“Well, if you’re a newspaper reporter you collect stories, I suppose,” said Alice.
“That’s a nice way of looking at it,” Jean said.
Next time she wrote up the Magistrates’ Court Reports she would think of herself as a curator of people’s stories. Beatrice Casemore of Frant Avenue, Sidcup, who pleaded guilty to stealing a pair of gloves worth two shillings, eleven pence from Dawson & Co., Drapers. Roland Crabb who was fined ten shillings for keeping a dog without a license. These were her dolls.
“The story I’m collecting at the moment,” she added, feeling that the conversation had neatly arrived at its proper destination, “is about a patient who was at St. Cecilia’s while you were head nurse there. If true, it’s rather remarkable.”
Alice put down the doll she had been holding and gave Jean the benefit of her attentive, probing gaze. The blue of her eyes was made brighter by a yellowish tinge to the white, not unlike the color of the doll’s porcelain face.
“Go on.”
“I wonder if you remember a girl called Gretchen Tilbury, I mean Edel, as she was then.”
“I remember all my patients,” Alice said, “so yes, I do remember Gretchen very well. A lovely girl. She suffered dreadfully from rheumatoid arthritis; she was in constant pain, poor thing.”
“Would you call her a truthful kind of person?”
Alice needed no time to reflect. “Yes, I would. I wouldn’t necessarily say that about all the girls at St. Cecilia’s during my time, but Gretchen was what you’d call a good girl.”
“Did she ever leave the clinic for any reason during her stay?”
“Oh good heavens no. She barely left the bed. It took two nurses to get her up and onto the commode. She really could hardly move.”
“I suppose if I told you the dates she was a patient you’d be able to confirm them?”
“Not from memory,” Alice replied. “But I have my diaries of the years I worked there.”
This was promising—better than Jean had expected.
“You kept a diary the whole time?”
“Not a personal diary. Just a record of the working day—who was admitted or discharged, who had what treatment. If the boiler broke down. That kind of thing.”
“That would be tremendously helpful—if I could read it,” said Jean.
She was already wondering how feasible it would have been for Gretchen to have been impregnated by a visiting boiler repairman.
“You’re being very mysterious,” said Alice. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me something has happened to Gretchen.”
“Oh no, Gretchen is alive and well.”
“I’m very pleased to hear it.”
“And the mother of a little girl, who was apparently conceived during her stay at St. Cecilia’s.”
Alice Halfyard’s hands flew up to her throat, coming to rest on her gold crucifix. “No! That’s impossible. Who on earth would have told you such a story?”
“Well, Gretchen herself, and she was as dumbstruck as you. She is adamant that the child was a virgin birth.”
In Alice’s pale face Jean thought she could identify the transit of emotions—shock, disbelief, dismay. It was a moment or two before she was able to find her voice again.
“I don’t know what to say. It can’t be.” She shook her head. “That child was as innocent as a lamb. She wouldn’t have known one end of a man from another. Not that there were any men around the place. The nuns would never have allowed it. I would never have allowed it.”
“What about doctors? Surely some of them must have been men?”
“Doctor Reardon was a lady doctor, and a very good one. And Gretchen was on a ward with three other girls—one with the rheumatoid, what was her name? Martha. And Brenda—they didn’t like her so much—and poor Kitty in the iron lung. The girls were never alone for one minute. They couldn’t sneeze without one of the nuns knowing about it.”
“What about visitors? Fathers, brothers, odd-job men?”
“We didn’t have an odd-job man. We had nuns, and very practical they were, too. The families used to visit on Saturday afternoons. Most of the patients lived some distance away, so the parents only came once a week. There was no opportunity for the girls to be alone with a visitor—they were all in the ward together. And the sister was in there too, making sure things were kept calm and quiet for the patients.”
“Did Gretchen have any male visitors?”