about it,’ came the swift reply.

‘You only need to ask,’ said John Higgins.

It was then that Ernest saw red. Here he sat like a begging dog, unable to achieve level eye contact with a man who represented all he despised. ‘You think you’re so clever,’
he said.

‘Do I now?’

‘Hiding this from me.’

John leaned an arm against the door frame. ‘Can you imagine any one of us choosing to tell you, Mr Barnes? What sort of reception would we have got? My daughter is inside the house just
now, quaking in her shoes—’

‘So she has shoes?’

‘She does, so.’

Ernest’s rage was surfacing. He took one of his sticks and drove the end of it into John’s stomach, pushing so hard that John fell inside the house, while Ernest, unsteadied by the
ferocity of his own movements, crashed backwards onto cobble stones. The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was a crowd of Higgins faces peering down at him.

John stood up, his hands folded over a sore stomach. ‘Ernest needs the hospital,’ he told Sal.

Rachel wept quietly in the kitchen doorway. Although she loved Frank Barnes with every fibre of her being, she was beginning to wonder how much trouble she was bringing on those she loved.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ she wept. ‘Is it worth it?’

John looked at his wife, at his poor-but-clean home, at the holy palms above the fireplace next to a framed papal blessing. There was a little font of holy water inside the front door, a small
statue of the Infant King on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s worth it,’ he advised Rachel. ‘A good marriage is the best gift of all.’

Sal smiled at him. ‘Thomas,’ she told their adopted son, ‘away now and fetch the ambulance for Mr Barnes. Dr Clarke will telephone for you. And tell the girls to put a blanket
over him, or he’ll be frozen stiff before he sees the hospital. Go with Thomas, Rachel. The rest of you – go out the back way for a while after you’ve covered up Mr
Barnes.’

When they were alone, John sat next to his wife, took her hand in his. ‘I’ll never get to grips with this Catholic and Protestant stuff, all the persecutions and the sadness caused.
But I looked into that man’s face, Sal, and I saw a blind, boiling hatred for me and mine.’

‘Frightening,’ she answered.

‘Tell me again, Sal – as if I don’t know – why did Jesus come?’

She giggled like a child uncertain of her catechism. ‘To save us,’ she said.

‘All of us?’

Sal nodded.

John squeezed her fingers gently in a fist that might have cracked a walnut wide open. ‘Then the ambulance must be got,’ he whispered, ‘so that even Barnes might have a
chance.’

He woke in a bed, his head sore and bandaged, the bad leg burning, an angel leaning over him. Had he died? No, the angel was familiar, one he had seen many times before. Where
was Dot? He would be needing his baccy and papers, clean pyjamas, decent food if his memory of hospital dinners served him right . . . Dot. Oh God, where was she? She was a fixture in his life, a
thread of continuity, something he saw every day.

She had left him. Memory flooded back into place, the surge causing his head to hurt even more. He had spoken to Higgins, had prodded him with a stick, thereby unseating himself. All those
damned girls had crowded round him, then he had passed out. And he still had his problem. Who was going to look after him? A bang on the head might buy him a few days in hospital, lumpy porridge,
lumpier mash and soggy toast, but what about afterwards? The angel was not smiling. She was simply staring at him, her gaze unflinching.

‘Mr Barnes?’

Oh, God. Another flaming Irish Catholic, another voice that sounded as if it belonged in a musical box. He grunted a ‘yes,’ the monosyllable echoing in his skull. She lived at number
2, had a daughter who was reputed to be some type of genius. The trouble with these Irish types was that they were often endowed with an extraordinary beauty. She looked like something off one of
those holy picture cards – all she needed was a halo and a bunch of flowers.

‘I’m just now going off duty, so I thought I’d come and look at you. How’s your head?’

‘Sore.’

She nodded sympathetically. ‘The ward sister said a neighbour of mine had been brought in. Well, I hope you will soon be feeling better.’ This was one terrible man. Until his leg had
been shattered, he had introduced misery into many lives. Magsy O’Gara prayed for patience, but could not offer much of a smile to the man in the bed. He had cold eyes, no expression in them,
certainly no hint of remorse in those steely orbs.

Ernest cleared his throat. ‘And I might as well tell you before the street does – my wife has left me, and my son is going to marry one of the Higgins lot.’ He could not
remember speaking to Magsy O’Gara before. As she lived at number 2, she was attached to all the din that came from the Higgins household. She had just the one child, as her husband had died
before the papist breeding programme could get off the ground properly. Rabbits, they were. They should be marched en masse to a vet for neutering.

‘Then I am sorry about you, Mr Barnes.’

He tried to lift his head from the pillow, failed. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ he replied.

‘’Tis your situation I feel sorry about,’ she said, the soft Irish voice lilting across the space between the two of them. ‘Feeling sorry for you personally would be a
difficulty, as you invite no concern and no friendship.’ Well, she told herself, it was time somebody put the truth to him. He would have to ask for help now, would be forced to drop his
guard.

His jaw slackened after she had spoken, but he offered no answer.

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ she said now.

He considered his immediate needs. ‘Will you fetch me some tobacco and papers?’ he asked. He pointed to the bedside locker. ‘There’s a ten bob note in there.’

She retrieved the money, held it up for him to see. ‘I will get your tobacco. Anything else?’

‘No.’ After a moment spent beneath that gentle, undemanding stare, he added, ‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll be going, then.’

He didn’t want her to go. He didn’t know why he didn’t want her to go. ‘Are you a nurse?’ he found himself enquiring.

‘A cleaner,’ she answered. ‘I’m on extra hours today.’ She eyed him dispassionately. ‘Beth is cared for by my neighbour, Sal Higgins. After all, what
difference to them is one girl-child more or less? I mean – they have so many already.’

He caught the benign challenge, did not rise to it. ‘You lost your husband right at the end of the war. Couple of months later, it was all over bar the shouting.’

‘That’s right.’

If he had been capable of squirming, he would have squirmed. Ernest had never been so close to Magsy O’Gara before; she lived on the Catholic side while he was an inhabitant of the
Protestant terrace in Prudence Street. Why was he bothering with her? And why did he feel so uncomfortable? She had the advantage – she was in a standing position while he lay flat and
helpless – but it was more than that. She was so . . . composed. In a way, she put him in mind of Dot, the woman whose failure to react had caused all the trouble at home. Women were devious;
they drove men to drink and worse.

‘But you have to remember that my late husband was only another Irishman, Mr Barnes.’

He shifted his gaze until it rested on a man across the ward, an aged chap with no teeth and very little hair. ‘What time is it?’ he asked now. The old chap was dribbling onto a bib
tied round his neck.

‘Time I was off to Mass,’ she answered.

‘On a Saturday?’

‘It’s Sunday,’ she informed him, ‘you have been unconscious for the whole night. That was quite a crack you took, according to the nurses. But you’ve been X-rayed
and you seem to be in fair condition.’ She paused, and her eyes twinkled slightly. ‘That’s a good, thick, Protestant skull you have there, Mr Barnes. If you will wave sticks at
your neighbours, you’ll be needing those strong bones. Mr Higgins is a large man.’

He attempted no answer.

‘So, I’ll be off to the early service at St Patrick’s, Mr Barnes. Will I say a little prayer for you?’

Again, Ernest found nothing to say.

Magsy drifted away down the ward, stopping to chat with several patients on her way out.

In the doorway, she paused, turned and looked at Ernest Barnes. He was the enemy, yet she could not think of that pale, shrivelled and injured man as a foe. He had beaten his wife and his
children; he was a deeply, radically unhappy man.