the bag and pull out the shawl, but even wrapped tight around her, it did nothing for the icy dread that seemed to be seeping all through her body.
‘Are you sure your sister won’t mind me just landing on her?’ she asked at last.
‘No,’ McAllister said confidently. ‘I have explained it all in a letter that I will give you to show her. Big sister Gwen refuses me nothing.’
‘You might be a better man if she had a time or two,’ Aggie was tempted to say, but she bit back the retort. There was little point in annoying McAllister at this late stage, particularly when she needed information. So instead she said, ‘And what about getting rid of the baby and all? Will she know someone?’
‘Course she will,’ McAllister said. ‘You won’t be the first person she has helped, not by a long chalk. Everyone in the area knows her. Her name isn’t McAllister but Halliday, Gwen Halliday, for she was married. She lives in Varna Road now in a place called Edgbaston. That’s not far at all from New Street Station in Birmingham city centre.’
‘Her husband might have something to say about me just turning up,’ Aggie said, ‘however lax Gwen seems to be.’
‘Oh, the old man is dead and gone now,’ McAllister said. ‘She was left with the one son to rear but he’s grown up too. See, Gwen is twelve years older than me and was more of a mother to me than my own ever was. She won’t let me down, never fear.’
‘Won’t she be shocked that this is your child that I am having to get rid of?’
‘Why should she be?’ McAllister said. ‘She knows what men and woman get up to. The prostitutes working the area were forever seeking her out. Can’t work if they have kids hanging on to them, can they now?’
Aggie had never been so shocked in the whole of her life. ‘Does she know prostitutes?’ she said.
In Buncrana such things just didn’t go on, but everyone knew that prostitutes were the very dregs of society.
McAllister laughed. ‘Time for you to grow up, little girl,’ he sneered. ‘When our father died, Gwen was fifteen and there were six mouths to feed. With my mother gone to pieces altogether, Gwen went on the streets to prevent us all starving to death. She eventually married one of the punters. Our mother had died by then too, and as I was the youngest she took me in to live with her and her husband. Then when she was widowed, she went back out on the streets again to provide for her son. That’s how it is.’
Aggie mouth dropped open. She had never been so shaken in the whole of her life. Surely that wasn’t really how things were, not in normal, respectable society.
‘What price is virtue, Agnes?’ McAllister went on. ‘Especially if the alternative is starving to death?’ He gave a wry laugh and added, ‘Not that Philomena knows any of this. She would react very much as you did, shocked to the core of her Roman Catholic soul. She doesn’t know much about my earlier life at all. She met Gwen just the once, at our wedding, and they never really hit it off. I used to visit Gwen on my own after that.’
‘I am not surprised they didn’t hit it off,’ Aggie said, her lip curling in distaste. ‘Your wife is an honest and decent woman. You talk about women choosing to go with men for money as if it is just a job like any other.’
‘So it is.’
‘How can you say that? Aren’t there normal jobs for people?’
‘Jobs are often few and far between,’ McAllister said. ‘And if you should get one, it will usually be backbreaking work for long hours, and all you pick up at the end of the week is a pittance of a wage. Gwen didn’t want that sort of life and I don’t blame her.’
Aggie was silent. She wondered what sort of place she was going to at all where things totally alien to her seemed almost commonplace. What sort of woman was this Gwen, whom she would be forced to rely on? The apprehension in her increased. However, it was too late now for doubts and second thoughts. The die was cast.
McAllister delivered Aggie to Derry Station, but could not take time to stay with her because he had to get the horse back to Buncrana before the place was astir. Aggie understood his concern, even shared it, and yet it was hard to see him disappear into the darkness. The waiting room was open so there was shelter from the wind at least, but inside the dark was so intense Aggie thought a person could almost touch it. She was so cold her teeth chattered and she couldn’t remember being as scared in the whole of her life.
For a time she sat on the wooden bench running around the walls, aching with cold and fear, but eventually, worn down by weariness, she lay down on the bench, drew her legs under her, and with her shawl wrapped about her she closed her eyes.
She woke stiff and colder than ever, and noticed straight away that the darkness was not so deep. She pulled herself to her feet and began to walk briskly around the small room, slapping herself with her arms to get the blood flowing as she watched light steal into the day. Already she would have been missed at home, but her parents would know no more than that, because Tom would never betray her.
She wondered what they would think, for she’d spoken the truth when she’d told McAllister that she hadn’t a penny piece to bless herself with. She wondered how long it would be until her mother noticed the missing clothes and would guess that she had run away. Mammy would be perplexed for she would know that Aggie had nowhere to run to.
Would McAllister betray her? She doubted that. There was one other person, though, that would, at the very least, be aware that McAllister hadn’t slept in his bed that night and that was Philomena. When the news that she had run away from home became common knowledge, would she put two and two together? Would she challenge him or, heaven forbid, tell her parents of her suspicions?
Would they call out the Garda and could they make her return home if they found her? She imagined they probably could, and that thought made her feel colder than ever. She wouldn’t feel totally safe until a stretch of water separated her from her parents.
It seemed an age until other people began arriving at the station and the ticket office opened. Aggie was then able to spend some of McAllister’s money and make her way to the platform where the train lay waiting. There were few travelling that February morning, but those on the train were curious about such a young girl travelling alone.
Aggie knew they would be and she had her story ready. She told them she was to take up service in one of the big houses near Birmingham in England. As she told the lies she thought that in the end that might be the truth because when this was all over – provided she survived, of course – she had to have a job and place to live. Being in service seemed as good as any other employment.
‘Why Birmingham?’ one woman asked, while another commented that she was young to travel so far alone.
There again Aggie had her answer. Her brother worked in Birmingham, she said, and would be meeting her off the train at the other end and taking her to her place of work. The women were only slightly mollified, but Aggie knew how delighted she would be if the tale she had delivered had been the truth.
She was glad of the women’s concern for her, though, when they reached the mail boat straining against the ropes that secured it to the dock side for she was scared as well as a little excited to be boarding it. But the excitement fled when the boat was on the move, tossed from side to side by the turbulent waves, making Aggie feel so sick she vomited over and over till her stomach ached and her throat felt raw.
‘You’ll likely get used to it,’ one of the women told her.
‘Aye,’ said another. ‘Sure, wasn’t I just the same when I went over first? Now I take it in my stride as you will, cutie dear.’
Aggie gazed at her through bleary eyes. She could not remember feeling this ill since she had had the measles, and she had the feeling she could never get used to the crossing. Anyway, she told herself, she wouldn’t have to get used to it; the chances were that she would never see the shores of Ireland again. Maybe some day she might regret that, but at that moment all she could feel