For a moment in the darkness she wept. It was true what she’d said to her visitors that afternoon: that she felt nothing now. It was true, yet sometimes she wept when she remembered how together they had weathered the strangeness of their emigration or when she thought of Liam now, living in mortal sin with the woman and her mother above the newsagent’s, not going to Confession or Mass any more. Every month money arrived from him, which with Miss Custle’s rent and what she earned herself from cleaning the Winnards’ flat three times a week was enough to manage on. But Liam never came back, to see her or to see Betty, which implied the greatest change of all in him.
Memories were always difficult for her. Alone now, she too easily remembered the countryside she had grown up in, and the face of the Reverend Mother at the convent, and Mrs Barry’s squat public house and grocery at a crossroads. Emir Ryall had stolen her Phillips’ atlas, putting ink blots over her name and substituting her own. Madge Foley had curled her hair for her. Liam had always been in the neighbouring farm, but until after they’d both left school she’d hardly noticed him. He’d asked her to go for a walk with him, and in a field that was yellow with buttercups he had taken her hand and kissed her, causing her to blush. He’d laughed at her, saying the pink in her cheeks was lovely. He was the first person she’d ever danced with, in a nameless roadside dance-hall, ten miles away.
It was then, while she was still a round-faced girl, that Bridget had first become aware of fate. It was what you had to accept, what you couldn’t kick against: God’s will, the Reverend Mother or Father Keogh would have said, but for Bridget it began with the kind of person you were. Out of that, the circumstances of your life emerged: Bridget’s shyness and her tendency to blush, her prettiness and her modesty, were the fate which had been waiting for her before she was born, and often she felt that Liam had been waiting for her also, that they were fated to fall in love because they complemented each other so well, he so bouncy and amusing, she so fond of the shadows. In those days it would have been impossible to imagine that he would ever go off with a woman in a newsagent’s.
They were married on a Saturday in June, in a year when the foxgloves were profuse. She wore a veil of Limerick lace, borrowed from her grandmother. She carried scarlet roses. Liam was handsome, dark as a Spaniard in the Church of the Holy Virgin, his blue eyes jokily darting about. She had been glad when all of it was over, the reception in Kelly’s Hotel, the car bedecked with ribbons. They’d gone away for three days, and soon after they’d returned they had had to emigrate to England because the sawmills where Líam had a job closed down. They’d been in London for more than twenty years when the woman came into his life.
Eventually Bridget slept, and dreamed of the countryside of her childhood. She sat on a cart beside her father, permitted to hold the reins of the horse while empty milk churns were rattled back from the creamery at the crossroads. Liam was suddenly there, trudging along in the dust, and her father drew up the reins in order to give him a lift. Liam was ten or eleven, a patch of sunburn on the back of his neck where his hair had been cut very short. It wasn’t really a dream, because all of it had happened in the days when Liam hadn’t been important.
Norma’s husband came on his own. ‘I hope you’ve no objection, Mrs Lacy,’ he said, smiling in his wide-eyed way. There was a wave in his fairish hair, she noticed, a couple of curls hanging over his forehead. Everything about him was agreeable.
‘Well, really I don’t know.’ She faltered, immediately feeling hot. ‘I really think it’s better if we don’t go on about it.’
‘I won’t keep you ten minutes, Mrs Lacy. I promise.’
She held the hall door open and he walked into the hall. He stepped over a Weetabix packet which Betty had thrown down and strode away from. In the kitchen Betty was unpacking the rest of the shopping, making a kind of singing noise, which she often did.
‘Sit down,’ Bridget said in the living-room, as she would to any visitor.
‘Thanks, Mrs Lacy,’ he said politely.
‘I won’t be a minute.’
She had to see to Betty in the kitchen. There was flour among the shopping, and eggs, and other items in bags that might become perforated or would break when dropped from the kitchen table to the floor. Betty wasn’t naughtier than any other child, but only a week ago, left on her own, she’d tried to make a cake.
‘You go and get the Weetabix,’ Bridget said, and Betty obediently marched into the hall to do so. Bridget hastily put the rest of the shopping out of reach. She took coloured pencils and a new colouring-book from a drawer and laid them out on the table. Betty didn’t much care for filling already-drawn outlines with colour and generally just scrawled her name all over them: Betty Lacy in red, and again in blue and orange and green.
‘Be a good big girl now,’ Bridget said.
‘Big,’ Betty repeated.
In the sitting-room Norma’s husband had picked up the Cork Weekly Examiner. As she entered, he replaced iron the pile of magazines near his armchair, saying that it appeared to be interesting.
‘It’s hard to know how to put this to you, Mrs Lacy.’ He paused, his smile beginning to fade. Seriousness invaded his face as his eyes passed over the contents of the living-room, over the sacred pictures and the odds and ends that Bridget had been meaning to throw out. He said:
‘Norma was in a bad way when I met up with her, Mrs Lacy. She’d been to the Samaritans; it was from them I heard about her. I’m employed by the council, actually. Social Services, counselling. That’s my job, see.’
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘Norma was suffering from depression. Unhappiness, Mrs Lacy. She got in touch with the Samaritans and later she came round to us. I was able to help her. I won her confidence through the counselling I could give her. I love Norma now, Mrs Lacy.’
‘Of course.’
‘It doesn’t often happen that way. A counsellor and a client.’
‘No, I’m sure not.’ She interrupted because she knew he was going to continue with that theme, to tell her more about a relationship that wasn’t her business. She said that to herself. She said to herself that six years ago Norma had drifted into her life, leaving behind a child. She said to herself that the adoption of Betty had been at Norma’s request. ‘You’re a lovely person, Mrs Lacy,’ Norma had said at the time.
‘I can’t get to her at the moment,’ Norma’s husband explained. ‘Ever since the other day she’s hiding within herself. All the good that’s been done, Mrs Lacy, all the care of our own relationship: it’s going for nothing, you see.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She went to the Samaritans because she was suicidal. There was nothing left of the poor thing, Mrs Lacy. She was hardly a human person.’
‘But Betty, you see – Betty has become my child.’
‘I know, I know, Mrs Lacy.’ He nodded earnestly, understandingly. ‘The Samaritans gave Norma back her humanity, and then the council housed her. When she was making the recovery we fell in love. You understand, Mrs Lacy? Norma and I fell in love.’
‘Yes, I do understand that.’
‘We painted the flat out together. Saturdays we spent buying bits of furniture, month by month, what we could afford. We made a home because a home was what Norma had never had. She never knew her parents: I don’t know if you were aware of that? Norma comes of a deprived background, she had no education, not to speak of. When I first met her, I had to help her read a newspaper.’ Suddenly he smiled. ‘She’s much better now, of course.’
Bridget felt a silence gathering, the kind there’d been several of the other afternoon. She broke it herself speaking as calmly as she could, trying to hold her visitor’s eye but not succeeding because he was glancing round the living-room again.
‘I’m sorry for Norma,’ she said. ‘I was sorry for her at the time, that is why I took in Betty. Only my husband and I insisted that it had to be legal and through the proper channels. We were advised about that, in case there was tro
uble later.’
‘Trouble? Who advised you, Mrs Lacy?’ He blinked and frowned. His voice sounded almost dense.
‘We went to a solicitor,’ she said, remembering that solicitor, small and moustached, recommended by Father Gogarty. He’d been very helpful; he’d explained everything.
‘Mrs Lacy, I don’t want to sound rude but there are two angles we can examine this case from. There is Norma’s and there is your own. You’ve seen the change in Norma; you must take my word for it that she could easily revert. Then consider yourself, Mrs Lacy, as another person might see you, a person like myself for instance, a case-worker if you like, an outsider.’
‘I don’t think of it as a case, with angles or anything else. I really don’t want to go on like this. Please.’
‘I know it’s difficult, and I’m sorry. But when the baby has become an adolescent you could find it hard to cope, Mrs Lacy. I see a lot of that in my work, a woman on her own, no father figure in the home. I know you have a caring relationship with Betty, Mrs Lacy, but the fact can’t be altered that you’re alone in this house with her, day in day out. All I’m saying is that another case-worker might comment on that.’
‘There’s Miss Custle too.’
‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Lacy?’
‘There’s a lodger, Miss Custle.’
‘You have a lodger? Another woman on her own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Young, is she?’
‘No, Miss Custle isn’t young.’
‘An elderly woman, Mrs Lacy?’
‘Miss Custle still works on the Underground.’
‘The Underground?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see, Mrs Lacy, what might be commented upon is the lack of playmates. Just yourself, and a woman who is employed on the Underground. Again, Mrs Lacy, I’m not saying there isn’t caring. I’m not saying that for an instant.’
‘Betty is happy. Look, I’m afraid I’d rather you didn’t come here again. I have things to do now –’
‘I’m sorry to offend you, Mrs Lacy.’
She had stood up, making him stand up also. He nodded and smiled at her in his patient manner, which she now realized was professional, he being a counsellor. He said again he was sorry he’d offended her.
‘I just thought you’d want to hear about Norma,’ he said before he left, and on the doorstep he suddenly became awkward. The smile and the niceness vanished: solemnity replaced them. ‘It’s like putting a person together again. If you know what I mean, Mrs Lacy.’
In the kitchen Betty printed her name across the stomach of a whale. She heard voices in the hall, but paid them no attention. A moment later the door banged and then her mother came into the kitchen.
‘Look,’ Betty said, but to her surprise her mother didn’t. Her mother hugged her, whispering her name. ‘You’ve been washing your face,’ Betty said. ‘It’s all cold.’
That afternoon Bridget cleaned the Winnards’ flat, taking Betty with her, as she always did. She wondered about mentioning the trouble she was having with Norma and her husband to Mrs Winnard, who might suggest something for her to say so that the matter could be ended. Mrs Winnard was pretty and bespectacled, a kind young woman, full of sympathy, but that afternoon her two obstreperous boys, twins of two and a half, were giving her quite a time so Bridget didn’t say anything. She hoovered the hallway and the bathroom and the four bedrooms, looking into the kitchen from time to time, where Betty was playing with the Winnard boys’ bricks. She still hadn’t said anything when the time came to pack up to go, and suddenly she was glad she hadn’t because quite out of the blue she found herself imagining a look on Mrs Winnard’s sympathetic face which suggested that the argument of Norma and her husband could not in all humanity be just dismissed. Bridget couldn’t imagine Mrs Winnard actually saying so, but her intuition about the reaction remained.
In the park, watching Betty on a slide, she worried about that. Would the same thing happen if she talked to Father Gogarty? Would an instant of hesitation be reflected in his grey features as he, too, considered that Norma should not be passed by? Not everyone had experienced as awful a life as Norma had. On top of that, the regret of giving away the only child you had been able to have was probably a million times worse than simply being childless.
Not really wishing to, Bridget remembered how fate had seemed to her when she was a girl: that it began with the kind of person you were. ‘We’re greedy,’ Liam had confessed, speaking of himself and the woman. ‘I suppose we’re made like that, we can’t help it.’ The woman was greedy, he had meant, making it cosier by saying he was too.
She watched Betty on the slide. She waved at her and Betty waved back. You couldn’t call Norma greedy, not in the same way. Norma made a mess of things and then looked around for other people: someone to look after a child that had been carelessly born, the Samaritans, the man she’d married. In the end Norma was lucky because she’d survived, because all the good in her had been allowed to surface. It was the man’s love that had done that, his gentleness and his sincerity. You couldn’t begrudge her anything. Like Liam and the woman, fate had come up trumps for her because of the person she was.
‘Watch, Mummy,’ Betty shouted from the top ot the slide, and again Bridget watched her sliding down it.
Eventually Bridget did speak to Mrs Winnard and to Father Gogarty because it was hard to keep the upset to herself, and because it worried her even more when she kept telling herself that she was being imaginative about what their reaction would be. Mrs Winnard said the couple’s presumption was almost a matter for the police; Father Gogarty offered to go and see them, if they could easily be found. But before either Mrs Winnard or the priest spoke Bridget was certain that the brief flicker she’d been dreading had come into their faces. There had been the hesitation and the doubt and – far quicker than thought – the feeling that a child belonged more suitably with a young married couple than with a lone middle-aged woman and an ageing employee of the London Underground. In continuing to talk about it to Miss Custle herself, Bridget could swear she experienced the same intuition: beneath all Miss Custle’s outrage and fury there was the same reasonable doubt.
The telephone rang one evening and the young man’s voice said:
‘Norma hasn’t done anything silly. I just thought you’d like to know that, Mrs Lacy.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m glad she’s all right.’
‘Well, she’s not really all right of course. But she does take heart from your caring in the past.’
‘I did what a lot of people would have done.’
‘You did what was necessary, Mrs Lacy. You understood a cry for help. It’s an unpleasant fact, but neither she nor Betty might be alive today if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Oh, I can’t believe that for an instant.’
‘I think you have to, you know. There’s only one small point, Mrs Lacy, if you could bear with me. I spoke to a colleague about this case – well, having a personal interest, I thought I better. You may remember I mentioned an outsider? Well, strangely enough my colleague raised an interesting question.’
‘Look, I don’t want to go on talking about any of this. I’ve told you I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what you’re suggesting.’
‘My colleague pointed out that it isn’t just Norma’s circumstances which have changed, nor indeed your own. There’s a third factor in all this, my colleague pointed out: this child is being brought up as the child of Irish parents. Well, fair enough you may say, Mrs Lacy, until you remember that the Irish are a different kettle of fish today from what they were ten years ago. How easy is it, you have to ask yourself, to be a child of Irish parents today, to bear an Irish name, to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church? That child will have to attend a London school, for instance, where there could easily be hostility. Increasingly we come across this in our work, Mrs Lacy.’
‘Betty is my child-’
‘Of course. That’s quite understood, Mrs Lac
y. But what my colleague pointed out is that sooner or later Norma is going to worry about the Irish thing as well. What will go through her mind is that it’s not just a question of her baby being affected by a broken marriage, but of her baby being brought up in an atmosphere that isn’t always pleasant. I’m sorry to mention it, Mrs Lacy, but, as my colleague says, no mother on earth would care to lie awake at night and worry about that.’
Her hand felt hot and damp on the telephone receiver. She imagined the young man sitting in an office, concerned and serious, and then smiling as he tried to find a bright side. She imagined Norma in their newly decorated flat, needing her child because everything was different now, hoping.
‘I can’t go on talking to you. I’m sorry.’
She replaced the receiver, and immediately found herself thinking about Liam. It was Liam’s fault as well as hers that Betty had been adopted and was now to be regarded as the child of Irish parents. Liam had always firmly regarded himself as Betty’s father, even if he never came near her now.
She didn’t want to go and see him. She didn’t want to make the journey on a number 9 bus, she didn’t want to have to see the woman’s predatory lips. But even as she thought that, she could hear herself asking Mrs Haste to have Betty for a couple of hours one afternoon. ‘Hullo, Liam,’ she said a few days later in the newsagent’s.
She’d waited until there were no customers, and to her relief the woman wasn’t there. The woman’s old mother, very fat and dressed all in brown, was resting in an armchair in a little room behind the shop itself, a kind of store-room it seemed to be, with stacks of magazines tied with string, just as they’d come off the van.
‘Heavens above!’ Liam said.
The Collected Stories Page 111