December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

  And then she ran, as fast as she could, away from the hospital and from anyone who might be following her. She ran all the way down the street and the next, racing to catch up with a horse tram ahead.

  Anyone who saw her, a woman with a large, pregnant stomach, would have thought that she was a very fit lady to be able to run so. And when she got on the tram she sat and clutched her case and she couldn’t help but weep. She had lost her baby, this time a real baby, not like the one before, which was only blood and not even a heart-beat.

  She had let Albert down again. What an awful wife she was.

  * * *

  She’d hid in a run-down guest house after the hospital, not daring to leave, curling handfuls of bread and margarine into her mouth, bought in a shop a few yards from the room she’d taken for two nights. She prayed Albert wouldn’t go to the hospital to seek her out, that he’d stay at home, like she asked.

  She spent the days pacing the floor, clenching and unclenching her hands, scratching at her arms and her scalp. She thought about trying another hospital - the Lying-In wasn’t the only building in London were babies were being delivered. But the thought of going back into the sterile wings, with the nurses and the sleeping, just birthed mothers, sent a dread through her. She couldn’t do it. There had to be another way.

  As dawn broke on the second morning of her stay at the guest house, the thought came to her - filtering in through the dark of the small single room.

  It would buy her more time. It would give her time to think.

  Carefully she packed up all her things, placing them back into the brown case, fighting a pain in the pit of her stomach as she wrapped up the baby’s belongings again. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She shouldn’t have been returning home without him.

  She walked up Louisville Road slowly, taking her time, enjoying seeing the familiar cracks in the pavement that she could count and help calm herself.

  She noticed the dust on the front door and how grimy the windows looked as she went to put her key in the door. Just two days and look what had happened while she was away.

  Inside, the smell of home hit her nose, a smell she’d never really noticed before - it was comforting and she breathed it in, glad to be back on her territory, even though she could see that the whole place needed scrubbing down to get rid of all the germs that would have formed there since she’d been away.

  Upstairs, she replaced her late pregnancy cushion with a half-way one, bringing her bulk down. She went to her dressing table and found her translucent powder at the back of a drawer. Carefully she applied it to her cheeks and mouth, making herself look as pale as possible.

  Then, she went down to wait in the sitting room, on the ground, leaning against the sofa, her hand on her tummy. She would wait there till he came in, working on her story, on her emotions, so that she would be ready, to face him.

  ‘My love,’ said Albert, only his head visible, his body blocked by the door, as he stood peering round it. He had arrived home from work at the usual time, his key scratching in the front door lock.

  He came in and leaned down, holding out his arms to embrace her, and as she got up and he pulled her close, she felt his head turn, searching the room for their baby.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know you were getting out, I would have come to collect you?’ he said into her hair.

  He held her shoulders and scanned the whole room for the crib. ‘Where’s the baby?’

  She let her face fall, as if she were in terrible pain.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me bring him home,’ she said.

  She sniffed and then let the tears come, a great sob coming from her throat. Shocked at his wife’s upset, Albert put his arms around her again.

  ‘He’s so poorly, Albert, oh you should see him. So tiny. They said it could be weeks, weeks before we get him home.’

  ‘Oh, my love,’ he said, rubbing her back, holding her face against his torso. ‘I’ve been worried sick. I got your note but all I wanted to do was go and see you.’

  ‘He was too sickly for visitors Albert. He still is. Even I might not be let in to see him.’

  ‘The poor mite,’ said Albert and when she looked up, she saw that he too had tears in his eyes.

  ‘And you?’ he said. ‘How are you feeling, shouldn’t you be in bed? I thought they’d be keeping you, for two weeks at least.’

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said. ‘I feel weak. But I’m fine. I just want my baby.’

  She let her shoulders shake, racks of sobs folding over each other, tears and clear snot cascading down her face.

  Albert held her, comforting her, not asking any more questions.

  And this was how she kept it for weeks.

  The baby in hospital. Not able to be seen. Albert not able to ask questions, because he wouldn’t know about such things and it upset his wife too much.

  Chapter Nineteen

  MOLLY

  I’d learned a new skill. It was the ability to leave myself. To go away from my body and mind. I’d noticed it creeping in right at the start. After the first few days when I’d seen nearly thirty men. I found that I wasn’t quite there. That as soon as they unbelted or pulled down their trousers or turned me round or even touched me, I was gone.

  Most of the time I was still in the room. Still there, some part of me, my physical body maybe. I could see myself, just me and my blank face, no expression, doing what I had to do to get it over with. But my mind wasn’t there. It was somewhere else. Up above me, floating near the ceiling, in the clouds.

  I began to play a game - imagining the nicest thing that could ever happen to me, right there and then. Mostly I was at home. At the river. At the top of the mound at Dowth. Or with my mother. Never my father. I never brought him into my thoughts with the men that were here. I thought about Oliver and a lovely house we would have in the country. Just me and him. I thought of him growing big and strong, his fair hair growing long and bouncing as he ran in the sun.

  I saw the flies and midges that kicked up out of the grass as he tottered. I felt the rays on my skin and I smelled the fresh, earth smell. I could float for as long as I needed to float, until they’d finished and then I had to get up and wipe myself and tidy the room and set about getting ready for the next customer.

  I wondered how long I could go on for. Doing this and floating away. I feared I was damaging my mind, that I never knew which part of me was here and which part was there.

  I detested who I’d become.

  The girls seemed to like me more now that I was one of them. I could see why they’d resented me being in the kip-house, cleaning and pouring drinks and never having to offer up my body like they had to. I was also taking trips to the pharmacist for the ointments and poultices they recommended to take away the soreness. The broken skin. The aching. I feared I would catch a disease - something awful like I’d seen on Angela that day. I prayed to God every night and every morning that he would protect me, get me through another day, and save me from the men with the venerals.

  After a fortnight or so of working properly at the kip-house Madame Camille swept in, doing her checks, chatting and flirting with some of the punters. She got me aside and asked me how I was getting on.

  ‘Fine,’ I say, not really looking at her, more at the floor. And my feet.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Well, the reports are good Molly, you’re doing well, I knew you would.’

  Doing well. At being a prostitute. I didn’t think it was a compliment.

  ‘Madame Camille,’ I say, looking up at her. ‘My slate - can you tell me what’s on it and what I’ve earned and maybe when I can start earning for myself? It’s the baby you see, I want to be able to put something away for him, for the things he needs.’

  ‘Don’t you have what you need?’ she says, her eyes darkening, her beautiful face creasing into a scowl.

  ‘He’s grand,’ I say. ‘I have his clothes now and that. But it’s more for myself, to know that I have a bit for him.’r />
  ‘Molly, I’ve told you already. You have a heavy slate. Haven’t I put you up for the past six months for free? Paid for a hospital stay? A midwife? New coat. Baby things. Haven’t you a cheek to be asking about payment when all I’ve done is fork out for you, hand over fist?’

  A white spittle flies from her mouth and lands on my cheek, under my eye. It feels hot. I stem the urge to wipe at my face.

  ‘Look around you, Molly. How long are these girls here? Do you see any of them starting to earn just a week after work? Seems you have a short memory, about all I’ve done for you.’

  I was afraid she’d bring up about the couple again. The couple who wanted to buy my baby and that she’d tell me to consider it again. So, I told her I was sorry, that it was alright, I understood, and I wouldn’t ask again.

  Madame Camille had total control over me: where I lived, how my baby lived, and now how my body was bought and sold for the very roof over my head.

  That was the first day that I had a whiskey and added it to my slate. Right after she was gone out of the kip-house; back to her life of grandeur and glamour. What difference did it make anyway? If I was going to be here for months, working off this slate, then what harm would a few whiskeys be to get me through it? That’s what I told myself anyway.

  * * *

  Oliver was growing fast. He suckled on my milk at all hours of the day and when I had to go to work, he would cry so we had to start preparing glass bottles with formula and sugar in them for when I was gone. I hated leaving him in that house, in the care of a girl who had no care for him at all, who could never see the beauty of his eyelashes against his cheeks, the hollow of his temples, the way his little nostrils flared when he yawned or cried.

  I was glad that I got breaks from the house to come back and feed him, to hold him. To smell his beautiful baby scent before I had to go back and smell the other smells I had come to hate. Sweat. Cigarettes. Coal dust. Semen.

  I was having awful trouble getting my own family out of my mind. My mother was always in my thoughts. My brothers too. They came to me at night, in my dreams, their faces looming in front of me, never looking happy, as if they were crying. In the mornings when I’d wake, I’d think about them, and how lovely it would be to get out of bed, go downstairs and find them clattering round our old kitchen, making tea and buttering bread; getting ready for the day.

  I thought how they might love to look at the baby, how they might hold him and coo after him and rub his little feathery head the way I liked to. It made me sad to think that he would never know his real family. That here and now, there was only one person who loved him in the world, and that was me.

  As I got up and moved around and looked out the window at the cloudy sky, I thought about how I hadn’t seen the sun in months. That the smog had covered everything up, making everything grey.

  I felt grey too. The whiskey left me with headaches in the morning and I’d gulp down the glass of water beside my bed as soon as I woke. But it never got rid of the dull ache that was in the centre of my head, right in the middle, on the inside and when I got to work, I’d have a whiskey, just to get rid of that pain, because it always did.

  I was drinking every day now. I knew each one was being added to the slate and I was afraid to add them up but I couldn’t help getting the house madam to pour me another. I thought how I used to pity the drinking girls and think how silly they were. These things seemed to keep happening to me. Thoughts that I would never do such a thing, never become that. And yet I did.

  In the summer, I started seeing a new man. He had a long face and hunched shoulders. He had been with a few of the girls in the house before, but he took a shining to me. It was my accent he said. He loved to hear me talk.

  He was coming every week and always asked for me and after I’d done what he asked, he made me sit on the bed and he asked me questions about myself. I felt that he was wasting my time a bit, that talking wasn’t getting any more money off my slate and so he began to offer more money, to spend some time with me.

  Money for talking was good by me. I started telling him anything he wanted to hear. I buttered him up a bit, telling him what an interesting man he was, when really, he was no more interesting than the boot on my foot.

  One day, as he was leaving, Elizabeth came past my room and looked in after he had left.

  ‘That your regular?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He likes to talk.’

  ‘I’ve a right pervert after me at the moment. Real disgusting,’ she says, wrinkling her nose. ‘I think I had him before,’ she says, nodding after my regular. ‘Does he make a noise like this?’

  She starts honking, her voice soft at first, then getting louder. We both burst out laughing as she does a giant honk before making an exaggerated sigh and falling backwards on the bed.

  ‘Like the church organ pipes, isn’t he?’ I nod because I’m giggling so much I can’t talk. ‘Mr Tubular!’ she says and the two of us clutch our stomachs and laugh as loud as we can.

  It felt good to make a joke over our pathetic situations. That we could find humour in this world we were living in. This world of never ending men, of our bodies not being our own, of our minds floating away so that we could get through it, one customer at a time.

  ‘Mr Tubular,’ I say and that was his new name. He’d been christened.

  I could never have known then, the part that Mr Tubular was going to play in my life. That he, along with Mr McKenna, would change it forever. I could never have predicted that his shine for me was real. That he would, later that summer and with Madame Camille’s agreement, make me his wife.

  Chapter Twenty

  HENRY

  It wasn’t something he expected. The interest. The letters. The gifts. The surrounding him at soirees and house parties.

  The mothers were the worst. They pressed into him, their great big bosoms trussed up and in his face, lauding on and on about their daughter. Had he had the pleasure of meeting her yet? She really was a sight to behold. And so interesting!

  He had learned that they were never interesting. That they were dull and some of them half-stupid, incapable of holding a conversation, no interest in the world outside of some dancing and light piano playing. They had nothing to offer him.

  He stopped attending events, only going to gatherings that he absolutely had to. But this made him more of catch; the shy reclusive bachelor who was rarely seen.

  Arthur attended everything he was invited to, bringing home tales of beautiful women and some not so beautiful, who he had kissed and fondled anyway.

  ‘I think I had my way with her,’ he would say, scratching his head at breakfast, his eyes bloodshot, his breath foul with drink. When he had had some tea and soda bread with butter, he would go back to bed, then get up late in the afternoon and start drinking again.

  Henry looked forward to September when his brother would return to Oxford. He was tired of trying to control him. He wanted him gone, needed him away from the house and no longer in his worries. There was enough to be concerned about as it was. It had shocked him, the dire state the accounts had been left in.

  The first boxes of papers had started arriving a month after his father’s death. They had been with his father’s solicitors, Faber & Sons, and on leafing through the first pages, he immediately made an appointment to go and see Faber himself. He’d sat in their offices, staring at the yellow walls, imagining himself working there. This is where his father had wanted him to intern.

  ‘Are you serious?’ he’d asked when Faber came into the room. ‘Are you honestly telling me this is the state of affairs you left my father in? This?’

  He pointed at some papers he’d spread out on the table, stabbing at the statements of the various bank accounts and savings bonds Seymour had invested in.

  ‘Nothing? There’s nothing left?’ he said.

  Faber, infuriatingly, shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Henry, you knew your father liked to gamble. It got out of c
ontrol.’

  ‘Out of control?’ said Henry, surprising himself with the venom in his voice. ‘There’s nothing fucking left. Nothing.’

  ‘We did offer advice that the stocks he was investing in could prove worthless. Which is what happened. Can I remind you, Henry, that we are executors of the will. We are not bankers.’

  ‘No, but he trusted you,’ said Henry. ‘He was always running to you for financial advice. You were his confidante. All those meetings, bringing in his papers. I know he was paying you – to oversee things.’

  Faber shrugged again.

  ‘We offered advice where we could, Henry. We did try to warn your father. But he was insistent. He didn’t listen to us. You know Seymour loved to gamble.’

  ‘You, as legal guardians, had a duty to protect the estate and my father’s interests. You allowed him to do this. I am laying the blame firmly at Faber & Sons’ door.’

  The anger felt like it might explode from Henry’s throat. It was taking all his willpower to remain seated and hold some level of civility to his voice.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ said Faber. ‘Your father made the decisions. He knew the gamble hadn’t paid off. And he was, right up to his death, trying to win back what he’d lost. He thought he could do it, and he might have too, had he not … well his death was very untimely. I’m sorry, Henry. I know you are upset. But it was your father’s estate. And it was his decision.’

  Things were making sense now. His father’s demeanour each time he came home. His outbursts. His constant demands that Henry get involved in the legal paperwork. He knew he was losing the estate. And he thought that Henry, with all his legal learnings and experience, could help him. That’s why he didn’t want him going to London. He needed him at home, to fight his case.

  ‘Is it really as bad as it looks? Is there anything I’m missing, accounts not outlined here, something to work with?’

  ‘There’s his insurance policy. There’ll be a bit in that. And if we add up the remainder of what’s in the accounts and bonds, there’ll be a small sum. There is a possibility that some of the shares will rise again. Some are worth holding on to. And of course, there’s the land, Henry. Prices are not at their best now, but maybe, if you held on to it for another six months, things could change.’