Whitethorn Woods Read online

  One of these days her Neddy was going to have to make up his mind. She was not going to influence him. This was something he had to decide on his own. Would he sell his father’s farm for a small fortune to that syndicate of gangsters which had people like Eddie Flynn in their number? Or would he hold out in case he alone could stop the march of progress and save the woods and the well that in his big innocent heart he really believed had cured his mother for so many years?

  *

  ‘You’re never going to dinner with Skunk?’ Father Brian Flynn was astounded.

  ‘Are you going to tell me he has a wife and ten children?’ Judy asked in a slightly brittle tone.

  ‘Lord, no, who’d marry Skunk?’ Brian said and then wished immediately that he hadn’t said it. ‘I mean, he’s never been married so you think of him as always being single,’ he said lamely.

  Judy was brief and crisp in her response. ‘Why do you all call him Skunk?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ her brother said truthfully. ‘He was always Skunk as far back as I remember. I actually thought that was his name.’

  Lilly Ryan couldn’t believe the change in her husband Aidan over the last eleven months. He was very gaunt looking, with a drawn face and large dark circles under his eyes. Their son Donal, who hadn’t wanted to come, seemed to shrink back from the man with the wild look.

  ‘Please Donal,’ she begged in a whisper. So the boy stretched out his hand unwillingly.

  ‘I hope you are looking after your mam properly.’ Aidan sounded very stern.

  ‘Yes, I’m trying,’ Donal said.

  He was eighteen and wanted to be a million miles from here. He had seen his dad beat his mam in the past. He couldn’t bear that his mam was pathetically grateful that they had been allowed to come.

  ‘You can’t make a worse job of it than I did,’ Aidan Ryan said. ‘In front of Father Flynn and you, Donal, I want to apologise for the way I treated Lilly over the past time. I simply have no excuse so I am not going to struggle to find one. Alcohol and the grief over our lost baby is a sort of explanation but it’s no excuse.’ He looked from one face to another.

  Father Flynn said nothing because this was family business.

  Lilly was completely lost for words. So Donal answered. In a very grown-up voice he said, ‘Thank you for saying all this publicly. It can’t have been easy for you. If it were just myself and my forgiveness you were asking for, I would never give it to you, not for a hundred years. I have seen you take the leg off a chair to beat my innocent mother. But life goes on and if my mother asks me to forgive you, I will consider it. We will go out now, Mam and myself, and leave you with Father Flynn and we’ll see do you still feel the same next week at visiting time.’ He stood up to go.

  Aidan Ryan pleaded with him. ‘Of course I’ll feel the same, son. I’m not going to change my mind.’

  ‘You used to change your mind within half an hour before they locked you up here.’ Donal spoke flatly, without emotion. Then he made to leave.

  ‘Don’t go!’ Aidan Ryan cried. ‘Don’t go away and leave me for a week not knowing where I am before I know if you’ll forgive me.’

  ‘You left my mam for years not knowing what she had done to make you so violent. You can wait a week.’ He was propelling his mother out before she spoke, they were nearly at the door.

  Father Flynn admired the boy so much he wanted to cheer aloud but he kept his face impassive.

  ‘It was grief, Donal,’ said Aidan Ryan. ‘It takes everyone in different ways. I grieved so much for your sister who disappeared.’

  Donal spoke calmly. ‘Yes, it does take people in different ways. In my case I didn’t ever know Teresa but I envied her because whoever took her had taken her far from you and your furious drunken rages …’

  And then they were gone.

  Outside in the corridor Lilly said, ‘Why didn’t you let me speak to him? He’s so sorry …’

  ‘Speak to him next week, Mam, if he’s still sorry.’

  ‘But think of him sitting there all that time …’ Her eyes were full of pity.

  ‘You sat there all that time, Mam,’ he said.

  In the visiting room, under the eyes of the warders, Father Flynn sat beside a weeping Aidan Ryan.

  ‘Do you think she’ll forgive me, Father?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘So why didn’t she say something?’

  ‘She was in shock, Aidan. She needed time to think. You see, how does she know if she can forgive you or not? A year ago you landed her in the regional hospital and then you wouldn’t let her come in here to see you. I think that takes a bit of thinking about, don’t you?’

  The man looked frightened, Father Flynn was pleased to see. This was good. Father Flynn knew that Lilly Ryan would forgive her husband next Tuesday. Donal Ryan probably knew it too.

  Let him sweat a little.

  Myles Barry, the lawyer, went out to the Nolans’ farm. His face was grim.

  He had a communication from one of Her Majesty’s prisons in Britain. A Mr Christopher Nolan (otherwise known as Kit) had read of the compensation about to be offered to farmers near Rossmore whose land might be acquired in the scheme for the new road. Mr Christopher Nolan wished it noted that his father Martin Nolan was elderly and unable to make any real decision on the matter. And to add that his younger brother Edward Nolan (otherwise known as Neddy) was in fact mentally handicapped. He had not ever been able to hold any position of responsibility or trust. In fact he had proved himself unable to work even on building sites in London. It would therefore not be in the interests of justice if either of these men were to reach a decision that would affect the Nolan family. He, Christopher Nolan, would like his interest in the property recorded and acknowledged.

  Myles Barry had never been so angry.

  The worthless criminal Kit, having read in some tabloid paper in jail that there was money to be made out of the home and family he had long abandoned, was coming in for the kill.

  Myles Barry had to show them the letter or tell them its contents. It wasn’t something he looked forward to.

  He met Father Flynn who was just leaving the Nolan farm.

  ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’ Myles asked.

  The priest laughed. ‘No, it’s not Last Rites or anything. Marty likes Communion brought to him now and then, he’s not able to get into the church for Mass as well as he used to.’

  ‘I suppose he should be in care?’ Myles suggested.

  ‘Hasn’t he the best care in the world here with Neddy and Clare?’ the priest said, unaware that Neddy had come out behind him. ‘If I was an old person in Rossmore I’d much prefer to have that couple looking after me than anyone else. It would be desperate to be left there, like my poor own mother and the poor old canon who are determined to stay independent but who are really just struggling to keep going …’

  Neddy, who had come out to greet the lawyer, joined easily in the conversation.

  ‘Isn’t the canon just fine, Father? Josef was telling me that he loves being near the centre of the town and in the heart of everything.’

  ‘Yes, Neddy, but Josef wants to leave and go to work full time on the new road when it comes.’

  ‘If it comes,’ Neddy said.

  ‘No, I’d say it’s when it comes,’ Myles Barry said. ‘That’s what I’m here to talk to you about.’

  ‘Oh well, there go my hopes that we wouldn’t have to make any decisions.’ Neddy laughed at himself.

  The priest got into his car and drove off and the lawyer came into the kitchen. Neddy kept this house in shining condition. Myles Barry noted the gleaming surfaces, the scrubbed table, and the blue and yellow china neatly arranged on the open shelves.

  Neddy said his father was having a rest in his own room, poured the lawyer a big mug of coffee and offered a plate of home-made biscuits. He had seen a cookery expert do them on television last week, he said, and thought they looked easy enough.

  He was an innocent,
certainly, but he was not a foolish man.

  Suddenly Myles Barry decided to show to Neddy the hurtful, greedy letter written by his brother Kit from an English jail. Neddy read it slowly.

  ‘He doesn’t think much of us, does he?’ he said eventually.

  ‘Wasn’t I at school with Kit? He was always a bit dismissive of people, you know the way he went on, it really meant nothing …’ Myles Barry began.

  ‘Was he ever in touch with you since he left school?’ Neddy asked mildly.

  ‘No, but you know the way it is, people’s lives are different. They go in one direction or another …’ Myles Barry was wondering why he seemed to excuse Kit Nolan when really he wanted to punch him in the face.

  ‘He never writes to me either. I send him a letter every month, always have, telling him what’s happening here in Rossmore, how Dad is and everything else that might interest him. I told him all about the road of course. But I never hear back.’

  ‘Maybe he has nothing to tell,’ Myles Barry said.

  His anger over Kit was now at boiling point. Imagine, the decent Neddy wrote to that ungrateful brother of his every month for years and what was the result? Kit stirred himself to write to a lawyer to say that Neddy was a halfwit.

  ‘That’s true. Every day must be like the day before in there.’ Neddy shook his head sadly.

  ‘And you heard from Eddie Flynn’s syndicate, did you? I believe they were coming to see you.’

  ‘Oh yes, a confused sort of visit.’

  ‘And what did you say to them, Neddy?’ Myles Barry held his breath.

  ‘I told them I couldn’t possibly deal with them, and that we would never take that huge sum of money, it was just outrageous.’

  ‘And what did they say to that?’ Myles’s voice was only a whisper.

  ‘You won’t believe it, Myles, but they just offered me more money still! Like as if they hadn’t been listening.’

  Myles wiped his brow. Never again in his life would he have a client like this. Mercifully.

  ‘So what exactly happens now, Neddy?’

  ‘We get it sorted out when the time comes – when the compulsory purchase order comes.’ Neddy was calm about it all.

  ‘You do understand, I mean, I did explain to you, the government won’t pay nearly what Eddie Flynn’s pals will. You see, those syndicate people are operating from strength – they’ve bought up little bits of land everywhere.’

  ‘Yes, I know all that, but if I sold it to them it would be theirs and I’d have no say in what happens.’

  Myles Barry pondered over whether he should say that Neddy Nolan wouldn’t ever have any say in what happened once he sold the land. But it hardly seemed worth it.

  ‘So what will we say to Kit?’ he asked despairingly.

  ‘There’s no need to say anything to Kit – he doesn’t have any rights to anything from this place, only what I choose to give him.’ Neddy looked around him proudly at the refurbished kitchen in what had been his father’s broken-down farmhouse.

  ‘Well, I agree it sounds as if it would be hard for him to prove any legal claim but of course as your father’s son he might be able …’

  ‘No, Myles.’ Neddy was again very calm. ‘No, when I bailed him the second time, I had to go across there to do it. And I found an English lawyer, a very nice old man he was too. But anyway, he made Kit sign a document saying that in return for the bail money he would relinquish his claim on the family estate. I mean, I told this lawyer it was only a few acres of poor land, but still it was an estate technically.’ He smiled, thinking of it all.

  ‘And do you still have that document, Neddy?’

  ‘Oh I do. You see, Kit skipped bail that time, so I never got our money back, and when he was back in again they wouldn’t even give bail so there was no point in his even asking.’

  ‘Could I see this document, do you think?’

  Neddy went to a small oak cabinet in the corner. Inside were neat files that would have done credit to any company. Within seconds he pulled out the right piece of paper. Myles Barry looked back into the filing drawer. He saw files marked ‘Insurance’, ‘Pensions’, ‘St Ita’s School’, ‘Medical’, ‘Household Expenses’, ‘Farm’ … And all this from the man whose brother said he was not the full shilling.

  Sebastian Slattery was proving to be an excellent companion. Judy found it very easy to talk to him and he was very interested in her work too. How she set about illustrating a children’s story. Were there some stories that she didn’t enjoy and did she find them harder to do?

  He asked her, did she ever go to France on the Eurostar train? It was something he had always promised himself that he would do when he was next in London. He told her that he had hardly any family himself. He was an only child and his parents were dead. He did have cousins some miles out, in a small village called Doon – a nice place actually. He had been invited to the opening of a building out there called the Danny O’Neill Health Centre, in memory of some Irishman who went to America, and his grandson who was half Polish was doing it in his honour. Maybe Judy might like to come with him as his guest.

  ‘Why do they call you Skunk?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘I don’t know, Judy, to be honest. They did at school and it stuck. Maybe I smelled awful then. I don’t smell awful now, do I?’

  ‘No, Sebastian, you do not, you smell fine to me,’ she said.

  At that moment Cathal Chambers the bank manager walked by.

  ‘Evening, Skunk, evening, Judy,’ he said affably.

  ‘Oh Cathal, we were actually just discussing this. Sebastian is going to be called his real name from now on,’ Judy Flynn said as if she were addressing a class of unruly ten-year-olds.

  ‘Sure, I’m sorry, Skunk, I mean, Sebastian, no offence ever meant.’

  And Skunk Slattery, who had been called that for over thirty years, graciously forgave him.

  Next day Judy got an extensive grilling from her sister-in-law Kitty as they made Mrs Flynn’s bed and settled her in a chair. They had got a good routine going now. Mrs Flynn had eventually and grudgingly recognised her daughter, and equally grudgingly got over her unreasonable dislike of her daughter-in-law, which was a considerable advance.

  Of course she complained as usual that someone had stolen all her clothes and was not at all comforted when Judy briskly unpacked the clean items from the Fresh as a Daisy.

  ‘Well, come on then! Did Skunk lay his hands on you?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘His name is Sebastian and he was quite delightful,’ Judy said primly.

  ‘Skunk? Delightful?’ It was beyond Kitty’s comprehension.

  ‘I told you, he’s not answering to that silly schoolboy name any more.’

  ‘It’ll take a while to get that message across, Judy.’

  ‘Well, he’s starting this morning, he’s painting a new sign over his shop,’ Judy said.

  Mrs Flynn looked from one to the other. ‘You could do worse than Skunk, you know, he has plenty put by,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t choose a man just for what he has put by,’ Judy said, reprovingly.

  ‘For what reason would you choose then? Because he’s a good tap dancer?’ her mam asked and for some reason that they couldn’t quite understand they all found this very funny.

  Cathal Chambers at the bank was concerned because Neddy Nolan had borrowed so much money. Of course he had put the farm up as collateral; still it was a heavy sum. And this from a man who would think twice before buying a pair of shoes in the charity shop.

  ‘Could you let me know what it’s all for, Neddy?’ Cathal asked.

  ‘It’s for my advisers,’ Neddy explained.

  ‘But God above, what kind of advice are you getting that could cost all this money?’ Cathal was bewildered.

  ‘Experts in their field charge high fees,’ Neddy said as if that was any kind of explanation.

  ‘It’s just that you wouldn’t want cowboy advisers who might bleed you dry or anything.’ Cathal was sincere
. He was as much out for Neddy Nolan’s good as for the bank.

  ‘No, indeed, Cathal, highly professional,’ Neddy said with a calm little smile.

  Cathal went to see the lawyer, Myles Barry.

  ‘Myles, I don’t want to get into the lawyer–client relationship but who are all these advisers Neddy Nolan has?’

  ‘Advisers?’ Myles Barry was confused.

  ‘Yes, people he’s paying huge fees to apparently.’

  Myles scratched his head. ‘I don’t know who the hell they are – I haven’t even sent him one bill, he can hardly have retained another firm of lawyers without telling me. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cathal, I really don’t.’

  Lilly Ryan and her son Donal went to the prison on visiting day. This time they wanted to go without the priest.

  ‘I’ll be there visiting someone else in case you need me,’ he said.

  Father Flynn had an entirely unsatisfactory conversation with poor Becca King, who seemed to be getting madder all the time. She had got a very long prison sentence for being involved in the murder of her rival in love. She showed no repentance at all, just kept repeating that it had to be done. He hoped that she wouldn’t ask him again to arrange a prison wedding with that young man she was obsessed with. A young man who wouldn’t even come to visit her in jail, let alone marry her there. But no, today it was something different. She had a petition for St Ann, a card that she wanted pinned on to the shrine for all to see.

  She showed it to the priest. It was a photograph of Gabrielle King, her mother, and underneath was written: ‘Please, St Ann, punish this woman severely for having destroyed her daughter’s life. And if any of your loyal followers should see her in the streets of Rossmore, they should spit at her in your name.’

  Father Flynn felt very old and tired. He gravely said he would go there this afternoon and do it, he would give it priority.

  ‘It must be in a place where everyone can see it,’ Becca called as he was leaving.