by Laura Elliot
Inevitably, looking back like this too often caused the black dog to snap at her heels, so it was better to look outwards as the tour boats nosed their way into the fiord. When she glimpsed flashes of light, she knew that photos were being taken of their house ─ what could be seen of it beyond the trees ─ and that the tour guides were telling those tourists that it was the home of the reclusive artist, George Maclure, whose great-grandfather once ran the now-defunct Maclure Cannery. Nothing left of the cannery now except rusting steel, the bleached skeletons of fishing boats, and this vast relic of a house that had been built originally for a family of eight. These days, it was occupied only by ghosts, Marianne often thought. One a pale shade of his former self, and herself all hollowed out.
In the evenings she read to her husband. He favoured Westerns; he was a Zane Grey fan: Forlorn River, The Desert of Wheat, Tales of Lonely Trails. Recently, he had started asking her to read from her diary; the one she began when she first came to him. At first, she had resisted his request and claimed she was unable to find it. She had no desire to look back to that troubled time, but she soon realised that he was trying to hold on to the circumstances that had drawn them together before that memory was taken from him. Knowing this, she read to him in a steady voice that belied the emotions raging inside her. When would she be able to stop yearning for all she had lost when her mother lifted Adele from her arms and she ran away from the horror of Sergeant Bale’s pitiless accusation? Nothing, neither time nor distance, could change the fact that she was a penitent, unrepentant of the crime she had committed yet unable to forgive herself for abandoning her daughter.
50
Twenty-four years previously
I thought the Tank was the loneliest place in the world to be but here is worse. Mr Maclure tells me I’m safe. When he says I’ll get used to living with him, I know he hasn’t a clue. How am I supposed to get used to living on the edge of the world? That’s what it feels like. All those cliffs and rocks and the waves bashing off them and roaring in my ears.
I stand on the cliff every day and watch for the boat. I know it’s on its way. It has to be. Sergeant Bale is the long arm of the law. He always gets to the nub of the matter and he meant it that night when he said I’d spend the rest of my life in jail. He’ll come with Garda Gunning and they’ll have truncheons and handcuffs and big fists. Maybe they’ll throw me into the same cell that Shane was in.
I’m able to picture Shane’s face again. I couldn’t for ages but now when I see him in my mind, he’s got blood all over his mouth and nose so it’s not really him I’m seeing, just the blood. I’ve only been able to do that since Amaia gave me a present of this diary. I told her about the one that got burned in the fire and she said sometimes the only way to make sense of the world is to journal. That’s what she does when she’s not cleaning and cooking for Mr Maclure or looking after her children. She has five, two boys, three girls, and a husband with tattoos on his face. He’s scary but she says he’s really only a pussycat and the tattoos have all sorts of meanings about family and the past. I don’t have a tattoo, or a moko, as Amaia calls it, but I feel as if everything about me is branded in red on my skin and I’ll never be able to remove it.
I left a moko on Shane. The marks on his arms must have been a gift from heaven for Sergeant Bale.
Scratches made by my nails, clawing at him, unable to see his face and believing they had returned. The statement I signed, I thought that by doing so he would be released but it sent him away to the other side of the world. We were done for as soon as Sergeant Bale recognised the cigarette packet. Chinese cigarettes, I smelled the smoke on Keith that time when he snatched my hat and pressed me against the wall of the snooker hall. Such a strange smell, smoky and fruity all mixed up, and it was there again on his stinky breath that night.
The Chinese letters on the box meant nothing to me then but later, in Atonement, I understood. No wonder Sergeant Bale stopped all enquiries and ran us out of Reedstown. It was easy to guess who the other one was. But the third one… I never wanted to believe it was Bob and I didn’t until Adele was born and I saw the cast of him on her tiny face. It didn’t matter then. Later, if I’d been able to keep her, I could have dealt with all those confused feelings but then, all that mattered was planning to escape, as Barbara had done.
The cliff when I stand on Cape Maclure is high. Such a long drop to the rocks below. Today I took one step closer to the edge. Just one step. It made me sway and the ticklish feeling in the pit of my stomach was the strongest yet. Mr Maclure says the boat won’t come. Only tour boats enter Maclure Sound and the Gardai have no powers of arrest in New Zealand. He sounds impatient when he talks to me. Like he hates me being in his studio or his house and can’t figure out how a teenage killer ended up living with him. I can’t figure it out either. One minute I’m nursing my baby in Atonement, then I’m standing on a cliff and moving one step closer to the edge every day. I know lots happened between those two moments. It’s just hard to figure it all out. When I try to do so, I end up choking, like the smoke is still in my lungs, and then Amaia gets cross with me because I forgot to take my inhaler again.
The sun was shining like gold on the ocean the first morning I was here. I knew it was night-time in Ireland and I kept thinking of Adele lying in the dark crying for me, like I was crying for her. That’s the first time the choking started. Mr Maclure had to ring for the flying doctor, who gave me the inhaler. That’s two months ago and the doctor has flown to the cape to see me twice since then. There’re lots of seaplanes here. They use them like we use bikes in Ireland. And there’s boats too. That’s why I can’t stop waiting for Sergeant Bale with his big red hands holding on to my arms the way he did that night when he said he was going to put me in jail for life and was throwing away the key because I murdered Gloria Thornton.
51 Marianne
This morning George was snoozing on the veranda when she entered his studio. Since his illness had taken his power away, the bristles on his paintbrush were stiff and dry, his palette washed clean. Once a storehouse for the cannery, it was a vast, barn-like building, filled with paintings he had abandoned partway through, or those he had finished and then rejected for reasons she had never understood. His paintings roared. That was the impression they had created in her mind the first time she saw them. Roaring waves and storm-tossed forests, the tumbling fall of rock and ice. The paintings that moved her most were the ones of stunted trees hurtling downwards from the cliffs, their fragile roots torn loose from rocky crevices. Her roots on Cape Maclure were just as shallow but they had enough strength to keep her in a prison with an open door.
George had taught her to paint during those early years but her paintings were too grim to attract buyers. Who wanted to see broken glass on top of walls, bars on a window, an empty cot, flames raging? She seemed to be incapable of painting anything else and after a while she stopped trying. George said she had talent. It was the only time she remembered him being angry with her. Talent was a gift from the heavens and squandering it an unforgivable sin, he stated. Not that he believed in sin, or what he called ‘religious balderdash,’ which Marianne found strange at first, considering his favourite nephew was a priest.
George was tall then, and strong-limbed, a gruff, loud-voiced and bewildered guardian, saddled with a traumatised young mother. Cape Maclure was his retreat from the world. He had travelled its four corners, tasted fame, love, notoriety, wealth, and all were found wanting. On the cape, named after his great-grandfather, He’d planned to spend his days peacefully painting the landscape of his youth. Instead, he found himself nursing her back from the edges of insanity and despair.
A treasure trove, George told her when his voice was still strong. His paintings, all hers on his death. What would her life on Cape Maclure be like when he died? Would she cling to the solitude of the peninsula or step onto the ferry, as he wanted her to do? She could set up a gallery in Kaikoura. Unseen George Maclure paintings – she would be on to
a winner with such a collection, he believed. She found it difficult to believe anyone outside Cape Maclure had ever heard of him but Van, his agent, claimed otherwise.
Trekkers came and went along the cliffs that dominated the peninsula. Sometimes, they stopped at the house and asked for their water bottles to be refilled, but, otherwise, the solitude she shared with her husband was seldom disturbed, apart from the flying doctor, who checked on George every week. Van called occasionally to announce the sale of another George Maclure painting, and Amaia always came to see them when she returned to visit her husband’s grave. After she had left to live with her married daughter in Kaikoura, Marianne had taken over the household chores and what was meant to be a temporary arrangement had not changed since.
When he first became ill and they went to Christchurch for a diagnosis, Marianne had been dazed by the noise, the harried faces hurrying towards the wards, the brisk steps of medical staff, the claustrophobic order of confined spaces. Could she ever adapt to new surroundings? Ever shake off the feeling of being watched, judged, convicted? She had had no idea that the fear was still coiled as tightly as ever inside her. The belief that a hand would reach out from the crowd and clasp her in irons. It had been possible to contain her imagination on Cape Maclure, where the small community who lived on the peninsula had long ceased to wonder about the reclusive artist and his much younger wife.
Living on the cape had changed her beyond recognition, she believed. Rory disagreed and said that she still had ‘that look’. When she pressed him as to what he meant, he said ‘untouched innocence and vulnerability’. It was a strange thing to say to a grown woman who had celebrated her fortieth birthday and was four years a wife. But she understood what he meant. She was an unfinished piece of work, her heart hacked to pieces before it had a chance to fly. Her mind, also, its stunted growth still trapping her in Atonement packing medals in poxy boxes, as Barbara once wrote. She hadn’t thought about the poem for years yet the words were still there, learned faithfully and remembered as she recited them loudly in her husband’s abandoned studio.
All day we pack in poxy boxes
Mother Gloria’s paradoxes.
Blessed with spite, with greed and bile
Medals to bewitch, beguile
Those chosen ones who think their hates
Will bring them through the golden gates.
Such joy to know each crazy Thorn,
Who look upon us with such scorn,
Will kiss the face that’s stamped in tin
The face they think is free from sin,
And never know that we’ve all spat
A glob upon their sacred tat.
Barbara had dismissed her poem as a bit of nonsense. Doggerel, she had called it. She was going to be a real writer when she escaped from Atonement, and reveal the truth about the Thorns. Marianne had read all her books. Rory sent them to her as soon as they were released. They were wise and witty, helpful to women who planned on smashing the glass ceiling or to those whose ambitions were simply to seek fulfilment in their own way. She wrote about freedom from fear, how to be confident, content, satisfied and, if her readers had the wisdom to recognise it, how to embrace happiness. But she never wrote about Atonement. Somewhere along the way, she must have decided not to give currency to her past. She had four children. The eldest was called Aaron. Her first book had been dedicated to him.
To my precious Aaron. Who came to me in flight and on the wings of courage.
Her readers must have wondered what she meant. Not Marianne. Or Malachi, if he still lived and was moved to read her books. Barbara was the one who got away. But the others –what had happened to them? Rory said that those who were there on the night of the fire were taken to hospital to be assessed and then discharged into the care of the State. The illegal adoption of the babies from Atonement had been stopped but Gloria’s past activities had been hushed up, he said. The whole damn operation kept under wraps and she was just short of being sanctified for her heroic rescue of the expectant mothers in her care. The Thorns, those who had worked in Atonement, were either dead or had blended back into society, reverting to their own names instead of the Biblical ones they had chosen when they joined Gloria’s sodality.
Marianne had longed to shout her truth across the continents. Sometimes she thought she would choke on it, lodged as it was so deeply in her throat when she thought about the young mothers she had known. Mothers, like herself, who had been prodded and poked and bullied into giving their babies away. Elizabeth Green with the red curls. Marianne was unable to forget the sight of her cried-out eyes when they took Conor from her. Miss Bethany used to call him ‘that sickly child’ but Elizabeth had made him strong with her breast milk. Marianne used to laugh at his cheeks going in and out like tiny bellows, and Elizabeth, all swoony with love, staring down at him. Miss Bethany sent her to Lilian’s Foodstore for groceries one afternoon. An hour was the time it took her to walk to Inisada and back. Conor was gone by then. They heard her screams, saw her tears, and then she, too, was gone. Her parents collected her, all stiff-backed and proud, and not listening to a word she said about getting Conor back.
And Siobhan Miley, what about her? Did her twin daughters really die in hospital? Marianne, accompanied by Barbara and Malachi, had gone with her to see a tiny grave, recently dug. Someone had placed a wooden cross with their names, Sarah and Stella, on it. Siobhan had knelt on the mud and traced her fingers across the carved letters of their names. Were her babies in that grave? Or was that another lie? Siobhan would never know. According to Rory, all their documentation had been lost in the fire. All their precious information turned to ash.
Names were important. Barbara had had a name book, hidden from Miss Bethany, who prowled the dormitory like an anteater sniffing out acts of disobedience. Adele, they discovered, meant nobility. It was the perfect name for her daughter. One that would blot out the horrors of her beginnings. Did her mother hear her through the roar of the fire when she cried out. ‘My baby’s name is Adele… I’ll be back to care for her soon… soon.’
52
Twenty-four years previously
My body was toxic with hate when I entered the tank yet something strangely wonderful happened while I was there. I discovered that love could conquer hate. Like a butterfly shedding a chrysalis that was no longer needed, I abandoned hate. My baby stopped being an object I was forced to carry and became real. A little person fully formed in her own right. This love turned everything upside down. I was so stupid to think Mother Gloria would allow me to keep her. I’d put my name to so many forms since Mam left me in Atonement that I must have signed her away to some rich Americans months before she was born.
Mam was supposed to be with me for the birth but Adele came early and easily. No stitches or complications. I kept asking for her. She would fight off the greedy hands reaching out to take her from me. I believed that if I screamed loudly enough someone in that hellhole would heed me. Again, that was just me being stupid. Malachi was the only one who spoke to me, telling me that Adele was a beautiful baby, who looked exactly like me.
The Thorns wouldn’t listen to me until the third day, when I was still refusing to eat. That’s when Mother Gloria decided that I could have Adele for one day. She made me promise that I’d behave like a ‘sensible girl’ when I had to give her back. Miss Bethany brought Adele from the nursery to me and locked us into a room on the ground floor. I was free to sing to Adele, to make silly noises when she smiled. I knew she was smiling even when Miss Bethany insisted that I’d ‘gone mad’ from the birth and Adele was far too young for such a thing.
I hadn’t been allowed to breastfeed her and Miss Bethany came in every few hours with her bottle. Adele was a fitful feeder until I brought her to my breast. I was tense, waiting for the door to be unlocked, but she fed from me as easily as she had been born. My slippery little fish. My lost baby.
The roars of a house in agony, the cries and racing footsteps: it’s hard to believe I di
dn’t hear them. The door was strong, the walls thick, and I was unaware of anything except my tiny daughter. I smelled the smoke in the same instant that the lights went out. I’d no idea what was happening until I stood on the bed and looked out of the window. All those flames leaping from the north wing and the courtyard filling up with Thorns and penitents. That’s what they called us, penitents who had to atone for our sins, but out in that courtyard, there was nothing to distinguish anyone. They were all just frightened people. I put Adele high up on the wardrobe shelf and banged on the window with the legs of a chair until the glass shattered. My hand began to bleed but air was coming through the bars. I don’t know how it happened that my voice reached Malachi. He came to my rescue. I can still hear him at the door, kicking and kicking at it until the lock broke. The smoke had reached us by then. I still couldn’t see it but I could feel it stinging my eyes and catching in my throat. I was terrified it would choke Adele as we made our way along the corridor into the main hall. Malachi had a torch and that helped us to see where we were going. Then, suddenly, Mother Gloria was there. I thought she was a ghost at first, the way her long, white robe was floating around her, but she was real and she wanted my baby.