Tom dropped her hand in dismay. ‘After all you’ve been through, you’re still more afraid of that wretched priest than protecting your own life.’
‘No I’m not,’ she said, stung by the truth. ‘And if you cared about me, you’d leave me alone rather than thinking about your own satisfaction!’
Tom stood up abruptly. ‘If that’s what you want, then I won’t touch you.’ At the door he glanced back. ‘I just want to comfort you, Kitty, that’s all.’
He left for work and Catherine lay, head spinning. The walls seemed to be moving, shapes conjuring themselves out of the patterned wallpaper, faces coming to leer at her, chattering voices filling her head. She was useless, a failure, a bastard inside and out. Sinful. She’d go to Hell for marrying a Protestant. It was Tom’s fault. Her babies were screaming in Purgatory because of him, because of her. Kate’s face stared at her from the ceiling, Kate’s raucous laughter filled the room. She was bad seed of a bad woman. Blood will out. Her babies stood no chance coming from her infected womb. She wasn’t really married - not a proper marriage - so her babies were doomed. Better to die in the womb than to suffer the same shame that she had suffered . . .
Catherine pressed her hands over her ears and screamed for the voices to stop. But they grew louder, began to curse and swear. They were like her own voice, once again thick with dialect, peppered with foul language like Grandda John’s. She buried her head under the covers, praying for them to stop.
Eventually, after a supreme effort of will, she staggered from the bed and got dressed. Unsteady and light-headed, she wrapped herself in coat, hat and scarf and went in search of Father Logan. In the dark of the confessional she poured out her torment about her dead babies and how she must not have any more.
‘But I’m still a wife,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I still have a duty, don’t I? How can I without - without using contraception? That would be a greater sin, wouldn’t it?’
She waited, dry-mouthed for the voice behind the grille to answer.
‘Your husband is Protestant, isn’t he?’
Catherine braced herself for another lecture on the wrongfulness of mixed marriage. ‘Yes,’ she swallowed.
‘Then let him do the sinning,’ Father Logan advised.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If he takes the precautions, then the sin is not yours and you have not put your mortal soul at risk.’
Catherine was flabbergasted. What hypocrisy! She was beset with a huge moral dilemma, drowning in doubts, and he was reducing it to a child’s game of who to blame. She was too upset and angry to speak. Leaving the church, she wandered around the town in a daze, outraged at what the priest had suggested. It was all nonsense. God didn’t exist. She was seized by a wild aggression, like a caged animal. God, the Church, the priests had all betrayed her. It was as shattering as the moment she had discovered as a seven-year-old that Rose and John had lied about being her parents.
Catherine collided with a woman who was turning into a chemist’s shop.
‘Sorry,’ Catherine said, only half aware of what she was doing.
The woman put the brake on her pram and left it in the doorway. Catherine stared into it. A swaddled baby lay under a mound of blankets, his tiny features just visible under a knitted bonnet. A button nose, rosebud lips, closed eyelids so new and fragile that the veins showed. A beautiful sleeping newborn.
Catherine put out a hand and touched the blanket. He was hers for the taking. All she had to do was reach out and pull him to her. She yearned to hold him with every fibre of her being. She deserved him. There was nothing else in her life to fill the gaping black hole inside. God would not punish her because God wasn’t there.
Catherine glanced into the shop. The woman had her back to her. She probably had half a dozen other children at school, at home. She did not need this one like Catherine did - would thank her for taking him off her hands. Her heart began to palpitate. Do it now, a voice said. Now. Her arms ached at the thought of holding him. Her fingers flexed over the blanket.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman spoke behind her.
Catherine looked round startled. The mother gave her a wary look and took hold of the pram’s handle possessively.
‘I was - just - looking . . .’ Catherine mumbled, snatching back her hands and bunching them at her sides.
The woman nodded and pushed her baby briskly up the street, glancing back once with a curious look. Catherine stood gasping for breath, horrified at what she had nearly done. Would she have run away with the baby? Would she have smothered it to death? She felt she was capable of anything. There was nothing to stop her, no beliefs to hold her back. She wanted to run to the sanctuary of the church and throw herself at the feet of the statue of the Virgin Mary and plead for help. But if there was no God there was no Holy Family, no Our Lady to offer forgiveness and comfort.
Nausea engulfed her. Catherine staggered into an alleyway and vomited into the gutter.
She did not tell Tom about her urge to snatch the baby, only about her anger at Father Logan.
‘I’ve lost all faith,’ she declared. Yet when Tom reached for her at night in bed, she shrank away. She could not bear for him to touch her. Abstinence was the only way to gain peace of mind.
Tom searched for a way to stop her withdrawing into a twilight world of accusing voices and hallucinations.
‘I’ve been to see the priest,’ he told her one spring day.
‘Why?’ she asked in suspicion.
‘To ask for instruction,’ he said diffidently. ‘I’m thinking of converting to Catholicism.’
‘What on earth for?’ Catherine asked, appalled.
‘So we can go to church together,’ he said, looking suddenly unsure. ‘I want to help you through this, Kitty.’
She blazed at him, ‘Help me? You stupid man! You’ve waited all this time - till I’ve lost all belief - and now you think converting will make the slightest bit of difference? Well it won’t, so don’t even bother!’
He flinched as if she’d hit him.
‘I’m trying to help,’ he said losing patience, ‘I’m doing it because I love you.’
‘Do you?’ she challenged. ‘Is that why you stay away at the camp till late at night? Maybe you’ve got a fancy woman up there - one who’ll sleep with you and give you brats. Then you can leave me for good.’
He stared at her as if she were a stranger. But that’s how she felt. She did not know from where such hateful words came. They bubbled up from some deep cesspool inside her, poisoning her sickly marriage.
Tom said, ‘If you won’t let me help you, then someone else must. I want you to go back to the doctor. You’re not well, Kitty.’
‘Not well?’ she laughed harshly. ‘That’s the understatement of the bloody year. Of course I’m not well. I’m in Hell! I hate living here - I hate this room -I hate being here with you! I don’t love you any more, Tom!’
He left. That evening he didn’t return. She stayed up all night waiting and worrying, her rage turning to panic. By the time he came home the following evening, she was in a sweat of anxiety.
‘I slept up at the camp - thought I’d be doing you a favour,’ he said, tired out.
Catherine threw her arms round him. ‘I was so worried. I thought you were dead. I didn’t mean any of those things I said. Don’t leave me, Tom. Promise me!’
He pulled away, unable to hide his irritation.
‘I’m not going to leave you.’ His voice was dull, resigned.
As news came of the Nazi surrender in Europe and the country erupted in celebration, Catherine forced herself to join in. She put on a desperate show of being happy and threw a party for some of Tom’s workmates. His friends teased Tom for keeping his vivacious wife hidden away.
‘No wonder you never wanted to live at the camp,’ one joked.
Catherine laughed and joked with them, and that night encouraged Tom to make love.
But when the morning came and he was gone to work, Catherine’s depression descended more heavily than ever. She was seized anew by a host of fears. Fear of dying, fear of Tom leaving, fear of Kate, fear of having no father, fear of drunkards, fear of God, fear of no God, fear of the black-robed priest who haunted her dreams, fear of hands that smelled of the docks, fear of going mad, fear of getting out of bed.
She stared at the room and once again it was filling with faces and voices that swore and screamed at her to get out of bed. She tried and could not move. Her legs were as heavy and useless as iron weights.
She cried out for Tom, even though she knew he was far away in camp. She wept and whimpered like a child, calling out for her mother. Eventually Mrs Bright, the landlady, came, scolding her for making such a racket.
‘It’s all that partying till late at night,’ she said in disapproval.
‘I can’t move,’ Catherine said helplessly.
The woman gave her a sceptical look. ‘Sleep it off, I say. I’ll bring you a cup of tea. But no more noise. Mr Blight’s trying to sleep before his nightshift.’
Catherine lay all day, tortured by the voices. Memories from her childhood flashed in front of her eyes like a flickering film. She was climbing the steps to Bella’s house, dressed in a fresh pinafore and new hair ribbons. She’s knocking at the door but nobody hears. After a long time, Bella comes to the door with all their other friends crowding about, laughing and pointing.
‘ You can’t come in – you’ve got no da . . .’
The words rang around her head like the Angelus bell.
Then Catherine saw herself down at Jarrow Slake, bobbing from timber to timber on the oily tide, playing a game of dare.
‘Dare you to jump to that one, Billy,’ she taunts a smaller boy.
She’s full of anger because the other children won’t play with her any more. They say she’s a bully, too rough by half. She feels like a firework ready to go off. Danny, the Irish lodger, has gone, but she knows it’s her fault. Kate hates her for it. Danny was going to be her da. The idea made her sick. She has no da. She has no da! Roughly, she pushes scrawny Billy into the water.
‘Jump, you little waster!’ He misses the next plank and splashes into the brackish water. He comes up spluttering and thrashing for help. The other children won’t play with her; she’s not good enough for them, their parents say. She can’t go to their parties. But Kate says she’ll get her own back one day, just see if she doesn’t.
She’ll have her revenge now. Billy the cry-baby will pay for all the hurt. She’s got power over him, at least. It flashes through her mind in the seconds it takes Billy to scream. She’s full of a red-hot feeling. She pushes Billy’s head under the water again. His hands are waving as if in goodbye.
Hands seize her and shove her away. Billy is being hauled from the water by a big man in hoggers and work boots.
‘You nearly drowned him, you evil little bitch!’
Catherine clings to the bank, horrified. In an instant, she’s scrambling up it and running away from the furious man and the gasping, sobbing boy...
In the claustrophobic bedroom in Hereford, Catherine lay pinned in terror. For years she had denied the truth, too ashamed to think of it. Kate had beaten her when she’d found out. It was what she deserved. She had tried to drown an innocent boy. She was wicked to the core. No wonder God had taken away her babies - she wasn’t fit to keep them. She was a danger to children. Catherine was filled with fear to think how close she had come to stealing a baby that winter.
‘Help me!’ she screamed to the pulsating room.
Trying to raise herself up, she caught sight of herself in the spotted mirror above the washstand. Kate’s puffy, drink-sodden face stared back at her. Catherine put her hands to her face and the woman in the mirror did the same. Who was she? She did not know any more. Some husk that looked like her mother. Her real self had done a flit, vanished away. Maybe she had never been a real person.
Tom came back to find her sweating and cowering under the covers. The doctor was called and she was taken to hospital. A few days later, when she could walk a few shaky steps, she agreed to see a psychiatrist.
She could not talk to Tom. They moved around each other like strangers in a silent film, while all the time her head burst with arguing, angry voices. After a week, she agreed to be admitted to St Mary’s mental asylum. She could no longer run from her past; it was time to turn around and face up to it.
Chapter 49
It could have been five days, five weeks, a life-time that she had been at St Mary’s; Catherine had no concept of time inside the large gothic asylum. It had echoing corridors and high-ceilinged wards that reminded her all too painfully of workhouse hospitals. In the next bed was a widow who would not speak, and on the other side a young woman who thought she was a film star. Every morning she packed her bag and sat waiting for someone to come and take her to the film set.
During the day Catherine sat in a chair staring out at the leafy grounds, picking at a piece of needlework they had given her to do. At night she was kept awake by her own whirling thoughts and the crying of others. But the days she grew to dread were the ones she was taken down the stone steps to the basement for electro-convulsive therapy. She sat waiting her turn on a wooden bench in a dingy corridor like a pupil awaiting punishment. It was next to a lavatory that stank of urine and Catherine would have to clamp a hand over her mouth to stop herself being sick on the stone floor.
By the time her turn came to be strapped to the hard bed by the white-coated medical staff and hit by the glare of harsh light, she was rigid with fear. White tiles, the clank of metal instruments, the bite of leather straps, and the sinister hum of machinery all compounded her terror. Was this what Nazi torture chambers looked and smelled like? Stark, clinically clean, devoid of human touch.
Next, something hard and bruising was clamped to her head. A rushing sound filled her ears as the shock of electricity pulsated through her, drowning out her thoughts, lifting her body, possessing her. For a second, everything was the colour red. Then it was blackness, oblivion.
Once Catherine knew what awaited her in the white-tiled theatre, she would alternately sweat and shake as she queued on the bench. While her fellow inmates sat in silent resignation, Catherine fought back nausea, convinced that she had stumbled into a living Hell.
The treatment was gradually robbing her of thought, of emotion, of memory. Afterwards she could not recall what day it was, what she had eaten for breakfast or what her grandmother’s name was. Gradually, details would come back to her. But some things did not. She found it hard to remember large chunks of her school years or the names of her classmates that she had once summoned as easily as her own.
Sometimes this forgetfulness was welcome. There was so much in her past she wished to obliterate. It was comforting to sit in a fog of confusion, unable to concentrate on the simplest tasks, her thoughts cocooned. But the fog robbed her of feeling. She felt no strong emotion for anything or anyone. She woke, dressed, ate, walked and sat. She didn’t smile, laugh, cry or love.
At times she felt so detached that she struggled to remember who and where she was.
‘Mr Cookson’s here to see you,’ the nurse told her one evening.
Catherine stared at her blankly. Who was Mr Cookson?
‘Your husband,’ she prompted, ‘he’s come to visit.’
Husband. What a strange word. What did it mean? What did husbands do? She did not have the will or energy to find out.
‘Shall I tell him you’re too tired tonight?’ the nurse suggested. ‘He can come again tomorrow.’
Catherine nodded. It did not seem to have anything to do with her. The nurse and the husband could sort it out between
them.
Later, in the middle of the night Catherine came wide awake. The husband was Tom. Tom had come to see her. He would have cycled miles only to be turned away again. She could visualise Tom on a bicycle, pounding along narrow lanes, whistling. It was like watching a film of another life. How strange to think of a world other than her own going on somewhere else.
***
Sometimes Tom would arrive and sit with Catherine in silence the whole visit. He had given up trying to tell her about his work or current affairs, such as the build-up to a general election. She showed no interest, hardly seemed to notice that he was there. She was even less inclined to tell him what was happening to her in the hospital. He only gleaned that from questioning the staff. She was having regular electric shock treatment.
Watching his once lively wife, sitting lank-haired and pinch-faced, Tom feared that she would never recover. Gone were their long conversations on literature and ethics, gone was her sudden infectious laugh and wry northern humour, gone the feeling of her arms around him in bed. After a month of cycling to the asylum every evening after a long day at camp, Tom almost gave up going.
His presence made no difference, perhaps even harmed her recovery. She looked at him with suspicion or not at all. Then came the day that Catherine refused to see him. It was terrifying to think he might have lost his Kitty for good. The relief of not having a depressed and volatile wife to return to at night had been short-lived. Lying in their bed alone was a desolate experience. A life without her vibrant, loving nature was a life without colour or warmth. A life in monochrome.
He must remind himself of the woman he had fallen in love with the instant he saw and heard her in Kate’s lodging house. She was the real Catherine, not the bitter, raging, hurtful woman who had told him she no longer loved him. His Kitty was ill - lost in a black storm of depression - and he must not abandon her as others had done.
Tom forced himself back the following day. At once he found a different Catherine waiting for him. She was slow and weak on her feet, but there was a glimmer in her sad eyes.
THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow Page 126