‘No, Daisy,’ she whispered. ‘Do you realize what that would do? I am not fond of the bishop any more than you are, now, but he would be arrested and I might be as well. God only knows what would happen to the church and the school. Haven’t I always taken care of you, Daisy? I think the best thing is if we keep all this to ourselves and make sure those two hospital porters get their come-uppance. But, please, keep it just between us about the bishop and Father James. Let us keep as our secret the photographs we found in the desk.’
‘I can’t, Sister.’ Daisy’s voice sounded stronger than she felt. ‘I can’t, because although you have been good to me since the father died and you are a good and kind Reverend Mother, you haven’t always done the right thing. For years I was stuck in that Priory with Father James doing to me the same things you saw in the photographs, and the bishop too. And you want me to keep that just between us? I can’t do that, Sister. I can’t. I have to tell the police everything. That’s what Maggie told me I had to do.’
Shocked, Sister Evangelista was unable to speak. Her life had been sent out of control with her future spinning away from her.
‘I will also give the police the key to the cellar safe. I took it with me, because Father James told me to never let anyone have it and to always keep it hidden when he wasn’t around. Maggie told me, that now that he is dead, I don’t have to do that any more.’
‘Who is this Maggie?’ Sister Evangelista almost screamed the words.
‘She is the person who looked after me and smuggled me out of the St Vincent’s convent and got me back home. She told me I was no more simple than she was, Sister. Maggie said I only couldn’t speak very well because no one ever spoke to me and I thought I was simple because everyone told me I was. Maggie said, if people didn’t use their brains and keep their wits about them, everyone would be simple. Maggie told me, no one should keep secrets with the devil himself. If we don’t tell the police, Reverend Mother, that is what we would be doing. That’s not the right thing, is it? You should meet Maggie. You would really, really like her.’
With that, Daisy stood up and, with her head held high, she walked out of Sister Evangelista’s office.
18
‘IS HE STILL sleeping?’ Mrs McGuire leant across and whispered to Mary.
She was sitting next to her daughter in the back seat of a taxi, travelling from the airport to Galway. The bags piled between them were now full of wet terry-towelling nappies and everything a baby could possibly need on a journey from Chicago to Galway.
Alice travelled in a cab following on with the remainder of the bags.
A large carrycot was wedged into the front seat and was also full of baby accessories. As she spoke, Mrs McGuire craned over the pile of bags to take a peep at the baby lying on her daughter’s lap. He had slept for almost the entire journey.
Having had a blood transfusion before they left for Ireland, the sickly boy had transformed into a jolly pink bundle of joy.
‘Aye, he is, but not for long, I reckon. He will have me awake all night now,’ an exhausted Mary replied.
With a sigh, she gently ran her thumb across the latest dark bruise to appear on his leg. The gesture alone spoke volumes.
‘Look, Mammy, he’s dying in my lap. This bruise, it tells me so.’
Mrs McGuire pushed a bag aside and slipped her arm round her daughter’s shoulders, her own gesture of concern encompassing both her daughter and her baby.
Mrs Mcguire was delighted they were returning home, even though, given the circumstances, that feeling had to be wrong. This made her feel guilty, which was the default position for every self-respecting Roman Catholic.
If the child had not been as sick they would never have attempted the journey whilst he was so young and it would have been a very long time before she set foot once again in her village on the outskirts of Galway.
However, Mary had insisted Mrs McGuire came too. She would find it hard to travel to Ireland alone with Dillon. If she had to travel to find his birth mother, they would do it together.
Mrs McGuire still knew her way around every back kitchen in every house in her village and, despite the many years she had spent in Liverpool and Chicago, Galway was the only place that truly felt like home.
‘That’s the thing about home,’ Mary had explained to her. ‘No one is anonymous. The chances are, someone we know will know someone who knows the people we are looking for and that’s why I need you, Mammy, because, sure, don’t you know half of the people in Ireland anyway.’
Every sensible person they knew in Chicago had tried to persuade Mary to leave the baby behind. She had refused to budge.
‘He has been ours for only a few months and I have waited my whole life for him. I will not be parted from him for a day. God in heaven, he will have forgotten who his mother is if I leave him.’
Henry gave up trying to stop Mary from doing what she wanted to do. ‘Jesus, she’s like a woman possessed,’ he had said to Sean as they stood in the garden, watching the new gardeners prune Henry’s conifers. Henry didn’t trust anyone to do anything he couldn’t do himself. He might be a rich man now, but if he had had the time to do his own garden, he would have done.
‘Ever since the baby has been sick, there has been no talking to her. She’s driven, so she is. She will do whatever it takes to make him better and I for one am not standing in her way.’
‘I wouldn’t try, Henry,’ Sean had replied. ‘She is her mother’s daughter. Nothing you can say will make a ha’p’orth of difference. Da would vouch for that if the poor man were still alive.’
Henry nodded in agreement as he lit two cigarettes and handed one to Sean.
‘I’m glad Alice is travelling with Mary and Mammy to Ireland. I think it will take the three of them to manage the baby and all the luggage. I would feel better if she were with them.’
Sean agreed. Maybe Alice herself needed a break. They had been arguing a great deal of late. Sean was finding it impossible to say or do anything to please Alice. It felt as if everything had become an effort. Every single day at some point they would have the same argument and the last time had been just hours ago.
‘Get your hands away from me,’ Alice had said as she stormed out of bed. ‘I am not falling for that. I know what your plan is. I have an appointment at the doctor’s office today and I’m asking him for the new birth control pill. It takes a month to work and then I am safe. Until then you can keep your hands to yourself.’
As the bathroom door banged shut, Sean lay on his back and remembered Brigid, who had done everything in her power to make him happy. The images of his daughters’ faces swam before his eyes as tears prickled. He wished it was he who could have travelled home and kept Mary company because, if it had been possible, wild horses wouldn’t have kept him from visiting his children. For the first time, Sean realized he was a wealthy man. He had all he had ever dreamt about and yearned for, but without a loving wife and children to share it with, what did any of it mean?
He turned his head towards the bathroom door.
An en suite bathroom. Who had ever heard the like? He imagined the expressions on his children’s faces if he could show them around Mary’s house, how beyond excited they would be. He could see Emelda and Patricia bouncing up and down on his king-sized bed, jostling each other as usual to be picked up first. Then he saw the deep blue eyes of his baby, looking up at him trustingly from the pram as he had bent down to place a kiss on her cheek the morning he had left her, for the last time.
He allowed his tears to flow, because he knew that to see them all again was a dream that would never materialize.
As the taxi bumped along the uneven road, Mrs McGuire looked out of the window at the familiar countryside. She had already sent a letter on ahead to her daughter-in-law, Brigid, and her grandchildren, to let them know she would be visiting as soon as she arrived in Ireland. Neither her son, Sean, nor his mistress, Alice, were aware of this but, as far as Mrs McGuire was concerned, no one woul
d keep her away from her own granddaughters, certainly not her son’s fancy bit on the side.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with Alice and me to the convent tomorrow, Mammy?’ asked Mary in a whisper, careful not to wake the sleeping baby.
‘No, Mary, ye and Alice go. I have friends I want to catch up with and I have the taxi booked to take me. No point me coming all this way back home now and not saying hello to my friends, is there? That would just be a waste of a visit now. Ye and Alice, sure, that’s enough to be dropping in on the nuns unannounced.’
‘Well, if you are sure, Mammy. I don’t want ye to think I don’t want ye with me.’
‘Sure, child, why would I think that? Just because my blockhead of a son thought I shouldn’t visit my grandchildren? I know what’s going on in his head all right. He doesn’t want me carrying tales to Brigid and the girls about him and Alice. He should have stopped the boxing years ago. I swear to God it sent him mad.’
Mary looked out of the back window of the taxi. Alice was now following closely behind them in the second taxi.
‘Are you off to see Brigid, Mammy?’ Mary had seen right through her mother’s story of visiting her friends and knew exactly what she was up to.
‘I am, Mary, and nothing ye or anyone else can say is going to stop me. I almost brought those girls up. Your brother broke my heart, leaving them all like he did and landing us with that harlot back there.’ This with a backwards nod towards Alice.
Seeing the taxi driver’s eyes light up in the rear-view mirror as he heard the word ‘harlot’, Mary gently pressed her mother’s arm and nodded towards the driver.
‘Sure, I’m not bothered by Porick,’ her mother replied. ‘I knew his daddy when he was just a child and I’ve changed his nappies often enough. D’ye not remember him? Ye was at the convent together with his big sister. They live on the Knock Road. Porick, repeat a word ye hear in this car and I’ll slap yer legs raw. D’ye understand?’
Porick, who was at least twenty years of age, winked at Mary in the rear-view mirror and replied with a grin, ‘Aye, Mrs McGuire. Yer secrets are all safe with me, so they are. I’ll not say a word to the harlot, so I won’t.’
Mary smiled. She thought that there was possibly not a single person in all of Ireland that her mother didn’t know. She also knew that by tonight every detail of their conversation would be the main topic of discussion in the pub.
‘Can ye put me out at the main street, Porick,’ Mrs McGuire said.
‘What for? We are staying at the hotel, Mammy. You don’t need to go to your house and we don’t need anything until tomorrow.’ Mary looked at her mother and frowned, knowing exactly what Mrs McGuire was doing. ‘You can’t wait, can you?’ she whispered to her. ‘You want to show off to your mates, don’t you?’
Mary smiled indulgently, holding the baby tight to her chest so as not to wake him. If Mrs McGuire had a fault, it was that she could never resist the chance to brag.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ her mother replied, her voice loaded with indignation. ‘Ye have Alice to help with the baby and Porick here will carry the bags into the hotel. Sure, Mary, ye have come a long way in the world. Ye don’t need me to show ye how it works any more. I just want to have a bit of a wander round the shops now. To see what’s changed an’ all.’
Mrs McGuire had made sure that she was known by her friends and neighbours in Ireland as a bit of a jet-setter. It wasn’t difficult, given that she was the only woman in the village to have ever set foot on a jet. Now she tried to change the subject.
‘Let’s go to the chippy for our tea tonight, Mary. God knows, I can’t remember the last time I went to one.’
Mrs McGuire loved to regale her friends back home in Ireland with stories of the exotic delicacies to be found in Mr Chan’s chippy on Liverpool’s Dock Road.
Saveloys. Oh my, how she loved the way that word rolled off the tongue.
Was there ever a more exotic word?
‘In Liverpool, I often pop to the chippy for saveloys,’ she would say to her friends. Slowly.
‘God in heaven, s-a-v-e-l-o-y-s? What would they be?’ her friends would demand to know.
She loved the way their mouths fell open when she described sodas, burgers, corn dogs, barbecues, air-conditioning and ice-making machines.
And, as everyone knew, the person she most liked to impress with her stories was the butcher, Mr O’Hara, who also owned the village shop. Mr O’Hara was a man of business. He wore a brown overall and carried himself with the air of a man of the world.
Mr O’Hara often travelled as far as Dublin, which gave him some standing in the local community, Dublin being such a dangerous place by all accounts.
There was a time when Mrs McGuire could easily have become Mrs O’Hara, that’s if Maisie O’Toole hadn’t pushed herself in first.
Maisie had died ten years back and, a month later, so had Mr McGuire, leaving behind a pair of once-upon-a-time, almost-young lovers with stars uncrossed.
Mrs McGuire liked to pop into Mr O’Hara’s shop and brag about her international travels, to which he would listen patiently before he responded with his own prepared tales of daring and bravery, as he sliced rashers and laid out pig’s trotters.
It was a ritual they both engaged in, each and every time she returned home.
Tales at dawn.
And even though it was she who had travelled oceans and had shared experiences, she had yet to win their battle of words.
Mrs McGuire leant against the car window and peered at the low, white-stone cottages they passed. Closing her eyes for a moment, she remembered the last time she had come home and their parting conversation.
‘Sure, now, I have to travel to Dublin most weeks. If ye were contemplating such a visit these days, Mrs McGuire, ye would need to carry a gun around in your handbag before ye set foot out of the bus.’
‘Surely, Liverpool and Chicago are far safer places altogether, I think,’ she had replied, never missing a chance to casually drop her jet-setting credentials into the conversation.
Mr O’Hara nodded sagely as he wrapped up her two pounds of bacon rashers in waxed paper, handing them over with a very solemn expression.
‘I would think that would be so, Mrs McGuire, safer altogether I would be saying now,’ he replied, in a tone as serious as if he were telling her the Pope had visited his shop and dropped dead, then and there, on the sawdust-covered floor, right on the spot where she was standing.
She had left that day feeling strangely empty. She had failed to impress.
It was a task unfinished, awaiting her return.
On a jet plane.
Porick pulled over in the main street for Mrs McGuire to alight.
The taxi with Alice pulled up behind. Mrs McGuire noticed that Alice’s head was on the seat. She was fast asleep, so she had no need to explain herself. Mrs McGuire walked round to the front of the taxi and spoke through the driver’s window. ‘Porick, will ye meet me back here now in an hour to take me to the hotel?’
‘Aye, Mrs McGuire. Should I meet ye here, or go straight to the butcher’s?’ Porick grinned from ear to ear, feeling very smug and pleased with himself.
Sure, apparently everyone knew there had been a thing between Mrs McGuire and Mr O’Hara.
His daddy had told him only that morning.
‘If there have ever been two mismatches in marriage, it was them two not seeing the obvious right under their noses. But then, Maisie O’Toole, she was far from stupid, that one. She knew what she was up to and Mr O’Hara, he was just an eejit of a man who was knocked off his feet with a roll in the hay and a story of a babby on the way. God knows, that was the longest pregnancy in history. Two years until after the wedding, it lasted.’
‘Ye cheeky beggar, Porick, I will meet ye here, as I said.’
She turned to Mary. ‘I will be an hour now. I’ll just say a few hellos.’
‘Aye, take as long as ye want, Mammy,’ Mary said. ‘I’m going to have
a nap and take the little fella with me.’
Mary was true to her word. The twenty-four hours she had spent in the company of Alice and her mother had been enough. She was in need of some peace and quiet of her own. Exhausted by the journey, she took herself off to bed within half an hour of checking into the hotel.
Mrs McGuire had walked for only a few minutes before regretting her hasty decision to leave the taxi, wishing she had popped into the hotel for a quick bath and a change of clothes before venturing out. She felt nervous, probably because this was her longest absence from home ever. Now she felt uncomfortable, like a stranger in her own village.
As she was continually halted on her way down the main street by people she had known all of her life, she made slow progress.
‘Howarye?’
She answered this greeting a dozen times before finding herself at the kerbside, facing the butcher’s shop belonging to the man who had passed her over all those years ago.
A young boy ran out of the school gates towards the tobacconist’s shop, splattering her legs with dirt from the gutter. She recognized him from her own childhood. She knew his look. He was a Power, all right, and if she had to ask him, she would put money on him belonging to the eldest lad, who was the son of Colm, who was the son of PJ.
She knew them all. Grandfather, father and son.
The familiarity of his face, in his run, in his shouts to his friends, made her realize just how many of the years she had spent away.
From the opposite side of the road, she saw Mr O’Hara, standing in the same place, in the same brown coat, as he had done for almost forty years. Man and boy.
‘Hello, howarye?’ he shouted across to her, moving swiftly to fill the shop doorway with his bulky frame.
Mrs McGuire stepped off the kerb, ready to cross the mud-and-dirt road, towards the shop and the life that might once have been hers, if Maisie O’Toole hadn’t slipped in first.
As she checked for traffic and looked towards the school gates, there they all were, their ghosts of the past: Maisie O’Toole and herself, running home, pigtails flying in the air. Maisie, her once best friend. Maisie, in whom she had confided her heart’s deepest secrets and desires. Maisie. The thief. Dead but not forgiven.
The Four Streets Saga Page 84