The Ballymara Road

by Nadine Dorries

  Tommy had promised that tomorrow he would take him into town on the bus, to the second-hand bookshop on Bold Street, to see whether there was anything suitable for him. The new library, being built alongside a new children’s nursery on the bombed-out wasteland, was only halfway through construction. Harry was possibly the only child on the four streets to have lost sleep with excitement at the thought of having an endless supply of books at hand and no longer having to beg them from the sisters, or explain why he wanted something other than the bible or a prayer book.

  ‘Make sure you choose the biggest book they have, if they are all the same price. It will last longer,’ Maura had said when Tommy had made the suggestion early that morning.

  Maura had never read a book in her life.

  Neither Harry nor Tommy commented, but Harry saw the little smile reach the corner of his da’s mouth as, once again, he gave Harry that wink. The wink that told Harry: they were united, father and son. A team. Together.

  Paddy had persuaded Harry to watch him playing footie on the green with his brothers and the rest of the local boys. Harry’s asthma meant that he couldn’t join in, but he enjoyed watching. Harry looked up at Little Paddy and nodded.

  ‘Go on then. You look as though you will explode if I don’t listen to whatever gossip it is ye have now. Although God knows, Paddy, it always gets you into trouble with ye da and I have no notion how it is ye get to know all these things.

  Little Paddy needed no further encouragement. He was now unstoppable. He jumped from foot to foot on top of the stone and spoke at double his natural speed.

  ‘There’s a new priest arriving at the Priory. His name is Father Anthony and he has said that he is going to get to the bottom of who killed Father James, so help him, God.’

  Little Paddy roared the ‘so help him, God’ bit, and raised his fist to the sky and dropped his voice an octave to mimic an older man.

  Little Paddy continued, ‘Mammy went to the Angelus mass last night at St Oswald’s and she heard it herself from Annie O’Prey. Sister Evangelista has asked Annie to give the Priory a good dusting before they arrive and to be the new cleaner, now that Daisy has gone. She’s to help the new father’s sister, Harriet, who is coming to look after him and protect him from murderers. Annie is taking over from Daisy, so she is, and she’s right pleased about it, too. And there’s more. They think Daisy has gone missing, so she has, and never got off the boat in Dublin, or met her brother.’

  Harry was now impressed. This was serious news, but he also knew his mother’s chagrin at Peggy’s having heard first would know no end, especially as it concerned the arrival of the new priest.

  His mother was always the first with gossip from the church, her being so holy. Before the murder of Father James, followed by Kitty leaving so suddenly to visit Ireland on her far-too-long-for-Harry’s-liking holiday, his mammy had never missed the Angelus. With her being the most religious mother in the street, she would surely have had that gossip first.

  Twilight was falling. Both boys lapsed into silence as they looked across the misty graveyard towards the Priory. Harry felt an icy shiver run down his back as the lights in an upstairs window flicked on and then off again, as the night closed in.

  Downstairs, in the Priory basement kitchen, Annie O’Prey was almost on the edge of hysteria. Sister Evangelista was trying her best to calm her down.

  ‘Jaysus, it was there, so it was, on the kitchen table. I went upstairs for no longer than five minutes to light the fire in the study. I came back down and the chicken was gone. What am I to do if I have no food ready for the new father and his sister? What kind of welcome to the streets would that be, now?’

  Sister Evangelista was relieved that a new priest was arriving and that his spinster sister was accompanying him to act as his housekeeper. They had left Dublin that morning and were expecting to be welcomed with a quiet supper at the Priory, with a full meal at the convent with the sisters the following night.

  Sister Evangelista had been glued to the phone since Christmas Eve. As yet, she had told only the few nuns she could trust that the previous housekeeper, Daisy, had failed to meet her family at the port in Dublin. Daisy’s brother and his wife were convinced that Daisy had never boarded the boat at Liverpool. But Sister Evangelista knew better. Miss Devlin, a teacher at the school as well as a good friend to the convent and to Daisy, had put her on the boat herself. She had even asked two elderly ladies to look after her, until they berthed in Dublin, so they knew she had caught the ferry. Neither of them had a good Christmas, worrying about Daisy’s whereabouts.

  What was more, the bishop had been less than sympathetic. He had even shouted at Sister Evangelista down the phone and since then she had refused to talk to him again.

  ‘Take a hold of yourself, Sister, you are like a hysterical farm girl from the country,’ he had said. ‘Take charge of your senses and stop yerself from turning everything into a crisis, when none exists, will ye? I am fair exhausted with the carryings-on at St Mary’s. Father Anthony and his sister will arrive shortly, so just leave it all to him. And remember, ye tell him nothing of what ye found in the Priory, before Father James was murdered by whoever it was who savaged the poor man, do ye hear me?’

  She had heard him all right. Having discovered in the Priory, following his death, the father’s dirty secret and a heap of filthy photographs of young children, she wasn’t so sure she would describe him as a poor man any longer. She had also heard the bishop singing a different tune altogether regarding the arrival of Father Anthony, who had been sent directly to Liverpool from Rome via Dublin.

  The Pope was none too keen on his priests being murdered and their private parts dismembered. So the Vatican had taken Father James’s replacement out of the hands of the bishop, who had been incensed from the minute he was told the news.

  ‘Apparently, Father Anthony has been at the Vatican for a number of years and is very well known and trusted. Seems to me the Pope knows exactly what he’s doing and, regardless of what the bishop says, I am mightily grateful for the Vatican’s intervention,’ Sister Evangelista had told Miss Devlin, the teacher at the school.

  Sister Evangelista had been made very angry by the bishop’s tone. There had been two murders, not one: Father James and their neighbour, Molly Barrett, who had been found in her own outhouse with her head caved in. Sister Evangelista had had to beg the bishop to visit Liverpool and take some responsibility, but had been bitterly disappointed. He had been no help at all, leaving Sister Evangelista to deal with the police single-handed. It was not until she found the disgusting photographs in Father James’s desk that the bishop had bothered to visit the Priory. As she had confided to Miss Devlin, this was all very strange behaviour indeed.

  ‘Sure, he was never away from the Priory when the father was alive. Now that he is dead and we need the bishop’s assistance, I’m having to beg. That is a sad situation altogether.’

  Miss Devlin had agreed, but the bishop had been put there for one purpose only, to be obeyed, and neither of them felt inclined to challenge his authority.

  Sister Evangelista once again felt a familiar sense of helplessness and isolation. Father James’s housekeeper, Daisy, was missing and the bishop just couldn’t care a jot. And after all the trouble she had taken to follow his precise instructions for Daisy’s safe journey to Dublin.

  So much had happened in the aftermath of the two murders that Sister Evangelista had found herself struggling yet again. When she heard that Father Anthony and his sister Harriet would be arriving to lead the church, she had dropped to her knees in relief to give thanks to God.

  Another welcome pair of shoulders to carry the burden of upholding the authority of the Church in the parish of a murdered priest.

  The devil had brazenly strutted down their streets and Sister Evangelista was convinced that she was possibly the only person in the whole world who knew why.

  Maura let herself in through Nana Kathleen’s back door, to find Nellie washing
the dishes, Kathleen rolling out her boxty on the kitchen table and Joseph snoozing in his pushchair.

  Maura smiled at Nellie, the child whose birth had taken the life of Bernadette, Nellie’s mother and Maura’s best friend, and who was up to her elbows in soapsuds.

  ‘You all right then, Nellie?’ Maura asked.

  ‘That poor Nellie,’ Maura had said to Tommy in bed only the night before. ‘First her mammy dies and then her stepmother runs away with the father of one of her best friends, leaving the little lad behind for her and Nana Kathleen to look after. What child deserves that, eh, Tommy? What next? Nothing, God willing, because that child can’t take much more. She has lost enough.’

  Tommy pulled Maura to him. ‘No one was closer to our Kitty than Nellie, that’s for sure. She will be missing Kitty badly, so she will. Ye can’t worry about everyone, Maura. Once our Kitty is home and Nellie has her friend once more, they will both be back to normal.’

  Within seconds Tommy had fallen into a deep sleep, but Maura lay awake into the small hours, worrying about everyone and everything but most of all about Kitty, whose secret baby was to be delivered at the Abbey mother-and-baby home in Galway. Almost no one, other than those closest to her, knew.

  No one on the four streets, not even nosy Peggy next door, had suspected what had really happened to Kitty, or why.

  ‘I’m grand, thank you, Auntie Maura,’ Nellie had replied without her usual bright smile. ‘Would you like a cuppa tea?’

  ‘Aye, put the kettle on, Nellie,’ said Kathleen as she slapped the big round potato-bread onto a tray and slid it into the range oven at the side of the fire. Every woman on the four streets baked in the morning, using the roaring heat of the first fire of the day, before they began to simmer the stock.

  ‘Any news?’ Maura asked Nana Kathleen as she pulled a chair out from under the table.

  Kathleen knew exactly what she was talking about. Both women had been waiting for some kind of fallout since the night Jerry’s wife had left him for his workmate and neighbour, Sean. But Jerry had barely reacted at all. The emotional tempest anticipated by the women had never arrived.

  ‘No, not a dickie bird. I have to say this about our Jer, I’ve never seen a man recover from a broken heart as fast as he has, so I haven’t. Seven days they have been gone and this morning, he didn’t even mention her. Nothing like when Bernadette died and he was beyond any consolation that I, or anyone else, could give him.’

  ‘What about little Joseph?’ Maura whispered, so as not to wake him.

  ‘Well now, that’s different altogether. He’s asleep now because he’s been awake all night. The poor child has no idea what is going on. When he is in my arms, he pulls me to the kitchen window and I know he is looking down the backyard for his mammy. Maura, what can I do? I cannot even say her name, so I can’t, or I will risk setting him off. Thanks be to God for our Nellie. She can really distract him now, much better than me, can’t you, Nellie?’

  Nellie looked across at them from the range and nodded. Maura noted that she looked sad-eyed, as though carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.

  ‘And what about poor Brigid?’ said Maura.

  Maura was referring to Sean’s wife: the wronged woman, deserted without the slightest inkling that anything had been amiss and left with a house full of little red-haired daughters to keep and care for. A woman who was both extremely house-proud and very much in love with her husband and her perfect family. Perfect, that is, until the moment on the night before Christmas Eve when she had opened a note she found propped on the mantelshelf, informing her that Sean, the husband she had devoted her life to, had run away to America with Alice, the wife of her friend Jerry.

  That was the moment when everything had altered. When her love had turned to hate. In one tick of the clock, her life had gone from light to dark. All she believed was true in their world had washed away before her, in a river of tears.

  ‘We should call in and see her this morning,’ said Kathleen. ‘The poor woman is distraught.’

  Nellie was pouring boiling water into the tin teapot when she saw Bill from the pub burst through the gate, run down the yard and in through the back door.

  ‘Maura,’ he panted. ‘Maura, ye have to get to the pub now, yer relative from home, Rosie, she will be calling back in thirty minutes. She says to tell ye she is phoning from Mrs Doyle’s in Bangornevin. She needs to speak to ye as well, Kathleen. She said I have to take ye both together ’cause she won’t have the chance to call back again, she needs to speak to ye both and that I had to make sure of that.’

  With that, Bill ran back down the yard to the pub where the draymen were in the middle of a delivery. But that mattered not a jot. News from home was the most important kind and not to be kept waiting.

  Kathleen, Maura and Nellie looked at each other, but no one spoke until Nellie whispered into the silence, ‘Can Kitty have had the baby?’

  She put down the kettle and moved closer to the others. They were in their own home and no one could possibly overhear them, but they were the only females in Liverpool who knew why Kitty was in Ireland. She had slipped across the water, in the dead of night, with Kathleen and Nellie for company.

  The baby growing in her belly had been put there by Father James, and Tommy had ensured he paid for it. A priest’s murder, dismembered of his langer, coinciding with a child’s pregnancy would surely have guaranteed that Tommy would have been hanged once the police realized he had been defending his daughter’s honour. The connection was too obvious.

  Kitty had awaited the birth in Galway, hiding in a convent and working in a laundry. Waiting out her pregnancy and delivery.

  Sister Evangelista and Kitty’s school friends believed that Kitty was visiting Maura’s sister who was poorly and needed help, but on the four streets only three women – Maura, who was Kitty’s mother, and her closest friends, Kathleen and her granddaughter, Nellie – knew the truth. Or so they had thought.

  ‘She’s not due for three more weeks, but it is possible,’ said Maura.

  ‘If it’s Rosie wants to speak to ye, then that baby has been born and if Rosie is at Mrs Doyle’s, it’s her way of letting us know Kitty is at Maeve’s farmhouse and safe,’ said Kathleen.

  Maura was already standing at the back door, holding it open and waiting impatiently whilst Kathleen tied her headscarf and fastened her coat, ready to run to the pub and reach the phone to hear news of her daughter. She had counted the days, one by one, since Kitty had been dropped off at the Abbey. Thoughts of her daughter were the first to enter her mind as she woke in the morning and the last as she closed her damp eyes at night. The pain of missing Kitty was almost more than she had been able to bear.

  But Maura knew that the existence of Kitty’s baby would have provided the police with a motive and a direct line to the murdered priest.

  The only way Maura had been able to maintain any degree of normality, after she returned with Kathleen from Ireland, was to believe that Kitty was happy and being well looked after. That she would have made friends with the other girls, and that the nuns would not have made her work too long, or too hard, in the laundry as her pregnancy progressed. These thoughts had sustained her throughout the months of missing her daughter.

  ‘As God is true, I have been counting the days to this news, Kathleen,’ Maura said as they ran down the entry together.

  ‘I know, Maura. Jeez, can we stop a minute. I’m pulling for tugs here.’

  Maura stood and waited for the older woman to catch her breath. Kathleen, red in the face and panting, reached into her pocket for her cigarettes. ‘It helps me breathing,’ she said to Maura, offering her the packet to take one.

  The phone rang just as they pushed through the wooden doors and Bill smiled as he waved them over.

  ‘Aye, they are both coming through the door right away. Ye can speak now…’

  His words trailed off, as Maura grabbed the phone from his hand.

  ‘Rosie, have ye any ne
ws?’ Maura hissed, her heart beating wildly.

  Rosie was a relative by marriage and a midwife. She had been due to deliver Kitty’s baby at the convent, in the middle of January.

  ‘Is she at Maeve and Liam’s? Shall we come to fetch her?’

  There was silence at the end of the telephone.

  Kathleen didn’t want Bill to hear the conversation between Maura and Rosie. There had been too many people interested in one another’s business since the murder of the priest, and then there had been poor Molly Barrett, bludgeoned to death in her own outhouse. That one had stumped even Kathleen.

  She knew who had murdered the priest all right but Molly Barrett, that was a mystery, which had perturbed them all.

  ‘It’s freezing out there, Bill,’ said Kathleen. ‘Any chance of a couple of ports before we run back? Not often we get news from home in a phone call.’

  ‘It’s more often than not a birth and sometimes a death, Kathleen. Has your Liam got Maeve with a babby on the way, then?’ said Bill, grinning as he took a bottle out from underneath the bar and began pouring the ruby-red liquid into two glasses.

  Kathleen grinned back uneasily and, taking the glass of port, used all her willpower not to down it in one.

  ‘Ye have been through a bit of bad luck, with Alice and all that business there over Christmas,’ said Bill to Kathleen, leaning on the bar.

  ‘Rosie, can ye hear me?’ said Maura, her voice louder this time.

  ‘Aye, Maura,’ came the reply down the crackling line. ‘I have just asked Mrs Doyle if I could speak in private and had to wait while she moved into the back of the post office.’

  Maura could visualize the hovering Mrs Doyle, who looked as much like a crone as anyone who hadn’t met her could possibly imagine and a crone with more than her fair share of rotting teeth.

  Rosie’s voice crackled down the line again.

  ‘Kitty has had the baby, Maura, but I’m afraid I was not in attendance. The snow brought the Abbey telephone lines down and they couldn’t get through to me, until yesterday morning.’