Mr Mahoney called the convent a charity. The Sisters will take good care of you. But to me it felt awfully like the workhouse I was lucky to have avoided. Later, I learned the history. Somewhere between 1900 and 1906, Pelletstown, the first special institution for unwed mothers, had been established in County Dublin. Not long afterwards, the convent at Sunday’s Corner followed suit. In exchange for what they called our safe haven, we would labour without pay until our babies were born. Then we would stay on another two or three years, working. Our children would remain in the convent – first in the nursery and then on the other side of that high cement wall – until they were adopted, fostered out, or moved to an orphanage. We were meant to go to the county hospital in Cork City to deliver two weeks before our babies were due, but that spring, a girl’s water broke during lawn duty, when she swung a heavy scythe to cut the grass. She gave birth on a mattress by the laundry room with no doctor or nurse, only a few other girls in attendance. Afterwards, the nuns drove her and her baby to hospital in their farm truck. Ten days later, she was back on the front lawn, pulling daisies and weeds, and wielding the scythe where needed.
There were girls who worked the convent farm – tending ducks, milking cows and digging potatoes – under the close watch of the nuns. But I was kept inside the gates. Perhaps the nuns saw escape in my eyes. I tended their graveyard, did the laundry and scrubbed floors on my hands and knees. Each night I fell onto my bed exhausted to the core of my being. From growing a child inside me; from worry; from being so far from home; from waking each day at five for prayers and Mass, then labouring till 6.30 p.m. in the evening. And, perhaps most exhausting of all, from loving Finbarr. From waiting for him to recover, return to consciousness and come fetch me. A rumour persisted among the girls that, a few years ago, someone’s beau had shown up and paid the Mother Superior for her release. Father Joseph had married the couple in the parish church. Not all the girls were pregnant by boys they loved. But those who were, myself included, counted on this fantasy as our only hope. I refused to consider Finbarr’s death a possibility. We weren’t allowed to send or receive letters but surely his parents would tell him where I was, and he’d come for me. I didn’t start wishing for him to come for us until the first day my baby kicked.
Bess, Fiona, Susanna and I were working in the basement laundry over boiling, soapy cauldrons. The floor was tiled, a pattern of large grey squares and smaller blue and pink squares, a cruel commemoration of the babies most of us wouldn’t be allowed to keep. Heat from the fires kept my forehead slick with sweat as I stirred sheets and napkins with a long wooden stick. All of a sudden, my child moved inside my body: unmistakably, distinctly, gracefully. I froze with the magnitude of falling in love. Children have moved in the womb since the dawn of man but never had any child moved in just this way. A somersault, toes grazing my insides, sending up a fountain of bubbles. I stopped, startled, and put my hand on my belly.
Bess stopped stirring and smiled. ‘It’s like magic, isn’t it?’
We weren’t supposed to become friends, or talk to each other, or even know each other’s names. But of course we did. Girls thrown together find friends sure as night follows day. I’d insisted Bess and Fiona memorize my family’s address in London, so we could write to each other if this ever ended.
‘Was it real?’ I asked Bess, rubbing my hand over the spot where I’d felt the movement.
‘Sure it was.’ Bess was further along than me, but she was so narrow and slight you could barely see the pregnancy beneath her apron and shapeless dress. ‘Did you think you were in all this trouble for the sake of a mirage?’
I laughed. The sound startled me, it had been so long since I’d heard such a sound from myself or anyone around me.
‘Can’t you be quiet?’ Susanna snapped. She hated breaking rules. Susanna was the oldest girl in the convent, somewhere in her thirties. This was her second stay here. Last time her baby had been adopted at six months, and she’d remained another year before being released as a maid to a local family, only to return, pregnant again, five years later.
Sister Mary Clare, the youngest and kindest nun, came in to check on us. She was lenient enough not to chastise us for talking. The room filled with her humming, a haunting Gaelic tune that trailed her like a mist wherever she went. Unlike some of the other nuns, she didn’t have a strap attached to her habit. Also unlike the other nuns, she was not Irish but English. The sound of her voice was a comfort to me. On one of my first days at the convent I had asked her how she had come to Ireland.