Wayward Angel

by Elaine Crowley

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

From the moment Danny first saw Angel he was enchanted by her beauty. By the time she was fourteen - a woman with a child's face, long golden hair and sleepy violet-blue eyes - Danny had completely fallen in love with her and dreamed of making her his wife. But Angel was not interested in Danny. Angel loved Johnny Quinn - but Johnny, training to be a boxer, didn't even notice her. When Angel's pursuit of Johnny ends in disaster and disgrace she leaves for Dublin and thinks her life couldn't possibly be worse. But Fortune has only just begun to turn her wheel, and Angel soon finds that she has a lot further to fall before she can find lasting happiness...

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 441

Sample

Lizzie, the handy woman who delivered babies, washed and laid out the dead, bent over the woman on the bed, the heel of her
hand on the woman’s belly. ‘One more push and it’ll be all over,’ she said. Wrapped in a towel and a piece of blanket, tightly
swaddled, its head turning searching for the breast, the baby lay on the sofa. ‘Push now,’ Lizzie commanded, and pressed down
with her hand. The afterbirth was expelled on to a doubled sheet of newspaper. Looking closely at the substance, which resembled
a couple of pounds of liver, Lizzie smiled. ‘Grand, every bit of it there, thank God. That’s the boy that could finish you
off. Leave a bit inside you and you’d be poisoned, not get it out and you’d be a goner. Bleed to death like a stuck pig before
hand or help could come to your aid.’


She wrapped the placenta in the paper and then in several more sheets that were by the bed. She would take it away later for
burning. On the hob a big iron kettle sang. Lizzie poured some of the hot water into a basin then added cold from a jug. She
tested the heat until it was tepid, then put the bowl on a bedside table and began to tidy Aggie. She sponged her face and
hands and in between her legs. ‘There, now, don’t you feel a new woman?’


‘I do. I’m grand. Wasn’t as bad as I expected. When can I have a hold of her?’

‘In a minute, after I’ve fixed the bed. Lift up your bum and I’ll give you a clean drawsheet. That’s the girl. And now the
pins.’ She undid the rows of safety-pins from the back and front of Aggie’s nightdress which had kept it from being soiled
during her labour and delivery.


‘There y’are, all clean and tidy,’ she said, arranging the bedclothes. ‘You can have her now. Put her to the breast, but only
for a couple of minutes.’


Aggie gazed in delighted wonderment at the little face, kissed the soft downy scalp and stroked the little one’s cheeks. The
baby clamped her lips greedily around the nipple and suckled.


‘That’s long enough. Put her down now.’

Aggie laid the child beside her, and Lizzie opened two bottles of stout then poured them with a practised hand until a creamy
top collared each glass. Handing one to Aggie, she said, ‘Get that down you. Better for your milk than all the cups of tea,’
sat by the bed and drank from hers. Froth coated her top lip which she wiped away with the back of her hand before she spoke.
‘God bless and spare her, she’s the loveliest child I’ve ever brought into the world. Not a crease or crumple. Neither red
nor purple in the face. As fair as a primrose.’


Aggie glowed with pleasure, and again touched the velvet-textured skin of her little daughter. Between mouthfuls of stout
Lizzie continued to talk. ‘D’ye know what she reminds me of? An angel. She’s the spitten image of an angel.’


‘I thought,’ replied Aggie, ‘that angels were boys, little fellas or men – ye know, like Michael and Gabriel.’

‘Well, aren’t you the terrible serious woman? How would I know what’s under their robes? It’s their faces I’m on about. You
know the ones I mean, the little ones you see flying round in holy pictures. She’s the spitten image of one of them. What are you going to christen her?’


‘Katherine, after my mother, Lord have mercy on her.’

‘Well, to me that saw her first, she’ll always be Angel. Mark my words, she’ll grow into a raving beauty.’

Father Clancy, the parish priest, a distant cousin of Aggie’s, used the pet name, as did everyone in the village, except the
nuns in school and Miss Heffernan, the infant school headmistress.


Angel grew into the beauty Lizzie had foreseen: her hair was like golden floss, her eyes blue and, in a certain light, with
a hint of violet. Few praised her to her face: it wasn’t lucky to do so – you didn’t want to tempt the ill-wishers, them with
the evil eye or fairies, jealous of a mortal child, who in a fit of spite could mar a lovely face or maim a limb. Not everyone
was aware of their reasons for withholding compliments – they were too deeply buried in the pagan past. Instead they found
other ways to praise her, telling her what a good girl she was, how kind and obedient, never cheeky or answering back. They
laid hands on her silky hair, touched her cheek, asked her to say a prayer for them before giving her pennies for sweets.


As she grew older she asked questions about her father. ‘Why haven’t I got a daddy?’

Time and time again her mother told her, ‘Before you were born, before I even knew God was sending you to me, your daddy went
to the potato-picking in Scotland and never came back.’


‘Did he go to heaven?’

‘That I couldn’t tell you. The same thing happened with my own father. He went to America and was never seen again. I think it was with us not having the “wiles and ways”! Your
granny was a beauty, and in my young days I wasn’t bad to look at. But neither of us had them. And beauty on its own won’t
get you far.’


‘What are they, them things?’

Aggie promised to tell Angel when she was older.

The village was three miles from Dublin. The local men worked in the quarry on the outskirts, and in the tram depot, where
preference was given to men who came from rural Ireland. For the women there was only domestic service.


There were two streets, and in the longest lived the working men and their families in small houses, some of which were owned
by the tram company. These had four small rooms, two up and two down. Cold water was laid on to the kitchen, where meals were
prepared and eaten. Children did their homework on the kitchen table, women cut out dresses and caring fathers mounted their
lasts to mend the shoes and boots. The ironing was done on it, too, and in enamel basins the delph washed.


More industrious men, or those with forceful wives, had built lean-to sheds against the kitchen walls – outhouses where women
had clothes-boilers, mangles and stored odds and ends. In the street there were a few one-storey cottages; some had half-doors,
one a thatched roof, cold-water pipes in the minuscule back yards, and there were two communal lavatories to share by the
cottagers. The cottages predated the tram company. They were believed to be two hundred years old. Some were whitewashed regularly,
others neglected. In one of the neglected ones Angel lived with Aggie, who intended every summer to get a bucket of lime and give inside and out a lick of white.


Across the street, down a fairly steep slope, ran the river, hardly more than a stream, not deep enough to be feared when
the children played there but with enough water for pinkeens to swim and be caught in ha’penny gauze nets fixed to the ends
of canes. They were carried home triumphantly in jam jars, well stuffed with water weed, which was supposed to keep the fish
alive. It didn’t and they died. Cats ate them, or sometimes the children gave them a fine funeral.


Aggie often wished she hadn’t been an only child. It would be grand to have a brother who would do a turn for you – whitewash
the cottage, mend a leak in the roof – or a sister to confide in. But she could tell Lizzie her troubles. Lizzie was the only
one she had been close to since her mother died. But Lizzie was getting on, and worn out with bringing babies into the world
at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes you’d be talking to her and in the middle of it Lizzie’s chin would drop on to
her chest and she’d fall fast asleep. It’s a friend of my own age I’d like, Aggie would think, but Mammy put paid to that.
Never letting me bring anyone to the house, never letting me go into anyone else’s home. Lord have mercy on her, I thought
she was being hard on me then. I could play with the children in the street, walk to school and home again with them but never
set foot inside their homes nor they in mine. And everyone else did that, were given cuts of bread and jam, pieces of blackberry
tart or apple. I used to be so jealous and hated my mother for what she deprived me of. And she’d go on and on about their
mothers. I can still hear her voice …


My poor mother, I didn’t understand her then, didn’t know what it was to be a deserted wife. And she so proud and having to
go on parish relief, live in a house that was falling asunder, never able to buy a new bit of oilcloth for the floor or a
bit of stuff to run up a pair of curtains, dressing me in the off-falls of clothes belonging to the children of women she
cleaned for. Not that I minded the second-hand clothes. Sure most of them in school were dressed like that. But they had fathers
who if they were off the drink sometimes handed over money, and when they did there’d be a big splash. Especially at Christmas
or Easter.


By the time I was ready to leave school the girls no longer invited me home and seldom knocked on our door. They’d found their
bosom pals, walked arm in arm together and told each other their secrets. They’d talk to me in the street, pass the time of
day outside the chapel, as was the custom in the village. And if we met in the shops or outside Mass they’d nod and smile
and comment on the weather.


But Mammy knew what was said behind her back: ‘Couldn’t hold on to her man … It takes two to make a marriage. How does anyone
know what goes on between man and wife?’ So whenever possible she shunned them, knowing their feelings for her were pity and
derision. And once Aggie was old enough to understand, her mother drummed the same suspicions into her.


Being young, Aggie ignored most of what her mother said, but she was not bold enough to ignore the ban on going to people’s
homes or inviting them to theirs. ‘Nosing that’s all they’d be. And as for coming here, wouldn’t that satisfy them? Seeing
the dilapidated state of the cottage. “The price of her,” they’d say. “Well, pride goes before a fall, and she the one who thought herself a beauty.”’ And they’d feel smug that their men, drunkards though
they might be, whose blows they often felt, were still by their sides.


Gradually, as Aggie grew older, she came to appreciate her mother’s position: the real or imagined scorn, pity and backbiting
must have crucified her. She experienced it herself, a dig here and there, a reference to women who couldn’t hold their men.
Eventually she had less and less to do with the others she worked with in the laundry and, without being vain, understood
that had she been ugly or plain her lot might have been easier.


Then she met Larry and fell madly in love with him. They married and she was in heaven until he, too, deserted her. Then,
at last, she could fully sympathise with her mother. Not only that, but she determined when Angel was born to instill in her
what her mother had imprinted on her mind. And so that Angel, too, grew up with few close friends – except for Mona. Mona
was like a leech. Aggie didn’t like her: for all her family was generous, they were a sneering, jeering crowd, self-satisfied
in the midst of their big family. Lucky too, there was always someone earning.


Aggie didn’t envy them. She didn’t envy anyone. While her mother was alive she had her for company and her mother’s friend,
Lizzie, the midwife, and there was her cousin and confessor too, Father Clancy, a second cousin once removed, but a blood
relation all the same.


Behind the street, on a low rise, were other houses where the few professionals, the managers of the quarry and the tram company,
lived, and a quarter of a mile from the village, in a large detached house, the doctor and his family. To support herself
and Angel, Aggie cleaned some of their homes and drew parish relief. It scalded her heart that Angel couldn’t have many things other than the
bare necessities so she scrimped and saved to buy her a pretty frock occasionally or take her into Dublin for a treat.


If she was aware of being deprived, Angel never complained, never made comparisons between herself and other girls, never
showed envy of her best friend, Mona. Every night Aggie prayed that something wonderful would happen to change their circumstances.
Maybe one day her long-lost husband would turn up, loaded with money, and they’d live happily ever after. They could open
a shop. Lots of women had shops in their front rooms. But she didn’t have a front room, except the one used for everything,
and a little scullery. In any case, she consoled herself, those who had shops didn’t seem to make much.


To make money from a shop you’d want one like Danny Connolly’s. That was a shop and a half, ‘Connolly and Son, Provision Merchant’
painted in gold letters over it. His father had added ‘and Son’ when Danny was born.


Aggie wondered if Danny would ever marry, ever have a son? He wasn’t bad-looking. Quite takish, if you didn’t mind his gammy
leg and the high boot. And many a woman wouldn’t. But he seemed in no hurry to get married. And sure why would he? Didn’t
he have all the comfort in the world? Even with his parents gone to their long rest, wasn’t he waited on hand and foot by
his housekeeper? And, unlike a woman, he had years before him. A man in his forties was in his prime whereas a woman of that
age was ‘an oul wan’.


When Danny was forty, Angel’d be old enough for marrying, Aggie thought. Wouldn’t it be the grand thing if there was a match there? Mrs Connolly, no less, on a par with the
doctor’s and solicitor’s wives, living in the lap of luxury. And, the best thing of all, she’d have a good man who’d cherish
and respect her. Always, after indulging in these fantasies, she’d smile in the darkness of the room – dark except for the
dying fire and the little red lamp burning below the picture of the Sacred Heart – and remind herself that Angel, sleeping
beside her, was still only a child with years in front of her. Then she’d kiss her daughter’s forehead or cheek and settle
down for the night.


When Angel was twelve years old, she had the flowerlike face of a child and the body of a woman. The changes that had come
upon her frightened her, not so much the breasts for all grown-up girls and women had those, but the hair that grew under
her arms and between her legs. Sometimes she imagined it might grow to cover all of her body. She brooded about it, remembering
a story her mother had told her of a woman in the city whose face was covered with hair. She had turned a beggarwoman away
from the door, telling her to take herself and her monkey-like children off out of that. The beggarwoman had cursed her and
said, ‘For all you know it’s a monkey you might be carrying.’


One day, when she could bear her fears no longer, Angel told Mona about the hair and how she was sure she was getting like
the hairy woman in Dublin. ‘You’re the greatest eejit I ever met in my life. Everyone gets that – even fellas,’ Mona said
scornfully.


‘Honest to God?’

‘As true as I’m standing here.’

Angel was relieved, until she remembered how in the summer she and Mona had gone into the river where a pool formed deep enough to swim. Angel had kept on her vest and knickers
but Mona had stripped to her skin and there was hair only on her head. Angel reminded her friend of this and said, ‘You’re
an awful liar, Mona, so you are.’


‘I am not. It wasn’t there in the summer but now it’s growing. And in any case haven’t I seen my sister’s? And she says when
the hair grows it means you’re turning into a woman. And another thing that happens is you get the others!’


‘The others? What’s them?’

‘Angel,’ Mona’s voice sounded exasperated, ‘I told you before, millions of times. You’re in gores of blood from down there.
That’s when you get babies.’


‘But how d’ye get babies?’ asked Angel, her face screwed up with worry.

Mona shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘How would I know? My sister won’t tell me. Not till I’m grown up. But the blood’s got something to do with it.’


Angel felt sick and frightened. Gores of blood. She wanted to know all the secrets Mona got from her sister but at the same
time hated her for the telling. When she talked about them she reminded Angel of a monkey. She’d seen a monkey in the zoo,
with black hair like Mona’s and little brown eyes, grinning the way Mona did too.


She’d seen a black panther in the zoo, too, but that was beautiful. Black, smooth hair, big green eyes and muscles that rippled.
It reminded her of Johnny Quinn. She’d love to have put her hand through the cage and touched the beast. She imagined its
hair would be soft and silky. But she was afraid. She’d love to touch Johnny, stroke his black hair, get the smell of him. Sometimes, if you were close enough, you got a whiff. It wasn’t hair oil, nothing
like that, just a smell that no one else had. But you wouldn’t touch him any more than the panther. Johnny could take the
head off you with just a look.


Boys got queer when they grew up. Johnny hadn’t always been horrible. When they were small, he used to play with her in a
gang of boys and girls, fishing for pinkeens, chasing each other in the woods, building dens and, in the dark evenings, knocking
on doors and running away, hiding to watch people open up and wave their fists. But that all changed when they were ten or
eleven. Just about the time when Angel began to notice Johnny’s lovely smell.


Since he turned fourteen and went to work in the bike shop, he had been worse. When he had a bike upside down on the path
to mend a puncture and you had to squeeze by him, he’d let on not to see you. She wondered if he’d change back, would be nice
to her again one day.


She confided in Mona, who had no time for Johnny. ‘All the Quinns are piggish in their manner. Me ma says it’s after their
oul fella they take. She’d kill me sister if she ever went out with one of them. Me ma says they’ll finish up drunkards like
their da and knock their wives about. Did ye never see the shiners he gives her? She does be black and blue all over, never
mind her eyes. And in any case Johnny has his heart set on being a boxer and getting outta here.’


Angel was flabbergasted. ‘Where do you get all your information?’ she asked, in a sarcastic tone to conceal her shock.

‘From my brothers,’ replied Mona, ‘so you’re wasting your time fancying him.’

After leaving Mona, while Angel was walking home she remembered ‘the wiles and ways’. Her mother had never explained properly
what they were, something about helping you to get a fella. She’d ask Aggie when she got in.


Aggie had been soaking her feet and was now paring a corn on her little toe with a cut-throat razor – the only thing her husband
had left behind when he went, apart from the newly conceived Angel. Angel kissed her mother’s cheek and asked if she’d like
a cup of tea. ‘I’m that thirsty I’d drink one off a sore leg. Were you with Mona?’


‘I was. We were talking.’

‘Sometimes I think that young wan’s too knowing. I hope she doesn’t be telling you things, filling your head with notions.
They’re a flighty lot, Mona and her sisters. Thanks, love.’ Aggie poured some of her tea into the saucer to cool it.


‘D’ye know, Ma, I was just thinking about them wiles and ways. Is it true if you’ve got them you could marry anyone you fancied?’

‘Oh, indeed it is. Them that’s got them has been known to marry kings and lords. And one was an orange-seller in the street.’

‘In our street, Ma?’ Angel was all agog.

‘Ah, no, it was in London in the olden days.’

‘But she became a queen?’

‘Well, no, because the King was already married. Maybe if he’d lived longer he might have married her. But her name was the
last word on his lips before he died. And many’s the one that did marry lords and gentlemen and lived happily ever after.’


‘What are they, these wiles and ways? You never said.’

‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. Like, it’s ways of doing things. The way you walk. Making eyes. All sorts of things.’
Aggie put down her cup and saucer on the fender and spread out her hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I don’t know for sure, except
that I haven’t and never did have them.’


‘Have I got them?’

‘Ah, sure, darlin’, you’re only a child still. Maybe when you grow up. And if you’re lucky to be blessed with them you can
have any man you choose. Anyone in the whole world. Certainly anyone in the village.’


Angel thought about Johnny Quinn and hoped he was the one she’d get.

‘Take, for instance, Danny. Now there’d be a grand husband. A little gentleman.’

Angel said nothing. As far as she was concerned, Danny was an old man. A nice old man, but old all the same.

Poor foolish Aggie went back to paring her corns and relating the news she’d heard in the village. There was talk of a strike.
‘Everyone in the city will be idle. If it comes off I could lose my bit of work.’ Angel, her thoughts still centred on Johnny,
wasn’t interested in strikes or whether her mother was in or out of work. In her mind’s eye, she was walking past the bike
shop having learned the wiles and ways. Johnny had noticed her, stopped her, and was pleading with her to go for a walk with
him. Her mother’s voice cut in on her dreams. ‘Would you ever empty the basin and then brush my hair? I’ve one of my headaches and the brushing always does the trick.’


Angel carried the basin to the half-door, looked to make sure no one was in the way, and threw the soapy water on to the pavement.

Aggie took down her hair. Thin and wispy it had once been the colour of Angel’s, but now little of the gold remained among
the ashy grey strands.


While Angel brushed it gently, Aggie talked. ‘Father Clancy says he’ll put in a word for you with Mrs Gorman. She’s looking
for a general and you’re nearly thirteen.’


‘Ah, but, Ma, I wanted to stay in school. Mother Imelda said I could be a monitor.’

‘I know that, love, and wouldn’t I have been the proud woman? But if this strike comes to a head and I lose the bit of work,
how would we manage? But I’ll tell you what, as a treat before you start work, we’ll go to Dublin for the day. A special treat.
We’ll have our tea out and I’ll take you to see the waxworks. That’ll cheer you up.’


‘Thank God, isn’t it a lovely day? It was like this the day you were born, thirteen years ago. The time does go that quick.
Lizzie, God be good to her, said you were as fair as a primrose. It was her that put the nickname on you. She said you were
like an angel.’ Aggie continued talking as she and Angel made their way to catch the tram into Dublin. She wanted to distract her daughter from brooding over starting work the following week. She was not aware that Angel’s
mind was occupied with Johnny Quinn, the fair that would come in September, and the boxing booth where he’d try his luck.
She was imagining him being beaten to a pulp or, worse still, winning and going out of her life for ever.


On the day that Aggie and Angel went to see the waxworks, Danny Connolly whistled as he went about the shop. His friend, Brian
Nolan, was coming to visit later in the evening.


They’d been in Gormanstown and had seen little of each other since their schooldays but for an occasional meeting in town
where they talked about old times, or whether the Home Rule Bill would ever see the light of day. Brian was a Redmond man
and believed the Bill would settle the Irish question. Danny was a nationalist and didn’t agree. Their arguments were lively
but never left any bad feelings.


Tonight, Danny thought, they’d have one of the liveliest with the strike brewing. If it came off, he’d be in for supplying
his customers with credit: they were decent, honest people and he wouldn’t see them short. He doubted that the strike would
last long – between most of the clergy who, in the name of religion, would side with the employers, and William Martin Murphy,
the biggest blood-sucking employer of them all, the strikers would get nowhere.


He blessed the day his father had opened the shop. He had left the tram company and, with a little money inherited from his
parents and some land in the country left to his wife, they’d taken the plunge and opened the shop. Many a time he’d heard his father talk of the struggle it had been to begin with, the never knowing from week to week
if you could make ends meet. ‘But we did. It was hard work, but with God’s help and a bit of luck we made it. I’m beholden
to no one and I’m my own master. That’s the great thing, Danny, always remember that.’


Aggie and Angel took the tram as far as Leonard’s Corner. ‘It’ll be a nice walk from here. Plenty to see,’ said Aggie, when
they’d dismounted. ‘Down there there’s lots of Jews living, over from a foreign country. Some of them don’t speak a word of
English. And another thing, a lot of the women wear wigs.’


‘Wigs,’ repeated Angel, her attention captured for the moment. ‘Are they baldy?’

‘Not really. After they get married their heads are shaved, so I believe. I knew a woman who used to work for them. She told
me. They’ve quare ways – don’t lift a hand of a Saturday because Saturday to them is like our Sunday.’


‘But we do plenty of a Sunday.’

‘We don’t sew or iron or anything that can wait till through the week.’

They turned on to the South Circular Road, and Aggie pointed out the Cock Church. ‘I suppose it’s got a real name,’ she said,
‘but that’s what it goes by.’


Angel’s thoughts had returned again to Johnny. She was wishing it was with him she was walking instead of her mother, holding
his hand, looking at the big redbrick houses, picking out the one they’d live in when they got married.


‘Are you tired, love? Maybe we should have gone on to the Green, only this way we saved twopence on the fare. You can have it for the penny bazaar. And Harcourt Street’s nice.’


They turned into it. The houses here were bigger than the ones on the South Circular Road – and Angel decided this was where
they’d live.


‘Over there’s the railway station. You can go from there to Bray. It’s a seaside place. I knew a woman who went there for
a day and never stopped talking about it. The most beautiful place, she said it was.’


‘When I grow up and am rich I’ll take you,’ Angel said, catching hold of her mother’s hand.

They began their walk down Grafton Street. From previous walks there, Angel identified shops and smells. ‘That’s the coffee
being ground in Bewley’s,’ she said. ‘And there’s the smell of the flowers from the dealer’s baskets and the perfume and powder
that the rich women passing by are wearing. This must be the most wonderful street in the whole world. A magic street.’


Sauntering on, Aggie drew Angel’s attention to Trinity College – ‘That’s where all the rich Protestants go, and over there’s
the Bank of Ireland.’


They walked down Westmoreland Street, crossed the road and stood on the bridge. The tide was in, and for a few minutes they
watched Guinness’s barges going down the Liffey. Angel asked what was in the barrels. ‘Porter going over to England,’ Aggie
replied. ‘It’s the best in the world. Ireland’s famous for a lot of things. Sackville Street’s the widest street in the world
and the Phoenix Park the biggest. Maybe for our next treat we’ll go there again, and to the zoo. You loved the zoo. I couldn’t
get you away from that cage with the black beast in it. What was its name?’


‘A panther.’

‘So it was. A queer name, that, for an animal. Still, I suppose it’s because it’s foreign. The penny bazaar’s not far now.
And we’ll go to the waxworks too, of course.’


A military band crossed Carlisle Bridge, the music, loud, rousing. A crowd of young boys followed it. ?