Bad Girl Magdalene

by Jonathan Gash

‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘It seems proper.’

  ‘My folks are looking forward to seeing you Sunday. Is twelve o’clock all right? They said to ask.’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Twelve.’

  This was the sort of invitation they wrote yet more notes for, from a reticule with a silver pencil that unwound itself, while a footman waited obediently to do the lady’s bidding. She, being Magda, was at a casement window looking wistfully out onto extensive gardens laid out by her great-grandfather before the family’s fortunes fell prey to the wiles of a wicked neighbouring squire who had designs on the maidens of Magda’s once-exalted family.

  ‘You don’t want me to wait? It shouldn’t take more than a minute.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ No lengthy note with this offer. ‘I’ll get on, and speak to the desk, ah, lady.’

  ‘Fine. See you then, Magda.’

  ‘See you, Kev.’

  She waited until he waved. He made for the bus, caught it with a bound. She was relieved but saddened. He was lovely to be with, though troubling. What did he want, coming all this road to the hospital he had no intention of visiting?

  A sense of growing choice, such a rare word to her, came on her as she went slowly into the hospital grounds. She felt afraid of it. Before now, choice was beyond her, as if it was a colour she could never see or even guess at. It was out of reach and too far for sight. It was unknowable. Now? Now, choice was somehow here and blocking her path. She simply did not know what it was. The distress within made her feel ill. She’d had no idea it had such intensity. It was so gentle and gay in those grainy old pictures, a sort of game. Was this how – what was her name, in that story they kept re-making in London and showing on late TV, Miss Bennet? – felt? Magda had reservations about her, though, for wasn’t she just a gold-digger? Or was she the tender innocent she made herself out to be? Magda distrusted her for chiselling.

  Magda judged the hospital. Choice was here again, in front of her face.

  In the Magdalenes, she was punished for being an orphan. She deserved it. She was a lesser person, without real certainty. Whatever the world of nuns, older girls, the Church, the cosmos of her Magdalenish existence and priests, said was so, had to be so. If some element seemed, just for a fleeting instant, not to be quite so – like the dog, the vegetable man, the girls who fainted, being whacked and thrust into the pail locker, whatever – was forced into the mould. The world was made to comply. Everything was forced to come into and be an orthodox part of the world as the Church defined it. The world was the Magdalenes. She was an orphan. God decided that for her, for Lucy, for everybody.

  Now, she seemed able to do things without reference to anybody else. Uncertainty was a new and dreadful thing. She could go into the hospital and ask after Father Doran. She had phrases all ready, from being awake in the night worrying what to say. Or she need not go in at all. She could go home and have her meal – egg and oven chips tonight, red sauce and bread-and-marge to make butties, then settle down to watching them old black-and-whiters rerunning the livelong night, to save Lucy her frightening fall again. Or she could stay here a bit, watch folk going in or out. But rest was sinful. ‘Do nothing, you sin,’ Sister St Paul the provisions monitor of the kitchen at the Magdalenes, explained as she leathered Magda’s thighs for dozing behind the scullery when she should have been hard at the newly scrubbed pans. The litany was always three questions fired at her, all the girls in earshot responding.

  ‘Whose work is idleness?’

  Satan’s work, Sister.

  ‘Why is it evil?’

  Because it offends against so good a God, Sister.

  ‘What is your resolution?’

  To never more do Satan’s work, but to act in true and faithful obedience to our holy Mother Church, Sister.

  Magda decided to make a choice of her own. Nervous about it, she went to the damp bench outside the entrance and sat, looking round guiltily. She kept turning, to deceive anybody who might think she was just there being idle, maybe even on the way to falling asleep and earning punishment in Purgatory.

  It didn’t work. In a minute, she was up and into the hospital. She asked the woman at the desk how Father Doran was.

  ‘He is poorly with his heart,’ she said, following her rehearsed speech. ‘He is under the knife today.’

  ‘Father Doran?’ The lady seemed disinterested, clicking on some computer thing and not even glancing at Magda.

  ‘Yes. He’s…’

  ‘Yes. Cardiothoracic. Take the lift to…’

  Magda heard little of the speech, but went in the direction indicated, mystified by the signs, following a woman who was having difficulty marshalling her three small children. Maybe they were going to see some father, husband, brother, under the knife too?

  The choices seemed to be several, Magda thought in dismay, too many. The Church was no choice, sure, being there by God’s orders anyway. Everybody did as the Church said, except for Lucy, and just look what happened to her. And except Emily, who did whatever she wanted anyway. It was controlled and had to be obeyed.

  Then there was this strange entity that was Kev. In the background was Sergeant Bernard, or did he not count now? And Damien. In it too was her own behaviour, so inept when Kev talked to her, and not knowing what to say to his sister Jean in that bar. This strange world of reality was all of a piece. In it too was her poisoning Father Doran to kill him dead, and the listening hard she did so much of. The lay cleaning women lived more in this radical reality-driven world than ever they did in the holy ritualistic Church.

  Then there was a pretence world, which was the dangerous world of imagination. This was the no-work world of idleness the nuns condemned in God’s name. It was wrong, discipline was essential, or the world would come to grief. All history, Magda had learnt, was there to prove that calamity followed where immorality led, and civilisations tumbled.

  She followed the stout lady and the three children. At the lifts, she asked the lady where the Cardiac Unit was. The lady saw her bafflement, and went with her up to the third floor in the lift, pressing the buttons as if she was familiar with everything.

  Magda stepped out into mayhem.

  A bench with a table, some magazines and two armchairs seemed safe enough. She took up her stance of waiting for someone, and stayed seated there while everybody moved by. Frightening, it was, disturbing the mental order Magda was trying so hard to construct. The problem was how to decide things. If she had practice, she might have been able to make up her mind. The choice was the threat, not the decisions she might make. Guess wrong, people out here in this reality just said, oh, well, and started a different thing entirely. How on earth did they have the nerve?

  She sat there. The visitors stopped coming. The nurses seemed to change duty – Magda recognised the signs, some coming on and wanting to know what about this, about that, and signing things. Doctors went by. A patient was wheeled by, bottles and tubes and shuffling gowned staff leaning on the trolley, their hands about the patient’s face. It could have been anyone, so wrapped up. Surely, she thought, they’d be too hot under all that? For an instant the patient’s eyes opened, gazed in her direction with a flat kind of opacity. She believed it might be a man. The eyes seemed vaguely familiar, but by now Father Doran would be sitting up in bed having his no-poison tea and reading his old breviary. Then the figure was glided off on them quiet wheels, all them boots squeaking away.

  By now she was desperate to go to the loo, but didn’t know if she would be allowed. She didn’t know how to get back to the outside.

  A nurse came to her. ‘Are you waiting for someone?’

  ‘Yes. To see Father Doran.’

  ‘Father Doran? He went to theatre. He’s long back.’

  ‘Is he…?’

  ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘No. I’m…’

  ‘He’s not to have visitors just yet. Do you want to leave anything?’

  ‘No.’ It came out sharper than Magda had wa
nted, and she said it again but softer, ‘No. I wanted to say something about…’

  ‘Can I have your name? You could leave a message.’

  ‘No. I’ll come back.’

  The nurse pointed the way to the lifts. Magda went in the right direction, hoping to see that little black mark that meant the women’s loos were through the signed door. Then she felt bold. Had she come all this way, dithering like an imbecile, to leave without at least telling how she’d done wrong and was sorry? Yet she had worried herself sick, thinking all that about how there were three lives she was trying to live all at once. You had to keep trying, even with one life at a time. That was what God said, she was almost sure.

  Returning, she said to the nurse, ‘Could I leave a message for Father Doran please?’

  ‘Certainly. Do you want to write it?’

  ‘No.’ Magda took the plunge and said out loud, right to the nurse’s face, the nurse in her grand uniform with its badges and everything, ‘I can’t write. I’m sorry.’

  She could have made up her usual tale about needing spectacles. Her favourite was, ‘I dropped them under the sofa,’ which didn’t sound too bad because she hadn’t a sofa either so it was a complete falsehood.

  ‘That’s all right.’ The nurse found some paper, a whole notepad, and a ballpoint. ‘What do you want to say?’

  ‘Could you please say, Dear Father Doran, I’m sorry for that wrong stuff.’

  The nurse wrote, repeating the message. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘No name? He’ll want to know who it was from.’

  ‘Oh.’ Magda knew the nurse must watch that old telly on duty of a night. Well, no time for speculation. She couldn’t say the full details, not even to this friendly nurse. The nurse must want a decent ending, like in them old stories in country houses.

  ‘A name?’

  ‘Yes. Unless he’ll know who it’s from.’

  This was a dilemma. To give the nurse the whole tale would get the priest arrested when he was poorly. You had to visit the sick, like honouring thy father and thy mother, if you ever learnt who they were.

  ‘Say, Yours sincerely, Lucy.’

  That was a brainwave, signing it Lucy. He would know straight away it was to do with Magda’s friend. That would ease his mind, telling him he was forgiven. Then maybe they’d meet like under that tall tree in that great park where Mr Darcy comes walking up to the lady seated in a bower, where flowers grew and everything and they became all friends again. It was such a peaceful arrangement, nobody got whacked and their legs made black and blue where the inspectors could never see.

  ‘Yours sincerely, Lucy,’ the nurse repeated. ‘That it?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  Magda waited a moment, then turned and walked away towards the lifts. As she went past one of the rooms full of machinery, with nurses and them tubes all round a patient, the desk nurse called, ‘Oh, Lucy.’

  Magda turned in fear. ‘Yes?’

  ‘No address?’

  ‘He will know,’ she said, and left.

  Luckily, two doctors got in a lift and asked where she wanted to go. She told them the outside.

  ‘Car park?’ one said, smiling just like Mr Darcy. ‘You were lucky to get space. Never seen it so crowded.’

  ‘True,’ Magda said, thinking she was being brilliant, like that Sherlock Holmes when he got the Spider Woman, and that old police Inspector Lestrade in his daft bowler hat went off grinning with the Spider Woman on his arm.

  She went outside. On the way, greatly daring, she entered the door with the sign and went to the loo, washing her hands afterwards with the most beautifully scented soap ever. It was a pity to waste it in old water just to wash, but she didn’t need telling what was right and what was wrong, no.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sunday dawned with Magda frantic. The thing was, she had two things to wear. Choice was a terrible thing.

  This became more terrible today. She thought of praying, and went to church full of devout pleas to Jesus to help, because he was sort of neutral. Then the Virgin Mary, then St Veronica. She was never quite sure of St Veronica, who did all that cloth business and ought to know a thing or two about material. She came away none the wiser, and went home to do baked beans on toast in the most ineffectual grill in County Dublin, her Baby Belling on full.

  She had one nearly black dress, her best. It troubled her because it needed cleaning and the dry cleaner’s at the corner of Crown Alley was extortionate. Worse, it picked up every dust fleck, every hair, every fragment of lawn blowing from the silly displays at the Dublin Woollen Mills, to nobody’s benefit but the dry cleaners of the world. She wanted a string of pearls, as worn by – who, Jean Kent? Patricia Roc? – the previous night in Wicked Lady when out riding on her horse, in her crinoline or whatever, singing that lovely song about love stealing your heart, so pretty. Luckily, James Mason got shot. He always frightened Magda so she had to turn the sound off when he was talking in case his words started coming through when Lucy started falling as Magda dozed off, as the outside darkness slowly became its usual morning grey.

  Well, like that set of pearls, but Magda had none.

  Her other dress was a flowery thing one of the cleaning ladies had passed on to her, handed on from her daughter, who was more or less Magda’s age. It didn’t really fit, but was the one she usually wore all the time. Magda rattled on about it. She knew it had some signs on the label behind the neck, but since she couldn’t read she had to have it cleaned.

  She had started a savings account, putting her wage money in. She listened to the saving place people as they explained the ins and outs, and said she had hurt her hand so she couldn’t sign her name at all. They gave her a plastic card. This was even more trouble but in a new way, since she had to hand the card over when she took her wage to them at the end of the week. She asked for what she thought she’d need, guessing on their say-so, and they kept the rest.

  They got to know her, and she deliberately crooked her right hand as if it were twisted from birth like Mrs MacConnigal’s, who cried every night from terrible things that had happened, poor lady. She had been taken away to a mental hospital at the finish, and she had no family to speak of so it was hard. Magda often wondered where Mrs MacConnigal had got to, and thought how nice it would be to go and see the old lady, maybe to telephone her and just ask.

  Magda’s entertainment was listening to the people telephoning on the concourse of the railway station. ‘Take it easy!’ blared some Tannoy all the time for a whole month or two once, when Magda first started going there. It sounded demented and put the heart across you, but there was no stopping it. They’d given the slogan up now, thanks be to God.

  She made a habit of standing there as if waiting for some train, or perhaps meeting some gentleman in his natty trilby, like Trevor Howard, who’d take some train dust from her eye, and then start up a romance at the snack bar, nothing carnal that would call for confession or anything. It was only the listening to the old telephones that she did.

  Every single life she overheard at them old telephones was worth it. Sometimes there were rows, though these happened in the very best circles, she knew from her informal education at the TV screen of a night. Usually they talked pleasant. Some were disappointments, just a barked instruction to do this or that or meet somewhere. Those didn’t repay all the effort Magda went to, positioning herself just to hear what was being said. Other times there was a serious talk, some relatives might be poorly or, once, in a breathtaking chat of sorrowfully brief duration, about whether the man talking and the lady at the other end should go ahead and buy some house. It was exhilarating. Sometimes Magda walked away as if floating on air, delirious with pleasure at the images raised in her mind, better than any old fillum, that was for sure.

  The trouble was that nobody she would ever come to know by all this watching and listening ever revealed how it was they came to some decision. Worse, there was a terrible fina
l realisation. However well she eavesdropped at the telly and heeded what the lords and ladies said on their galloping steeds, Magda never would know the outcome of their decisions. Did that smiley lady with the pearls and getting the love of that lord as they sang riding on the moors ever think back and tell herself, ‘Goodness gracious, how exciting to hold up some London coach with the cry “Stand and deliver!” then ride off laughing with the wind in your hair’?

  That’s the bit she needed to learn about. If she’d got her age right, she must be knocking twenty, the twenty-second of July, to be about as precise as guessing allowed.

  Maybe this was an opportunity? Kev was probably checking his family was getting on with it as they came back from Holy Mass. She felt scared, like she was going to get clouted by Mrs Rooney and Sister St Paul as they set about her in so much anger they shook with rage over her slow carrying them frosty vegetables in. Worst had been the time Lucy had coughed so bad Magda had had to carry them in on her own and hadn’t been strong enough to do them as fast as she should. Lucy, poor sainted thing, coughed under the lintel of the kitchen door, and Sister St Paul had berated Lucy for setting herself choking on something she’d stolen from the vegetables and walloped her hard. Then they gave Magda a leathering for concealing Lucy’s theft of vegetables. It wasn’t true at all. Magda found herself weeping at the pain, but was it right to cry when Lucy too got a whacking when she’d done no wrong?

  Magda looked into her cracked mirror. She looked a fright, and her hair was a ghastly mess. She did her own hair with a brush and comb, and washed it in the sink along the landing. She would have liked to have done it at the St Cosmo but that wasn’t allowed. You were stealing time from God Almighty, and stealing the St Cosmo water supply and heating.

  She combed her hair. It wouldn’t stay straight, curling in a troublesome manner. She gave up and let it get on with it. The hairdresser two shops down from where Dame Court did that sudden end into Exchequer Street looked pleasant. They showed you a list of things they could do to your fright of hair, but how could she read it? They showed you lists of dinners in bars too, that Kev had coped with so magnificently, checking with a casual glance the wall list. He was elegant, so much in command. This was the difference that God surely intended when He designed the world.