This time last week I hadn’t known that I’d had a sister, and I hadn’t met Jeremy Gill. Now, I was parked on the north side of Dublin’s inner city, across the street from the twelve-foot-high red sandstone wall that surrounded the Convent of the Blessed Eucharist: Rhona Macbride’s old school, and the place Jeremy Gill had made his first short film.
I had parted from Sadie at around ten o’clock the night before and had finally replied to Davy’s texts when I got home, to say that I’d had a bad day, couldn’t talk, and was turning off my phone. Later, when I was on my yoga mat, unsuccessfully trying to bring my attention to the breath, the doorbell went.
‘I didn’t want to let things rest the way they were this morning,’ Davy had said, over the intercom. ‘I thought we should at least try to talk about what happened.’
I buzzed him in and met him halfway down the stairs on the landing. We stood facing each other in silence. Then I undid his shirt and led him into my bedroom.
But as we were both leaving the house this morning I said, ‘This can’t happen again.’
‘It can,’ he said. ‘Though I think you’re right. It probably shouldn’t.’
He kissed me on the cheek and ran out the door into the black winter morning and he didn’t look back so he probably didn’t notice I’d stopped breathing.
By 7 a.m., I was driving up the M8. I had intended to hit Dublin around 10.00, just after the morning rush hour, but the traffic had been rainy day bad and it was well after eleven by the time I arrived at the convent.
I’d have to conceal my reasons for being there but the dishonesty wasn’t going to come as easy as it had of late. Lying to a graduate on work experience was one thing, but lying to a nun? After finishing primary school, I went to St Angela’s Convent Secondary on Patrick’s Hill. Most of the classes were taught by lay teachers, but not all. I found out fast that nuns are human lie detectors, Sister Attracta, the history teacher, especially. I had been studious, mostly, but on any occasion I hadn’t done my homework, unfailingly she had called on me to read my answer to the class. Still, it had been good training. I had learnt that, when lying, it was best to tell as much of the truth as possible.
I crossed the road and pressed the doorbell, my breath misting the brass plate on the door. It could do with a shine, I thought. But there were few nuns now, and most of those were geriatric, well beyond such duties. Many convents had closed, and there was a real risk that Sister Bernadette was dead, or had moved to a retirement home. I was about to press the bell again when the door was opened by a small, chubby, orange-tanned woman in a neon green velour leisure-suit. Times had changed, though surely not this much? But the woman was much too young to be a nun, I realised.
‘Good morning, I’m here to visit Sister Bernadette, if she’s available,’ I said.
‘I’ll check,’ the woman said.
She sounded like a local.
‘What’s your name, love?’
‘Nola Fitzpatrick.’
Almost nobody calls me ‘Nola’ – I don’t encourage it – and Sister Bernadette was unlikely to be on Twitter, but you never knew. I wasn’t prepared to give a false name. That was a step too far, but a rarely used diminutive might provide some cover. At least the nun was still around – if it was the same woman. It was a common name, after all. I was regretting that I hadn’t asked Tiernan more about Sister Bernadette.
The woman showed me into a narrow passageway and directed me to a row of plastic chairs placed against the left-hand wall. Then, without a word, she disappeared through a second larger door, and locked it behind her. The passageway looked like a recent addition. A weather protector? Or a security measure? More likely the latter, I reckoned. Their centuries-old raison d’être meant that the nuns couldn’t close their doors to callers – but they could be sensible. These were tough streets, had been since the Act of Union had abolished the Irish parliament and led the moneyed classes to London. Their great houses had become slum tenements, entering a cycle of dereliction, demolition and replacement with council flats, the poverty of the local residents the only constant. Convents in areas like this had been socially radical, educating the children of the poor. But these were less respectful times and it looked like the nuns had had to beef up their security as a result.
I checked my watch. I had been waiting more than forty-five minutes, which might mean that I’d been forgotten. Then I heard the Angelus bell toll. Presumably the nuns had prayers around now. If that was the case, I’d be waiting another while. Any other time, I’d be scrolling through Facebook and Twitter to pass the time. But I’d vowed to keep off the internet for a few days, hoping that the Gill furore would have died down by the time I returned. I did a breathing exercise and rehearsed my story in my head.
The smell here was the same as it had been in St Angela’s convent, a mixture of furniture polish, cooking and mothballs. Comforting, in an odd way. By the time I got to secondary school, I had been adopted and my name had been changed to Fitzpatrick. It had been Whelan for most of primary school, until my birth mother had died. That had been a scary time, but Mam and Dad had said that they would fight to keep me if they had to. As it turned out, they didn’t have to fight very hard. All of my birth mother’s relatives, country people, had said no-thank-you-very-much to the social worker’s suggestion that one of them might want to take me in. After a couple of months, or years, it had seemed like a long time, but it might not have been, everything was settled.
In St Angela’s, a lot of my classmates didn’t know that I was adopted, and most of those who knew assumed it had happened just after I was born. There were a few from Gardiner’s Hill School who knew my original name and my whole story, but I eased them out of my life as fast as I could. They hadn’t been nice to me in primary. I might as well have had a label around my neck, or a bell to ring. The kids hadn’t known the difference at first. Their mothers were the ones who wouldn’t let me come for sleepovers, who told their own children about how, when my birth mother brought me to school, I had had scabies and lice and a nose that never stopped running, and how they had had to complain to the teachers about it, and how I was often left hanging around on the side of the road, and if my mother showed up to collect me, which half the time she didn’t, she was drunk, if that’s all she was. And hadn’t any shame about any of it, which was the worst thing nearly, and how in the end the school had had no choice but to call in the Health Board, and wasn’t that the lucky day for the poor misfortunate because weren’t the Fitzpatricks only after applying to become foster parents because they weren’t able to have children themselves, sure God help us.
The stories followed me right through primary, and whenever lice came into the school, the mothers and the children stared at me. Secondary with the nuns at St Angela’s had been my great escape from all that, from the knowing looks of outsiders, even if I was never able to silence the voices in my head.
Just after 12.20, I heard the jangle of a bunch of keys behind the great door and, instinctively, sat straighter in my chair. I might be about to tell a pack of lies, but the ‘no slouching, girls’ rule was harder to break. The door opened, a crack at first, then wider. I stood as a rail-thin, silver-haired woman in a calf-length grey wool skirt and what looked like a hand-knitted grey round-necked jumper, with a starched white round cotton collar inside it, came into the passageway. She wasn’t wearing a veil. She didn’t have to. She had nun written all over her. I caught a flash of neon green. The other woman was there too, watching from the inside hall. The nun looked to be in her late sixties, but nuns often looked a decade or more younger than their age. This one might be pushing eighty.
‘Thanks for seeing me, Sister Bernadette,’ I said, taking a chance with the name.
‘Well, yes, I haven’t agreed to anything yet,’ the nun said. ‘Yvonne told me you looked as if you wouldn’t eat me so I thought I should come and check. But we don’t know each other, do we?’
Her voice was strong, and her gaze was intelligent. I wouldn’t have had a chance of deceiving the woman in her prime. But there had been a hint of the uncertainty that old age brings. That might be enough.
‘No, Sister. And I realise that I should have written or phoned first. But I was in the area and, honestly, I thought there’s no time like the present. Memories are so easily lost.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose. But you’re not a past pupil?’
‘No, Sister, I’m sorry, I’m making a hopeless job of explaining. I’m here about the film that was made here. I’m an amateur film historian, and I was lucky enough to see Jeremy Gill during his recent visit to Cork Film Festival. Afterwards, I had lunch with, not with Mr Gill, I wouldn’t have been so privileged. No. I had lunch with Tiernan McDevitt, the arts journalist. He worked on Mr Gill’s first film, I don’t know if you remember? No? Anyway, Tiernan told me about the filming, how it took place here. And I realised that I hadn’t known that at all. It’s such an important part of the Gill story and it’s almost completely unknown and I just thought it needed to be recorded. So here I am. Cheeky, I know. Sorry again for the short notice, Sister, and for being a terrible pest.’
I waited.
‘I see,’ Sister Bernadette said. ‘It’s not known, you say? But isn’t it in the credits that it was filmed here? I thought – no, I definitely remember that it is.’
‘Well, of course, yes. There’s a thank-you to the convent in the credits. But the circumstances aren’t known – for example, that the park in the film is the convent’s own garden. And what it was like for the community. Any special memories, all that.’
‘I see,’ Sister Bernadette said again.
After a pause, she continued.
‘What would you want to do?’
‘Talk, record an interview, take a few photos of the garden, the other locations, that kind of thing. As much, or as little, as you want. I’d put the information into the Film Festival archive, so that it would be preserved. And let you have a copy for your own archive, too.’
Most of it was true, though my amateur film historian status had only been dreamt up in the car on the way up.
‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ Sister Bernadette said. ‘It’s the kind of thing that might be forgotten, and so much has been forgotten, so much has changed, so much will change soon. The convent can’t continue, not like this, not for much longer.’
She looked wistful, and I nodded in what I hoped was a sympathetic fashion.
‘Come into the parlour and Yvonne will bring us a cup of tea.’
‘Thank you so much, Sister,’ I said.
Sister Bernadette remembered little about the filming, or how it had come about, though she said that Jeremy Gill’s mother had been a past pupil. She thought that, perhaps, the initial approach had come by way of Jeremy’s mother, and spoke at length about Gill’s kindness and generosity to her and all the sisters, both during filming and, in particular, afterwards. The weight given to ‘afterwards’ left me in no doubt that a substantial donation, perhaps more than one, had been made to the convent’s coffers. I listened closely to everything Sister Bernadette said. I took notes, in addition to my iPhone recording, and deliberately avoided all mention of Rhona Macbride until we got to the garden. The bench, the location for most of the film’s scenes between Gill and Rhona, was still there. I started by taking a few photos of Sister Bernadette on the bench from various angles, and then sat beside her.
‘It’s such a thrill to be here,’ I said. ‘I think you’re in Mr Gill’s spot and I’m in Rhona’s.’
‘Oh yes, I do believe you’re right.’
She blushed, and laughed, but coyly, as if I had made a slightly risqué joke.
‘Was there much of an audition process for her role, do you remember?’
‘Oh my goodness, I don’t remember a great deal about the auditions. From what I do remember, I think Jeremy saw nearly every girl in the school. He was marvellous with all of them, but once he saw Rhona, he made up his mind that she was the one. I’m sure she’d remember more about it herself.’
‘Fabulous, it all sounds like such fun. But you know, you’re right. You’ve just made me realise that I should talk to her too. She’s a big part of the story.’
‘Ye-es, I suppose. Though she changed schools, you know. Not long after the film, just upped and left. I needn’t tell you, I was disappointed. A lot of media people came to take pictures for the papers and the news when dear Jeremy was nominated for the Oscar for the short film. They wanted to take a photograph of Rhona, too. And we had to tell them that she wasn’t here. Well, it didn’t look good. And that’s it, I suppose, that’s the way it goes. I could never understand it. I was dean of students at the time, out of active teaching since they brought in the compulsory retirement age, which is a terrible nonsense. But I had held on to that honorary role, and I knew Rhona Macbride very well. She had been an excellent pupil, but she changed all of a sudden, they often do at that age, was absent for a while and then the request for the transfer came in. She went from here, so convenient for her home on Wickstead Street on the other side of the Basin, to Stanhope Street School. Really, from every point of view, it seemed the wrong move. I said it to her mother at the time. But she was adamant that if Rhona wanted to move, she could. And I spoke to her father Tom too. But it was no use, no use whatsoever. Girls can be so wilful at times. That’s what I’ve learnt these fifty-seven years. Wilful and stubborn, and if they don’t get discipline at home as well as in school, if they’re allowed to do what they like …’
I had stopped listening. As soon as I could, without being rude, I thanked Sister Bernadette, and left. I had a father’s name and a street address. It was enough to be getting on with.
I had been in the convent more than two hours, an hour more than my parking permit allowed. As I crossed the road to my car I saw that I had been clamped.
‘Shit,’ I said, under my breath.
The clamper van was still on the street, further along. I ran after it. There was no prospect of getting away with the fine – but I might persuade them to release me, provided I paid fast, over the phone. After a hurried conversation, more lies and a lot of pleading, the attendant agreed to come back. I ran ahead of him, called in my credit card details, and sat in the car while he unlocked the clamp.
My phone pinged. It was a text message from Aifric Sheehan.
Mentioned D to Eoghan MacG. He never knew her. Definite. You sure he did?
I typed a reply to Aifric.
Must have got it wrong. Thanks Aifric
But the Carneys had been absolutely sure that Eoghan MacGiolla, though he hadn’t been teaching at her school at the time she was there, had known Deirdre from the area. I made a note: I’d have to arrange another chat with him when I got back to Cork.
I looked again at the convent, at the rows and rows of windows, lighting rooms long vacant of people and purpose. I saw what looked like a grey figure watching the scene from a window on the first floor. Was it Sister Bernadette? I waved, but got no response.
Maybe it was a trick of the light.