The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(34)

‘It was how things were done then. There was none of this bonding with the baby or the father being present at the birth. Elizabeth’s little boy was taken from her and buried without ceremony in the plot of the angels up in Shanganagh Cemetery. They wouldn’t even put a name on the grave in those days. He died before being baptised, so as far as the nuns were concerned he remained in a state of original sin,’ Jo put in quickly.

‘That’s terrible,’ Lucy whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It was just the way of things. We went along with them, because there was no point in expecting anything else. I was one of the lucky ones. Many of the girls who were committed to that place spent years in it. Some of them only got out as old women when the convent closed down. They were literally forgotten about.’ Elizabeth had made a point after she lost the baby of going into the home. She visited once a week with parcels of food and clothes and a healthy financial donation for the nuns to keep the place heated. She was the doctor’s wife, one of the few who could reasonably expect to be allowed in.

‘I often wondered if perhaps you should have married him, instead of Eric,’ Jo said and Elizabeth couldn’t be sure if she was making fun of her.

‘I’m not sure Mr Abbott was the marrying kind,’ she said a little sadly.

‘And Eric was?’ The words were pointed.

‘You have a fair point, but I think he did the best he could,’ Elizabeth said quickly. He had saved her; it was as simple as that. Even after her child had been stillborn –Elizabeth had always known it. Eric had rescued her and no matter how things had turned out between them, she’d always known she could never repay that debt to him.

‘Bloody Stockholm syndrome,’ Jo muttered in a familiar refrain. ‘That’s what they call it, you know, when you can’t see your jailer for what they are…’

‘Oh, Jo, you have no idea, not really.’ Elizabeth would never forget Maureen Duffy. Poor Maureen Duffy; she was driven demented with the grief of her child being taken from her. She knew only too well; she’d seen girls her own age sent to the convent and they’d never left; not really. Their babies had been shipped around the world, while those girls had spent a lifetime mending other people’s clothes in an effort to make some payment for their sins. By the time the last of the women were turned out in the early nineties, most of them had become so institutionalised they were hardly able to care for themselves, never mind set about finding the child they’d given up all those years earlier. Those spirited girls she’d known decades earlier had long since died to be replaced by women who were little more than empty, broken shadows of themselves.

At the end of the day, Eric had rescued her from that. Even if he was a drinker and a gambler, he was, she knew, at his core a good man for doing that single act of saving her. ‘I know what Eric was, believe me. I know it even more now, but how can I blame a man who had more to fear from life than I had? His life in Ballycove would have been over if anyone then had known that he was gay. We were both making up for our own shortcomings. It’s just a shame that our limitations couldn’t have been more compatible.’

‘At least you weren’t hiding the truth from yourself,’ Jo said eventually.

‘How do you mean?’ Elizabeth swam closer to her, sensing that what she was going to say next was not going to make either of them smile.

‘Oh, Elizabeth, I’ve been such a stupid woman. I found a lump, in my breast, months ago…’

‘No.’

‘Yes. You know me, always pretending that everything was fine. I buried my head in the sand… It looks like I might have left it too late…’

‘Oh, no, don’t say that, Jo, it can’t be. Did you know about this, Lucy?’

‘Only because I forced her to take a blood test,’ Lucy murmured.

‘So, it’s confirmed? You’re quite sure?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘She’s gotten my blood samples back, but even from them, she can tell, it’s going to be quite the battle. She’s made an appointment for me with a top consultant. We go this week…’

‘Well then, we will have to wait and see and you will have to stop thinking the worst now,’ Elizabeth said fiercely. She knew for sure that giving up before you started was no way to win a war.

‘My mum might have to book a few sessions with you, only taking life as she finds it,’ Lucy said softly.

‘It didn’t do me a lot of good, did it? An empty marriage and an empty bank account.’ The vast darkness reverberated its own kind of silence around them, with only the waves to hear. Elizabeth knew life somehow levelled things out here – there was no hiding between real friends.

‘Don’t say that,’ Lucy said.

‘Lucy, the bailiffs could arrive at the front door any day. I’m just hoping I can make some clever moves before they realise exactly how bad things are.’ Of course, all of her worries were nothing now compared with Jo’s news. Elizabeth turned over onto her back, stared up at the clouds peeling back above her head to reveal a velvet black sky punctured with a horde of silver stars. ‘We’re a right lot, aren’t we?’

‘Maybe, but we have each other; I have a feeling that might be enough to pull us through.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ Elizabeth said softly.