by Rose Doyle
I stumbled into the privy and it was as if I was being emptied of everything I'd ever held inside me. I couldn't imagine that my baby would cling on in my womb. I knelt with my back against the wall, exhausted.
Mary Ann came to me then, in the dark and the cold of the privy, as my head reeled and I thought I was facing death.
She put her hand on my forehead and stood away from me, her face very serious and worried. She looked lovely, the way she'd looked before the pneumonia, neat and with shining fair hair to her shoulders. Her blue eyes lit up the dark of the privy. 'I would have been an aunt to your baby if I'd been allowed to live,' she said. I'd have liked that. Imagine: me an aunt!'
She smiled and I smiled back at her, weeping.
It's too late,' I said, 'look at what I've done.'
'You've done nothing yet,' Mary Ann said, 'your baby is still alive.'
'Are you sure?' I asked.
'You'll see,' said my dead sister.
I knelt on and the pain subsided. Mary Ann stayed with me, patiently talking of this and that, about our father before his accident, about our grandmother when she had a drop taken and how funny she could be, about the way our mother put up with both of them.
She said she was happy and that I shouldn't be sad about her. She put a finger to her lips when I would have asked to know more.
The pains came again and with them a swirling blackness and icy cold. I lost consciousness.
When I awoke Mary Ann was gone. I called to her, begging her to come back and wait with me. When she didn't answer I prayed that my baby would not leave me. That Mary Ann might be an aunt. That Jimmy might be a father. That I might be a mother. I sat slumped against the wall, every pore in my body clammily perspiring. I knew I had been touched by death.
But there was no blood and I knew too my baby was still inside me.
As the bells of St Saviour's rang for three o'clock I left the privy. The house in front of me had already started to move into the day, women getting up for work even at that hour. As I stood in the middle of the yard. I prayed one last prayer before I went inside.
'Dear Mother of God, forgive what I did here tonight and let mine and Jimmy Vance's child stay in me. Let me give her birth and life. Amen.'
I had no doubt but that I was carrying a girl.
I don't remember going back up the stairs, nor lying again on my bed, nor falling asleep. I don't have any memory either of my grandmother and mother getting up for their day's work and departing.
It was Allie who shook me awake. 'What's wrong with you, Sarah?'
Her face above me was a blurry frown framed by a fur- trimmed bonnet. She helped me out of bed and I stood swaying weakly.
'I came to see for myself what was wrong with you,' she said as she put an arm about my waist and helped me to a chair. 'You look like a ghost.'
She set about making tea. It was eleven o'clock and my father's snores came loudly from the bedroom. 'I've been asleep for nearly eight hours,' I said in wonder.
'How do you feel?' Allie was brisk.
'Weak,' I admitted, 'a bit dizzy . . . sick in my stomach. I'll be fine after the tea.'
'You might,' Allie said, 'and you might not.'
We said nothing else until she sat opposite me on the stool with the tea, a cup for each of us in her hands.
'Tell me what's the matter with you,' she said and I did, in a low voice while my father snored and the goldfinch sang. I left nothing out, except the details of the afternoons with Jimmy in the room by Kingsbridge Station. Allie said nothing when I told her about Mary Ann coming in the night. She was right not to. Some things are given to people to experience and should be accepted for that.
When I finished I felt better. The talking had helped clear
the space in my mind I needed to plan what I would do. I didn't want opinions or advice, even Allie's.
She read my thoughts. 'What will you do?' she asked.
A fruit cake she'd brought with her sat round and fat on the table. The top of it was bursting with red cherries. They had a bad effect on my uncertain stomach.
'I will have my baby,' I looked away from the cherries, 'and I will call her Mary Ann.'
Allie nodded, as if this were right and proper. 'Where will you have her?' She looked doubtfully at my bed in the corner.
'I don't know,' I said, 'yet.'
Allie had taken the fur-trimmed bonnet from her head and in the sunlight looked girlish and delicate, though a lot better than when last I'd seen her. I felt very much older than she was, and a woman. For a minute I was filled with desolation for the loss of my girlhood. But this passed and I felt glad to be facing motherhood.
I lifted the bonnet from the table. The fur was feather-soft. 'It's beautiful. I suppose everyone in Paris wears bonnets like this?'
'Not everyone and probably not at all this season.' Allie reached and put the bonnet on my head. 'Come to the mirror,' she said, 'you look lovely.'
I looked nice all right but anyone would have looked well in a bonnet like that one. We tried it every which way, the two of us taking turns, parading and laughing until we cried, holding on to one another, and my father came roaring from the bedroom. 'A man needs his sleep,' he yelled at us.
Allie nodded and said of course he did. We left, quickly, taking the stairs two at a time until we got to the street.
'Jimmy has not forsaken me.' I dried the last of my tears. 'It's just that he didn't get my letters.'
'Perhaps,' Allie said.
'You don't believe in him, do you?'
'I believe in your belief in him.'
'That's not the same thing.' I was annoyed. 'I'll write again only this time I'll go to Beggar's Bush Barracks and ask them to send the letter directly from there.'
'How does the army feel about its soldiers marrying?'
'Bad,' I sighed, admitting my worry. 'Jimmy's told me fierce stories about wrongs done to women who marry soldiers. The army doesn't want the worry of caring for women and children in its camps.'
'I can see how it would be contrary to the purpose of an army all right,' said Allie.
Though it was nearing midday there was frost on the ground. I still felt weak and walked slowly, afraid I might fall. I was grateful for the support when Allie put an arm through mine.
'Jimmy says there are ways of dealing with the army,' I told her as we rounded the corner out of Henrietta Street. 'But he says too that they allow only four soldiers to marry in every company of sixty. He says that sometimes wives have to share the billets of the unmarried men with only a curtain around the bed to give privacy.'
'But that's barbaric!' Allie stopped and stared at me. 'It can't be true! He really said that?'
'He did.'
'Then he's not very encouraging . . .'
I remembered something else. 'He says too that the army opens soldiers' letters.'
'Do you think they read yours and didn't give it to him?'
'I don't know.' I unhooked my arm from hers and leaned against a railing. 'I must rest a minute.' My legs felt so weak I would have sat on the pavement if Allie hadn't been there. But she would have worried so I hung on instead to the railings.
She worried anyway. 'You're green about the face,' she was sharp, 'it's time you saw a doctor. What you did last night was dangerous, Sarah, and you know it. We're halfway to Eccles Street. We'll go to the dispensary . . .' She stopped when I all but fainted again.
There was no reasoning with her after that, no protesting that I didn't want to see a doctor yet, especially not Dr Daniel
Casey, with whom I would feel mortified. Not the Eccles Street dispensary either, where I would be sure to see someone I knew.
'You've no choice.' She took my arm again and slowly, but with the tenacity of a terrier, moved me forward.
'I'll have to take the work with Beezy Ryan.' I thought this would stop her. It almost did.
'Beezy Ryan?' She raised her eyebrows in what I supposed was a Parisian way. 'Your friend the madam?' She sni
ffed and tossed her head. I wondered if she intended going through life with the affectations she'd picked up in France. 'You think growing up in a kip house will prepare your child for a respectable life?'
'No, I don't. But the other choice is to give her for adoption in a Magdalen convent.' I paused. 'Anyway, Jimmy will stand by me and all of this worry will have been for nothing.'
As we came into Eccles Street we saw people waiting in the street outside the dispensary.
'We'll go straight on in,' said Allie, 'you can't be expected to wait outside in the cold. Anything might happen to you. I'll say I am a nurse, and working there.' Which is what we did.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Allie
My girlhood ended the day I found Sarah half conscious and corpse-coloured on her bed in Henrietta Street. She didn't have to tell me she was pregnant; some things are a given and my certainty that she was with child was one of those things. Also, she'd been spending a dangerous amount of time with her soldier. Too much time, certainly, to have any left over to spend with me.
I allowed her to tell me about her baby, and was glad when she did. It got rid of my fear that the fact of her becoming a mother would put a barrier between us.
Her need of me meant we were able to take the step from girl-to womanhood together. Or maybe the real truth was that I'd taken that step on my own already, during my weeks alone in the Haddington Road house. It could be that Sarah's dire news simply helped me recognise how far I'd travelled in that time.
I knew, because of the horrific thing she'd tried to do in the night, that she had to see a doctor.
The doing of this fell neatly into place when she became ill again in the street. Since we were already halfway there at the time she couldn't put up any useful argument against us going to Eccles Street to visit Dr Daniel Casey. I told the crowd outside the dispensary that I was a nurse and we went ahead of them into the waiting room.
The moans and low, gasping cries from the other side of the doctors' examining room sent Sarah into a panic.
'We'll come back another time.' She pulled at my sleeve. 'Today looks like a bad day.'
'It's the day you need to see a doctor,' I said. 'Sit down and I'll find out what's happening.'
There was nowhere for her to sit. The benches, along two walls and across the room, were filled with patients. Some looked ill or had injuries, others looked to be merely sheltering from the cold outside, most were waiting to have medicines dispensed to them.
The room itself had a scrubbed, rough wood floor and a stove against one wall to provide heating as well as pots of boiling water. Half of the space was taken up by the dispensing counter behind which there was a huge collection of bottles on shelves.
No one offered Sarah their seat. I frowned at a man paring his nails. He was wearing a worn, and torn, frock coat but looked to me in fairly robust health.
'I wonder, sir,' I stood over him, 'if my friend might have your place on that bench? She's not well.' He ignored me. 'Sir?'
I shook Sarah off when, hissing at me to be quiet, she pulled again at my sleeve.
'I'm not well myself.' The man didn't look up. He'd a reddish colour, which might have been a sign of apoplexy.
'Forgive me,' I said, 'I mistook you for a gentleman.'
'You did indeed.' He looked up then, a grin all over his face. 'I was never a gentleman and am not planning on being one now or in the future either.' He squinted at his companions on the bench, then around the room. 'If it's gentlemen you're looking for you won't find too many here.'
He clipped another nail, neatly, and held it up for me to admire. He was still grinning.
'You can keep your seat,' Sarah said, 'I'm not so badly off as all that.'
The moans from the inner room had subsided a little but there was no sign of Daniel Casey anywhere, nor of any other doctor either.
A boy arrived with medical supplies and out of nowhere a man appeared behind the dispensing counter to take them from him. I prayed for a similar, sudden entrance by Daniel Casey.
It didn't happen. A woman on the bench beside me touched my hand.
'That's a misfortunate woman called May O'Toole inside there and about to have her baby,' she nodded to the closed door and spoke in the loud whisper people use in churches. 'She was out walking when she should have been resting,' the whisper got even louder, 'her waters broke. The pains came on immediately and she shouted for help. What else was she to do?'
Since she seemed to expect an answer to this I nodded. 'It was the right thing to do,' I said.
Encouraged, she went on. 'They brought her in here and she was put immediately up on the bed. She's been in there for an hour or more now.' She shook her head. 'She's a neighbour of my own and I know for a fact she's only the seven months gone.' She closed her eyes. 'There's nothing to be done but pray for her.' Her lips moved in silent frenzy. A pair of rosary beads appeared between her fingers. She had the whitest hair of any woman I'd ever seen, yet she wasn't old.
'The sickness has passed. I feel grand now.' Sarah had been listening. 'We should go . . .'
'We will not go,' I said, 'we will wait to see Daniel.'
'There are people here need to see him worse than me.' Sarah, hissing in my ear, pointed to a man holding a bleeding head in his hands, at a small girl with a ferocious stone cut on her knee.
'Dr Casey's not here, if it's him ye're arguing about,' the white-haired woman said without opening her eyes.
'What doctor is here then?'
'Dr Connolly's here. He's not young but he's all the better for that. He'll be a while with the poor woman in there.' She opened her eyes and looked at Sarah. 'The sick will wait for him. They're used to taking their turn.' She stared. 'You're from Henrietta Street. I've seen you there. Your grandmother's Martha Rooney, am I right?'
'You are.'
'What ails you?' The woman went on staring.
'Nothing ails her,' I said, 'she's here because she's with me. I'm a nurse.' Let her run with that as a story to Martha Rooney.
Slowly, the woman turned from her scrutiny of Sarah. She looked at my clothes first, then my face.
'You'll not last,' she said, 'any more than any of the others that were here. It's a job for a man. Or a strong woman. You're neither.'
'You don't know what I am.'
'You're not serious, I know that. You wouldn't come here dressed like a chorus girl if you knew what you were about.'
I could have told her my morning dress of garnet-coloured cashmere was the warmest I had. That my fur-trimmed bonnet was also for warmth. That dressing as if for a funeral didn't advance the cause of life. What I said was, 'Does Dr Connolly have help with his patient?' I used a lofty tone.
The woman smiled. Now she'd opened them her eyes were like a pair of dark grey pebbles and missed nothing. 'He has a nurse attendant with him, a woman as old as himself who's trying to save her soul with good works.' She gave a short laugh. 'I wouldn't let her next or near me even if I was dying.'
She looked briefly Sarah's way before closing her eyes again. It was a relief to have that prying gaze turned off. 'Prayers are what May O'Toole needs. There's not a lot doctors or nurses can do for her at this stage.'
I went to the door of the examining room and knocked. Sarah followed me but I ignored her agitation as I listened to the pained sounds and gasps and pleading cries from the other side of the door. After a minute, when no one answered, I stepped inside. Sarah slipped in after me and I closed the door behind us.
We were in a much brighter room and to the back of the building. Against one wall stood a wood-framed screen. The others displayed charts with anatomical drawings and such as well as a watercolour picture of a doctor visiting a patient.
A stove burned in this room too, with a kettle on top, and a table held medical equipment, lint and muslin. A thin, disapproving woman was pouring hot water into a basin.
All of this I saw before the doctor, without looking up, said, 'Who are you and what do you want? Are you
a relative? Have you come to help?'
He was old, in his late sixties I'd have said, and he was heavy and mostly bald. He wore no jacket and his shirtsleeves were rolled up.
As he spoke he mopped the brow of the woman thrashing and groaning on a bed between the two windows. She wore a shift but no drawers. She still had her boots on, her foot showing through a hole worn in the sole of one.
I moved on into the room. Sarah stayed where she was.
'I'm a nurse,' I said. I’ll help if you tell me what to do.'
'Maybe there is a God . . .' Muttering, the doctor looked at me. He shook his head. 'Though if there is He works in mysterious ways.'
He straightened and moved away from his patient. 'Take off your bonnet and gloves,' he said, 'and stand at the head of the bed and do what I ask of you. Don't do anything I don't tell you to.' To the woman washing her hands he said, 'you can go into the other room, Bridget, you'll be of more use in there. Talk to the patients, see if there's any of them can come back tomorrow.' He peered over his glasses at Sarah. 'Go with her. You've no business here unless you're a relative.'
I gave my bonnet and gloves to Sarah and stood where he'd asked me to. I didn't look up when the door closed behind Sarah and the other woman. To save my life I couldn't have taken my eyes from the woman on the bed.
Her yellow hair was a damp tangle on the pillow, her face the colour of a plum and perspiring. Her arms, shoulders and chest were covered in freckles, as were her exposed legs.
She fastened a pair of terrified eyes on mine when I stood beside her. 'Glory be to God but I'm frightened. I've got four children at home.' She held my hand. 'All of them born in my own place, in my own bed . . .' she spoke fast, 'I never had a bit of trouble before. Nor a man doctor before either. Always the handywoman, always Ma Brophy. She brings home all the babies where I live.' She gasped and her grip tightened on my hand and she cried out, 'Oh sweet Mother of God why have you given me this pain . . . oh, sweet Jesus why . . . what did I do to you oh, God, what did I do wrong . . .'
I held on, mopping her brow as the doctor had done. Her back arched and she began a new and dreadful moaning.