Trio - страница 9

She closed her eyes, heard her own breath sighing. Then the band started up again, a waltz. She felt the pressure between her legs, a sudden change as he took his finger out and there was pushing. She realised with a rush of horror what he was doing. ‘Roy! No.’ Her words sharp, she tried to get out from under him but his weight was too much for her. ‘No.’ She pushed at his face with her hands.

He gave a shudder and yelped, rolled off her.

‘You shouldn’t,’ she yelled, ‘you shouldn’t!’

‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded upset too. ‘I thought you wanted…’ And then, stupidly. ‘I do like you, Caroline.’

She felt sticky and uncomfortable. The giddy mood from cider and whirling about was replaced by a heavy sense of guilt and worry. A burst of clapping rang out from the barn.

‘We better go back in,’ she said in a small voice.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said gruffly. ‘I’m not that sort of girl.’ She didn’t like to think about how nice the stroking had been.

‘I know. I never meant…’ He stuttered to a stop. ‘Oh, God.’

She scrambled to her feet, arranging her dress, brushing bits of grass and fragments of apple bark from her hair.

She didn’t dance again and left before the end of the evening too uncomfortable with the glances from Roy, who sat with his brothers across the other side of the hall.

The cloud was clearing as she walked back, more stars were visible, silver sparkles in an indigo sky. She saw a falling star and wished, wished that it would be all right. Though she couldn’t have explained what she was so worried about, not having any notion then that what Roy had done was go all the way and that you could get caught first time.

Megan

‘I’ll bloody swing for him! I’ll knock his ruddy block off! The weaselly fucking bastard!’

‘Daddy, no!’ Megan cried.

‘Anthony,’ her mammy admonished, hating his lapse into coarse language.

‘What were you thinking of?’ He rounded on his daughter, fists balled with frustration. ‘You silly, little eejit.’

Megan gulped, tried to stop crying. ‘He wants to marry me.’

‘Oh, no,’ Anthony Driscoll announced. ‘Over my dead body.’

‘Mammy, tell him,’ Megan pleaded.

But her mammy blinked. ‘Yer awful young.’

‘You were my age when you had me.’

‘That was different,’ her daddy announced.

‘Why was it? Mammy was pregnant when she married you. I can do my sums, you know. I wasn’t born three months premature, was I?’

He lurched towards her, anger furrowing the muscles in his face, his arm swinging back.

‘Anthony!’ her mammy barked. He had never hit them, none of them. It was something he prided himself on. But this was taking him to the limit.

‘Jesus wept!’ he railed and slammed his hand on the table. ‘You’ll not marry him, I’ll not give my permission.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s a clown. He’s got no prospects, no land. Nothing.’

‘We’re not back home now,’ she retorted. ‘I’m not after a farmer. He’s apprenticed. He’ll learn a trade. He’ll be a printer. We won’t need to wait half our lives for an itty-bitty strip of boggy land that won’t grow any bloody thing.’

‘Megan!’ Mammy snapped.

‘It’s not fair!’ she yelled.

‘When you’re twenty-one you can marry who you like, but until then you live in my house and you marry who I say.’

Six years! He was touched in the head. ‘It’s your grandchild,’ she protested. ‘It’s a bastard and you don’t want it, but I do and it needn’t be like that.’

Her mammy started at the sentiment. Megan knew if it was only her there might be some chance, but her daddy was the stubbornest man in the world.

‘I want it, Daddy.’

‘Oh, now you do.’

‘And Brendan does.’

‘I have no more to say on the matter.’ He clenched his jaw shut.

‘Mammy,’ she appealed for help.

‘You’re not the first, Megan, and you won’t be the last. I tried to raise you good, teach you right from wrong. If Brendan had an ounce of respect… You’ve gone to the bad and it must be put right. We’ll talk to the Catholic Rescue.’

‘I don’t want to!’ Her voice was high and childlike. She began to cry again. Her mother put her hand on Megan’s head. ‘It’s the best way,’ she cajoled.

‘Please, Daddy.’

‘Enough,’ he said shortly and she watched the feeling drain from his eyes and his look turn, the bright pain replaced by a dull grey stare, dead as stones. She couldn’t win. Another day, a different moment, perhaps he’d have said yes, hesitated in his decision long enough to hear her pleas and see the sense of it. But now, once he’d said it, that was it. No matter how wrong he might be, or what harm might result, he would be unmoving. She hated him for it. She would never forgive him, she told herself, never, never, not until they put pennies on her eyes.