Blood And Water (23 page)

“Mr. B-b-bertram,” she whispered.

“Mr. Bertram what?” Barbara asked, not understanding what the gibbering girl was trying to say.

“He … he … he is the …” but she couldn’t finish her sentence for her intense sobbing.

“Is the father?” Barbara finished, paling. “Are you trying to tell me Mr. Bertram is the father of your child?”

“Yes,” she sniffed, her face drenched by her tears.

But Barbara didn’t need to hear her; she got it the first time but just didn’t believe it.

“You lying bitch! How dare you!” she spat instinctively, slapping the girl hard across her already burning face.

Lillian recoiled, raising her hand to her face and looked up at Barbara, her eyes filled with shock and terror.

She was no more than a child herself. She looked so innocent, so angelic, so credible. Doubting her was pointless. This wasn’t the face of a liar.

At least now she’s stopped blubbering, Barbara thought, while between her ears her blood raged like a torrent inside her head. She felt its rapid course through every vein and artery until it pounded in her head, ready to explode. She might have screamed, or maybe just cried aloud, but one way or another she couldn’t speak, her pain was that intense.

William steered clear of her with nothing to say and no apology on offer while she couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eyes. She didn’t challenge him or ask him how he could have done this to Lillian, to her, to the children. She knew exactly how it happened. She even knew why it happened. But knowing it and saying it were two different things. For a week Barbara was left to her thoughts and could think of nothing else but Lillian and William.

“What a fool you are,” she told herself as she worked through what could and should happen next.

Her room became her jail. She was too ashamed to be seen by anyone – not her friends, not even Gladys who must have seen what was going on. Even the children, she thought, looked at her with pitying eyes. How could they? They’re so young. Oh, they know all right, she tormented herself, they can smell it. Shame has a powerful stench.

When William eventually came to her it was with embarrassment rather than humility.

“May I come in?” he asked politely from the doorway.

“You already have,” she answered bitterly as he entered without waiting for an answer.

“This … eh . . .” he paused, seeking out a word that might be least offensive to her “. . . eh . . . this situation . . .”

She replied with a slow shake of her head.

“Well, I think the best thing is for Lillian to leave.”

“Leave?” Barbara asked in disbelief. “And go where?”

“Well, it has been suggested –”

“By whom?” she shot at him. “Who else knows about this … about this ‘
situation
?” Her words slurred slightly at the end, the effects of her first few drinks of the evening kicking in.

William bit his tongue in recognition of his error in talking about their situation to anyone outside of their own circle.

“There is a community in the North that welcomes girls …” He left the sentence open-ended, inviting her to pick up the meaning.

“Oh really?” she asked politely. “And what then?”

He looked back at her, confused.

“What then, mastermind? What does she do with it?”

“With what?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, William! Are you being purposely obtuse? The baby.
The bloody baby!
What do you do with it?”

“The child will have a home,” he stated with dispassion.

Barbara was too incensed to ask where.

“And what if she won’t go? What if she won’t give it up? What if she wants to keep it? Have you thought of that?” she asked instead with shaky calm.

“I think she knows she can’t stay here and she doesn’t want to go home with the baby, so …”

“You think? You’ve spoken to her about this?” Barbara asked with an acid laugh. “How cosy! Post-coital chit-chat. Just bloody lovely.”

Affording her, in the circumstances, the right to be childish, he ignored her jibe and told her, “She leaves on Monday.”

“She leaves tonight,” Barbara corrected. “I don’t want her a night more under this roof. And you can go with her.”

William moved around the bed to sit into the chair in the window. There was more.

“Not me,” he said. “You.”

It took a minute for his words to sink in.

“Me?” she asked with a confused laugh. “I’m not going anywhere!”

“I’ve thought about this and there is only one way to keep this quiet.”

“You are insane, do you know that?” Barbara interrupted, knowing but not believing the direction of his instruction.

William continued as if he didn’t hear her interjection. “The baby will come here after it’s born.”

“And Lillian? What about her?”

“Lillian will keep quiet. She doesn’t want the child.”

“She’s told you that, has she? So what does she want? Money? Is that it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question. If she doesn’t want the baby and she’s not after money what exactly is she after? But never mind that – where is she going to go?”

“Well,” he shrugged, “then she goes home.”

“Home where? Here?”

“
Think, woman!
” he almost shouted, his patience wearing thin. “Back home to her mother in Galway of course.”

“And if she won’t go?”

“She will. We’ll give her a healthy allowance and a glowing reference. She won’t be able to refuse.”

“And what about me? Do I not have an opinion?”

“Barbara, you
know
this is the only way. You don’t want this getting out any more than I do, do you?”

He was right. She didn’t. But to take the child as her own? He must be mad. She thought of Emily. She still felt her loss every single day: her little girl. Maybe this child would be a girl …

“Well?” he asked, looking for her response, like she had a say.

“You have it all worked out, don’t you?” she asked him quietly. “What if I don’t agree?”

“You will,” he told her confidently. “You’ll do what’s best, for us all.”

“How could you do this to me?” she demanded, between sobs.

“I have needs,” he told her. “I didn’t set out to hurt you, it just happened.”

“William, things like this don’t
just happen
. And what about the others?”

“What others?” he asked, taken aback by her suddenly forthright questions.

“Don’t take me for a fool!” she sighed. “I may be a drunk but I’m not stupid.”

“Well, maybe if you stopped drinking and took some notice of what was going on around you this might not have happened.”

And there it was. The blame. And it was hers to accept and keep. Ever the politician, William managed to deflect both attention and blame away from himself. It was his parting gift as he left the room, delegating the responsibility for their dysfunctional marriage to her.

On the Monday morning the car came to collect them and almost immediately an agency nanny moved in. The children, not that they really understood, were told that “Mammy has to go away for a while. She’s not feeling well because she’s going to have a new baby but needs some special care. Lillian is going to go with her so she can take care of Mammy”.

Barbara often wondered what would have happened had she not got into that car. How differently things might have turned out. But it was the 1970s, she was the wife of a promising young politician, a future Taoiseach perhaps. She didn’t have a choice.

On paper, it was a simply explained exercise but in reality it became an arduous journey of self-inflicted punishment and flagellation for Barbara. She accompanied Lillian to the wilds of Donegal and remained with her for the remainder of the pregnancy. Proving that everything had a monetary value, she and William were guaranteed discretion by the nuns and Barbara was treated like religious royalty, if there was any such thing. It might have been cheaper to stay at the Ritz, she quipped to herself as Mother Superior took her to her room. She was given one of the larger cells to sleep in which had privacy in its favour and a view from a small window that looked over the fields and out to sea. Lillian on the other hand slept in one of the dormitories with the other girls of which there were at least fifty, all young, all scared and all very, very lonely. No one, it seemed, ever came to visit, there were no letters and no phone calls to or from the makeshift booth in the main hall. It was like they had been lost or just simply forgotten.

Such a cold place, always dull like the sun never shone and if it did the rays were devoured by the grey boundary walls before they even had a chance to shine through the windows. Barbara kept to herself, steering clear of the loud clatter of the girls as they marched through the corridors at lunchtime or in the evenings when their work was done. They were kept busy, working twelve-hour days. Waking up at six in the morning and finishing at six at night they spent their days washing and scrubbing for the community. It was their penance, Mother Superior told her when she first arrived. These were girls, troubled girls, in need of reform and guidance, she said with a smile that had no heart.

Even though they were all pregnant or recent mothers there was neither sight nor sound of their babies. She never saw them together, the mothers and their children. Never a cry or a whimper, although sometimes, even through the yard-thick masonry walls of the convent she heard the girls cry while the nuns screamed –
guiding
them, Barbara thought, pushing the morality of what she was witness to out of her mind completely.

It was only years after she left the convent that she thought about what went on in that house and wondered what had become of those girls, so many of them abandoned by their families, all in the name of repentance and the need to hide their shame. How misguided. How hypocritical. How evil. It was easy to blame the Sisters, brainwashed in the unnatural environment of their own captivity, but all of those girls had parents who had knowingly sent and left their daughters there to suffer. They were the culpable ones. They were the heartless bigots. People just like herself and William.

For Barbara, it was her longest period sober since Sebastian was born and for seven months she walked the harsh and unforgiving weather-beaten coastline. Although Mother Superior often offered her time to share her thoughts and worries, Barbara never quite trusted her and chose instead to keep the story of how and why she ended up in the far north of the country to herself. The magic and beauty of a landscape that was different every day became her best friend and her captor, keeping her lucid and in control. Despite herself, she did miss her boys in her own peculiar way but even so she was happy to be alone. She felt she could quite happily have remained there had she been allowed but as the seven months ran out so did her patience with her own company.

The baby arrived early on a Monday morning. It was fast and sore with no medicine to ease the pain. The novice attending the delivery, Sister Jude, without consultation named her Ciara and Barbara didn’t care to object. She was taken from Lillian and delivered straight into the arms of Barbara who held her for only a minute before handing her back, repulsed, to Sister Jude.

She did ask after Lillian, out of curiosity rather than concern, to be told that she had cried and hadn’t stopped yet but would get over it eventually.

On the eve of her planned return home to Galway some weeks later, Lillian left the house bright and early only to return lifeless and limp in the arms of a stranger. He had pulled her from the sea which was just too wild for such a slip of a thing. And, despite seeing the fragile girl in the early minutes after life, Barbara secretly counted it fortunate that sweet Lillian had passed.

And as if to add a final insult to Lillian’s family’s hurt and inconsolable pain, they buried her where she died rather than sending her home.

“How will she ever be able to rest in peace there?” her mother wailed. “Why did you leave her there? You should have brought her home to me.”

William, having taken it upon himself to ‘manage’ the situation, having delivered the news that not only had her daughter passed away but was already buried, took her hand and with well-practised remorse captured it in his own and leaning forward told her in his most sympathetic guise, “She loved the country. It’s what she would have wanted.”

Lillian’s mother cried while her little sister listened from the stairs outside.

Chapter 21

For as long as she remembered Ciara always knew she was different. Not physically, but inside. And now she knew why. Without a second thought she left her mother to contemplate her drink, got into her car and drove straight to the hospital, distracted to the extent that she didn’t even think to call Robert. Her head was chaotic, her thoughts a blur. It was impossible to index the words that tripped so easily off her mother’s lips so processing them into any kind of bite-sized intelligible pieces was hopeless. By the time she reached the hospital she had worked herself up to an almost hysterical frenzy.

“
Is it true?
” she shouted, storming into her father’s room without greeting but not without seeing Rian, Martha and Enya sitting around William’s bedside like good attentive children.

How hypocritical, she thought, cringing inside, not knowing how she should feel about her siblings now she was only halfways related. Each of them turned in surprise at her abrupt entrance. Glancing briefly at each with accusing eyes, like this was as much their fault as his, she ignored their stunned stares and instead focused her attention fully on her father.

“
Is it true?
” she repeated with a force sufficient to make her sister jump. Betrayal bubbled inside her as she waited for him to answer, her eyes searching his pale and insipid complexion. She wanted to feel nothing but anger towards him, but his frail demeanour refused to let her fury completely consume her. Doing her best to push her compassion aside, she shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.