In Turbulent Times

By Ron Duffy

Since its inception as a semi-autonomous country within the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland has survived the convulsions of the Civil War, the privations of the Second World War, the abortive IRA campaign of violence in the 1950s, and the student-led agitation for civil rights in the 1960s that led to over thirty years of brutal terror, euphemistically referred to as The Troubles.

Nora Carrick lives through those turbulent times with demons of her own: the loss of a lover; one failed marriage, another barely survivng; a contentious, divided, dysfunctional family; and most demonic of all a debilitating, life-threatening epilepsy. Nora fights all of these demons with that stoic independence of spirit inherited from her MacLir family ancestry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Libros Libertad Publishing
• Release date: Apr 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301965069

Ron Duffy

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Ron Duffy spent three years “on the road”, mostly by bicycle, travelling extensively in both western and eastern Europe, with “working sojourns” in Norway, Austria and England.  HisMy adventuring over, he settled down to studies, and obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast. He then emigrated to Canada, took an MSc in Biogeography at the University of Calgary and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in geography. Duffy’s writing career began when he started publishing mostly travel and history articles in numerous Irish, British and Canadian newspapers and magazines. In 1988 McGill-Queen’s University Press published his non-fiction book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War which was based on his PhD thesis. In 1988 his play, Hearts and Minds, won first prize in the novice section of the annual Alberta Playwriting Competition. Another play, Loved and Left, was given a staged reading by Theatre 80 in Calgary. Retired from lecturing, Duffy turned to writing full-time. In the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition in 2012 his novel Crossed Lives was a nominee, and his historical novel O’Hanlon received an Honourable Mention. He has also written a trilogy of Irish novels, The Unquiet Land, In Turbulent Times, and A Further Shore, since published independently in one volume, and a World War Two novel Brandt.  As a companion volume to the Ulster trilogy he wrote Until The Troubles Started: A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland.

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In Turbulent Times

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY: Ron Duffy on Smashwords

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Table of Content

Copyright

About the Author

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

We live in turbulent times.

Rosa Luxemburg

in a letter to her sister, Louise Kautsky, 1906

ONE

The wind wailed like a keener at a wake and fitfully dashed cold rain against the kitchen windows. Michael Carrick watched the tears of sleety rain stream down the panes. Dimly through the wet he saw the mourning veils of cloud draped low over the darkening face of evening. He sat by the range with the dog asleep at his feet and a half-emptied glass of poteen at his elbow. His eyes wandered with the restless indetermination of a butterfly, flittering from fire to window, from window to oil-lamp, from oil-lamp to dog, from dog to fire again. Occasionally he would reach for the stinging drink and sip and then raise his face to the ceiling, listening for sounds from upstairs. But he heard nothing from there, nothing specifically human. All he could hear was the howling of the wind around the farm-buildings, the blatter of rain against the windows, the tick-tock of the clock on the mantelpiece, the hiss of water bubbling out of the kettle on the back part of the range.

Even the thought of Christmas, two or three days hence, did not cheer the wintery night. Caitlin and her stepmother, known to one and all as Mother Ross, had been discussing Christmas dinner only three days before, excited at having received a free turkey from the poultry farmer, Chucky Henderson. ‘For no reason,’ Chucky had said. ‘Just the compliments of the season.’ Michael recalled Caitlin’s huge belly and the ungainly, swaying way she walked. Occasionally she had stretched her dress and apron tightly over her swollen abdomen and let him see the baby moving. Like a kitten caught under a blanket, he had thought. He found it hard to believe that a living human being moved about inside his wife’s belly. It did not seem possible. Now that living human being was about to break out into the world. Michael could almost hear its lamb-like bleat of victory and fear.

A cry he did hear. He leapt to his feet, and the dog woke with a start, jerking its head up and staring at Michael as if waiting for a command. Michael was gazing up at the ceiling, wishing he could see into the room above his head. But the room had become a forbidden sanctuary of female mysteries presided over by the indispensable Mother Ross, assisted by the faithful neighbour, Una Slattery. From up there the cry came again. No lamb-like bleat, but an adult human cry. Caitlin in the pain of her progressing labour. Michael glanced at the clock. Three hours already. Why did it take so long? Another cry. The pain in the cry pierced to Michael’s heart. He paced across to the window and looked out and saw himself looking in, his features distorted by the runnels of rain.

As black a night as ever I remember, he thought. Please, God, may you do better upstairs than you are doing outside.

He heard the ceiling creak as someone walked across the bedroom floor. A door opened. Footsteps on the landing, on the stairs. Michael rushed into the hall. Mother Ross was coming down.

‘Is she all right?’ Michael blurted anxiously.

‘Michael, I think Dr Starkey should be here.’ Mother Ross avoided, or perhaps did not even hear, Michael’s question.

He repeated it, more loudly, more distractedly.

‘I don’t know, Michael,’ Mother Ross replied. She seemed impatient and tired. ‘Dr Starkey should be here. Caitlin has started bleeding again, like she did before. Go get the doctor.’

As Mother Ross returned upstairs, Michael prepared for the drive to the village. He grabbed a fisherman’s oilskin coat and sou’wester from the rack in the hall and hurriedly put them on. Mother Ross’s voice had worried with an urgency in spite of her attempt to reassure him that all was well. He pulled on a pair of wellington boots at the back door, opened it and stepped outside. The rain pelted down. The wind tore at him angrily. It flung fistsful of rain in his face and almost blinded him. It rolled a tin bucket across the yard, banging it on the cobbles. The rainwater overflowed from the gutter along the eaves and fell to the ground with a loud splashing.

Michael bent almost double and rushed to the stable where he harnessed an unwilling pony to the trap.

‘Come on now, old fellow. Don’t start playing up at this hour of the night.’

Five minutes later they were out on the main road, trotting to the village. The wind and the rain attacked from behind, flailing Michael’s broad back. But he did not notice it. His mind was on Caitlin. He heard her cry above the moaning of the wind. He pictured her sweating face, convulsed with pain, her head jerking from side to side, her hands opening and closing, beating the bed in her agony and impotence. He heard the word ‘complications’ echo and re-echo through the innermost hollows of his skull. He recalled the shadow of anxiety that had flitted across Mother Ross’s face. That shadow grew in his memory till it menaced like a cloud of doom. Something was wrong. Caitlin’s life was in danger. The baby’s life was in danger.

Michael turned the pony and trap into the main street of Corrymore. At the first house on the left, where Dr and Mrs Starkey lived, he reined in the pony, leapt down on to the road and dashed up the path to the dark-green door. He pounded a heavy, iron knocker and waited. The door opened. Mrs Starkey appeared, a short, stout, grey-haired woman, shaped like a sack of potatoes. She was wiping her chubby hands on a blue apron dusted with errant flour.

‘Michael,’ she said, ‘is Caitlin due?’

‘Ay, she is, Mrs Starkey. Mother Ross says it’s time the doctor came. She says there may be complications.’

‘Oh don’t listen to Mother Ross,’ said Mrs Starkey in an off-hand way. ‘She’s just being dramatic.’

‘But Caitlin was bleeding heavily two or three months ago,’ Michael explained. ‘Dr Starkey was keeping an eye on her. Then the bleeding stopped, but now it has begun again. She’s bleeding badly, Mrs Starkey.’

The doctor’s wife stepped back a pace or two. ‘Come in, Michael. That’s a desperate night out there. God help the sailors on a night like this, my mother used to say. Come in. Come in. I’ll have to phone the doctor. He’s in Carraghlin but he should be on his way home by now.’

‘I’ll just stand in the hall, Mrs Starkey,’ Michael said considerately. ‘I’m running water like a duck in a thunderstorm.’

Michael was glad to be in out of the rain and the mid-winter wind. The small entrance hall between the inner and the outer doors was warm and filled with the appetising smells of baking that wafted from the kitchen. Christmas pudding, perhaps. Or apple tarts. He heard Mrs Starkey speak to someone at last but he could not make out the words. Then she came to the door again.

‘Dr Starkey’s on his way,’ she said. ‘He left Carraghlin half an hour ago, so he should be here soon.’

‘You’ll send him straight up to the house?’ said Michael.

‘That I will, Michael,’ Mrs Starkey promised. ‘Now don’t you be getting yourself all worked up. Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll be the proudest father in the country before the night’s out.’

But Dr Starkey did not come home that night. He crashed his Morris Cowley near the Tamnagh Bridge. His arm was broken; his hip dislocated; his face a bloody mess of cuts and bruises.

Mrs Starkey was unaware of this. When Michael returned about an hour later, she thought it was her husband. She rushed to tell him not to take his coat off but to go up to the MacLir house, the name the large stone house still bore from the family of Caitlin Carrick, whose ancestors, the MacLirs, had built it in the nineteenth century.

‘Michael, it’s yourself back again,’ she said in surprise. ‘Is Dr Starkey at your place?’

‘No, Mrs Starkey, but we need him up there badly.’ Michael’s voice was trembling. A look of distraction agitated his face. ‘Something’s wrong, Mrs Starkey. Caitlin’s yelling and screaming, and Mother Ross says the baby isn’t coming out right. For God’s sake, where’s the doctor?’

‘I don’t know, Michael.’ Mrs Starkey was worried now herself. ‘He should have been here ages ago. Wait and I’ll phone again.’

All Michael could hear was Caitlin’s screaming. It pierced his ears like a torture. It made his heart pound and brought sweat to his forehead, mingling it with the rain. He moved his weight from one foot to the other. He clenched and unclenched his huge fists. ‘Please come, Dr Starkey. Oh my God, please, please come.’

Mrs Starkey appeared at the inner door again. ‘Something’s happened to the doctor, Michael.’ Her voice too quivered with worry. ‘He was visiting the Collinses in Carraghlin and he left an hour and a half ago. They haven’t heard from him. They suggested that I phone the police in Carraghlin, but even before they finished talking, the phone went dead.’

‘Must be a line down,’ Michael said.

‘Could be there’s trees down too,’ said Mrs Starkey. ‘The road’s probably blocked.’

Fear speared Michael’s heart. He felt the blood gush out. It filled his stomach, and he felt nauseated. ‘Mrs Starkey, I must get help for Caitlin,’ he shouted. ‘She’s in agony. This birth is going to kill her, like her own birth killed her mother.’

‘Calm yourself, Michael. Calm yourself. That’s no way to be talking. Caitlin’s in good hands with Mother Ross. Dr Starkey himself hasn’t delivered more babies than she has.’

‘But Mother Ross is frightened now herself,’ cried Michael. ‘She can’t handle this. She told me so. Where does Dr Chapman live?’

‘He’s in Ballydun usually,’ Mrs Starkey replied. ‘But he’s away in England till the New Year. Dr Murray in Lisnaglass is looking after his practice. It’ll take you an hour or more to reach him on a night like this. And I can’t telephone him.’

‘Good God, Mrs Starkey, what should I do?’ Michael was frantic.

‘Clifford Hamilton,’ Mrs Starkey cried. ‘He’s almost a doctor now. He’s home at the Big House for Christmas. Go get him. Tell him if there’s anything he needs I can let him into the doctor’s surgery.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Starkey,’ Michael said with relief. ‘If the doctor comes, send him up to the house right away.’

‘Ay, if he comes,’ said Mrs Starkey apprehensively.

‘I hope he’s all right,’ said Michael.

‘Oh, he’s probably sitting in his car behind a fallen tree and cursing like a trooper. Good night to you, Michael. Good luck to Caitlin. And a Happy Christmas.’

‘Same to you, Mrs Starkey.’

Michael urged the reluctant pony back up the street and turned to the right. He stopped at the iron gates in front of the Hamiltons’ large house that stood well back from the road in a cordon of tall, dripping sycamore trees. As he jumped down from the trap, he saw with sudden fear that a thick chain and padlock secured the gates. Then the strong beam from a torch shone in his face, blinding him. ‘What the hell,’ he muttered.

‘What’s your name and what are you doing here?’ a voice shouted from the blackness behind the torchlight. The bright beam waved in the air, sweeping across the pony and trap, then back to Michael.

Michael couldn’t understand what was going on. Where was Clifford Hamilton? ‘My name is Michael Carrick,’ he shouted back. ‘I’m a friend of Clifford Hamilton. I need to talk to him right away. It’s urgent.’

‘Wait there,’ the voice commanded. The bearer of the torch turned and strode towards the house. He wore a military cap and a dark cape, both items shedding rain as he walked.

‘God in heaven, not another delay,’ Michael said to himself. ‘What the devil is going on here?’

In what seemed like an age and a half to the wholly distraught Michael Carrick, the military officer in the cape returned. His right hand held a revolver, his left a key with which he fumbled to open the padlock. Then he withdrew the thick chain from around the gate. Carrying the chain, the lock and the key, he pointed the revolver at Michael. ‘Walk ahead of me,’ he commanded.

He followed Michael to the front porch of the large stone house and told him to open the door. Lamps were burning on two narrow consoles in the spacious, carpeted hall. Clifford’s sister was waiting there in a flowered dressing gown with a green shawl held around her shoulders. Michael tried to remember her name, but the only name that came to mind was Caitlin. He knew the girl was Clifford’s sister. A stranger would have known that, so close was the family likeness between them. She lived at home in this old house and looked after her mother who was dying of consumption. Her father was already dead, drowned on the Titanic more than eight years ago. A sad house, it had always seemed to Michael.

‘Is this the man you know as Michael Carrick?’ the military officer asked the young woman.

‘Yes, Timmins, he’s a friend of my brother’s.’

‘Very good, ma’am.’ Timmins walked away down the hall, while removing his cap and pulling the wet cape over his head.

‘I’m sorry to intrude at this time of the night, Miss Hamilton,’ Michael said, ‘but I have to see Clifford. It’s very, very urgent. Is he here?’

‘He is. I’ll go and fetch him for you.’ She climbed the broad, carpeted staircase to the upper floor, leaving an increasingly agitated Michael waiting in the hall. He heard her knock on a door and call, ‘Clifford! Clifford! Michael Carrick is here looking for you. He says it’s urgent.’ Silence. Then in a louder voice she repeated, ‘Clifford! It’s Michael Carrick. He’s waiting downstairs. He has to talk to you.’

She came back down the stairs. ‘Clifford will be with you shortly. He was asleep already.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said, ‘but it could be a matter of life or death.’

‘That sounds very melodramatic.’

‘Yes, perhaps it does,’ Michael agreed, without knowing exactly what was meant by ‘melodramatic’. Then he asked, ‘What’s going on here? The locked gates, the army officer.’

‘B Specials. We have a small platoon of B Specials protecting the house.’

‘You mean Auxies. RIC Auxiliaries.’ Michael was referring to Royal Irish Constabulary auxiliary forces sent by the British government to keep order in the unquiet land of late-1920 Ireland.

‘Oh no. The Auxies, as you call them, are as thuggish and brutal as the Black and Tans,’ said Clifford’s sister. ‘Fortunately we don’t have any Auxiliaries in this northern part of the country.’ She spoke with what Michael considered a cultured, educated voice, a high-society voice of the kind of woman who attended classical music concerts and theatre in the city and made trips to London and Paris. She looked about eighteen or nineteen, tall, slim, attractive, with long, straight, brown hair. ‘The B Specials are a new group of Special Constables. They are very young and they don’t have uniforms yet. That ex-serviceman, George Timmins, is in charge of them.’

Michael kept glancing up the stairs, longing with growing impatience and fear for Clifford to appear. He kept wondering what was going on up the stairs at his own house. The last thing he wanted was a lecture on the new Special Constabulary. But he realised that Clifford’s sister was making polite conversation while they waited for her brother. Michael thought he ought to do the same. ‘You haven’t had trouble here, have you?’

‘Oh yes. We were attacked about half past eleven one night. Bursts of rifle fire came from out of the darkness all around the house. I and our maidservant, Annie, had to lie on the floor below the window in my mother’s bedroom. A few of the other windows were broken; several chips were made in the granite, and ugly white scars were left on some of the trees. But our protectors saw them off.’ A noise made her look up. ‘Here comes Clifford now. I’ll leave you two alone.’ She hurried away into the back of the house as if glad to get away.

‘Michael, good to see you again,’ the suave young medical student said cheerfully. A full, but carefully trimmed moustache now adorned his upper lip. ‘I won’t chide you for getting me out of bed at two-thirty in the morning. Won’t you have a drink? Get those oilskins off and come to the drawing room for a Christmas glass. You can tell me what this is all about.’

‘Clifford, I need your help,’ Michael said in a pressing voice. ‘Caitlin’s giving birth and she’s having a bad time. Something’s gone wrong. She’s losing a lot of blood.’

‘Where’s Dr Starkey?’ Clifford asked. He wanted to avoid the responsibility that he saw being thrust upon him.

‘Held up somewhere on the road from Carraghlin.’ Michael noted clearly the reluctance on Clifford’s face. ‘I’ve been trying to get him for a couple of hours. Dr Chapman’s in England for Christmas, and I can’t reach Dr Murray because the telephone lines are down. Clifford, it’s serious. Caitlin could die if she doesn’t get help. Or the baby could die.’

‘Now, now, it’s never that bad, Michael,’ Clifford said soothingly. ‘Who’s with her at the moment?’

‘Mother Ross and Una Slattery.’ Michael was becoming exasperated. He had no desire to stand and answer questions. He wanted Clifford to come immediately to Caitlin’s aid.

‘With those two she’s in very capable hands,’ said Clifford.

‘Not capable enough, Clifford. Caitlin needs a doctor. Mother Ross says so herself. She’s worried. Mrs Starkey says she’ll give you anything you need from the doctor’s surgery.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ said Clifford. ‘I have everything I’m likely to need here.’ He dithered. Then he drew a deep breath and said, ‘Very well, Michael, I’ll come right away. Let me get my stuff together and put my rain-gear on.’

He climbed back upstairs to his room.

Hurry, Clifford, hurry, hurry, Michael kept saying to himself. For God’s sake, hurry.

At last Clifford came down again, buttoning his raincoat. He carried a black bag in one hand. He shouted down the hall, ‘Timmins, we’re leaving. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Don’t lock the gates.’ Then he turned to Michael and said with a levity lost on the distraught father-to-be, ‘Now, let’s be off to the rescue of this fair damsel in distress.’

He followed Michael to the main road and climbed into the trap. The shafts tipped up, the harness jingled and creaked, the pony snorted and tossed its wet head. Michael jerked the reins a couple of times and shouted. He turned the pony and trap around, and off they went, slowly at first, until the pony found its stride.

God, what a miserable night to be born, Clifford thought. He was nervous. He had already delivered three babies, but they were easy, straightforward births, the first two under supervision. This one sounded difficult. A breech birth at least. Perhaps a Caesarean. He would rather have kept clear of this ordeal but found it impossible to refuse. He had a reputation in the village where many already regarded him as the best new doctor in Belfast. The village was proud of him. This birth would enhance his reputation or shatter it like a dropped mirror. Clifford was worried in case it might go badly. As the rain-beaten cart bounced and swayed towards the MacLir house, Clifford frantically recalled everything he ought to know about breech births and Caesarean sections. By the time he and Michael arrived in the yard behind the house Clifford was confident he could handle any complication. His reputation was assured. It was not the village that was looking on, he thought with typical self-importance, it was the world.

As he rushed across the farmyard to the back door, Clifford slipped on a wet, muddy cobblestone and almost fell. He only just reached the door in time to check his forward fall with his free outstretched hand. That frightened him. Tonight he could not afford to be clumsy. Tonight he needed swift decision-making, speedy and determined action, hands that did not fumble or shake.

Be cool, Clifford Hamilton, he told himself as he took off his raincoat in the hall. For God’s sake, stay cool.

‘She’s upstairs, Clifford,’ Michael said, giving him a verbal push. ‘The back room on the left.’

‘Fine,’ said Clifford. He climbed the stairs two at a time.

Michael would never have guessed how nerves were tying and untying knots in Clifford’s insides. The giddying sensations they produced were strong enough to make the student doctor almost ill. He paused on the landing to allow time for the nauseating knotting in his belly to relax. He was glad that Michael had not waited to see him enter the room where Caitlin lay writhing in the throes of her difficult labour, for Clifford was unable to open the door. He looked at it and wondered what was going on in the room behind it. But he was powerless to move. He suspected that every moment was of vital importance to the lives of Caitlin and her baby, but he was too frightened and nervous to go inside. Had it been any other woman he would have strode confidently into the bedroom with no hesitation, no fear, no agonisingly renewed qualms about his ability to handle the situation. But Caitlin Carrick had been his first love. He had thrilled with pubescent pleasure at the sight of her face and the womanly shape of her body. Though he had matured since then, Caitlin Carrick held him still in a spell he had never broken. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Oh God, why did this have to happen to me? he thought. Why did I have to be the only doctor in the village tonight? And then he heard Caitlin cry out in her pain. She needed him. More than anyone else in the world, more even than her husband Michael, Caitlin needed him, Clifford Hamilton. Boldly he opened the door and went inside.

Michael had taken off the wet oilskins and returned to the kitchen, dropped more turf into the low, red fire in the range, and poured a drink. He noticed that the kettle was no longer there. He jerked back both head and arm, and the poteen vanished from his glass. He gulped and screwed up his face. Then he poured another and downed it just as quickly. Then a third. His insides burned as if he had swallowed the red turf from the fire. He poured a fourth, shaking the last drops from the greedy lips of the bottle. But he did not drink it. He left it sitting on the arm of the chair and placed the empty bottle in the hearth. Unneeded and useless, he stood in front of the window and stared at the streaming rain that distorted the reflection of himself and of the room behind him. He was looking at his own ghost, its pale face twisted as if in a devilish agony that he could not feel because the hell-fire in his belly numbed it.

The upstairs room was silent. Only an occasional creak of the floor as Clifford or Una or Mother Ross moved around the bed. Michael would sooner have been able to banish Caitlin’s agony from his thoughts but that was impossible. He sat in the chair and stretched his legs across the hearth. His foot knocked over the empty poteen bottle. He let it lie. To reach down and set it upright would have taken more effort than it was worth. His hand sought the glass instead, but his forearm found it first and knocked it off the chair. It fell with a crash on the stone-flagged floor.

‘Stupid glipe,’ Michael chided himself.

His head fell backwards onto the high back of the chair. His eyes flickered shut like a baby’s. In five minutes he was noisily asleep.

❦

‘Michael. Michael. Wake up.’

He struggled back to consciousness, forcing his aching eyes to open. Fuzzily he saw Mother Ross leaning towards him. ‘Michael. Michael. Wake up.’

Sleepily he sat up in the chair. His neck was stiff; his head was sore. ‘Mother Ross,’ he muttered. ‘It’s you.’ Then suddenly he remembered everything and leapt to his feet. ‘Mother Ross. The baby? Caitlin? How’s Caitlin?’

‘Michael, Clifford wants you to fetch Father Mullan.’ Mother Ross looked worn out. Her face was pale and forlorn; her eyes red-rimmed and sore, her forehead puckered in a frown.

‘Caitlin?’ Michael screamed. ‘Caitlin? How’s Caitlin? For God’s sake, Mother Ross.’

‘We think that Caitlin’s all right, Michael.’ Mother Ross began to weep.

‘You think!’ cried Michael. ‘Oh my God. And the baby?’ Michael was close to weeping himself, keeping back the tears with an effort. His throat was tightly constricted. He could hardly speak. ‘What about the baby?’

‘We don’t know, Michael.’ Mother Ross forced the words out. ‘She’s having convulsions. She’s been having them for an hour or more. Clifford doesn’t think she’s going to last out the night.’

Michael felt unaccountably composed. He held Mother Ross close to his heaving chest and gently patted her back. Then a tear broke free from each eye and rolled down his cheeks. They dropped on to Mother Ross’s gingery grey hair. Neither Michael nor the old woman spoke till Mother Ross’s sobbing had stopped.

‘It’s a girl then?’ Michael said in a voice stronger and firmer than he expected.

‘Ay, and such a bonny wee thing.’ Mother Ross withdrew from Michael’s arms and wiped her eyes.

‘What went wrong, Mother Ross?’

‘The placenta was blocking the baby’s passage out of Caitlin’s womb, Michael,’ Mother Ross tried to explain. ‘Clifford had to use chloroform on Caitlin and cut the baby out through her belly. He did very well for a young, inexperienced doctor. Your little daughter had a hard time being born into this unfriendly world.’

‘And these convulsions she has. Can she survive?’

‘There’s a chance, Michael,’ Mother Ross replied. But her voice lacked conviction. ‘In any case, Clifford thinks you should get the priest. For Caitlin and the baby.’

‘In other words there’s no chance for either of them,’ Michael said with resignation. He thought bleakly of all of Caitlin’s suffering during the past nine months.

‘Oh no. Don’t say that, Michael. It’s in God’s hands. If He chooses, they’ll live. Both of them.’

God chose.

And both of them lived.

The baby was baptized that night by Father Gerard Mullan, the new parish priest, and given the names Nora Sinead.

Mother Ross sat all night, spooning brandy into the baby’s mouth. Gradually the terrifying convulsions stopped, and the baby slept.

Caitlin too slept. She was pale and sweating and tossed restlessly.

Michael sat by the bed watching her with a deep love. Then he too fell asleep.

TWO

Liam Dooley was thirty-eight, going on thirty-nine. His fair, wavy hair was receding alarmingly at the temples. He believed a baldness was spreading at the back of his head also, like a threadbare elbow in an old jacket, but he could not see for sure in the mirror and he would have been embarrassed to ask. There was no one he could have asked in any case without feeling foolish. His parents were dead; his sister, after her twenty-first birthday, had moved to Belfast to marry the father of her daughter; and Liam lived alone in two rooms, a kitchen and a living-bedroom that the Church had built onto the back of the new school as accommodation for the teacher, but which could be converted to additional classrooms when the growing number of pupils made the extension necessary. Liam’s baldness and his forties were both approaching rapidly. Both inexorable. He could always have lied about his age to strangers who did not know him but he could not pass himself off as twenty-eight or twenty-nine when his hairline was almost as far back as his ears and threatening to meet up with the circle of skin he felt was spreading at his crown. He had to face facts. Liam Dooley’s youth was irretrievably lost. Lost, not squandered. Liam was no profligate. He was no philanderer. His intimacy with women extended only to walking one or two of them home from church. Once he went as far as holding Molly Noonan’s hand as they strolled home from a choir practice but he could not bring himself to embrace her, nor to give her a kiss as he left her at her door. He wanted to. He wanted to very much. But he was timorous and hesitant. Fearful of rejection, he held back. Molly did not ask him in for tea. Nor did she ever walk home with him again. Sean O’Sullivan, a tenor with large, yellowing teeth, escorted her home after that. Then Molly got pregnant, and she and Sean ran away to Belfast and were never seen again.

Liam often thought of Molly Noonan, of the pert looks she flicked his way, of the teasing scent from her red hair as he stood behind her in the choir, of the smiles she gave him when he entered Lizzie Martin’s shop where she worked. He remembered the late spring evening when they had last walked home together. They had paused where Killeenagh Burn trips down through the heather. The stream chattered to them like a lonely gossip glad of company. They listened to it courteously, saying nothing themselves, not from the want of things to say but from Liam’s diffidence about saying them. They walked on. They listened to the prattling of lesser streams instead. Once in Cooney’s Wood they stopped. Molly had a stone in her shoe. She supported herself on Liam’s arm and raised her foot to remove her shoe and shake out the offending stone. Liam saw her exposed calf and part of her thigh. His imagination groped higher, but his hands hung limp as rope-ends by his sides.

‘It’s so quiet here,’ Molly said, lowering her foot to the ground and straightening her skirt.

They stood still as posts, listening. But for Liam’s hammering heart the silence was unbroken. Not a sound. Not a sigh from the trees. Not a whisper from the grass. The silence almost cracked their ear-drums. Then they walked on to Molly’s house. He wished her ‘Goodnight’ and left her at the door without a goodnight kiss.

Liam often recalled that evening with Molly Noonan and every time he thought of it he squirmed with embarrassment, and cursed himself for his timidity. ‘She wanted me to kiss her,’ he would reproach himself with anguish. ‘And I was scared even to touch her. I’ve been as yellow as butter since I was a boy.’

Liam’s racking fear was that he would grow old and die without ever having seen a naked woman, a live, naked woman, without ever having caressed or explored her body with his quivering hands. Most unbearable of all was the thought that he would live out his life without ever experiencing the ecstasy, the ultimate mystery, of the sexual act. Over and over again in his mind’s craving he encountered beautiful girls, nude among the warm sand-dunes of Tranaliskeen or in farmhouse barns or bedrooms along the quiet lanes of the rolling, interior countryside. They beckoned him from shadowy, inviting doorways, they called to him to follow them along unfrequented pathways into dark and dappled woods. But never in reality. Except for that one time with Molly Noonan, and then he was afraid to do what he had done so often in his desirous daydreams.

Each year with aching heart and unquiet thoughts he watched the young girls in his small classroom arrive at adolescence. His eyes constantly strayed to their blouses or their cardigans. He could not stop his errant eyes nor put a shackle on his wayward thoughts. But only his eyes and his thoughts roamed free. He had no lewd intentions towards the girls. He would not have touched one of them, except in his fantasies. To watch them develop into young women, to be aware of untouched breasts below the clothing, gave him pleasure which he knew was sexual. And almost certainly sinful.

Society did not realise to what psychological torture it condemned its men like Liam Dooley. To deny them the right to yield to natural passions, to force them to hold back their human urges, almost to deny their very humanity, was to inflict suffering more grievous than any devised by the Inquisition. Men like Liam Dooley were prisoners and victims of a cruel and uncompassionate moral code. Society chained them like dogs on a leash. They could run and play within that determined circle. But any attempt to leap beyond its bounds, even in playfulness, was checked by a tight yank on the leash that choked. For a dog to be tied continuously to an immovable stake was unnatural. A dog, like any other living creature, had to have freedom to explore, to learn, to develop. Constant frustration of its natural urges turned the young and playful pup into a snarling and vicious brute, smarting from the raw-red abrasions round its neck, abrasions that pained more unbearably the more he pulled against the leash. Snarling viciousness might be desirable in a Cerberus but not in a Fido or a Spot. Liam Dooley smarted from moral chafing, but the hurt was more mental than physical. He had long ago recognized the limits of his leash. He looked beyond the well-trodden circle, but however green and lush the grass that grew there he did not try to caper into it, as a pup would. Liam was a cowed old mongrel who had come to terms with his predicament. No Cerberus. Merely a Fido or a Spot, lying at the feet of women and saints, a symbol of fidelity, a carrier of torches, a licker of wounds, a foot-rest for Crusaders who fought life’s battles in fields faraway. He felt like the little dog with reddish hair that Aztecs cremated with the corpse of the dead. On this little dog the departed soul swam into the underworld. White dogs could not swim the river; they had washed themselves. Black dogs could not swim the river; they had soiled themselves. Only red dogs could pass to the shore of the dead. That was Liam; neither pure nor wicked, yet sacrificed by society for being neither the one nor the other.

Now there was Nora.

Nora Sinead Carrick was the most intelligent pupil he had taught in his sixteen years at the school in Corrymore. Every week the pages of her exercise books were decorated with small, shiny, adhesive stars, the coveted emblems of excellence. And hers were always gold stars, the highest and most coveted award of all. Every year that she attended school her art work adorned the classroom walls and attracted immediate attention by its remarkable maturity. Three of her paintings and two of her pencil drawings had once been accepted for an exhibition of children’s art in the Museum and Art Gallery in Belfast. Liam brought all his pupils there on a special outing one day, but they showed more interest in the Egyptian mummy, the huge, stuffed Irish wolfhound, and the ugly orang-utan than they did in their classmate’s art. Nora’s own effervescent enthusiasm was divided equally between the geological exhibition and the paintings of William Conor.

Liam remembered that day as clearly as if it had occurred last week. Nine years ago. He could hardly believe it. Nine years. He was not yet thirty then. His hair was still thick and wavy. Nora was eleven. She was a plain little girl with large, brown eyes and straight, dark hair cut severely square both above her eyes and across the back of her neck. She was going to be a nun, she said, and help to heal the sick and starving children in India. She showed little indication then of the beautiful young woman that she was today. The only vestige from her childhood was her large, dark eyes. All else was changed. Her hair was long and black and sparkled with highlights like a starry sky. Her skinny body had fleshed out fully. Especially her breasts. Her shapely, bodice-straining breasts. Liam had a fixation with the female breast that almost frightened him. He imagined that one day he would begin uncontrollably reaching out and fondling the breasts of every woman he would meet. The urge to unbutton girls’ blouses made his palms sweat and sent quivering sensations from his finger-tips to his loins. No one quickened his pubescent impulsions more than Nora Carrick.

At the age of eleven Nora had awakened in Liam only sympathy. She was a pale and sickly child back then and she remained so through her adolescence. She lacked conspicuously the robust good health of her contemporaries and for that reason perhaps she was a solitary little girl, one not given much to play. The high-spirited rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard was not for Nora. Then the summer before her twelfth birthday she experienced the first frightening surrender of her will to those dark powers that some, not being able to understand them, described as satanic. As a result, Nora was always serious, almost cheerless, with her large, pathetic eyes staring from a wan face. She seemed indifferent to the world, but her indifference was feigned, a defence that drove her in upon herself, forced her to develop a strength of will and purpose that did not fit so frail a constitution.

No one but her parents knew for how long Nora had been fighting the dark, possessive powers before that first awful capitulation in the schoolyard. But those same powers—satanic or divine, according to opinions prevailing from time immemorial—held her in their grip and demanded annual or even more frequent submission ever since. Her epileptic seizures were a constantly gnawing concern to Liam while Nora was his pupil and a cause of fright, excitement and storytelling among the other children in the school. Dr Alexander had declared that the fits were simply the result of some slight brain damage that Nora had suffered when she was born and that they were nothing to be alarmed about. More malicious tongues blamed the incompetence of the still unqualified medical