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 ha
d 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.
‘Howaryerself? I’m grand and glad to be back home,’ she called back as she reached the front of the shop.
Now that she stood in front of him, feeling more like sixteen than sixty, she had forgotten all the boastful anecdotes she had dreamt up on the plane.
‘Well, ye are a sight for sore eyes and that’s for sure. I was wondering only the other day how long it would be before we saw ye back here. Mrs Kennedy, she said now, no, ye won’t be seeing her back in these parts. Gone for good she is, to Chicago, and I thought, well now, isn’t that a great shame.’
He had thought about her?
She was speechless. He had thought of her and spoken to others in the shop about her.
‘Well now, I will always come back. ’Tis my home after all.’
‘Aye, but many don’t. Time passes and they forget. We have houses now standing empty for years and no one to sell them on or to claim them. Families in America, long gone. Old Catherine, over a hundred she was, now, when she died. Her house has stood empty these two years or so. Solicitors, they have tried but, sure, they cannot find the son. He emigrated to America sixty years back, and could be long dead himself now. It will stand empty forever, I would say.’
He smiled. ‘I’m about to lock up. How d’ye fancy a glass in the pub and a catch-up over old times?’
Mrs McGuire nodded, but said nothing. She couldn’t have spoken even if she had wanted to. He had asked her to the pub as though he were commenting on the weather. And yet her heart was beating as fast as it had when they had been teenagers, and he had kissed her, one burning hot day, when they had both helped out at the Finnegan’s harvest for a penny each.
On that day, just as they were about to leave together, Maisie had interrupted and spirited Mrs McGuire away on a spurious excuse, saying she was needed urgently by her mother. Mrs McGuire found her an hour later, sitting in a bar drinking Guinness with no notion at all as to why anyone should be looking for her.
Leaving her mother, she had gone in search of Maisie and Mr O’Hara. It was Colm Power who had given her the news that had shattered her world.
‘Would ye be looking for Maisie? Ah, well, ask yer man. They was sneaking off looking very sweet with one another, I would say now. Kissing the two prettiest colleens in the village in one day. Isn’t he just the lucky bastard?’
Mr O’Hara turned the closed sign to face the window and put the key in the door ready to lock up.
She hesitated, thinking about Mary and Alice, back at the hotel.
Mary could manage. Alice could manage. They could all manage. Bugger them.
She was about to do something she had wanted to do for a very long time and a thrill shot down her spine. She would spend time alone with the man she had first fallen in love with, over forty-four years ago.
No one could ever say Mrs McGuire wasn’t a patient woman.
The following morning, Porick drove Mary and Alice to the convent. Long before he reached its gravel drive he began to slow down.
‘Shall I wait at the bottom of the drive for ye, Mary?’ he said without turning round.
Porick didn’t like the nuns and the closer he got to the convent steps, the more anxious he became. Given a choice, he would have preferred to have dropped both women and the baby at the bottom of the drive and agree to pick them up there later, or even at the gates of hell, anywhere they wanted. He just did not want to hang around outside the convent, waiting.
‘I would prefer it if you waited outside the main building,’ Mary replied. ‘But, if you don’t want to, park up outside the gates and we will walk down the drive to you when we have finished. Just keep an eye out for us now.’
‘Why didn’t Mrs McGuire want to come with us?’ Alice asked Mary.
Alice was holding the baby while Mary used her compact mirror to reapply her lipstick and check her hair before they stepped out of the taxi. Mary had her own stories of being educated by the nuns. Lipstick was her warpaint. Her armour of defence.
Mary carefully outlined her lips. Her intense focus on keeping a straight line provided her with an excuse to act distracted, delaying the moment she might have to lie. She did not want to be the one to inform Alice that Mrs McGuire had taken herself off to see Brigid. Mary had wanted to join her herself to visit the woman who was legally married to her brother and see her lovely nieces. She had packed presents for them all in her suitcase. Alice didn’t know that either. Unperturbed by Mary’s silence, she continued, ‘Do you think they will be able to tell I’m not a Catholic, Mary? Am I actually allowed to step inside?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Alice, we don’t look any different.’
Mary sounded impatient, which was unusual for her. Alice didn’t take offence; she understood that Mary was nervous about meeting the nuns.
‘Mammy didn’t come because she had a hangover, I reckon,’ Mary now said to Alice. ‘When I popped into her room this morning she said she felt as if a rocket had landed on her head and, my God, she did look ghastly. I thought it was best to leave her. I think she ended up in the pub with one of her friends last night.’
Mary was quite sure that, as soon as they had left the hotel, Mrs McGuire would recover and be on her way to visit Brigid.
Mary felt a moment of panic as she looked at Porick. She hoped he would keep his mouth shut and not mention Mrs McGuire this morning. It was his father who would be driving her mammy, she imagined, as soon as she and Alice were down the road and out of sight.
It was Sister Celia herself who answered the door of the Abbey.
She recognized Mary instantly. It was not often a parent offered three thousand dollars for a baby. Sister Celia’s face instantly transformed from its normal grumpy setting to a smiling mask of compassion and care. A carefully crafted pretence, masking abject indifference.
‘Ah, come on in now,’ she said as she gently took hold of Mary’s arm. ‘Come in.’
Mary gratefully stepped into the hallway. ‘This is Alice, my sister-in-law, Sister. We are so sorry to call in on you unannounced, but I did write ahead to Sister Assumpta. It’s just that we didn’t know what flights we would be able to catch and everything was so rushed as we left. I am so sorry.’
‘Stop, would ye, stop, not at all, not at all,’ said Sister Celia as she ushered Mary down the corridor. ‘Reverend Mother has a visitor with her, Sister Theresa from St Vincent’s, but, sure, she was on her way when the bell rang, which is why I was in the hall. Come along now, I will make sure ye go straight in.’
Alice hung back a little. Surrounded by statues of the sacred heart and paintings depicting scenes from the bible, she was uneasy, and felt as though the initials C of E burnt brightly on her forehead.
Alice and Mary stepped into the Reverend Mother’s huge office with its vast expanse of Persian rug.
‘Beautiful carpets,’ Alice whispered to Mary. ‘Just like the make we had in the foyer of the Grand in Liverpool. That was called Axminster, the best.’ The opulence of the carpet made Alice feel at home. This was more like it.
‘Come along in, ladies,’ Sister Assumpta called out from behind the desk.
Alice felt she had better do something to make herself useful, as well as to divert the nuns’ attention
away from her, just in case they could spot a soul in limbo. While Sister Celia prattled on and pulled out chairs, Alice whispered to Mary, ‘Give me the baby to hold so that you can concentrate.’ As she held out her arms to take the sick baby, she noticed Sister Assumpta looking at her with more than a hint of curiosity. Alice smiled back, tentatively, as she rewrapped the shawl around Dillon. The smile was unreturned. God, she can tell, Alice thought. She began to tremble and all thought of defiance in the face of intimidation fled.
Nervously, but calmly, Mary began to explain her situation. She had practised her words over and over the evening before, but now, sitting in front of the Reverend Mother, she was unable to prevent the tears from filling her eyes and thickening her throat, making it difficult to speak without almost breaking down.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she sniffled as she opened the clasp on her handbag and took out a hankie.
Mary felt overwhelmed. Neither nun spoke or offered a gesture of comfort.
On the plane over, she had rehearsed this scene in her mind. In her imagined scenario, the nuns had been kindly. In reality, they were unyielding, devoid of compassion.
‘We are in a desperate situation, Sister. We have no choice other than to come here and ask for your help. The baby is very poorly and we need to find his mother urgently, or he will die. There is almost no chance of finding a stranger with a good enough match. We must find the woman or the girl who gave birth to him.’
As Mary spoke, Sister Assumpta occasionally altered the position of something or other on her desk.
She moved her pen slightly further up. Straightened the blotter. Stroked the silver and ivory letter opener. Raised her eyebrows. Tipped her head to one side.
Mary felt she wasn’t really listening and, worse, that the Reverend Mother had known what her answer would be and was waiting impatiently to deliver it.
‘We desperately need a member of his family to donate a sample of bone marrow. ’Tis a simple operation and we would pay for the family member to be flown to America. Everything would be covered. There would be no problem with that. We would make sure the family were very comfortable.’
The Ballymara Road Page 22