Aye, I bet, Lizzie thought, but she said nothing for Celia’s words, soft as they were, had brought the nun’s head swinging round to scrutinise them, although she wasn’t sure where the sound had come from. Lizzie had learnt that in the convent it was safer to keep your head lowered. If you were forced to lift it, if they demanded it, you fixed your gaze on a point above their head and you kept it there. So now she studied her feet on the polished floor.
Eventually, the nun, rapped out, ‘Now we will say Grace, to thank the Good Lord for his bounty,’ and though Lizzie mumbled the prayer she couldn’t help feeling she’d be a lot more thankful if she’d had the rashers and eggs that she’d seen carried behind the nun’s screen, and the smell of bacon rose in the air, tantalising them as they ate their lumpy porridge.
Five days later, Cora announced she’d begun her labour by collapsing in the laundry room just after they began work. Millie hadn’t returned as she was still lying in, and Cora was taken to an adjoining room. By teatime, Cora’s screams could be heard reverberating off the walls. ‘They’ll kill her, behaving like that,’ Celia hissed as she and Lizzie worked the mangle together. ‘They’re not above giving you a slap if you make a fuss.’
Slap or not, the screams went on, even in the chapel, though it was fainter there. By bedtime, Cora was crying for her mother, the Blessed Virgin, the Living God, and tears for the girl so filled Lizzie’s eyes she could hardly see what she ate, and the lump in her throat made it
hard to swallow and her stomach was tied in knots. Others besides herself looked equally miserable. No one said a word then, but later in the dormitory, with the door locked and bolted, Freda said, ‘She was terrified anyway and small wonder in this place. I mean, it’s a frightening enough thing if you have your man by your side and a neighbour woman in attendance who has done it many times before, knows what she’s doing and is doing all she can to help you.’
‘Aye, and you know she’ll have a doctor look at you if she’s at all worried.’
‘Do you have no doctor at all?’ Lizzie asked.
‘There’s one in the village,’ Celia said. ‘You’d have to be on death’s door to see one, and I mean it literally.’
‘Aye, Sister Clement trained as a nurse. They think what she can do is enough and that only basic medical intervention is suitable for ones such as us.’
‘Aye, and when did she train? The year dot, I bet’.
‘God knows. It’s a wonder she doesn’t prescribe leeches for everyone, whatever ails them,’ Celia said.
‘Christ, will you be quiet and stop giving them ideas.’
‘Still, I’m sorry for Cora,’ Lizzie put in. ‘The screams were getting to me.’
‘They were getting to us all,’ said Dilly from the far bed. ‘And I’m not being heartless when I say I’m glad we can’t hear her any more.’
Lizzie felt the same. The attic room the girls shared was just two far away from the infirmary. The nuns’ quarters weren’t, but she guessed they wouldn’t be disturbed by anything or anyone.
The girls knew they could do nothing, and
eventually, one by one, they fell asleep and the room grew silent.
Lizzie was awoken by the noise of car tyres crunching on the gravel path outside. It took her a while to ascertain what had woken her and then she got up and ran to the window. There was already a cluster of girls there and others came vying for a space. Celia was one of the ones with her nose pressed to the pane. ‘It’s the doctor,’ she said in ominous tones. ‘The bloody nuns have called the doctor.’
‘Jesus, she must be in a bad way.’
Lizzie felt sick. She thought of the young girl below in the throes of labour, sick enough to need the services of a doctor and yet no one to give her a kind word or gesture.
The doctor stayed a long time. Lizzie had no idea how long, though she heard his car drive away. Some had fallen asleep by then, for she heard their even breathing, and she thought others might be listening as she was, unable to drop off.
She was still wide-eyed when she heard Sister Mary’s tread on the attic stairs and the key turned in the lock. The nun turned on the light and all the girls stirred and those already awake turned to stare at her. Lizzie was surprised that she wasn’t barking at them to be out of bed and quick about it, and she felt as if ice had trickled down her spine at the look on the nun’s face.
Her voice was surprisingly gentle as she said, ‘Cora passed away early this morning.’
‘Passed away! She was having a baby. Women don’t die in childbirth these days.’
It was Celia’s voice and Lizzie bit her lip in trepidation for the young girl, but the nun just shook her head sadly. ‘Some do, Hetty. They do indeed, but I understand you are shocked and maybe upset so I will forgive your little outburst. Mass this morning will be dedicated to Cora, so get up and dress quickly and quietly in respect for the poor dead girl.’
‘Poor dead girl!’ Lizzie wanted to cry. ‘You never thought her poor while she was alive. What respect did you show her then?’ But what would she achieve by throwing this in the nun’s face. She might get away with it, it might again be put down to shock, but it would change nothing.
Two new girls joined them that afternoon. Both were incredibly young and frightened witless and Lizzie knew they’d have to wait for nightfall or beyond to find out anything about them. They were told their names—Rosie and Queenie—by Sister Carmel before they were set before a sink full of suds, soda water and a washboard.
That night, Lizzie was woken by the sound of muffled crying. She sat up in the dark and looked around her. As she’d thought, it was the two new girls both further up the room by the window, in the beds once occupied by Millie and Cora. Lizzie wondered if she should cross the room and say something.
Say what? said a wee voice inside her. Say everything is fine when it blatantly isn’t? Say they’ll get used to this harsh regime when they shouldn’t have to? Say they don’t have to stay in here forever when they might have been disowned by their families and be totally destitute?
No, she decided, there was nothing to be gained by trying to talk to the distressed girls. They’d have to get over it like so many others before them, and she turned over and closed her eyes.
The next day their swollen eyes bore evidence to the hours they’d spent weeping, and they were reluctant to rise from their beds. Lizzie’s conscience smote her, but she reminded herself that any assurances she gave them would hardly make them feel better.
But what she could do was prevent them being beaten that morning. ‘Get up,’ she hissed at the pair of them, ‘before Sister Mary comes back. You’ll get the cane across your backside if you’re not ready for Mass.’
Wearily, the two girls clambered from their beds and Rosie began taking off her nightie. ‘No,’ Lizzie said. ‘You must dress and undress under your nightie. You only strip off when the nuns tell you to. At other times, nakedness is to be frowned on.’
Rosie had never dressed covered by a nightie before, and Lizzie, who was ready, helped her, catching a glimpse of the mound of her bulging stomach before the smock dress covered it. ‘How far are you?’ she whispered.
‘Six months,’ Rosie said. ‘I’ve been a prisoner in my bedroom for two months till my father heard of this place. He beat me black and blue when I told him. He wanted the name of the father—and I told him too, for all the good it did. The man was married. You wouldn’t have thought it when he was courting me, buying flowers, taking me out. Never said a word of his wife then. I loved the very bones of him, and when
I let him…you know, he said I’d be safe, he’d make sure. When I told him I was expecting he was a different man altogether, told me I was a stupid little trollop and I needn’t think he’d marry me, for he already had a wife and three weans.’
She looked at Lizzie, her large and very beautiful blue eyes still brimming with tears, and went on, ‘I told Daddy all this and he went off to see the man. He told Daddy I was mad for it, that I trailed him in the town, that I offered myself freely, that I was more than willing. The truth was I put up with it to please him, for I never took enjoyment out of it, but Daddy believed him. I really thought he was going to kill me. In the end, Mammy stopped him, not for my sake but in case I should miscarry. But I can’t understand why he believed a man he’d just met, over me that he’d reared for years.’
Lizzie didn’t know either. It was just the way of things. Didn’t her own parents doubt her tale? She patted the girl’s arm and said, ‘They’ll likely get over it.’ She didn’t believe it, but the girl might for now. She’d come to the realisation that she was stuck in this place indefinitely in her own time, but now she was hurt and disillusioned and both were feelings the nuns would play on if they were aware of them.
‘Look,’ she said to the two girls, ‘a word of warning to the both of you: don’t let the nuns know how upset you are and try not to cry in front of them. They’ll see it as a sign of weakness, and, like all bullies, hone in on it.’
The girls were dressed just in time and Lizzie, her eyes attuned to the rustle of the nun’s approach, was
beside her bed before Sister Mary entered the room, grateful to Celia, who’d tidied her bed when she saw her helping the new girls.
Cora’s funeral was three days later on, Monday, 4
th
August, in the little chapel. Lizzie thought she had got over being shocked or surprised at anything that went on at the convent, but this time the fact that no member of Cora’s family attended the funeral shook her to the core. All that said goodbye to the young girl and her dead baby placed beside her in the coffin were the nuns and girls she’d been sent to live amongst.
Somewhere in Ireland, that child, for she was little more, had been born to a family and raised, possibly with siblings; and because that child had sinned, even though it might not have been her fault at all, she was cast out. Not even in death could she be accepted back into the family, and Lizzie knew she’d be buried in the small graveyard behind the chapel, like plenty more.
‘They’re probably pleased,’ Celia said bitterly as they stood clustered by the grave. ‘The dead tell no tales. Now there’s no child who might one day take a notion to search for his mother. Dead and gone and out of the way is best, and no need for any of them to make the journey to see her laid to rest as if she was a valued family member.’
‘Don’t, Celia,’ Lizzie cautioned, for she heard the break in the girl’s voice and the rise of it in her distress. Any minute she would bring the nuns’ attention upon her. If she was taken for punishment, in the mood she was in, she could say anything and that could be disastrous.
‘I’m all right,’ Celia said, taking a grip on herself. ‘I thought I couldn’t be hurt further, but I know if I had died giving birth to my wee boy, no one belonging to me from my home in West Meath would have shed a tear or travelled to my funeral. God, sometimes I don’t think I can stand this place a minute longer.’
‘Please, Celia, please be quiet.’
Even as she pleaded, Sister Maria grasped both Lizzie and Celia by their collars. ‘Talking when they should have been praying for the poor dead girl’s soul,’ she informed Sister Jude once they were in the nun’s office.
‘Pansy wasn’t talking,’ Celia burst out. ‘I was talking. She was trying to get me to stop.’
‘I didn’t ask you to speak.’
‘I don’t care,’ Celia shouted. ‘I don’t care about any of you, can’t you see? You’re repressed, wizened-up old women—dried up inside with hate and evilness.’
Lizzie had the urge to clasp her hand over Celia’s mouth, to stop the words that she could see were infuriating Sister Jude. She saw it by the flush of her face, the spittle forming on her lips, and the tic beating in her temple. ‘Sister Maria,’ she bawled, and the nun, who must have been hovering outside, popped her head around the door. ‘Take Hetty into the office of the infirmary,’ she said. ‘She’s overwrought. I’ll deal with her later.’
But Celia wouldn’t go quietly. She kicked and screamed and hurled abuse, and in the end Sister Clement and Sister Carmel had to be called to almost carry the struggling girl, whose voice could be heard still, but became fainter and fainter.
Sister Jude turned her attention to Lizzie. ‘Hetty said
you tried to stop her speaking. What was she saying?’
Lizzie had the urge to sink on her knees and plead for leniency for Celia, for she knew what their ways of dealing with people were, but she also knew it wouldn’t help and might make things worse. So she said, ‘It wasn’t anything, Sister, I mean nothing particular. She was upset over Cora, the fact that none of her people came to her funeral an’ all. She wasn’t herself when she said those things to you.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ the nun snapped. ‘As for being upset, don’t you girls realise most of your families want nothing more to do with you. If we didn’t take you in and feed and clothe you, you would starve to death in the gutter, for no one else is wanting to take on that responsibility.’
‘No, Sister.’
‘So what should you have done when Hetty spoke?’
‘Told one of the Sisters.’
‘I’m glad you know,’ said Sister Jude. ‘Maybe this will help you remember promptly in future. Lift up your dress.’
It was not quite as painful as last time, and yet Lizzie was so worried about Celia the strokes seemed to matter less.
Celia didn’t appear again that day, nor the next. When Lizzie asked Sister Mary she said she was in the infirmary because she wasn’t well.
It was a Saturday, four days later, before Celia entered the laundry again, and Lizzie noticed she moved stiffly and painfully and the marks of grazes and bruises were on her face, and both her eyes were discoloured. Lizzie’s eyes were sympathetic, but Celia muttered under
the cover of folding clothes, ‘Don’t worry, they tried to punch and kick the shit out of me, but they didn’t succeed and it was worth it to say what I did. I’m just sorry you got it. How many?’
‘Six.’
‘Oh God.’
‘It’s all right.’
Sister Maria came in the door at that moment and scanned the room. On catching sight of Lizzie, she went across to Sister Carmel and whispered something to her, and the nun looked up and straight at Lizzie. ‘You are to go to Sister Jude’s office, Pansy.’