by Maeve Binchy
The Rector hid the painting, as instructed, as he sent Brother Harkin to repair Meadowfield’s car. But the stolen Caravaggio was not the only thing that Father Rector Jonathan Rynne was hiding. A thorough search of Aylesmere in the aftermath of the Caravaggio affair revealed a fascinating series of furnished wardrobes and cosmetics. No way was Dark Heart ever going to part with a painting that meant so much to her. She had to eliminate Meadowfield. The rest was history – or, at least, was on CCTV.
*
Alice sighed. She had hoped never again to use the gun with which she had shot Bruno Junior. And yet some old instinct of self-protection had made her report it to her superiors as stolen and then hide it in the toolbox of her car before she had enrolled in Doon Abbey.
She got up and began to dress in the grey, pre-dawn light. The convent was a far happier place now that Maggie was in charge, even if the Aurelian tradition of silence was still observed. Three more applications for novitiates had been received, thanks to the publicity around the return of the Caravaggio. The future for Doon Abbey had never been brighter.
Alice made her way down the marble staircase. Fifteen minutes still remained until the bell rang for lauds. She liked to walk alone around the cloister in the slowly growing light, in personal contemplation. Tucking each hand into the opposite sleeve of her habit, she stepped outside.
Almost immediately, she saw Maggie standing alone outside the door to the chapel. Maggie had made herself personally responsible for locking and opening the chapel, each evening and morning. Now she stood there, looking at Alice, her eyes round. Alice frowned. Maggie was pointing.
Alice saw that the chapel door was open. Maggie brandished the key.
Oh no, not again, Alice thought as she rushed into the cool space. She stumbled up the nave. The Caravaggio … was there. Thank God, Alice thought. So what was Maggie on about? Alice turned around. Maggie’s sign language indicated that when she had come down there five minutes before, the door to the chapel was open.
What? Alice mouthed.
Maggie mimed that she had walked in there, checked the picture was still in place, then proceeded towards the altar.
OK, Alice signalled.
Maggie opened the altar rail and acted out what she had done: climbed the steps to the altar, looked around.
‘And then?’ Alice asked with eyebrows and hands.
Last night the altar was bare, Maggie indicated, with clean sweeps of her palms.
But when I came in here five minutes ago, I found this.
Alice stared.
Maggie opened her fist.
A Claddagh ring lay there, two hands in gold enclosing a frail human heart.
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About the Authors
Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy’s best-selling novels have been translated into thirty-seven languages and have sold over forty million copies worldwide. Her first novel, Light a Penny Candle, was published in 1982. Several of her books have been adapted for cinema and television, most notably Circle of Friends and Tara Road. She was married to the writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell for thirty-five years, and died in 2012. www.maevebinchy.com
Peter Cunningham
Peter Cunningham is best known for his novels set in Monument, his fictional version of Waterford, where he grew up. The Sea and the Silence was awarded the Prix de l’Europe in 2013. Consequences of the Heart was shortlisted for the Kerry Listowel Writer’s Prize. His novel, The Taoiseach, was a controversial bestseller. He has written the Joe Grace series of thrillers under the name Peter Wilben. (www.peterwilben.com) He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish association of writers, musicians and artists. www.petercunninghambooks.com
Neil Donnelly
Neil Donnelly is best known for the plays, The Station Master, Upstarts, The Silver Dollar Boys, Chalk Farm Blues, Flying Home, The Duty Master and Butterfly.
Cormac Millar
Cormac Millar is the author of two crime novels, An Irish Solution (Penguin, 2004) and The Grounds (Penguin, 2006). As Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, he is a professor at Trinity College Dublin, and an academic author and translator. This was perhaps inevitable, given his family background. www.cormacmillar.com.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has published many novels, collections of short stories, books for children. She has won several literary awards, including the Stewart Parker Award for Drama, three Bisto Awards for children’s books, and the American Association of Irish Studies Butler Award for Prose. Her novel The Dancers Dancing was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
She is a member of Aosdána. www.eilisnidhuibhne.com
Mary O’Donnell
Mary O’Donnell is the award-winning author of fourteen books, including poetry and fiction. Her latest novel, Where They Lie, was described by the Irish Independent as ‘a timeless story of loss, grief and tribal loyalties’. Her fiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead literary journal (Canada), and many anthologies, including Phoenix Irish Short Stories, and The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction. She lectures in Creative Writing at NUI Maynooth and with Carlow University Pittsburgh. She is a member of Aosdána. www.maryodonnell.com
Peter Sheridan
Peter Sheridan is a leading figure in the Irish theatre. Among his plays are No Entry, Down All The Days (from the book by Christy Brown), The Liberty Suit (in collaboration with Gerard Mannix Flynn), Diary of a Hunger Strike and Finders Keepers. He has written two memoirs on his family, 44: A Dublin Memoir (nominated for an Irish Times Non-Fiction Literature award) and 47 Roses. His latest book, Break a Leg, was published in 2013 and is now also a stage play. He is a member of Aosdána.
Editor’s note
The idea for ‘Sister Caravaggio’, a novel written by seven writers, came about completely by chance. One morning a few years ago, I was having a coffee with Irish writers Mary O’Donnell and Neil Donnelly, when someone, I can’t remember who, said, ‘Can a group of people write a novel?’ We tossed the idea around. Easy enough to write the first chapter, or even the second, we all agreed; but what then? I suggested a Dublin criminal who chained the bodies of his victims to the floating foundations of a disused treacle factory. Nuns were mentioned. It sounded like an entertaining caper, albeit one of these projects that would never get off the ground. We all went home.
A few weeks later I was at lunch with Maeve Binchy in her cosy home in Dalkey, County Dublin. We had been friends for many years and during lunch we had been regaling each other with stories of our past annual golf outings in Tramore, County Waterford. Maeve wasn’t a golfer, but Gordon Snell, her husband, was, and is. We had formed a golf society of which Maeve was patron. I had provided a trophy, which was made from the mascot that had been on the bonnet of my grandmother’s car. Our golf society played one game, once a year, for the trophy, with extensive celebrations before and after.
Maeve suddenly asked me what I was working on. Maeve, whose mind was never still, required other writers, including those who were her friends, to have the same hard-working standards of readiness as herself when it came to their work. But that day, having just completed a novel, I was working on very little, an unacceptable state of affairs by Maeve’s standards. And so I told her of an idea that involved a number of writers each contributing a chapter to a novel. Maeve’s eyes narrowed.
‘Tell me more,’ she said.
Collaborative novels are highly unusual, for reasons that may be obvious, but which are worth mentioning nonetheless. Writing a novel is an intensely personal, lonely business, requiring dedication, patience and perseverance. The creators of fictional characters often spend years spinning out a story from a tiny
embryonic core, a miniscule idea that is nurtured painstakingly into adult life. Writers sometimes know the beginning, middle and end before they start; but how to deliver that in a form that someone will pay money to buy and read is the challenge. The expression, ‘everyone has a book in them’ may be true, but only few people can get that book out.
The idea, then, of a group of people embarking on such a notoriously difficult project can be fairly described as a challenge. But here I was, in Dalkey, outlining this crazy idea to a woman who had already sold forty million books. I found myself outlining the day to day life of a tiny religious community living in an old castle in County Kildare. How many nuns? Maeve asked. Five or six, I said. How do they survive? she asked. They have a small dairy herd, I replied. But, I added, someone left them a Caravaggio painting that hangs in their chapel and which tourists flock to see every year, paying ten euro a head for the privilege.
Up to that moment I’d never even thought of Caravaggio, but he suddenly seemed perfect. A real Caravaggio? Maeve asked. Well, a Caravaggio fragment, I replied. ‘What is it called?’ Maeve shot at me. ‘The Agony of Judas Iscariot,’ I answered as we hurtled along. One morning at dawn the nuns get up and enter their chapel to pray. The Caravaggio is gone. ‘That’s wonderful!’ Maeve cried.
‘Would you write a chapter?’ I asked her.
There was no hesitation. ‘I’m in,’ Maeve Binchy said.
There was no going back after that. Over the months that followed our group slowly came together. Peter Sheridan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and Cormac Millar joined Maeve, Mary, Neil and myself. I rang my friend, Dermot Bolger, who over a decade earlier had devised and edited the popular ‘Finbar’s Hotel’, also with seven writers; but ‘Finbar’s Hotel’ had consisted of seven stand-alone stories bound together only by the hotel in which they take place, and by the covers of the book. Dermot told me that he felt what I proposed would be, to put it mildly, difficult.
Novels evolve, but they evolve between the ears of one person. A writer knows usually knows how to get his character out of a tight spot before he puts him into it. In this case, the risk was that, without a plan, successive writers would find themselves beginning their chapters from tight spots which they’d no idea how to escape from. As the chapters began to come in, my overriding emotion was often dread, since I realised that no-one, me included, had the remotest idea what was going to happen next.
I spoke to Maeve about my worries and she encouraged me to plan the whole thing out in detail from beginning to end. She was right, there was no other way. Mary O’Donnell and I sat down and began to put a plan on paper. Mary is a talented writer, full of ideas, and has the ability to come up with the unexpected, just when it is needed. The idea of there being a hint of menace in the story emerged at that first planning meeting. After all, Caravaggio himself seemed to embody menace, as we discovered.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s short life – he died in 1610 at the age of 39 – was filled with controversy. In 1606 he killed a man in a tavern brawl and fled from Rome after the Pope himself issued his death warrant. Two years later, Caravaggio was involved in a similar incident in Malta. In 1609, in Naples, he narrowly escaped being murdered, and died a year later in Tuscany under suspicious circumstances. I went along to the National Gallery in Merrion Square to look at ‘The Taking of Christ’. It shows the moment when Judas Iscariot kisses Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and thereby identifies him to the Roman guards who are looking to arrest him. The Judas moment. Only the moon illuminates the scene. It glints from the armour of the soldiers and lights up Christ’s resigned face. Saint John flees the scene in terror. It is a powerful painting, full of menace and danger. It seemed to us, writing the book, that certain kinds of people would murder to get their hands on a Caravaggio. And that is exactly what happened.
But what about the nuns? I had spent my kindergarten years with nuns in Tramore, but apart from fond memories of Mother Monica, my mind was a blank. Did nuns still have to shave their heads? Was silence a rule of many such religious orders? And so, Mary, Neil Donnelly and myself went by arrangement to a Carmelite convent in Dublin where the very modern and helpful Sister Superior explained to us how present-day communities of religious orders, some with only a few members, go about their day-to-day lives. The tiny community of Doon Abbey in County Kildare slowly came to life.
We started the novel from the principle that we would not disclose who wrote which chapter of ‘Sister Caravaggio’, and we have kept to that decision. The reader will be able to decide for him- or herself from the style of the writing who wrote what. And even though each chapter was written to an overall plan, each author brought his or her own distinctive style and personality to bear, and invariably came up with highly unexpected and juicy plot twists. It was very exciting reading each new chapter as it came in. My job as editor was made a lot easier by the fact that I was working with six consummate professionals. Each writer delivered on time and with great virtuosity. It was fantastic fun. In one way, I wanted it never to end.
During the editing process, often every other week, I discussed the progress of ‘Sister Caravaggio’, as the novel came to be known, with one or more of the other writers, including Maeve. She was intensely involved, supportive, encouraging and helpful. She read the early drafts and made suggestions, as did the other writers.
The fact that collaborative novels like ‘Sister Caravaggio’ are almost unheard of appealed to Maeve Binchy. She was interested in the technical details that went into making a book with seven parents. She also enjoyed being one of the gang, and never wanted her role highlighted. She was a perfect team player. With everyone’s help, including Maeve’s, the book slowly took shape.
She would have enjoyed the great reaction the novel is getting around the world. She never imagined, I’m sure, that our conversation at lunch that spring day in Dalkey would result in the final novel that she would be involved in.
Peter Cunningham
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