The Christie Affair (35 page)

When I got there, my baby’s cot lay bare and empty. No sheets, just a tiny stained mattress where countless other babies had lain. Sister Mary Clare walked towards me with her arms outstretched, a look of consternated sympathy puckering her jolly young face. And something else: a twinkle in her eye. I saw it. Whatever she was about to tell me would account for the
day’s excitement. A bolt of understanding landed in my heart with the first murderous twinge.

‘Where is my baby?’ I demanded.

In another cot a little boy old enough to stand pulled himself to his feet, bright copper hair in disarray. He held out his arms to be picked up and Sister Mary Clare swerved away from me as if to accommodate him. I grabbed her billowy sleeve.

‘Where’s Genevieve? Bring me to her right now, please.’

The nun was the barest bit shorter than me but considerably broader. ‘Oh, Nan,’ she said. ‘Poor, dear Nan. Don’t you worry about that baby.’

The other nuns always did that. Called our children ‘the baby’ or ‘that baby’, as if they were still in utero and would only be born when delivered to their counterfeit parents or transferred next door to the orphanage. But at least in my presence, until this moment, Sister Mary Clare had always called my baby Genevieve.

‘Your baby is gone,’ she said. ‘To the nicest family, Nan. They’ll give her a wonderful life.’

‘You can’t adopt her to anyone else. She’s mine.’

‘There, dear. Of course she’ll always carry you in her heart.’

‘Where is she right at this moment?’

‘Now, Nan,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you. I could get into great trouble for doing so, but I believe this will please you. It’s an English family who’s adopted her. A lovely English family, she’ll be raised right and proper.’

‘Where in England?’ It came out as a bellow. A scarcely contained roar. To my own ears I sounded like an animal. How must I have sounded to Sister Mary Clare? Fierce enough for her to take a step backwards, looking less confident in her ability to soothe me.

How could I ever have believed her? I felt seduced. My hand still clutched the fabric of her sleeve. I closed the distance between us, my nose almost touching hers.

‘You bring me to my baby right now.’ Not a bellow this time but a growl. I finished the sentence in my thoughts: or I swear to God I will kill you where you stand.

Now she saw it. Now she was afraid. As if the threat hadn’t just been in my head, but I’d said it aloud. The jolliness disappeared from her face along with the sympathy. I stepped closer. She stepped away. Now she was near enough to the wall to feel its cold stone through her habit. Genevieve’s molecules still inhabited this room. Her laughter still echoed from its stones.

It was the man I’d seen earlier. I knew it. Had they brought her directly to him? Or had they let him shop, as if for a puppy? Perhaps he had walked up and down the rows of cots, peering into every one, until my Genevieve’s bright blue eyes stared back at him. So alert. So beautiful. So plump and rosy on mother’s milk. Worth any price the nuns asked. Perhaps she’d performed her new trick for him and laughed. Enchanting.
I’ll take this one.

And Sister Mary Clare handed my baby right over to him. Genevieve, bundled into a stranger’s arms and carried away. And all the while I was working in the very same building.

The nun stared straight at me. You’d think the shape of my face would be something she’d remember her whole life, but her eyes never took me in. Not really. All she saw was her counterfeit kindness, reflected back at her as something real. Her gaze was no more authentic than the studied furrow in her brow, now, as if she cared about me. As if she hadn’t presided, jolly and smiling, over the kidnapping of my child.

A criminal. In the course of this story thus far I have described to you a variety of crimes. But none –
none
– is more heinous,
more violent, more unconscionable, than this one. The theft of my baby. Nothing I could unleash upon Sister Mary Clare could ever equal what she’d just done to me.

My fingers twitched. They rose, almost without me. I placed both hands around her neck. How satisfying her gasps – first of shock and then of pain. She tried to gasp but couldn’t. No oxygen for her, my hands saw to that. Her eyes bulged. Her hands came up to claw at my arms but I worked with the strength of a mother protecting her child – too late but none the weaker. She tried to bat me away but her blows were like air, as if she knew she had no right to defend herself.

It felt good. It felt like the beginning. I would kill her and then I would leave the convent and find the rich, slick-haired man and retrieve my baby. But first this sweet task, choking Sister Mary Clare until her face turned blue. Once she was dead, I would smash her head against the stone wall, one sharp blow. When she fell to the floor, I’d smash her head a final time, breaking it open on the hard-tile floor, that cruel pink and blue. Sister Mary Clare made a gurgled sound of fear, which only fuelled the pleasure I took in harming her.
Soon you will be dead.

I could feel her pulse beneath my hands, steady and stoppable. Slowing down. Against my palms, her throat tried to gurgle but couldn’t. I pressed harder. Her eyes bulged. Good. Excellent. Good. I’d scarcely known my own strength. It was the first religious moment I’d encountered between these hallowed walls.

Then a baby cried. Perhaps it was Susanna’s baby. That distinct hungry mewl, sharp and desperate. My milk let down with a searing sting, soaking through my shirt and apron. I let go of the nun. Sister Mary Clare raised her hands to her throat, stroking away what damage I’d done, reclaiming the room’s oxygen with great honking inhalations. I could see welts, red now; by
evening they would be black and blue. She stared at my chest, milk spilling through my dress and apron, its sweet smell filling the room.

How far away was Genevieve at that moment? Every second brought her further and further from my arms. If I raised my hands again, if I killed Sister Mary Clare, I’d be incarcerated for good. There would be a trial. My parents would discover my whereabouts through newspapers. The harlot who strangled a bride of Christ. I would spend the rest of my life in prison, if I was lucky enough not to be executed.

So I kicked off the clogs and ran from the nursery with my soiled apron, in my stockinged feet. Out of the convent. Into the nuns’ graveyard. The children from the orphanage played in the yard, I could hear their voices rising up into the air. When I got to the iron gate, I only had to kick the bar, turn sideways and squeeze myself through, just as I’d practised. I ran away from the road, across the fields. After a while, in the distance, I heard the convent’s bells and then a constable’s siren.

The bells were for me. I knew the nuns would be scurrying and exclaiming and running in useless circles. But the sirens sounded for a different reason. Luckily for me, the police were engaged elsewhere. An RIC patrol had been ambushed in Cobh and every available officer was rushing in that direction. Every girl in the convent could have escaped without capture, if only I’d known to tell them.

First I ran, faster than ever, joyless. I flung off my cap and my apron, in motion, never missing a stride. I ran off the road, through fields. Not the barest slip or side sprain of an ankle. Clean, fast strides, like I’d been in training. I passed a farmhouse
where laundry dried on the line, swaying in the cool crisp afternoon. I should have stopped and stolen clothes, disguised myself. The front of my dress was soaked through with milk, drying from my flight and the sun. But I didn’t stop. I ran and I ran.

‘Whoa, there darling,’ a woman said.

I hadn’t seen her, leaning against a barn. Wearing trousers and a thick jacket, a cigarette in one hand, the other raised up in the air as she stepped out in front of me, stopping me short. She had wild grey curls and a wind-burned face, standing close enough for me to smell last night’s whiskey on her breath.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please let me go.’

Her eyes landed on my chest, the milk stains dried by now, then travelled to my shredded stockings and feet. She blew out a stream of smoke then dropped her cigarette dangerously into the hay. Took a moment to stamp it out.

‘And where is it you’re going, then?’

‘I don’t suppose I need to tell you.’ I sounded more weepy than defiant. Nothing had ever felt more incorrect than standing still. I had to run, away and also towards.

The woman took off her coat and placed it over my shoulders. ‘I know where you’ll be going,’ she said, raspy voice wanting to be kind, forcing itself to be stern. ‘Straight to the boy who got you here in the first place. But you mustn’t go to him, dear. Listen to you. Sounding like England. That’s where you belong, then, isn’t it?’

Her name was Vera and she brought me inside, gave me a change of clothes and fed me. I think she told me about her life, the friend she lived with and her feelings about the nuns and what they called charity. I didn’t hear any of it. For the longest time I
didn’t hear a word anyone said to me. I was a shoeless girl on foot, desperate to win a race against cars and boats. From the moment I discovered I was pregnant I had only ever been a girl on foot.

At some point another woman arrived, also wearing a man’s work clothes and smelling of smoke and whiskey. ‘Good gracious,’ she said, at the sight of me.

‘That’s Martha,’ Vera told me.

Martha looked directly at my breasts, swollen to lopsided rocks with breast milk. ‘Come with me, love,’ she said. ‘I can help you with that.’

She brought me into the small bedroom and unwound a cloth bandage for me to wrap around my breasts. ‘You want to let the milk out a little bit, every now and then,’ she said. ‘Enough to relieve the pressure, but not so much to keep you producing.’

Thinking about it now I wonder what babies were in her past, whose milk she’d had to stop. But I didn’t wonder at the time. Vera and Martha emptied a biscuit jar of pound notes and shillings. They bundled me up in what may have been one of their best coats. Vera’s shoes fit me better; she gave me a pair of soft-leather boots. Then they loaded me into the back of their wagon.

‘Lie low and still,’ Vera instructed.

And so I left Sunday’s Corner the same way I’d arrived, in a horse-drawn carriage. Martha sang as she drove the horses, the same tune Sister Mary Clare used to hum, echoing like bagpipes through the stairwells and hallways of the convent. Finally I learned the words:

‘Come, all you fair and tender girls

That flourish in your prime

Beware, beware, keep your garden fair

Let no man steal your thyme.’

The song and the women carried me to the train station where they bought my ticket to Dublin and gave me the rest of the money for the boat back to England.

‘How will I ever repay you?’ I asked.

‘Be well,’ Vera said, ‘and be happy.’

Martha’s dress was far too big. I kept the good coat buttoned to my chin. When the boat docked in Liverpool, a group of English soldiers waited to be dispatched to Ireland. And I wondered, in the history of the world, had one soldier ever been sent to win back a mother’s stolen child? In the coming months I’d search for Genevieve in the most illogical ways. I walked from London all the way to Croxley Green, straight through the night, the soles of my shoes worn down, speckled with holes. I peered into every pram, wary mothers or nannies rolling them back, pulling up the hood.