‘Doctor, I’ll begin to recover as soon as I am away from this place,’ Lizzie said. ‘Believe me.’
He believed her, he was no fool, and Lizzie did feel light-headed with relief at leaving the convent. She sank into the car seat gratefully and gave a sigh as
Johnnie got in beside her and started the engine. She fought the desire to turn around to see if Celia had made it and just asked instead, ‘You all right, Celia?’ as they pulled away.
Celia’s voice was muffled under the blanket, but cheerful enough as she answered, ‘You bet.’
Johnnie sighed in relief, but he glanced back as they drove out of the convent gates. ‘We’re not safe yet by a long chalk,’ he said. ‘There’s clothes for you in the parcel on the back seat: change into them and tie the scarf around your head. If the Guards are sent to look for you, they’ll be looking for someone dressed as you are now. There’s boots too. They were an old pair of Eileen’s, and they’re better than the ones you have, but I hope they are the right size.’
Celia dressed in the things, knowing if she lived to be a hundred she’d never be able to repay the debt she owed Lizzie and her brother. It was amazing how different clothes could make a person feel, she thought later as she laced up the boots. They were too big, but that didn’t matter.
‘Thanks for all this,’ she said. ‘Thanks seems such a short and inadequate word to describe how I feel about what you’ve done for me this day. I hardly ever cry, but God knows I could bawl my head off right this minute.’
‘I know just how you feel,’ Lizzie said, turning at last to smile at her friend. ‘You look just terrific, Celia,’ she said, seeing the girl’s beauty that had so captivated her brother. She had high cheekbones and a full, quite sensual mouth, but mostly it was the eyes, so large they seemed fathomless. And now there was a light
dancing behind them that Lizzie had never seen there before, and it lent a glow to her whole face. ‘Can I hold the baby, Lizzie?’
‘Course you can.’
Celia too was captivated by the tiny baby, who grasped her finger in her little hand, and when she looked back at Lizzie her eyes were moist. ‘Oh, Lizzie, isn’t she just bloody marvellous?’
‘Oh aye, bloody marvellous she is right enough’ Lizzie agreed, but her own eyes glistened with tears, for she knew at that moment Celia was realising what she had given away.
They had to travel about seventy or eighty miles across Ireland to reach the docks at Dun Laoghaire in time to catch the evening ferry, and as the car Johnnie borrowed was not a powerful one, and he’d kept to back roads just in case they were pursued, he was not anxious to stop for long anywhere.
But eventually he drew to a halt under the cover of trees, some miles from the convent, and got out the picnic his mother had made up. He’d told his parents very little. Nothing about the baby, for they were adamant that they didn’t want to hear. He supposed they thought the child had been packed off to some orphanage somewhere, and they knew nothing of Lizzie’s decision to keep the baby, nor anything about the existence of Celia, never mind the escape they had planned for her.
The girls tucked into the food gratefully, for they’d had nothing but thin, lumpy porridge, and Lizzie’s mother was acknowledged as a fine cook. Johnnie had something else to give Lizzie that had arrived that morning redirected from Violet, and that was a
telegram. Violet had opened it as she thought Flo should be told if anything had happened to her son, and so all the family knew that Steve Gillespie would be buried in some foreign field, but Johnnie decided to let Lizzie eat her fill before hitting her with the tragic news.
Even when they were well-satisfied and the food washed down with sweetened tea from a flask that was heavily laced with whisky against the cold of the day, there was plenty of food left. Johnnie insisted they pack up what was left to sustain them on the rest of their journey.
‘But what of you?’ Lizzie asked.
‘What of me?’ Johnnie said. ‘Aren’t I a big man, well able to stop for a sandwich and pint anywhere along the road? And anyway, isn’t this the land of plenty and any food can be had if a man has money enough? I’m not going to a land of restrictions and food allotted out. It might not be so easy for you. Take it to please me and stop me worrying about the pair of you.’
Johnnie was anxious to get going as quickly as possible, for they had a long way to go yet, but the baby was protesting and Lizzie said she must be fed and so she’d sit in the back of the car with Celia. Until that point, Johnnie had not bothered himself with looking at the child. He’d thought Lizzie mad to saddle herself with it, but now, as Lizzie unwrapped the baby a little before putting her to the breast, Johnnie, catching sight of it in the mirror, saw it was a baby like any other. Her skin was slightly dusky and her eyes large and dark too, and she had a down of curly black hair on her head.
‘You have a fine child there, Lizzie,’ he said.
‘You might say that but you still think Lizzie wrong to take her back with her, don’t you?’ Celia challenged. ‘I’ve seen it in your eyes. You think she should have delivered her to some orphanage and forgotten all about her?’
Johnnie couldn’t deny it. ‘It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for the baby,’ Johnnie said. ‘I do. Anyone would. But I don’t know the baby, and I do know my sister and I worry for the life she will have.’
‘However bad it is, it can’t be worse than the bloody convent.’
‘I know it was a harsh regime,’ Johnnie said. ‘And I don’t know why they made you wear those hideous clothes and cut your hair until it was like stubble.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Celia said bitterly. ‘Did you not tell your brother, Lizzie?’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘Why waste our precious time together talking about something Johnnie could do little about, but would only fret over.’
Celia could see the sense of that. ‘Tell me now,’ Johnnie said. ‘I’d like to hear how it was.’
Afterwards, he almost wished he hadn’t asked, for he listened to a tale of such brutality, such depravity, that it was scarcely believable. But he had only to look at Celia’s eyes to see every word was true, that and hear the comments from his sister supporting her.
‘Now,’ Celia said at last. ‘Those same order of nuns are in charge of most of the orphanages in Ireland. What chance would a wee, half-caste baby have, brought up by sadistic buggers like those, Johnnie?’ She didn’t wait for a reply and said, ‘You know what’s
laughable, or would be if it wasn’t so tragic: we worked dawn till dusk six days a week doing all the laundry for the townfolk and we never saw a penny piece of the money paid out.’
‘Aye,’ Lizzie put in, ‘it all went to the black baby heathens in Africa, but when a half-black child was born to me, they couldn’t bring themselves to touch it. Now d’you see why I couldn’t just walk away from my baby, for I know the sad, frightening and often painful childhood she would have had. She won’t have an easy road to travel anyway, I know that, but at least this way she will have one person to love and cherish her.’
‘Two,’ Celia put in.
‘Celia, I didn’t go to the trouble of planning your escape from that prison to encase you in another. You are a free agent.’
‘I’m a free agent because of you,’ Celia said sincerely. ‘I can’t forget that. It will take a lifetime to repay that debt to both of you, and I will stay as long as you want me to and love Georgia as if she were mine.’
Lizzie was too choked to speak and Johnnie was glad his sister had a staunch friend by her side. He now understood more of the dilemma she’d been in with regards to the baby, and why she had taken the decision she had, and now he had to hit her with more bad news. He waited until the baby had been fed, changed and wrapped up again in her shawl before withdrawing the letter from Violet with the telegram folded inside it that he had in his pocket. ‘This came this morning,’ he said.
He saw Lizzie open the letter from her friend, thinking it odd it had been addressed to Johnnie, but when the telegram fluttered out from the pages she understood why. ‘Violet explained it went to your house and she opened it so that she could tell his mother before she’d hear it from someone else,’ Johnnie said.
‘Aye,’ Lizzie said, scanning it. ‘So you know and she knows that Steve is dead.’ And she felt a sudden, almost violent sense of loss; a yawning emptiness inside.
Dead! Steve was too vibrant, too alive to be dead. ‘Killed in action’, it said. She wondered what action and whether he’d received her letter before he died, or was it part of his effects that would be sent back to her. She hoped he hadn’t received it, that he didn’t know about the rape and the result of it. Her intention had never been to shame Steve, nor to flaunt her sin in front of him, but it was how he would see it, she knew that, so it would be better if he’d died with his image of her intact.
She wondered at the lack of tears, but she seemed numb inside; and yet she knew she would miss him dreadfully, for in his own way he had been a good husband, a good provider, a good lover most of the time, even if she had to share that part of him with others. ‘The children will be devastated. Have they been told?’
‘Not yet,’ Johnnie said. ‘Mammy is telling them today.’
‘It will be hard to soften a blow like this,’ Lizzie replied. The tears came then. She cried for the loss of Steve the husband and father, and she cried too for Flo, who’d lost a treasured and favourite son. Celia
held her till the spasm of grief abated a little and the guilt began. ‘What if he got my letter,’ she said through the tears, and then, ‘Oh God, what if what I had to tell him was the cause of his death?’
‘How do you work that out?’ Celia asked.
‘He might have been upset over it, not watching himself, you know.’
‘Stop beating yourself about the head for something you know nothing about,’ Celia said quite sharply. ‘The man was in a war, for Christ’s sake. It’s a tragedy and awful for you and your children, but that’s what happens in war. Think of it this way too, at least he isn’t to be shamed by the appearance of Georgia.’
But Lizzie couldn’t rid herself from this feeling of guilt. And, in a way, she had been right.
Steve had been in North Africa when the letter came, and battle-weary like they all were. They were all overdue a spot of leave, but they had to hold the city of Tobruk until reinforcements got there.
He was sick of the place; sick of the unrelenting heat, which ensured that he was damp with sweat in minutes so that his uniform stuck to him. His head had a constant ache and his eyes stung and watered.
And the sand! God, the sand! He was fed-up to the back teeth with sand: miles of it—as far as the eye could see. It got everywhere: he’d eaten and drunk it now for months. It got into his hair, stung his eyes, gilded his eyelashes and seeped into his mouth and nose. It was ingrained in his hands and under his fingernails, inside his clothes, itching him or raising rough, raw patches. And his feet! Walking hour upon hour in
heavy boots on that uncompromising sand that filtered through his army-issue socks so that the blisters were rubbed raw.
The heat and brightness seemed never-ending, and then, in an instant, it was black night. No gradual sunsets in this Godforsaken place. And the nights were cold, sometimes very cold. That had surprised him at first. Nothing did any more.
They’d suffered heavy casualties in the opposition they’d encountered as soon as they reached North Africa. Every time he came through the battles unscathed he was amazed. Each hour he was left alive was a bonus.
He was a seasoned fighter now and had been in this bleeding hole for going on fourteen sodding months. But soon, and it couldn’t come too soon, they’d be taken to a port and shipped home to Blighty, back to their loved ones, he thought wryly.
He wasn’t sure about his loved ones at all, his wife at least. She’d been sending weird letters for weeks now. Even when he’d asked how Tom liked school it took her over a fortnight to answer and then it was very vague and giving one excuse after the other why she couldn’t come home. It was just pathetic.
Mike said both Tressa and Lizzie were better off where they were for the duration. Course, he had reason to say that. Seemingly he’d only have to catch sight of Tressa and she’d get pregnant again. Steve doubted that with the children’s demands she’d have time to wish Mike the time of day, or even notice he was there. Lizzie was different. She always made a fuss of him when he was home, didn’t complain overmuch when
he went out each night and came home bottled, or even smelling of perfume when he’d had a bit of slap and tickle with some hot bit of stuff.
Took it in her stride did Lizzie, and she never refused his advances either. He wanted her back in their house when his leave came up, ministering to his every wish as a good wife should.
His mother kept on saying he should decide who was master in that house, who wore the trousers. Well, by Christ he’d show Lizzie who that was all right. If she wasn’t back at home in Birmingham when he got leave, he’d go to Ireland and fetch her back if he had to drag her every inch of the way.
And now there was another letter from her. Once he’d longed for her letters. They’d been his lifeline. Many he knew had received ‘Dear John’ letters, as if their women couldn’t do without sex with men away and they’d take it from whoever was available. It was understandable that fighting men would take any diversions offered them, but wives and mothers. God, it was disgusting!
At least he’d never expect behaviour like that from Lizzie. Her letters had been odd, but not worrying in that sense. She wasn’t that kind of woman.
But this letter was like no letter she’d written before. Open-mouthed, he read of the attack on her the previous February. He’d known about it of course, his mother had told him, yet when he’d mentioned it to Lizzie she’d been quite dismissive and said there was nothing to worry about.
But it wasn’t just an assault, it was a full-scale attack, a stabbing with a knife that could have been
fatal. She painted a good picture too of the blackness of that night, and he remembered how horrendous the blackout had been at times from his days at home with his bad leg and arm. Course, other times the blackout had been a blessing, when he’d not wanted to be seen.
And this man hadn’t wanted to be seen. He wondered why she’d told him it all now and why the man had picked on Lizzie; or was it some random choice, could it have been anyone? He read of Lizzie being rendered unconscious and of Violet finding her, and he stiffened when he heard of Violet also noticing Lizzie’s knickers beside her still body.
He’d interfered with her, the dirty sod. His mother had never mentioned that. Course, Lizzie might not have told her.
But, as he read on, his mouth dropped open and he was unaware of it. Almighty Christ, the sod had done more than interfere with her, he’d made her pregnant!
He read of her shame and initial revulsion for the child. Now he understood her flight to Ireland, but knew his mother was unaware of the reason, though he could bet that that bitch Violet was in the know. He scanned the letter further, taking in how Lizzie’s parents had sent her to a place run by nuns.
The nuns take the children away and give them to Catholic childless couples. And it was what I wanted, I welcomed the chance to get on with my life. I gave birth to a girl a few days ago. And she is quite, quite beautiful, but also half-caste.
Steve jumped up and threw the letter away in disgust. A nigger. How in God’s name had she let a nigger up inside her? He remembered for a brief moment the one black woman he’d had that he’d lusted after since he’d first caught sight of her. There was an element of curiosity there too. Everyone said a black man’s dick was bigger than a white man’s and he wanted to take a black woman and see if they were any way different as well.
She’d fought like a tiger, he remembered, but that had just excited him more; and the sex afterwards—on God, it had been wonderful. Course, she’d cried and carried on, but God, he could have started all over again and might have done if she’d have shut up. He knew the neighbours might easily come round to investigate and he’d told her to shut her gob, but when that had no effect he’d given her a smack in the mouth and taken off through the night, melting into the darkness.
That had been the first time he had taken a woman by force and he’d found it more exciting than those who were willing. He had the physique to subdue most women and that thought excited him further.