Frank looked at her in disbelief.
‘Yes he does, and I just wanted to have lunch with you and tell you straight out how bad it was and you’d understand because you were Dad’s friend way back at school in the Brothers when you used to climb over stone walls … he told me … and you’re doing so well there and married to the boss’s daughter and everything … And that’s all I wanted, I didn’t whore around, I’ve never slept with anyone in my life and I didn’t mean to sleep with you, I wasn’t to know you’d fall in love with me and all this would happen, and now you say it’s all my fault.’ She burst into tears.
He put his arms around her and held her close to him.
‘Christ, you’re only a child, what have I done? Christ Almighty what did I do?’
She sobbed against his jacket for a bit.
He held her away from him and his eyes were full of tears.
‘I’ll never be able to make amends. Literally there’s nothing I can do to tell you how sorry I am. I’d never … never if I hadn’t thought … I was so sure that … but that doesn’t matter now. What matters is you.’
Helen wondered had he always loved her or was it only now. People could fall in love so easily.
‘We’ll have to forget this,’ she said. She knew that a woman had to take the lead in such matters. Men would dither and give in to temptation. Anyway there was no temptation for Helen, if this was what it was like then the rest of the world could have it as far as she was concerned.
‘It happened, it can’t be forgotten. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’
‘Yes, but we can’t keep on seeing each other, it wouldn’t be fair.’ She looked over at the picture of Renata.
She thought he looked puzzled. ‘No, of course,’ he said.
‘And we won’t tell anyone, either of us.’ She was girlishly eager about this.
‘Lord no, nobody at all,’ he said, looking highly relieved.
‘And my father?’ She spoke without guile, she spoke as Helen always spoke, eager to get over the meaning and burden of what she wanted to say, heedless of timing or other people’s feelings.
She saw a look of pain cross Frank Quigley’s face.
‘Your father will get a job. He told me that he didn’t need one, that he was looking about, that he had plenty of offers.’ Frank’s voice was cold. ‘He will be reinstated in Palazzo. Not overnight, I have to talk to Carlo, these things have to be done tactfully. They can take a little time.’
Helen nodded vigorously.
‘And you, Helen. Will you be all right, will you forgive me?’
‘Of course. It was a misunderstanding.’ Her voice sounded eager, as if she too wanted to be let off a hook.
‘That’s what it was, Helen, and Helen listen to me, please. The only thing I can tell you is that it won’t always be like this … it will be lovely and happy …’ He was straining to try to tell her that this gross happening would not be the pattern for the rest of the lovemaking in her life.
He might as well have been talking to the wall.
‘Are you sure I couldn’t do anything about the sheets, like a launderette or anything?’
‘No.’
‘But what will you say?’
‘Please, Helen, please.’ His face was pained.
‘Will I go now, Frank?’
He looked unable to cope.
‘I’ll drive you …’ His voice trailed away. His face showed that he didn’t know where he was to drive her.
‘No, it’s all right, I can get the bus. I know where I am, I’ll just get the bus home and say … say I don’t feel well.’ Helen gave a little giggle. ‘It’s true in a way. But listen, Frank, I don’t have the bus fare, could I ask you …’
She couldn’t understand why Frank Quigley had tears pouring down his face when he handed her the coins and closed her hand over them.
‘Will you be all right?’ He was begging to be reassured. He was not ready for what she told him.
‘Frank.’ Helen gave a little laugh. ‘I’m not a child, for heaven’s sake, I was sixteen last week. I’m a grown-up. I’ll find my way home on the bus.’
She left then because she couldn’t bear the look on his face.
Of course he had to stay away from the house in case he wasn’t able to control himself when he saw her. That’s what she told herself.
She never remembered him coming to Rosemary Drive again after that. There had always been some excuse, he was on a conference, he was abroad, he and Renata were going to see some of her relations in Italy. He was terribly sorry, it was such bad timing. Mother said he was getting above himself, still wasn’t it great that they never had to go to him cap in hand to ask him to reinstate his old friend in Palazzo’s? At least that idea had come straight from Mr Palazzo himself, who had realized that this was no way to treat valued managerial staff.
Helen never knew whether her father realized that it was Frank. It was hard to talk to her father, he had built a little shell around himself almost for fear of being hurt, like Mother’s shell for fear of letting themselves down somehow.
She had found those last school terms endless, the world had changed since that strange afternoon. She was always frightened of being misunderstood. She had started to scream one day when the singing master at school asked her to come into the storeroom and help him carry down the sheet music to the school hall. The man hadn’t touched her but she had this sudden claustrophobic fear that he would think she was encouraging him somehow, and that he would begin this hurtful business and then blame her. As things turned out he did blame her very much indeed and had said that she was a neurotic hysterical fool, a troublemaker, and if she were the last female on earth he wouldn’t touch her with a barge-pole.
The Principal of the school seemed to agree with him and asked Helen sharply why she had begun to scream if she agreed that there had been no question of an attack or even an advance.
Helen had said glumly that she didn’t know. She had felt that she was in some kind of situation she couldn’t handle and that unless she did scream something else would happen and it would all be too late and too complicated.
‘Has anything of this sort happened to you before?’ The Principal was not entirely sympathetic. Helen Doyle had always been a difficult pupil, gushy, anxious to please, always creating waves of trouble around her.
Helen had said no, unconvincingly.
The Principal had sighed. ‘Well, you can be certain that it will keep happening to you, Helen. It’s your personality. This sort of thing will turn up in your life over and over again, situations that you can’t handle. That is unless you pull yourself together and take control of your own actions.’
She sounded so final it was as if she were passing a life sentence.
Helen had been dazed at the unfairness of it all.
It was then that she decided to be a nun.
And now, years later, she was almost a nun. Well, she would be a nun if Sister Brigid had not been so adamant about telling her that she was only using the convent as a crutch, that she was using it as a place to hide and that those days were over in religious life.
Helen felt safe in St Martin’s. And even as she made a mug of coffee and sat down to join the beautiful Renata Palazzo Quigley whose face had looked at her from a silver frame on that frightening day … she felt safe. Safe from the memories and the fear of that time.
‘Tell me what you want and I’ll see if there’s anything we can do,’ she said with the big smile that made everyone love Helen. When they met her first.
‘It’s very simple,’ Renata said. ‘We want a baby.’
It was very simple. And very sad. Helen hugged her mug of coffee to her and listened. Frank was too old at forty-six. Too old. How ridiculous, but adoption societies wouldn’t consider him. Also he had a poor medical history, some heart trouble, nothing very serious, due to stress at work, and all businessmen had this in today’s world. Natural mothers and fathers were allowed to bring a child in
to the world into any kind of appalling conditions, tenements, places of vice, nobody stopped them and said that they couldn’t have any children. But for adoption everything had to be over-perfect.
Renata had heard that sometimes, if she were only to meet the right person, there must be occasions where a child could be given to a good loving home, to a father and mother who would love the little boy or girl as their own. There surely were cases when this happened.
There was a look of longing in her eyes.
Helen patted the hand of the woman who had once looked at her from the silver frame.
She had told Renata that they would meet again in a week when she would have made some inquiries. She thought it wiser not to consult Sister Brigid for the moment. Sister Brigid being an authority figure had to keep so well within the limits of the law … Better just let Helen inquire a little. All right? All right.
She told nobody. They said she looked feverish and excited, and Helen entertained the Community with tales of how she made her garden grow.
‘Anyone call?’ Brigid asked.
‘No. Not anyone really, you know, usual callers.’ Helen avoided her eye. It was the first time she had told a direct lie in St Martin’s. It didn’t feel good but it was for the best in the end.
If she could do this one thing, if she could do what she hoped she might be able to do, then even at the age of twenty-one her whole life would have been worth living.
It was Nessa’s turn to do the kitchen for half a day. Nessa was the one woman at St Martin’s who found Helen almost impossible to get on with. Normally when they worked together Helen stayed out of Nessa’s way. But this time she positively hung around her neck.
‘What happens when the children are born to really hopeless mothers, Nessa? Don’t you wish you could give them to proper homes from the start?’
‘What I wish isn’t important, I don’t rule the world.’ Nessa was short, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor and Helen kept standing in her way.
‘But wouldn’t a child be much better off?’
‘Mind, Helen, please. I’ve just washed there.’
‘And you always have to register the births, no matter what kind of mother?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean do you have to go to the town hall or the registry office or whatever and sort of say who the child is?’
‘No, I don’t always.’
‘Oh, why not?’
‘Because I’m usually not the one who does it, it depends. It depends. Helen, do you think that if you’re not going to do any work you could move out of the kitchen so that I could clean it?’
‘And no babies end up without being registered?’
‘How could they?’
‘I don’t know.’ Helen was disappointed. She had thought there might be long twilight times when nobody knew who or what the baby was. She hadn’t understood how the Welfare State at least checked its citizens in and out of the world.
‘And foundlings, babies in phone boxes, in churches, where do they end up?’
Nessa looked up in alarm. ‘God, Helen, don’t tell me you found one?’
‘No, worse luck,’ Helen said. ‘But if I did would I have to register it?’
‘No, Helen, of course not, if you found a baby you could keep the baby and dress him or her up when you remembered, and feed the child when it occurred to you, or when there was nothing else marginally more interesting to do.’
‘Why are you so horrible to me, Nessa?’ Helen asked.
‘Because I am basically pretty horrible.’
‘You can’t be, you’re a nun. And you’re not horrible to the others.’
‘Ah, that’s true. The real thing about being horrible is that it’s selective.’
‘And why did you select me?’ Helen didn’t seem put out or hurt, she was interested. Actually interested.
Nessa was full of guilt.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m just short-tempered, I hate doing this bloody floor, and you’re so young and carefree and get everything you want. I’m sorry, Helen, forgive me, I’m always asking you to forgive me. Really I am.’
‘I know.’ Helen was thoughtful. ‘People often are, I seem to bring out the worst in them somehow.’
Sister Nessa looked after her uneasily as Helen wandered back into the garden. There was something more than usual on her scattered brain and it was weighing very heavily.
Helen rang Renata Quigley. Same address, same apartment, same bed presumably. She said that she was still inquiring but that it wasn’t as easy as people thought.
‘I never thought it was easy,’ sighed Renata. ‘But somehow it does make all the going out to functions and to this celebration and that celebration a little easier if I think that somebody as kind as you, Sister, is looking out for me.’
With a thrill of shock that went right through her body Helen Doyle realized that she would meet Frank and Renata Quigley at her parents’ silver wedding party.
Frank Quigley had been the best man back in those days when he and Father were about equal.
Before everything had changed.
The garden was finished and more or less ran itself. Sister Joan loved being in the clothing centre, and she was quick with a needle, so that she could do an alteration on the spot, move the buttons on a jacket for an old man, praise him, admire him, say that the fit made all the difference in the world. Let him think it was custom tailored.
There was no real work for Helen, no real place.
Once more she asked Brigid about taking her vows.
‘It’s very harsh to keep me on the outside, seriously I have been here for so long, you can’t say it’s a passing fancy any more now, can you?’ She begged and implored.
‘You’re running, Helen,’ Brigid said. ‘I told you that from the word go. This is not like a convent in the films, a place in a forest where people went to find peace, it’s a working house. You have to have found peace already to bring it here.’
‘But I’ve found it now,’ Helen implored.
‘No, you’re afraid of engaging with real people, that’s why you’re with us.’
‘You’re all more real than anyone else. Honestly I’ve never met any group I like so much.’
‘That’s not the whole story. We shelter you from something. We can’t go on doing that, it’s not our role. If it’s men, if it’s sex, if it’s the cut and thrust of the business world … we all have had to face it and cope with it. You’re still hiding from something.’
‘I suppose it is sex a bit.’
‘Well, you don’t have to keep indulging in it,’ Brigid laughed. ‘Go back out into the world, Helen, I beg you, for a couple of years. Stay in touch with us and then if you still feel this is your home, come back and we’ll look at it all again. I really do think you should go. For your own good.’
‘Are you asking me to leave. Truly?’
‘I’m suggesting it, but do you see what I mean about this not being like the real world? If this was a real place, I’d be telling you to go or promoting you. It’s too protective here for you, I feel it in my bones.’
‘Let me stay for a little while. Please.’
‘Stay until after your parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary,’ Brigid said unexpectedly. ‘That seems to be preying on your mind for some reason. And then after that we’ll see.’
Helen went away from Sister Brigid’s little workroom, more wretched than she had been for a long time.
She looked so sad that Sister Nessa asked did she want to come and help with the young mothers. This was the first time the invitation had ever been made.
Helen went along, for once silent and without prattle.
‘Don’t be disapproving or anything, will you Helen?’ Nessa asked nervously. ‘We’re not meant to be passing judgement, just helping them cope.’
‘Sure,’ Helen said.
She sat listless as any of the girls who were on low-dosage anti-depressants or who lived in fear of a pi
mp who had wanted them to have an abortion. Nessa looked at her from time to time with concern. But Helen was quiet and obedient. She did everything she was asked to do. She was useful too in a way. She went out to the flats of those who had not turned up. Nessa had always been nervous since the incident of the little Simon who had crawled out of his flat almost into the mainstream of rush-hour traffic.
In the late afternoon Nessa asked Helen to go and find Yvonne, who was eight months pregnant with her second child. Her eldest, a beautiful girl with Jamaican eyes like her father long gone, and a Scottish accent like her mother who gave birth to her at sixteen, was waiting at the door.
‘Mummy’s gaen do wee wee,’ she said helpfully.
‘That’s great,’ Helen said, and brought the toddler back into the house.
From the bathroom came the groans and the cries of Yvonne.
Suddenly Helen found courage.
‘You’re better in your bedroom,’ she said suddenly to the chubby child and moved a chest of drawers to make sure the child couldn’t get out.
Then she went to cope with what she thought was a miscarriage in the lavatory.
But in the middle of the blood, the screams and the definite smell of rum all around the place, Helen heard a small cry.
The baby was alive.
Yvonne remembered nothing of it all. She had been so drunk that the day passed in a terrible blur.
They told her she had lost the child, that she had flushed it down the lavatory.
The ambulance men had been tender and gentle as they lifted her on to the stretcher, they had looked around the place and even down the lavatory bowl in confusion.
‘They told us she was near to her time, she couldn’t have got rid of a full-term foetus, surely.’
But Helen, the cool-eyed girl who said she was a voluntary welfare worker at the mother and child centre, and that she lived with the Sisters in St Martin’s, assured them that she had not been able to get in to the flat and had heard continuous flushing of the chain and then found the place covered in blood.
The small round three-year-old seemed to back her up, saying that her mother had been long time wee wee and that Helen had been long time at the door.