by Esther Freud
There were six steps leading to the front door, spotless but for stains of water drying unevenly in patches. The door itself gave off a gleaming tang of polish. Rosaleen lifted the brass knocker and, shifting her eyes from her miserable reflection, let it fall. Once, twice, she daren’t knock a third time, and as the echo faded she listened for a strain of comfort, the voices of girls, of children, but there was silence. She glanced behind her at the car, already halfway off along the drive, and clasped the handle of her case as if it was a hand. Was it too late to run? She was standing there, considering where to go, when she heard the heels of a nun tapping across tiles. A latch was lifted; the door creaked open. ‘Yes?’ The nun was old, and dressed in a black habit, her eyes huge behind the bug ends of her glasses.
‘Rosaleen Kelly.’ A new fear flared in her: What if she was sent away? ‘I was told you’d be expecting me.’
The nun glanced down at Rosaleen’s stomach, disguised, but clearly not disguised entirely, because a sour look of resignation turned down the corners of her mouth. ‘Sister Augustine,’ she introduced herself. ‘Come inside.’ She held the door unnecessarily wide as Rosaleen lifted her case in over the step. She’d packed up everything, clothes and books, every last word she’d had from Felix, even his one silk sock, and, wrapped in tissue, a minuscule white matinee jacket she’d seen hanging in the window of a launderette, the lady who’d knitted it sitting happily behind her counter, threading ribbon through a pair of booties. I should have bought the booties too, she thought now, looking at the many hard surfaces, the empty hall, the row of panelled doors, all closed. ‘This way.’ Sister Augustine led her into a smartly furnished room, a rug at its centre, Jesus with his heart aflame above the fire. There was a desk spread with papers, and behind it sat a fiercely shrivelled nun, so old she made Sister Augustine look spritely.
‘Reverend Mother, Rosaleen Kelly is arrived.’
The Reverend Mother did not look up. She was reading through a pile of papers, and as they waited, mutely, she continued to compile small stacks of figures, ticking them off, crossing them out, as if she was marking the results of an exam. Rosaleen stood on the edge of the rug, and with each minute that passed, she felt herself more desperate. Her arm was aching – she’d forgotten to set down her case – and her skin pricked cold with sweat. This is only what I deserve, the thought bore down on her; it is what I have brought upon myself. Her shoulders drooped, her belly clenched, and she wondered why she hadn’t thrown herself into the sea. She’d considered it, tested how easy it would be to hurl herself over the railings of the ferry, but as she’d leant into the roar of spray, a lilting, tuneless voice had breezed in on the wind and sung the Itsy Bitsy Bikini song, and there was Felix watching from the funnels, his smile amused, his eyes piercing, forcing her back from the edge. She was that girl still, she remembered, and she stood tall.
Reverend Mother’s head snapped sharply up. ‘Can you tell us the date you’re due?’
Rosaleen counted, nine months since the South of France. Mid-April.
‘And the person who should be contacted in case of an emergency?’
Rosaleen paused.
‘Would that be your mother?’
‘No!’ There would be no emergency, not as long as she had breath. Reluctant, she gave them Angela, and the address of the farm.
‘While you’re here’ – Reverend Mother’s pen was poised – ‘we advise each girl to take a name.’
‘A name?’ She wasn’t sure she understood.
‘You won’t want to be using the one you were baptised with.’ Even her name, it seemed, must avoid contamination.
Who could she be? The nun was waiting. ‘Patricia.’ She shivered to be heaping this new misfortune on her cousin.
The Mother Superior wrote it down and shuffled the papers into order. ‘Sister Augustine will show you to your room.’ Rosaleen clasped the handle of her case, but the nun said, stern, ‘You won’t be needing that.’ Too shocked to answer, or enquire when, if ever, she’d be reunited with her belongings, she followed her from the room. They walked across the polished hall and up the staircase, along a corridor, and up another set of stairs, the ceilings lower, the paint faded and scuffed. She was grateful for the old nun’s halting steps. Each time she paused, Rosaleen took a rest herself, tired to sickness after the long night. The nun stopped outside a door. She took a breath and pushed it open. A young girl leapt to her feet. She’d been sitting bent over a letter, and the sheet of paper, lined with a round blue scrawl, fluttered to the floor. She kicked it fast under the bed. ‘This is Carmel.’ Carmel had orange hair, and her rabbity teeth pushed her top lip out. ‘Her due date is just ahead of yours.’
The room was sparsely furnished. Two small chests of drawers. Two metal beds. ‘This is Patricia,’ the nun said, and Rosaleen looked behind her before remembering who she had become. ‘Carmel, you’ll show her where to get new clothes.’ The girl was wearing a uniform of limp blue denim. ‘When she’s changed’ – Sister Augustine narrowed her eyes at Rosaleen’s coat, a soft fawn wool bought with her wages – ‘send her down to Sister Ignatius.’ She turned to Rosaleen and barked with such ferocity as to make her jump, ‘Take off those shoes!’ before hobbling away along the hall.
Rosaleen sank down on to the bed, but Carmel remained standing. ‘They don’t want the floors marked. You’d better take them off and quick. We only wear socks inside.’ Rosaleen slipped off her shoes and, stowing them with her coat under the bed, followed Carmel back along the corridor, down a flight of stairs, across a landing and into a large storeroom. Here there were cupboards lining one wall and folded in stacks were uniforms in variously faded shades of blue. Carmel lifted one and shook it out. ‘You’ll be lost in that.’ The dress was the size of a tent. ‘How far along do you say you are?’
Rosaleen pulled up her shirt to show the old grey corset and the wrap of scarves that held her in. The girl giggled – ‘No good pretending now’ – and Rosaleen unhooked herself, releasing her squashed, creased stomach and the soreness of her breasts. Carmel held an aproned smock against her. ‘This will do.’
Once Rosaleen was changed they slithered in their socked feet down a back staircase, Carmel stopping to push open a door into a bathroom as they passed. The cold came off the walls in gusts. ‘About twenty of us share, so it’s a bit of a scrum first thing. Not that you’d want to linger. Quick now, if you need to go.’ Rosaleen shook her head, and they hurried on to the ground floor.
Sister Ignatius was waiting. She was a tall woman with a sallow face and the dark shadow of a moustache. ‘You have been assigned to cleaning and maintenance duties.’ She consulted a chart. ‘Here in the convent you will be expected to work hard, just as we do, to rise early and use the day productively, just as we do, to attend Mass and ask the Lord’s forgiveness . . .’ Here the nun added nothing more. Instead she pointed to a row of wellingtons. ‘You can assist the girls on the side lawn.’ She handed her a pair of scissors.
There were coarse brown overalls hanging from pegs. Rosaleen pulled one round her, holding her breath against the staleness of sweat. She looked for Carmel but the girl had gone. She worked in the laundry, she’d told her as they’d skidded along corridors. It was the worst job, heaving the soiled nappies to be soaked, lifting them with poles out of the steam. ‘I have the morning off today,’ she’d said, and smiled. ‘Thanks to you.’
Rosaleen trudged through the yard and out under an arch to the side of the house where a group of girls were crouched, snipping at the grass. No one looked up as she approached. For a moment she gazed down at the heads, at the streak of partings in the women’s hair, some blonde, others dark, one ginger, another grey, and fearful of a reprimand, she dropped her own body to the ground and pressed her knees to the wet earth. Snip, her scissors were small and blunt. Snip. The grass brought with it a sod of mud. She glanced sideways and saw backs bent low, fingers clipping, brushing away the shorn tips of the grass. Rosaleen pressed the roots back into the earth and
tried again, keeping the scissors straight. A small harvest fell from the blades, five stalks, no more. She looked up and across the lawn. A sea of grass and clover. She turned her eyes to the sky and wondered if it could be the same sun that illuminated the world she’d left behind.
IT WASN’T UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING that Rosaleen saw every girl together. Three hundred and fifty of them, assembled for Mass. She’d been woken early, the voice of a nun barking through the door, and Carmel, in the bed beside her, jolted upright, for all that her whimpers had kept them awake half the night. They’d hurried together to the bathroom and joined a row of women, eyes ringed dark, hair lank, queuing for their turn. The water at the sink was cold, a gulp of air ushered from the hot tap, nothing more, and so she’d splashed herself beneath her nightdress, a swift wipe under each arm, aware of the sin of appearing naked, especially here in this room. There was no mirror, and she was grateful as she cupped her hands around her face, and for one moment she allowed herself forgetfulness, her breath held, the ice water pressed against her eyes.
Surely now it will be breakfast? They’d had bread and margarine for tea – but, much like at St Joseph’s, first the beds were to be made, then Mass endured. They went in their stockinged feet, careful, down the cold stone staircase. ‘Whatever the state of our souls,’ she whispered, thinking of Teresa, ‘at least the floors shine bright.’
Carmel flashed her a fearful smile and clutched at the banister.
On the ground floor there was a long, dim corridor that led to the chapel. Hunched figures hurried along it. Rosaleen followed, breathing in the damp and incense smell, and once inside she squeezed herself on to the end of a pew and sat with her head bowed. She could hear the familiar murmurs of mouths moving, Carmel lisping through a prayer: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you . . . blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit . . . and without thinking she herself started in on an Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, before she stopped herself, reciting slowly and with care, the names in descending order of the twenty-one children – seventeen surviving – of the cowman at Barraghmore. She halted when she reached Frances, number twelve, who once took her to their cottage for a visit and showed her upstairs to the bedroom where she slept with nine of her brothers and sisters and a grandmother in two double beds, their brass headboards pressed together, their shoes thrown down into the gap between. There were two babies hardly more than a year apart, grimed, their noses bunged, still in with the parents, and the lot of them came tumbling out and followed, gaping, as Frances took her to check the hens.
It wasn’t until the first intonations of the priest that Rosaleen looked up. All around her were the watchful faces of other pregnant girls, and across the aisle, the faded reflections of their future selves – thin, bedraggled women, their stomachs flat. From habit Rosaleen shielded her own stomach with an arm, and as the priest proceeded with his sermon she stole wary glances at the papery thinness of their skin.
Facing them sat the Mother Superior, her gaze upturned and fixed on the pulpit. The priest’s voice floated out to her, rising, swelling, spreading through the chapel where it fell, or so it seemed, on Rosaleen – sin, weakness, the evils of the flesh – until her skull was burning. Please God, she heard herself murmur, and her hand was rising to form a cross when a girl, two pews ahead, slumped forward, and there was the dull sound of her head as it hit wood. Rosaleen’s hand dropped to her lap. Please God, my arse, and as she watched, the girls on either side, one of them surely no older than Angela, used all their strength to haul her upright. ‘Mam?’ the girl cried out, and then coming round she saw where she was, and she fell quiet.
Rosaleen glanced over at the row of nuns, none of whom had stirred. Surely she should be taken out into the air, given a glass of water at the very least? But the nuns maintained their serene smiles, and the sermon continued, stretched to the full hour.
Breakfast was bread again, with margarine. The tea, already milked, was poured from a huge pot. Rosaleen gulped hers, finishing too soon, reminding herself to eat the bread slowly, an old trick from school, to last it out. Even so her stomach griped with hunger, clenching, painful, clawing at her sides.
‘Tuesday and Friday,’ Carmel whispered, catching her looking for scraps along the rows, ‘we get an egg with our tea, and on Sunday’ – she flicked her eyes anxious in the direction of the nuns – ‘they bring a pan of sausage, boiled in the oven, and there’s one each, although the mothers, they take them for their babies, or they must thrive on nothing but pandy and goody.’
Goody, she knew, was a mush of bread, milk and tea, but all the same her own baby gave a kick of expectation. She put a hand to the nub of a limb as Sister Augustine turned her eyes in their direction. ‘Silence!’ She struck a knife against her cup.
Work began directly after breakfast. The sky had lightened, but the grass was wet with dew, and as Rosaleen crawled forward she distracted herself by riffling through the clumps of clover that dotted the lawn. She’d played this game with Angela, each one determined to be the first to find a four-leafed stem, remembering how she’d pressed two stalks together, torn off the extra leaves, and convinced her sister she’d won. Now Rosaleen dragged her body over the grass, the baby hanging in the hammock of her belly, her breasts, braless, as was the rule, rubbing against coarse cotton, her thoughts running through the list of her sins until she had convinced herself that, for the crime of pretending to be lucky, her punishment was fair.
That evening, after clearing plates from the canteen, she staggered up the last flight to her room. Carmel was already in her nightdress, hunched over her letter.
‘Who is it you’re writing to?’ Rosaleen asked.
‘My ma.’ Tears pooled in her eyes, and her words were broken up with sniffing. ‘I’m giving her my news . . . I’m a waitress, you see, over in Dublin.’ She lifted the page and showed her the blue lies. ‘What a grand time I’m having, and a dance to look forward to on Saturday . . .’
‘Does no one know you’re here?’
Carmel looked startled. ‘Not a soul. Only the friend, the one who helped me. Can you imagine, if they were to guess?’
‘And what about the father?’ Rosaleen sat across from her.
‘He’s married, isn’t he? With a child to support. So what can he do to help me?’ She was reciting his own argument, and Rosaleen thought of Felix, dropping to his knees, pressing his mouth against the curve of her belly. ‘I’m sorry.’ She shook herself. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Not as awful as getting pregnant and only then finding out he’d got a family.’ Tears splashed on to the sheet of paper. ‘I’m a fool, that’s what I am.’ She searched under her pillow and found a handkerchief, stained and crumpled, and wiped it angrily across her face. ‘I still love him – much good it’ll do me. But mostly . . .’ She swallowed a great new gulp of tears. ‘. . . I miss my ma.’
Rosaleen did her best to soothe her, but the girl cried harder. ‘What if they find out where I am? The shame will kill her, honest to God it will.’
‘How can they?’ Rosaleen reached out to touch her arm. ‘Unless’ – the blotched words lay between them – ‘they trace your letters?’
‘I post them to Dublin, and my friend, the one who helped me, she sends them on for me. Oh Patricia, what a time I’m having in the city, the dinners and the walks along the Liffey, and the tips I get at work – soon I’ll have saved enough to go to England.’ She blew her nose. ‘And what about you? You’re the talk of the place, do you know? With your fancy accent, and your smart coat. You’ll not be staying, that’s for sure.’
‘What do you mean, not staying?’
‘The three years.’
Rosaleen looked at her. ‘Three years . . . ?’
‘To work off your debt.’
Rosaleen stood up. ‘They can’t keep us, surely?’ Even now there was nowhere to go, and forgetting Carmel didn’t have a job in Dublin, that she wasn’t even Carmel, she asked what kind of a bo
ss did she have anyway, three years, and with no visit home?
Carmel shrugged. ‘The manager, he’s put a word in for me with a friend in London. The new job won’t wait, and I must save every last penny for the trip. It’ll break my heart, but there’ll be no time to travel home before I go.’
‘And me?’ Rosaleen asked. ‘How is it I’ll get out?’
‘You’ll have some fancy fella – a hundred pounds, they don’t accept a penny less – and you’ll be out of here within ten days of the birth, that’s what they’re saying in the laundry.’
‘A hundred pounds!’ It was an unfathomable amount. ‘Where would I go’ – Rosaleen saw herself aboard the ferry, her baby wrapped tight in a shawl – ‘with such a young child?’
Carmel’s eyes grew wide. ‘You’ll not be taking any child. There’s no amount of money you can give the nuns – they’ll not let you keep it.’
‘The priest, he said they’d help me. He said they’d see I was all right.’
‘And so they will.’ Carmel clasped her hand. ‘If it wasn’t for the nuns, just think what would become of us. The disgrace, for you, and for the baby.’ Firmly, she made sure the door was shut.
‘The priest . . .’ Rosaleen was trapped behind the grilled wall of Confession. She could hear the scratching of his pen. ‘There wasn’t one word about giving up the baby.’
‘They find good Catholic homes for them. Couples come from England, they travel from America.’
There was a shout for the lights to be turned off. ‘It’s for the best.’ They stood in darkness. ‘We’d better sleep now,’ and so, still clothed, Rosaleen climbed in under the covers where she lay with her nose inches from the wall. Felix, she allowed herself, and she took his hand and placed it on the warm wall of her stomach. Tears slipped over her face, but it was her mother who was with her on the gangplank of the ferry. ‘Look after yourself now.’ She embraced her as they said goodbye, and for a brief moment their eyes met.
