Daylight was creeping across London and Dot felt the occasional short-lived flutter of excitement to be out and about. The longest she had ever slept away from home was one night and that was under the roof of her paternal grandma on the night Dee was born. Yet, unsurprisingly, this was the aspect of her forthcoming incarceration at Lavender Hill Lodge that worried her least. Eventually the cab pulled into a driveway in Battersea, passing a square gate house of red brick, whose white-painted window frames and cheerful window boxes full of pretty little red and yellow flowers made it look cute and welcoming. The sight lifted her spirits for approximately ten seconds. Then the car rounded the bend in the drive and stopped in front of Lavender Hill Lodge.
The burly cabbie did not attempt to help her retrieve her bag from the boot. Instead he watched in the rear-view mirror as she struggled to haul it over the rim without bashing her swollen stomach. He pulled away the second the boot was closed, his small wheel spin on the gravel and shake of his head telling her all she needed to know about where his sympathy lay. It didn’t matter. What was one more disapproving click of the tongue and curl of the lip compared to the battle she was about to undertake.
Huge white columns supported the ornate stone portico over the Lodge’s double-front doors, which were painted red. Dot placed her foot on the highly polished brass doorstep and peered through the half-glazed doors; the glass was so clean and smear free, she wondered if it was actually there at all. She spied the black and white tiled floor of the hallway, which reminded of her of a giant chess board, a game that she had never learned to play. A wide oak staircase ran up along the right, with decorative acorns carved on the top of the newel post. A wrought-iron chandelier, plain but vast, hung down to just above head height on three large chains. The place looked grand, but not like the Merchant’s House, which was more like an art gallery or a stately home; this looked like a church.
There was no obvious bell and Dot was wondering how to knock or draw attention to her arrival at such an early hour when the door was swept open by a tall, bright-eyed nun. Her veil and wimple were pulled so tight, it made her small eyes slant upwards at the corners, and despite her advanced years her skin had the look of alabaster, matt and line free. Her mouth was thin, her lips invisible. Her nose, small enough to be classed as ‘button’, was too pointed, more like a tiny cone.
‘You will be Dot.’
Dot nodded. Yes she will be.
‘I am Sister Kyna. Come in.’
The nun stood back. Dot lifted her case and placed it inside the door. She stepped gingerly into the hallway and immediately swallowed to quell the nausea that rose in her throat, a combination of nerves and the overwhelming smell of bleach that filled the air. Sister Kyna was barely able to close the door.
‘Come, come – further in, girl. Goodness me, don’t tell me you’re shy!’
Dot shook her head and released the front flaps of her mac that she habitually held shut to conceal her bump. No, she wasn’t shy.
‘Of course you’re not…’ The woman’s Irish brogue might have been comforting were it not for the fixed, blank expression on her face. ‘Shy girls tend not be sent here in the first place. It’s a particular sort of girl that comes here and shy is not the word that first springs to mind when describing them.’
This was to be her greeting. Dot swallowed again to try and budge the sob that sat at the base of her throat. Not here as well. Naively, she had expected different.
‘Oh, come now, it’s a little late for tears, don’t you think? The good news for you, my girl, is that even for the fallen, our Lord is most merciful and it is never too late to seek redemption for the terrible sin that you have committed. For a sin it is, most grave. You have slipped from his grace and our purpose is to show you the error of your ways and by God’s holy hand you will find the path again to righteousness…’ Suddenly she clapped her slender hands together and changed tack, as though they had been discussing the weather. ‘But enough for now; goodness, you have only just arrived! Let’s get the administrative tasks taken care of and then we can show you to your room and get you settled.’ A brief smile caused her lipless mouth to part, revealing small, yellow chips of teeth. Her eyes, however, remained brilliant and fixed.
Dot followed the nun along a corridor and into a small office. The walls were lined with filing cabinets and the room needed a good airing. It smelt of bad breath.
‘Sit down.’ Sister Kyna pointed to a leather swivel chair.
Dot lowered her bulk into the seat and thought of the last time she had sat in a study on the wrong side of a desk. ‘He has gone home, to St Lucia. Did he not tell you?’
The nun placed her gold half-moon spectacles on the end of her nose. ‘I have, as you know, been conversing with your mother, Dot, but there are a couple of formalities to be taken care of today.’
Dot nodded.
‘I trust you understand what will happen when the child is born?’
Dot nodded again, not because she did understand what would happen when the child was born, but because she couldn’t bear to hear the detail, still hopeful that a solution would present itself. A miracle.
‘Good, good. Well then, all I need is for you to sign both these sheets of paper; print your name and then sign by the side.’ She pointed at two spots at the bottom of the typed documents.
Dot crossed her fingers on her left hand and buried them in her lap; with her right, she signed and printed as instructed. Everyone in the world knew the universal rule: if your fingers were crossed, it didn’t count.
‘It is some small mercy that, despite the wrong that you have done, God can in his infinite wisdom find a way to make a positive from your transgression. Your child will be welcomed into a Christian household and its spiritual welfare will be paramount. That must be of some small comfort?’
Dot nodded. It was of no comfort at all.
‘It is a small miracle every time a flower springs from a worthless pasture.’ Sister Kyna delivered this with a smile. Dot twisted her hands in her lap; she didn’t need reminding that she was a worthless pasture, she never forgot.
Dot lugged her suitcase from the entrance hall up the wide staircase and along a narrowing corridor. They stopped at one of several identical white-painted doors. Sister Kyna pulled a key out from under her cardigan; it appeared to be attached to a chain on her belt. She unlocked the door and pushed it, revealing a white-walled room with two wrought-iron single beds against opposite walls. Above each bed was an image of Christ on the cross. One bed was neatly made; on the other lay slumped a very pregnant girl who had clearly only recently woken up.
‘Are the doors always locked?’ Dot was taken aback; having never been locked up anywhere in her whole life, the idea petrified her.
Sister Kyna smiled thinly. ‘I think you will find that it was freedom that started this trouble for you in the first place. In you go.’
Dot stepped onto the green linoleum and flinched as the door banged shut behind her.
‘Don’t listen to her, she is a cow, pure evil!’ The girl tried to stand but wobbled back onto the mattress, which Dot would soon discover was actually a straw palliasse. It was covered with a thick grey woollen blanket and starched white bed linen turned over to form a wide, pristine border.
The girl was no more than five foot three tall and yet her stomach was vast, distended beyond recognition, as if she had swallowed a barrel full of beer. She had a wan complexion and her pale hair hung in two thin strips either side of her gaunt face.
‘Don’t get up!’ Dot shouted, partly out of fear for the girl’s welfare, but also because God only knew how she would manage to get her righted if she fell.
‘Thanks. I’m like one of those blasted shipping tankers that take days to turn around in the ocean! I’m Susan, by the way, Susan Montgomery. But please call me Susie.’ Susan gave a small wave from the bed on which she was beached.
‘I’m Dot.’
‘Is that it? Just Dot?’
‘Yep, that’s it, just Dot.’ But to him I was Clover, his Clover…
‘Welcome to our luxury suite!’
‘I’m sorry, taking up space in your room.’
‘No, don’t be, it’s our room now and it’ll be nice to have company. I hate being here by myself.’
‘I need the loo actually.’ Dot cast her eyes around to see if there was a bathroom. ‘How d’we get out?’
‘Oh, sweetie, we don’t. They give us regular loo breaks, but they rarely coincide with when my bladder wants a loo break. For that reason, we have a large bowl under the bed, which we can tip out over there.’ Susan pointed at a small china sink on the wall with a hand towel and a small sliver of soap stuck on the side. ‘I call my bowl Winston Churchill, as in WC.’
Dot tried not to cry. She could not imagine in a million years going to the loo in front of Susan Montgomery, who liked to be called Susie, no matter how friendly.
‘Go ahead, Dot, cry if you like. It’s shit, but you’ll get used to it.’ Susan’s tone was quite plummy, it made Dot feel even more out of place.
‘I don’t want to get used to it!’ she sniffed.
‘I know, but you do, trust me. Where are you from?’
‘London, east. You?’
‘Dorset. Miles and miles away.’
Dot sat on the bed and took off her mac.
‘Gosh, look at your neat little bump! You look quite gorgeous; you are tiny compared to me.’
Dot beamed. She felt far from gorgeous, but to receive a compliment was lovely nonetheless.
‘Mind you, I do have a jolly good excuse for looking like a whale; I’ve got two in here!’
‘Twins? No way! Oh my goodness, I can’t imagine…’
‘Yes, twins, lucky old me.’ Susan patted her swollen bulk and exhaled deeply.
It felt strange to be able to discuss being pregnant, let alone anything else, without fear or embarrassment.
‘Oh my God, twins!’ Dot shook her head. What was it they said – double the blessing? Or maybe not, in this case.
‘It’s typical of my luck; I never do anything by halves. I’m the type of girl that doesn’t get caught with a joint in the school dorm but a whole bloody dope factory! I’m always the one left holding the baby. Quite literally!’ Susan laughed loudly at her own joke.
Dot felt far too desolate to find anything funny. She lay quietly on her side until her stomach cramped with the need to go to the loo; it was agonising. She closed her eyes and drifted into a light slumber.
‘That’s my girl!’
‘I like being your girl.’
‘That’s good, because I am never going to let you go…’
She practically leapt from the bed when she heard the key in the lock. The bathroom was sparse, functional: the brickwork was painted in white gloss and the floor was covered with a rubberised reddish finish that continued for a couple of inches up the wall. It had the echoey quality of a public loo and smelt like a hospital. Dot noticed there were no mirrors anywhere – not that it mattered, she didn’t particularly want to be reminded of what she looked like. When she got back to her room, Susan was occupying the small space between the two beds. She had changed into a pale gold smock whose voluminous fabric hung down from the empire line under her swollen bust.
‘You can smirk, missus,’ Susie said when she caught Dot looking at her unusual cover-up, ‘but yours is in the wardrobe and you need to put it on before breakfast, which is in precisely ten minutes. These are to be worn for all meals and other public duties.’
‘Public duties?’
‘Don’t look so worried, you’re not expected to launch ships or open an art gallery, nothing like that; it’s just a very grand term for cleaning and other pointless bloody chores that we do en masse while considering the error of our ways.’ The last few words she delivered with an Irish accent.
Dot smiled. It was impossible not to find Susan entertaining, even at this dark time. She was grateful that she was there. She pulled the smock over her head; it was part overall, part surplus and it looked awful, drab and slightly choirboyesque, which was probably the whole point. Susan laughed at Dot and Dot laughed back. It was the first time she had laughed in months and the duo looked too hideous for it to be anything other than funny.
A different, younger nun – Sister Mary – opened all the doors and the girls from each room filed out to form two orderly queues. Dot gawped and stumbled, trying to comprehend the system. What would Barb or her mum make of this carry-on, she wondered, forgetting for a moment that her mum was not amused by anything Dot did these days, and that it had been necessary to drop Barb, before and during her ‘trip to Kent’. The two lines of around ten girls moved like fat drunk ducks, hands clasped in front of them, waddling along the corridor and down a narrow staircase towards the dining room.
Dot was fascinated by the girls, who all looked her age or younger, one or two much younger; all were in the advanced stages of pregnancy. The horrid smocks gave them a certain uniformity, but up close they were all very different. Some girls positively glowed with the radiance of pregnancy, rosy cheeked and chubby; no doubt those from the poorest backgrounds were benefiting from the regular meals that the Lodge provided. Others, herself included, looked exhausted, with black rings below their tear-swollen eyes and sad, drooping shoulders. So many girls with distended stomachs and swollen chests! Is that what she looked like? She assumed so.
A long refectory table sat centrally in the dining hall, with benches along either side. The leaded windows were set in deep sills and the whole room remained in shadow and smelt vaguely of damp and cabbage. Large embroidered banners hung from wooden poles on the far wall. One was of Mary tending to Jesus’s wounds on the cross, his horrified disciples looking on. The other was of the bleeding heart, a red pulsing shape with flames leaping from the top and bound by a ring of entwined thorns. They made Dot feel a little light-headed.
On the table were plates of fried eggs, triangles of bread and butter, pots of jam, slices of ham and glasses of orange juice. Dot swallowed the bile of morning sickness that had plagued her entire pregnancy so far. Dr Levitson had assured her it would tail off, but he’d been wrong and she could quite easily have thrown up on the tessellated waxed wooden floor as soon as she smelt the eggs.
Watching the girls swing their legs in an ungainly fashion over the benches could have been quite comical, but the swollen abdomens, altered centres of gravity and ballooning smocks made the process unnecessarily difficult. And then they had to sit in great discomfort without support for their aching backs.
Sister Kyna waited with a calm smile while all the girls took their places. Her eyes lingered longest on those that found the task most challenging, silently chastising them while urging them to hurry. It wasn’t enough that they had gone and got themselves up the duff, they were now keeping everyone from their breakfast. Finally she began. ‘Almighty God, in whose presence today we hang our heads and bow before your majesty, we ask that you have mercy on the souls of the girls here present. We ask that you forgive the sinful action that the Devil himself has conjured to tempt these poor misguided creatures and we ask that you help them find the path back to righteousness. We thank you, Lord, for the food that we have been blessed with to nourish the poor abandoned souls that they yield. Amen.’
A chorus of ‘Amen’ rang out around the room. Dot swallowed her tears; this was no time to cry, here in front of all the others. The idea of her baby being a poor abandoned soul filled her with horror. The girls chatted while they ate, not the easy, audible banter of a table at home, but it wasn’t silent and for that Dot was grateful. She managed to take a few small bites of bread and butter and sipped at the orange juice.
All the girls seemed to have been allocated tasks and when the meal finished, some gathered plates and gla
sses, while others headed to the kitchen to assist with the dishes. Dot was handed a long-handled dustpan and brush by an older nun.
‘Here, dear, as you haven’t been assigned a work group yet, please take this and sweep under the tables and all the chairs. You’d be amazed how many stray crumbs can gather!’
The nun smiled at her and Dot returned the smile hesitantly; what was the catch? This woman seemed genuinely pleasant, not like Sister Kyna at all. Dot nodded and wobbled slightly, any exertion after weeks of lying on her bed left her feeling quite faint.
‘I’m Sister Agnes.’
‘I’m Dot.’
The sister smiled. ‘So I believe. Hello, Dot.’
Dot concentrated on her task. It was just as hard to receive kindness as it was criticism without bursting into tears.
When the morning chores were finished, Dot and Susan lay on their beds and stared at the ceiling.
‘Sister Agnes seems quite nice.’
‘Compared to Sister Kyna, anyone would seem nice!’
‘I guess so.’ Dot laughed. It felt slightly disrespectful to be talking about nuns in such a fashion.
Susan propped herself up on her elbow, her stomach spilling onto the palliasse. ‘Oh, these beds are so uncomfortable,’ she said. ‘But once you actually fall asleep on them, they do warm up and then it feels like you’re being held in a giant paw!’ She laughed at Dot, who was looking nonplussed. ‘How long have you got?’
Dot cringed and swallowed. These very private, embarrassing matters had been kept between her and Doctor Levitson and it took monumental effort to discuss them with her roommate, who was still a stranger. It was bizarre that their lives had collided in this way.
No Greater Love - Box Set Page 78
