The Doorstep Child

by Annie Murray

  The days were spent on chores in the house, eating, resting and some recreation together. Outside was a wide garden, but it was too wet and cold to go out. Evie gradually got to recognize the nuns, some gentle, some obviously judging her to be fallen and of no account. She could see moral superiority in their eyes. She didn’t really care. They were mild medicine compared with her mother’s hands and mighty gob. She made faces behind their backs, which amused some of the others, and didn’t let their icy looks reach her at all. In any case, despite the fear and loneliness of the first few days, there was a surprise at Lahai-Roi, as the house was called, a gift of something unexpected which came as a wonder to her: the other girls.

  The silent, sad girl Dora slept in their dormitory but she left within a few days. On each side of Evie were girls who were still expecting, like herself. To her left was Jen, mousey-haired, nicely spoken and so slender that her pregnancy looked like a strange growth jutting from her. On first sight of her and the others, Evie guessed they would all be snobbish but she was wrong. The situation they were all in brought them closer. Jen, a precious only child from Leamington Spa, had been sent away by her parents.

  ‘So,’ she explained to Evie as they perched on the edge of their beds the first night, ‘they wanted somewhere quite far away from everyone we knew in Leamington, that’s for sure. I don’t even know if there is a place like this there . . . They’re telling people I’m on a holiday.’ She looked towards the window. Her face was gentle, with neat, modest features and a rose-bud mouth.

  ‘We only did it once,’ she said, looking back at Evie, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I mean, it was silly. I didn’t know him all that well. Actually, he’s a friend of my father’s – younger than Daddy but still quite a bit older than me. I suppose he sort of talked me into it. I hardly knew what he was going to do ’til he’d done it. When they found out they forced me to say who the father was – oh my goodness!’ She rolled her eyes, laughing and crying at once. ‘You’ve never seen such a kerfuffle.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t half feel silly, though. And, sort of cheap. The way they talked to me . . . And of course he doesn’t want to know now.’ She looked across at Evie. ‘What about yours – did you love him or anything?’

  Evie put her head on one side. Ken. Sweet, affectionate Ken. Angry, hurt as she was, she knew he was not a bad person. He was scared and young and didn’t know what he was doing. Just like her. And sometimes she ached with missing him, before the pain of his betrayal came to her all over again, his blaming her for everything that had happened. She was the one having to do this, not him.

  ‘I thought I did. I thought he loved me. Just . . .’

  ‘Not quite enough to stick around?’ Jen said with a wry expression.

  Evie nodded, giving a sad smile. ‘Yeah. That’s about it. His parents didn’t want me either.’

  ‘Like Rhoda.’ She nodded at the empty bed the other side of Evie. ‘That tall, interesting-looking one. That’s a sad story. Not that she shows it much. They were both madly in love but the parents won’t have it, not at any price. She’s only eighteen. How old’re you, Evie?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Oh my! Are you? You look older! I’m twenty.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Still got no sense, though.’

  Just then the other girl, Rhoda, arrived. Rhoda was tall and rangy looking with heavy brows and full lips, both of which seemed to take up most of her thin face. It was not a pretty face, but one Evie found she kept wanting to look at in fascination. She was very heavily pregnant and was walking leaning back slightly.

  ‘Who’s got no sense?’ she demanded, rummaging under the thin pillow for her nightdress. Her voice was deep and rich. Evie realized she was rather posh and immediately felt on her guard.

  ‘None of us, by the looks of us,’ Evie said.

  Rhoda stopped what she was doing and burst out laughing. Evie felt gratified that she could make her laugh. ‘Can’t argue with that,’ she said. She came round the bed and sat down. ‘You’re Eve?’

  ‘Evie. Usually.’

  ‘When’s it due?’

  Evie shrugged. ‘Two or three weeks. Not sure. What about you?’

  ‘Any sodding minute.’ She rolled her eyes and the three of them laughed. Evie was taken aback by her language. ‘Anyway, welcome to “Tears of the Living Well”,’ she said, and seeing Evie’s puzzled expression, explained, ‘That’s what Lahai-Roi means. It’s from the Old Testament.’ With another throaty chuckle, she added, ‘Cheerful that, isn’t it?’

  Despite the fear and heartache all around her, those weeks in the home were not all unhappy. She got used to the rooms, the food, the distant sound of the babies from the nursery on the first floor, the way they rang a little bell when one of the girls gave birth – one ring for a boy, two for a girl – and the others would all look at each other.

  Evie grew close to Jen and Rhoda also, in the short time she was there. Rhoda kept swearing – in both senses of the word – that as soon as she got out of this place she was damn and blasted well going back to Tom, the father of her child, and everyone else could sod off and leave them alone. She would elope if necessary, to Gretna Green. Within three days of Evie being there, Rhoda went into labour and was delivered of a little boy. During the time afterwards, they could see her wrestling to keep up her front of bravado and resistance to being pushed around. But at night, she wept and wept. Hearing her heartbroken sobs, the other girls got out of bed to comfort her, sitting round her in the darkness.

  ‘He’s so beautiful. He’s mine,’ Rhoda cried. ‘Mine and Tom’s. I hate my bloody parents. Hate them.’ She thumped the mattress beside her head. ‘They can afford to let me keep him. All they can think about is what other people think. Stupid, narrow-minded people, all shut into their little social conventions. I don’t even know most of them. Cowards, all of them.’

  Stroking Rhoda’s shoulder beneath the thin candlewick, Evie met the revelation that there were other people who loathed their parents. Jen didn’t say she hated her mother and father, but all the same, they had seen fit to send her off miles away to preserve their own reputation. This was an eye-opener to Evie.

  She lay awake for a long time afterwards, thinking about all the people who had made up her life. She didn’t want to go over what had happened with Ken. That hurt too much. But she kept thinking about her family. Sharing a room with Rita and Shirley as she grew up had meant an almost constant vigilance against their spite. It had been like a game to them, she thought, so normal that until now she had barely given it a thought. She could not walk across the room without Shirley sticking a leg out to try and trip her up; could not do anything without Rita’s jibes about her looks, or anything she did. They ganged up with Mom to leave her out and be nasty to her. She thought of her birthday – the day of the Kit-Kats. And here, it was so different. The girls were kind and sympathetic to each other.

  She could see that her sisters were nothing but the result of training by their mother. Everything always revolved round Mom and her feelings. Mom’s loathing of her, all stemming from Dad and that woman and her son, and the fact that she was a girl, meant she had recruited Rita and Shirley to her side. She had shown them nothing but an example of how to be nasty. Even though she disliked and distrusted her sisters, Evie could see that this was the truth. It made her feel very sad. And Dad had never been any good – not to any of them. He just did what he wanted and sod everyone else.

  Thinking of her mother, despite everything, there was all the old longing. Love me, please. Can’t you just love me? All those times she had tried to please her, to get her to be nice, just for once . . . She felt the child moving inside her body and she wondered, frightened now after seeing Rhoda’s grief, how she was going to feel after the baby was born. Would she love it the way Rhoda did her little boy? A wave of longing came over her. If only she could keep this little baby and bring it up. She would give it everything she possibly could and she would love it and love it . . .

  A po
ssibility leapt into her mind. Could she keep the baby? She had the money that Ken had given her. That would last for a while. Then she’d get a job, find someone to look after him.

  She thought of Mary Bracebridge. That morning, dressed and ready, before they set off, she had said to Evie, ‘I’m sorry not to be able to give you a home, my dear. I would have done once, you know that. But things are different now.’ In the light of day, Evie had seen that Mrs Bracebridge looked aged and exhausted.

  ‘But I want you to remember something. I get the impression you have not had a lot of love in your life.’ Her eyes were kind. And she had a message to deliver. ‘Just remember that whatever happens, the Lord loves you. You are, as the hymn says, “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven”. Just go on after this, dear. You have a good heart; I could see that in you when you were a child. Pray to the Lord and he will strengthen you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Evie had agreed humbly. ‘All right.’ She didn’t really think she would, though. Surely God didn’t bother with people like her?

  Lying in her bed now, with its squeaky springs, she decided it was worth a try.

  ‘Dear God . . .’ She faltered. It felt a bit like writing a letter. Hardly knowing what she was asking for she went on, ‘Please let me keep the baby. Please.’

  Twenty-Five

  Jen’s baby came earlier than expected and she vanished into the delivery room. Eventually, they heard the two rings of the bell that the home used to announce the arrival of a baby girl. Evie and Rhoda looked at each other.

  ‘Poor old Jen,’ Rhoda said gently.

  Evie was the only one of the three of them who had not yet passed through this experience, though there were two more girls in their room who were waiting as well. She found herself spending more time with them. Rhoda was in the nursery every moment she was allowed, nursing her baby son, who she had called Edward. In between she seemed unable to sit still, pacing with frustration, saying she was going to run off with ‘my little Eddie’, but never actually doing it and crying stormily. Evie sometimes sat beside her, stroking her back and trying to think of something to say.

  Jen returned to their room the evening after the birth looking pale, with dark rings of exhaustion under her eyes. Her whole body seemed to sag. The others greeted her warmly and Jen raised a smile which left her eyes looking dead and sad.

  ‘You all right?’ Evie said as Jen sank down on her bed with the cautious slowness of someone whose body is very sore.

  Jen nodded stiffly.

  Evie felt awed. Jen had now passed over to the other side. She knew what it was like and Evie both wanted and did not want to know this.

  ‘You had a little girl?’

  Again, Jen just nodded, as if speech was too much to risk.

  Rhoda came round and sat on Evie’s bed, her black hair loose down her back. ‘What’ve you called her, Jen?’

  Jen shrugged and, seeming to come to life, said angrily, ‘What’s the point in me calling her anything? They’ll only take her away and call her something else, won’t they?’

  ‘No,’ Rhoda insisted with her usual passion. ‘You must give her a name – the name you want her to have. That you’ll always remember her by.’

  Jen made a twisting motion with her head and shifted on the bed, wincing. ‘I’m so sore,’ she said, looking down at herself.

  ‘From the feeding?’ Rhoda said. Evie was glad she was there. She was not sure what to say to Jen.

  ‘From everything,’ Jen said tearfully. ‘All this bleeding. It’s horrible . . .’

  She lay down, curled away from them as if making herself as small as possible.

  Evie and Rhoda’s eyes met and Rhoda shook her head sadly. Evie looked at Jen’s slender back in her pale nightgown. In a few weeks, Jen’s baby would be gone, given away forever to strangers. And Rhoda’s boy. And . . . She lay a hand on her drum of a belly. And hers . . .

  But despite the flickering movements inside her, which had become the twitches and kicks of a child almost full-term, still none of it felt quite real.

  ‘Do get on with it, Sutton.’ The nun who had shown her into the house stood at the foot of the staircase. ‘We want them dry, quickly, not soaking wet all day!’

  Evie clanked the heavy mop bucket down onto the next step.

  ‘Bossy bitch,’ she muttered. The harsh smell from the bucket of dirty water mixed with disinfectant and the rotten old stink of the mop all turned her stomach. However heavily pregnant you were, there was no let-up on the chores. Her job today was to sweep and mop the brown linoleum of the enormous staircase, from top to bottom. Her belly was heavy and her innards felt sore and dragged down. All she really wanted was to go and lie down.

  She wrung out the mop, working it across the step until she heard footsteps moving away and knew she was no longer being watched. She was not bothered by the nuns. Some of them were kindly and one or two she liked; others were sour and cold in their attitude. But none of it mattered. It wasn’t as if she was going to be here all that much longer.

  What she was going to do after she just could not think. She could not imagine after.

  She had finished the top half of the staircase and began working her way down the wide flight which led into the hall. One or two people passed up and down, some saying, ‘Sorry, Evie!’ as they trod all over her handiwork.

  ‘S’all right,’ she muttered. For a moment a warm feeling filled her. It was nice in some ways living in this place where people knew her name and there was a lot of kindness and fellow feeling among all the girls because whatever background they had come from, they were all facing the same disgrace and heartache.

  She kept thinking about Rhoda. Rhoda was the sort of girl who lived in a big house in the country and rode horses. Evie would never ever have met her in any other situation. But today was the day when the adoptive parents were coming for Rhoda’s baby – this afternoon at two thirty, to be precise – and she could do no more about it than any of them.

  When the babies left the home, in the arms of strangers who were to be their new parents, the girls were told to go and wait in the basement, in the room next to the laundry, out of the way. It was deemed best that they did not see the parents who were taking on their child. They were not to upset them. As the time drew nearer, Rhoda had gone very quiet. She knew, and they all knew, that she was not going to keep her baby. But that morning she had been frantic.

  ‘I can’t.’ She was pacing up and down the room, looking as if she had not slept at all, dark smudges under her eyes. ‘I can’t let them take him. I can’t stand it.’ Tears poured down her face and she clutched at her chest. ‘It’s tearing at me. I can feel my heart actually breaking.’

  ‘Oh Rhoda,’ Evie said, feeling her own rare tears welling in sympathy. It was so hard to watch her friend’s agony and know that there was nothing any of them could do about it. There seemed nothing they could do about anything. For all Rhoda’s brave talk about keeping her boy, her parents were dead set against it. So far as everyone knew, she was in France working looking after someone else’s children, which seemed to Evie a cruel lie to tell. And she had heard not a word from Tom, the man who was supposed to love her so much. Evie thought sourly that she hadn’t heard a word from Ken either, though she also knew that Ken would have no idea where she was. And Ken had walked out of her life, she had watched him do it, whereas Rhoda had clung to the belief that there was hope.

  As Evie lifted the mop bucket to move it further down the stairs she felt something give inside her. Liquid poured down her legs, the warm gush of it soaking her underclothes, and she cried out. Her waters!

  If she had been at home, she would not have known what this was but by now she had heard so much talk. Girls who she had heard say, ‘I thought I’d wet myself – you know, spent a penny . . .’ She leaned over, propped up on the mop handle as the liquid ran down into her shoes and seeped around her feet. She gasped, feeling sensations inside her like a dam breaking, slowly, slowly . . .

  Someone
was coming up the stairs behind her.

  ‘Evie? You all right?’

  It was Jen.

  Evie turned to her. ‘It’s starting,’ she said. ‘My feet are all wet. Help me. What do I do?’

  She stood staring down at a dot of light reflected in the mucky, shifting water of the mop bucket as Jen’s footsteps hurried away to get help.

  ‘Right.’ It was the same nun again, something white in her hands. ‘Any pain?’

  Evie shook her head. Not pain, not exactly.

  ‘I see. Well, in that case, tie this on yourself.’ Evie saw that she was offering a wodge of towelling, like a large napkin. ‘You can mop up after yourself and finish the job. And Cairns,’ she said sternly to Jen. ‘You go and finish whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.’

  Jen’s eyes met Evie’s for a sympathetic moment before she obeyed. It made Evie feel less alone, seeing that kindness in them. The nun stood over her as she had to undergo the humiliation of hitching up her skirt and trying to pin the napkin on somehow, over her soaked underclothes. The wet and the bulk between her legs felt shameful and being watched by those cold eyes made it even worse.

  ‘There you go,’ the nun said as Evie at last tugged the hem of her baggy frock back down. ‘You’re not in labour yet so get on with it.’

  Evie, having no idea what labour felt like, began her mopping again. ‘Sour old cow,’ she said to herself. ‘You sodding try it.’ But though she tried to be defiant she felt frightened and very much alone.

  The pain started soon after, a clenching so fierce across her abdomen that she could only clutch the banister and whimper, caught up in it, until it passed.

  One of the sisters walked her down to the delivery room, to a hard white bed. Hands undressed her and forced her limbs into a shroud-like robe. She lay on the bed and realized that there was no longer anyone else in the room.