Kit wondered if something had gone wrong with Moll at the time of her birth, if some seed of trouble had been planted then that was flowering only now. She’d had her suspicions at the time but all of her questions afterwards had been answered curtly, with a threat of crossness. No one working on Saint Bridget’s lying-in ward at the county hospital was going to tolerate being cross-examined by the wife of a labourer. She’d been a long time in her pangs at home before the midwife had cycled down from Glencrue, and shortly after she arrived she asked Paddy had he a car, and of course that time they hadn’t, but Paddy said he could easily borrow one, and she’d snapped at him to go do it so, and stop standing over them with his two hands hanging. He’d gone off across the top field to the Jackmans to get a loan of their car, and the three of them had driven in as far as the county hospital, and there was a doctor and a nurse there waiting, and Kit had suffered unearthly pain, and she’d looked in the crucified Christ’s baleful, knowing eyes, and found in those moments no comfort even there. And Moll’s first breath had been a long time in coming, and when at last she drew it, the cry that followed it had been low and weak, apologetic almost, as though she knew the trouble she’d caused and was afraid now of making any more fuss. Now, Missus Gladney, the midwife said, as she placed the still-pink form against Kit’s bared breast. There’s Her Ladyship at last. Didn’t she take her sweet time about it? Didn’t she make us go to great rounds?
And Moll was taken from her again and Kit slipped away to darkness, and her torn perineum became infected, and she found herself lifted from the darkness, and out away from the county hospital, and standing at a garden gate, with her hand on the sun-warmed wood of the top rail of it, and she was about to push it open and walk forward onto a soft grassy path through an avenue of trees, but a breeze was whispering in the trees, a sighing voice saying softly, Go back, go back, you have to mind your baby, and she woke drenched and her wounds seared and her vision was blurred but she could make out Paddy at the far side of the small room, and his cap twisted in his hands and his face white, and her own mother with her beads gripped whitely in her hands and she was saying, God help us, here she’s back to us now, oh, thanks be to God.
But she didn’t know if any of that was related to this new trouble. It didn’t seem believable that a girl just out of her teenage years who’d made hardly a peep since she’d left the cradle would all at once go off bold and bareheaded without there being some root cause, some reason good or bad. The neighbours and cousins who called had no help to give in that department: some of their stories of disappearances started badly and ended worse, with bodies dredged from bogs or found twined in rushes on muddy riverbanks or submerged in ditches or loughs of water. Why people saw fit to recount these things in her presence was beyond her. To help her brace herself, maybe, for the day the sergeant and the priest would roll up the boreen with dread tidings. She was only a shout from sixty and Paddy was on the far side of it, and Moll had been their mid-life miracle, their smile from God, and now she was gone, and they felt on their shoulders the terrible weight of all the things about the world they didn’t know.
They took the train to Dublin once. A few weeks after Moll went missing. Paddy wanted to get the early bus from the village into Nenagh the way Moll had done so that her exact steps would be retraced but Kit said that was foolish: they’d be stranded inside at the station that evening when they got back. They’d have to be phoning people looking for lifts and you couldn’t be putting people out like that. And what good would it do them to be sitting on a bus that hour of the morning with all the factory crowd gawking out of their mouths at them? They’d look well, the two of them. The butt of every whispered joke and every elbowed rib. So Paddy sighed and went out to the shed to see about getting the car started for the morning drive but, of course, it only coughed at him and wouldn’t catch for love or money.
He walked down to the shop and filled a jerry-can with petrol and put it in the car, and he couldn’t find a funnel so half of it slopped down the back panel below the filler cap and more of it slopped down the front of his trousers because it was dark and awkward in the shed where the car had been parked since the middle of January. And, of course, it still wouldn’t start and he thought maybe the points were damp so he took them off and dried them at the fire and he spaced them correctly and wrenched them back on, but still the sulky Austin wouldn’t start so he gave the fuel pump a good bang of a hammer and that got it going. He dragged the Jackmans’ new compressor over to the door of the shed to pump up the tyres and he topped up the oil and he greased the bearings and he gave the windows a good wipe down and the seats a brush off. He found a spider’s web that stretched from behind the rear-view mirror down as far as the gearstick and back along to the parcel shelf, and the sun that streamed in through the space where the slats were cracked lit the thin strands of it so it shone there silky in the shard of evening light, and the size of it and the intricate detail of it and the way it spanned out so perfectly from a central point made him shiver with pleasure and wonder, and it nearly broke his heart to destroy all that spider’s good work with one sweep of his arm.
The day in Dublin was long and frightening. They hadn’t planned it well at all. What good was it, walking streets they didn’t know, trying their best to remember their path so that they’d find their way back again? It was fine up along the river from the train station and past the Four Courts: the day was bright and the inland breeze was soft and tinged with salt, and the giant, hook-beaked seagulls were a sight to watch, fighting with each other over scraps, wheeling and swooping and screeching from the river and the rooftops. But once they got to O’Connell Bridge and saw the massing crowds crossing from the riverside to the wide main street, with the Liberator himself haughty and dark above them, hiding his killing hand beneath a stony cloak, they knew they were on a fool’s errand. Even if Moll was among these people, if she was somewhere here among the buses and the rushing crowds and the pigeons and the gulls and the fumes and the river stink, they’d never find her; they’d never cover all the hard ground of this alien place.
They had an address of a place Kit’s cousin said in her letter that country girls sometimes went who were in trouble. Kit had been upset reading the words in trouble, because she knew her daughter and she knew there was no question of that, but maybe, she reasoned, her cousin had been using the term in a wider sense, and anyway, what about it, what matter now what anyone thought? They asked a doorman who stood top-hatted and grey-tailed outside the front door of the Gresham Hotel how best to get to Granby Row, and he made a big show of telling them in a booming voice and a thick Dublin accent, his white gloves describing arcs and angles in the air so that it was hard to follow his directions because he was so enjoyable to listen to. They held hands as they passed the Ambassador Cinema and the Garden of Remembrance and turned left and then right onto Granby Row and a line of narrow grey townhouses, their windows blinded and shadowed, and they found the one from Kit’s cousin’s letter and it looked the same as all the rest. Paddy drew the ring of the knocker back and let it fall heavy against the strike plate, and the booming loudness of the sound of it made him step back a bit in fright. A woman came to the door and she had a kind face and she was about the same age as Kit and the same go as her, and she had a country accent though not of their part of the country, and she didn’t take the photograph from Kit’s hand but put her hand behind Kit’s and held it there as she looked before shaking her head slowly, saying, no, she hadn’t seen that girl, but if they left a telephone number or a postal address she would make it her business to keep an eye out and to let them know straight away if she ever came across Moll Gladney from Tipperary, and she wished them every blessing God could give.