by Anne Bennett
‘Still, I’m sorry for Cora,’ Lizzie put in. ‘The screams were getting to me.’
‘They were getting to us all,’ said Dilly from the far bed. ‘And I’m not being heartless when I say I’m glad we can’t hear her any more.’
Lizzie felt the same. The attic room the girls shared was just two far away from the infirmary. The nuns’ quarters weren’t, but she guessed they wouldn’t be disturbed by anything or anyone.
The girls knew they could do nothing, and eventually, one by one, they fell asleep and the room grew silent.
Lizzie was awoken by the noise of car tyres crunching on the gravel path outside. It took her a while to ascertain what had woken her and then she got up and ran to the window. There was already a cluster of girls there and others came vying for a space. Celia was one of the ones with her nose pressed to the pane. ‘It’s the doctor,’ she said in ominous tones. ‘The bloody nuns have called the doctor.’
‘Jesus, she must be in a bad way.’
Lizzie felt sick. She thought of the young girl below in the throes of labour, sick enough to need the services of a doctor and yet no one to give her a kind word or gesture.
The doctor stayed a long time. Lizzie had no idea how long, though she heard his car drive away. Some had fallen asleep by then, for she heard their even breathing, and she thought others might be listening as she was, unable to drop off.
She was still wide-eyed when she heard Sister Mary’s tread on the attic stairs and the key turned in the lock. The nun turned on the light and all the girls stirred and those already awake turned to stare at her. Lizzie was surprised that she wasn’t barking at them to be out of bed and quick about it, and she felt as if ice had trickled down her spine at the look on the nun’s face.
Her voice was surprisingly gentle as she said, ‘Cora passed away early this morning.’
‘Passed away! She was having a baby. Women don’t die in childbirth these days.’
It was Celia’s voice and Lizzie bit her lip in trepidation for the young girl, but the nun just shook her head sadly. ‘Some do, Hetty. They do indeed, but I understand you are shocked and maybe upset so I will forgive your little outburst. Mass this morning will be dedicated to Cora, so get up and dress quickly and quietly in respect for the poor dead girl.’
‘Poor dead girl!’ Lizzie wanted to cry. ‘You never thought her poor while she was alive. What respect did you show her then?’ But what would she achieve by throwing this in the nun’s face. She might get away with it, it might again be put down to shock, but it would change nothing.
Two new girls joined them that afternoon. Both were incredibly young and frightened witless and Lizzie knew they’d have to wait for nightfall or beyond to find out anything about them. They were told their names—Rosie and Queenie—by Sister Carmel before they were set before a sink full of suds, soda water and a washboard.
That night, Lizzie was woken by the sound of muffled crying. She sat up in the dark and looked around her. As she’d thought, it was the two new girls both further up the room by the window, in the beds once occupied by Millie and Cora. Lizzie wondered if she should cross the room and say something.
Say what? said a wee voice inside her. Say everything is fine when it blatantly isn’t? Say they’ll get used to this harsh regime when they shouldn’t have to? Say they don’t have to stay in here forever when they might have been disowned by their families and be totally destitute?
No, she decided, there was nothing to be gained by trying to talk to the distressed girls. They’d have to get over it like so many others before them, and she turned over and closed her eyes.
The next day their swollen eyes bore evidence to the hours they’d spent weeping, and they were reluctant to rise from their beds. Lizzie’s conscience smote her, but she reminded herself that any assurances she gave them would hardly make them feel better.
But what she could do was prevent them being beaten that morning. ‘Get up,’ she hissed at the pair of them, ‘before Sister Mary comes back. You’ll get the cane across your backside if you’re not ready for Mass.’
Wearily, the two girls clambered from their beds and Rosie began taking off her nightie. ‘No,’ Lizzie said. ‘You must dress and undress under your nightie. You only strip off when the nuns tell you to. At other times, nakedness is to be frowned on.’
Rosie had never dressed covered by a nightie before, and Lizzie, who was ready, helped her, catching a glimpse of the mound of her bulging stomach before the smock dress covered it. ‘How far are you?’ she whispered.
‘Six months,’ Rosie said. ‘I’ve been a prisoner in my bedroom for two months till my father heard of this place. He beat me black and blue when I told him. He wanted the name of the father—and I told him too, for all the good it did. The man was married. You wouldn’t have thought it when he was courting me, buying flowers, taking me out. Never said a word of his wife then. I loved the very bones of him, and when I let him…you know, he said I’d be safe, he’d make sure. When I told him I was expecting he was a different man altogether, told me I was a stupid little trollop and I needn’t think he’d marry me, for he already had a wife and three weans.’
She looked at Lizzie, her large and very beautiful blue eyes still brimming with tears, and went on, ‘I told Daddy all this and he went off to see the man. He told Daddy I was mad for it, that I trailed him in the town, that I offered myself freely, that I was more than willing. The truth was I put up with it to please him, for I never took enjoyment out of it, but Daddy believed him. I really thought he was going to kill me. In the end, Mammy stopped him, not for my sake but in case I should miscarry. But I can’t understand why he believed a man he’d just met, over me that he’d reared for years.’
Lizzie didn’t know either. It was just the way of things. Didn’t her own parents doubt her tale? She patted the girl’s arm and said, ‘They’ll likely get over it.’ She didn’t believe it, but the girl might for now. She’d come to the realisation that she was stuck in this place indefinitely in her own time, but now she was hurt and disillusioned and both were feelings the nuns would play on if they were aware of them.
‘Look,’ she said to the two girls, ‘a word of warning to the both of you: don’t let the nuns know how upset you are and try not to cry in front of them. They’ll see it as a sign of weakness, and, like all bullies, hone in on it.’
The girls were dressed just in time and Lizzie, her eyes attuned to the rustle of the nun’s approach, was beside her bed before Sister Mary entered the room, grateful to Celia, who’d tidied her bed when she saw her helping the new girls.
Cora’s funeral was three days later on, Monday, 4th August, in the little chapel. Lizzie thought she had got over being shocked or surprised at anything that went on at the convent, but this time the fact that no member of Cora’s family attended the funeral shook her to the core. All that said goodbye to the young girl and her dead baby placed beside her in the coffin were the nuns and girls she’d been sent to live amongst.
Somewhere in Ireland, that child, for she was little more, had been born to a family and raised, possibly with siblings; and because that child had sinned, even though it might not have been her fault at all, she was cast out. Not even in death could she be accepted back into the family, and Lizzie knew she’d be buried in the small graveyard behind the chapel, like plenty more.
‘They’re probably pleased,’ Celia said bitterly as they stood clustered by the grave. ‘The dead tell no tales. Now there’s no child who might one day take a notion to search for his mother. Dead and gone and out of the way is best, and no need for any of them to make the journey to see her laid to rest as if she was a valued family member.’
‘Don’t, Celia,’ Lizzie cautioned, for she heard the break in the girl’s voice and the rise of it in her distress. Any minute she would bring the nuns’ attention upon her. If she was taken for punishment, in the mood she was in, she could say anything and that could be disastrous.
‘I’m all ri
ght,’ Celia said, taking a grip on herself. ‘I thought I couldn’t be hurt further, but I know if I had died giving birth to my wee boy, no one belonging to me from my home in West Meath would have shed a tear or travelled to my funeral. God, sometimes I don’t think I can stand this place a minute longer.’
‘Please, Celia, please be quiet.’
Even as she pleaded, Sister Maria grasped both Lizzie and Celia by their collars. ‘Talking when they should have been praying for the poor dead girl’s soul,’ she informed Sister Jude once they were in the nun’s office.
‘Pansy wasn’t talking,’ Celia burst out. ‘I was talking. She was trying to get me to stop.’
‘I didn’t ask you to speak.’
‘I don’t care,’ Celia shouted. ‘I don’t care about any of you, can’t you see? You’re repressed, wizened-up old women—dried up inside with hate and evilness.’
Lizzie had the urge to clasp her hand over Celia’s mouth, to stop the words that she could see were infuriating Sister Jude. She saw it by the flush of her face, the spittle forming on her lips, and the tic beating in her temple. ‘Sister Maria,’ she bawled, and the nun, who must have been hovering outside, popped her head around the door. ‘Take Hetty into the office of the infirmary,’ she said. ‘She’s overwrought. I’ll deal with her later.’
But Celia wouldn’t go quietly. She kicked and screamed and hurled abuse, and in the end Sister Clement and Sister Carmel had to be called to almost carry the struggling girl, whose voice could be heard still, but became fainter and fainter.
Sister Jude turned her attention to Lizzie. ‘Hetty said you tried to stop her speaking. What was she saying?’
Lizzie had the urge to sink on her knees and plead for leniency for Celia, for she knew what their ways of dealing with people were, but she also knew it wouldn’t help and might make things worse. So she said, ‘It wasn’t anything, Sister, I mean nothing particular. She was upset over Cora, the fact that none of her people came to her funeral an’ all. She wasn’t herself when she said those things to you.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ the nun snapped. ‘As for being upset, don’t you girls realise most of your families want nothing more to do with you. If we didn’t take you in and feed and clothe you, you would starve to death in the gutter, for no one else is wanting to take on that responsibility.’
‘No, Sister.’
‘So what should you have done when Hetty spoke?’
‘Told one of the Sisters.’
‘I’m glad you know,’ said Sister Jude. ‘Maybe this will help you remember promptly in future. Lift up your dress.’
It was not quite as painful as last time, and yet Lizzie was so worried about Celia the strokes seemed to matter less.
Celia didn’t appear again that day, nor the next. When Lizzie asked Sister Mary she said she was in the infirmary because she wasn’t well.
It was a Saturday, four days later, before Celia entered the laundry again, and Lizzie noticed she moved stiffly and painfully and the marks of grazes and bruises were on her face, and both her eyes were discoloured. Lizzie’s eyes were sympathetic, but Celia muttered under the cover of folding clothes, ‘Don’t worry, they tried to punch and kick the shit out of me, but they didn’t succeed and it was worth it to say what I did. I’m just sorry you got it. How many?’
‘Six.’
‘Oh God.’
‘It’s all right.’
Sister Maria came in the door at that moment and scanned the room. On catching sight of Lizzie, she went across to Sister Carmel and whispered something to her, and the nun looked up and straight at Lizzie. ‘You are to go to Sister Jude’s office, Pansy.’
Lizzie stared at her. She’d never gone in the woman’s office without trembling, and with reason, for it usually resulted in at least a severe rebuke or a caning. For the life of her she couldn’t think of anything she’d done to warrant being sent for. ‘Me, Sister?’
‘Yes, you. Would I have said you if I meant someone else?’ Sister Carmel said. ‘Go along quickly. Don’t keep Sister Jude waiting.’
Lizzie’s heart was thumping and her hands suddenly so clammy she had to run them down the front of her skirt, as she followed the nun up the steps and down the long corridor, wondering what now was in store for her.
Sister Maria knocked at the door and on the curt command to, ‘Come in,’ she swung the door wide for Lizzie to go in, but didn’t attempt to enter herself. And so, tentatively, Lizzie approached the desk, which she could see from the door.
As she went into the room, she knew there was a person to the side of the nun that she’d caught sight of out of the corner of her eye, and that it was a man. She knew she mustn’t look at him or acknowledge him in any way, unless given leave to do so, and so she kept her head down.
But the man spoke. ‘Lizzie?’
It was said almost hesitantly, for Johnnie couldn’t be sure that this stumbling person with the swollen belly, dressed in hideous clothes, was the sister he’d come to seek.
But at the one word he spoke, Lizzie swung her head around and her lacklustre eyes were suddenly alight with joy. Nothing, no nun on earth, could have stopped the cry of relief and pleasure, nor the way she bounded across the room and threw her arms around Johnnie’s neck, so that he was nearly overbalanced. ‘Johnnie. Oh, thank God. Thank God!’
‘This is highly irregular,’ Sister Jude said. ‘We don’t encourage visitors, but in view of the circumstances.’
What circumstances? Sudden fear gripped Lizzie. Surely some calamity had happened. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is something the matter with the children? Mammy? Daddy?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ Johnnie assured her. ‘They’re all grand.’ But he was thinking, by Christ, what have these monsters done to my beautiful sister? ‘We need somewhere quiet to talk,’ he went on. ‘Sister Jude has been kind enough to let us stay in the office.’
Lizzie continued to stare at him. She wanted to touch him, convince herself he was real. She listened to his words: ordinary, everyday words from a person outside these prison walls. She didn’t know whether she’d pay for this later and didn’t care either. ‘All right, Johnnie,’ she said. She’d have said all right to anything he suggested.
She was hardly aware of the nun, muttering, ‘I’ll leave you now, then,’ or of her leaving the room. Then Johnnie took hold of her hand and sat her on one of the chairs set before the desk, while he stayed on the one beside her.
‘Almighty Christ, Lizzie,’ he said. ‘When it’s all over, I’ll make it up to you, I promise. But, for now, we’ve hit a few problems.’ For a brief moment he remembered the fight he had had to get so far and he sighed, for it had been well worth it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘What is it?’ Lizzie demanded of Johnnie. ‘Glad though I am to see you, I feel only a major event would bring you here, and yet you say everyone is fine at home.’
‘They are,’ Johnnie said. ‘I’ve come because of the letters.’
‘Letters?’
‘People can’t just disappear off the face of the earth,’ Johnnie said. ‘Not even for a few months, no matter what Mammy and Daddy may think. There are a number of people asking about you. I’m afraid we opened the letters. You’ll see the first one’s from your mother-in-law, and there’s one from your neighbour from three weeks ago. Since then, we’ve had another two from your neighbour, and you’ll see that inside the first one there are two letters from Niamh.’
‘Niamh wrote?’ Lizzie said.
‘Aye, and in secret,’ Johnnie said. ‘We knew nothing about it.’
Lizzie opened up her daughter’s letters. In the first one her child’s confusion and hurt could be almost lifted from the page.
I was upset that you weren’t there to see me make my First Holy Communion, when you’d come home spesahlly for it and you promised.
Granny told us you had to go home because our other Granny was ill and I felt sorry for you then, because it must be horrible looking a
fter someone you don’t like very much…
The tears squeezed from Lizzie’s eyes, so that she was unable to read any more for a while. She imagined her daughter’s sadness and realised she’d put it there, whether it was inadvertently or not, and her heart ached.
In the next letter, she was more angry than hurt:
Why didn’t you answer my letter? I waited and waited. Granny said you’re busy, but no one can be that busy. Please write to me, Mammy. I miss you so much…
‘Oh dear God!’ Lizzie said, and put her head in her hands.
‘There’s more, sis,’ Johnnie said. ‘In the next one she wrote to Violet to find out what was up with you. See, Mammy and Daddy foresaw none of this. They can be grateful that the postman passed all post to Violet, knowing the house was empty.’
‘It wasn’t. I mean, Steve’s brother Neil is supposed to be living there.’
‘Well, if he had been, and had opened Niamh’s letters, it would have really set the cat amongst the pigeons,’ Johnnie replied.
But on opening Flo’s letter, Lizzie knew why Neil hadn’t been at the house, because, amongst the vitriolic abuse, she read that:
Neil has received his call-up papers. Another son to worry about not that you will have the slightest idea what that feels like.
‘Now that Steve’s brother has been called up there may not be a house for me to return to in the end anyway,’ Lizzie told Johnnie,
‘Why?’
‘They’ll not hold a house with no rent coming in,’ Lizzie said. ‘The point was, none of the women were going to tell the landlord the house was empty, and I never saw him anyway. As I was working, Violet and I always left our rent money with one of the neighbours.’
‘That’s all sorted,’ Johnnie said. ‘I didn’t know the arrangements you had made with Steve’s brother, but I knew rent had to be paid on a property, and so I wrote to that friend of yours, Violet. I knew she’d know everything because you always mentioned her so much in the letters you wrote home. She told me she has been leaving your rent and hers with someone called Minnie, and she is going to continue to do that, only now I am going to reimburse her.’