In the Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

Davy was shaking hands with the barman, telling him, ‘You won’t regret it.’

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ said Brendan under his breath.

  Davy joined them, lifted his pint and gave Brendan a toothy grin.

  ‘You jammy bastard,’ said Brendan, ‘he’s going to take the jukebox?’

  ‘Nothing to it – persuasion is my particular gift.’ Davy sank his lips into the cream of his pint.

  ‘You couldn’t persuade yourself into a job in Dublin,’ said Ali, lighting up a fag.

  Melody’s was not the kind of pub where a jukebox would look at home. Dusty bottles of lime and lemon cordial stood beside a ceramic Johnnie Walker striding out in his top hat and cane, the lino was studded with decades of cigarette burns. Through the door at the back of the bar you could see tea towels and pillowcases hung to dry over a range in the Melody family kitchen.

  ‘I said he could select his own music from a list of thousands of CDs and I’d give him his own free code so he could play it to himself whenever he wanted.’

  Brendan struggled to keep his voice down. ‘Then he’ll tell the regulars and we’ll make nothing.’

  ‘He won’t, he hates giving anything away.’

  Ali looked up at the bit of blue sky visible through the clear panes of glass above the window shutters. Brendan was telling Davy about the record decks he’d got cheap, how he was setting up as a DJ on the side. Mr. Melody polished the bar surface with a cloth. It was so still that her smoke settled in a thin layer just above their heads.

  Davy rippled through it as went up to get another round, buoyant with success.

  ‘Business is going to boom, Bren, now that you’ve me on board,’ he said on his return, ‘The old Davy Brennan magic touch.’

  ‘Not so magic in all areas, is it?’

  Davy gave his nephew a cool look, took a deep swallow of his pint.

  ‘What?’ said Ali. ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you he’s been unlucky in love?’

  She looked at Davy, but he had turned away. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a girlfriend, ever.

  When Brendan suggested a third drink, she managed to persuade them against it, insisted she needed to eat something.

  The light was already fading when they got outside. She was wondering where she had left her purse, when Davy thrust it into her hands.

  ‘The food in the hotel looks nice,’ she said.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Brendan, ‘never been in – it’s just for tourists.’

  They climbed back into the van and Brendan steered a fast U-turn, then turned left over the old bridge and out onto the road that gradually swept them a field’s distance from the river. She recognised the little landmarks along the way – the ruined chapel, the cattle mart, the brutal concrete of the handball alley in front of Glinchy’s farm. Petrol blue squares of pine plantation patched the hills over towards Ennisbridge.

  In moments she would be at the farm, with a bathroom and food and afterwards a bed to lie on. She could make out the white gate posts ahead, but instead of turning up the driveway, Brendan drove past it and pulled into a rough track about a hundred yards beyond.

  ‘You don’t want to go to the old folks yet,’ said Brendan, ‘you want to see Davy’s new place first.’

  She looked at Davy but he just laughed. They bumped up the track and stopped in front of a new bungalow, identical to thousands of others throughout the country, a low grey shoebox with a brown tile roof and nothing to recommend it beyond the cheapness of the build. This one wasn’t quite finished. The breeze-block foundations were left bare, and the ground around was churned mud, baked dry into ruts by the summer heat. A lone oak tree rose from the wasteland, a couple of its lower limbs roughly lopped. Ali suddenly recognised the site as the place where the farm’s stables used to stand, home to an ancient carthorse and her cousin Roisín’s envied pony, Skipper.

  ‘So where does Skipper live?’ said Ali, confused.

  ‘She’s long gone’, said Davy, and Brendan drew a finger across his throat and grinned.

  ‘Dogfood. Davy and the twins have supplanted her.’

  ‘Are the twins living here?’

  ‘They were here on sufferance!’ said Davy, ‘And they can get their own lodgings when they come back.’

  ‘Does it have a toilet?’ said Ali.

  ‘It did when I left,’ said Davy, ‘but God knows what those gurriers have done in the meantime.’

  It looked like the building process had been abandoned just before the final push. An open ditch ran around the outside walls with pipes laid along the bottom. Near the front door a pillow of solidified cement stood on its end, the plastic bag that once contained it blowing in tattered ribbons around its base. The step up to the porch was knee high.

  ‘Did they not finish the front steps?’ asked Davy.

  ‘Nothing to do with me, D,’ said Brendan.

  ‘They’re supposed to have done work in exchange for rent,’ Davy said as they hauled themselves up onto the doorstep. He opened an elaborate front door with patterned glass panes, and held it wide for her, annoyance bringing a dark flush to his face.

  Ali thought Davy had come to Dublin to make a new life in the city. It was odd he never mentioned this place. The walls and doors and brass coloured light switches were all pristine, but the floor was a concrete screed, raked like corduroy. In the front room, an old sofa was complemented by a massive low table made from a sheet of chipboard propped on breeze-blocks. The battered television in the corner stood on an empty cable reel.

  Davy stopped in the middle of the hall, looking dazed, as if he hardly knew the place.

  ‘Toilet?’ said Ali.

  ‘Second door on the right,’ said Brendan, bringing up the rear.

  She wandered down the corridor, passing a bedroom furnished only with a mattress on the floor and glamorous mirror-fronted wardrobes built in to the walls. The bathroom had a new suite but no toilet seat. The edge of the bath still had paper tape on it. Ali hovered over the cold porcelain to pee and hoped that no one would try the lockless door.

  Brendan was in the corridor waiting when she came out.

  ‘Y’alright?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I go down to the farm?’

  ‘Don’t be fretting.’ He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  In the front room Davy was pulling out bottles from a six-pack of beer that must have come from Melody’s. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand.

  ‘You don’t smoke,’ she said.

  He looked at it for a moment, wondering, put it behind his ear.

  ‘Sometimes I do, but it’s horrible.’

  Ali sat beside him on the sofa, retrieved the fag from his ear and lit it herself.

  ‘Where are the twins?’

  ‘They got a job in a pea factory in England. Seasonal work. That’s why Brendan needs a hand.’

  ‘A pee factory? Is that a joke?’

  ‘Not at all. A pea factory – P-E-A – little green yokes, canning them, eh Brendan?’

  Brendan edged around the table to join them on the sofa.

  ‘Give us a bottle there. D’you want one Ali?’

  ‘I’m okay, thanks.’

  ‘But we only got Smithwicks ‘cos you like it.’

  Davy put a bottle in her hand and gave another to Brendan.

  Ali slumped into the couch and the boys talked over her, Brendan giving wandering updates about the local team and minor village scandals. They weren’t going to mention the baby. They weren’t going to mention The Late Late. It was good to come here, to escape it all.

  She let her head fall to the side and come to rest on Davy’s shoulder. She turned her face so that her nose was buried into the wool of his grey jumper. He kept his arm still so that she could stay there, even while he thumped the sofa arm with the other ha
nd. She started to drift.

  A sharp rapping shocked her awake. Outside the plate glass window a figure stood in a dusk that had gathered from nowhere. He wore a cap and a mackintosh, but she couldn’t see his face. The boys exchanged guilty glances. Davy motioned the figure to come inside.

  Her Uncle Joe had aged a good deal since she had last seen him, and his open tweed jacket framed an impressive dome of belly. He was wearing an old cap with a greasy-looking brim, and a vexed expression.

  ‘Una had dinner ready an hour ago. Did ye not think to bring her down? Hello, Ali.’

  ‘Sorry Da,’ said Brendan, ‘lost track of the time.’

  Joe looked pointedly at the bottles and the butt-strewn saucer. With a push from Davy, Ali got to her feet and went over to kiss her uncle on the cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Joe. I’ll come down with you now.’

  ‘You coming too?’ he asked the boys.

  ‘We’ll be down later. Few things to sort out here, about the business, like.’

  Joe gave a little snort, and lifted Ali’s rucksack lightly onto his shoulder. She followed him out, stepping carefully off the front porch into the darkness.

  They followed a path through trees that widened into a dirt drive. She could sense the bulk of the barn looming to her right – darker and heavier than the gloom about. Up the hill on the left, she could make out the roofs of the pig sheds, the dull gleam of iron. They walked around the corner of the barn, and the lights of the farmhouse appeared, the kitchen window spilling a buttery glow into the greyness.

  Ali caught her breath. She could see the corner of the big range, the table with its faded oilcloth, the dresser stacked with delft. Nothing had changed; it was like stepping out of the dark and straight into the past. Sensing her pause, Joe stopped too and for a moment they stood wordlessly in the dark, looking on as Aunt Una appeared like a figure on a stage, passing through the lit square with a stack of plates in her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry’ were Ali’s first words of greeting to her aunt.

  She wondered if there ever would be a time when she wasn’t feeling sorry or ashamed. Una stood with her back to the range, a thinner, more worn-away version of her own mother. Her face was plain, and her short bobbed hair was pushed firmly behind her ears. It was a lighter colour than Ali recalled, a kind of faded blond. Una came forward to press her dry cheek to her niece’s.

  ‘Your dinner’s in the range.’

  ‘She was kidnapped,’ said Joe.

  ‘Is Davy not with you?’

  ‘He’s up in the bungalow with Brendan,’ said Ali.

  ‘Talking business,’ said Joe, taking off his jacket and cap in the scullery, ‘like a pair of Nelson Rockefellers.’

  Ali sat at the kitchen table, and Una put a big plate of stew in front of her, yellow domes of boiled potatoes rising from a brown pool, dry skin on its top. Una said that she and Joe were going through to watch Tenko and Ali could come and sit with them when she had finished.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ali.

  ‘We’ll talk properly tomorrow, eh?’

  ‘Sure.’

  If discussion could be put off once, it was more likely to be put off again. Ali mashed her potatoes into the stew and started to bolt it down, but by the time she was halfway through she felt stuffed.

  She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so she took her plate through the scullery to the back door and surrendered it to the yard cats. Five creatures ran to her – skinny black and white cats with splodges of tabby brown on some. They hissed and swiped at each other as they fought for position around the plate, licking frantically.

  She remembered a kitten she fell in love with that December, a little black one with a white front paw. She smuggled it upstairs to sleep in her bed, but woke in the dark to find the kitten curled tightly around her neck, making it hard to breath. She moved the kitten away, but it kept trying to be at her neck. Every time she removed it, the kitten would mew, showing its tiny needle teeth. She grew scared of those teeth next to her neck. She couldn’t make it understand. Finally, in exhausted tears, she snuck downstairs and put it out the back door into the freezing night.

  There wasn’t a speck of stew left on the plate, but two cats still worried away at the glazed surface with rasping tongues. Ali lifted it and stepped back into the kitchen. As she closed the door, she remembered something else. That long-ago night, taking this very same route from yard to kitchen, a groggy voice had called to her from the sofa in the corner. She had nearly jumped out of her skin with fright. But it was only Joan, sleeping under a pile of blankets. Telling her to go back to bed.

  Only Joan. Joan’s face filled her mind, the paleness under the freckles, the distant look she often wore as if she was hiding inside herself. The cloud of hated curls. Ali remembered taking the chance to pat those curls one morning when Joan was crying over a lamb that hadn’t made it through the night. Joan seemed so much older than her then, a woman like Aunt Una, but was probably only the age that Ali was now, only a grown girl.

  The old sofa was still there, dressed in a flowered slipcover now. It was strange to realise how well she knew this house. She never gave it a thought in Dublin, but it was here all that time, waiting for her.

  TWELVE

  When Sister O’Dwyer appeared in the doorway of the convent parlour, Swan and Barrett rose automatically to their feet at the sight of such frailty. The old nun might have been all of five foot if she was able to stand up straight, but gravity or curvature of the spine had bent her towards the ground so that she now cleared no more than four. Barrett stepped out from behind the table and supported the last leg of her journey by placing his hand under the nun’s right arm, steadying her. Her other hand clutched the knob of a varnished blackthorn stick that she poked into the carpet in little hops. But Sister O’Dwyer’s frailty was only physical, Swan noted. As she took her seat she tipped her face up to look at him eagerly, berry-eyed, apparently delighted to engage with a couple of policemen.

  Swan smiled warmly at the woman.

  ‘I’ll assume you know why we’re here – what happened in the Rosary Garden – but I’ve been hearing that some girls call it Sister O’Dwyer’s Garden.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been supposedly in charge of the place for thirty years now, so the girls associate it with me. It’s only called the Rosary Garden because of the Rosary Walk beside it. It has no religious use of its own. In fact some would say it’s quite a pagan place.’

  ‘Why would they say that?’

  ‘You mustn’t take me too seriously. All I mean is that the girls who use it don’t necessarily have God on their minds. Gossip, sweets and the odd cigarette are their main devotions. Oh, and the occasional bit of forced labour with a rake.’

  She gave him a dry smile.

  ‘It’s a credit to you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. Even if I had the knowledge, I don’t think you could make any decent kind of garden in that particular spot. Too shady, too dry. But gardening’s not really the point.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  The nun leaned forward, her face aglow, light through parchment. Swan sensed Barrett shift beside him, impatient at this circuitous talk.

  ‘Are you familiar with the term sanctuary?’ said the nun.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It has religious connotations usually, the sepulchre, the place of something precious. But I’m an admirer of St. Francis, detective, and when I think of the word sanctuary, I think of a bird sanctuary. That is what my garden is – in a literal sense because of all the birds in those hedges ­­– but really, it’s a girl sanctuary!’ and she clapped her hands together and wheezed a laugh.

  Barrett was doodling on the page in front of him, drawing a man’s face, bland, square jawed. You wish, thought Swan and gave Barrett’s leg a little kick. He should do t
he woman the courtesy of looking like he was listening.

  ‘That seems a wonderfully liberal approach, sister. Can I ask, when were you last in the garden yourself?’

  Her face clouded. ‘On Monday, after they found the little thing.’

  ‘And before that?’

  The nun looked down at the carpet beside her chair, as if the answer might be in its pattern.

  ‘Sometime in spring. I seem to remember crocuses.’

  ‘But you run the gardening club.’

  She looked up at him and frowned. ‘Perhaps you’re trying to flatter me. As you can see, I don’t get about like I did. My supervision has been at a distance for some time, but someone else will be running the club soon.’

  ‘Another nun?’

  Barrett was jiggling his leg now, sending vibrations up Swan’s chair.

  ‘Yes, Sister Bernadette, a wonderful young woman. She’ll pull it back into shape, I know.’

  ‘She seems very cool-headed, all right,’ said Swan.

  ‘She’s far more than that – Bernadette is worth ten of me to our little community. She knows nursing, she did a course in social work, she leads all of our city initiatives… such energy.’

  ‘Sister – I need to ask you something directly. If your girls thought of the garden as their sanctuary – is it so unlikely that one of them might bring their baby there?’

  ‘I don’t think any of them were in that kind of trouble. And none of them would murder a child.’

  ‘How can you know for sure? You weren’t around much.’

  ‘I know it in my heart.’

  You could go so far questioning these nuns, it seemed, then something closed down.

  ‘Could the child have been born to anyone in the convent?’

  He expected immediate rebuttal, but Sister O’Dwyer appeared to think it over, as if running through an album of people in her mind.

  ‘We would have known.’

  ‘So what do you think happened? Indulge me. I can see you’re a woman with a decent imagination.’

  Sister O’Dwyer smiled slightly at her clasped hands and strained her face up to meet his eye once more.