Ninemile House Read online

  “The Magdalene Homes were work houses,” Derry pointed out, her dander really up now, yet unable to deny that there was a certain amount of truth in the nun’s words. “Slave labour. All those women working themselves to the bone. For what? To be despised and reviled. To have everything taken away from them – even their name! And with all due respect, Sister, many of the women didn’t survive. And the infant mortality rate amongst the Magdalenes’ children was sky-high, way out of proportion to that of the general population. Mind you, we’ll never know quite how many died, given that hundreds, both mothers and children, were laid to rest in unmarked graves and many other children adopted abroad. Added to which, there seems to have been a real dearth of proper records kept. Odd that, don’t you think?” She scraped the chair violently back on the uneven stone flags of the floor. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not waste any more time. I’d really like to see my sister.”

  Sr Peter pushed back her own chair and rose once more to her feet, her lips tightening almost to the point of disappearing completely, her heavily hooded eyes blinking as though blinded by a light. “You can’t. What I mean is, you can’t just yet. It’s only fair that she’s prepared. Even you must see what a terrible shock it would be to her, to have you turning up out of the blue. How old were you when she last saw you. Four? Five? A mere baby.” A more reasoning note entered her voice. “Give me a while to set the wheels in motion. Surely that makes sense. Why don’t you start off by sending her a letter, say? Fill her in a bit about you and the family. Send her a couple of photographs.”

  Disappointed, Derry could, nevertheless, could see some sense in the argument. It had been a huge shock to her to discover that Theresa was still alive. Wouldn’t it come as almost an equally big shock to her sister to know that her baby sister, all grown up now, had come to take her home? After all those long years of silence.

  “Okay,” she conceded reluctantly. “I’ll write first, but I’m warning you, in a week, no more, I’ll be back and I’ll be taking Theresa home with me. So you just do what you have to do to prepare her.”

  Outside, she sat in the car for a while, gazing up at the huge, forbidding, Gothic structure of Ninemilehouse, the slate grey of its walls striking a jarring and prison-like note against the stunningly beautiful backdrop of Slievenamon. A light rain peppered the windscreen, whilst huge black cumulus clouds marshalled overhead, promising torrents more to come. And yet, undaunted, from some concealed place on the convent wall, a thrush sang its tiny heart out.

  Could Theresa hear it too, she wondered, this sweet, clear free-fall of notes? As if in answer, the white moon of a face appeared at one of the upstairs windows and Derry found herself sitting bolt upright, her fingers clenched on the steering wheel. Is that you, Theresa?” she mouthed silently, but the figure was too high up and too far away for her to distinguish any features and a moment later whoever it was had gone away again, blending back into the nothingness. With a sigh Derry started up the car and drove away. The thrush sang on.

  ***

  “You’re mad!” James was pacing about the living room, turning as he reached one end and pacing back again. “Naïve! You really can’t see what a can of worms you’re opening, can you? Oh, no, too blinded by your Good Samaritan act, that’s you. And to hell with me and the consequences!” He stopped for a moment, shot her a look of pure rage. “What is it, Derry? No, what is it really? Jealous, are you, that my career is going so well, while yours has hit the skids? Is it shoot-James-down time? Is that what it is? Is this all a way just to get back at me?”

  “Oh, don’t be so paranoid! That’s bloody ridiculous and you know it.” Derry had heard just about as much as she could stand. “This isn’t about you, James. Contrary to what you might think, the world doesn’t revolve about you. This is about righting a wrong. This is about my sister. My sister! My flesh and blood.”

  “And what if I refuse?” James asked, halting by the drinks cabinet, picking up a tumbler and pouring himself out a whiskey, which he knocked back in one gulp. “What if I refuse to have her anywhere near my house?” He immediately poured another, the melody of the liquid tinkling into the crystal, out of sync in an atmosphere that had suddenly become charged with tension.

  “It’s my house too,” Derry shot back. “So don’t you dare come the macho man with me. I worked just as hard as you and contributed just as much and, as my husband, I expect you to be supportive of me, instead of which you seem hell-bent on chucking obstacles in my path, left, right and centre.”

  James’ mouth took on a bitter twist. “And isn’t support supposed to be a two-way street? Now, more than ever, I need you in my corner, Derry.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m this far away retaining my seat in government. That’s all!” Aggrieved, his voice took on a bargaining note. “Look, I’m not asking you to turn your back on Theresa. I’m only asking for a bit more time. Surely that’s not unreasonable? After the elections it won’t much matter who gets wind of the story. But I am simply not prepared to become tabloid fodder at this point in time. It could ruin me. I could lose everything.”

  Despairing, Derry shook her head. “I. I. I. That’s all I’m hearing. Nobody else seems to rate a mention. Well, I’m sorry, James. I already told you, I’m not leaving Theresa a second longer in that place than I have to.” She shuddered, “God, you should see it. It’s like a damn prison, all grey slate and heavily studded doors, hidden miles out in the wilds of Tipperary. It took me ages to find it, even with a map. Talk about depressing. It reminded me of nothing so much as a German concentration camp or Dracula’s castle, maybe. As for the nuns! That Sr Peter looked like a right hard strap. I pity the poor women working under her.” A sudden long drawn-out wail from upstairs caused her to break off. One of the twins had woken up. “I’d better go up,” she said, “before the other one wakes up too and all hell breaks loose.”

  “You do that,” James said. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere with this argument anyway.” As she left the room, he picked up his mobile phone, punched a number in from memory.

  A moment later, Sinéad picked up.

  CHAPTER 6

  St James’ Hospital – Dublin 1999

  “So you found her, then?”

  Derry nodded. “Yes, They moved her to a convent in Tipperary and changed her name, but, after a bit of digging around, I found her all right.”

  “Thank God for that!” Her mother closed her eyes, and a tear slipped down from under one eyelid and slid slowly down her cheek. “I can die peaceful now. You’ll take care of her, Dervla?”

  “Yes,” Derry promised. “You’re not to worry about anything. Do you hear me? You just concentrate on getting better.” A sob in her throat, she reached for her mother’s hand, feeling it light as a tiny sparrow in her own, a fretwork of delicate bones and rice-paper semi-transparent skin.

  “Ah, Dervla, stop codding yourself. I’m not going to get better, but that’s okay. I’m ready to go now. I miss your daddy.” Slowly her eyes opened again, fixed on the half-bent head of her youngest daughter. “Tell her I’m sorry. Will you do that? Tell Theresa, I’m sorry. Tell her, I never stopped thinking about her. Loving her. Tell her I was wrong. We were wrong, her father and me. We should never have put her in that place.”

  .

  “I’ll bring her here and you can tell her yourself.” In a panic, because she knew her mother was on borrowed time and the hourglass was fast running out, Derry made to stand up. “I don’t care what that Sr Peter thinks. She’s no right to keep her there.”

  “Hush, now.” Her mother pressed her fingers lightly. “I don’t want to see Theresa. I don’t want to see what age and time and me and your father did to her. It would shame me even more than I’m shamed already. I want to remember her as she was, a proper little tomboy astride a horse, with the wind playing tag in her long black hair, her head thrown back and laughing at something daft your father said. I want to remember her the way she was before Michael Kinnane got his filthy hands on h
er, when she was sweet and innocent and all our hopes and dreams for her were still intact.” She struggled to sit up, fell uselessly back against the pillows again. “Can you grant me that, Dervla?”

  Too full to speak, Derry nodded and, satisfied, her mother drifted off to sleep again. She died, the doctors told Derry the next day, at some time between two and three a.m., going so quietly, that her passing went unmarked. But not un-mourned. It broke Derry’s heart that she hadn’t been there to say goodbye. But, at least, she could carry out her last wish. At least she could take care of Theresa.

  ***

  “My sister,” Gabby said awestruck, staring at the photograph in hands that were trembling with pure nerves. “That’s my sister, all grown up. That’s Dervla.” A smile of recollection curved her lips. “We always called her Derry, like the county.”

  “She looks a lot like you,” Angela said, craning over her shoulder for a look.

  “Do you think so?” Self-consciously, Gabby drew a hand through her hair, the black heavily interspersed with slivers of grey. “I don’t. She’s beautiful.”

  “So are you,” Angela said loyally. “Only you don’t have much of a chance to shine in this place. And are those her children?” she asked, pointing to where two little girls in matching strawberry-scattered pink summer dresses were hanging either side of Derry’s knee.

  “Yes.” Gabby flipped over the photo where the names were written on the back. “That’s Dara and Dilis. They’re twins. Five years old, only. About the same age Derry was when I last saw her. God, would you look at them! All that blond hair. Did you ever see such a pair of angels!” She tapped on the photo. “And that’s James, her husband. He’s a politician, she says. Isn’t he handsome?”

  “I’d vote for him,” Angela agreed. “If only I had the chance. I really envy you, Gabby, having a family like that who want to take you out of this place. I have no one or no one who wants to know, anyway. I’m a lifer, me. Here for the duration.”

  “I’m frightened,” Gabby admitted, staring at the photographs. “What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t like them?” The shaking increased, spread to the rest of her body. “I thought I’d be delighted to be getting out of this dump. I mean, how often did we talk about it, wish for it, dream of it? And now . . . now that I’m finally going to make my escape, a part of me wishes I could just carry on as before. Do I sound completely mad?”

  “Mad as a hatter,” Angela confirmed cheerfully. “If it was me, I’d be jumping up and down for joy. I’d be counting every second of every hour. I’m telling you, Derry, wild horses wouldn’t hold me back.”

  “Oh, Angie!” Conscience-stricken, Gabby suddenly realised how selfish she must sound to her friend. “I wish you were getting out as well. But I won’t forget you. I’ll write and phone and come and visit as often as I can.” She wanted to tell Angie that she could come and visit her too, but that promise wasn’t hers to make.

  “Will you, Gabby? You promise you won’t forget me?” The other woman’s eyes were suddenly slick with tears. “Because I’ll be depending on you. God knows, poor old Clare and Mary aren’t much company. There’ll be nobody left to talk to. I’ll probably go mad cooped up here with just two mad old women for company and a couple of even madder nuns.”

  “Of course, I won’t forget you,” Gabby said, putting her arms around her friend and hugging her close and to hell with being caught by the nuns. “Ever.”

  ***

  “Sr Peter wants you, Gabby.” Shuffling up to the door, Mary, with Clare hot on her heels as usual, stuck her head into the bedroom where Gabby and Angela were still speculating excitedly about what the future might hold. At sixty years old, she had been a Magdalene for over forty years. Her one good eye – she’d lost the other in an accident in the laundry many years before – beamed at Gabby. “Is it true you’re getting out? Is it true your mother has sent for you?”

  Clare, commonly known as Mary’s echo, and another one who had been inside for a good forty years, put her grizzled head round the door behind her. “Is it true your mother sent for you?”

  Gabby smiled at them both. The poor craythurs. Not an ounce of harm in either one of them, as Angela often said, but not much in the way of conversation either. “Not my mother, no. My sister, Derry. Would you like to see her picture?”

  As the old girls crowded round, oohing and aahing over Derry and her family, Gabby found herself thinking about her mother. She was dead, Derry told her in the letter that had accompanied the photograph. Dead, recently. Gabby wasn’t too sure how she felt about that. It had been so long since she had allowed herself to think about her mother at all. She’d known when her father died years before, because the nuns had brought her the news, and she’d bawled and roared like a baby, despite what he’d done to her. With his death, she felt she’d lost her final hope. Because her mother would never dream of going against his wishes and if he hadn’t wanted to set her free, then her mother wouldn’t dare to disobey him, even in death. And then Gabby had closed down, just like that, gone deep inside herself and never spoke or consciously thought about either him or her mother again. But no one has control over their dreams and sometimes still the nightmares came thick and fast and the past crept up on her in a stranglehold, making her scream and thrash about and wish to God she had never been born.

  ***

  Derry stood back and tried to put herself in her sister’s shoes, imagining how she would feel when she first set eyes on the newly decorated spare bedroom. Would she like it? She hoped so, although after the spartan conditions of Ninemilehouse, anything was bound to be an improvement. The duck-egg blue wallpaper had been a good choice, calming and serene, and the restful theme was carried through in the soft furnishings, which were of the same shade, sprigged about with forget-me-knots. A Louis-style, triple-mirrored dressing table and matching upholstered stool, stood foursquare in the bay window that looked straight out over the Irish sea. Ornately decorated in white and gilt, she had chosen it especially for its feminine characteristics, knowing Theresa would have had very little opportunity, if any, to indulge her femininity over the past thirty years. And Derry wanted to make it up to her, in whatever small way she could, although she was not so foolish as to suppose that all the feminine fripperies in the world could ever erase the deprivations of Theresa’s past. The focal point of the bedroom was the bed itself, also French, white with an intricately carved headboard, the centrepiece of which was an oval-shaped embroidered panel featuring two graceful swans, necks curved and beaks interlocking. Specially imported from Bordeaux, it had cost an arm and a leg and had almost given James a heart attack when he’d caught sight of the credit card bill. She’d dressed it with her best Irish linen sheets, a wedding gift to her and James, and piled it high with a mountain of snowy, lace-trimmed matching pillows. Then, as a sort of grand finale, she’d finished off with a satin eiderdown of the same duck-egg blue as the walls, and now, the finished article looked inviting and regal and fit for a queen.

  “So, what do you think, girls?” Derry asked, as the twins pottered in behind and ranged themselves one on either side of her. “Will Aunty Theresa like it, do you think?”

  “She’d bloody better,” James answered for them, arriving on the scene and looking frostily around. He swept his arm in an arc. “Considering what you paid for this little lot would have paid off the national debt of a third world country.”

  “The guest room needed doing, anyway,” Derry reminded him, equally frosty. “It’s an investment.”

  James snorted. “Investment, my foot! You’ll live to regret this, Derry, I’m telling you. Whether you like it or not, this woman is a total stranger to you. She could be a complete nutcase. Bound to be, after being locked up for all those years. We could all end up being murdered in our beds.”

  “Oh, stop that this instant!” Derry snapped, sending a warning look to where the kids were gazing up at him with suddenly anxious eyes. “You’ll frighten the children. Poor Theresa! Have y
ou no sympathy in you at all? Can’t you try to see it from her side? This is all new to her too. Terrifying, probably. It’ll be like coming to live on another planet.” She sat down on the side of the bed, looped an errant strand of hair back over her ear. “Think of how much the world’s moved on in the last thirty years. I’ve been trying to imagine what it will be like for her and I must admit I’m not doing a terribly good job of it.”