‘Does your Aunty Bee know you want to do that?’ asked Roshine. ‘You and your notions… Your da will go mad when he finds out – he won’t allow it, you know that, don’t you? I thought you’d told your Granny Nola that you wanted to live up on the farm?’
Mary Kate smoothed down the front of her skirt and checked herself in the mirror. ‘No, Bee doesn’t know. I haven’t told her yet, because if I do, she will write to Daddy and Rosie to ask their permission and then they will find a million reasons why I can’t go. I’d rather be on the farm than in the house, but, Roshine, I’m seventeen now, I’m a grown-up and I’ve been at boarding school all these years. I am not going back to be cooped up in Tarabeg, not yet anyway. I want to see the world and do things and make me own money. If Aunty Bee was in America, I’d be off there, but if I told Daddy that, I think he’d die of a heart attack right there and then.’
Roshine grinned. ‘Liverpool is a wild place – are you sure it isn’t the fellas you’re after, Mary Kate?’
Mary Kate laughed and poked Roshine in the side. ‘No, it is not. I’m not a madwoman. I’m not going to be tying meself down like Aunty Keeva with a football team of boys running around. I want to… you know… do something real and see places. There has to be more to life than Tarabeg and if it was so great, wouldn’t everyone who leaves be running back? I swear to God, not one of them does.’ Mary Kate looked down to her feet and an expression Roshine had become used to crossed her face. ‘’Tis Mammy… she’s not there at the house, and Aunty Bee, she is a part of Mammy, we both are, she’s Mammy’s blood too, like me, and I want to go and stay with her. Even Granny Nola said ’tis wicked that Daddy and Rosie won’t let me go and see her even for a visit. I’ve not set eyes on her or Ciaran and Captain Bob since the day she left Tarabeg.’
Roshine gave Mary Kate’s hand a squeeze. No further words were needed. Over the years, Mary Kate had opened up and confided in Roshine about the death of her mother and how her father had then gone on to marry the woman who’d been her own schoolteacher.
Mary Kate turned and ran to the window, grabbing the sill to stop herself from hurtling into it. Roshine raced after her, her footsteps echoing on the wooden floorboards.
‘Will you take me with you, to Liverpool?’ Roshine’s eyes were full of hope. The girls’ nine years together at St Catherine’s had been happy ones, made all the more so by their solid friendship.
‘I will. As soon as I get to Aunty Bee’s, I will call your daddy’s surgery and let you know. All you’ll have to do then is get yourself over to Liverpool. Aunty Bee will love you.’
A car rolled into the driveway, closely followed by a van, the different vehicles reflecting the differing means and livelihoods of the parents collecting their girls for the final time.
‘Promise me you will come for a visit at least?’ Mary Kate said.
‘Look, there’s my mammy and daddy.’ Roshine pointed at one of the cars, and she and Mary Kate almost jumped up and down on the spot.
‘Come on! The time has come – those cars are here to spring us free. Two more hours and we are out of here.’
At the door, the girls both turned and for the last time glanced over the dormitory where they had laughed, cried and shared their hopes and dreams for the future. The iron bedsteads had been stripped of their pink candlewick counterpanes, and the row of sinks against the far wall were already pristine, clear of their wooden toothbrushes, pots of talcum powder, hairbrushes and ribbons, ready and waiting for September and the new girls who would take their place.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Mary Kate, breaking the melancholy, and without further hesitation they galloped down the stairs hand in hand, the ringing peal of the bells and the sound of car tyres on gravel more inviting.
*
‘And, finally, you will leave this school as young ladies of education and impeccable manners, you will demonstrate thrift and the ability to manage whatever circumstances life may place before you. I send you out into the world as ambassadors of St Catherine’s, and, remember, in all your deeds and actions we shall also be judged.’
Sister Magdalena folded her speech notes and gazed down at the solemn upturned faces of the latest group of girls to depart her care, the leavers of 1963. They were seated cross-legged on the wooden floor, which had been specially polished for the occasion, its mirror-like shine testament to strong-smelling lavender wax, elbow grease and the tears of many a housemaid’s knee.
It was speech day and summer and expectation fizzed like static in the air. The freedom of adult life was creeping closer by the minute and even though they were sitting on the floor, the girls were giddy at the prospect of what lay before them, just beyond the boundary walls of the school.
On hard wooden chairs and gym benches arranged down the sides of the hall sat the lay teachers and nuns who had taught and cared for the girls during their time at St Catherine’s, penning their pupils in for one last time, on guard against any premature bids for freedom. The school turned out young ladies with the skills to run a home, manage household accounts and cook an array of fine meals made up of things other than rashers and potatoes. Through the years, it also identified its most pious pupils, who would today be transferred to the convent situated directly adjacent to the school in preparation for a life of religious devotion. Mary Kate looked around at the faces whose future that was and her heart melted with pity for them.
The parents sat at the rear of the hall on wooden chairs brought in from the dining room. In the dining room itself, just down the wood-panelled corridor, the long refectory tables had been covered with the white damask cloths kept for religious holidays and speech day. Plates of sandwiches, brack and trifle, prepared by the girls and the kitchen maids, stood ready and waiting for when Sister Magdalena sounded the final retreat.
The hall was now silent as Sister Magdalena folded her glasses and laid them on top of her notes on the green-baize table. The moment of quiet she had left for her words to be absorbed by her young ladies was filled only by the inevitable rumbling of stomachs and shuffling of feet. The sun fell in through the high arched windows and the room was crisscrossed with pillars of light and swirling eddies of fine dust that settled on the tightly plaited and beribboned heads. The girls were poised ready to rise and flee, itching to be on their way, and this protracted farewell in the form of speech day was agonising. There was not one more lesson to take, and the trunks were already piled up in the gravel driveway – out in the open, this year, thanks to the fine weather – ready to be loaded up and driven away.
Most of the mothers present had themselves been through this rite of passage. They knew their position as parents to the young ladies before them gave them no authority here. They were powerless in the presence of Sister Magdalena, headmistress of the school and mother superior of the convent. In the eyes of God, she was the mother of all who were gathered there, young and old. Her shrunken form, bowed from years of work, did not diminish her authority. Those mothers had once sat cross-legged on that same floor and they too feared the wandering eyes of Sister Magdalena landing upon them as she scanned her congregation, feared it as much as their daughters did, sitting like angels, perfectly still, hands crossed in laps, blancoed shoes leaving white smears on the polished floor. Lips were licked, a baby cried, a less patient mother politely coughed.
‘Can we go now? My arse is as stiff as a dead donkey’s langer on this chair.’ A man’s hoarse whisper flew over the heads of the girls and reached Sister Magdalena’s ears.
A wave of suppressed giggling washed through the hall, Sister Magdalena frowned, and Mary Kate swallowed hard. That voice had belonged to her Grandfather Seamus, she was sure of it. She closed her eyes.
‘What? What did you say?’ The voice rang out again.
It was definitely Grandpa Seamus. He’d become hard of hearing over the past few years and had taken to talking far too loud. Mary Kate knew without turning round that even though Granny Nola would be equally embarrassed, she�
��d also be fighting hard to contain her mirth.
Mary Kate’s head of red hair lifted sharply and her unblinking blue eyes met Sister Magdalena’s gaze. Mary Kate… Possibly the keenest of all her girls to rise and run, Sister Magdalena thought. It would be you. The edges of Mary Kate’s mouth rose in an almost imperceptible smile of defiance and Sister Magdalena felt the familiar rush of blood to her face. Of all the girls that had passed through her school during her fifty years on the staff there, no other had driven her to the depths of anger or heights of admiration in quite the way Mary Kate had. She looked down at the open gaze, at the only girl whose hair was already staging its own rebellion, escaping from its plaits and springing up around her cheeks in soft curls, and a shiver ran through her veins. For fear was a stranger to Mary Kate, and if there was one thing Sister Magdalena knew after all this time it was that fear, and fear alone, kept her girls safe. Fear of the Lord, of sin, of purgatory, of superiors. Before her sat nineteen fearful young women, and one other, who would, hands on hips and without a second thought, always face fear down. She was so different from most of the girls she’d taught, but then so were the circumstances that had brought her there.
The only reason Mary Kate had been accepted into the school was because Father Jerry and the magistrate Brendan O’Kelly had insisted on it. And how could Sister Magdalena refuse; what was she there for, if not to nurture children like Mary Kate? The child’s story was written in sin: her mother dead, her grandmother murdered and her father about to be remarried. Sister Magdalena made no comment on the latter – wasn’t it just the best kept secret anyway. Every widowered man had to marry, for a man could not live without sex; and every widowed woman had to marry, for a woman could not live without money. ‘And who will be paying her fees?’ had been the first question she’d asked them.
‘There will be no problem there, the father only has the fastest-growing store in all of Ireland. The money runs in laughing through the door of his shop all by itself, so it does,’ Brendan O’Kelly had exclaimed, a hint of envy in his voice.
‘Well, if that’s the case, why bring her all the way to Galway? Why not pay for someone closer to home to teach her? We are a charitable school, bursting at the seams. Is there no National school in Tarabeg? I’ve been told there are still hedge schools operating in the barns on the bogs and hills and around the west coast, with good Catholic teachers from Dublin thirsty to educate and elevate the people from lives of poverty. A man with good money would be well placed to help his own village and pay for a teacher, would he not? Would ye like some tea and brack?’
Sister Magdalena had given the men a smile and they had both softened in its glow. She’d been sixty-five at the time and still able to make advantageous use of her twinkling blue eyes, her diminutive stature and her love for the Lord, which shone through her every pore.
Father Jerry looked to Brendan, who was fiddling with the hat he’d removed as they’d stepped into the visitors’ room, rotating it round and round in his hands. They had failed to plan a strategy or decide who would say what, or rather what wouldn’t they say. There was a lot in Tarabeg to hide, and now that they were there, standing before the honest and probing gaze of Sister Magdalena, one thing was clear to Father Jerry: plan or not, they would have to tell her everything.
‘Ah now, the hedge schools are long gone, Sister, even on the bogs.’ Father Jerry smiled. He was on safe ground here, this he knew. Sister Magdalena had been at the convent since before the turn of the century. She was talking about the teachers who used to travel out from Dublin to educate children in barns or, if they were lucky, in a deserted cottage; teachers who were keen to try and provide the youngsters of poor west-coast families with the skills to better their lives. But these days those who could aimed to better their lives by escaping the seemingly perpetual rain and emigrating to Liverpool or America at the first opportunity.
Sister Magdalena held out a pretty china cup balanced on a delicate saucer to Brendan. The grey wisps of steam obscured his spectacles as he took a grateful sip of the strong, sweet tea.
‘Sister, Mary Kate, she comes from the most devoted of families,’ Father Jerry began, ‘but her mother died in childbirth a year ago, and now the father, he is to marry the woman who has been helping him since the death of Sarah.’
‘She was the mother,’ interjected Brendan helpfully as he placed his cup down on his saucer with a clatter. He had drained the tea in two gulps.
Father Jerry took the opportunity of Brendan speaking to fill his mouth with the buttered brack. It was still warm and he wondered would he dare tell his housekeeper, Teresa, how good it had been when he returned to the presbytery in Tarabeg? He often flirted with such a notion, knowing all the while that he would never dare. If Teresa asked him had there been cake and how was it, he would reply as always, ‘Ah, ’twas a little on the dry side,’ or, ‘I was thinking they would benefit from a lesson from yourself now.’ Today would be no different.
‘You see, here’s the thing, Sister. The woman who has been helping the father, Michael Malone, she is also the teacher at the village school.’
Sister shot a look at Father Jerry, awaiting his own explanation. Already she could tell something was not quite right. ‘Really? A teacher’s job is to teach, not to nursemaid an orphan. How did that happen?’
As Father Jerry pointedly sat forward in his chair and eyed the teapot for several hopeful seconds, it occurred to him that he wasn’t really sure. How had it happened? How had quiet Rosie O’Hara become installed in the Malone home so soon after Sarah had died? He knew, they all knew, that Rosie O’Hara had been in love with Michael Malone before he’d left to fight in the war. It was not something she’d ever spoken of, to anyone, but nothing escaped Father Jerry’s housekeeper, Teresa, who had after all been Rosie’s only friend in those early days. But that had all changed when Michael had returned from the war and within almost hours, to the surprise of everyone, had married Sarah McGuffey.
‘She was a good friend and help to the mother who died,’ said Brendan.
Father Jerry sighed with relief. Brendan had put it so much better than he would have. A man who took confession was inclined to confess himself and let everything spill out, but that would not be right, not here. Not to a mother superior who had spent her life shielded from evil. How could he tell her of the problems they had experienced in Tarabeg? Problems that had led them to bring the case for Mary Kate to Sister Magdalena’s door. That in their own school in Tarabeg, the principal – a man appointed by Father Jerry himself, a man they had all admired, a man they had drunk with in Paddy’s bar, fished with, played football with – had all the time been practising his own form of evil on the boys they had entrusted to his care. And who was it who had helped Father Jerry to deal with all of that – hadn’t it just been Rosie O’Hara herself?
‘More tea, Father?’
Father Jerry relinquished his cup and saucer, which in his huge hands looked like they belonged to a child’s china tea set. ‘Now that the father is to remarry, it has brought its own problems. It was felt by all that it would be better altogether for the child if she was to continue her education here, in a good school, away from the village.’
Sister Magdalena knew she was lost. How could she refuse? But she still felt that information was being withheld. ‘What of the other members of the family?’ she asked. ‘Is there no one else to step in and help?’
Brendan coughed and looked to Father Jerry as he spoke. ‘There is a great-aunt. She left for Liverpool, months ago now. ’Tis a fact that the girl was close to her and, well, there are worries that since the great-aunt left, Mary Kate is finding it hard and ’tis almost as though she’s suffered a second loss. The father is worried that she may want to follow, and as she is so unhappy, he may find it hard to refuse her, but… there are reasons why that would be impossible.’
Brendan made no mention of Captain Bob, the man Bee had moved away with and whom everyone knew had a wife of his own back in Bal
lycroy. He left it to Sister Magdalena to assume what everyone else did, that a childhood in a city of sin like Liverpool was to be avoided at all costs.
Sister Magdalena had placed her own china cup onto the silver tray on the low polished mahogany table. They were Sisters of the Poor in name only. ‘Very well, gentlemen. Term begins in two weeks and the fees are fifteen shillings a term, paid in advance. A better education for that she will not receive anywhere else.’ She rose to pull the cord at the side of the fireplace for one of the maids to collect the tray and missed the sighs of relief that came from both men.
And now, nine years later, Sister Magdalena looked down into the eyes of the seventeen-year-old Mary Kate and wondered what life had in store for her. She spotted her father with his wife, Rosie, and her brother at the back, along with her beloved grandparents who had never missed a Saturday afternoon visit. Sister Magdalena and Mary Kate had fought their battles over the years, but she did something now that she had never done before during a solemn service: she smiled down on Mary Kate, who immediately smiled back up. It had always been clear to her that if Mary Kate chose to take the veil, she would one day become a headmistress or mother superior herself, but she was sure that would never happen. Sister Magdalena recognised in Mary Kate the qualities of endeavour that others had once recognised in herself, but a convent and the confines of a school was somewhere Mary Kate was heading from, not to.
‘Let us pray. Up onto your feet, girls,’ said Sister Magdalena as the shuffling rumble and scraping of feet became louder and more impatient.
‘Are you going to do it now?’ hissed Roshine.
‘Mary Kate,’ a voice whispered above the clatter from the side of the hall. One of the lay teachers held out the bouquet of flowers that Granny Nola had transported to the school.
Mary Kate took the flowers, walked to the front of the hall with her head held high and a smile on her face, mounted the steps to the stage and placed them on the table in front of Sister Magdalena. ‘Thank you, Mother, from all of us. We will try our best to make you proud.’
Mary Kate Page 4