by Nicola White
‘A baby’s not really a person, is it, Una?’
She shifted her eyes to look out the windscreen. ‘Of course it’s a person, it has a soul.’
‘Did you confess what you did to the priest?’
‘I only disposed of it. Protected Joan. Protected you. God will be my judge.’
‘You got away with it.’
‘You’ve no idea what it is to live with something like that. I got away with nothing.’
They drove on towards the farm.
‘I’ll drop you at your house,’ said Una, ‘you can change, then you’ll come down to the farm for your tea.’
A man was walking towards them on the roadside. He had a beige raincoat on, open and blowing back from a pale grey suit. Not the kind of clothes anyone wore around here. The knees of his trousers had mud on them. As they drew closer, Davy recognised the detective from the Dublin police station. He quickly raised a hand to his face. Una looked in the rear-view mirror. Davy turned in his seat. The man stood gazing after them, his coat billowing against the cow parsley that gushed from the hedge.
‘Who’s that?’
‘I don’t know. Just drop me at the track.’
As he got out of the car, Davy looked back down the road towards town. The man was no longer in sight.
‘Come down in about an hour,’ said Una.
‘I’m not hungry,’ said Davy, and started up the track towards his bungalow.
THIRTY
Ali ignored Swan’s advice. A bath would fix nothing, and she didn’t want to face her aunt. Instead of going to the farm, she walked up to Davy’s house. He wasn’t there. She sat down on the cement stump that stood like a sentry by the unfinished threshold. The afternoon was mild, but she couldn’t stop her limbs from trembling. Down on the road, a car door slammed and soon after, Davy appeared through the trees, walking fast. He was still wearing his dark funeral suit, but it looked looser on him than when she’d seen him at the graveyard, and his tie was gone.
He started to raise a hand in greeting, but then blinked and stood still, looking at her with an expression somewhere between disgust and confusion.
‘What have you got there?’ he called.
Ali looked down. The doll was lying across her knee. She had forgotten about it.
‘It’s my doll.’
He closed the distance between them. In the light of the clearing he looked ill, his skin doughy. He stood over her, staring down at the filthy remains of Baby Joy. He brought his hand up to his shoulder and swung it in slow motion towards her face. His fingers delivered a light flick against her cheek.
‘You little joker,’ he said, but he wasn’t smiling.
Ali stood up.
‘You’ve been in the pub, haven’t you?’
‘Where did you find that aul’ yoke?’
‘This yoke is the doll I was supposed to get that Christmas. I found it buried in the cottage on the forestry road.’
Davy started to laugh, low and empty.
‘So that’s what she did with it. What a retard. So you’ve been all on your own here?’
‘Yea.’
‘Only I saw a man on the road, heading for the village – he had city clothes.’
‘That’s Detective Swan – he’s from Dublin.’
Davy took a small bunch of keys from his pocket and bounced them rhythmically in his hand.
‘I hope he’s not going to take you away from us again?’ He hopped past her up on to the doorstep and busied himself with the lock.
‘Naw, he’s here to talk to Sister Bernadette from my school. She’s one of Doctor Nolan’s daughters. Well, you probably know that.’
Davy was taking a while to unlock the door.
‘Why don’t you come in for a coffee,’ he said, his back still turned, ‘tell me about it, eh?’
‘Davy?’
He looked around.
‘Who’s a retard? When I said I’d found the doll, you said something like she’s a retard.’
He lifted his shoulders then relaxed them in a long exaggerated sigh.
‘Joan. I gave her that doll to help her get over losing the baby that night. Something to hold while she was wailing. We needed the box. I didn’t think she’d go and bury it.’
Ali shivered. We needed the box. So matter of fact. She did a sum in her head. Davy must have been sixteen when Joan had her baby.
‘Do you know about… where the baby ended up? When we found this doll, I was thinking where’s the real one?’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Detective Swan and me – he helped dig it up.’
Davy stepped down beside her.
‘You’re some kid, do you know that? Okay, so…’
Sliding an arm round her shoulder, Davy started to walk her along the rough path towards the farm. The doll hung from her hand, brushing through the grass. Everything was both ordinary and extraordinary, and she felt that she was being carried along on some kind of current, that even though she spoke and moved, she couldn’t affect the flow of things. Even Davy seemed strange to her, full of flippant cheer.
‘Joan used to stay in that broken cottage with her little brother, just like a pair of tinkers. I don’t know what you see in him, by the way, he’s closer to livestock than human. He thinks it was me that shafted her. Got her up the pole. An altar boy like me.’
‘Do you feel alright, Davy? I don’t think I feel right.’
He squeezed her closer to him, but kept walking.
‘He’d rather think that than the truth. Better than knowing it was your old man or your uncle or even one of your brothers doing her. That’s why she used to stay over in the kitchen – she didn’t want to go home. She knew an awful lot for her age, sex stuff. She was very keen to teach it, too.’
The path widened and the trees gave way to farm buildings. Davy released his hold on her, looked about at the barn and outbuildings as if they were new to him, rubbed at his chin.
Ali walked ahead onto the concrete screed of the farmyard, and the view opened up around her – the soft rise of hill, the lines of hedges, and closer in, on her left, the pig sheds. Davy came up to stand beside her.
‘Technically speaking, of course, I might have been the father, but I know in my heart it wasn’t mine. It was a sickly thing, and its end was sad. I won’t have that one associated with me. I won’t.’
Gold light slanted across the open fields, but here in the shade of the barn it was cold. Ali tucked the doll inside her cardigan and drew the cloth tight around her. A tractor came into view, crossing the high meadow. Cut grass spewed out behind the reaper blades in quilted lines.
‘Looks like everyone’s back from the funeral,’ she said, her own voice high in her ears. ‘Lets go down to the house.’
She took a step forward, but Davy’s hand fell on her shoulder, as she half expected it would, holding her in place.
‘You asked me a question,’ he said, ‘at least let me answer.’
Ali turned to look at him. He jumped to one side and landed on a drain cover. It rang from the blow, like a gong.
‘Do you know what this is?’
As he said it, her nose opened to the familiar smell. Under the square drain cover was the tank that took all the pig waste. Cement channels ran down from the sheds and under the concrete rectangle they were standing on.
‘It’s the slurry tank,’ said Ali.
‘Good girl. Three fathoms deep of shit and piss. The magical thing is you never need to empty it, because the shit eats itself.’
Ali remembered a fear she had when she was little, when she was helping to brush the slurry down the channels, that she would slip through one of the narrow slits at the end into a bottomless pool of stink. But that had been a groundless fear, the stuff of nightmares, easily dissolved. Nothing like what she felt now, lurking,
wide-awake.
‘That so?’ said Ali. Her hand moved to embrace the curve of the doll’s back beneath the thin wool of her cardigan, some animal instinct in her feeling a small presence there. The tractor thrummed somewhere not far away.
Davy drew her close and lowered his voice.
‘Una’s not a very sentimental person, you know that. It was the middle of Christmas day that you found it. She did what she had to do.’ He tapped on the metal with the toe of his scuffed black brogues.
Ali stepped back from the metal hatch, couldn’t block out an image of the baby’s body sinking slowly into the brown muck, lit by a square of daylight. Una standing above, the grimy box in her hands.
‘That’s horrible.’
‘Women do horrible things, though your Mary O’Shea libbers don’t think so. Oh the poor mistreated women… oh the terrible men that oppress them… If you hadn’t stuck your little nose in, it could have waited. I might have buried it properly on Stephen’s Day, when things were quiet.’
‘You knew it was under the bed?’
‘ ‘Course I did. I said I’d deal with it. And I would have, but…’ he turned from her, ‘ach, you were only a child, it wasn’t your fault.’
Ali stared at him. He was quieter now – the antic spirit had gone out of him as suddenly as a wind dying. He’d been too young to be involved in something like that, younger than she was now, and she didn’t believe that callous tone he was trying to muster. He was still her Davy.
‘Let’s go down to the house,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to see my sister right now.’
‘We could go into town.’
‘Too many people.’
The tractor noise was moving towards them, though the machine itself was hidden behind the sheds. The light of the day was fading, shadows gathering like fog in field hollows and the lee of buildings.
‘You look tired,’ Ali said.
‘I’d like to sleep for a thousand years, but I can’t even manage an hour. Come back to the bungalow and have a drink with me.’
He held out a hand to her, and after a moment she took it. She had asked and he had told her. That should be worth something. Truth should be worth something.
They walked back through the trees, Davy humming a meandering slow tune. His grip on her hand was reassuring, tight.
THIRTY - ONE
The Nolan home was on a rise of land to the north of the village, half hidden by a lush hedge. It was double-fronted, with wide bay windows, a large brick-arched porch and a thick creeper straddling one corner. They left two police cars blocking the top of the driveway and the Kinmore guards quickly fanned out in the grounds. Swan, Considine and Fitzmaurice walked round to the front door. An old blue and white vase took centre stage in one of the windows, holding sprays of gladioli. In the deep of the room, a pale face turned to their passing.
After a short wait, it was Sister Bernadette who appeared in the porch, her expression rigid.
‘Good afternoon, detective,’ she said.
‘Good afternoon, Sister. We need to talk to you further, and to your sister Peggy.’
She stood silent as if running through reasons to refuse them. Her eyes moved to take in the Garda that stood by the cars.
‘Come in.’ She stepped back to allow them into the house. The broad hall beyond the porch was wood panelled, with a grandfather clock and a carved oak bench. Discreet good things, handed down. A brass plaque on one door read ‘surgery’. Sister Bernadette was attempting to usher them into the room opposite, but Swan hesitated.
‘Who else is in the house with you?’
‘My father’s in his study, working,’ she said, indicating the door with the brass sign. ‘My mother’s shopping in Limerick with a neighbour.’
‘And your sister?’
‘She’s having a nap,’ said Sister Bernadette. A board creaked above their heads. Swan raised his eyes to the sound.
‘Peggy?’ Bernadette called.
Bare feet appeared at the top of the stairs, slowly followed by the rest of a young woman. She wore a nightdress and a shawl around her shoulders. Her hair was indeed the colour of a chestnut and curled thickly around her shoulders. She registered no surprise to see them there. Her face was still as wax.
‘Peggy, we’re going to have a chat with your sister,’ said Swan. ‘Perhaps my colleague Gina here can keep you company in the meantime?’
Considine was on her way up the stairs when a man with white hair stuck his head out of the surgery door. Garda Fitzmaurice greeted Doctor Nolan in an easygoing way and reassured him that no emergencies were in progress. Swan introduced himself and said he’d be obliged if the doctor could remain in the house for the moment.
Nolan exchanged a furtive glance with his eldest daughter before retreating behind his door.
Sister Bernadette led Swan and Garda Fitzmaurice into the living room and took a seat on the very edge of a chintz-covered armchair, hands demurely clasped over one knee. Swan experienced a surge of impatience in the face of her composure, an urge to shout or throw some delicate ornaments about. Instead, he wandered past her to take in the view from the window, settling his breathing. When he spoke, he addressed the windowpane.
‘We’ve been chasing you round the country, Sister. Your nuns think you’re in Newry.’
‘I needed to come home.’
‘To check on your sister?’ He turned.
She gave him a steady look. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been to St. Jude’s. Your sister stayed there, didn’t she?’
A quick nod. ‘My sister’s not well.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I think having a child disturbed her – disturbed the balance of her mind.’
‘So you’re not going to deny she had a baby or that she stayed in St. Jude’s under your care?’
‘No.’
‘Well, that saves time. Can I ask where her baby is?’
Sister Bernadette looked over at the dried flowers arranged in the empty fire grate. ‘You have it.’
‘The baby in the shed?’
The nun turned to look at him, her eyes full of rising tears. ‘I recognised her the moment I saw her lying in that basket. I delivered her myself. Held her in my arms each day she lived.’ She pulled her black sleeve down over the knuckle of her thumb and wiped her cheeks quickly.
‘I couldn’t tell you at the time, I was worried about Peggy. She disappeared from St. Jude’s the day before the child was found. I had to come down here to find her, to talk to her for myself.’
She had deliberately mislead him, had wasted days and days.
‘You think your sister killed her baby?’
‘We argued about the child. I thought she should keep her, bring her back home, but she wanted her to just disappear, that’s what she said.’
‘Your sister’s not married – wouldn’t it be tough for her to keep a child and raise it alone? ’
‘We would have managed. I told her I’d help.’
‘But you’re up in Dublin.’
‘I could have come home.’
More tears appeared and Sister Bernadette swiped at them irritably.
‘Your sister refused your help?’
‘Maybe I pressured her too much.’
‘Did she admit to killing it?’
Bernadette shook her head quickly. ‘But I know having a baby can bring on depression. I didn’t think Peggy could do something like that, but what do I know?’ There was bitterness mixed with the grief in her voice.
‘And what does Peggy say?’ asked Fitzmaurice.
‘She says the baby in the shed wasn’t hers, that her baby was adopted, that she’s been taken abroad. It’s a fantasy. I held her dead in my arms, so how can she be in another place and happy? She wasn’t just Peggy’s, she was something to me
too… in my head, I call her Grace.’
They sat in silence for a minute while Sister Bernadette struggled to control her breathing.
‘Why did you unwrap the coverings from the baby – to hide the blouse was it?’
‘I needed to see what was done to her.’ She brought a curled fist to her mouth, pressed it hard against her lips. ‘I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know why I hid the blouse; I think I was in a panic in case it was Peggy’s. I sent the Hogan girl away for water so I could have some time. Just an excuse – she’d been baptised already in the little chapel at St. Jude’s, just the three of us there.’ She smiled briefly at the memory.
‘We spoke to Sister Dreyfus at St. Jude’s,’ said Swan. ‘She saw your sister leave with the baby. She saw her being driven off in a car.’
Sister Bernadette looked at him, puzzled.
‘Who else did she know in Dublin?’ he asked.
‘No-one.’
‘Did she tell you who the father was?’
‘I asked her, but all she would say was that they couldn’t be together – yet.’ Sister Bernadette took a breath, ‘I think he must have been a married man, but she still had hopes for him. The hope was more precious than the child.’
There was a knock at the door, and Considine stuck her head in, asked to see Swan for a moment. They went into the small front porch and kept their voices low.
‘I was making small talk, boss, I wasn’t trying to do my own interview, but she just started talking about the kid.’
‘Okay. What’s she saying?’
She says the one found in Dublin wasn’t hers. Says that hers was taken to England. She won’t say who took it.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘It’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it?’
‘Did she talk about being picked up in the car?’
‘No – I wanted to hold off till you were there. How’s the nun?’