Whitethorn Woods

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘No, I’m great as I am,’ he said, searching for a chair to sit on.

  ‘You’re better not to eat, I suppose, they feed you like a prize pig in all these houses you visit – it’s no wonder you’re putting on a bit of weight.’

  Brian Flynn wondered had Kitty always been as sour as this? He couldn’t recall. Perhaps it was just the disappearance of Eddie with the sexy young Naomi that had changed her.

  ‘I was in with my mother,’ he said tentatively.

  ‘Had she a word to throw to you?’

  ‘Not many, I’m afraid, and none of them making much sense.’ He sounded weary.

  But he got no sympathy from Kitty. ‘Well, you can’t expect me to weep salt tears over her, Brian. When she did have her wits, I was never good enough for her marvellous son Eddie, so let her sit and work that one out for herself. That’s my view.’ Kitty’s face was hard. She wore a stained cardigan and her hair was matted.

  For a fleeting moment, Father Flynn felt a little sympathy for his brother. If you had the choice of all the women around, which apparently Eddie had, Naomi would have been an easier and more entertaining option. But then he reminded himself of duty and children and vows, and banished the thought.

  ‘The mother can’t manage much longer on her own, Kitty, I’m thinking of selling up her house and moving her into a home.’

  ‘Well, I never expected anything out of that house anyway, so go ahead and do it as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Eddie and Judy about it, see what they think,’ he said.

  ‘Judy? Oh, does her ladyship ever answer the phone over there in London?’

  ‘She’s coming over here to Rossmore in a couple of weeks’ time,’ Father Flynn said.

  ‘She needn’t think she’s staying here.’ Kitty looked around her possessively. ‘This is my house, it’s all I have, I’m not letting Eddie’s family have squatters’ rights in it.’

  ‘No, I don’t think for a moment that she’d want to … to … um … put you out.’ He hoped his voice didn’t suggest that Judy would never stay in a place like this.

  ‘So where will she stay then? She can’t stay with you and the canon.’

  ‘No, one of the hotels, I imagine.’

  ‘Well, Lady Judy will be able to pay for that, unlike the rest of us,’ Kitty sniffed.

  ‘I was thinking about Ferns and Heathers for our mother. I was there today, the people all seem very happy.’

  ‘That’s a Protestant home, Brian, the priest can’t send his own mother to a Protestant place. What would people say?’

  ‘It’s not a Protestant home, Kitty.’ Father Flynn was mild. ‘It’s for people of all religions or no religions.’

  ‘Same thing,’ Kitty snapped.

  ‘Not at all, as it happens. I was there bringing them Holy Communion. They are opening a wing for Alzheimer’s patients next week. I thought maybe if any of you would like to go and look at it …’ He sounded as weary as he felt.

  Kitty softened.

  ‘You’re not a bad person, Brian, not in yourself. It’s a hard old life what with no one having any respect for priests any more or anything.’ She meant it as a kind of sympathy, he knew this.

  ‘Some people do, just a little bit of respect,’ he said with a watery smile, getting up to leave.

  ‘Why do you stay in it?’ she asked as she came to the door.

  ‘Because I joined up, signed on, whatever, and very occasionally I do something to help.’ He looked rueful.

  ‘I’m always glad to see you anyway,’ said the charmless Kitty Flynn, with the heavy implication that she was probably the only one in Rossmore who might be remotely glad to see him anywhere near her.

  He had told Lilly Ryan that he would call and tell her how her husband Aidan was getting on in prison. She still loved him and had often regretted that she had testified against him. But it had seemed the only thing to do, the blows were so violent now that she had ended up in hospital and she had three children.

  He didn’t feel in the mood to talk to her. But since when was all this about feeling in the right mood? He drove into her little street.

  The youngest boy Donal was in his last year at the Brothers School. He would not be at home.

  ‘Aren’t you a very reliable man, Father?’

  Lilly was delighted to see him. Even though he had no good news for her it was at least consoling to be considered reliable. Her kitchen was so different to the one he had just left. There were flowers on the window sill, gleaming copper pans and pots; there was a desk in the corner where she earned a small living by making up crosswords: everything was in order.

  She had a plate of shortbread on the table.

  ‘I’d better not,’ he said regretfully. ‘I heard in the last place that I was as fat as a pig.’

  ‘I bet you did not.’ She took no notice of him. ‘Anyway can’t you walk it all off you in the woods above? Tell me, how was he today?’

  And with all the diplomacy that he could muster, Father Flynn tried to construct something from his meeting with Aidan Ryan that morning into a conversation that would bring even a flicker of consolation to the wife he had once beaten and now refused to see. A wife that he seriously believed had sold their eldest baby to a passer-by.

  Father Flynn had looked up newspaper accounts over twenty years ago of the time that the Ryan baby girl had been taken from a pram outside a shop in town.

  She had never been found. Alive or dead.

  Father Flynn managed to keep the conversation optimistic by delivering a string of clichés: the Lord was good, one never knew what was going to happen, the importance of taking one day at a time.

  ‘Do you believe in St Ann?’ Lilly asked him, suddenly breaking the mood.

  ‘Well, yes, I mean, of course I believe that she existed and all that …’ he began blustering and wondering where this was leading.

  ‘But do you think that she is there listening at the well?’ Lilly persisted.

  ‘Everything is relative, Lilly, I mean, the well is a place of great piety over centuries and that in itself carries a certain charge. And of course St Ann is in heaven and like all the saints interceding for us …’

  ‘I know, Father, I don’t believe in the well either,’ Lilly interrupted. ‘But I was up there last week and, honestly, it’s astonishing. In this day and age all the people coming there, it would amaze you.’

  Father Flynn assembled a look of pleased amazement on his face. Not very successfully.

  ‘I know, Father, I felt the same as you do, once. I go up there every year, you know, around Teresa’s birthday. That was my little girl, who disappeared years before you came to the parish here. Usually it’s just meaningless, but somehow last week I looked at it differently. It was as if St Ann really was listening to me. I told her all the trouble that had happened as a result of it all, and how poor Aidan had never been right since it happened. But mainly I asked her to tell me that Teresa was all right wherever she is. I could sort of bear it if I thought she was happy somewhere.’

  Father Flynn looked mutely at the woman, unable to summon any helpful reaction.

  ‘But anyway, Father, I know people are always seeing moving statues and holy pictures that speak, and all that kind of nonsense, but there was something, Father, there really was something.’

  He was still without words but nodding so that she would continue.

  ‘There were about twenty people there, all sort of telling their own story. A woman saying so that anyone could hear her, “Oh, St Ann, will you make him not grow any colder to me, let him not turn away from me any more …” Anyone could have heard her and known her business. But none of us were really listening. We were all thinking about ourselves. And suddenly I got this feeling that Teresa was fine, that she had a big twenty-first birthday party a couple of years ago and that she was well and happy. It was as if St Ann was telling me not to worry any more. Well, I know it’s ridiculous, Father, but it did me a lot of good and wher
e’s the harm in that?

  ‘I just wish that poor Aidan could have been there when she said it or thought it or transferred it to my mind or whatever she did. It would have given him such peace.’

  Father Flynn escaped with a lot of protestations about the Lord moving in mysterious ways and even threw in the bit of Shakespeare about there being more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. Then he left the little house and drove to the edge of Whitethorn Woods.

  As he walked through the woods he was greeted by people walking their dogs, joggers in tracksuits getting some of the exercise he obviously needed himself according to his sister-in-law. Women wheeled prams and he would stop to admire the babies. The canon used to say that a playful greeting of ‘Who have we here?’ was a great get-out when you came across a child in a pram. It covered both sexes and a failing memory for names. The others would fill you in and then you could take it up from there – grand little fellow, or isn’t she a fine little girl?

  He met Cathal Chambers, a local bank manager, who said he had come up to the woods to clear his head.

  He had been flooded by people wanting to borrow money to buy land round here so that they could sell it at a huge profit once the new road was given the okay. It was very hard to know what to do. Head Office had said he was the man on the ground so he should have a feel for what was going to happen. But how could you have a feel for something like that?

  He said that Myles Barry the solicitor was in exactly the same predicament. Three different people had come into him asking him to make an offer to the Nolans for that smallholding they had. It was pure greed, speculation and greed, that’s what it was.

  Father Flynn said it was refreshing to meet a banker who thought in such terms, but Cathal said that was not at all the way they looked at things in Head Office.

  Skunk Slattery was walking his two greyhounds and came up to sneer at Father Flynn.

  ‘There you go, Father, coming up here to the pagan well to hope that the gods of olden times will do what today’s Church can’t do,’ he taunted the priest, while his two bony greyhounds quivered with what seemed like annoyance as well.

  ‘That’s me, Skunk, always one for the easy life,’ Father Flynn said through gritted teeth. He nailed the smile to his face for the few minutes it took before Skunk ran out of rage towards him and moved the trembling dogs onwards.

  Father Flynn also went onwards, his face grim as he headed for the first time ever on his own to visit St Ann’s Well. He had been here as part of parish activities, always resentful and confused but never voicing his opinion.

  A few wooden signs carved over the years by pious local people pointed to the well, which was in a big, rocky, cavernous grotto. The place was damp and cold; a little stream ran down the hill behind and around the well and it was muddy and splashed where many of the faithful had reached in to take scoops of the water with an old iron ladle.

  It was a weekday morning and he thought that there would not be many people there.

  The whitethorn bushes outside the grotto were festooned, yes, that was the only word Father Flynn thought suitable, literally festooned with bits of cloth and notes and ribbons. There were medals and holy cures, some of them encased in plastic or cellophane.

  These were petitions to the saint, requests for a wish to be granted; sometimes they were thanks for a favour received.

  ‘He’s off the drink for three months, St Ann, I thank you and beg you to continue to give him strength …’

  or

  ‘My daughter’s husband is thinking of getting the marriage annulled unless she gets pregnant soon …’

  or

  ‘I’m afraid to go to the doctor but I am coughing up blood, please, St Ann, ask Our Lord that I be all right. That it’s only some kind of an infection that will pass …’

  Father Flynn stood and read them all, his face getting redder.

  This was the twenty-first century in a country that was fast becoming secular. Where did all this superstition come from? Was it only old people who came here? A throwback to a simpler time? But many of the people he had met even this very morning were young and they felt the well had powers. His own sister was coming back from England to pray here for a husband, the young Polish couple wanted their babies baptised here. Lilly Ryan, who thought she heard the statue tell her that her long-disappeared daughter was all right, was only in her early forties.

  It was beyond understanding.

  He went inside the grotto where people had left crutches and walking sticks and even pairs of spectacles as a symbol of hope that they would be cured and able to manage without them. There were children’s bootees and little socks – meaning who knew what? The desire for a child? A wish to cure a sick baby?

  And in the shadows, this huge statue of St Ann.

  It had been painted and refurbished over the years, making the apple cheeks even pinker, the brown cloak richer, the wisp of hair under the cream-coloured veil even blonder.

  If St Ann existed she would have been a small dark woman, from the land of Palestine and Israel. She would not have looked like an Irish advertisement for some kind of cheese spread.

  And yet kneeling there in front of the well were perfectly normal people. They got more here than they ever did in St Augustine’s Church in Rossmore.

  It was a sobering and depressing thought.

  The statue looked down glassily – which was a bit of a relief to Father Flynn. If he had begun to imagine that the statue was addressing him personally he would really have given up.

  But oddly, even though the saint was not speaking to him, Father Flynn felt an urge to speak to her. He looked at the young troubled face of Myles Barry’s daughter, a girl who had failed to get into law school to her father’s great grief. What could she be praying for with her eyes closed and her face so concentrated?

  He saw Jane, the very elegant sister of Poppy who ran the old people’s home. Jane, who, even to Father Flynn’s untutored eye, seemed to be wearing high-fashion designer clothes, was mouthing something at the statue. A young man who ran an organic vegetable stall in the marketplace was there too, his lips moving silently.

  As he gave a last look at what he considered an entirely inappropriate representation of the mother of the mother of Jesus, he wished he could ask the saint through the statue whether any of these prayers were ever heard and ever answered. And what did the saint do if two people were seeking conflicting favours?

  But this way fantasy lay, and madness. And he was not getting involved.

  He stroked the walls of the cave as he left the grotto, damp walls with messages carved on them. He made his way past the whitethorn bushes crowding the entrance, bushes that no one had cut back to give easier access because they felt the hopes and prayers and petitions of so many people were attached to them.

  Even on the old wooden gates there was a note pinned:

  ‘St Ann, hear my voice.’

  All around him Father Flynn could almost hear the voices. Calling and begging and beseeching down the years. He heard himself make up a little prayer.

  ‘Please let me hear the voices that have come to you and know who these people are. If I am to do any good at all here let me know what they are saying and what they want us to hear and do for them …’

  CHAPTER 2

  The Sharpest Knife in the Drawer

  Part 1 – Neddy

  I’ve heard people say about me, ‘Oh, Neddy Nolan! He isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer …’ But, you see, I never wanted to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Years ago we had one sharp knife in the kitchen and everyone was always talking about it with fear.

  ‘Will you put the sharp knife up on a shelf before one of the children cuts the hands off themselves,’ my mam would say, and ‘Make sure the sharp knife has the blade towards the wall and the handle out, we don’t want someone ripping themselves apart,’ my dad would say. They lived in fear of some terrible accident, and the kitchen running
red with blood.

  I was sorry for the sharp knife, to tell you the truth. It wasn’t its fault. It didn’t set out to frighten people, that’s just the way it was made. But I didn’t tell people how I felt, they’d just say again that I was being soft.

  Soft Neddy, they called me.

  Because I couldn’t bear to hear a little mouse squealing in a mousetrap, and I had cried when the hunt came near where we lived and I saw the eyes of the fox as it fled by and I shooed it into Whitethorn Woods. Yes, I suppose other fellows thought it was soft but the way I looked at it, the mouse hadn’t asked to be born in the scullery instead of out in a field where he could have lived peacefully to be an old happy mouse. And the lovely red fox certainly hadn’t done anything to annoy all those hounds and horses and people dressed up in red who galloped after him with such fury.

  But I’m not quick and clear at explaining things like that, so often I don’t bother. And nobody expects too much from Soft Neddy so I more or less get away with my way of looking at things.

  I thought it would be different when I grew up. Adults didn’t get all silly about things and sorry for them. I was sure this would happen to me too. But it seemed to take a very long time.

  When I was seventeen a crowd of us – me, my brother Kit and his pals – all went off from Rossmore in a van to a dance, oh, miles away beyond the lakes, and there was this girl. And she looked very different to the others, like they were wearing dresses with straps over their shoulders, and she was wearing a thick polo-necked jumper and skirt, and she had glasses and frizzy hair, and no one seemed to be asking her to dance.

  So I asked her up, and then when the dance was over she shrugged and said, ‘Well, at least I got one dance out of tonight.’

  So I asked her again, and then again; and then I said at the end, ‘You got fourteen dances out of tonight now, Nora.’

  And she said, ‘I suppose you want the going home.’

  ‘The going home?’ I asked.

  ‘A court a ride,’ Nora said in flat resigned tones. This would be the price she would pay for having been asked to dance fourteen times.