The Magdalen

by Marita Conlon-McKenna

  But Majella Doyle could give no comfort. She sat in the armchair, white-faced and stone cold, locked in a world of her own.

  Esther felt like a part of her had died too that day. She could feel her mother blaming her for what happened every time she looked at her. So she ironed shirts, and set out her brothers’ suits. She pressed her mother’s costume, and contacted relatives telling them the time and day of the funeral. There were a hundred and one jobs to do and she filled her unquiet mind with them.

  The small church was packed to capacity, some of the neighbours having to stand outside, Father Brendan glad of the support for the bereaved family. He had been up in Doyle’s most of the day and evening before. The little girl had reminded him for all the world of a saint, lying there in her wooden coffin. The mother now sat in the front row of the church. Bernard Lawless had given her something to take the edge off what was happening; she was obviously still in shock, sitting there like a stone statue at her own daughter’s funeral. In the congregation he knew there was hardly a woman who hadn’t suffered the loss of a child, usually in infancy or at birth, or during epidemics, but somehow this loss had been more tragic. Women had to learn to carry this cross, and put these things behind them. Majella Doyle would in time get over the child’s death. He began the familiar Latin words of the mass as the people joined him in prayer.

  Esther knelt, watching the priest up at the altar. Usually Nonie pushed and shoved in the pew beside her, playing with her gloves, pulling at her mantilla, bored by the long mass. Today there was no-one to shush or scold. Her sister was gone.

  Suffer the little children. That’s what Father Devaney had talked about in his sermon. Nonie would always have been a child. Her body might have grown up, but her mind would have stubbornly stayed in the place of games and rhymes and tricks. She would never have grown up. Comfort, the priest had said they should take comfort from the fact that Nonie had so recently made her first confession and received the sacrament of First Holy Communion. How in God’s name could they take comfort from that! They who had practised and preached for weeks in the kitchen with her all about Jesus and his mother, and God his father, and how much they loved her. They had loved her so much, they had let her fall and suffocate in a stinking bog hole up the back of beyond. Esther almost choked with anger at it all.

  For more than half an hour they had stood outside the church in Carraig Beag as almost everybody in the area came to pay their respects. Esther had not realized how much her sister had been loved. Total strangers shook her hand, their eyes welling with tears. “Such a dote!” “A grand wee lassie!” “God be good to her.”

  Con had come, he and Nuala McGuinness sitting near the back of the church. He had held her hand for a long time when they had come to offer their sympathy. Nonie had been laid to rest beside her father in Carraig Beag’s small graveyard. The heavy earth had been dug up, Esther wanting to scream as it reclaimed her sister, watching the earthworms weave in and out of the exposed dark clay as the small pine coffin was laid on top of Dermot Doyle’s. Sea-breezes belted against the mourners as the final prayers at the grave were said. Aunts and cousins and distant relations had appeared out of nowhere, filling the house. Trays of sandwiches were passed around, glasses filled, tea poured. Bottles of whiskey, sherry and porter, supplied by McEvoy’s, were drunk. A fine funeral, that’s what they would all say afterwards, thought Esther. A fine fecking funeral!

  Chapter Twelve

  Bread, ham, tomatoes, whiskey. She’d vomited them all, kneeling on the cold lino of the outside privy. Acid in her stomach and throat, burning her as she got sick into the toilet bowl in the early hours of the morning.

  “Esther! Are you all right?” It was Tom, standing outside the door, worried about her. “Are you sick?”

  “Aye,” she groaned, just wishing her good kindhearted brother would let her be. She was sick all right, sick with guilt, thinking of herself straddled naked across Con in his bed while her small sister’s lungs filled with stagnant water, suffocating her, less than a quarter of a mile away. “There’s nothing you can do, Tom, I’ll be fine. Go back to bed.”

  In the following days, nightmares haunted her and she felt sick to her very soul. This time she could not go to the confessional and have Father Devaney absolve her. There was no absolution. She had seen Con twice since the funeral. He’d called to the house the night after, and they’d walked along the coast road, barely touching. A few days later she’d walked up to the farm, anxious to see him. They had lain on the summer grass, kissing and stroking each other, but she was too afraid to do any more. She’d stopped Con when his hand had moved to lift her skirt and fondle the top of her thighs. Annoyed, he had rolled over from her, unspeaking. Every time she looked at her mother’s eyes, she blamed herself. Her mother had trusted her to mind and protect Nonie. They all knew the child was touched, not normal, and needed more minding. She’d let her down. Aunt Patsy and Father Brendan and neighbours and friends had all come to visit Majella.

  “Snap out of it, girl!” she’d heard her aunt say to her younger sister. “The child is in heaven, a far better place for her than the likes of this cruel world. You have a family to raise. The boys and Esther need you!”

  But Esther knew that the needs of her other children mattered not at all to her mother in comparison to the loss of her special child. Majella Doyle had retreated to a place where she would not have to tolerate more pain. Bewildered, the boys did not know how to cope with their mother’s blank stares and mumbled indifference to anything they said.

  “What’s wrong with Mammy?” whispered nine-year-old Paddy. “Doesn’t she love us anymore?”

  Esther hugged her plump-faced baby brother, knowing that he was only voicing the sentiments of them all. Even Gerard had softened to their mother, bringing her cups of tea, reading her snippets from the papers and trying to cajole her to come for a drive with him into town, all without success.

  So her brothers worked the farm, the fishing, the land, while Esther did her best to run the household. The boys were always starving and she cooked mountains of food, increasingly nauseated by it. Con had gone back home for a few weeks to visit his parents. He had got word to say that his father had had a stroke, and was paralysed down one side and unable to speak. He’d set off for West Cork immediately, barely saying goodbye to her.

  “Don’t be fretting, Esther, I’ll be back to Carraig Beag just as soon as I can,” he’d promised. How Esther missed him, and longed for the sheer physical comfort of his arms around her.

  Gerard found comfort in the arms of the publican’s daughter. They were doing a strong line. Brona McEvoy had become a regular visitor to the cottage, never arriving empty-handed: a spare apple or rhubarb tart, a baby bottle of whiskey for Majella. Esther did not like to see their mother sipping greedily at a mug of hot whiskey and cloves, but had to admit it did seem to relax her more. There were bottles of orange squash for the children and one time a big fizzing syphon of red lemonade. Donal and Tom teased Ger about her, making comments about the unevenness of her skin, and the time they’d seen her with a whiskery lip. Ger had kicked them both on the backside. Brona McEvoy might not be the most beautiful-looking girl in the district, but there was no doubt that she was the apple of her father’s eye since the desertion of her brother to the foreign missions. With her long straight dark hair, heavy lashes, and sallow colouring, she looked fine enough pulling pints and chatting to customers as she polished the glasses behind the bar. She was a hard worker, which was another thing in her favour as far as he was concerned. After hours she would sit in his truck, letting him suck her heavy tits and rubbing and stroking him till he was almost mental for it—she was saving it for her marriage bed, she insisted, driving him to the crazy consideration of being the one to share it with her. He knew that John Joe would welcome him as a son-in-law, and held him in high regard where business was concerned. He could do worse than marry Brona.

  Tom had finished school and was hoping to get good res
ults in his exams, as he wanted to train to be a teacher; it was a profession he admired and he longed to join the world of learning. Esther envied his certainty about his future. She wondered how long her mother’s grief would continue, and how much longer she would be blamed.

  Her monthly had failed to appear. The rags her mother provided lay unused in the drawer. For once she prayed for the dull pain in her back and the heavy cramping period pains to arrive, but no such luck. By another twenty-eight days later she knew without a doubt that she was pregnant, her tingling breasts and sick stomach testament to her fertility. She had to speak to Con, tell him that she was expecting his child. She was uncertain of his reaction. She had called up by McGuinness’s a few times, leaving messages for him. She knew that he was back from West Cork and wondered why he was avoiding her. She was fed up waiting for him to call down to her. Obsessed, she checked and rechecked the Society of the Sacred Heart calendar that hung in her bedroom, hoping above hope that she had made some error in her calculations, got her dates wrong. She prayed to the Virgin Mother to help her, lit candles for her special intention at Sunday mass, and sobbed silent useless tears in her bed at night, but nothing would change the fact that she had not bled for weeks.

  Determined, she knew that she had to speak to Con, tell him about the baby. He would stand by her, they’d get married. He’d work something out. She washed her hair till it shone, and put on her flowery summer dress and sandals.

  Waiting till evening when she knew all the work would be done, she set off for McGuinness’s. It was a warm evening and she felt clammy and nervous as she walked along, wondering how Conor would take the news, a lonesome cricket chirping in the parched grass along the roadside. There had been no rain for about three weeks and the land lay cracked and raw. The farmhouse sat still in warm sunshine, Nuala’s heavy black bicycle resting against the whitewashed wall.

  Esther went around to the back door. His boots lay there, so she knew he was around. She peered through the scullery and pantry and kitchen windows, but there was no sign of him. The back door was ajar and she stepped inside. A lazy bluebottle buzzed over the kitchen table; trying the blue and white muslin-covered milk jug and the sticky covered jampot, ignoring the domed metal cover over the sliced cold meats, it pitched on the abandoned rose-patterned plate. She watched as it licked the slice of bread and trick-tracked across the remnants of baby-pink ham. Out in the hallway the grandfather clock ticked heavily. Perhaps he was in his room. Making her way along the narrow flagstoned corridor, she realized that he was there. “Con!” she called, pushing in the door.

  White bare skin and a tangle of legs and flesh, he kneeling on the bed, his penis erect and huge and Nuala naked, her scrawny breasts and jutting hips and mouse-coloured pubic hair egging him on. Esther recoiled, shocked, sickened.

  “Jesus! Esther!” he cried, trying to get up.

  “What’s that Doyle girl doing in my house!” screamed the middle-aged woman, trying to cover herself with the sheet.

  “You shite! You dirty-looking bastard!” cried Esther, disgusted by the both of them and the thought that she had shared that bed with him. Scarcely able to breathe or think, she ran out of the house as fast as she could, vomiting along the roadside, staining her dress and sandals.

  He called down to the cottage two hours later. She sat dryeyed waiting for him. The others had gone to the Stations which was being held up at the McEvoy’s large house in the village, Ger done up like a dog’s dinner and Mother having a little whiskey to relax her before they’d set off.

  Conor had two big pimples on his neck. Funny she hadn’t noticed them before.

  “What did you go and have to do that for?” he accused her.

  “You were with her! With Nuala!”

  “You upset her, coming into the house like that,” he replied testily. “She’s a very private person. She doesn’t want any gossip or talk.”

  “How long have you been sleeping with her?”

  “She’s lonely, it just happened.”

  “How long?”

  “A few months.”

  “Months! Before you met me!”

  “Aye. It just happened. It’s one of those things!”

  Esther felt like laughing hysterically, like scraping the skin off his face, like sticking her tongue in his mouth, kissing him, seeing if all this was real or imagined.

  A canyon of silence lay between them.

  “I came to the house because we need to talk,” begged Esther. “I had to see you.”

  “Before you say any more, Esther … I think you are a lovely girl, and what we had was special, but Nuala and I are involved now. I should have said something to you, broken it off earlier, but what with you losing your sister, I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Involved with her! You’re involved with me! And as for upsetting me, I’m upset enough! I’m going to have a baby, your baby, Conor!” she said, almost hysterical.

  He raised his head up from his hands and for a second Esther thought he would strike her. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Christ!” His face filled with disgust.

  “What will we do?” she insisted.

  “We … ? I’ll not marry you, Esther, if that’s what you’re after.”

  She recoiled. “You’ll marry that old spinster I suppose,” she suggested sarcastically.

  “Nuala and I have discussed it,” he admitted stubbornly. “The farm needs a man to run it.”

  “Do you love her?” she demanded angrily.

  He refused to answer.

  “You said you loved me, you told me you loved me!”

  “I meant it, Esther, Jesus, I really meant it then, but with Nuala it’s different! You and I’d have no life together. Where would I work, where would we live! We’d never have a place of our own. We’d never have a bob between us.”

  “And that would matter!”

  “Aye, it would matter. We’d end up hating each other.”

  Anger scorched her eyes. “What about me and the baby?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  They sat silent and miserable, like two strangers, she longing for him to reach out and touch her and make everything right, him anxious to escape the cottage and her.

  “I have some savings, I could let you have them,” he offered.

  “What for?”

  “If you wanted to go away, go to England, for doctors or whatever,” he explained lamely.

  “Keep your bloody money, I don’t want a penny of it, since money is so important to you!” He wanted rid of her and rid of the baby. She could see the fear in his eyes. “I might have the baby here, stay with my family. Raise our child here in Carraig Beag.”

  A look of utter panic and pure hatred crossed his face.

  She stood up. “Get out of here, you bastard! Get out!” she screamed, pushing him out of the door. “You make me sick!”

  Bile gathered in the back of her throat as she watched him go. They had nothing more to say to each other. Whatever had happened between them was over. She had lost everything and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Next!” called Bernard Lawless to the near-empty waiting room attached to the side of his house. He could hear Jack Kearns coughing: severe emphysema, with little to be done about it.

  The young Doyle girl was ahead of him and he could sense her embarrassment already at visiting him; there was no sign of her mother or the rest of them.

  He gestured to her to sit down in his small surgery. She looked washed-out, pale, perhaps after the shock and grief of her sister’s accident. He went to the filing cabinet in the corner and took out a slim folder, laying it flat on the desk.

  “I think I might be expecting a baby,” she blurted out, “but I’m not sure.”

  Bernard Lawless sighed. The age-old story: another young girl in trouble. “How long is it since your last period?” he asked matter-of-factly, jotting down the date. “Well le
t’s see if we can confirm if you are or are not pregnant first.”

  A faint glimmer of hope gleamed in her eyes that there might be some other cause for her missed monthlies. Handing her a metal bowl, he sent her down the hall to the bathroom to give a sample of urine for testing. Then he examined her, already noticing the enlarged breasts and able to detect the growing fundus. He checked her blood pressure and weight. She looked like a scared rabbit, terrified out of her wits at what he was going to tell her, which after all was what she knew already.

  “Come and sit down, Esther,” he said kindly. “The test will take a few days but I think it will only tell us what you suspect already. You are going to have a baby.”

  Tears welled in her eyes and she sniffed, trying not to cry.

  Checking his calendar, he gave her an approximate date in March. “You are young and healthy and should have a normal pregnancy. Have you told the baby’s father yet?”

  She swallowed hard. “He doesn’t want the baby, Dr. Lawless, or anything to do with me now that this has happened.”

  Bernard Lawless gripped his pen. Another bastard somewhere out there. Why did these young girls fall for it every time, let themselves be used? “Do I know him? Would you like me to talk to him? Perhaps he’ll come around, change his mind.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about your mother? She’s a good woman, look how well she cared for Nonie, she’ll help you.”

  Esther sat across from him, numb. How could a stranger ever understand the complex shifting relationship that existed between Majella and herself?

  “Have you told her yet?”

  “No!”

  “Esther, you are fit and well but having a baby is not something you can cope with alone. You must tell Majella and, if she disapproves, well, there are alternatives until your child is born. You know I’m here if you need me to come and talk to.”