With her sisters and her aunts all making novenas on her behalf, Cliona had the sense to refrain from confiding her other recent conclusion: that she could discern no earthly reason to confine sexual intercourse within the bounds of marriage. Not that she had any plans, mind you.
Girdle or no, Cliona was accustomed to being appreciated by the other sex. With a cloud of flaxen curls, dewy skin, tipped nose, wide mouth, and clear blue-gray eyes, she drew attention. She had settled upon becoming an actress and all the ogling and flattery confirmed her choice.
She had no stage experience, excepting school pageants, but that didn’t stop her from heading to London. Her parents tried to talk her into attending the local commercial college for girls that the Dominicans had opened. Then they just tried to talk her out of London. “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph, lassy, they are evacuatin’ people out o’ London and that’s where you’re fixin’ to go?” Her father took her by the shoulders and tried to stare some sense into her.
While several continents put the international havoc on the scale of an official World War, the Irish didn’t even call it a war but referred to it by the diminutive “The Emergency,” which naturally infuriated the English. Ireland was bent on maintaining her neutrality, and perhaps this contributed to Cliona’s determination. “I have to be going to London,” she shrugged. “That’s where the Ealing Studios are.”
Cliona was besotted with films. She liked viewing them and thinking about them and talking about them, so she was sure she would like being in them. The thing Cliona liked most about London was the number of cinemas she found there.
The thing she disliked most about London, the thing that made her homesick, was not so much the absence of family (she did miss them, but she was enjoying her independence) or the lack of familiar landmarks but the absence of lights. Cliona hated the blackout. As though it were the enemy. The blackout wasn’t just visual but palpable. She could feel it coming on every afternoon, like the return of a headache.
To the surprise and dismay of the Rooney clan, who looked for her speedy return, Cliona was hired at Ealing, first as an assistant to the assistant to the script girl, and then as a stand-in for the likes of Gracie Fields and Anna Lee, and finally for bit parts.
She went out several times with one of the cameramen employed at Ealing. Invariably, they would end up at the cinema. “A busman’s holiday,” he called it. Cliona found that the only nighttimes she didn’t feel stalked by the blackout were those she spent cocooned in a darkened cinema.
Rolly taught her about lighting and her face and the camera, the angles that were best for her, and she got more bit parts. Cliona was grateful to him. She liked him well enough but he didn’t stir anything in her. She could tell he was quite smitten, though. Enough to ask her to marry him. With a ring and all. She said no.
He thought she was giving him the brush, but she was sincere when she said she didn’t see why they couldn’t go on as they were. So they did go on, but Rolly grew less satisfied and more morose. Cliona said it had become clear he no longer enjoyed her company and they “should call it a day.” He told her that seeing her had become torture. Being so near but not close felt like she was punishing him. Or he was punishing himself.
She considered this. She didn’t like the notion that she was making him suffer. “Is it doin’ the bold thing that you’re after?”
It was a few minutes before Rolly understood she was talking about intercourse. It wasn’t just that he was unfamiliar with the Irish expression but that he was unused to sex as a topic of discussion. When he comprehended and then composed himself, he confessed it was all he thought about.
Cliona explained that, while she didn’t know if she believed in the institution of marriage, she wasn’t opposed in principle to the act of coitus. Finally, she said, “Well, you’re a kind man, Rolly, leastwise you’ve been kind to me, and curious I am meself about the deed.” She went on this way until Rolly realized she was offering to put him out of his misery. She suggested they set a date for it, but a glazed look had come over him, reminding her of her brother’s middle son the time the boy had emptied the sweets box. Trembling, he took her hand and shook his head. “Now,” he said.
Cliona decided she had no strong objection, so they went to his flat. It was the first time she’d seen where he lived, how he lived. Two rooms, minimally furnished, but the walls were papered with black-and-white photographs from films he’d shot—stills, he called them. Cliona wanted to stop to examine the images but he had clasped her hand and was drawing her into the second room with its neatly made metal-framed bed.
Pulling away, Cliona reclaimed her hand and with it she untucked her blouse from her skirt and began undoing buttons as he watched, slack-mouthed. When she had stepped out of her shoes and divested herself of blouse and skirt and slip and laid them neatly over the rail at the foot of the bed, he could remain still no longer. He sprang to cover the space between them. Rolly slid the gossamer straps of her brassiere off her shoulders. With a gasp, he cupped his hand around one of her small breasts and gave a strangled cry as he came all over himself. He mumbled an agonized apology but then saw Cliona had no idea what had happened so he knelt and removed the garters holding up her hose and then the hose themselves. This last made Cliona anxious as hose were hard to come by and she feared him snagging hers. Finally, he slipped her panties over her hips and down her long legs. A sob escaped him. Cliona patted his head and stepped away to fold down the blanket and top sheet and lie down on the bed.
He undressed hurriedly, turning his back to her to wipe himself with his undershirt. He already had a second erection by the time he wheeled to face her. She stared at his engorged member and would have liked to back out of the situation, out of his flat, out of London and this new adventure, but a retreat on the brink would have been cowardly and unsportsmanlike and unlike her.
As he entered her, Cliona cried out but stifled any more sounds of pain. Rolly was suffering too, by the sound of it.
Afterward, as he stroked her hair and kissed her cheek, she lay still and thoughtful. Cliona came to the conclusion that she didn’t like sex. It was painful and awkward and messy and horribly smelly. If it were her flat, she would burn the sheets.
She was not distraught at having tried it—how else could she know what it was really like as it was quite unimaginable? That anyone would want to go through that nasty business twice was beyond imagining. She told her cameraman they wouldn’t be doing any more of that.
By turns, he was distraught, penitent, and insistent. But none of it did him any good. After a month of entreaties, he was convinced that nothing he could do or say would get Cliona to accept either his hand in marriage or his hand anywhere on her willowy body again.
To expunge his passion, he had to turn her into a slut and a cock tease in his mind. And then, for corroboration, in the minds of others. Rolly’s new coldness, his knowing leer, made Cliona’s position in the studio much less pleasant. Then she stopped being called for bit parts, even for work as an extra. She imagined things were being said about her on and off set. And she was right.
It wasn’t long after the atmosphere in the studio changed that Cliona discovered she was pregnant. “That . . . mess,” she marveled, “the whole business lasting less than the time it took to undress—that’s all it takes to make another person.” She also marveled that it could happen the very first time; she’d assumed that the baby part took some skill or at least some practice. Of course she’d known of girls who had gotten pregnant when they didn’t want to, but she had figured that the fetus had accrued, resulting from some magic number of accumulated experiences.
She was a bit simple perhaps, but she had grown up in the dark ages before World War II, was barely eighteen, and had come from a family that had worked to shelter her not just from harsh realities but from all reality. She didn’t cling to fairy tales but had them tucked all around her, cushioned by well-meani
ng parents and older siblings who wanted to insulate her and indulge her. Her belief in Father Christmas outlasted all her baby teeth.
She might have declared herself uncertain about the institutions of the Church and of marriage, but as she considered her options, abortion was never one of them. Neither did it occur to her to consider giving the child up for adoption. Nor would she raise a bastard. Her only choice, as she saw it, was to provide a father for the child. But as she didn’t intend to do the bold thing ever again let alone on anything like a regular basis, she decided to give the child a dead father.
This was not as difficult as it might seem. At first she thought about choosing a soldier who had been killed at the front, a hero a son could look up to and a daughter could use as a standard to judge other men by, but soon saw complications. She’d have to acquire and master details about the war and the dead man’s record of service. And what about the War Widow’s Pension everyone would be expecting her to receive? A dead soldier would be troublesome.
Instead, she chose a different casualty of war, one that had the added advantage of being neatly unencumbered by family relations. Arlen Jones died in a collapsed rooming house during one of the worst nights of bombing in the horrible blitz. He had no known relatives, people who could object to her naming him as father on the child’s birth certificate, and the date of his demise would work nicely. The blitz could be blamed for her lack of their marriage certificate and all of his belongings, even for her having no photographs of her husband.
She had taken his name and scant biographical details from a roster of unclaimed bodies of victims. She wrote to her family back in Dublin of her marriage to an English baker a few months back and of her imminent return with the unborn child of their ill-starred union. She signed the letter Cliona Jones.
None doubted her. Not their child of grace made of butter. Headstrong Cliona had never lied to cover her tracks before. Rather, she had always seemed to enjoy defying convention. They saw no reason to suspect she had given up the practice. Besides, they were too busy with worrying about her future—a grieving widow not yet out of her teens about to embark on motherhood—and with forgiving her for her unforgivable marriage.
She gave notice at Ealing and left London before she started to show. The last thing she wanted was for Rolly to find out he was going to be a father. Then she’d never be quit of him.
The Rooney family welcomed her back like the prodigal she was. She had her choice among her parents’ and two of her siblings’ homes. She chose to bide with her parents. After her homecoming supper was cleared away and all the sisters and brothers had made their good nights, her parents bade her sit again at the table. Her mother clasped both Cliona’s hands in her own as her father said, “I won’t be bringin’ it up but this one time: how is it you come to be wed to an Englishman?”
“Love, I guess, is the answer.”
“’He was good to yeh?”
“Never an unkind word or gesture.”
“If he was no two-headed monster, then why not bring him home and be married proper?” her father thundered. “Why in secret?”
“Da, you know I would have felt two-faced being wed in a church and you would have been mad as a box o’ frogs to see me wed elsewhere. And then I thought you’d take to him being English a mite better if he were a fact rather than a threat.”
Teddy Rooney grunted. He regretted what she had done but he could see the logic in it. “And why was this Arlen Jones not away in His Majesty’s service?”
Cliona had wondered this, too, so she had an answer prepared. “His eyes,” she said. “Bad vision.” No one could fault her dead husband for that. “You should have seen the specs he wore, they were that thick.”
Sheila Rooney released her daughter’s hands and made the sign of the cross over herself as she asked, “How is it—thanks be to God—you happened not to be with your husband when the bombs hit?”
Cliona had almost rejected Arlen Jones as a candidate because of his occupation. The same night, a bank manager had been killed in the street when the portico of a hotel fell on him during the raid. She thought a bank-manager father would be more inspirational than a bread baker, but then she wouldn’t be able to explain her lack of any inheritance. Now she had reason to be grateful for Jones’s profession. “He was in bed hours before I got back. Our schedules coincided only on Sundays. He had to get up for work at three in the mornin’ six days a week. We were filming late that night, and by the time I got there, the fires had been put out, but there was no building upstanding and no husband lying in bed.”
Sheila started to cry softly, picturing her daughter standing in the ashes of her marriage. Cliona realized it would look well to shed a tear or two of her own, so she pretended to be in a movie. She imagined herself just coming back to Dublin and finding the rubble of London and the suffocating blackout shrouding her dear city.
True to his word, Ted Rooney never raised the subject of Arlen Jones again.
The night of May 30, 1941, Cliona’s water broke and the midwife was sent for. Bridie had made a favorable impression on her antenatal visits. She was young and earnest and seemed quite knowledgeable. She talked to Cliona not just about what she should and shouldn’t do but about the development of the fetus. On her first visit she told Cliona her baby was already the size of a plum. The next time she said, “Oh, you’ve got a turnip inside you now.” Eventually she was told she was carrying a red cabbage, then a cauliflower, then a green cabbage, then a coconut, and finally a pumpkin.
Cliona had only once seen either a coconut or a pumpkin with her own eyes and both on the very same occasion, a wrap-up party for cast and crew on Spare a Copper in which she played two nonspeaking roles, a music shop customer and the bewigged and buttoned-down secretary to a German spy, both of which ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, she got paid and the party was fun and the exotic centerpiece was divvied up and the produce went home piecemeal with the guests, a bonus you could sink your teeth into during the privations of rationing. Perhaps because she was well liked, or perhaps out of sympathy for being erased from the picture, Cliona had been awarded the coconut, but she shuddered at the thing, all hard and hairy on the outside—but hairy like it was balding—and sloshy on the inside. She didn’t know what to do with it. She traded her coconut for a small paper cone of hazelnuts, real nuts, she congratulated herself.
She didn’t care to contemplate a turnip, or cabbages of any color, or a disgusting, hairy coconut growing inside her. She continued to think of the interloper as the little plum throughout her pregnancy.
Cliona was already in bed with regular pains when Bridie arrived. The midwife got right to work, opening her case. She felt around and listened through the Pinard Horn and frowned. With one hand on Cliona’s belly, Bridie said something to Sheila Rooney during one of the contractions and the latter slipped out of the room. When she didn’t return immediately, Cliona wished she hadn’t begun this whole baby business. She thought, I’m just a babby meself. “I want me ma!” she wailed when another of the contractions came on.
When at last Sheila returned, she brought a strange woman into the bedroom, strange because she was not of the Rooneys’ acquaintance and strange because one side of her face was drawn up toward her ear.
“This is Sister Martha,” Bridie said. “She’s come to help with the birthing.”
“I’m a registered midwife,” the newcomer said briskly. “A full year’s training at Belfast’s Union Infirmary. I was in a fire when I was eight,” she added, turning her face toward the light for a full view. “But it didn’t affect my hands or my brain, the parts of me needed this night. So let’s have a look.”
Cliona finally understood that something was wrong, that this Sister Martha had been sent for. “What’s the matter with me babby? Why doesn’t someone tell me? Ma? Is it dead?”
Bridie lifted her head from the wooden horn she had resting
on Cliona’s belly. “No, no, your baby’s alive. The heartbeat is strong.”
“Your baby is in the breech position,” Martha said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s tryin’ to come out arseways,” her mother said.
“What?”
“Arse first instead of head first.” Sheila was wringing her hands because she didn’t know what else to do with them.
“That’s bad, is it?”
Bridie stepped between the bed and Cliona’s distraught mother. “Sister Martha is the best in Dublin when it comes to delivering a breech. Just do as Sister says and everything will be fine.”
Martha spread her hands like wings and moved down Cliona’s front and along her sides as if she were measuring her for a dress.
“Can you turn it?” Sheila Rooney asked. “I’ve heard how some can use their hands on the outside to turn the baby ’round on the inside. Have you ever done that?”
“I have done, but we’ll be doing otherwise tonight.”
“There’s dangers of their own come from that,” Bridie whispered.
“Your daughter,” Martha turned to the mother, “is long and narrow on the inside as well as the outside. Turning is too risky for the baby. Now—Cliona, is it?—now, Cliona, I want you to get out of the bed and squat down. Bridie, you take this arm and, Missus, you take the other. Let’s let gravity do some of the hard work.”
For a moment it passed through Cliona’s mind that this was the way Sister Martha took her revenge for what had happened to her face, the needless torture of the unscarred, but she was too sensible to hold such a thought for long. Cliona squatted as Bridie and her mother knelt on either side of her, keeping her upright.
“With the next contraction, push hard,” Martha instructed.
The Opposite of Chance Page 19