“She never had her sorrows to seek. That’s what I say. She always had it hard, so she did, even when others were getting it easy.”
“Ach, I wouldn’t altogether agree with that, Maisie. Like, I’m the first to admit that she never got it aisy, but then who did?Who around here did? Answer me that?”
“Nobody did, but some got it harder than others, and Lily was one of them, so she was. Sure you know that yourself, Aggie. You saw the way she was brought up. Her poor mother didn’t get much help from oul’ Davy.”
“She couldn’t keep him out of the bloody pub!”
“And was that her fault? Was it? Aggie, sometimes you get on my wick! You’d think the rest of us married saints, so you would, to hear the way you talk. Let oul’ Davy rest in peace. He did more harm to himself than he did to anybody else, and even if he did spend a lot of time in the pub we know that he wasn’t on his own. There was always plenty there to keep him company, so there was. Drink was his problem all right, but one thing I’ll say for him: drunk or sober he never lifted his hand to her or the children. How many could say that about their man these days?”
“Maybe that’s what Lily needed. Spare the rod and spoil the child. That’s a true saying if ever there was one. No man ever has the right to lift his hand to any woman, but a child needs to be taught wrong from right, so it does. I’m not saying anything about oul’ Davy or Missus Caldwell, God rest their souls. Or Lily either for that matter. I’m only making the point that there was no excuse for the way Lily got on when she was young. To look at her today you’d think she was somebody.”
“Ach, I wouldn’t say that.”
“That’s ’cos you don’t know the half of it. You were always too soft, so you were. You look back on things now and you see them all nice and rosy. Well, it wasn’t like that, Maisie, so it wasn’t, as you should know.”
“Nobody knows it better. Do you think I’m doting? I was here, Aggie, so I was. I could write a book about it. I don’t need to be told how tough things were. I’m trying to forget the hard times. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if you went round all the time thinking of all the things wrong in this world you’d go mental. You want to be more positive, so you do. You need to get a good grip on yourself, Aggie love.”
“Ach, I’m all right, Maisie. It’s just that I met that Lily one down the town the day, so I did, and she walked right past me as if I wasn’t there.”
“Maybe she didn’t see you!”
“Oh she saw me, she did. Says I to her, ‘Hullo, Lily,’ and says she to me, ‘Hullo, Aggie,’ and that was it. Before I could get another word out she was gone. She had a wee grandson with her: he was in her arms. She nearly knocked me down to get by.”
“Well, maybe she had other things on her mind. There’s many a time I be walking about in a trance thinking or worrying about this, that or the other thing, and if the Angel Gabriel himself appeared to me I swear I wouldn’t take him under my notice. Maybe that’s the way Lily was.”
“That’s you all over, so it is. Making excuses again. You’ll never change, Maisie. Especially as far as Lily’s concerned.”
“Aggie, look, hang on a wee minute. You seem to have a bee in your bonnet over Lily Caldwell. Well, maybe I know a wee bit more about Lily than most people, so if you houl’ on till I pour the two of us this wee mouthful of tea, I’ll soon give you the gist of why I’ve a bit of time for her.”
“You could tell me nothing I don’t already know, Maisie. The whole world knows she was fond of a bit of the other and that’s the height of it!”
“Is that right now, Aggie? That shows how much you know, so it does! Here, take this cup off me. I’m scalded, so I am. There … that’s better. Will you have a wee piece of cake? I’ve nothing in. You should have come next week. That’s my pension week; this is my bad week. Here, take a piece.”
“No, Maisie, no: I’ve to make me dinner when I get home. A cup in my hand is just lovely. Have you got your own?”
“Aye, Aggie, now where was I? Aye! You were wanting to know about Lily. Well, me and her were very close as you know. She was a few years older than me. She was working in the mill and we met through the camogie. I was still at school but we both got a wee job, so we did, working together at nights for a couple of hours in Mr Keenan’s sweetie shop.”
“Poor old Mr Keenan, now he was a proper gentleman. I remember…”
“Lily always got the boys. I recall one time saying to my mammy about, you know, Lily always getting the boys, and my mammy said to me not to worry, she wouldn’t have her sorrows to seek. Anyway, not long after that Lily got pregnant. She never told any of us, none of her friends or family. I didn’t know until she was about six months, and by then some of the women in the mill had advised her how to get rid of it. That’s what the story was anyway. I couldn’t tell you if it was true or not, Lily never talked about it. Anyway, she’s supposed to have taken things to make the baby come away. If she did it never worked. The baby was born: it was a wee girl—deformed so it was; it lived for about a month. Poor Lily never saw it.”
“Ach, I never knew that, Maisie.”
“I know, Aggie. You were away at the time. Do you remember? You went off to Cushendall with our Aunt Sadie for the summer. You were too young anyway. Remember, there’s ten years between us. That mightn’t be much at our age now, but it’s a lot when you’re younger, so it is.”
“What age were you then?”
“I was about fifteen and Lily would have been about nineteen or twenty-odd. Everybody was talking about her at the time. All the boys at the corner arguing and saying it wasn’t theirs. That really annoyed me. Poor Lily. And all the fellas she was so crazy about: all they could think about was themselves.”
“Typical bloody men. They’re all the bloody same.”
“I still knocked round with Lily. Remember oul’ Missus Reid? She came around one day and told me mammy that she shouldn’t let me go around with Lily ’cos Lily had such a bad name. She was shown the door—nicely, of course. Me ma said that I was her rearing, not meaning any harm on Lily’s mammy, of course, and I could keep my own company. Like, me ma wouldn’t let you say a word about Lily. Lily was more often in our house than she was in her own.”
“Is it true that her mother used to follow her about the place?”
“Aye, but only because she was worrying for her. Me mammy says Lily had a wee want in her, a wee weakness, and her mother knew this. I think it got worse after she lost the child. I remember hearing her mammy and ours talking one day and her mammy was saying that when you lose a child like that you have a wee craving inside you for another one. When I asked me ma about it afterwards, she told me I’d understand when I got older.”
“Who was the father?”
“Nobody knows. Except Lily, of course. I heard years later it was a married man from Leeson Street. Lily’s mother always blamed poor Sean Dunne from one of the Rock streets. Sean was as innocent as a baby himself, but Lily’s mother gave him dog’s abuse. She never gave him the light of day, shouting at him in the street and this, that and the other thing.”
“I never heard of him.”
“Ach, you’d know his sister, Gonne. She married into the Quinns from Hawthorn Street.”
“Ah yes, I know who you mean. Gonne and me were in the same class together. She never mentioned a brother, Sean. There was Brendan and Hugh and…”
“Sean ended up going off to sea, so he did. He’s dead now, God rest him. He died in Norway or one of them places. Anyway, a year or so later Lily was pregnant again. Only this time she told everybody and her family and all of us helped her, so we did. The only thing was the fella she said was the one that done it: he said it wasn’t him.”
“Typical! Was he married too?”
“No, not at that time. I might as well tell you his name. It was big Sammy Mallon.”
“Big Sammy? Nora McCluskey’s man? Him?”
“Aye, he was a fly man in them days. All the girls were dying about him, so they were. Like, I don’t know what they saw in him. It was said if you spat in the street you were bound to hit one of his children. But he denied making Lily pregnant.”
“And did he?”
“Of course he did. Lily thought the sun rose and shone on him. She would have done anything to get him. Like I said before, she was a wee bit foolish that way. Sure he wasn’t fit to clean her arse. He was the road to no-town. He actually came round to see me, so he did; he was never short on cheek. He knew Lily and I were very close. He swore to me it wasn’t his child, that he hadn’t been seeing Lily for over four months. I told him that I had seen the two of them together on Halloween night, which is the night she conceived, and he got all flustered. He said it couldn’t a been him ’cos he was too big to go into her. Ha! The cheek of him!”
“Big Dick!”
“Aye. Or so he thought. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Then he told me that he had an operation and he couldn’t have any children. I threw him out.”
“You did right.”
“That’s not the end of it. His mother went to see the priest and the priest sent for Lily. She went down on her own; she wouldn’t take anyone with her. I wanted to go but she wouldn’t let me. I met her when she came back and she was crying. She said the priest did everything but call her a hoor. He said it couldn’t be Sammy’s child, that Sammy came from a good family. Then he came out with all the oul’ shite about Sammy not being able to have children on account of the operation. Like, everybody knew it was Sammy. He had even been boasting about doing it before it turned out Lily was pregnant.”
“You couldn’t trust a man as far as you could throw him. That’s a true say…”
“Anyway, Lily had the child. A wee boy. A lovely child. You’d think big Sammy spat him out of his mouth, you would. He never ever acknowledged the child, not then, not now. He never acknowledged Lily either for that matter. That child fathered himself.”
“God bless him. The street reared the poor wee soul.”
“Sammy’s father, by the way, he always knew that Lily’s son was his grandchild. He wouldn’t have passed him. Sammy himself got married a couple of years later. Within eleven months his wife had a baby and another one a year after.”
“So much for his so-called operation.”
“Any excuse will do. Fifteen years later Sammy’s mother apologised to Lily. A bit late, but there you are. Lily just said, ‘That’s all right, Missus Mallon,’ as nice as ninepence.”
“She did right.”
“Anyway, Aggie, that’s the story of poor Lily. Now she’s a granny just like the two of us. And you know something: isn’t it sad after all this time that her past is still following her around, and her that never did harm to anyone?”
“And never a word about Sammy Mallon.”
“Or the married man from Leeson Street.”
“It’s a man’s world, Maisie.”
“Indeed it is, Aggie. That’s as good a reason as any why we women have to be a wee bit soft with one another sometimes.”
“But not all the time, Maisie.”
“Indeed not. But I’ll always remember what our mother said to old Missus Reid that time she came round. ‘Never talk about anyone’s children,’ says she, ‘when you’re rearing children of your own.’
“Here, give me your cup and I’ll fill it up for you. You know a funny thing? Ever since her son was born, and that’s nearly forty years ago, Lily’s never been with another man. They used and abused her, and when they wouldn’t treat her right she just gave up on them and gave her life to her son. Now, all this time later, maybe she’s got what she always wanted—a bit of love and affection and dignity.”
“How would she get that now, Maisie?”
“From her grandson, Aggie, from her grandson. Everybody loves a granny, Aggie. Don’t they?”