Saturday's Child by Ruth Hamilton

steady as a rock. ‘Sure, we knew about Frank and Rachel, but we found out just today that you were about to learn the
good news. He’s a fine man.’
    ‘He’s a Protestant,’ spat Ernest.
    John decided to make no reply. His faith was simple; he differentiated between good and evil, but left room for all Christians to choose their own way through life and into the hereafter.
    ‘She’s too young for him,’ continued Ernest.
    ‘I’ve never thought age differences to be that important,’ answered John, ‘and as for religion, had she wanted to marry out, we would have supported her.’
    Ernest drew a deep breath. ‘My wife has gone,’ he stated baldly. ‘She knows my opinion, and she has taken off with Frank, to live with him and your daughter, I
suppose.’
    John nodded. ‘Aye, that’ll be the truth of it.’ He cast an eye over the man on the chair. ‘This’ll leave you in a merry pickle, I expect.’
    ‘Nothing merry about it,’ came the swift reply.
    ‘You only need to ask,’ said John Higgins.
    It was then that Ernest saw red. Here he sat like a begging dog, unable to achieve level eye contact with a man who represented all he despised. ‘You think you’re so clever,’
he said.
    ‘Do I now?’
    ‘Hiding this from me.’
    John leaned an arm against the door frame. ‘Can you imagine any one of us choosing to tell you, Mr Barnes? What sort of reception would we have got? My daughter is inside the house just
now, quaking in her shoes—’
    ‘So she has shoes?’
    ‘She does, so.’
    Ernest’s rage was surfacing. He took one of his sticks and drove the end of it into John’s stomach, pushing so hard that John fell inside the house, while Ernest, unsteadied by the
ferocity of his own movements, crashed backwards onto cobble stones. The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was a crowd of Higgins faces peering down at him.
    John stood up, his hands folded over a sore stomach. ‘Ernest needs the hospital,’ he told Sal.
    Rachel wept quietly in the kitchen doorway. Although she loved Frank Barnes with every fibre of her being, she was beginning to wonder how much trouble she was bringing on those she loved.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ she wept. ‘Is it worth it?’
    John looked at his wife, at his poor-but-clean home, at the holy palms above the fireplace next to a framed papal blessing. There was a little font of holy water inside the front door, a small
statue of the Infant King on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s worth it,’ he advised Rachel. ‘A good marriage is the best gift of all.’
    Sal smiled at him. ‘Thomas,’ she told their adopted son, ‘away now and fetch the ambulance for Mr Barnes. Dr Clarke will telephone for you. And tell the girls to put a blanket
over him, or he’ll be frozen stiff before he sees the hospital. Go with Thomas, Rachel. The rest of you – go out the back way for a while after you’ve covered up Mr
Barnes.’
    When they were alone, John sat next to his wife, took her hand in his. ‘I’ll never get to grips with this Catholic and Protestant stuff, all the persecutions and the sadness caused.
But I looked into that man’s face, Sal, and I saw a blind, boiling hatred for me and mine.’
    ‘Frightening,’ she answered.
    ‘Tell me again, Sal – as if I don’t know – why did Jesus come?’
    She giggled like a child uncertain of her catechism. ‘To save us,’ she said.
    ‘All of us?’
    Sal nodded.
    John squeezed her fingers gently in a fist that might have cracked a walnut wide open. ‘Then the ambulance must be got,’ he whispered, ‘so that even Barnes might have a
chance.’

Four
    He woke in a bed, his head sore and bandaged, the bad leg burning, an angel leaning over him. Had he died? No, the angel was familiar, one he had seen many times before. Where
was Dot? He would be needing his baccy and papers, clean pyjamas, decent food if his memory of hospital dinners served him right . . . Dot. Oh God, where was she? She was a fixture in his