EILEEN, 1960

EXCERPT FROM A GOOD ENOUGH MOTHER

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.

A GOOD ENOUGH MOTHER by Catherine Dunne will be published on the 18th of June.

“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.”
#excerpt @DunneCatherine @BetimesBooks

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