A Dangerous Fortune(132)

Maisie was a widow, but Rachel was still married to Micky Miranda. Rachel never saw her husband but he would not divorce her. For ten years she had been carrying on a discreet affair with Maisie’s brother Dan Robinson, who was a member of Parliament. The three of them lived together in Maisie’s house in suburban Walworth.

The hospital was in a working-class area, in the heart of the city. They had taken a long lease on a row of four houses near Southwark Cathedral and had knocked internal doors through the walls on each level to make their hospital. Instead of rows of beds in cavernous wards they had small, comfortable rooms, each with only two or three beds.

Maisie’s office, a cozy sanctuary near the main entrance, had two comfortable chairs, flowers in a vase, a faded rug and bright curtains. On the wall was the framed poster of “The Amazing Maisie.” The desk was unobtrusive, and the ledgers in which she kept her records were stowed in a cupboard.

The woman sitting opposite her was barefoot, ragged and nine months pregnant. In her eyes was the wary, desperate look of a starving cat that walks into a strange house hoping to be fed. Maisie said: “What’s your name, dear?”

“Rose Porter, mum.”

They always called her “mum,” as if she were a grand lady. She had long ago given up trying to make them call her Maisie. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes, please, mum.”

Maisie poured tea into a plain china cup and added milk and sugar. “You look tired.”

“I’ve walked all the way from Bath, mum.”

It was a hundred miles. “It must have taken you a week!” said Maisie. “You poor thing.”

Rose burst into tears.

This was normal, and Maisie was used to it. It was best to let them cry as long as they wanted to. She sat on the arm of Rose’s chair, put her arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

“I know I’ve been wicked.” Rose sobbed.

“You aren’t wicked,” Maisie said. “We’re all women here, and we understand. We don’t talk of wickedness. That’s for clergymen and politicians.”

After a while Rose calmed down and drank her tea. Maisie took the current ledger from the cupboard and sat at her writing table. She kept notes on every woman admitted to the hospital. The records were often useful. If some self-righteous Conservative got up in Parliament and said that most unmarried mothers were prostitutes, or that they all wanted to abandon their babies, or some such rot, she would refute him with a careful, polite, factual letter, and repeat the refutation in the speeches she made up and down the country.

“Tell me what happened,” she said to Rose. “How were you living, before you fell pregnant?”

“I was cook for a Mrs. Freeman in Bath.”

“And how did you meet your young man?”

“He came up and spoke to me in the street. It was my afternoon off, and I had a new yellow parasol. I looked a treat, I know I did. That yellow parasol was the undoing of me.”

Maisie coaxed the story out of her. It was typical. The man was an upholsterer, respectable and prosperous working class. He had courted her and they had talked of marriage. On warm evenings they had caressed each other, sitting in the park after dark, surrounded by other couples doing the same thing. Opportunities for sexual intercourse were few, but they had managed it four or five times, when her employer was away or his landlady was drunk. Then he had lost his job. He moved to another town, looking for work; wrote to her once or twice; and vanished out of her life. Then she found she was pregnant.

“We’ll try to get in touch with him,” Maisie said.

“I don’t think he loves me anymore.”

“Well see.” It was surprising how often such men were willing to marry the girl, in the end. Even if they had run away on learning she was pregnant, they might regret their panic. In Rose’s case the chances were high. The man had gone away because he had lost his job, not because he had fallen out of love with Rose; and he did not yet know he was going to be a father. Maisie always tried to get them to come to the hospital and see the mother and child. The sight of a helpless baby, their own flesh and blood, sometimes brought out the best in them.

Rose winced, and Maisie said: “What’s the matter?”

“My back hurts. It must be all the walking.”

Maisie smiled. “It’s not backache. Your baby’s coming. Let’s get you to a bed.”

She took Rose upstairs and handed her over to a nurse. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’ll have a lovely bonny baby.”

She went into another room and stopped beside the bed of the woman they called Miss Nobody, who refused to give any details about herself, not even her name. She was a dark-haired girl of about eighteen. Her accent was upper-class and her underwear was expensive, and Maisie was fairly sure she was Jewish. “How do you feel, my dear?” Maisie asked her.

“I’m comfortable—and so grateful to you, Mrs. Greenbourne.”

She was as different from Rose as could be—they might have come from opposite ends of the earth—but they were both in the same predicament, and they would both give birth in the same painful, messy way.

When Maisie got back to her room she resumed the letter she had been writing to the editor of The Times.

The Female Hospital

Bridge Street