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  Kathleen was all too well aware of the power of the Church and the impending crisis of Kitty’s pregnancy. No matter who had put that baby there, it was still a sin of the highest order. The fact that it was a priest’s bastard made the situation doubly worse and it would be Kitty who would be labelled the sinner.

  There was no separation between the Catholic Church and the local neighbourhood. They were one and the same. The control of the community by the Church was absolute.

  Maura had cried each time the subject of Kitty’s pregnancy was raised. Kathleen knew she had to allow her time to come to terms with what was a living nightmare, but now she would have to put her foot down. She was finding it hard to believe that Maura was unaware of the danger Kitty’s condition presented to them all.

  ‘If we don’t act quickly,’ said Kathleen to Alice as she took her coat down from the hook on the back of the kitchen door, ‘the hounds of hell will be chasing after us and I am not about to allow that to happen when we have other options.’

  She fastened a headscarf over her curlers and held Joseph, whilst Alice reached for her own coat. Alice was a Protestant. The power and the ways of the Catholic Church were all a mystery to Alice, but she had learnt enough over the last few years to know that you didn’t argue with Nana Kathleen.

  Sister Evangelista and her sisters of the Sacred Heart convent ran the school and sustained the children with messages of faith, obedience, guilt and fear.

  Whilst the children were in school praying, each mother on the four streets attended mass at St Mary’s every single day, some twice, morning and evening. The hold of the Church and its grip on the community were unbreakable. A forgiving exterior hid a steadfast dogma. There was no escape.

  Kathleen was relieved to find Maura alone in the kitchen with her latest baby and she appeared to be happy to see them both.

  ‘Oh, thank God it is ye two. I have told everyone I feel unwell, to try and stop the knocking on. I swear to God I am terrified of being in the company of the others and blurting out something that shouldn’t be said. My nerves are in pieces, Kathleen.’

  Maura didn’t need to tell Kathleen that; she could see it for herself. She walked over and took the baby from Maura.

  ‘Is she fed?’ she asked, lifting the baby up to her face and blowing a raspberry at the same time.

  ‘Aye, she is,’ Maura replied, ‘and Kitty is in bed feeling like death.’

  Kathleen shifted the baby onto one arm and, with her free hand, picked up the baby’s shawl from the top of her sleeping box. Expertly wrapping it around her, she took her outside to the pram in the yard. Moving Joseph over a little, she laid the baby next to him and then covered them both with the blanket.

  ‘Alice, love, take them both for a walk to the shops and give me a while with Maura, will ye now?’ she said.

  Alice nodded. ‘Of course I will. How long shall I be?’

  ‘Give me half an hour and bring me back a packet of five Woodbines. I think we may all need one soon.’

  As Alice passed through the back gate with the pram, Kathleen looked in through Maura’s window and saw her wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.

  Holy Mary, there is more to come. How is she going to cope? thought Kathleen as she closed the gate behind Alice and moved back indoors to Maura.

  When Maura was sitting down with a cup of tea, Kathleen began. It wasn’t often the Doherty house was quiet and Kathleen had to seize her moment.

  ‘Listen, Maura, Kitty’s abuse at the hands of a man of God will present us all with a terrible threat, so it will.’

  Kathleen looked at Maura as she spoke, leaning forward so that she could lower her voice. Even with just the two of them in the room, Kathleen still felt the need to whisper.

  ‘Kitty’s pregnancy will lay bare Father James’s hypocrisy, Maura. It will reveal the truth, that our priest was an impostor, a despicable human being, not a man of God. But who will listen, Maura? Imagine if it weren’t Kitty, but Mrs Keating’s daughter. What would happen? Who would ye and Tommy have thought was to blame? Your precious Father James? Or the Keating girl? Would anyone talk to the Keatings again? And what would the Church do and the nuns? Would they support her, or do ye think the Keating girl would be labelled a liar and a whore overnight? Would the Keatings even stand by her or would they throw her out? And by God, Maura, here’s the worst of it. When Kitty’s belly starts to show weeks after the priest was murdered, Kitty becomes a liability. She becomes a motive. Do ye understand me? Kitty’s belly will point the finger at you and Tommy. Do you see what that means?’

  Maura hadn’t said a word. She sat at the table looking at her hands, then began to sob.

  ‘My poor Kitty, she doesn’t stand a chance, does she? What in God’s name can we do?’

  ‘Maura, when that child’s belly starts to show, people around here are going to put two and two together. That’s not a baby, it’s a motive, and we have to get Kitty out of the way before anyone guesses.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Maura as she sank back into the chair. ‘Oh, Holy Mother, of course it is, I had not realized that.’

  Kathleen now put her own arms round Maura’s shoulders.

  ‘Aye, two events of such an extraordinary nature would have to be linked, Maura. Once Kitty starts to show, the police will be round here in a flash. We have to get her away, and for now, something is pulling me back home to Ireland. I must leave and take her with me.’

  ‘We cannot put the shame on either of our families in Ireland, Kathleen, are ye mad? They would be scorned and become outcasts themselves. No one would speak to them. We cannot do that.’

  ‘I know, but there has to be somewhere for the poor child to go and, God knows, no one round here must know what is going on. I have to think, Maura, and I cannot do it here. That kid needs a rest, she looks so sick. I’m taking her with me and I’m going to take Nellie, too. Make it look like a grand little holiday now, in the middle of all the upset and all that. What could be more natural, with us all distraught by the priest’s death? It is just the sort of thing a nana with a nice farmhouse and family in Ireland would think of doing, especially as I won a handsome amount on the bingo last week.’

  Maura smiled for the first time in days.

  Kathleen was a legend down at the bingo; she won more often than all the women on the four streets put together.

  ‘Before I take her, Maura, we need to tell Kitty she is pregnant. And we will do that as soon as Nellie gets home from school. She hasn’t got a clue. Best to tell them both at the same time.’

  Maura nodded. She could not trust herself to speak. Both women turned their heads to look at the flames flickering around the coke cinders in the grate and became lost in their own thoughts. Upstairs, Kitty rolled over in her bed, exhausted and sickly, deep in her second sleep.

  Kathleen mused that if it was this difficult reasoning with Maura, how could they even begin to explain it to Kitty?

  Kathleen felt a huge sense of responsibility. She was in it up to her neck and it appeared to her that she was the only person who had a plan to save Tommy and Jerry from the hangman’s noose.

  She had discovered the priest in Kitty’s bedroom, about to carry out his wicked deed, and had smashed him over the head with the poker. She hadn’t killed him, but she felt as though she had.

  ‘I hated that evil man with his vain and pompous hat and cape from the day I arrived on the four streets. He made the hairs on the back of me neck stand up on end, so he did.’

  She had said the same thing to Jerry, every day since the morning Father James had been found as dead as the corpse on whose grave he had been discovered.

  She should have known. Why had she not acted on her instincts?

  He had been in and out of every house on the four streets that had daughters. It was staring them straight in the face.

  Every night since, when she gave Jerry his tea and Nellie was in bed, she vented her spleen.

  ‘Why had not one of us ever noticed that he n
ever called on the Shevlins, with a house full of boys, eh? They’re so holy, Maisie Shevlin’s knees are rheumatic with the praying she does, and yet it never occurred to us. We never even questioned why the filthy priest did not once knock upon their door or why his vile shadow never darkened their doorstep. Jesus, we must all be bloody eejits.’

  Kathleen had barely stopped punishing herself since that fateful night.

  ‘Shush, Mammy, what’s done is done now. He’ll not be harming any other child,’ said Jerry, trying to calm his mother down.

  Jerry, who gave the same reply each time, wondered when his mother would stop beating herself up.

  ‘Mammy, how were ye to know? How could ye possibly have known what he was up to? No one knew, not even Maura and Tommy, and he was at it under their very noses in their own home. Shush now or ye will make ye’self ill.’

  Aye, but ye don’t know all the facts, thought Kathleen as she placed his steaming bacon ribs and cabbage on the table in front of him. When ye do know that Kitty is pregnant, ye will be feeling as bad as I do. Kathleen would not be pacified.

  ‘When I saw him coming out of Brigid and Sean’s house, a home full of little red-headed daughters, I should have known. The dirty bastard.’

  Kathleen probably should have known because she had the gift. A gift that was aided and abetted by the Granada TV rentals man, and his comings and goings in and out of every house: that was the truth of it. Nevertheless, she did have the gift of prophesy, manifest via reading the tea leaves.

  Most of the women on the four streets visited Kathleen on Friday mornings to have their teacups read. Kathleen knew things. She could tell the women what their future held. She knew when most women on the street were pregnant before they did themselves. And yet the biggest danger of all had slipped past her. She had suspected Father James was a bad man, but she had kept her own counsel.

  She was convinced she had let them all down and none had been more let down than little Kitty, who would have to be told the worst news of her life.

  Early that morning, unable to sleep, Kathleen had tiptoed down into the kitchen to put the kettle on what was left of the heat in the range embers, before stoking up the fire. She looked up at the statue of the Holy Mother on the shelf above. Kathleen often talked to the figurine. They were both mothers. She thought, as she often did, of Bernadette, the woman who had loved the home Kathleen cared for.

  Beloved Bernadette. Still thought of and missed every day.

  Kathleen set the kettle down on the black range and, with her hand still gripping the handle, bent her head in prayer.

  ‘Bernadette, ye will be in heaven, queen, and so, please God, don’t ye mind if I pray to ye both. Help us today with little Maura and Kitty. I know that man wasn’t a man of God, he was a man of the devil, deceiving us all. Don’t let him win. Holy Mother, the mother of all innocence, be with us today, for the child’s sake.’

  It seemed fitting to Kathleen, halfway through, that it should be the Holy Mother she prayed to. Having had an unusual pregnancy herself, she might understand.

  As Kathleen and Maura drank their tea and stared at the fire, each lost in their own thoughts, the back door flew open and Alice, breaking the silence, rushed in. Rushing was a new experience to Alice. Kathleen was worried that she was rushing a bit too much.

  Alice, her difficult daughter-in-law, who had tricked her son, Jerry, into marriage following the death of his wife, Bernadette, had come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years.

  Alice had been the reason Kathleen had left the family farm in the West of Ireland to live with Jerry and Nellie in Nelson Street, to save them from the horrors of living with a woman who was obviously, as a result of her own abnormal upbringing, mentally unwell.

  Alice, who had been the housekeeper at the Grand hotel until she had married Jerry, had known their Bernadette. When Bernadette had first arrived in Liverpool, she had been a chambermaid at the hotel. That was how Alice came to set her cap at Jerry. As soon as she heard of Bernadette’s death, she had her feet under the table before any other God-fearing Irish lass stood a chance.

  Alice was now almost entirely weaned off the Valium tablets and each day she felt more alive.

  She knew that Jerry and Kathleen, and even Nellie, were watching her closely, but she would never slip back to the dark years. Nana Kathleen had rescued her. It had taken years of patience, but she had got there. And then Alice had rescued herself. Which had felt even better.

  ‘They are both asleep in the pram and I have got the Woodbines. Shall I make a fresh mash of tea, or shall I reuse them tea leaves again?’ Alice trilled, without pausing for breath.

  Kathleen didn’t know why, but today Alice’s voice grated.

  Alice had proved her worth in recent weeks. She had dispatched the police from their door with a flea in their ears and provided an alibi for Jerry when the police had taken him away for questioning. As an innocent man at the scene of the crime, doing nothing more than trying to protect Tommy from himself, Jerry had needed one.

  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.

  4

  ALICE 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 id
ea 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.’