Authors: Nadine Dorries
Kathleen rose from the chair to help Alice make the tea.
The normally happy, laughing, vivacious Maura didn’t move her vacant gaze from the fire.
‘I’ve just seen the police on the street,’ said Alice cheerfully.
Now Maura stirred. Both she and Kathleen looked at Alice, neither speaking, both waiting for her to continue.
‘It looked like Molly Barrett was inviting them into her house. The poor woman must be feeling lonely if she wants a cuppa with the coppers.’
It seemed to Nellie that she was the sick-duty child today because she was now on her second journey out with an ailing pupil.
This time it was little Billy from the Anchor pub. He was so poorly he wasn’t fit to walk and Nellie squatted down so that Miss Devlin could lift him onto her back, then she carried him in a piggyback all the way to the pub.
Billy’s da was grateful. ‘Come and have a glass of sarsaparilla before ye walk back to school. Our lad is heavy, so he is.’
‘I’d love one, thanks very much,’ said Nellie.
She liked drinking sarsaparilla. Sometimes, when the pop man brought it round with his horse and cart after church on Sundays, her da would buy a bottle to have with their Sunday lunch. It was sweet and black and made her feel grown up, as if she was drinking a glass of Nana Kathleen’s Guinness.
Gratefully drinking the whole glass full almost at once, Nellie handed it back empty with a polite thank-you and made her way down the pub steps to run back to school.
Just as she turned the corner at the top of the road, she saw Alice, standing outside the shop with the pram, in what looked like a deep conversation with Sean, Brigid’s boxer husband. The only man Nana Kathleen had said was nearly as good-looking as Nellie’s da, Jerry.
Alice threw back her head and laughed, as Sean bent down to look inside the pram.
As Nellie watched, Alice placed her hand on his arm, chatting all the while.
The women on the four streets never really talked to the men. They talked to one another.
Men talked about football and sex.
Women talked about the other women on the four streets and sex.
Nellie didn’t know this. She knew only that the warm feeling of happiness that had arrived with the sarsaparilla evaporated, faster than the bubbles that had danced on her nose as she drank.
A
LICE WAS A
new woman, so much so that she was often flooded with feelings of exhilaration, partly due to her growing love for her baby boy, Joseph. The baby she had never wanted.
These days, Alice laughed out loud.
When Jerry commented upon it, she announced proudly, ‘I have opinions now and everything.’
Jerry laughed and said to Kathleen, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, between you and Dr Cole, you have worked a miracle, Mammy.’ As he spoke, he glanced at the unopened bottle of Valium tablets, standing on the press.
‘It’s like Alice has broken free and now we have no idea where she will end up. Each day I wake up to a bolder Alice.’
Kathleen wasn’t as impressed as Jerry by Alice’s transformation.
It had all been very gradual and welcome to begin with, but lately Alice was presenting Kathleen with cause for concern. She had moved from moody to giddy in no time at all. Sometimes, it appeared as though Alice couldn’t sit still, or stop talking.
Alice and Kathleen were now both returned from Maura’s to their own house, waiting for Nellie to arrive home from school, when they would pop back over to Maura’s and break the news to Kitty.
‘I have given the floor a mop and washed the dust off the sills,’ Alice announced as she bustled out through the door to Kathleen who was now in the yard.
‘Aye, well, ’tis just a novelty now. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts,’ said Kathleen, but she had laughed, despite herself. They both had. And Kathleen counted their blessings. As little as a year ago, no one would have imagined that Alice could laugh.
Kathleen turned Joseph’s nappies in the copper boiler, using the long wooden paddle.
Electric-mangle washing machines and twin tubs were all the rage now, but in a two-up, two-down there was nowhere to put one. It mattered not a jot to Kathleen. She thought the copper boiler and the big mangle, kept in the outhouse, did a grand job anyway. It was her routine and Kathleen didn’t like change.
As Nellie came through the gate from school, Kathleen wiped her hands on her apron and announced, ‘Right, we’re off, so we are, Nellie, no need to step on Alice’s clean floor,’ and within minutes, with Joseph once more tucked up in his pram, they were on their way back across the road.
Molly Barrett twitched her net curtains and craned her neck to take a clearer view of the top of the entry.
She had just made a cuppa for Annie and given her chapter and verse on her conversation with the two police officers. Both had said that her scones were absolutely delicious. She had given them an extra one each for later.
‘Well, what would ye know,’ she said to Annie, ‘they are off again. Now tell me there’s not something bloody funny going on with that lot. They were all over at the Dohertys’ not hours since.’
Annie O’Prey jumped up to look through the nets herself.
Most families on the four streets lived in the back of the house and used the back entry and gates. Not Annie and Molly. They both preferred the front. They liked to see what was happening and just who was visiting who, and this was by far the best place to do it. Molly had placed a folded-down dining table in front of the net curtain, with an aspidistra pot plant in the middle and a chair on either side providing an excellent and unhindered view of who came and went. This was where they both had a cup of tea whilst they did an hour’s knitting, most afternoons. On fine days, they took the chairs outdoors and sat on the pavement underneath the window.
‘Oh, my giddy aunt,’ exclaimed Annie, putting her hand over her mouth in shock as she watched Alice pushing the pram, with Kathleen and Nellie behind, crossing into the entry again. ‘Do you think they killed the father, Molly?’
‘What? Kathleen? No, you silly cow. How could she do that? It would have taken more than a handbag or a hairpin to take his bloody langer off. No, I don’t think she killed him, but there is something very suspicious about the comings and goings at number nineteen and that’s a fact.’
‘Did you say that to the policeman when he was here?’ Annie’s voice was loaded with suspicion.
‘I might have done,’ said Molly in a tone that invited no further questions.
Both women picked up their knitting. There was nothing more to see, but the fact that Molly Barrett’s cat had played a part in detecting the murder imbued in her an inflated sense of responsibility. Molly, via her cat, was now involved. She had told the police she would tell absolutely no one, not even Annie, of the fact that she was now officially helping them with their enquiries and had promised to maintain a vigilant watch on the comings and goings across the road.
As Kathleen, Alice and Nellie walked in through Maura’s back door, the kettle began to whistle on the range. Maura jumped up to fill a large metal teapot that she placed on the table, along with the milk jug and the cups and saucers. She had been dreading this moment, but she knew there was no alternative. Kitty had to be told.
Kathleen was glad to be getting on with what they had to do. She couldn’t explain it with any degree of meaning to any of them but she was weighed down with an overwhelming sense of urgency. It was her gift, helping her, and she knew she had to move fast. The appearance of Bernadette in her dream last night, doing exactly what she had done on the night of the murder – urging Kathleen along, pushing her, faster – had not left her thoughts throughout the day.
As they drank their tea and sat round the table chatting, Nellie looked out of the window over the kitchen sink, steamed up from the boiling kettle.
There she was. Nellie knew she was somewhere, she could sense it. She could see her outside, standing in the yard, looking in. Nellie knew it was her mother, Bernadette. She had seen her often since she was a child and the visions didn’t scare her. She never told Kathleen or Alice.
She felt Bernadette’s love so strongly that she could have scooped it up in her arms and held on to it.
Bernadette never missed her birthday. Nellie would enter her bedroom and be overcome by a heady smell of flowers. There were no flowers anywhere in the house. None even within a mile of the four streets. Nellie knew it was her mother, the woman no one ever talked about, not even her da.
Nellie didn’t always see Bernadette. Sometimes she could only feel her. On the night Nellie had been discharged from hospital following the accident when she and Kitty had been knocked down, she had been curled up on her da’s knee, reading the paper with him in front of the fire, when Bernadette came, or at least the feeling did.
As she arrived, her presence washed over them, gradually at first and then wrapped around them both. As Nellie rested her head on her da’s chest, she looked at Jerry and they smiled. They hugged one another tightly and watched the flames leaping in the fire, not making a sound nor moving a muscle, not wanting to scare Bernadette away. And then she left slowly, in gentle waves, just as she had arrived, until she was with them no more.
Jerry softly kissed the top of Nellie’s head and she felt his hot tears drip through her hair onto her scalp.
Nellie knew her da still missed Bernadette and that, when she joined them in these special moments, it was painful for him, even though she had died on the day Nellie was born.
Nellie knew that if she looked away from the kitchen window now, Bernadette would disappear in a flash. Her eyes began to water – she was scared to blink.
‘What are ye gawping at, miss?’ said Nana Kathleen, swivelling round on her chair to see what it was that Nellie was staring at.
She blinked. Bernadette left, leaving Nellie alone again.
Maura, timorously, began to speak.
‘Kitty, we have a problem, child, and it is something we need to talk about and sort out before we tell Daddy. He will be distraught when I tell him the news and so we must be well prepared, so we must.’
Maura began to cry. She was never going to get through this.
Her Kitty. Maura had dreamt of her daughter taking the veil. Kitty, who was like another mother in the house, so good was she with all the little ones. With two sets of twin boys, Maura found life hard and Kitty had eased her burden by half.
But Maura wasn’t selfish. She didn’t want to keep Kitty to herself. She wanted to share her with God and thereby elevate the status of the Doherty household above that of her neighbours. Maura craved status; in fact she craved anything that would reward the family for her endeavours. She longed to be looked up to and, indeed, many a less holy neighbour already did look up to Maura. If there was a problem on the streets it was Maura or Nana Kathleen they went to. But that wasn’t enough. Maura wanted one of the Doherty clan to do something, to be someone. She yearned for her household to be set above and apart from the others. What could achieve this more than having a child become a nun or a priest?
She had prayed about sharing her children with God. About giving God back some of the issue with which she and Tommy had been blessed.
Kitty had been shared with God.
Just not in the way Maura had prayed for.
Maura knew that what she now struggled to say to Kitty flew in the face of every motherly instinct. Earlier in the day she had questioned Kathleen.
‘Once I have spoken those words, there will be no going back, Kathleen. Are we sure?’
‘Aye, Maura, we are sure, queen. I wish to God we weren’t and I have prayed that every day you would run up this entry to tell me Kitty was started, but you haven’t. There is no use us putting it off any longer or denying it: the child is with child, God help us, so she is.’
Now that they were here and the time had come, Maura lacked the strength to speak. Her mouth felt as though it were stuffed full of wool and the words she had rehearsed so well were lodged somewhere deep in her throat. The tears began to pour uncontrollably down her cheeks.
Everyone round the table stared at her expectantly, but she couldn’t make out their alarmed expressions as their faces swam in a blurred haze through her tears.
Maura was weak. She was lost. Events had knocked the stuffing right out of her and she was as close to done for as it was possible to be.
Nana Kathleen decided it was time to take over. Twenty years older than Maura, Kathleen had also been crushed by events but it was not her daughter who was about to suffer. They were her closest friends facing a problem to which there was almost no answer.
Nellie sensed something utterly catastrophic was about to take place.
Had they all stopped breathing? They had. They had.
Fear gradually wrapped its icy tendrils around Nellie’s heart and slithered down into the pit of her stomach. Under the table, she slipped a hand across and met Kitty’s, searching for her own.
For a heartbeat of a moment, a drumroll of domesticity filled the silent kitchen.
Maura’s gentle sniffling into her hankie.
The click of Alice’s knitting needles.
The tick-tock from the clock and the slow, repetitive drip from the tap pinging onto an enamel bowl in the sink.
As the coal burnt in the fireplace, it hissed and spat in accompaniment to the slow bubbling simmer of a pan of broth, warming on the range.
Kitty looked at Nana Kathleen and knew that whatever she was about to say had something to do with the night the priest had raped her in her hospital bed. Nothing had been the same since. Then, after years of abusing her, he had elevated his depravity to a new level and was about to do it again in her own bedroom when all were at the Irish centre and dancing at a wedding. But Nana Kathleen had caught him and then the priest was found murdered. He had never bothered her again.
Kitty had been stunned by the reaction of her da. She thought he was going mad with the rage. Tommy, normally mild-mannered and gentle and who loved them all to distraction, had been torn apart by the knowledge that the priest had been helping himself to his precious daughter, in his own house.