Annie O’Prey jumped up to look through the nets herself.
Most families on the four streets lived in the back of the house and used the back entry and gates. Not Annie and Molly. They both preferred the front. They liked to see what was happening and just who was visiting who, and this was by far the best place to do it. Molly had placed a folded-down dining table in front of the net curtain, with an aspidistra pot plant in the middle and a chair on either side providing an excellent and unhindered view of who came and went. This was where they both had a cup of tea whilst they did an hour’s knitting, most afternoons. On fine days, they took the chairs outdoors and sat on the pavement underneath the window.
‘Oh, my giddy aunt,’ exclaimed Annie, putting her hand over her mouth in shock as she watched Alice pushing the pram, with Kathleen and Nellie behind, crossing into the entry again. ‘Do you think they killed the father, Molly?’
‘What? Kathleen? No, you silly cow. How could she do that? It would have taken more than a handbag or a hairpin to take his bloody langer off. No, I don’t think she killed him, but there is something very suspicious about the comings and goings at number nineteen and that’s a fact.’
‘Did you say that to the policeman when he was here?’ Annie’s voice was loaded with suspicion.
‘I might have done,’ said Molly in a tone that invited no further questions.
Both women picked up their knitting. There was nothing more to see, but the fact that Molly Barrett’s cat had played a part in detecting the murder imbued in her an inflated sense of responsibility. Molly, via her cat, was now involved. She had told the police she would tell absolutely no one, not even Annie, of the fact that she was now officially helping them with their enquiries and had promised to maintain a vigilant watch on the comings and goings across the road.
As Kathleen, Alice and Nellie walked in through Maura’s back door, the kettle began to whistle on the range. Maura jumped up to fill a large metal teapot that she placed on the table, along with the milk jug and the cups and saucers. She had been dreading this moment, but she knew there was no alternative. Kitty had to be told.
Kathleen was glad to be getting on with what they had to do. She couldn’t explain it with any degree of meaning to any of them but she was weighed down with an overwhelming sense of urgency. It was her gift, helping her, and she knew she had to move fast. The appearance of Bernadette in her dream last night, doing exactly what she had done on the night of the murder – urging Kathleen along, pushing her, faster – had not left her thoughts throughout the day.
As they drank their tea and sat round the table chatting, Nellie looked out of the window over the kitchen sink, steamed up from the boiling kettle.
There she was. Nellie knew she was somewhere, she could sense it. She could see her outside, standing in the yard, looking in. Nellie knew it was her mother, Bernadette. She had seen her often since she was a child and the visions didn’t scare her. She never told Kathleen or Alice.
She felt Bernadette’s love so strongly that she could have scooped it up in her arms and held on to it.
Bernadette never missed her birthday. Nellie would enter her bedroom and be overcome by a heady smell of flowers. There were no flowers anywhere in the house. None even within a mile of the four streets. Nellie knew it was her mother, the woman no one ever talked about, not even her da.
Nellie didn’t always see Bernadette. Sometimes she could only feel her. On the night Nellie had been discharged from hospital following the accident when she and Kitty had been knocked down, she had been curled up on her da’s knee, reading the paper with him in front of the fire, when Bernadette came, or at least the feeling did.
As she arrived, her presence washed over them, gradually at first and then wrapped around them both. As Nellie rested her head on her da’s chest, she looked at Jerry and they smiled. They hugged one another tightly and watched the flames leaping in the fire, not making a sound nor moving a muscle, not wanting to scare Bernadette away. And then she left slowly, in gentle waves, just as she had arrived, until she was with them no more.
Jerry softly kissed the top of Nellie’s head and she felt his hot tears drip through her hair onto her scalp.
Nellie knew her da still missed Bernadette and that, when she joined them in these special moments, it was painful for him, even though she had died on the day Nellie was born.
Nellie knew that if she looked away from the kitchen window now, Bernadette would disappear in a flash. Her eyes began to water – she was scared to blink.
‘What are ye gawping at, miss?’ said Nana Kathleen, swivelling round on her chair to see what it was that Nellie was staring at.
She blinked. Bernadette left, leaving Nellie alone again.
Maura, timorously, began to speak.
‘Kitty, we have a problem, child, and it is something we need to talk about and sort out before we tell Daddy. He will be distraught when I tell him the news and so we must be well prepared, so we must.’
Maura began to cry. She was never going to get through this.
Her Kitty. Maura had dreamt of her daughter taking the veil. Kitty, who was like another mother in the house, so good was she with all the little ones. With two sets of twin boys, Maura found life hard and Kitty had eased her burden by half.
But Maura wasn’t selfish. She didn’t want to keep Kitty to herself. She wanted to share her with God and thereby elevate the status of the Doherty household above that of her neighbours. Maura craved status; in fact she craved anything that would reward the family for her endeavours. She longed to be looked up to and, indeed, many a less holy neighbour already did look up to Maura. If there was a problem on the streets it was Maura or Nana Kathleen they went to. But that wasn’t enough. Maura wanted one of the Doherty clan to do something, to be someone. She yearned for her household to be set above and apart from the others. What could achieve this more than having a child become a nun or a priest?
She had prayed about sharing her children with God. About giving God back some of the issue with which she and Tommy had been blessed.
Kitty had been shared with God.
Just not in the way Maura had prayed for.
Maura knew that what she now struggled to say to Kitty flew in the face of every motherly instinct. Earlier in the day she had questioned Kathleen.
‘Once I have spoken those words, there will be no going back, Kathleen. Are we sure?’
‘Aye, Maura, we are sure, queen. I wish to God we weren’t and I have prayed that every day you would run up this entry to tell me Kitty was started, but you haven’t. There is no use us putting it off any longer or denying it: the child is with child, God help us, so she is.’
Now that they were here and the time had come, Maura lacked the strength to speak. Her mouth felt as though it were stuffed full of wool and the words she had rehearsed so well were lodged somewhere deep in her throat. The tears began to pour uncontrollably down her cheeks.
Everyone round the table stared at her expectantly, but she couldn’t make out their alarmed expressions as their faces swam in a blurred haze through her tears.
Maura was weak. She was lost. Events had knocked the stuffing right out of her and she was as close to done for as it was possible to be.
Nana Kathleen decided it was time to take over. Twenty years older than Maura, Kathleen had also been crushed by events but it was not her daughter who was about to suffer. They were her closest friends facing a problem to which there was almost no answer.
Nellie sensed something utterly catastrophic was about to take place.
Had they all stopped breathing? They had. They had.
Fear gradually wrapped its icy tendrils around Nellie’s heart and slithered down into the pit of her stomach. Under the table, she slipped a hand across and met Kitty’s, searching for her own.
For a heartbeat of a moment, a drumroll of domesticity filled the silent kitchen.
Maura’s gentle sniffling into her hankie.
The
click of Alice’s knitting needles.
The tick-tock from the clock and the slow, repetitive drip from the tap pinging onto an enamel bowl in the sink.
As the coal burnt in the fireplace, it hissed and spat in accompaniment to the slow bubbling simmer of a pan of broth, warming on the range.
Kitty looked at Nana Kathleen and knew that whatever she was about to say had something to do with the night the priest had raped her in her hospital bed. Nothing had been the same since. Then, after years of abusing her, he had elevated his depravity to a new level and was about to do it again in her own bedroom when all were at the Irish centre and dancing at a wedding. But Nana Kathleen had caught him and then the priest was found murdered. He had never bothered her again.
Kitty had been stunned by the reaction of her da. She thought he was going mad with the rage. Tommy, normally mild-mannered and gentle and who loved them all to distraction, had been torn apart by the knowledge that the priest had been helping himself to his precious daughter, in his own house.
The man they had trusted above all others – the Holy Father of the community, whom everyone revered as though he were God himself – had abused their trust. And Tommy, whose only job was to protect and provide for his family, had let down his first-born and closest in a way he could never have imagined, not in his very worst nightmares.
Just when Kitty had thought the horrors of the past were about to fade, she had now begun to throw up every morning and most of the day.
Kitty really couldn’t remember normal any more.
Kathleen found the words hard. Kitty was still only fourteen but she looked just twelve and, sure, wasn’t that the reason Kitty and Nellie got on so well? Kitty was still an innocent little child, hesitant to embrace her teenage years, while Nellie, having faced adversity at such a young age, was older and wiser than most.
‘Kitty, my lovely one,’ said Kathleen in a soft voice.
She rubbed the top of Kitty’s hand, a thin, pale hand of innocence, held in a plump, warm hand of wisdom.
Kathleen raised her gaze and looked her straight in the eye.
She wanted Kitty to fully understand each and every word she was about to say. There was no room for ambiguity once it was spoken out loud.
All eyes rested on Nana Kathleen.
Kitty waited. Mouth open. Licked dry lips. Heart beating.
Tense expectancy cast a spell and drew them in closer.
‘Kitty, we have to tell ye important news, my darlin’. Ye need to know now. We cannot keep this in the dark any longer. Yer mammy and I, we are very sure ye is having a babby.’
She held Kitty’s hand more tightly.
‘Ye is pregnant with the priest’s child and we have to decide what we are going to do about it.’
All eyes were on Kitty and silently they witnessed the moment when her childhood died.
‘No,’ she screamed loudly, as she dropped Kathleen’s and Nellie’s hands, pushing the chair away and staggering backwards towards the range – desperately needing to put as much space as she possibly could between herself and what Kathleen had said.
Space, so that the words would not touch her, but would fall to the floor and shatter before they reached her. Space, to protect and save her.
But the words had been spoken. They were crawling all over her, already inside her, screaming in her head, piercing her heart.
It was too late. No escape. She had become what the words had made her.
‘A baby? Oh God, Mammy, no, not me. I can’t!’ She looked to Maura with her hand outstretched.
And then they all died a little as Kitty howled with both her hands clutching at her abdomen as though testing to see if Kathleen were telling the truth.
Everyone in the room began to cry, even Alice.
But Kitty knew. As the words slowly filtered deeper and settled into place, she knew. She had seen Maura and other women on the street in the same situation often enough. Her mind was recoiling. Her heart sank and the fight, which had quickly flared up in her, took its leave and left.
It was true. Really, she already knew.
Within seconds, Maura was at her side, shaken out of her stupor by Kitty’s distress. Her child needed her.
Kitty made a sound like that of an animal in pain as they stood and rocked together, Maura absorbing Kitty’s agony, holding her upright.
Kitty, in her torment, provided Maura with a reason not to fall apart.
Nellie hadn’t moved from her chair and had begun to cry quietly to herself, stunned by the news and shedding her own tears for the loss of Kitty’s childhood.
Alice had jumped up and was making another pot of tea while Kathleen began washing the pots in the sink. Ordinary tasks, ushering normality back into the room.
Kathleen could hear Joseph stirring in the large box Maura used as a baby basket. Kitty’s crying had woken him. Time to put things back on an even keel, she thought, as she watched Alice pick him up to change his nappy. Now, as she dried the wet cups and saucers, Kathleen felt a sense of relief that Kitty now knew.
Kathleen had won at the bingo twice this month. The money had been placed straight into the bread bin with the money she was paid for reading the tea leaves at her kitchen table on a Friday morning.
She was not short of money. Joe had been a clever and hard-working farmer and they had done well, because they were careful and had saved. Now Kathleen spoke again.
‘Sit down now, Kitty,’ she said kindly. ‘Nothing can alter the facts, but we have to find a way to deal with them.’ She gestured towards a chair at the kitchen table. ‘Ye may be pregnant, Kitty, but really, ’tis our problem too. We will sort it and don’t ye worry about a thing. This is one for the grown-ups.’
Kitty’s crying subsided and an expression of desperate gratitude flooded her face.
‘Maura, pull yourself together now. It could be worse, the child isn’t dying.’
Kathleen knew the worst was over. Now they had to plan.
Nellie jumped up to help her nana and put the teapot on the table. Alice had Joseph in her arms. His little face lit up at the sight of Nellie and Kitty, now sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, with Nellie’s arm round Kitty’s shoulders.
Alice walked over to the range to fetch Joseph’s bottle, which she had placed to warm on a range shelf. She pulled up her sleeve and shook the milk onto her bare elbow to test it was the right temperature and then sat amongst them to feed him.
The atmosphere was subdued. The only noise was the sound of Joseph sucking and the snuffles of his blocked nose.
Kathleen began to talk.
‘Kitty, I have an idea if ye can just hear me out. I don’t think we should tell the men just yet. I don’t think we should tell anyone. What we need is some time to think about how we are going to manage this. What about if I take you and Nellie away back home to Ireland to the farm for a little holiday and try to think of a plan from there? What do ye think, girls? Would ye like that? We can go when the school breaks up for the holiday in a couple of weeks.’
Amazingly, both the girls smiled. Even Kitty. The excitement of a holiday together had for a few seconds wiped out the shock of Kitty’s pregnancy.
Kitty had never had a holiday. It would be her first.
‘Let’s run upstairs now,’ whispered Nellie to Kitty. Nellie had visited the farm many times. She wanted to share every detail with Kitty, in private.
‘Holy Mother, Kathleen, would ye look at them smiling,’ said Maura. ‘It’s a fairground ride of emotions all right.’
Alice began to pack up the pram. She had her own ideas about what to do.
‘Have ye thought of an abortion?’ she whispered to Maura and Kathleen, so that the girls upstairs didn’t hear. ‘You can get one easily. The chambermaids at the Grand used to go to a woman on Upper Parliament Street.’
No sooner had the words fallen from her lips than Alice felt bad. When first pregnant with Joseph, she had visited the same woman, though she had baulked at the offer
of surgery. She had witnessed some of the chambermaids return to work in agony and be laid up for days. One girl had been taken into the Northern hospital after having an abortion and had never been seen again. Alice had no idea what had happened to her, but she knew she had been very ill. That was the old Alice.
The Alice who couldn’t have cared less.
Alice, shamefully, had taken various concoctions and potions. But to no avail. Joseph was determined to make his entrance and look at him now. None of them could remember life before he had arrived.
However, this was different. Kitty was a child, and Kathleen was right. Her growing belly was a danger to them all.
Maura turned pale at the mere mention of the word abortion. Maura, who had wanted her daughter to become a nun, was now having to discuss whether or not Kitty should commit the biggest mortal sin imaginable, that of taking a life.
A second life.
A second murder.
My God, what and who had they become?
‘Do ye think I want two murderers in the family, Alice? Do ye not think one is enough?’ she hissed back coldly. The old animosity between Alice and Maura was never far from the surface.
Neither of them could quite forget the closeness there had been between Maura and Bernadette.
‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Alice. ‘It just seemed like a good idea to me. And a quick solution too.’
‘Aye, well, I think not. It only seems a good idea to you, Alice, because ye don’t have the faith. No abortionist is sticking a dirty coat-hanger up my daughter. That’s the path to three lives lost.’
Maura wanted to stop this loose talk of an abortion as quickly as possible and shouted up the stairs for Kitty to come down.
Alice looked to Kathleen, who put her finger to her lips.
The recovery of Alice had been a welcome one, but Kathleen could see that, with each day, her new boldness brought a fresh challenge.
‘The offer of a holiday for Kitty is a kind one, Kathleen,’ said Maura, walking back to the table, ‘and one I will accept gratefully.’
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