The Ballymara Road

by Nadine Dorries

  ‘Blimey!’ said Father Anthony. ‘Well, here’s hoping I’m never on the wrong side of Sister Evangelista.’

  ‘You?’ said Harriet. ‘Anthony, you have everyone you ever meet eating out of your hand. You are goodness itself, so how could that ever happen?’

  ‘Now,’ said Harriet, ‘we had better hurry or we will be late and that will not do for the priest. Let me just place a damp tea towel over the last trifles. It seems to me as if half of Liverpool is attending this wedding and that trifle is their favourite dish.’

  They both stopped short in the hallway, hearing the sound of organ music as if carried on the rays of sunshine that fell in shimmering pillars, through the open Priory door.

  ‘Look at them all,’ said Harriet, smiling up at her brother. ‘I have never seen so many people stand outside a church to watch the bride arrive.’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s no different from home. We may be in Liverpool, but everyone here is Irish and the ways have just travelled across the sea.’

  Father Anthony waited while Harriet pulled on her lemon gloves. She picked up a lemon-and-white hat from the hall table and said, with a flourish and a spin, ‘There, holy brother, will I do?’

  ‘You are a vision of primroses, sister. Mammy and Daddy would have been very proud.’

  ‘Come along then, Father Anthony,’ she said briskly, gently pushing her brother in the small of his back as they stepped outdoors.

  They walked down the path together but could barely make their way through the throng of people assembled outside the Priory walls, lining all the way down to the church gates.

  The crowd parted to allow the priest and Harriet through. The words, ‘Morning, Father,’ rang out from everyone they passed.

  For everyone in return, Father Anthony had a smile and a greeting. ‘Morning to you, ’tis a wonderful day,’ he called to the happy well-wishers.

  No one saw Alison Devlin’s car, as it passed the top of Nelson Street and then swung away again.

  ‘Go round once more,’ Alison urged the driver with an uncharacteristic impatience. ‘I don’t think they are ready for me. I can see Father Anthony and Harriet walking to the church. I want to make a big entrance. Turn round quickly.’

  ‘Why not, queen,’ laughed her father, as he sat in the back of the car and lit up a cigarette. ‘You only get married once. Let’s make the most of it.’

  ‘Da, watch my veil with the match,’ shouted Alison as a profusion of gauze, trimmed with appliquéd white cherry blossom, almost went up in flames.

  Alison was aware that not one resident in the four streets had ever before seen a bride arrive at the church in a car. It was a first. The distance from most people’s houses to the church was so short that every bride walked and, besides, cars were a luxury that just could not be afforded. Miss Devlin taught at the school, but she lived in Maghull and her true home was Cork. Her life was so deeply rooted in the four streets and St Mary’s church, convent and school that there was never a question she would marry anywhere else.

  Alison turned and looked out of the back window as the car moved away. She saw her friend Harriet and Father Anthony, winding their way through the crowd towards the church entrance. Just behind them, Tommy and Maura Doherty, the parents of her bridesmaids, were strolling up to the church with Kathleen and Jerry, Nellie’s nana and da. They walked with heads bent, linking arms as if holding each other up. Even though it was her wedding day, Alison’s heart turned over in sadness.

  Harriet noticed that everyone who could do so had squeezed into the church itself, respectfully leaving four pews empty for the nuns. She grinned at the sight of the sisters pouring out of the convent and making their way towards the church, bustling and giggling like nervous, happy schoolgirls.

  She thought to herself how different the nuns in Liverpool were. At her own convent school in Dublin, she had never seen a nun bustle or giggle.

  The bells were ringing out in happiness, the sun was shining. Harriet looked about her, amazed at the love and support the community openly displayed for their favourite teacher, Miss Devlin.

  Children from the school, both past and present, and residents from the four streets sat scrubbed and clean, in their Sunday best, chattering to each other over the organ music. Rays of sunshine, passing through the stained-glass windows, were reflected by one head of red hair after another, infusing the chancel with an amber glow.

  The familiar smell, found in all churches everywhere, of old dark wood, once lovingly carved into pews and altar by hands long forgotten, mingled now with that of fresh flowers and damp moss.

  Harriet had attended so many weddings in her lifetime, too many to count and now, here she was, too old even to be a bridesmaid.

  ‘Morning, Harriet, you look lovely, you do. Love your hat.’ One of the mothers, Deirdre, edged past her to take her seat next to her neighbour.

  ‘Morning, Deirdre, thank you. You look lovely too. That’s a pretty dress.’

  ‘I know,’ Deirdre replied with no false modesty. ‘I got it in a jumble sale. Isn’t it great? And it’s got a label that says St Michael, so I did well there. Not just a lovely dress but it’s got the name of the Irish centre and a saint on it. Can’t be bad, eh? I’ve got me back covered, me. I’m going to wear it for the bingo, so I am. Reckon it’ll bring me luck, Harriet?’

  Both women laughed as Deirdre edged her way down the pew.

  As she had promised to help Alison with her veil once she arrived, Harriet hovered by the church door and peeped out to see if she could spot the bridal car. The street seemed to be lined with every available officer from the Lancashire Constabulary.

  Harriet was amused as she pondered another guilty secret. She had always liked a man in uniform.

  Maura was having one of her bad days. Some were merely bad, others were dreadful. Today was just bad. She was coping better than she thought she would as a result of having Kathleen at her side.

  ‘Maybe it’s because the girls have been picked as Miss Devlin’s bridesmaids, and Harry and Little Paddy as page-boys, that I don’t feel so bad today,’ Maura had said to Tommy early that morning.

  She had packed her excited daughters into the taxi Miss Devlin had sent to take them to Maghull for the bridal preparation rituals, which apparently included lying on the spare bed for thirty minutes with slices of cucumber on their eyes.

  Tommy joined Maura on the front step just as she raised her arm to wave goodbye to her daughters.

  The daughters left behind. Those who hadn’t died. The ones she had been allowed to keep.

  ‘Aye, they will look grand when we see them later,’ Tommy whispered into her wire curlers as he hugged her.

  ‘They will and, sure, isn’t that something to look forward to?’ said Maura, hugging her Tommy back. Today, for the first time in a long while, Maura vaguely remembered what it was like to feel proud. She moved up the brow with her arm linked through Kathleen’s and the two men following behind.

  Maura still found it difficult to pass through a crowd. She could feel the silent sympathy that flowed towards her from the other mothers and, although she knew it was kind and well meant, she just couldn’t handle it, not even now after so much time had passed. Sorry for your troubles. Sorry for your troubles. Sorry for your troubles.

  They were the only words anyone had spoken to her for weeks and they still rang in her ears.

  Maura and Kathleen stopped for a moment on the way up the hill to exchange words with some of their friends and for Kathleen to have a last cigarette.

  ‘It lasts too long, a nuptial mass, too long to go without a ciggie and it looks rude, stepping out in the hymns for a quick one. And besides, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Father Anthony and Harriet,’ Kathleen said, taking her ciggies out of her coat pocket.

  ‘Look at this lot,’ she said as she lit up, blinking through a haze of stinging blue smoke that brought tears to her eyes, ‘not a curler to be seen anywhere. Doesn’t everyone look nice, eh, Maura?’ />
  Maura looked around. She had taken out her own curlers and put a comb through her hair that morning. She had to admit the women of the four streets had scrubbed up well.

  ‘Peggy, how do ye manage to sleep with that beehive?’ Kathleen asked, putting up her hand to feel Peggy’s hair. The solid tower wobbled to one side as Kathleen pushed at it.

  ‘There’s a whole tin of lacquer on it, that’s how,’ said Peggy, bending her head to take a light from the end of Tommy’s cigarette for her own. ‘It’s like sleeping on a fecking brick some nights.’

  ‘You want to watch that when you light up,’ said Kathleen. ‘Lacquer is flammable, you know.’

  ‘Flammable, what’s that?’ said Peggy. ‘I use Get Set from Woolworth’s. It’s the best and costs nearly a shilling a tin. Does the job, though. My hair won’t be going anywhere now and it lasts a whole two weeks each time it’s done. Jesus, it’s fecking itchy, though. Thanks be to God for knitting needles.’

  Tommy took another half-ciggie from behind his ear and lit up to join Kathleen. He put his arm across his Maura’s shoulders and hugged her to him.

  In the past few weeks, they had a newfound closeness, brought about by the realization of how near they had come to the edge of disaster.

  Neither would speak of the days when they had almost torn each other apart with blame and hatred. They did not acknowledge that Maura had entered her own temporary world of madness. Tommy, struggling with his own grief, had had to hide the tablets the doctor had given her, as he feared she would wake in the night and swallow the whole bottle. A shiver ran down his spine when he thought of how close they had come to falling apart. Looking at his neighbours all around him today, he knew, without doubt, how they had been saved. If it hadn’t been for Harry needing the hospital that night, God alone knows where they would be by now.

  Extinguishing cigarettes on the pavement under their heels, they walked into the church where Nellie and the Doherty girls stood at the back, near to the font, in all their lilac fluff and finery, waiting for the bride.

  ‘Not so comfortable with all these bizzies about, are you, Jer,’ Tommy whispered to Jerry.

  ‘’Tis a great day for robbers today,’ said Jerry, ‘the lucky bastards.’

  Jerry had said as much to Nellie that morning over breakfast.

  ‘They will all be here in the four streets today, every copper in Liverpool. There will be great pickings over at Seaforth on the docks when they know the coast is clear.’

  ‘Eh, pack it in, walls have ears,’ said Nana Kathleen, smacking Jerry across his cap with the tea towel and nodding furiously towards Nellie.

  ‘Eat that breakfast. Ye can go nowhere on an empty stomach,’ Kathleen had said to Nellie early that morning. Nellie had spent the entire night in yellow sponge curlers and had hardly slept a wink.

  ‘I’m putting those curlers in a parcel to Maeve,’ Kathleen had said as she removed them that morning.

  Kathleen sent a parcel from Liverpool back to the farm in Ballymara about once a month, as did anyone in Liverpool who could afford the postage home. In County Mayo, the shops carried very little of interest, their stocks being related directly to the need to survive rather than to entertain or amuse.

  Nellie had spent more hours than she could count in the post office queue, holding oddly shaped brown-paper packages tied up with string, ready to be weighed and posted by sea mail to Mayo.

  ‘They are no use here. Curlers to sleep in, my backside. What’s wrong with just leaving them in all day for decoration? Who would want to sleep in curlers? Curlers are meant to be worn, not slept in.’

  The parcel to be sent home lived in a drawer in the press and its contents grew each week.

  Only yesterday Nellie had taken a peep at this month’s parcel: Ladybird baby vests for someone in the village back home, Vitapointe hair conditioner and a bottle of Coty L’Aimant perfume for Auntie Maeve’s birthday, all these lay on the brown-paper sheets, waiting to be posted.

  Now, as Kathleen had scooped up the curlers and thrown them into the press drawer, Nellie found she was not sad to see the back of them.

  ‘Howard has no fecking idea that the fruit in his wedding cake came from a sack off the back of the Cotopaxi when it berthed six weeks ago. Sandra Dever doesn’t get her fruit or sugar from anywhere else. It’s always knock-off.’

  Both men sniggered and then Tommy stopped. He always felt guilty when he laughed, feeling he shouldn’t. After what had happened to Kitty, laughing must be wrong. He had never, ever wanted to laugh again. It had only been in the past few months that he had wanted to live.

  ‘Howard is all right,’ said Jerry. ‘It’s that Simon who gets to me. When they were questioning us, I always got the impression that he knew exactly what had happened and that, for some reason, he wasn’t letting on.’

  ‘That was just yer imagination, Jer. He couldn’t have known. How could he? No one saw us.’

  Tommy’s heart lightened as soon as he saw his girls in church, a cluster of lilac-dipped angels, smiling at him – even Angela. Before Kitty had died, she could rarely raise a smile and she certainly hadn’t done so since. Now she stood at the font in her white-satin, T-bar shoes, hopping from foot to foot, beaming.

  ‘Da, hurry up,’ she said impatiently. ‘The bride is arriving soon. Move, move, Da.’

  ‘I’m not budging until I get a kiss first,’ said Tommy, placing his hands on his hips.

  The girls laughed and clamoured, more eager to be rid of their embarrassing father than in need of a kiss. He placed a kiss on each of his girls’ foreheads as Jerry did the same to his Nellie.

  ‘You all right, Nellie?’ asked Jerry, thinking his heart would burst with pride. His little girl was growing through her own personal heartache with dignity, and growing more like her mammy every day with her red ringlets tumbling down over her shoulders.

  Nellie grinned up at him. ‘I am, Da, but get lost.’

  She playfully punched her da in the stomach. Jerry, pretending to be winded, laughed and followed Tommy into the nave.

  As he moved down the aisle, a thought struck Tommy.

  ‘Angela gets more like Kitty every day,’ he said to Jerry.

  ‘I was just thinking the same thing myself,’ said Jerry, patting his mate on the back as they dipped on one knee, blessed themselves and slipped along the pew, taking their seats next to Maura and Kathleen.

  Jerry didn’t like being in church. It made him uncomfortable and, already, his collar was beginning to make his neck itch. Since the death of his first wife, Bernadette, he had attended only the christenings and communions he could not avoid. Today he had no choice, as Nellie was a bridesmaid. He would be forced to sit and witness another couple take their vows at exactly the same altar where he and Bernadette had knelt all those years ago. Her coffin had lain in front of that same altar a few short years later.

  He now struggled to recall those years with the clarity he would like. This often made him panic, feeling that she was fading, which would mean that she was leaving them for good.

  It was the same church, the same time of day, the same sunshine. The same people bearing witness. The people of the four streets.

  The same shimmering silver ribbon of river flowed past only yards away. Every heart was filled with gladness, just as each had been for Jerry and his beautiful bride, Bernadette.

  Jerry and Tommy both knelt in prayer: Tommy, because Maura had prodded him; Jerry, because, for the first time he could remember, he felt compelled to give thanks for Nellie and his mother, Kathleen.

  He had lost his Bernadette in childbirth. His wife Alice had run away to America and left him for another docker on the four streets, a man who was supposed to have been his mucker. But he had his mam and his Nellie, both loyal and faithful, and he wanted God to leave them with him forever. For that, he knew, he should pray and ask him for his forgiveness, because sitting next to him was his best mate, Tommy, who had lost his daughter, Kitty. And there was Jerry, with his Nel
lie, alive and laughing at the back of the church. There, but for the grace of God, thought Jerry as he prayed.

  A frisson of excitement swept through the congregation and, without anyone having to turn round or guess, they were all aware that the bride had arrived.

  The organ struck up the bridal march and, as everyone stood, the procession began.

  Kathleen linked Maura’s arm with hers as they left the church, blinking in the bright sunlight. During those first awful weeks Kathleen had felt as though it was her job to prop Maura up. Now, it had become a habit. A physical reaction to Maura’s weakness. She had become a human crutch.

  The churchyard filled with the sound of cheers and children squealing as they pushed past each other.

  ‘Well, isn’t that just a grand sight,’ said Kathleen, smiling at Nellie and Maura’s daughters. The three girls, holding Alison’s bridal train high off the cobbled path, were giggling and ducking as their school friends showered them with confetti.

  As they walked on to the Irish centre, Kathleen shouted out to Maura and Tommy’s twin boys, ‘Run on ahead, lads, and keep our table. Run now, fast.’

  Peggy had caught up with them whilst her silent husband, Paddy, fell into step alongside Tommy and Jerry.

  ‘Aye, keep ours too,’ said Peggy to her son, Little Paddy, giving him a cuff across the shoulder. He ran off to join Harry. ‘There’s nothing going to stand between me and that buffet today,’ she said, ‘and I want a good seat now ’cause I’m in for the night.’

  ‘Will ye be taking to the dance floor tonight, Peggy?’ asked Kathleen, squeezing Maura’s arm gently.

  Maura smiled. Making Maura smile was something Kathleen knew she could sometimes still make happen and it gave her enormous pleasure. There had been times when Kathleen had wondered whether she would ever see her friend smile again.