The September Girls by Maureen Lee Page B

son she’d left behind in a house full of strangers.

    ‘Can’t he talk?’ Tyrone asked.
    ‘No, darlin’,’ Brenna replied.
    ‘Is he a loony, then?’ enquired Fergus. The lads had just arrived home from their new school.
    ‘He might be, he might not.’ Brenna shrugged. ‘No one knows. Don’t stare at him. You’ll make him uncomfortable.’
    Anthony was curled up in a chair, not looking at anyone, clutching the box of paints to his chest. From his face, it was hard to tell how he felt about anything. ‘He’s a rum child,’ Nancy had said once. Brenna bent and tried to embrace the little boy, but although Anthony didn’t exactly recoil from her touch, he stiffened, as if he’d drawn into himself.
    ‘He’s a fine-looking little fella,’ Colm commented later when he came home from work: Anthony hadn’t moved from the chair. Another miracle had occurred just after Christmas when Ambrose Houghton, the solicitor, had called to say a client of his, Cyril Phelan, was badly in need of a strong man in the yard where he sold building materials and was Colm interested? Colm had accepted like a shot and was now in receipt of the princely sum of twenty-five shillings a week.
    ‘He’s as handsome as a prince,’ Brenna agreed, ‘but aren’t our two every bit as bonny?’
    ‘They are indeed. Are you not giving him a meal, Bren?’
    ‘According to her ladyship, he’s already eaten.’
    ‘She’s not a titled lady, is she?’
    ‘No, but she acts like one.’ Brenna wrinkled her nose. ‘She looks down on me as if I were a piece of muck.’
    ‘She can’t look down on you too far, Bren, if she’s willing to leave her lad with you.’
    ‘Ah, poor thing.’ Brenna’s face softened. ‘For all her money, I feel desperately sorry for her. Fancy being terrified of your very own husband!’
    ‘They’re not all angels like me,’ Colm bragged, and she punched him playfully.
     
    Eleanor was hardly able to believe her luck. That night, Marcus ate only half his meal, then announced he was going to bed: he could feel a cold coming on. It didn’t happen often that he was ill, but he usually made a huge fuss, disrupting the entire household. Nurse Hutton was commanded to prepare a hot water bottle, Eleanor to look for Aspro and any other cold remedies in the house, and Nancy to fetch a dish of boiling water so he could breathe in the steam.
    The three women exchanged relieved looks when Marcus’s bedroom door finally closed. Nurse Hutton announced it was her night off and she was going to the Century picture house in Mount Pleasant to see Broken Blossoms with Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess and would Eleanor and Nancy please listen in case Sybil woke? The night nurses had been dispensed with after Christmas.
    ‘But I doubt if she will. She’s been as good as gold these last few weeks. I just knew it was that nasty three-month colic that made her cry so much.’
     
    Eleanor went to Shaw Street to see Anthony the next morning. Nancy promised she’d go that afternoon and leave Eleanor free to do some longed-for shopping. He had settled in well, Brenna told her. ‘He and our Fergus have taken a fancy to each other. They’re in the back yard playing on the swing. Fergus is a nice, gentle lad, not like Tyrone who’s a bit of a monkey.’
    The swing was merely a length of rope suspended from hooks on each side of the door that led to a passage behind the house. Fergus was pushing and Anthony’s eyes were tightly closed and his face, usually empty of expression, bore a look of dreamy bliss. She said, ‘Anthony,’ but he didn’t open his eyes, so she went back indoors, terrified at the sight of her cosseted child playing on such a roughly made contraption.
    ‘Is the swing safe?’ she asked Brenna in the paltry little kitchen where she was drying dishes.
    ‘Colm put it up. He wouldn’t let our lads use it if it weren’t,’ Brenna answered crisply. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
    ‘Yes, please.’