The Christie Affair(9)
‘He will recover,’ I said, fierce with believing the impossible as only the very young can be. Beneath my coat the dress I wore held a faint spattering of blood from Finbarr’s coughing.
‘You sound like an Irish girl,’ he said. ‘Not a bad idea to keep that up. The English aren’t so popular these days, around here.’
I nodded but I only understand his words in retrospect. If he had said Sinn Fein aloud, it would have meant nothing to me. I wouldn’t have been able to say what IRA stood for. My Ireland was the ocean, the shore birds, the sheep. Green hills and Finbarr. Nothing to do with any government, its or my own.
‘You’re a lucky girl,’ Mr Mahoney said. ‘Not so long ago the only place for you would have been the workhouse. But these nuns look out for mothers and babies.’
I thought it would be better if the workhouse was the only place for me. Surely Mr Mahoney would never have the heart to deliver me to a place meant for criminals, so he’d have to let me stay with his family. As it was, I’d spent my last penny on the journey to his door. I suppose I went along with him voluntarily, but that doesn’t seem the right word when you’ve nowhere else to go.
Finally we arrived at the convent in Sunday’s Corner. Mr Mahoney jumped from the wagon and offered a broad, calloused hand to help me down. The convent was beautiful. With red bricks and turrets it loomed and rambled, looking like a cross between a university and a castle, both places I never expected to see inside. On the grass out front stood a statue of a winged angel, hands clenched at her side rather than raised in prayer. Over the convent’s door, in a vaulted nook where a window should have been, stood another statue made of plaster – a nun wearing a blue-and-white habit, her palms at her sides, face out, as if offering sanctuary to all who entered.
My parents had never been religious. ‘Sunday’s for resting,’ my father used to say, explaining why he didn’t go to Mass. My mother was Protestant. I’d mostly only been to church with my Aunt Rosie and Uncle Jack.
‘That must be the Virgin Mary,’ I murmured.
Mr Mahoney let out a joyless chuff of a laugh, a sound that derided how little I knew about everything in the world. I’d come to Ireland hoping to live in his modest, dirt-floored house. Mr Mahoney had deep circles under his faded eyes but I could tell they’d once been just like Finbarr’s. I looked at him, willing him to see me and change his mind.
‘The Sisters will take good care of you.’ He may have believed this was true. His voice was gentle, almost regretful. Perhaps he’d go a little way down the road then turn around to come back for me before I could even unpack. ‘We’ll send word to you about Finbarr. I promise that.’
He lurched my suitcase from the back of the wagon – my mother’s suitcase; I’d stolen it from her before I left. She would have given it to me if I’d asked. Better yet, she would have begged me to stay, or run away with me herself. ‘How could you ever have thought otherwise?’ she would ask me, too late. ‘I would have done anything, fought anyone, including your father, to keep from losing another daughter.’
If I’d known in that moment what I do now, I would have trudged off on my own two feet, away from the convent. I would have walked down its long drive, over the hills, and swum across the freezing Irish Sea back to England.
Inside the nuns traded my clothes for a drab, shapeless dress that wouldn’t need replacing no matter how big my belly grew, and a pair of ill-fitting clogs. A young, sweet-faced nun took my suitcase. She smiled warmly and promised, ‘We’ll take good care of this for you.’ I never saw it again. An older nun sat me down and cut my hair so that it barely covered my ears. I’d only ever worn it long and worried what Finbarr would think when he came to get me.
I didn’t follow Mr Mahoney’s advice and speak with an Irish brogue. Once the nuns had explained the rules of my new home, I barely spoke at all, not for weeks.
A young person can’t know her life, what it will be or how it will unfold. When you grow older, you gain a sense that hardships occupy particular moments in time, which, by and by, will pass. But when you’re young, a single moment seems like the whole world. It feels permanent. Years hence I would go on to live a bigger life. I would travel all over the world. But that winter I was scarcely more than a child. I knew exactly two places: London and County Cork and only tiny pockets of both. I knew I was young but I didn’t understand how young, or that youth was a fleeting condition. I knew the war had ended but I didn’t yet believe it. The Great War had seemed not so much an event as a place, unmovable as England but nowhere near as destructible. In London my father’s favourite pub had been blown to rubble, kegs of ale rolling out onto the street as more bombs fell. For the rest of his life my father would say the world lost its innocence during the Great War.
The first task I was given at the convent – my hair shorn, my own clothes taken away – was tending the nuns’ graveyard. With two other girls, both of them heavily pregnant, I went out to sweep and rake, and clean the headstones of lichen. The cold air might have tasted like freedom if not for the iron bars extending around the perimeter, as far as I could see. To the right was a high stone wall. Thin sounds carried over it, which I didn’t realize were the voices of small children, brought out for a breath of air before their supper. Visible through the iron bars lay the road that led away from the convent; no sign of Mr Mahoney returning for me with a change of heart. Neither of the other girls spoke to me. We weren’t supposed to speak at all, or even know each other’s names.