was the finest, Granny Doyle knew that: 7 Dunluce Crescent had a grand garden and a large porch extension that gleamed in the sharp sun. Granny Doyle felt a surge of pride for her son, for this was Danny’s greatest achievement. He could build things, had built the finest porch in Killester; who cared if that upstart Mrs Donnelly had added a water feature to her rockery?
The only emotion Peg felt at seeing Dunluce Crescent was relief – which was misplaced, as her little legs had barely flopped onto one of the porch’s folding chairs before Granny Doyle was making grand plans to leave again. ‘We’ll have to beat the traffic,’ she called out from the kitchen, as if any other Dubliners would be mad enough to chase the Pope around the country. ‘He’ll be well on his way,’ Granny Doyle added, keen to share her radio updates with her friends gathered in the porch. Glass was the great friend of gossip and the porch served as the de facto community centre for the other old biddies on the street. They had all moved into the crescent within a few years of each other in the late Fifties and here they were, families raised and husbands buried, their lives moving in synch, morning Masses in Killester Church and the excitement of Saturday’s Late Late Show and Sunday roasts shared with disappointing children and glowing grandchildren and every event unpicked in Granny Doyle’s porch, which contained a folding chair for each of the auld ones on Dublin’s own Widows’ Way.
Peg imagined Granny Doyle’s neighbours as the fairies from Sleeping Beauty. Mrs McGinty was the tall, stern one and she mostly ignored Peg, which was far from the worst thing an adult could do. The McGintys had never had children and with her husband long gone, Mrs McGinty’s life revolved around the Legion of Mary, the youth branch of which she chaired with zeal. Mrs McGinty stood poker-still in the porch, eager to get going, the boot of her car packed the night before.
Mrs Nugent was her opposite in almost every way. A tiny woman, full to the brim with mischief and gossip, Mrs Nugent had enough energy to power the road through a blackout. Hearing that Peg was joining them, Mrs Nugent unleashed a stream of chat – isn’t that brilliant, pet? and won’t we have a great adventure, love? – gabbling onwards as if she’d never met a silence she couldn’t fill. Worse, she’d decided to bring one of her many grandchildren along for the trip, some ball of fury and flying limbs whose name Peg declined to remember, but who might as well have been called Stop That! for the number of times Mrs Nugent directed the sentence towards her.
Mrs Fay was the only one of Granny Doyle’s neighbours who had the temperament of a Disney fairy. A large woman with a kind face and impeccably coiffed white hair, Mrs Fay’s shoulders could easily have accommodated wings. Mrs Fay kept a basket of proper chocolate bars by her door for Halloween, not cheap penny sweets like Mrs Nugent or hard nuts and apples like Mrs McGinty. All sorts of other delights awaited beyond the threshold of 1 Dunluce Crescent, Peg imagined: freshly baked biscuits, shelves filled with books, curtains with tassels she could spend an afternoon admiring. Mrs Fay still had a Mr around, so she wouldn’t be joining them – a shame, because Mrs Fay was the only one of them who had noticed her new shoes and Peg was sure she’d stash decent treats in her handbag.
‘He’s left Drogheda,’ Granny Doyle shouted from the kitchen, information that seemed to add urgency to her clattering, even though the Youth Mass they were planning to catch in Galway wasn’t until the next morning.
‘He’ll be lunching with the priests in Clonmacnoise next,’ Mrs McGinty said.
‘Isn’t it a crying shame that Father Shaughnessy gets to meet him,’ Mrs Nugent fumed. ‘And him a slave to the drink.’
Mrs McGinty tutted, a sophisticated sound that conveyed both that she would never criticize the clergy so openly and that Father Shaughnessy was not the sort who should be lunching with the Pope.
‘Oh dear!’ Mrs Fay said.
Long ago, Mrs Fay had decided that most events could be met with an oh dear! or a lovely! and thus she was always ready to temper the world’s delights or iniquities.
Meanwhile, Mrs Nugent had found a new topic to animate her.
‘Did I tell you that Anita’s Darren is going to be one of the altar boys at the Mass tomorrow?’
‘So you said,’ Mrs McGinty said in a thin tone.
‘Lovely!’ Mrs Fay offered.
Darren Nugent’s proximity to a pope was enough to summon Granny Doyle from the kitchen. Before her brilliant holy water idea, she’d been tired of Dunluce Crescent’s many connections to the Pope. Mrs McGinty had a fourth cousin who was concelebrating the Mass in Knock. Not only was Mrs Brennan’s brother-in-law due to sing at the choir in Galway, but didn’t he get his big break at her Fiona’s christening, so she was basically responsible for his career. Even pagan Mrs O’Shea who could only be glimpsed at the church at Christmas, Easter at a pinch, had a shafter of a son who had helped clean the Popemobile. Now Granny Doyle could bear it all with fortitude, convinced that no Darren would ever develop a posterior suitable for a papal chair.
‘I can get you all Darren’s autograph tomorrow if you want,’ Mrs Nugent offered.
‘He’ll have to learn how to write first,’ Mrs McGinty tutted.
Granny Doyle was more magnanimous.
‘That would be an honour,’ she said, locking the inside door and scooping Peg up off her chair. ‘And you’ll have to get me yours as well: didn’t you say that the Pope winked at you?’
This was a well-placed grenade, Mrs McGinty’s fury at the blasphemy involved in a winking Pope strong enough to get them all out of the porch before it shattered. ‘He did, looked at me right in the eye and winked,’ Mrs Nugent insisted, chortling all the way down the footpath, displeasure the lubricant that kept them all together because Mrs McGinty lived to judge and Mrs Nugent lived to incite judgement. Granny Doyle beamed, loving the chat and her neighbours and her street and her granddaughter and even Stop That!, who at least had the wisdom to raid Mrs Donnelly’s rockery when she was after missiles to launch at passing traffic.
Peg clambered into the back of Mrs McGinty’s battered Fiat, beside Stop That!, who had abandoned her rocks to investigate the weaponry potential of seat belts. Mrs Nugent shuffled in beside them, stop that! and are you all right, pet? and it was not a bit of dirt in his eye! launched between the last few precious puffs of a cigarette. Peg wriggled away from Stop That’s seat-belt attack to look out the back window. Mr Fay had joined his wife on the side of the road, the better to properly see off their car. Both Fays thought that attending the Pope’s Youth Mass would be lovely, so there was slim chance they’d rush forward to rescue Peg. They stood there, smiling and waving, on the side of the quiet street in the afternoon sun. Peg gazed at the porch behind them, enticingly empty, the perfect place to spend the day, if Mrs McGinty hadn’t pressed her shoe against the accelerator.
Dunluce Crescent was only a scrap of a street, so by the time Peg’s head bobbed up again, they had already turned the corner and the kind smiles and waves of the Fays had disappeared from view, replaced with rows of other red-brick houses, indifferent to the motion of their car, waiting instead for fresh coats of paint and attic conversions and tarmac paving over gardens, the fortunes of the Doyles nothing to them.
4
Roll of Film (1979)
The next morning, something of a holiday spirit remained. They slept in, skipped the Sunday Mass, left the sheets in a tangle around their limbs. Danny Doyle still had some film left in the camera from
