The Ballymara Road

by Nadine Dorries

  ‘I’ll be dancing, all right, so I will,’ replied Peggy. ‘Michael Kenny is putting soap flakes on the floor tonight so we can dance a little faster. I can’t wait! Jer, I’ll be coming after ye for a spin as Paddy here, he’s feckin’ useless.’

  Tommy and Jerry exchanged glances of dismay. Jerry couldn’t think of anything worse than being forced to jitterbug with the neighbour named by the local kids as ‘Smelly Peggy’.

  ‘I have a spare pair of bloomers in me handbag just in case,’ said Peggy to Maura without a hint of embarrassment. ‘Don’t want the same thing happening as last time.’

  As they all walked on up the hill engrossed in the midst of comfortable chatter, no one dared ask what that was. All of them were talking, except for Big Paddy, who chain-smoked but never spoke a word. It was impossible to walk and talk at the same time when your lungs provided only enough oxygen for one function or the other.

  The bridal retinue stood on the path, posing for the photographer. The tall arched church door provided the backdrop for the former Miss Devlin and her new husband, Howard.

  As Nellie watched the departing backs of her da and Nana Kathleen walking up the brow, she felt both alone and very grown up to have been left behind with the wedding party. The girls were bouncing up and down with excitement.

  ‘Would ye look at them flowers,’ said Angela yet again, plunging her bouquet straight into her face and inhaling the fragrance. ‘Have ye ever smelt anything as wonderful as that?’

  Angela spun round and stuck her posy straight into Nellie’s face. Nellie’s posy was exactly the same and smelt just the same. Nellie fell about laughing as Angela began sneezing repeatedly.

  ‘Girls, girls,’ said Miss Devlin. ‘Stand still for the photographer now.’

  Nellie thought she had never seen anyone look as beautiful as her favourite teacher did today.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Devlin,’ she said, running up to the bride and grabbing her hand. With her face infused with pride and happiness, she grinned up at Miss Devlin, who slipped her arm across Nellie’s shoulder.

  Click, click, snapped the camera shutters.

  ‘Smile, girls,’ said the photographer.

  Click, click. A black-and-white moment, captured forever.

  ‘Look towards me, ladies. Kiss the bride, Howard. Go on, yer allowed, she’s yer missus now.’

  Nellie and the bridesmaids blushed and giggled at the photographer’s friendly taunts. They could hardly believe that Howard was actually going to kiss Miss Devlin, their teacher, right there in front of them, in broad daylight, yet he did just that.

  While Howard kissed his blushing bride, Nellie noticed a police car pull up alongside the bridal car that was parked at the church gates.

  ‘Where’s Harriet?’ said Alison, scanning the churchyard, then spotting Harriet modestly standing back from the main party. ‘Harriet, come here. I’m not having my photographs without you in them, so I’m not.’

  Harriet walked up to Nellie and, standing alongside her, placed her hand lightly on her shoulder, whispering in a confidential, girls-together way that made Nellie feel as though she wanted to burst with a sense of belonging and pride.

  ‘There are police cars everywhere, Nellie. I’ve never been to a wedding like this before and that’s for sure.’

  Nellie smiled up at her. It was not so long ago there were police cars everywhere on the four streets, every day.

  ‘We are used to that around here,’ said Nellie in a very matter-of-fact, grown-up kind of way. ‘It’s how Miss Devlin and Howard met.’ Nellie was displaying her life-before-Harriet credentials, her subtext being, not in an unkind way, we have known her longer than you.

  Harriet smiled down. She knew exactly what Nellie was doing.

  ‘Well, ’tis just a delight that everything has gone so well now. Don’t you think, Nellie? A wedding without a hitch, I think we could safely say.’

  Nellie laughed with pleasure. Harriet, a woman of indeterminate age, who was beautiful, travelled, clever and was the sister of the priest, was talking to Nellie as though she were her equal.

  ‘Yes, who would have dreamt that,’ Nellie said.

  She raised her gloved hand and returned her da’s wave as he turned on his heel and, for a moment, walked up the brow backwards to check up on his not-so-little-any-more girl.

  ‘But Miss Devlin is special, so she is. She can do anything. There not being a hitch was how it was always going to be. God, she would have let out a roar if anything had gone wrong, so she would.’

  As Nellie spoke, she noticed there was something unusual about the police car which had drawn up by the church gate. Rather than the usual blue-and-white panda, it was black and the officer who stepped out of it wore a flat-peaked cap with a very impressive wide black-and-white chequered band around the middle, not a domed helmet like most of the policemen around.

  He began talking to people in the street and casually walked over to some of the officers.

  Others, who obviously should have been elsewhere, such as on Seaforth docks, and not at the wedding, slunk back to their cars and began to slowly melt away.

  ‘Ooh, who is this?’ asked Harriet, following Nellie’s gaze.

  ‘I’ve no idea at all,’ said Nellie. ‘I’ve never seen a police car like that on the streets since the night Molly was murdered.’

  She whispered the last few words. It felt inappropriate to talk out loud about a murder whilst smiling for the camera at a wedding.

  ‘Howard, have you got a minute, lad?’

  One of the officers called out this most ridiculous-sounding question to Howard, beckoning him away from Alison, his bride of only minutes. Her smile slipped from her face as fast as her new husband’s hand slid out of hers.

  ‘Howard, what is it?’ Alison asked. Her feminine antennae were up.

  ‘Can’t be anything to do with me, love. I’m off for a fortnight now,’ Howard called over his shoulder. ‘Back in a second. I will just see what it is. Smile for the camera, girls.’

  His size twelve feet crunched on the gravel of the church path. Nellie realized that you could hear it very clearly because, suddenly, everyone else was quiet. The wedding scene stood in freeze frame. Only Howard was moving and the air filled with an intense expectation.

  Alison was the first to break the silence in an attempt to mask the sudden absence of her husband.

  ‘Harriet, what can it be?’ she said, putting out her hand to her friend, who moved from Nellie’s side to Alison’s. Nellie stepped closer in and tucked herself under Alison’s arm.

  Alison called to Sister Evangelista, who stood at the end of the drive, close to the important-looking policeman.

  ‘Who are they?’ she asked.

  Since Sister Evangelista had been talking to Annie O’Prey at the gate when Alison had called her, it was a fair assumption that she would have heard every word that had been spoken.

  ‘I have no idea, Alison. They asked Mrs Keating if they could speak to Howard. Annie O’Prey butted in and told them he was getting wed today, but apparently the man said it couldn’t wait, and he had to speak to him now.’

  As Sister Evangelista finished speaking, Howard was seen talking to the man with the black-and-white chequered band on his hat and frowning.

  Howard began to walk back down the path with the important-looking officer, both heading towards Simon, who had moved over to the gravestones without anyone noticing. Simon looked even more concerned than Howard.

  ‘What is it, Howard?’ said Alison as they both walked past her towards Simon. Alison sounded agitated. This was not part of her carefully orchestrated wedding-day plan.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Harriet.

  She had never seen so many men in uniform in one place before in her life. She felt her face flush; she had never known such excitement occur in one day.

  The man in the peaked cap put his hand on Simon’s elbow and led him to the back door of the large Black Maria police car, its windows blacked out.
Nellie could see that there was someone sitting in the back, but she couldn’t see who.

  ‘Alison,’ said Howard, shouting back down the path, ‘love, they have some news and they are going to need to talk to you.’

  ‘Me?’ said Alison, sounding both disbelieving and disappointed all at the same time. ‘Why me?’

  Suddenly the back door of the car opened and Alison gasped.

  ‘Daisy?’ Alison almost screamed her name.

  Click, click, snapped the shutters. Click, click.

  Wearing the pillbox hat they had presented to her at the Christmas play, and which Maggie had found on a hook in Sister Theresa’s section of the linen cupboard, Daisy half raised her hand in a nervous wave to Miss Devlin.

  ‘Oh, thank God.’ Alison put her hand to her mouth as tears filled her eyes. ‘I thought she was dead.’

  Sister Evangelista, Alison and Harriet reached for one another’s hands. All three women exchanged glances of relief and happiness that they could not express in words. Harriet knew who Daisy was. How could she not? Alison used to speak of her every day.

  ‘Here, Nellie, hold my flowers,’ said Alison, thrusting her bouquet at Nellie. She began to run down the drive towards Daisy, tottering on her high heels while holding up her white satin explosion of a dress.

  ‘Alison, it isn’t all good news, love,’ said Howard as he put out his hand to help her over the cobbles.

  ‘What do you mean? Daisy being found is the best news I could have on my wedding day. Howard, this is the best present I could have had, ever.’

  By now, she was hugging Daisy.

  ‘Alison, love.’ Howard was struggling to get through to his new bride, but, in her euphoria at Daisy being found, she was beyond hearing.

  It was only Nellie and Harriet who spotted the handcuffs being placed on Simon before he was discreetly slipped into the back of the car Daisy had vacated. The man in the black-and-white cap with the chequered band took the seat next to him and, within seconds, the car had quietly whisked them both away.

  8

  ‘I’m coming, Mother,’ Ben shouted down the stairs, in response to her repeated calls summoning him to her traditional morning fry-up. His mother’s hearing had been damaged by a bomb blast during the war and, despite the fact he had now replied three times, she hadn’t heard him once.

  Ben couldn’t move down the stairs as quickly as he used to.

  During the war he had served as an officer in North Africa and Italy. When in France, he had taken a German bullet that had shattered his right tibia and fibula into many pieces, at the same time that a flying piece of shrapnel took up residence in his cheekbone, leaving a four-inch scar running parallel with his right eye. Ben never complained. How could he? He was one of the lucky ones. His brother had returned home in a flag-draped box and his mother had yet to recover.

  Immediately following his injury, Ben had been taken by stretcher to a field hospital to be stabilized and made well enough to travel to a military hospital in Belgium. On the long journey back to his home on Queens Drive, he had spent three months in a convalescence home across the water in West Kirby, where his mother had come to visit once a week. He had managed to see his father just before he passed away of a broken heart. No words had been said but Ben and his mother both knew that the dead son had been his badly disguised favourite.

  All the doctors in the world could not have prevented Ben from being left with a right leg three inches shorter than his left. He was awarded a clutch of medals for his endeavour and bravery, which did nothing to ease his pain nor mend his anguish at returning from the war disabled and an only child.

  There were some medals he wore on his chest, pinned to his suit when he attended formal regimental dinners. There was also a much larger memorial trinket in the form of an iron leg caliper, which he would wear every day for the remainder of his life. At forty-two years of age, he required a stick to help him walk, very slowly.

  A more serious effect of his injuries had been their impact on his self-esteem. Before his facial injury Ben could have been described as handsome, albeit quietly so. He now felt that no woman worth her salt would ever want to look twice at a man as broken and unattractive as he. Since the day he had returned home, he had never once looked a woman directly in the eye. If he didn’t see her eyes, she might not see the deeper, hidden scars beneath his own.

  This saddened his mother who knew that, at sixty-six years of age, she could not be far from the end of her life. Whenever she felt she could do so, without making him cross, she would raise the subject of marriage with Ben. Her son never became really angry, but his scar would turn a tell-tale red when she had upset him and touched that ever-raw nerve.

  The scar spoke for him. It burnt and flamed the message back to his mother: ‘Who would take this trophy of war?’

  Olive Manning had lost her first son, Matthew, at the outbreak of hostilities and Ben, her second, had been injured close to the end of them. Her husband had died two weeks after Ben’s honourable discharge. His last words to his wife were that now Ben was home, injured but alive, and he would look after her. Her husband was quite right. Benjamin did look after her. He was the most dutiful of sons.

  Ben often wandered into his brother’s bedroom. The telegram, which his mother had received from the War Office, lay folded on the top of the dresser she polished every Friday morning, ready for the weekend, during which nothing of any significance ever took place.

  Ben often picked up the envelope, faded to a tea-coloured brown by the bright sunlight that still on occasion slipped into the room, and he read the black ticker-tape words over and over again. It had lain there, in the same place, propped up against the dark mahogany-framed mirror. It was as though his mother had placed the telegram on the dresser to inform any ghostly relative who might pop into Matthew’s room that he was dead, that he had joined them already and that he would not be returning to lay his earthly head on his feather pillow with its crisp linen cover. No point hovering here. Matthew has gone. We know this. Read the telegram.

  Ben hobbled into the kitchen, ducking his head under the narrow doorway at the bottom of the stairs, and winced, as always, as he managed the last two steps. His mother pretended not to notice.

  ‘What important meetings do you have this morning then?’ she asked.

  Benjamin worked at the City Corporation offices and was responsible for managing the fund the government had poured into Liverpool. It had taken them almost twenty years after the war, but at last they were building new houses, roads, libraries, nurseries and schools.

  Liverpool was about to benefit from a growth spurt and, as the new estates sprang up, private landlords would lose their grip on the poor with their extortionate rents for squalid houses.

  ‘It’s a meeting at the Priory of St Mary’s, down at the docks, about the new nursery and library we are building. The church want to have a say in running both.’

  ‘And is that possible?’ asked his mother. ‘St Mary’s? Isn’t that the church where the priest was murdered? I’m sure it was. Dear me, Ben, you had better take care down there. I would quite like you home in one piece.’

  ‘You’re right, Mother. It was that church. Well remembered. If I’m honest, I had forgotten. It was my secretary who pointed that out to me. There is a new priest now, apparently. He is very new school, very nineteen-sixties. He wants the Church to reach out and become more involved in the community. That is why they have asked me to attend the meeting. It is something I am happy to discuss. The more the Church helps, the less it costs the council, but I’m very nervous about the library. We want more than bibles for people to read and that will be a stumbling block.’

  ‘Quite right,’ replied his mother with a hint of relief in her voice. ‘Don’t let the papists take over everything, because they would if given half the chance, Benjamin. That’s how they work. It is all about power and control. The more pies they have their fingers stuck in, the more influence they can wield. I’m not saying t
hey are all bad. The Pope seems quite nice as a matter of fact, but they just have too much say in what happens everywhere in this city, if you ask me. This isn’t Dublin. It’s Liverpool, a different country entirely.’

  ‘Have you finished?’ asked Ben with a grin, buttering himself a slice of toast . ‘You say exactly the same thing about the Jews. You didn’t stop to draw breath there. Anyone would think you ran up the frocks for the Orange Order on march day.’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, Ben. I don’t like any religion. They are all trouble, as far as I am concerned. I go to my Church of England service on Easter Sunday and Christmas morning, and that is all that is required from any respectable Christian. All that God bothering. I can’t be doing with it. If God existed, he would make sure there were no wars and I would still have my son and…’

  Her voice trailed away. She wanted to say that Ben wouldn’t have been injured and he would have a wife and she would have grandchildren and her husband would still be alive and she would make a Sunday lunch for them all and present it on the ten-place dinner service she and Ben’s father had bought with love and care for just that day. It had been wished for and spoken about, even longed for. This was not the life they had foreseen in the heady first years of their marriage.

  But she didn’t say a word. She knew Ben didn’t like it when she raised the subject of marriage, even though that didn’t always stop her.

  She placed in front of Ben his breakfast of black pudding, sausages and fried eggs.

  ‘They’ve taken over Everton, you know, the Irish,’ she said and poured them both tea before sitting down at the table herself, as she did so sliding towards Ben the Royal Albert marmalade pot with its dinky silver spoon popping out from under the lid. ‘You can’t move for the Irish and Catholics anywhere on the brow now. They even have their own things in the shops.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ said Ben, already sounding exasperated. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, in the butcher’s, he has changed the sign from “bacon” to “rashers”. It’s just the start, Ben. They were all supposed to go back after the famine. It’s about time you stopped worrying about all those Irish and concentrated on finding yourself a wife. I will be in a wheelchair by the time I have grandchildren.’