‘’Twas not good enough, now, that a fucking priest was helping himself to our daughter in me own house. She wanted to send more of our kids their way. All Maura has ever prayed for was a son for a priest and a daughter for a nun.’
Kathleen made soothing noises, but even she was shaken by the rift between Tommy and Maura at a time when they needed each other the most.
Day after day the house filled with people calling to pay their respects.
Maura sat and stared.
Tommy was not allowed time off from the docks, for which Maura was glad.
Night after night, Kathleen tried to help.
‘Away to bed, Maura, ’tis late. The kids are all sleeping now, and so must ye.’
Maura did not sleep in a bed for weeks on end. She could not engage in any activity that resembled normality.
Switching off the lights and preparing for bed, slipping in between the sheets: that was normal. Normal was what other people did. People untouched by evil.
Maura spent her nights sitting in the chair next to the range, staring at the fire. In those hours when she was alone, she relived her days with Kitty. The first time she had set eyes on her first-born’s face. Kitty’s first day at school, her funny sayings, the way her hair smelt when she slipped her arms around her mother’s neck for her night-time kiss. Night after night, in the hours before dawn when sleep finally claimed her, Maura dipped in and out of Kitty’s fifteen years, comforting herself with recent memories as well as old ones, which she forced out of the darkest corner of her mind. As Maura succumbed to sleep, her last vision was that of Kitty, standing before her in front of the range where she used to dress on winter mornings: dripping wet, cold and crying for her mammy.
Exhausted, Tommy slept on top of the covers, fully clothed. Each time he closed his eyes, he prayed into the darkness, ‘Please don’t let me wake.’
He regarded his children as a curse and he hated them. They were compelling him to carry on, to provide food for the table and a roof over their heads.
They did that to him, just because they were there. It was the obligation to feed his children which drove him from his bed and down to the docks. Every morning he had to wake and know his Kitty was gone. Without Maura, who was mad somewhere within a living hell, he had to cope alone. He hated his family for forcing him to survive. He hated everyone, even the neighbours who left meals warming on the range for him, because their children were still alive.
Day after day could pass without either Maura or Tommy speaking a single word, either to each other or barely to anyone else. Once Kathleen had been able to persuade Maura to sleep in her own bed, for weeks Maura was hardly able to get up again or put her feet on the floor to face the day. Many mornings, she didn’t even try.
She lay in her bed, facing the wall, untouched and unaffected by the needs of her family. She was deaf to the cries of her baby, impervious to the sound of Tommy’s voice, oblivious to her own basic need for food or drink.
Those were the days when neighbours let themselves into the house, unasked or uninvited, and did whatever had to be done. They had their own code. If Peggy didn’t hear the familiar early-morning noises coming from Maura’s kitchen, she knocked on the walls with the mop handle, the jungle drums of the four streets, to inform the others that, today, they were needed. That today was not good. And, without fuss or drama, the women of the four streets took over the running of Maura’s house.
They did her washing, mopped her floor and left stews on the range. They baked her bread and cleaned her windows, letting her know they were there. Life still went on and, if she wanted, she could absent herself from it for a while but they would not allow her to leave altogether. She had children to care for. She could heal, in her own time, but she would not be permitted to wither.
With the support of old friends such as Kathleen and Jerry, and new friends like Harriet and Father Anthony, Maura and Tommy slowly surfaced from the deepest well of their own black thoughts. Their daily existence now became one of oppressive, scarcely bearable greyness. And still they did not speak.
It was Harry who eventually broke the spell of their despair.
‘Mam, Mammy, Da.’
In the small hours, Angela had turned on the landing light and stood framed in the doorway of Maura and Tommy’s bedroom.
Maura didn’t reply.
‘Mammy, ’tis Harry. His asthma has been really bad since yesterday and now he can’t breathe.’
Maura sat bolt upright in bed and strained her ears. She could hear the familiar whistle coming from the boys’ room, Harry’s distinctive and unique breathing: short in, long out. But it was too short in and too long out.
Maura had been so wrapped up in her own misery that she had been oblivious to the fact that Harry was ill.
She shook Tommy awake and, for the first time in six weeks, they spoke as though there had never been a period of silence between them.
‘Tommy, ’tis Harry, quick. It’s his asthma, something is wrong.’
The thaw came as they sat outside the children’s ward at Alder Hey Hospital, just as the first dawn light was breaking.
Tommy realized his anger had dissipated, to be replaced by concern for Harry. As he carried the two cups of tea the nurse had brought him, his love for his wife flooded back at the sight of her perched on the edge of the wooden bench, looking frail and exhausted, a shadow of the strong woman she had once been.
Maura placed the cup and saucer on the bench next to her. Tommy slipped his arm round her shoulder and pulled her into him. She cried and, for the first time in his adult life, Tommy cried too.
‘God, I’ve missed you,’ he whispered into her hair.
‘I’ve missed you too,’ she whispered back. ‘Please God, let Harry be all right. Tommy, I could not imagine…’
Her voice trailed off as a doctor came out through the swing doors from the wards and made his way towards them. They could tell, just by looking at him, that he was Irish. It wasn’t just his red hair, it was his facial features too. He appeared familiar. At his approach Tommy squinted, trying to place him.
The doctor was smiling.
‘Harry is going to be fine, so he is,’ he said.
Maura’s hand flew to her mouth as she let out a sob stemmed in relief.
‘We have been using a new trial drug, Salbutamol. I wish we’d had it all the years your little lad has been poorly.
‘A year ago, things could have been very different indeed, given the state of his asthma when he was admitted. He has responded better than we could have hoped for. What’s more, you can use it at home. It will make a huge difference to how we manage his asthma in the future. Harry is one of the lucky ones. This drug isn’t available everywhere yet.
‘I would just say, though, Mr and Mrs Doherty, it isn’t good to leave him so long when he has breathing difficulties. It makes life very problematic for us when we can’t find a vein that we can insert a needle into, to treat him with the drugs we now have that we know will work. When asthma is as bad as Harry’s was, the peripheral veins shut down and, even with the best drugs in the world, if we can’t get the drugs into him, treatment becomes impossible.’
The doctor placed his hand over Maura’s and gave it a squeeze.
‘I know you have had a lot on yer plate, but this little lad needs his mammy and daddy to look out for him. In the meantime, we are going to keep him here for a few days to make sure he is absolutely right before he returns home.’
By now Maura was beyond speech. When he spoke, Tommy’s throat was thick with unshed tears.
‘How do ye know, doctor,’ he asked softly, ‘that we have a lot on our plate?’
Neither he nor Maura had said Kitty’s name out loud since the day of her funeral.
‘My brother is the doctor in Bangornevin and he told me about the accident. Harry asked for his sister Kitty and then became distressed, for a short while. When he said a few things I put two and two together. I hope ye don’t mind my mentioning
it. He is fine now that he is breathing much more easily.’
‘No, we don’t mind,’ croaked Tommy.
Just at that moment both he and Maura turned as they heard the footsteps of Peggy and Little Paddy, their ever faithful friends and neighbours, heading down the hospital corridor towards them.
The arrival of Father Anthony and Harriet had transformed everything, despite the fact that his first mass had been for little Kitty. It could barely be heard above the sobs of every resident of the four streets. They crammed into the pews and the aisles, with many gathered outside the church. They stood, a sombre gathering, not a dry eye amongst them.
Howard – the detective and now the new fiancé of Miss Alison Devlin, teacher at the four streets convent school – had been the first person at the Dohertys’ house, following a phone call from the County Mayo state solicitor after Kitty’s drowning. It had been his responsibility to take a witness statement from them on behalf of the police in County Mayo.
Howard met Peggy on the way out of Maura and Tommy’s back door.
‘What the fecking hell do you want?’ Peggy asked, dispensing with even the most basic pleasantry.
Peggy had hardly slept the previous night. How could she? The most unimaginable thing that could happen to any mother had befallen the house next door. Howard, afraid that she might thump him, noticed that her right fist was clenched, ready. It was not unheard of for neighbours like Peggy to risk a prison sentence, in loyal defence of their friends. Howard, having served his probation on the beat in Liverpool and now having been elevated to the CID, knew that such communities took loyalty to an impressive but all too often self-destructive level.
‘Ye had better not be sniffing round here, to take Tommy Doherty to the station on one of yer trumped-up charges, ’cause if ye do, ye have me to answer to. The man is beside himself with grief. Have ye no fecking respect?’
‘I do, Peggy,’ Howard replied, softly and meekly. ‘I am here to offer my respects and to have a form signed, so that Kitty can be brought back to Liverpool to be buried. I am not here to arrest Tommy. The investigation into the priest’s murder is over and we all know Tommy had nothing to do with it.’
‘Aye, well, just ye fecking remember that,’ Peggy had said grudgingly, ‘and, if ye want anything else, come to one of us, don’t go barging in there. We will be looking after them, for as long as it takes. Maura is on the floor with grief and Tommy with her. We will make them right again, but we can’t do it with the likes of ye sniffing around here, causing worry, so we can’t.’
And with that, in her damp, rancid slippers she had shuffled across the cobbles, out of the back gate and into her own home next door.
As he opened the back door to Maura and Tommy’s, Howard was greeted by Sheila, who was stirring a huge pan of broth on the stove, and Jerry, who was squatting in front of the fire, carefully stoking the coke. He had been more welcoming altogether.
‘Hello, Howard,’ Jerry whispered. ‘Everyone is lying down with their own thoughts. Can I help?’
As Howard had looked at Jerry, he had been consumed with guilt that he and Simon had ever suspected Jerry of being involved in the priest’s murder. Here he was, rushing straight to his neighbour’s side in a time of crisis. Howard knew that his own Alison had baked a plate of biscuits and dropped them over earlier. Howard was in awe of how much people cared for everyone else here. How could he and Simon have ever thought the murderer had been so close to home?
The tragedy that had greeted her on her arrival at the four streets enabled Harriet to play her part. She spent a great deal of time with Nellie, as a result of Nana Kathleen voicing her need for help.
‘I am at the end of me wits, with nowhere to go, what with Nellie and Maura and Tommy. Everyone is in shock, but I have never known our chatterbox to be so quiet. She’s scaring me, so she is, and I have to admit, I’m at a loss what to do.’
Harriet had left the Priory at that moment and accompanied Kathleen home. Whilst Kathleen organized others to help care for the Dohertys, Harriet spent hour after hour sitting with Nellie, holding her hand and slowly trying to coax her to speak.
Nellie barely uttered a word for almost a month and, when she did, it was as an accompaniment to a flood of wretched tears.
‘I have never heard nor witnessed such sad tears, Anthony. They sounded as though they were pouring straight from her heart,’ Harriet had confided in her brother over supper that evening.
‘Maybe that is it now. Maybe she will begin to accept what has happened and improve,’ Anthony had replied.
He himself was weary from struggling with Maura and Tommy. He felt that, along with losing their daughter, they were losing their faith, somehow blaming the Church. It was as though they didn’t altogether trust him.
‘How did she drown, Anthony, do we know? It seems so tragic. One of the women told me that her cousin lives in Bangornevin and that the water where Kitty was found was less than a couple of feet deep. Can that be so?’
‘Well, sure enough, if it had happened in England, it would be suspicious, certainly, but it wasn’t even in Bangornevin, Harriet. It was on a remote farm just outside, in a place called Ballymara, with no one and nothing around for miles. She must have slipped and knocked her head on a rock. ’Tis a stony river and a famous one for the salmon, so I’m told.’
Jerry and Kathleen would be forever grateful to Harriet.
They were well aware that it was only because of the time that she had spent sitting at Nellie’s bedside, soothing, reading and even singing to her, that Nellie had surfaced from her own deep grief.
On one of the rare nights when Kathleen had allowed herself to break down, she had cried to Jerry, ‘If wasn’t for Harriet, I think we would have lost our Nellie with the grief as well as Kitty. I have never known the like, a child not wanting to eat or speak. I was out of me depth, Jerry, we both were.’
It was only when Nellie had recovered that Kathleen allowed herself to grieve. Once she knew everyone else was out of the woods, in the privacy of her own home, beside her own fireside, when Jerry and Nellie were asleep, she allowed her tears to flow.
Little Paddy and Scamp did all they could. Paddy would step silently into the Dohertys’ kitchen each morning, whilst Scamp waited patiently by the back door, to ask both sets of twins the same question every time.
‘You all right, lads? D’you wanna game?’
Each time they said yes and the boys slipped out, to escape the gloom within. Too guilty to leave the house on their own, they jumped at the chance when Little Paddy called and offered.
For Harry, his asthma made running difficult and football impossible. Often he didn’t play but just sat on the stone at the edge of the green, watching them all and waiting. He sometimes cried as he sat there, for his Kitty. Although by day, the mood of the house had improved, by night, everyone cried their own tears, under the cover of darkness.
5
THE WINTER HAD passed and it was the first sunny day of the year when Daisy walked up to the large greenhouse with her basket and an order from Maggie for Frank.
‘Morning, Joan,’ shouted Frank, giving Daisy a wink.
‘That girl tells me she is simple,’ Maggie had said to Frank on Daisy’s second day. ‘She is not simple. Daisy has just never had anyone talking to her for any length of time and she’s been frightened out of her wits by the priest she worked for. She speaks funny, mind, but ’tis her tongue not being exercised enough, nothing else. I tell you, one week of working with me in that kitchen and she will be talking as well as I do. No one will be calling her simple then.’
‘What’s she doing here? Have you found out why she arrived in the early hours on Christmas morning?’ Frank enquired.
‘I’m trying, Frank, but it’s hard. I can’t help the others if I am caught out so I have to be careful. Here, one of the girls sneaked me a letter. Can ye take it to the post office?’
Frank nodded and put the letter into his large coat pocket. Being caught
would mean him and Maggie being turfed out on their ears. They were too old for that to happen a second time, but it never stopped him helping the girls when he could.
Maggie and Frank grinned at each other.
‘Come here,’ said Frank and, removing the short distance between himself and Maggie, he threw his arms round her.
Maggie was uncomfortable with affection of any description, preferring to display a tough and practical exterior. A front belied by her acts of kindness and the degree of danger she frequently placed herself and Frank in, by helping the girls in the mother and baby home.
‘Ger off, you fat lump,’ she exclaimed as she pushed Frank away, but he took no offence.
Frank knew his wife’s capacity to love. He had seen her face as she held their baby. That was when Maggie had been soft, on the days she had walked out to the fields, carrying his lunch in one hand and holding their son on her hip with the other. That Maggie had never pushed him away. That Maggie had laughed when he threw his arms round his wife and baby son. If he closed his eyes for long enough, he could see her back as they walked away from him in the sunlight, his child, resting on his mother’s shoulder, smiling at his da and his small hand waving goodbye.
‘Maggie has sent me for greens, Frank,’ said Daisy.
‘Has she, now? Well, let’s grab some of these, then, shall we?’
Daisy followed Frank, whom she liked and trusted, into the greenhouse.
It had taken Daisy her customary while, but she had eventually opened up to Maggie and Frank. Each day, Maggie extracted a little bit more of Daisy’s extraordinary history.
‘How is it up at the kitchen today then? Is Maggie’s temper holding up?’ Frank said.
Daisy laughed. ‘Yes, it is. She gave one of the novices a right scolding. I thought the girl was about to faint with indignation, but Maggie doesn’t care.’
‘Aye, that’s because she knows they would fall apart if she left. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of Maggie or they would all starve, so they would, but I wouldn’t dare push it, mind. Me and my Maggie, we don’t have too many choices now. Are ye coming down to us for supper?’
The Ballymara Road Page 9
