The Angels of Lovely Lane (46 page)

*

Dana sat on the side of her bed and for the first time since that morning, reread the letter Beth had given her as they had walked in through the hospital gates. She was missing Victoria. She had no idea what to do, but she knew Victoria would know.

‘Heavens above, what a mess,’ she whispered as she read Teddy’s words yet again. He must have asked Celia to pass the note to me and she hid it in her room. Celia wasn’t even there to take to task. Dana stood and walked to her window to watch the storm. ‘You can’t hide for long, Celia,’ she said as she looked down at the rain bouncing off the cobbles on Lovely Lane. ‘You will be back.’

The curtains had not been fully drawn in the cubicle and Martha could see outside into the hospital garden. The night sounds of the patients, the crepe-muffled footsteps of tiptoeing nurses and the distant murmur of the occasional porter’s voice provided her with distraction as sleep eluded her. The pains in her abdomen were sharp and stabbing and brought tears to her eyes, but it had been two hours since anyone had even popped a head round her door. The night sister didn’t think much of her, she could tell.

‘So you’re the one who is causing all the trouble,’ she had said, when she began her rounds earlier. ‘Maybe you should have thought of the consequences before you dropped your knickers, miss. You young girls from the dock road, you’re all the same.’

She picked up the charts at the end of Martha’s bed and glanced down at them.

‘Have you been in here before?’ she snapped. ‘You look familiar.’ Martha was beyond being capable of a reply. There was no way she could speak, or even shake her head. She wanted her mother. She wanted Jake, but most of all she wanted the baby she knew had lived. She was on the edge of asking for Elsie, but she knew that if she did, Elsie might lose her job. This was all such a mess, and she had no idea how she had ended up here.

She thought of the woman who had ‘helped’ her. Helped to near kill her, more like. She closed her eyes and drifted into an exhausted and fitful sleep, back into her nightmare day.

*

‘I have half an hour,’ the woman said as she spread old newspapers out over her kitchen table. ‘Get your knickers off and then get up on the table. Put your backside to the edge so I can put your knees up. How far gone are you?’

It had taken Martha two weeks to find the name of an abortionist. In the end, she saw an advert in the paper from a woman offering herbal potions for a list of ailments, one of which was ladies’ stomach cramps.

‘Come back with five guineas,’ said the woman, ‘and then I’ll sort you out, dear. You won’t feel a thing. All over in a jiffy.’

Martha had been saving for the wedding and had exactly five guineas in an envelope in her bottom drawer. She had saved the money by adding half a crown every week for months and topping it up with sixpence or a shilling whenever she could. She would have to find a way to lie to Jake. To say it had been stolen, or lost. She was hardly showing and had barely put on any weight, she had been so ill, but she knew exactly how far gone she was. He had only raped her the once. As the abortionist spoke to her, her fingers slipped to her protector. To the knife in her pocket.

‘I can’t do it ’ere,’ the woman said. ‘It’s illegal. I have to do it at your own place.’

‘I can’t,’ said Martha. ‘My mam would find out.’

Begrudgingly, the abortionist agreed to perform the abortion in her own kitchen. ‘I don’t like doing that, mind, although there are a few on Upper Parliament Street who practically run bloody clinics, women in and out all day. The police don’t bother us, not unless they want a bit of business.’ The woman cackled and Martha had no idea what she was talking about.

She returned with the money the following day. The abortionist’s house revolted her. It smelt of stale cabbage and cats. She still had the blackout curtains up from the war and the sink was piled high with dirty dishes.

‘I’ll have you out of here in no time,’ the woman said, ‘and don’t you tell no one that you was ’ere, you got that?’

Martha nodded and watched as the woman opened a cupboard and took out a piece of rubber tubing and a jug.

‘Take this first, girl,’ she said, handing Martha a drink. ‘Knock it back in one, go on. It makes me job easier.’

Martha did as she was told. She wanted to be out of that kitchen even faster than the abortionist wanted her gone.

She began to feel light-headed and dizzy. So light-headed she could no longer stand without swaying. ‘Whoops-a-daisy, there’s me lady,’ said the abortionist, grabbing her by the arm. ‘Up you get, come on, love. Shuffle yer bum to the edge, there’s a good girl. Feels lovely that, doesn’t it?’ She grinned toothlessly at Martha, who lay rigid with terror.

‘I like a bit of that meself now and then, but I can’t always get me hands on it you know.

‘Now, hold your knees against your chest, put your arms around them and put your hands together. There you go. Don’t let go now or you might knock me arm. You’ll feel a little sharp prick down there, and then I’m going to mix some carbolic with water and flush your womb out. You’re quite far gone. Too far for anything else. Just cross your fingers it works, queen, but I’m not promising anything ’ere.’ It occurred to Martha that she hadn’t said that before she took the five guineas.

The woman lied. It was not a small prick. The tube felt like a searing hot knife as it was inserted through her hard-clamped cervix.

‘I’ve mixed more carbolic than usual with the water,’ said the woman. ‘You’re so far gone, you need it. Most of the women who come to me are only a couple of months gone. Get here a bit quicker next time.’

Next time? Martha could not believe that this woman would think she would ever want to visit her dirty kitchen again.

‘Does the fella know?’ Martha’s mouth would not work. Whatever she had been given to swallow allowed her to hear, but not to speak. Her tongue felt thick and filled her mouth.

The pain that followed was like nothing Martha had ever experienced in her life before and hoped she never would again. She felt something cold and liquid slip down between her buttocks and soak the newspapers. She was holding her knees against her chest for dear life, but the wooziness made it hard and she felt herself sway. ‘Keep bleedin’ still, I told you,’ the woman snapped, as Martha pulled her knees in tight.

What followed was a pain in her abdomen so sharp that she thought she was surely about to die, and all she could think about was Jake and her mam. It felt to her as though the people she loved most now belonged to a different world that was as far away from the nightmare she was living as it was possible to be.

Her first reaction was to convulse with the vomit that threatened to explode over the table.

‘Don’t worry, love,’ said the abortionist as she lifted her up into a sitting position. ‘It’s just a bit of shock. It always happens when you use the flushing method. Don’t know any woman it hasn’t happened to. What d’you think I put the old
Echo
s on the table for? Don’t want me kitchen messed up. It will go in a minute.’

It will, or I will, thought Martha, as she screamed with the pain. Her insides burnt with intense heat and, with a sense of horror, she watched as the blood ran down her legs. She tried to lift her head from vomiting, before everything around her turned black and she passed out.

*

Martha woke with a jolt. Her room was dark. Hours had passed. No nurse had checked on her. Her mouth was dry and thirsty, but when she reached for the jug on her bedside locker, it was empty. The sound of thunder and heavy rain filled the cubicle as she rested her head, too heavy to hold up, back on the pillow.

She saw the grass outside the cubicle light up a luminous bright green in a flash of lightning. It occurred to her that Matron had seen her many times before, when she was little, as she had sat for hours on end on the hard-backed chair near the main entrance to the hospital while she waited for her mother to finish working. She was very lucky Matron hadn’t recognized her today. She had felt badly for the young Nurse Tanner when they had all turned on her in a fit of temper. Martha had heard them in the corridor, shouting.

She had heard Nurse Tanner say, ‘He’s alive’, but when she asked Staff Nurse Bates only minutes later the staff nurse told her it wasn’t true. ‘No, I’m sorry, love, he was dead. But that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? What we need to concentrate on now is getting you better. You have been through a tough ordeal, Miss Smith. I can’t imagine what it was like for you before you got to St Angelus.’

Staff Nurse Bates had raised her eyebrows. Martha guessed she was hoping she would contradict the Miss Smith and confess her real name.

‘So, it was a boy?’ She was sure she had heard that too. ‘It was a boy?’ She had grabbed at Staff Nurse Bates’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Are you sure he’s not alive?’ she had asked, between sobs of grief. ‘It was a boy?’

She had no idea why she had cried the way she had. She had tried to abort her baby. Taken great risks, used all her money, lied to Jake, made herself ill. She had had her insides burnt out, and yet through the pain she felt nothing but overwhelming sadness and grief.

‘I had no choice,’ she sobbed, as Staff Nurse Bates stroked her fringe back from her forehead. ‘I had no choice. I didn’t know what to do.’

Staff Nurse Bates gave her a look of such deep sympathy and care that it actually made her feel worse. She would have preferred to be hated. For Staff Nurse Bates to have been rude to her, as the night sister had just been. That would have been so much easier. The kindness dissolved her and she was scared.

‘I had no choice,’ she sobbed to herself quietly again, while the thunder boomed outside her room. Jake would never have spoken to her or looked at her again, and would have married someone else. Her mam. God, her mam. The shame and disgrace. She would have had to leave her job and what a mess that would have put them both in. But it was the thought that she would lose Jake, that she would lose the boy she loved so much, that had driven her to do something that had almost killed her.

At first, she thought the noise was the thunder. The lights in the ward flickered and then they went off. Seconds later they came back on, but as the lightning struck they flickered again and the ward was plunged into darkness.

‘Don’t worry, ladies,’ she heard the night nurse say. ‘The generator will be on within five minutes. Happened all the time during the war.’

But then she heard it again. It wasn’t thunder but the sound of boots, running down the main corridor. Pounding and urgent, getting closer and closer, and the pounding and urgency sent a chill down her spine and a shiver across her body. It was night. It was dark. The generator had not kicked in. It was Mr Scriven. He was coming back to hurt her. Or had he sent someone else? Were they coming to kill her? To silence her and to keep Scriven safe. She heard a match strike, saw the glow of a paraffin lamp through her window and let out a sob. They were almost upon her. The merciless, pounding, urgent boots. She froze as the object of her new terror was almost upon her, and screwed her eyes tight shut. Her hands flew instinctively to her abdomen before she remembered there was no baby there. No little life to protect. The ward doors burst open and she heard the unmistakable voice of Jake as he roared ‘MARTHA!’ at the top of his lungs.

Sister Haycock walked through the main doors of St Angelus and headed for the stairs that led to the old sisters’ landing.

She had been so distracted. Before she had said goodnight to Mrs Duffy, her mind had been racing. Trying to find a solution to a problem for which there seemed to be no answer. Pammy was in desperate trouble, but she now had at least one bullet to fire. Mr Scriven had injected a drug into the girl’s abdomen that the BNF said was for intramuscular and IV use only. She made a mental note to slip on to a ward and check a BNF for herself.

Why had he done that? It was only a small bullet, but it opened up a line of questioning that might lead somewhere. Pammy said Staff Nurse Bates had only managed to keep one of the vials. She thought another drug had been used. What had that been?

She was desperate for a bath. Sad that she had missed her visit to Alf. Daunted at the thought of what tomorrow would bring.

Only three sisters remained in residence on the landing and she was now the fourth. The fact that she and Sister Antrobus were now neighbours depressed her. She had noticed that the night porter’s lad was nowhere to be seen. He sat in a wooden cubicle at the bottom of the stairs, just in case the sisters needed anything.

It was Biddy who had finally urged her to move in. How right she had been. ‘I think you might discover a thing or two on that corridor,’ Biddy had said.

As was often the case, Emily had no idea what Biddy was talking about. Right now, all she wanted to do was have a bath and kick off the soaking wet shoes she had been wearing for the past eighteen hours. ‘Bath, here I come,’ she whispered as she removed her shoes and picked them up from the floor.

There was no end of hot water in the bathroom on the sisters’ landing. Sheer luxury after what Emily had endured over the past two years.

She slipped behind the desk on the landing to remove the key to her room. The clean hospital towels were kept behind the desk and she removed two large fluffy ones. The best were kept for Matron and the sisters’ landing. As she held them to her face, she felt foolish for having attempted independent living for so long. The fees for Alf had made it impossible for her to afford anywhere respectable to live alone. She should have just given up and moved in ages ago, she thought.

As she tiptoed along the carpeted landing in her bare feet, not wanting to disturb the sisters, she thought she heard music coming from Sister Antrobus’s room and the murmur of voices. She stopped and listened. Maybe she had friends round? How could she, after the way she had behaved towards Pammy and the case they had dealt with? The two very much older residents had told Emily that they were in bed by eight in the winter, and visions of frilly nightcaps and teeth sleeping in jam jars had flown into her mind.