‘Speaking of baths, have you ever tried to wash Scotty? He’s impossible!’ Aoife launched into a story about how she and Sam had tried to clean Sam’s dog, but Kitty wasn’t listening to the story. Instead she caught the quick glance between mother and daughter, her mother reaching for her daughter’s hand beneath the table.
Name Number Seven: Mary-Rose Godfrey
Story Title: The Proposee
After meeting with Mary-Rose, Kitty made her way to St Margaret’s Nursing Home to meet Birdie again. She enjoyed spending time with Birdie, loved her simple stories of years gone by, her elegance, her gentleness, her openness to everything around her. Kitty had spent more time with Birdie than with the other people on her list, but, listening back over the tapes, Kitty realised that there was one question that needed to be asked. The day was still bright and sunny despite coming into a chillier evening at six o’clock. Many of the nursing home inhabitants were outside sitting in the shade, which was where Kitty found Birdie, looking as elegant as usual, her feet resting on a pillow on a garden chair, her face lifted up to the heat, her eyes closed.
‘Hello, birthday girl,’ Kitty said gently, not wanting to surprise her.
Birdie’s eyes opened and she smiled. ‘Well, hello, Kitty. It’s lovely to see you again.’ She took her feet down from the chair. ‘It’s not quite my birthday yet,’ she said. ‘Not that I’ll be celebrating it. Eighty-five years old, can you believe it?’ She shook her head, unimpressed.
‘You don’t look a day over eighty,’ Kitty said, and Birdie laughed. ‘You are celebrating it somewhere, though, aren’t you?’ Kitty probed, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. It had been playing on Kitty’s mind for the past few days: where on earth was an eighty-five-year-old woman planning on spending her birthday if it wasn’t with her family, and she was intent on not telling them where she was going?
‘Well, no, I’m not exactly celebrating it.’ She removed an invisible piece of fluff from her skirt. ‘Isn’t it a smashing day?’
Kitty smiled, loving the challenge. ‘Your birthday is on Thursday, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll be somewhere other than here for your birthday?’
‘That’s right, I won’t be here, but we can meet again on Saturday or Sunday, if that suits you. Even Thursday morning will be fine but I’m afraid I’m probably boring you with all of these stories.’
Kitty smiled. ‘Birdie, can I ask, where are you going?’
‘Oh, it’s not important, Kitty, it’s just …’
‘Birdie,’ Kitty said in a warning tone, and Birdie finally cracked a smile.
‘You don’t take no for an answer, do you?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, all right. I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Kitty, and I do apologise.’
Kitty’s ears pricked up and her adrenalin surged. ‘Yes?’
‘But only because it’s a silly little thing and nothing you would want for your story.’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’
She sighed. ‘I told you that when I was a young girl I was very sick.’
‘You had tuberculosis.’
‘It was an incredibly fatal disease then. It was like being handed a death sentence. Four thousand people died from it every year.’ She shook her head. ‘There was a terrible stigma attached to it. I was only fourteen and was sent to a TB sanatorium on the edge of town where I stayed for six months before my father, God rest his soul, decided to take me out of there and go with me to Switzerland. They thought the fresh air would help me. After a summer my father got the position of headmaster and we moved back home, but with my poor health there was very little I could do. So many people died in those sanatoriums. But because of my condition, my father wrapped me up in cotton wool. He had plans for me, he was very controlling of me – who I played with, who I talked to, eventually who I loved.’ She looked sad at that. ‘Even when I was improved, he couldn’t change. I was his sick little girl, his youngest, and he wouldn’t, couldn’t, I suppose, let me go.’
She was silent.
‘This is so silly, Kitty.’
‘It’s not. Please tell me.’
‘I suppose I got used to being treated as if at any moment I could break. Not to run too fast, not to jump too high, not to laugh too loud, not to do anything too much, just take it nice and easy, but I never liked it. The whole town knew that I was the headmaster’s sick daughter and many of them thought the TB would come back. I was brittle, I was fragile, I was not to be treated the same. I was the one who could drop dead at any moment, the one who wouldn’t live to see her eighteenth birthday. When I moved away it broke my father’s heart but I needed my own space and my own identity. I forgot about all those feelings over the years as I got married, had my babies, reared my children, and I could look after people for a change. But I see that is all I did. As though it was my way of rebelling against my adolescence. I became a childminder and cared for other children, never wanted to be cared for in that way again.
‘But coming here to this place has brought it back to me. That feeling of …’ she thought about it and looked as though she’d a bad taste in her mouth ‘… of being mollycoddled. Of being powerless. My children, as beloved as they are, have almost written me off already. I’m old, I know that, but I still have fire in my belly. I’m still … alive!’ She chuckled at that. ‘Oh, if the village could see me now.’
When Birdie looked at Kitty, her eyes sparkled mischievously. ‘On my eighteenth birthday I made a bet. I used the birthday money my father had given me and on the day I left the village for ever I made a bet.’
‘What was the bet?’
‘That I would reach the age of eighty-five.’
Kitty’s eyes widened. ‘Can you make a bet like that?’
‘Josie O’Hara, the meanest man in town, had the bookies in his family for what seems like for ever. He thought I was on my way out, just like all the others, and he was only too happy to take the bet.’
‘How much money?’
‘I bet one hundred pounds. A lot of money back then. And so confident was the bookmaker on my demise that he gladly offered me odds of one hundred to one.’
‘So that means, to the bookie’s dismay, you’ll be collecting …’ Kitty calculated it.
‘Ten thousand pounds,’ chuckled Birdie.
‘Birdie!’ Kitty gasped. ‘That is phenomenal! Ten thousand!’
‘Yes,’ Birdie raised her eyebrows. ‘But it’s not just the money.’ She turned serious.
