Whitethorn Woods Read online

  ‘Pride of place, that’s what I’ll get for it, Becca,’ he promised.

  As he left, Kate, one of the warders, laid her hand on his arm.

  ‘You are a kind man, Father, not to upset her.’

  ‘You do know that I’m going to throw it away, don’t you?’ Father Flynn said.

  ‘Of course I do, but you’ll wait until you get home and burn it rather than leaving it round here for anyone to pick up,’ Kate said.

  Brian Flynn put the card in his wallet beside a cheque that had come from London that morning. It was money left by a lady who had died, a Helen Harris. She wanted to thank the shrine of St Ann for having answered her prayers for the safe delivery of a baby twenty-three long years ago. Perhaps the priest could spend it as he thought best to honour the saint.

  As he sat there on a wooden bench in case Lilly Ryan might need him later, Father Flynn speculated to himself about the role of a priest in today’s society. He hadn’t come to any satisfactory conclusion when Lilly and Donal came out.

  ‘All well?’ he asked anxiously and felt annoyed with himself at the very question. How could all be well in a family where the father was in jail for domestic violence, a family that had lost a child nearly a quarter of a century ago?

  But surprisingly Lilly nodded as if it were a normal thing to ask. ‘Just fine, Father. I realise now he’s a very weak man. I didn’t know this, you see, what with him being so big and strong, and hurting me for being stupid. But he’s actually weak and frightened, I see that now.’

  ‘And my mam realises that just because she is understanding and forgiving to him, the State will not be forgiving and allow him to go home. He will have to finish his sentence,’ her son said.

  ‘Yes, and Donal was very good, it’s not really in his heart but to please me he shook hands with his dad and wished him courage.’ Lilly’s tired face looked less strained than before.

  ‘So would you say we have a result then?’ Father Flynn said.

  ‘Best result in the circumstances,’ Donal agreed.

  ‘That’s all any of us can hope for,’ Father Flynn said.

  *

  Clare was taking her pupils to the Heartfelt Art Gallery to do a project. Emer, who was the director there, was a friend of hers. They would let the girls wander round the gallery and try to answer the questions on the form while the two women had a cup of coffee.

  Emer was getting married shortly to a Canadian called Ken whom she had always fancied but thought she had lost. Then suddenly out of the blue he had come to her with bunches of flowers and everything had been perfect.

  Father Flynn was going to do a nice speedy job on the service. Emer supposed that the priest was so glad that anyone came into a church at all these days or married anyone of a different sex, he’d agree to anything.

  ‘He’s his own man,’ Clare said.

  ‘He is indeed,’ Emer agreed. ‘Did he marry you and Neddy?’

  ‘No, the canon did, but he was there kind of rescuing the canon and bringing him back if he started to wander down too many byways …’

  ‘I see your Neddy often these days, he has some kind of business in an office near Ken’s up here in the old flour mills they converted,’ Emer said.

  ‘Neddy? Business?’

  ‘Well, I assumed so, I saw him today when I was bringing Ken some lunch in his office. And yesterday …’

  Clare was silent. Neddy had mentioned nothing of any business. She felt a cold lump of dread in her heart. But not Neddy. No, never.

  Emer realised what was happening.

  ‘I could have been mistaken,’ she said lamely.

  Clare said nothing.

  ‘I mean, it’s all offices here, little suites they rent out as offices, you know. It’s not as if it was flats, apartments. No, Clare, not Neddy. He worships you, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I think these girls have had enough time, don’t you?’ Clare said in a very brittle voice quite unlike her own.

  ‘Please, don’t jump to conclusions … you know men,’ Emer begged.

  Clare knew men better than anyone in Rossmore.

  ‘Come on, girls, don’t take all day,’ she said in a voice that was not going to be disobeyed.

  She was getting into her car when she met Cathal Chambers from the bank. He greeted her warmly.

  ‘You and Neddy must be making great plans up in that farm of yours,’ he said.

  ‘Hardly, Cathal, it’s still very uncertain whether there will be a road running through the middle of it or not.’

  ‘So what are all these advisers then, the ones that cost all the money?’

  ‘I don’t know about any advisers costing lots of money.’

  ‘Maybe I got it wrong. But you do know you have huge borrowings, don’t you?’ Cathal’s round face was anxious.

  ‘Huge borrowings? Oh yes, yes indeed, I know …’ Clare said in a voice that would be obvious to anyone that she had absolutely no idea.

  There was a time she had thought that Neddy was just too good to be true. Maybe she had been right.

  When she got back home her father-in-law was having a siesta out on the porch they had built together. She remembered handing Neddy the nails one by one. Marty was asleep in a big wicker chair with a light warm rug on his knees. This place had meant peace and refuge to Clare, and now it was all over.

  Neddy was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by papers.

  ‘I have something important to ask you, Neddy,’ she began.

  ‘And I have something very important to tell you, Clare,’ he said.

  Judy Flynn stood back to get the full effect of the new sign over Slattery’s newsagents. It looked very splendid.

  ‘It may take time for them to stop calling me Skunk,’ he said anxiously.

  ‘Well, we have time,’ Judy said.

  ‘You don’t have to go back for a while yet, do you?’ Sebastian Slattery asked from the top of his ladder.

  ‘No, I’m my own boss, but I’m not made of money, I can’t go on staying in the Rossmore Hotel for much longer.’

  ‘What about your mam’s house?’ the newly named Sebastian suggested.

  ‘No, she would be found killed dead with a bread knife in her if I stayed there.’ Judy knew herself fairly well.

  ‘Kitty’s?’

  ‘Something similar. These are people I can meet just for very short periods of time.’

  ‘Well, what about my place then? You could stay here over the shop for a while until … until …’

  ‘Until what, Sebastian?’

  ‘Until we get married and look for somewhere nicer for you and for me, for us, I mean …’

  ‘Are we going to get married? We barely know each other,’ Judy said.

  ‘I do hope so,’ Sebastian said, coming down the ladder.

  ‘Right. I’ll move in tonight,’ she said.

  ‘Um – I’ll have to do up a room for you …’

  ‘You mean, we aren’t going to sleep together? In your room?’ she called across the street to him to the entertainment of passers-by.

  ‘I’ll have your terrible Druid of a brother after me, saying I am the wages of sin and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sebastian. Brian will just be delighted to see us happy. He won’t go on with all that kind of stuff. You’ve been away from the Church too long …’

  *

  Brian Flynn was surprised to see Chester Kovac, the big American who had financed the Danny O’Neill Health Centre in Doon.

  ‘I was wondering if I could prevail on you to marry Hannah Harty and myself quietly, you know, no big ceremony …’

  ‘Well, of course I will, and my warmest congratulations. But why won’t you be getting married out in Doon where you live? Father Murphy is in charge of the parish there.’

  ‘No, we’d have to ask everyone if we had it in Doon, and we’re a bit advanced in years to be making a big show of it. And anyway there’s Dr Dermot there – we don’t want to be sort of sh
owing off in front of him. It’s complicated.’

  Father Flynn knew Dr Dermot – a mean, crabbed man. He could well believe that it was complicated.

  ‘I just didn’t want you to miss out on a big day, that’s all,’ he reassured Chester.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, Father, we’ll miss out on nothing. There will be plenty of people at a big do when I go back to the States for a honeymoon. In fact we will be bringing my mom back here with us for a vacation. Her name is Ann, too, so she is very anxious to visit the well here.’

  Father Flynn thought to himself that she had better come fairly quickly if she wanted to see the well and he examined his diary to get a suitable early date for the wedding.

  *

  Eddie Flynn was nowhere to be found when the decision to build the new road was announced. The vote in the council had been satisfactorily in favour of building the bypass. Eddie’s syndicate had bought every piece of property that might have been central to this plan except the Nolans’ farm. The plan said the road would go straight through this property and up through the woods in a straight line, taking the well and the shrine with it.

  Eddie had assured the others that buying land from Neddy Nolan was like taking candy from a baby. Yes, true, it was Neddy who was the loser. The compulsory purchase order would not pay anything like what he had been offered by the syndicate. But Neddy had always been soft in the head. The real problem was that Eddie Flynn had not delivered. So he had disappeared.

  Kitty and the children barely noticed that he was gone. Naomi, however, was very distressed. She had fabric for bridesmaids and flower girls, and she needed to talk to him about it. Why had he done this now? And he had left her no money to be getting on with, and the flat was only paid for for the next two months. It was vexing in the extreme …

  Lilly Ryan had heard from her cousin Pearl over in the North of England. Pearl was married to this really nice fellow, Bob, and they had two grown-up children. It appeared that something nice had happened in their lives. Their children, who used to be quite cold and distant and maybe a bit ashamed of them, had been much nicer of late. Pearl always wrote very honestly, not pretending or putting on airs. She wondered, could she and Bob come and spend a long weekend in Rossmore. Now Lilly was to say if it was difficult, and she would quite understand.

  So Lilly sat down and wrote everything, all about Aidan and his accusations, and how he couldn’t cope and that despite his violence he was a weak man, and that he would be in jail for another eighteen months and how she, Lilly, would just love them to visit. When she posted the letter she felt much better, as if she had needed to write out the whole story to make some kind of sense of it. She said that she and Pearl would go up to St Ann’s Well for old times’ sake when she arrived.

  Clare and Neddy sat one on either side of the table. Clare didn’t even look at the papers spread out all over the place. She was about to have her first and last row with Neddy Nolan on the day she had been going to tell him that her period was three weeks late and they might possibly be looking at the pregnancy they both longed for. Now it was too late.

  Neddy spoke very quietly.

  ‘The permission for the road has been given today, Clare. As we thought it’s going straight through here and on up to the well.’

  ‘We knew that would happen, but you refused to sell to Eddie Flynn just at a time when you might actually need money more than any other time of your life.’ Clare’s voice was cold.

  ‘But I couldn’t sell to them or we’d have had no control,’ he said as if explaining it to a toddler.

  ‘And what control do you have now? Less money, that’s all …’

  ‘No, Clare, that’s not true, we have all this …’ He waved at the papers and maps on the kitchen table.

  ‘This?’

  ‘I took advice, I got experts to draw up an alternative plan, another way the road would go so that it wouldn’t take away St Ann’s shrine. It involved architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, and cost a fortune. Clare, I had to borrow from Cathal Chambers and he thinks I’m into heroin or gambling or something.’

  Suddenly she knew that this was indeed what he was doing with the money, rather than feathering a little love nest for himself in the converted flour mills. Her relief was followed by a wave of resentment.

  ‘And why didn’t you tell him and tell me, for God’s sake?’

  ‘I had to keep it very quiet, have meetings where no one would see me.’

  ‘In the old flour mills?’ she guessed.

  Neddy laughed sheepishly. ‘There’s me thinking no one knew!’

  He patted her hand and kissed her fingers as he often did. The resentment had gone. Clare felt only the relief that he still loved her. She hadn’t known until now just how much she would dread the thought of losing him.

  ‘Will it work, Neddy?’ she asked weakly.

  Neddy Nolan had hired all these people to make maps and surveys. It was unbelievable.

  ‘I think it will,’ Neddy said calmly. ‘You see, I hired a public relations expert as well to show us how to get public sympathy. And he will get us a media coach for the two of us for television.’

  ‘For television?’

  ‘If you agree we can go on a big news programme and debate it with the developers.’

  ‘We can?’ Clare whispered.

  ‘Oh yes, we can explain how so many people here feel grateful to St Ann and want to keep the well and the shrine. It would make no sense now for anyone to oppose us.’

  ‘But Neddy, couldn’t we have done that without you having to hire all these experts?’

  ‘No, that’s just the point,’ Neddy cried. ‘Then we’d only have been pious, old-fashioned, superstitious people standing in the way of progress. We’d only have looked like the old Ireland rooted in history and traditions against the good modern Ireland which wanted to improve life for everyone …’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now we have a perfectly possible alternative plan. A plan which you and I paid for with our own money, refusing huge financial offers from syndicates and the like.’ He nodded over at the little oak cabinet. ‘I have every detail of it recorded there. They’ll know we are telling the truth and putting our money where our mouth is.’

  ‘And where will the road go?’

  She bent over the map with him and he stroked her hair with one hand as he pointed with the other. The new road would still go through the Nolan farm, but would then follow a route that would allow a sizeable part of the woods to remain, the part that held the shrine. There would be a big car park there and a side slip road from the new road to bring visitors directly to the shrine instead of going through Rossmore. And yet the local people could walk there through what remained of the woods as always.

  Clare looked at him with admiration. It could well work. A government heading for a General Election, a local council fearful of being accused of taking backhanders, might well want to take this chance of avoiding the huge confrontation that seemed to be brewing. Neddy’s solution seemed a perfect way out for everybody.

  ‘I wish you’d told me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I was going to, but you looked tired, and you have to go into a classroom every day. I just stay here. I have a much easier life.’

  She looked around the gleaming house that he kept so well for the three of them. It was not such an easy life, and she knew it. But Neddy never complained.

  ‘Hey, you said you had something to tell me – what was it?’ he asked.

  She told him that there was an outside chance she might be pregnant. Neddy got up and held her in his arms.

  ‘I was up there at the shrine today and I know it’s nonsense but I did say that it was something we both wanted badly,’ he said into her hair.

  ‘Well, she had to do something for the man who saved her well,’ Clare said.

  They were still standing there, arms around each other, when Marty Nolan came in.

  ‘Father Flynn arrived and he couldn’
t get any answer so I came in to see were you two all right.’ He was indignant that he had to be woken from his chair.

  As they had their tea and home-made biscuits, the birds started to gather on the trees for the night. And the sun began to set over the woods that Neddy Nolan had almost certainly saved.

  And the priest knew that his sister Judy was up there at the well, thanking St Ann and saying she hadn’t expected that it would all work so quickly.

  So Father Flynn listened, as it got dark, to Neddy’s plans.

  He was going to buy a house much nearer Rossmore, and then maybe Father Flynn’s mother and the canon could come to stay. It would not be like moving too far from the town, he had seen a grand place with a garden that the canon would like. Neddy would look after them all.

  And if by any chance they were to get a little baby he would look after the baby too. It would be nice for older people to have a new young life around the place.

  And for once Father Flynn could find nothing to say. What he liked to think of as his comforting supply of meaningless clichés had dried up.

  He looked at the good honest man in front of him and for the first time for a long time he saw some purpose in a life that had recently been confused and contradictory on every front.

  He looked back up at the ever darkening woods.

  And it wasn’t fanciful to think of them as a very special place, where so many voices had been heard and so many dreams answered.

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Orion.

  This eBook first published in 2009 by Orion Books.

  Copyright © Maeve Binchy 2006

  Earlier versions of some chapters of this novel have appeared in

  Ageing Matters, Woman’s Own and Woman’s Weekly.

  ‘June’s Birthday’ was read on BBC Radio 4

  Copyright © Maeve Binchy 2006

  The rights of Maeve Binchy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.