The House at Mermaid's Cove(46)

From what I could gather, the men had been attacked when they’d passed through a checkpoint on their way to the beach. Their Resistance courier—the man who had come to meet our dinghy—had shot the German sentry dead when he began firing. The Scot had dived for cover at the sound of gunfire, and had fallen down a railway embankment, his scalp splitting open on a chunk of concrete.

Attempting stitches on a boat that was pitching in the open sea would have been too risky, so I cleaned up the wound and bandaged his head as tightly as I could. When I was satisfied that I’d done all I could for him and the others, I went to get some fresh air.

Jack was scanning the horizon with the binoculars. There was rain in the air, the sea a charcoal smudge against the pale gray of the sky.

“How are the patients?” he asked, as I stepped into the wheelhouse.

“All fast asleep,” I replied. “I’m hoping they won’t wake up until we get them back onto dry land.”

“Well, thank goodness you came. God knows what would have happened otherwise.” He lowered the binoculars and turned to me. “You realize you probably saved their lives?”

I shook my head. “All I’ve done is patch them up. The people at the hospital are the ones who’ll save them.”

“But if you hadn’t been in that boat, they’d never have made it. Not one of them was capable of rowing. They’d have been sitting ducks for the Germans.” He reached into a compartment under the wheel and pulled something out—a bulky shape swathed in white cloth. “Are you hungry?” He unwrapped a loaf of bread and tore off a piece, handing it to me. I bit into it, edging farther into the wheelhouse as the wind spattered raindrops against the back of my neck.

“It’s a shame there’s nothing to go with it,” Jack said between mouthfuls. “We could do with something hot to dip it into. Soup would be good, wouldn’t it?”

I nodded. I hadn’t tasted soup for years. Not since leaving Ireland.

“What’s so funny?”

I hadn’t realized I was smiling. It must have been a wry sort of look on my face, because what I’d been remembering wasn’t very nice. “I was thinking about the convent,” I said. “If you’d done something wrong, they put you on short measures of soup for a week. But there was a worse penance than that.”

“What?”

“Well, if you were really disobedient, there was something else you had to do before you got your soup: you had to kiss the feet of the ten oldest nuns in the convent.”

“Ugh!” He glanced at the bread in his hand as if he’d suddenly discovered it was crawling with weevils. “Why on earth did you become a nun? You could have been a nurse without all of that nonsense.”

“I wanted to work in Africa,” I replied. “It wouldn’t have been easy to do that on my own, at the age I was then.” I glanced through the rain-speckled glass at the gray-green sea, avoiding his eyes.

“That’s quite a sacrifice.”

There was something about the way he said it. I suspected that he’d guessed this wasn’t the whole story. I hadn’t intended to tell him about the boy I’d left behind in Ireland—but in this topsy-turvy world, where so much was supposed to be secret, I suddenly felt compelled to tell the truth.

“There was another reason,” I said. “I had a boyfriend. His name was Dan. We were only seventeen, but we’d talked about marriage.” I watched a raindrop slide down the window, gathering speed as it joined with another. “My father wouldn’t hear of it. He was the local doctor, and he knew that Dan’s mother had been admitted to a psychiatric institution.” I took a breath. The memory of Dad’s words still had the power to make my insides curl. “He said he didn’t want our family tainted by madness.”

Jack didn’t respond for a moment or two, as if he were sizing me up. “So, you became a nun to spite your father?” He sounded less surprised than I thought he’d be.

“I think I would have done it anyway.” I turned to face him. “I thought I was capable of another kind of love—the kind that doesn’t involve marriage or children.”

He shook his head. “But you were so young. How could you bear to make a decision like that?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to admit that I’d gone to the convent the day after the row with Dad, that I’d been fired up with a white-hot anger that drove all rational thoughts from my mind. And that if my love for Dan had been stronger, I might have chosen a different course. “I knew that it would hurt sometimes,” I said at last, “but at the convent they taught us that it was like pruning a plant: cutting off one possibility of love would encourage you to grow and flourish in different ways.”

“That might work for some women.” He gave me a searching look. “But I’ve seen how you are with Merle’s children. And with young Ned. It didn’t work, did it? Not for you.”

I felt as if a hand had squeezed my heart. How was it that in the space of a fortnight, he was able to understand me better than I understood myself?

“No,” I heard myself saying. “It didn’t work.” It was as if I were hovering above the boat, watching the person who had once been Sister Anthony letting out what she had locked away the day the train had pulled out of the station at Elisabethville. “There were two children in Africa—a boy and a girl. I found them in the jungle when I was on my way to carry out vaccinations at a school. They were babies—newborn twins. They were about to be buried alive with their mother, who had died giving birth to them.”