Every evening, Gloria would follow the same routine: after giving Hope her tea, she would settle down at the small dining table and set about writing her letter to Bobby and Gordon. But it was no good. Every evening, Jack would get back from work and find Gloria with a pen in her hand, a sheet of paper on the table, a frown on her forehead and several screwed-up balls of paper on the floor. Each time, Jack suggested that it might be a good idea to take Dorothy up on her offer of help with writing the letter. ‘She’s desperate to help. Plus, she’d be perfect – she’s had a good schooling … she might be able to help you put it in a way the boys can understand,’ Jack cajoled.
Finally, one evening, Gloria relented. Jack smiled and picked up Hope, who was holding aloft a scrunched-up piece of paper as though presenting him with a prized possession. Telling Jack to keep Hope entertained, Gloria retreated into the kitchen and made the tea. Chopping up onions while heating up a knob of lard in the pan, she kept thinking about her two sons, wishing she had told them everything from the off: how their father’s violence had got much worse after they had left for sea, as had his drinking, but she hadn’t wanted them to know for they had their own lives now. She didn’t want them worrying about their mam. They’d done enough of that as bairns. She realised that now.
As she added bacon to the pan, causing a burst of ferocious hissing and spitting, she wondered if she’d told them about the escalating violence and how Vinnie had been seeing another woman for two years before Gloria had finally chucked him out, whether this would have made them more understanding, more empathetic about her present situation; whether it would have paved the way to telling them about rekindling her love affair with Jack and then, later, about Hope. If she told them now, though, it would look like an excuse, like she was justifying living in sin with a married man and their illegitimate child.
As she turned and looked into the lounge, she saw Hope sitting on Jack’s lap; their little girl was sucking her thumb, immersed in a story her daddy was reading her.
Gloria forced herself to stop worrying.
She would get the letter written next week – with Dor’s help. Then she’d send it off and know at least that they had heard the news from her and no one else. There were other lads from the town on their ship and she’d started to worry that when the local gossipmongers eventually got wind about her and Jack, which in time they undoubtedly would, they would beat her to it. If she told them now, she’d get ahead of the rumour mill and hopefully, by the time her boys came home when the war ended, they would have been able to digest the news and perhaps – just perhaps – find it in their hearts to forgive her for not leaving their dad sooner, when they themselves had been bairns. The guilt of not having done so had weighed heavily on her for a long time.