Beware, beware, keep your garden fair
Let no man steal your thyme.’
The song and the women carried me to the train station where they bought my ticket to Dublin and gave me the rest of the money for the boat back to England.
‘How will I ever repay you?’ I asked.
‘Be well,’ Vera said, ‘and be happy.’
Martha’s dress was far too big. I kept the good coat buttoned to my chin. When the boat docked in Liverpool, a group of English soldiers waited to be dispatched to Ireland. And I wondered, in the history of the world, had one soldier ever been sent to win back a mother’s stolen child? In the coming months I’d search for Genevieve in the most illogical ways. I walked from London all the way to Croxley Green, straight through the night, the soles of my shoes worn down, speckled with holes. I peered into every pram, wary mothers or nannies rolling them back, pulling up the hood.
Once you’ve lost a baby their cries will reach you anywhere. Across miles of parkland. From an open window two streets away. You wake in the middle of the night and find yourself in the wrong place, you’re supposed to be elsewhere, with someone. Wherever she is, you know she’s waking too, blue eyes opening in the dark, searching for the one person in the world who answers to the name. Mother. Not a pretender. Her own real, true mother. The body knows, even when the mind does not.
When, finally, I made it home, grey-faced and ruined, I found a stack of letters from Finbarr waiting for me, some of them with money enclosed – for the journey to Ireland he didn’t know I’d already taken.
‘Why won’t you answer, Nan?’ he wrote, again and again.
His parents never told him how I’d landed on their doorstep. He knew nothing about the night I’d lain beside him, holding myself against his feverish body. Sister Mary Clare had never written to him, I was sure, and even if she had, the Mahoneys would have thrown the letter away.
‘If you don’t love me anymore,’ he finally wrote, in a letter that landed in England before I did, ‘I want to hear you say it to my face. I’ll come to London to hear you say it.’
I picked up pencil and paper to write back to him. But there was too much to say. Too much sorrow to deliver.
When my mother wrote to Aunt Rosie to tell her what had happened, Rosie travelled from Dublin to Sunday’s Corner and insisted on speaking to the Mother Superior, who sat her down and showed her a death certificate.
Mother: Nan O’Dea.
Baby girl: deceased. And there, written beside the word, was the same day in November they’d sent her off with the man I’d seen from the rooftop.
It was Sister Mary Clare’s handiwork. I knew it.
‘I’m so sorry, Nan,’ my mother sobbed, when she told me. Never having seen Genevieve that day, the laughing picture of health.
‘She’s not dead,’ I promised.
My mother looked at me, sorrowful for my loss, and possibly my delusion.
What could I do then but walk, all over London and beyond, refusing to rejoice in my freedom, wanting to search for Genevieve but not knowing where to begin? I clutched my body, cruelly bounced back to what it had been before, my stomach flat and smooth, my milk dried up.
If I’d been right enough in the head to track time, I could tell you the date I returned home to find Finbarr, sitting on the curb in front of our building, a satchel at his feet. It was the only time in my life where my heart didn’t leap at the sight of him. There was nothing I could do but break his heart once by telling him about Genevieve, and twice by sending him away.
If only he’d come for me just a little later, when I was at least able to pretend to be my old self. By the following spring, I was working a few afternoons at Buttons and Bits. Megs was already training as a nurse. Louisa, still home but already engaged, was taking a secretarial course. At our kitchen table she taught me the shorthand and typing that would one day lead to my job at the British Rubber Company. By that summer, I could walk through the world and present a face that didn’t look entirely broken, or constantly searching.