Anne Bennett - If You Were the Only Girl

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Anne Bennett 2012

Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007359233

Ebook Edition © January 2013 ISBN: 9780007383702

Version: 2017-09-08

I would like this book dedicated to Judith Kendal in recognition of the many things she has done for me in our twenty-year friendship.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The Aftermath

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the same author

Keep Reading – If You were the Only Girl

About the Publisher

Lucy Cassidy saw Clara O’Leary for the first time that she could remember that dull Sunday morning in late October as they were leaving the Sacred Heart church in Mountcharles, County Donegal, after early Mass. Clara was her mother, Minnie’s, oldest friend.

‘Since we were girls,’ her mother had told Lucy. ‘Even after we married we were friends, and then when you were born just a fortnight after her daughter, Therese, we were so happy to be young mothers together.’

Then Clara’s husband, Sean, developed typhus. He was a strong man, however, and was fighting the illness, but Therese caught it from him, quickly grew very ill and died on Lucy’s birthday.

‘Every year I think of that,’ Minnie said. ‘Sean had got over the worst and was recovering, but at the death of his small daughter it was as if he had given up and a fortnight later he died too.’

‘And that’s when her brothers took Clara O’Leary back to England?’ Lucy would prompt, though she knew the story well.

‘After Sean’s funeral,’ Minnie said with a nod. ‘And she’s never been back until now. Of course, it was a terrible tragedy and I don’t think you ever really get over a thing like that.’

Lucy thought privately that Clara O’Leary looked as if she had got over it well enough, for she was so elegant. Only the few very rich in Mountcharles’s parish could afford such clothes as she wore. She even had fur mittens to match her hat. How Lucy, whose gloveless fingers would throb painfully in the winter months, envied her those. Clara’s grey melton coat had the same black fur around the collar and cuffs, and Lucy gave a little gasp when she caught sight of Clara’s warm-looking, snug-fitting boots. Any boots Lucy had were either too large or toe-pinchingly small, often leaky and always heavily cobbled. She looked down with a sigh at the battered boots that she had thrust her benumbed and stockingless feet into that morning before Mass.

Lucy could hardly believe that this woman was the same age as her mother. She looked years younger. She was a little plumper, and she had a kindly face with pink-tinged cheeks and bright blue eyes. Her hair wasn’t grey-streaked but dark blonde and caught up in an elaborately woven bun at the nape of her neck, fitting so tidily under the hat.

As Clara drew nearer, Lucy saw her blue eyes widen with surprise as her mother introduced all of them: Lucy herself, and Danny, who was two years younger than she was, her nine-year-old sister, Grainne, and her two young brothers, Liam and Sam, who were seven and five.

Clara, observing her friend’s eldest, wasn’t merely surprised, she was totally shocked because Lucy was so thin and small, the size of a child of ten or eleven. She had seen her standing with the others, but had assumed she was a younger sister to the child she remembered. Lucy’s tawny-coloured hair was thin and straggly, and her deep brown eyes stood out in a face that was so gaunt it was like looking at a very old woman.

Lucy shifted her feet a little at Clara’s scrutiny, well aware that though she was wearing the smartest clothes that she possessed, her coat was far too short, the sleeves barely reaching her bony wrists, and she had a struggle to fasten it across her chest. Beneath the coat was a thin dress, which was also far too short, and with all the goodness washed out of it, totally unsuitable for the weather, even with the threadbare, darned cardigan she wore over it.

Clara took all this in, noting as well how the arms and legs of all of the Cassidy children were stick thin, and pity washed over her. But she pushed it away before she addressed herself to Lucy in a cheery way. ‘Well, well, Lucy, I last saw you as a toddler, running and tumbling about the place, and here you are, almost a young lady. You will be fourteen now, won’t you, my dear?’

Lucy gave a little bob of her knee and tried to smile at the woman her mother set such store by, and it tore at Clara’s heartstrings as she said, ‘Yes, Mrs O’Leary, just last week.’

Clara knew that Minnie’s husband, Seamus, had died six months before, for the old friends wrote to each other often, and Clara knew too that she should have come home and not just sent a Mass card, but she never dreamt that the family would be reduced to such penury so quickly. She also had a sense of unease when she saw the shabby state of the sparse cottage, which was none too warm, though Minnie soon poked new life into the fire and threw on more turf, causing a flickering glow to develop under the porridge she had left cooking in a large double pan.

‘Take off your coat,’ she said to Clara, ‘or you’ll not feel the benefit when you go out – Lucy will lay it on the bed in the room – and then come up and sit here before the fire. I will have it ablaze in a moment.’

Clara did as she was bid and watched Minnie swinging the kettle above the heat of the fire as she took the porridge pan off the hook. Clara was shaken by how little of the thin porridge was ladled into the children’s bowls laid ready. Minnie had none herself but she made tea for them both.

‘And I have some soda bread too,’ she said. ‘It would be a poor day altogether when someone is offered a bare cup of tea in my house.’

Lucy’s mouth watered at the thought of soda bread spread with butter, for the porridge did little to fill her up. She knew that’s all there was, though, and she suppressed the sigh and watched her mother making tea and slicing and buttering the precious loaf.