The Girl in the Letter

by Emily Gunnis

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t take her to hospital?’ said the driver.

  Sam felt for Kitty’s pulse, which was strong, and then took her frozen hand in hers. ‘No, I think she’s okay. Her pulse is fine but she’s cold. Can you turn up the heater, please?’

  She pulled Kitty’s coat up around her, causing the mobile phone in the pocket to fall onto the floor of the taxi. ‘Damn,’ said Sam, trying and failing to reach it without waking her.

  Kitty’s long, unkempt grey hair reminded Sam of a white witch. She had beautiful fine features, a narrow mouth and a button nose. Her skin was porcelain white. She looked completely different to her onscreen persona: younger, more vulnerable, with an almost childlike air about her.

  Kitty’s phone flashed up a reminder. Sam looked down at it: Richard Stone midday. She knocked the phone towards her with her foot, then picked it up and returned it to Kitty’s pocket.

  ‘Do you know where she lives?’ she asked the driver.

  ‘No, she flagged me down on Embankment, so I’m just heading back that way.’

  Sam could hear the faint sound of her own mobile phone beeping in her pocket. It was a text from Nana asking where she was and telling her that Emma was on the mend. Sam quickly replied, asking Nana to take Emma to Ben’s after breakfast and saying she would call her as soon as she could. She stroked Kitty’s hair as they drove along by the river. It was torture to be so close to her and not be able to talk. But one thing she was sure of: Kitty had called her Ivy. Somehow, she had known the poor girl.

  ‘This is where I picked her up,’ said the driver, pulling over to the side of the road.

  ‘Kitty?’ said Sam gently. ‘We need to know where your house is so we can get you home.’

  Slowly Kitty opened her eyes and looked up at her. Then she pushed herself up and pulled away, straightening her coat and twisting her hair into a knot as if trying to save face.

  ‘We’re back in London?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, you wanted us to take you home, but we don’t know where that is.’

  ‘Thank you for bringing me back. I’m sorry about what happened,’ said Kitty.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Sam replied, smiling, ‘I think you’re going to have quite a taxi bill, though.’

  Kitty stared at her, not returning the smile. ‘Who are you?’

  Sam hesitated for a second. ‘My name is Samantha, I’m a reporter with Southern News.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Kitty. ‘What is it with you people? Do you follow me night and day?’

  ‘Kitty, please, if you can give me one minute to explain—’ began Sam.

  ‘No, I can’t.’ Kitty turned to the driver, raising her voice to be heard through the glass partition. ‘Can you please get this girl out of my taxi!’

  ‘Blimey, I’m starting to feel like Jeremy Kyle here,’ he said, opening his door.

  ‘I know about your links with St Margaret’s. I believe you may have been born there,’ said Sam.

  Tears sprang to Kitty’s eyes and she waited to compose herself before speaking. ‘That is my private business and of no concern to you. If you try to print anything about it, I will sue you.’

  Sam frantically raked through her bag as the driver opened the door on her side.

  ‘Out you get, love.’

  ‘Please, look, I’ve been reading letters written by someone called Ivy about her time at St Margaret’s. I think you must have known her: you called me Ivy when I found you there.’ Sam held out the letters which Nana had tied in a red velvet ribbon, but Kitty didn’t take them.

  ‘Stay away from me,’ she said coldly.

  ‘The people mentioned in these letters, they were all involved with St Margaret’s, Mother Carlin, Father Benjamin, and they’re all dead. And I’m pretty sure their deaths weren’t accidental,’ Sam pleaded.

  The taxi driver pulled at her arm, ‘Come on, I don’t want to have to get the police involved.’

  ‘Get your hands off me!’ said Sam, pulling away.

  ‘Get out!’ Kitty shouted.

  ‘Okay,’ said Sam, ‘I’m going. I know you were there when your father died. It must have been horrific for you as a child to see something like that. It was never my intention to upset you, and I’m very sorry. I just wanted to get to the truth and I thought you would too.’

  ‘Wait? What did you say?’ said Kitty as Sam climbed out of the cab.

  ‘That I’m sorry,’ said Sam quietly, ‘and I am. It’s just these letters, they’ve done something to me.’

  ‘No, before that, about me being there when my father died.’ Kitty leant across to the door.

  ‘Someone I spoke to who lived on the road where your father died said a witness saw a young girl in a red coat. They thought you were in the car with your father when he crashed.’

  ‘What’s happening now? Are we going or not?’ said the driver, throwing his hands up.

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ Kitty said. ‘The first I knew of the accident was when the police woke me up.’

  ‘Well, who was it, then?’ said Sam.

  Kitty put her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh dear God.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Sam, leaning towards her.

  Kitty pulled out a wad of notes from her wallet and handed them to the driver, then climbed out of the taxi and took Sam’s arm. ‘You had better come back to my apartment,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tuesday 5 March 1957

  Ivy lay in the dark, staring up at the beamed ceiling, listening to the young girl in the next bed crying quietly. The dormitory was bitterly cold. Every girl lay on her side, curled up in a ball, trying to stay warm. The locked window next to Ivy’s bed had no curtains, and the moon cast a beam on the poor girl beside her. She was so young, she looked like she still belonged in school. She’d had puppy fat when she had first arrived, and a colour to her cheeks, but now her collarbone jutted out from under her overalls and her pale skin pulled at her haunted eyes, from which tears were now falling.

  Ivy guessed she was about fourteen. Whispered rumour had it that her pregnancy was the result of abuse at home by her father. Ivy thought she had heard Patricia wrong when she first told her: the child’s own father had got her pregnant and then left her to rot in this hell on earth? At least Rose had been conceived in love, albeit only on Ivy’s side, as she was beginning to fear. The girl had only gone into labour two days before, and yet here she was, back in her scratchy cold bed, all alone in the world, her baby taken from her. At dawn the bell would go and she would be expected to do a long, hard day in the laundry.

  Ivy listened for the sound of footsteps in the corridor; when she heard none, she pulled back her covers and got out of bed. The girl looked up as Ivy knelt down next to her.

  ‘It hurts,’ she whispered, her face stained from crying.

  ‘I know, but it won’t last,’ Ivy said softly. ‘Your milk’s come in. You have to take the pain for a few days, and then it will go, I promise.’

  The girl was shivering uncontrollably. Ivy slipped her hand under the covers. The sheet was drenched through, the girl undoubtedly had a fever. She looked to the door again, then pulled her overalls over her head. ‘Here, take this and give me yours.’

  The girl sat up slowly, wincing as she tried to take her own overalls off. ‘I can’t lift my arms.’

  ‘Come here,’ said Ivy, leaning in to help her. As she eased the scratchy material up the girl’s back, a vivid image came to her mind’s eye: her as a little girl, the light in her warm, cosy bedroom faint as evening drew in. Her mother pulling her nightie over her head and then suddenly stopping with Ivy’s hands still raised, her face covered, so she could tickle her. She bit down hard on her lip as she fought back tears and pushed the memory away.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, reaching over and pulling the blanket from her own bed and swapping it for the girl’s before lying her back down.

  ‘Thank you. Why did they shave your head?’ said the girl, tr
ying to get comfortable.

  ‘Because I fought back. They won’t do it to you. I’ll look out for you tomorrow; we can swap if Sister puts you on any of the heavy machinery. I’ll try and get you in the kitchen if I can.’ She knew she couldn’t arrange anything of the sort, but she wanted to put the girl’s mind at ease so she could rest.

  ‘Where is my baby girl?’ said the girl quietly as Ivy turned back to her own bed.

  Ivy stopped and thought of Rose, probably crying at that very moment with no one to comfort her. She looked at the girl. ‘She’s safe in the nursery. Now you need to rest. The bell will go before you know it.’

  Ivy lay in the dark with the girl’s sweat-soaked blanket over her feet and hugged herself to try and keep warm. Thoughts of Rose alone in the nursery made it impossible to sleep. Every day since she had begun working in the laundry again, the walk past the nursery was torture. The noise of the babies’ crying was deafening. She would occasionally see Patricia rushing from cot to cot, where the babies lay on their backs, swaddled tightly. There were about forty cots in total in the huge whitewashed room. The nursery was cold and colourless, nothing like the room she had imagined her baby would spend her first months in. One filled with soft blankets and a comfy chair in the corner for her to nurse her in. It took all her strength whenever she passed not to hammer on the door and scream for Patricia to hand Rose over to her. She knew there was no point; she would only receive a beating, and they would probably find a way to punish Rose too, by skipping one of her feeds perhaps. Still, she had begged Patricia to tell her which cot Rose was in.

  ‘I can’t, they’ll kill me,’ her friend had whispered as one of the sisters shot them a glance.

  Eventually, hidden briefly by the din of the ironing presses, Patricia had told her that Rose’s cot was at the far end of the room, next to the kitchen. She had told her of the intense cold in the nursery. How ice formed inside the windows and the babies screamed constantly as she struggled to change their nappies with her freezing fingers. Once they were fed, they had to be put back down in their cots. If they didn’t finish their bottles in time, they were put back anyway, even if they were still hungry. Most of them cried non-stop until their next feed, but some had given up crying because they knew already in their little hearts that no one was coming.

  Ivy curled up tighter into a ball. Her back and thighs were still all shades of purple from Mother Carlin’s beating, but it was the pain of being apart from Rose that made it impossible to breathe sometimes. She sat at dinner pushing the cabbage around her plate. The nights were longer than the days, hearing Rose’s cries in her head in the silence of the dormitory. The only thing keeping her from losing her mind was the thought that Alistair might still come for them, though even there doubt was beginning to creep in and her daydreams starting to fade. She thought of him continuing his life as it had been before, while she and Rose experienced nothing but pain and suffering. Was he getting her letters; did he not care at all? Why would he have gone to so much trouble to convince her of his love just to abandon her now?

  The events of the past two days had changed her for ever. If he knew what had happened, he would surely come. Shaking from the cold, she reached under her pillow and wrapped her trembling hand around the pen. As long as she could still hear Rose’s cry when she passed the laundry in the morning, she knew she was here still at St Margaret’s. Whilst there was still hope, she had to fight, but time was running out.

  My love,

  I am frantic.

  I was summoned from the laundry to Mother Carlin’s office today, and Father Benjamin was there. Mother Carlin stood in the corner, a fixed smile on her face, while Father Benjamin sat behind the desk. A woman I didn’t recognise was there too. Father Benjamin asked me to sit down, and I felt an overwhelming fear like I have never known before. He told me that the woman was Mrs Cannon, that she worked for St Margaret’s Adoption Society. I sat looking at the floor so he didn’t see my tears while he said the words he must have said to so many: ‘I have spoken with your parents, and we feel it would be better for the child if you put her up for adoption. The child’s father does not want her and as such she would be subject to ridicule all her life. Would you have her go through life rejected by society and her peers, paying for the sins of the flesh you have committed? You have no means to support her; you would both end up on the street.’

  Through my tears I tried to tell him I was sorry, and pleaded with him not to take my baby. Mother Carlin spat at me not to interrupt. Father Benjamin asked me again if I wanted my child to pay for my sins. He wore me down, my spirit fading; he told me that I had nothing to offer her, that my parents would not have me back, and she would have a much better chance of life without me. She would grow up in a good Catholic home, with a loving mother and father. I told them I wanted to keep her, that she was my daughter. I begged them.

  As Father Benjamin stood over me, the lady came and sat next to me. She took my hand, and told me to call her Helena. She said I must sign the adoption papers for Rose, that she was a beautiful baby and they would have no trouble finding her a loving family. I begged her to contact you, I gave her your name, but Mother Carlin told me that you had been contacted and told about the baby and that you weren’t interested. She smiled when she said it: a smile I will never forget. Mrs Cannon placed the pen in my hand and said I was doing the best thing for Rose.

  I told them I would never sign. Mother Carlin hit me so hard that a rage I had never experienced before came over me and I told her to go to hell. Then Father Benjamin and Mrs Cannon left. For the next hour, Mother Carlin set upon me with her scissors. She cut away the last part of me that I had any pride in, my long red hair, and with every clump, she made sure that the blade was too close to my skull so that streams of blood poured down my face. As she stood over me, she said that if it was up to her, I would never set foot outside St Margaret’s again. That little sluts like me only ended up getting themselves in trouble again, and that if I didn’t sign the papers, she would recommend to my parents that I be committed to an asylum.

  After she had finished, she beat me with a belt, then opened a door in the floor and pushed me into the hole beneath it. I screamed and begged her to let me go, but she closed the door on top of me and locked it. As I lay there in the pitch black, I heard the tapping of her shoes across the floor before she turned out the light and locked her office door.

  She left me there for fourteen hours, with no food or water, in a space so small I couldn’t lift my hand to my nose to scratch it. I had never stopped to imagine what it would be like to be buried alive, but the first thing that happened to me was that I had an attack of sheer panic. I started to scream and kick, pushing frantically at the floor above me, until I realised it was sealed tight. My breathing became very fast and shallow, until I was sucking air in and out so fast that I became dizzy, my mind spinning inside a space in which I couldn’t move. The more I panicked, the less air there was for me to breathe. Hot, stagnant air that smelt of floor polish and damp earth. It was only when I forced myself to think of Rose that I managed to gain some sort of composure. As I remembered her tiny fingers, her button nose, her blue eyes, her red hair, I was able to calm myself. Breathing slowly in and out until somehow the hours passed.

  It was the longest night of my life and I have no idea how I got through it. Something inside me died that night, and for the first time since she was born, I couldn’t hear Rose’s cry.

  In the morning, when Mother Carlin came back, she asked me if I’d like to sign the papers or stay where I was for another day. I told her I wouldn’t sign, and without a second thought she closed the door on me again.

  By the time she came back that night, I couldn’t breathe. My thirst was overwhelming and my hunger all-consuming. My fingernails were bleeding from scratching at the lid of my coffin for hours on end.

  When she opened the door, she told me that if I didn’t sign, they would stop feeding Rose and it would be my fault. I signed the
papers and made a silent promise to Rose that one day I would find her. One day I would find a way to escape and let her know how much I love her.

  I can’t go on living in this hell if they take Rose away from me. I don’t know what the reason for you ignoring me – ignoring us – can be, and I no longer care what you think of me. But you have a duty to come and get us out of this prison, for it is you – in part – who has put us here. And you are our only way out.

  With all my love for ever,

  Your Ivy

  Ivy pushed the pen and paper back under her pillow and listened to the sound of the girl next to her breathing heavily. She was finally asleep.

  She thought of the tiny dark-eyed girl who had come into the laundry that day. She had been horrified at the sight of her. She had seen girls as young as thirteen arriving, but this girl, with her overalls nearly reaching the floor, couldn’t have been more than six or seven.

  There and then, she made a decision: if she had to be here, powerless to help herself or Rose, she would do everything she could to protect that little girl. She would defy the sisters by doing what they detested most: making someone heartbroken feel loved.

  As the sun came up, Ivy finally fell asleep. She dreamed she was sitting on her father’s shoulders, his hands clasped round her feet as she stared down at his long stride. She was happy; smiling down at everyone who passed them from high up in her invincible tower, as the sea breeze blew through her long red hair.