A Good Enough Mother—read an extract from the highly acclaimed novel by Catherine Dunne
Catherine Dunne‘s new novel A Good Enough Mother traces the fractured lives of mothers and children in an eloquent, gripping story spanning generations. Critically acclaimed, it has won the hearts of readers across the country. Here you can read an extract from the book, which gives a flavour of the different voices and interweaving lives.
Listen to Catherine Dunne on our podcast, Burning Books.
PROLOGUE
Summer 2019
I stumble on the second step as I try to board the bus. The driver glares at me. Blue shirt. Smell of aftershave. Spearmint gum and perspiration.
My stomach shifts and I turn my face away. He stops chewing for a moment.
Are you all right? he asks. His tone is sharp, accusing. You’re not going to be sick, are you?
I shake my head. I look down; try to make my hair cover most of my face.
No, I say. I’m fine. I just tripped. Too much of a hurry.
I’ve already fallen once. My knees are stinging. I hide the palms of my hands, keep the grit and the grazes to myself.
He says nothing. I can imagine what he’s thinking. So I make myself stand up straighter. I look him in the eye. I’ve become aware of the other passengers queueing up on the street behind me. They’ve begun to shift, impatiently. It’s starting to rain.
I’m fine, I repeat, but I can see he’s still suspicious.
Finally, he nods.
There’s not enough on my Leap card, so I hand him a twenty euro note. He gives me the change, jerking his head in the direction of the seats behind him.
Sit close to the door, he says.
I sit in the second row. If he looks in the mirror, he’ll be able to see just the top of my head. I can hide here. I take off my shoes, curl my legs under me, make myself as small as possible. At the same time, I place my bag on the adjoining seat. I don’t want anybody sitting beside me. I don’t want Friday night chat-up lines. I don’t want anyone to touch me.
I look around, but there are few enough passengers. It’s not yet midnight; way too early for the late-night party crowd.
I keep glancing out the window. Sudden beads of rain begin sliding down its surface. The windscreen wipers start to squeak; I keep watching the way they make clean, smooth semi-circles while the rest of the glass is dark and dusty. The sound they make feels oddly comforting. Ordinary. I feel a wash of relief.
The bus pulls away from the stop and begins to move slowly along the quays. The Liffey is on my right; glassy, yellow waves of streetlights ripple along its surface.
It’s only then I begin to shake.
1
Tess, Summer 2019
Tess can’t bear the sticky interior of the tram a minute longer. Air: she needs air. The doors slide to either side and she gets ready to step out onto the pavement. As she does so, a loose gathering of shrieking teenagers surges forward, making it impossible for anyone to move.
‘Excuse me, please,’ she says, her voice sharp with irritation. Why can’t they learn to let people off the tram first? She ignores the face one of the girls pulls at her, pretends not to hear someone else mutter, ‘Cranky old bitch.’
She turns quickly to her right, makes her way down the platform and waits at the Luas validator.
If only this low grumble of cloud would lift. It’s kept the whole city prisoner for days now. Tess longs for thunder, rain, high winds, anything to disperse the steel-grey gloom. She presses her travel card to the screen and it beeps at her, a blunt, aggressive accusation. She tries again and is aware of a queue forming behind her.
On the third attempt, the machine grunts its assent and Tess marches away from St Stephen’s Green, crosses to the pavement on the other side and begins to make her way down Grafton Street.
The walk to Connolly Station will do her good. She keeps her head up, lengthens her stride. She feels the beginnings of a gentle breeze on her skin, as it snakes its way up from the Liffey. She even starts to enjoy the swell of optimism that ripples along on its surface, that sense of leaving everything behind.
It’s been one of those days. One of those weeks.
By the time she reaches the Spire, her annoyance has reduced to a murmur, a kind of background noise. All at once, the image floats again to the surface of her memory. She tries to push it under. But it resists, stubborn to the last.
Mike. That awful row at the weekend. What began as a quiet, companionable Saturday evening in the garden had ended up with his announcement and her fury. And now he’s gone, off again for another four weeks, leaving her to hold the fort on her own.
‘I don’t have a choice, Tess – you know that.’
She remembers his face as he spoke. Sees the unmistakable double-blink of his blue eyes as he looked at her: a silent admission of guilt. She knows him so well.
‘That’s not true,’ she’d flashed back at him. ‘You put yourself forward for this – you’ve just admitted it. You could have opted to stay in Dublin this time.’
‘Not the way things are going, I keep telling you.’
She’d watched the way Mike clasped the back of his neck with one hand, massaging the tightness out of the muscles there. It’s what he does these days when he’s stressed. It is like a tic; one she’s beginning to see much too often.
‘Everything is so volatile at the minute. You know that.’ The mute appeal in his eyes almost made her weaken. ‘I can’t afford to rock the boat. Brexit is changing everything – we may even go under.’
‘And what about Luke? What if he goes under?’
Mike shook his head at her. She could almost taste his exasperation. ‘It’s just teenage stuff. Bad-boy behaviour, pushing the boundaries. We’ve seen it all before.’ He pauses, suddenly not looking at her.
‘Mike – he’s out of control. He rarely comes home. Won’t answer his phone when I call. I don’t even know where he is or if he’s safe.’
Mike sighed. ‘He’s nineteen, Tess. I think you’re overreacting. I really do.’
She doesn’t want to remember the rest. The way she’d ignited, the way she said so many things she’d only thought over the years. The way Mike turned away from her that night, without even a hug. That hadn’t happened in the longest time.
‘Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,’ her mother used to say. It was trite then, and it’s trite now, Tess thinks. Some things can’t be resolved, or forgiven, or forgotten, with a goodnight kiss.
She reaches Connolly Station and makes her way through the crowds to the north-bound platform. Her train is just arriving and she hurries towards one of the opening doors. Packed, as usual. Not a chance of a seat. Everyone is absorbed by whatever is on their phones. She watches as people scroll down and across, down and across, over and over again and she thinks what a mindless activity it is.
Nobody looks up as a young, heavily-pregnant woman – just a girl, really – steps into the carriage as the doors are about to close. She looks exhausted. Her feet are swollen and there is a fine beading of perspiration across her upper lip. She looks around, sees there are no empty seats, and her whole body seems to sag.
Tess feels an instant tug of sympathy. She knows just how that young woman feels. You never forget, really. She glances at the nearest rows of seats to her right and spots a young man, early twenties, who reminds her of Aengus. He has headphones on, and his eyes are closed. He’s nodding away to some inaudible concert inside his head. Tess steps forward and taps him on the shoulder. Startled, he opens his eyes and looks up at her.
She knows at once that she has chosen well. There is no hostility in his grey gaze, only surprise. He pulls the headphones off. ‘Yeah?’ he says.
She smiles at him and motions towards the girl standing behind her. ‘I wonder would you be so kind as to give that young woman your seat?’
He jumps up at once. ‘Yeah, yeah, ’course.’ He gathers up his rucksack and a light summer jacket and stumbles, almost eagerly, out of the way. His headphones are now around his neck, and Tess can hear the scratchy sounds of something she thinks she recognises, a familiar bass beat she’s heard so often at home, played at full volume.
The young woman smiles at both of them as she takes her seat. She doesn’t speak, but her glance is grateful. She looks Eastern European, with that white-blond hair and large brown eyes. As she sits, one of the two youngish women opposite turns to her companion and says, in a voice that’s meant to be heard, ‘Didn’t know pregnancy was an illness, did you?’
The other woman sniggers and both of them look down at their phones again.
Tess sees the blush that crawls across the pregnant girl’s cheeks. Sees the way she glances back over one shoulder, her expression confused. She may not have understood the words, but it’s clear she’s got the message. Tess gives her what she hopes is a reassuring smile. She feels suddenly furious, and something else besides. Her eyes fill with tears and she turns away, looking out the window at the speeding city.
‘Didn’t know pregnancy was an illness.’ The words keep repeating themselves, pushing each other around inside her head. That’s like something Luke would say. It’s something he does say. That, and so many other things that feel calculated to provoke.
She shakes the thought away. She holds onto the back of one of the seats, allowing the rocking motion of the train to soothe her.
*
As she walks around the corner into the park, Tess sees the usual summer sights. Kids kicking a ball on the green. Young teenagers sitting on the garden wall of Grumpy Murphy’s house. The small boy from number nineteen trying to master his bike without the stabilisers. And there’s his dad, running valiantly behind, one hand barely holding on to the saddle. She smiles as she remembers Mike, shouting encouragement to Aengus, running down the path of this same park. The street she has lived in all her life.
It’s the smell of newly cut grass that does it: memory trails in its wake. The man from the council has been. He’s just tended to the large, open green space in the centre of the clustering houses. She can still see the marks of the tractor-wheels across the flattened surface. Kids are hurling clumps of cut grass at each other, the sweet and scented remains that the tractor has failed to gather up.
It was always like this. Her brothers, Eoghan and Myles and Conor, used to do exactly the same thing as today’s kids: chasing the neighbourhood girls around the green and throwing handfuls of grass at them. Their squeals and shrieks were familiar, uncomplicated notes, background music to Tess’s early summers. Not for the first time, she wonders about all those childhoods made happy, or sad, or a resentful mixture of both, in this modest circle of North Dublin houses.
When Aengus was small, he used to watch out for the tractor’s arrival every two weeks during summer. ‘Tractor’ was among his first words. Dan – long-haired, grey-bearded, bead-wearing, a hero among the local children – cheered from the tractor’s cab on the day Aengus finally managed to ride his bike without stabilisers. It was the weekend of his sixth birthday, and Mike had completed circuit after circuit of the park until Aengus found his balance at last.
Tess cheered him on too, standing at the garden gate with three-year-old Luke in her arms. Luke had been so difficult, that weekend. She can still remember his tantrums, the way he – she stops.
Because right now she sees it. A Garda car, parked at the kerb. She tries to unpick the scene. Is the squad car outside her house? Or is it parked in front of her neighbour’s?
There are two unfamiliar figures standing at the porch. Her porch. She begins to feel whatever fear has been lurking for weeks now in that troubled place beyond words. It makes her quicken her step.
Breathlessly, she reaches the door. She sees Aengus’s face, white and strained. Just behind him, Luke’s fair head. Aengus is agitated, almost shouting at her as she reaches the step.
‘I tried calling you,’ he says, ‘at least three times. Where were you? Why didn’t you answer?’
Guiltily, she remembers switching her mobile to silent as she was setting up the conference room for the directors’ meeting at four o’clock. She must have forgotten to switch it back on again.
‘I’m here now,’ she says, evenly. Her voice has a calmness she doesn’t feel. She turns to the two men standing there. ‘Can I help you?’
The taller of the two nods, acknowledging her presence. ‘Mrs McGrath?’
‘Yes.’ She takes a moment, makes a show of examining the man’s identity badge, waits for her heart to stop thumping.
‘I’m Detective Burke,’ he says. ‘And this is Sergeant Feeney.’ He gestures in the direction of the shorter, stockier man who’s standing to one side. Feeney doesn’t speak, just dips his head once. It’s an almost comical gesture. It reminds her of one of those dunking birds that Aengus used to love as a child. Feeney has a bald spot that he has tried, and failed, to hide. Out of nowhere, Tess thinks: comb-over. The man doesn’t take his eyes off Luke and Aengus. An aura of alertness surrounds him. If it were a colour, it would be bright red.
Detective Burke is speaking again. His voice is soft. Everything about him is quiet, contained but authoritative. ‘We need to have a word with Luke.’
‘Why?’ Tess glances towards her younger son, now standing beside his brother in the hallway. The sun hits the wallpaper to his right, making patterns of light and shadow that she doesn’t remember seeing there before.
‘We need him to help us with our enquiries,’ he says. ‘Just an informal chat.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’ The sharpness of her tone surprises her. The man’s studied calm, his impassive expression, have begun to make her angry. ‘Why do you need to speak to him?’
The detective looks at her for a moment. Afterwards, she thought his gaze had been almost kind. ‘We’ve had reports of an incident,’ he says. ‘Your son may be able to help us with our enquiries.’
‘What kind of an incident?’
Luke pushes past Aengus and steps out of the hallway into the porch. For a moment, she is startled at his appearance. He has never looked so careless of himself. His hair is uncombed, unstyled. His trainers are undone. His eyes seem bluer than ever, the lashes darker, thicker.
‘Luke?’ she says. Something begins to tighten inside her, where her heart used to be.
He shrugs. ‘It’s okay, I’ll go with them.’
‘I’ll come—’ she begins, but he cuts her off.
‘There’s no point in you comin’,’ he says. ‘I’m over eighteen. They won’t let you in.’ His tone is almost nonchalant.
Tess isn’t able to untangle the thoughts inside her head. She reaches out one hand, but Luke flinches, pulls back from her. It is hardly a movement at all, but Burke notices it. It’s as though she’s just been granted another sense, one that is hyper-alert. She can see and hear and feel with a depth and clarity she’s never known before.
‘You’re welcome to wait at the station, of course, Mrs McGrath.’ The man’s tone is courtesy itself. ‘But we will need to speak to Luke on his own.’
Mrs McGrath. Tess lets it go, again. It’s easier than arguing. She’d kept her own name after she married. But Doherty is your father’s name, Luke had once pointed out to her. Another one women can’t win, he’d said with a smirk.
Before she can reply, the detective makes his way down the path, with Feeney to his left. Somehow, Luke ends up between them. They are like mismatched men, the one tall, the other short. Luke is bobbing between the two of them, something vulnerable caught in their riptide. She watches, helpless, as Feeney places one large hand on her son’s head and folds him into the back seat of the squad car.
For an instant, she imagines herself running after the two policemen, shouting abuse, lashing out at them with both fists, demanding that they give her back her son.
‘Mum?’ She’s almost forgotten that Aengus is also here, at her side. ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’
‘I had it on silent. That doesn’t matter now.’ She keeps her eye on the squad car, watching the way it reverses smoothly and pulls away from the kerb. She searches for Luke’s face; sees the way he stares straight ahead. Not even one backward glance.
She becomes aware of a group of young people gathering outside her gate. Their faces curious, they glance in her direction, and then after the departing squad car.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she says to Aengus. They step into the hallway, and she closes the door behind them. Now her legs begin to shake; they feel as though they might belong to someone else. She needs to sit down. But the need to find out what’s happening is more urgent still.
She looks up into her son’s anxious face. ‘Do you know what’s going on here?’
She hates even asking the question. ‘Aengus the Responsible,’ he’d once flung at her, ‘that’s me.’ Aengus His Brother’s Keeper. Aengus the Explainer. There were other names, too, hurled around the house over the years. But Tess doesn’t want to remember them. This is not the time.
She follows him into the kitchen. He leans against the counter, his arms folded, waiting. She pulls out one of the kitchen chairs and sits, trying to drive away the hazy black spots that have begun to dance before her eyes.
‘Well? Do you know anything about what’s going on?’
Aengus runs one hand through his dark hair. It stands up, in the same endearing peaks as when he was a small boy. ‘Luke asked me to meet him here this afternoon at five.’ He shrugs. ‘I’d no lectures so I said yeah.’
‘Did he say why?’
Waiting for Aengus to answer, her anxiety rises. It’s like a vise tightening: hard, relentless. She has the taste of cold metal in her mouth.
Aengus shakes his head. ‘All he said was something happened last weekend. He said that the guards took a few of his mates in for questioning this morning. Now it’s his turn.’ He pauses, looks down at his feet. He pushes something invisible away with the toe of his trainer. ‘Luke says they stitched him up.’
‘What do you mean, “stitched him up”?’ she asks, sharply. ‘What mates was he talking about?’
‘I don’t know. That’s all he told me. Really, that’s all I know.’
Aengus’s voice has begun to grow louder.
‘It’s okay,’ she says, quickly. ‘It’s okay, I believe you.’ She waits, giving him time to gather himself. His body finally starts to loosen, and she holds out one hand to him, speaking more gently this time.
‘Sit down beside me for a minute. I’m not going to interrogate you, Aengus. I’m sorry for snapping.’ She lets that settle between them. ‘I just want to know what you think might be going on. That’s all.’
But still he doesn’t move. He remains standing and she sees the way his knuckles begin to whiten again. He looks over at her, and she watches, appalled, as his eyes fill.
‘I think,’ he says finally, ‘I think that this time, Luke might have done something really bad.’
Maeve, 1979
The door creaked open, slowly at first. A blade of light across the darkness wrenched me out of a thin, edgy sleep. For a minute or two, I didn’t know where I was.
I waited. I held my breath. I no longer trusted anybody, anything in that place. I watched as something pale drifted soundlessly out of the shadows, then back into the dark again.
‘What’s your wee babby’s name?’
The words, when they came at last, were barely a whisper. I didn’t recognise the voice at my elbow, not yet, but I began to breathe again. It was definitely one of us. None of the nuns would take up such small, silent spaces. And they wouldn’t ask us that kind of question, either.
I looked up, trying to make out a face in the gloom. ‘Who is it?’ I pulled Belle closer, feeling her stir against me.
‘It’s me, Joanie, so it is. I’ve come to see how y’are doin’. And the wee babby.’
‘I’m okay,’ I whispered back. ‘We’re both doing okay. But you shouldn’t be in here, Joanie. Go back to your own dormitory. You’ll be in big trouble if they find out you’re missing.’
I could sense, rather than see her shrug. Poor girl. Monaghan Joanie was even younger than the rest of us. I never found out who the father of her child was. We never spoke about things like that, any of us.
‘They can’t punish me worse nor they already have, so they can’t,’ Joanie said. She moved closer to the bed. ‘Can I hold her? Just for a wee minute.’
I could feel her tremble. It was always cold in St Brigid’s, cold enough to make anyone shiver, but that wasn’t what was happening here. I didn’t trust Joanie. I couldn’t, once I’d seen the hunger in her eyes. I knew what she wanted.
‘The baby’s sleeping now,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to disturb her. Maybe in the morning.’ It felt cruel to make excuses. Joanie made me feel guilty and I wanted to offer her some small generosity of comfort that didn’t cost me anything. ‘Her name is Belle,’ I said.
Joanie giggled. She tried to cover her mouth with one hand. In the other, I saw the small lemon-and-green-striped teddy bear that I’d knitted for her. We were allowed to use up scraps of wool and fabric in the evenings, once all our chores were done, and Joanie had begged me to make a teddy for her. Afterwards, she sewed on the little triangle of black to mark its nose, and the thin wavery line for its mouth. The eyes were two metal buttons.
I thought they made the bear’s face look blank, sinister, but Joanie was thrilled. She gazed up at me that day in the sewing-room, her brilliant blue eyes shiny with tears. ‘I’m goin’ to keep this for my own wee babby, so I am,’ she said.
So I am. So I will. So it is. So many of Joanie’s sentences had these moments of quirky emphasis: as though without them, she was all shadow, no substance. It was as if she had to keep reminding herself, reminding us, that she was real. Some of the other girls teased her about it: ‘Is this wee Joanie coming? It is, so it is,’ but she never seemed to mind. Mostly, she saw kindness in us, even if it wasn’t there. She was looking at me now, disbelief stitched into her expression.
‘Belle?’ she said. ‘What kind of a name is that? Who calls a wee girl after a bell?’ A pause as she took another step towards me. ‘What were you thinkin’?’
‘It means “beautiful” in French.’ Even I could hear the pride in my voice, and I made a real effort to cover it up. I didn’t want to set her off. ‘It is different, isn’t it? Do you like it?’
‘Aye,’ she said, having thought about it for a moment. ‘I like the sound of it, so I do.’ Then, realising what she’d just said, she began to giggle at her own joke.
Her round face emerged fully from the shadows. I could see the large freckles sprinkled across her cheeks, her ready smile. Her face still had its childish softness, all its openness and innocence. Her features were somehow indistinct, as though they didn’t know what they’d be when they grew up.
Monaghan Joanie was barely fourteen. They had taken her baby from her while she slept. Sometime during the night, a couple of weeks earlier, they’d slipped into the nursery and taken him. One of the other girls, Grace, had awoken to the sound of their habits, shushing across the linoleum corridor. Terrified, she’d closed her eyes again, pretending it wasn’t happening. She’d shifted quietly, turned her face to the wall.
‘I didn’t want to see,’ she whispered to me afterwards. She hung her head as she spoke.
‘Did you hear anything? What did they say?’
Rage unfurled inside me again as I looked at Grace: at her shamefaced glance, the way her eyes darted over one shoulder. There was always someone hovering around us, listening or about to listen. I knew Grace had her own son to care about. I knew where her terror came from. But still.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Nobody said a word. It was all over so quickly. I was even askin’ meself if it had really happened.’
Of course it happened, I wanted to snap. I felt like slapping her. How many times does it need to happen before you believe it? We never knew when: maybe at two weeks, three weeks, six weeks. But it would happen, to one baby after the other. Furious, I turned away from her, from her gaping mouth, her fear-flickering eyes.
The following morning, there was no doubt. Joanie’s howls filled the long corridor and ever since, she’d wandered about like a lost ghost, trapped somewhere between two worlds. The dreamworld where other people’s babies lived, and the nightmare world without her own. I knew she didn’t mean any harm; we all did. Nonetheless, when Joanie was around, we kept our babies close. Just in case.
‘All right, so,’ she said. ‘I’ll come back again in the mornin’, so I will.’ She turned to leave, and the sag of her shoulders made me want to cry. But I couldn’t afford to weaken.
Joanie closed the door quietly behind her.
That was the fourteenth of February 1979, the day Belle was born. Valentine’s Day. I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last time Joanie and I would see one another for more than forty years.
Eileen, 1960
When the train pulls into Euston Station, I wake with a jerk.
I wake in the same way now, all these decades later, after one of my bad dreams. They always start at the same place: seeing myself as I step out onto that platform, into the freezing, clattery November air, leaving the steamy heat of the carriage behind me. My suitcase is heavy, and I stumble as I try to get a hold of it. My hands are shaking, and I can’t get a grip on anything.
Not the handle of my suitcase; not myself; not my own life.
‘Hello, dear.’
Startled, I look up and a woman in a navy coat and sensible shoes is standing in front of me. I look around, confused. Is she speaking to me?
‘My name is Majella. I’m a Sister at Maida Vale Hospital. What’s your name?’
I am suspicious. Kevin has warned me to be careful in London. There are a lot of conmen around, he’s told me. Later, I think how rich that is, coming from him.
‘Eileen,’ I say, careful not to give her my last name, just in case there are conwomen around, too.
‘Well, Eileen,’ she says. ‘And how far along are you?’
I gape at her. ‘What?’
‘Ten, eleven weeks?’ She smiles. ‘I meet this train, three days a week. I’m from Kildare, originally, but in London for the past twenty years. I know why Irish girls take the boat.’
I try to take in all these pieces of apparently unrelated information.
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘Please don’t worry. I have a place for you to stay. You’ll be safe.’
I already have a name and an address in Camden written on a page torn out of a notebook. Kevin had handed it to me the previous week. ‘It’s my sister’s address,’ he’d said. ‘She’s agreed to help you. You can stay with her until you find your feet.’
He gave me that piece of paper at the same time as he gave me fifty pounds, in an envelope. He wouldn’t look at me. It was the same evening he’d told me he wasn’t ready to be a father.
‘What do you mean?’ I said – stupidly, as I soon came to realise. It was perfectly clear what he meant. And fifty pounds repeated it for me, loudly, in case there was something I hadn’t understood.
There I was, just twenty years of age, head over heels in love and thinking my life was sewn up forever. All sorted, pins on paper. Kevin told me so many times how much he loved me, how we were meant to be together, man and wife. And I fell for it. I loved being with him, loved the way sex made me feel. It was whole lifetimes away from my mother’s mutterings about men and what they wanted to do in the dark.
I loved Kevin. I loved the heat and the joy and the intimacy we shared. The knowledge that this man was mine, and I was his in all the ways that mattered. Kevin and me, marriage and babies: that’s what I believed in. We’d both grown into our brand-new selves together, at the same time. I saw our whole lives stretch out before us: years and years at each other’s side until we reached the gentle sunset of our old age.
And his sister had agreed to help me?
It’s the same old, same old story. I took the mailboat a week later. And by the time the train hissed its way into Euston, the certainty had begun to shock me: I was on my own. I had to find a job, fast. Fifty quid wouldn’t last long.
I felt a rush of savage satisfaction afterwards, tearing up that envelope and Kevin’s mean little bit of paper. I tore them both to smithereens, tossing the shreds into the fire, watching as my old life went up in flames. They were bitter reminders of the relief I’d seen in his eye when I accepted, so quietly, all that he’d handed me.
Majella takes me back to Maida Vale and the Matron there, a severe-looking woman whose uniform includes a bow under her chin, takes one of my hands in both of hers.
‘Another Irish girl to stay, Sister?’ she enquires, hardly looking at Majella, her shrewd eyes on me.
‘Yes, Matron.’
‘Very well, then. You’re welcome, my dear.’
And just like that, she’s gone.
It is Majella who teaches me about kindness. The practical robustness of it. ‘Just pass it on, my dear,’ she likes to say. ‘Just pass it on.’
*
It wasn’t her fault – hers or Matron’s – that what happened afterwards, happened. I wanted to keep my son; I really did. They did their best to help me. But it was a circle I couldn’t square: the work, the money, the baby’s needs.
I reserve the whitest heat of my anger instead for those who came afterwards. For the ones who handed my son over to a ‘respectable family’ without any proper paperwork. Who blocked all my efforts to find him. Who sent him out into the world without knowing who his mother was, or even how to contact her.
Those are the ones I will never forgive.
