The Ballymara Road (2 page)

Frank sipped his tea. He hadn’t told Maggie that he had seen babies and children being carried out from the orphanage and laid in the earth. No coffins, no prayers, no headstones. Just two stone-faced nuns with a couple of shovels.

The nuns had used older girls in the orphanage to help dig the huge burial plot, for those unfortunate enough to succumb to any one of the diseases that stalked the cold, damp building, to claim the malnourished and broken in soul.

Frank couldn’t tell Maggie about that. It would be the end. Every day she threatened to leave, but where would they go?

‘No point in getting back to bed now, is there, Maggie. The cold has woken me for good.’

‘Please yerself. There’s another hour waiting for me under that eiderdown and I’m not wasting it.’

Maggie slipped under the covers, still wearing her dressing gown, and soon filled the room with her snores, seconds after switching off the lamp.

Frank smiled at his wife. He couldn’t have slept even if he had wanted to. He had never slept well since the eviction. Reaching up to the mantelpiece, he took down his dudeen and, pushing in a new plug of baccy, he slowly lit up, drawing the air in through the long clay stem.

A proud and hard-working tenant farmer, Frank had made his farm so productive over a period of twenty years that it became highly attractive to potential buyers. Never one to miss an opportunity to line his pockets with gold, his landlord had sold the fields right out from under them at auction, giving Frank and Maggie twenty-four hours to pack up and leave. It was a shock so huge that neither of them had fully recovered even to this day.

By a fortuitous coincidence, just as Frank and Maggie were made homeless, the sisters arrived and took up residence in what would become St Vincent’s.

Their arrival had been announced at mass at their local church, the day before Frank and Maggie were evicted from their home. It had been a Sunday just like any other, when they had lit the fire, milked the cows, had rashers and tatties for breakfast and walked to mass.

Frank could remember every single second of that last Sunday on the farm and he frequently replayed each one in his mind as he went about his work.

The landlord had not even had the courtesy to inform them he was putting the farm and their home up for auction. Their only clue came in the form of a tall man in a scruffy suit, who had arrived unannounced and began strutting around the farm on the Friday afternoon.

‘Landlord sent me,’ was all he said to Frank as he left his car parked across the gate and then strode out along the bottom field, peering into the ditches.

Frank had worried all weekend.

‘If there was anything to worry about, the landlord’s agent would have told us,’ Maggie had protested. ‘Stop fretting, ye panic when there’s nothin’ to panic about.’

Yet all the time she had felt so sick with anxiety herself that she was unable to eat or sleep. A cold hand of fear had rested on her shoulder and there it had remained ever since.

The priest in the local church had been overly excited about the nuns arriving and the establishment of St Vincent’s. Nuns spoilt priests and that was a fact.

‘The sisters are here to protect your loose morals. The bishop has recognized that I, being the only man of Christ’s teaching in the area, am indeed struggling,’ he had announced in a scathing tone.

‘Who is he talking about, Frank?’ Maggie had whispered.

‘I’ve no idea, Maggie, but they say ’tis free love all over the world, especially in Liverpool. They have the Beatles and everything. Maybe they’s worried we will be next, all lovin’ each other.’

Maggie knew it wasn’t funny and she tried hard not to laugh. One of the daughters on the adjoining farm had become pregnant without any notion of free love and she had been sent away to the Abbey. It had been a shock to Maggie, who had thought the girl a beauty, both in looks and in nature, and Maggie failed to understand how she had become pregnant at all.

‘’Tis beyond me. She has never set foot away from her own farm and family. How in God’s name could she be pregnant?’

Four years later, the girl had still not returned, and she wasn’t the only one.

The sisters had moved into an old manor house that had been deserted by an English lord following the potato famine and had been purchased, via the Vatican, at a knock-down price. It didn’t take long for the nuns to realize that their order had bitten off far more than they could chew.

The gardens and land had not been tended in many years and were as wild as any jungle. With men and young boys from the village leaving for Liverpool to join their friends in building homes and laying roads on the mainland, labour at home was scarce.

As soon as the priest heard what had happened to Frank and Maggie, he had taken them straight to St Vincent’s. The newly established sisters needed considerable assistance with the overgrown and rundown manor, and the priest became a hero in their eyes for finding it in the shape of the rotund, married, middle-aged Frank.

Frank had not been truly happy since the day they had arrived. Although he loved working in the large gardens, there were strange goings-on up at the convent that made him feel very unsettled.

‘I would love to know that the potatoes and vegetables I grow find their way onto the plates of the children in the orphanage,’ he said to Maggie, ‘but how can they? Them kids look half starved. The skin is hanging off their bones.’

Maggie was equally perturbed.

‘I cook only for the nuns and the retreat. The orphanage has its own kitchen. I don’t know what the orphans eat. Almost nothing is delivered up there. I have no idea where our slops go. They don’t go to the pig man, but they disappear from the bucket, sure enough. I hope to God the orphans aren’t fed that. It would taste too disgusting for anyone to eat. Surely not, Frank?’

Frank shook his head. The truth was, neither of them knew and they dared not ask.

Frank and Maggie knew very little of the convent’s business. Their hours were strict and their routine rigid. They simply provided and cooked the food. That was their role, nothing more nor less, other than manning the gates.

Frank pulled on his pipe and inhaled deeply. Something in the eyes of the man who had dropped the woman off that morning had made Frank feel uneasy.

When Maggie rose an hour later, Frank was still on the settle, nursing his empty mug in one hand and his extinguished pipe in the other.

‘Are you still sat there? That mug won’t fill itself by you looking at it now. Why don’t ye put the kettle back on. And as the ground is frozen today, ye can help me in the kitchen this morning.’

Frank didn’t reply, still deep in thought, holding in his mind the image of the young woman, Daisy. There was something about her that perturbed him, a sweet, trusting innocence. He trusted no one.

Yesterday he had picked the vegetables for the Christmas lunch. They lay in flat wooden trugs on the stone floor of the kitchen cold store, waiting for Maggie to prepare and cook them.

‘Frank, what is up with ye, cloth ears? Will ye help me or not?’

‘Aye, Maggie, of course I will, love.’

Frank leant forward and placed his elbows on his knees. Maggie knelt down in front of him to stoke up the lodge fire.

‘Ye know summat, Maggie,’ he said to her back, pushing baccy into his pipe with his thumb. ‘I know this sounds fanciful, and I know ye is going to say I is mad an’ all, but even though ’tis Christmas morning, I think today I met evil for the first time in me life. It was dressed up as a man in a hat, but ’twas the divil himself, all right, and of that I am sure.’

‘Well, if ye did, that doesn’t bode well,’ said Maggie.

Her husband wasn’t fanciful by nature. She sat back on her heels.

‘There was a time when we woke on our farm on Christmas morning to the sound of a baby singing,’ she said as she looked wistfully into the fire. There were many things Maggie had yet to recover from and, Frank knew, the death of their child would always be one of them. Their only son, lost to diphtheria, had been born on a damp night, on a straw-filled mattress at the farm in front of a roaring fire. They had been two, alone. He had arrived in a hurry and then in the wonder of a moment, they became three, complete.

She dealt with life by keeping busy, but he was aware that memories pained her every day.

For a moment, they sat in companionable silence. Frank knew that, like himself, Maggie had returned in her mind to the last Christmas morning they had spent with the only child they had been blessed with.

Frank put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. His clumsy gesture, well meant, was intended to ease her pain. She patted the top of his hand with her own.

‘I have to leave for the house. God knows how many busybodies they have coming for lunch today. Councillors, doctors, priests, the bishop, his bishop friend from Dublin. There’s been so much fuss, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pope himself pops in for a cuppa.’

As Maggie entered the convent kitchens, she flicked on the light and almost immediately jumped with shock at the sight of the young woman sitting at the end of the long wooden table.

‘Well, hello,’ said Maggie. ‘I near jumped out of my fecking skin then. Who might you be?’

The girl, her face streaked with tears, looked tired.

‘My name’s Joan,’ she said softly. ‘Reverend Mother says I have to work down here with Maggie. Is that you?’

‘It is me, and there is no other, so ye are in the right place,’ said Maggie. ‘Have ye had any tea?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Did ye get any sleep?’

The girl shook her head again.

‘Have ye been sat there since ye arrived, in the dark?’

The girl nodded. ‘The Reverend Mother took my clothes and then gave me these.’ She looked down at the regulation serge-blue calico worn by all the girls and orphans.

‘Well, that’s the first thing we have to do: get a cuppa tea and some breakfast inside ye. And when we have done that, ye can start telling me how ye ended up here at four o’clock on Christmas morning. I also know yer name’s not Joan, ’tis Daisy.’

Daisy looked afraid. She had been told her new name was Joan and to forget that she had ever been called Daisy. She knew how strong the wrath of the nuns in Ireland could be if you disobeyed an order.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Maggie. ‘I know the name of everyone here is altered from the moment they arrive. I’ve yet to work out why in God’s name that happens. ’Tis a mystery to me. Are ye pregnant?’

Daisy looked stunned. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Well, ye aren’t on a fecking retreat. Are ye an orphan then?’

‘I had thought I was. When I was a child I lived in an orphanage in Dublin, with Sister Theresa, because they thought I was simple, but then I went to Liverpool to work as a housekeeper. A few weeks ago, my brother and his family made contact. He wanted me back with himself and his wife and children. They was so upset. He knew nothing about me or that I had been given away to the nuns when I was a baby. Miss Devlin, the teacher at the school in Liverpool, told me that my mam and da had even paid for me every year to be looked after – that was how I came to be in service.

‘I was supposed to be with my brother now, at Christmas. We were all so excited in Liverpool; Miss Devlin bought me a hat and they gave it to me at the school nativity play. My brother was due to meet me at the ferry, but then it was such a surprise to see the policeman on the ferry. I don’t think anyone can have known he was there or they would have said and he brought me here. Now they have told me I have to stay and work in the kitchens. I thought my brother would be here, waiting for me. That was what the policeman told me.’

‘Whoa, whoa, steady on. Ye lost me back at the orphanage in Dublin,’ Maggie said as she tipped up a bucket of coal into the oven burner. ‘Tell ye what, Daisy, we have a Christmas dinner to cook for every sod and his wife today, so why don’t ye help me do that for now? But there is going to be lots of time for us to talk so don’t cry any more tears. Me and my Frank, we get upset when we see people cry, now. Ye saw my Frank when ye arrived and he is worried about ye. Don’t tell the Reverend Mother we have spoken, but me and Frank, we will help ye to get things sorted.’

Daisy smiled for the first time since saying goodbye to Miss Devlin in Liverpool before she boarded the ferry.

They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps as the nuns who helped prepare breakfast ran down the worn stone steps towards the warmth of the kitchen.

‘Shh, now. I will call ye Joan, in the kitchen, but to me an’ my Frank, ye will be Daisy.’

That night, sitting on the settle in front of the fire, each with a mug of poteen, holding hands, even after all their years together, Maggie and Frank discussed Daisy.

‘There’s something not right there, Frank. The bishop from Dublin came down to have a word with her and she burst into tears right then and there in the kitchen, in front of everyone.’

‘What are ye thinking of doing, Maggie?’ He knew Maggie had a way of getting to the bottom of every situation.

Frank leant forward to poke the fire, sending a fresh shower of sparks up the chimney and out onto the hearth. Maggie instinctively drew her feet in closer.

‘I don’t know yet, but she shouldn’t be here and if it is my job to find out where she should be, then so be it. Maybe we were sent here for a reason. Maybe God put us through what he did, when they took our farm away, because he could make use of us here to help others.’

‘Well, we have nowhere else to live. If we cross the nuns, no other convent or church anywhere would help us, so for God’s sake be careful.’

‘Aye, I will, but that poor lass is sleeping on a mattress in a store in the kitchen. For some reason, Sister Theresa doesn’t want her mixing with either the other girls or the nuns. It doesn’t smell right, Frank. I will bring her down here tomorrow night. She can sleep in front of our fire and, that way, I can find out more.’

Frank stood and filled Maggie’s mug. He loved her best when she was plotting. When her interest was keen. The sparks from the fire reflected in her eyes as he lifted her to her feet with a smile. Then he led her to the bed, to finish that which, given half a chance, he would have begun, at five o’clock that morning.