Anne Bennett 3-Book Collection: A Sister’s Promise, A Daughter’s Secret, A Mother’s Spirit. Anne Bennett
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think so,’ she said.
‘I was thinking of an apology, at least.’
‘There will be no apology. The girl asked for everything she got.’
‘No I did not,’ Molly yelled, sudden anger replacing her fear. ‘You hit me because you wanted to and kept on hitting me, even when I couldn’t feel it any more. You are not even human, because it isn’t normal to go on the way you did.
‘Now you listen to this,’ she went on, ‘my face is a mess and my body a mass of bruises, but they will heal, but your mind I doubt will ever be right. Next time you hit me, because the notion takes you, I just might feel like hitting you back, so I should consider that, if I were you. And you can bring the priest, bring the goddamned bishop for all I care, and I will tell them what you did to me and that it was no cold kept me from Mass and the McEvoys, which is what I gather you told them. And at least now I know exactly where I stand.’
She walked across the floor as she spoke and took her coat from the peg behind the door.
‘Where are you off to?’ Tom asked.
Molly answered, ‘I don’t really know. Just somewhere out of this house, where the air is cleaner.’
Molly followed Tom to the cowshed that evening because she refused to be left in the house with his mother, but Tom said she was to sit on the stool and watch and she was still so full of pain she was glad to do so.
He had had no chance to talk to Molly alone all day, and they had barely closed the door, when he said, ‘I couldn’t believe it the way that you stood up to Mammy today. You must have nerves of steel. You looked scared to death when you first went into that room. I thought I would have to be the one to fight for you.’
‘In my rational moments I am still scared,’ Molly said. ‘But what she said was so unjust I was incensed and that sort of overrode the fear. I never complained to the priest, Uncle Tom. He asked me all the questions and when he said he would come and talk it over with my grandmother, I was pleased. No one could have predicted that she would go off her head the way she did. I honestly didn’t know what she is capable of, how brutal she can be.’
‘The point is,’ Tom said, ‘what are we going to do about it, because there will be occasions when you are in the house together and I am nowhere around?’
‘My father said fear had to be faced head on,’ Molly said. ‘He told me that everyone is scared at some time in their lives and if you don’t learn to cope with it, then it will control you. He freely admitted he had been terrified that day he had crawled out to reach Paul Simmons. I know he would agree with my stand against your mother because she is a bully and he was always adamant that no one should let a bully win.’
‘That is all well and good, Molly, but—’
‘You are always complaining that I am too fond of that word, “but”,’ Molly said with a smile. ‘I really think your mother is not right in the head and I will never let myself be such a victim again. I imagine I could give a good account of myself if I had to.’
‘And no one would blame you,’ Tom said. ‘God! When I saw what she had done to you, I wanted to kill her. If she hadn’t got out of my sight, I really think I would have hit her and that would have been the first and only time, and changed something between us for ever.’
‘Maybe it needs changing.’
Tom shook his head. ‘Not in that way. God, I would feel even less of a man than I do already if I raised my hand to any woman, let alone my mother.’
‘I can understand that,’ Molly said. ‘Just don’t expect me to feel the same.’
‘I don’t,’ Tom said. ‘As I have already told you, no one will blame you, and for what it’s worth, you will have my support. Not that you seem to need it.’
‘I do,’ Molly said. ‘Maybe not to fight my battles, but in championing me in other ways. It is really very hard to live with someone who hates you so much. Without you I don’t think I would be able to cope.’
‘Molly, that makes me feel so much better,’ Tom said.
‘Good,’ Molly said. ‘And now if you are finished here, then let’s go inside and face the old dragon.’ But she was glad her uncle couldn’t see her insides turning somersaults.
‘I can hardly believe it,’ Cathy said, taking hold of her friend’s arm as they came out of the church the following Saturday morning. ‘I could scarcely credit it when I saw you come into the pew. How did you get your grandmother to agree? Thought you said she was dead set against it?’
‘She was – still is, probably,’ Molly said. ‘But this is all the priest’s doing.’ And she recounted what had happened when the priest called.
‘And she agreed just like that?’
‘No, not quite,’ Molly said, and was unable to prevent the shudder that ran through her body.
Cathy was no fool. ‘She hit you, didn’t she?’
‘You could say that,’ Molly said. ‘She thought that I had gone complaining to the priest, though I hadn’t. He asked me why I wasn’t at confession more.’
‘And I suppose that cold you had …’
‘Was no cold at all,’ Molly finished for her. ‘My face was too battered to be seen and my body so stiff and sore I could hardly move.’
‘Poor you,’ Cathy said sympathetically. ‘What has she been like since?’
‘Well, it has been pretty fraught, as you might imagine, and I stayed in the bedroom for four days,’ Molly said. ‘In the end, though, I had to get up. I knew eventually I would have to face her, and the longer I left it, the harder it was going to be.’
‘God, you’re braver than me,’ Cathy said. ‘I would be a crumpled heap, and I think that’s how I would stay.’
‘If I had been, then she would have won, for it was what she wanted,’ Molly said. ‘I know now that from the moment she saw me, her intention was to bend me to her will as she did Uncle Tom. She isn’t right in the head, and reacting the way she does to things is crazy. Now, when we are in the house together and Tom not there, we seem to spend the time sort of circling each other like prizefighters.’
‘You haven’t got to put up with this kind of thing, you know.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘You could tell someone. The gardaí …’
Molly gave a hoot of laughter. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they would be very interested in me going in and complaining about my grandmother giving me a good hiding. They’d be likely to tell me not to be so bold and to run away and play. And in the unlikely event they did take it slightly more seriously, then it would be even worse for me. Just think about it for a minute.’
Cathy didn’t need a minute. ‘I just wish I could do something to make things easier for you,’ she said.
‘You do, by being my friend. Going to your house every week helps me keep my sanity and now if I can come to Buncrana every fortnight it will be even better. Come on, I can put my own money in the post office today and I’ll keep some back to buy sweets. What do you say?’
Cathy saw that the subject of the beating was now closed, and she gave Molly’s arm a squeeze and said, ‘I say that you are the nicest friend a girl can have.’
‘And I say that that is cupboard love,’ said Molly.
A fortnight later it would have been Molly’s mother’s birthday, and Tom knew why the girl was feeling so dispirited and low, because he remembered the day his wee sister was born. He was sent off on the horse, not Dobbin then, to alert Maggie Allinson, who did as a midwife for them all around, and he recalled he was nearly been blown right off the horse, and more than once, for the wind