Go Not Gently

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Once we get out of here, she’d said. If we get out of here. How would he try to kill us? Another injection? Did he really think he could get away with it if Agnes disappeared and I did too? There were several people who knew of our recent involvement with him: Moira, for a start, and the police she’d talked to; Matthew Simcock who’d been appalled by Goulden’s violence – he’d come forward, surely. Where was Goulden now? On his way back here? He said he’d hide our bodies. How? Bury them? Burn them? Chop them up?

There was silence for a while. The thick walls let little sound in from the outside world. I let my thoughts ramble. People at home would be worried about me. I’d left Agnes’ number but no address. How long would they wait until they called the police? And once they did, if they established the address they’d find an empty house and my abandoned car. No indication of where we might be.

How long till morning? Was Maddie fast asleep now or unsettled by the atmosphere as the grown-ups made excuses for my sudden absence?

‘You have a daughter?’ Agnes asked. Had I been talking aloud?

‘Yes, she’s five.’

‘And you’re by yourself?’

‘Yes, well, I’m not married. I’m a single parent but we live in a shared house.’

‘And the child, she’s happy?’

‘Yes, I think so. She’s never known anything else. She knows families come in lots of different combinations.’

‘Times change,’ she said, ‘and sometimes for the better.’

I waited.

‘My sister, Nora, she had a baby. She wasn’t married and in those days it was a terrible thing. You were shunned, completely ostracised. There was no mercy.’ She smoothed the paper across her knees, running her thumb over creases as she talked.

‘Was that before she went to Kingsfield?’ I asked.

‘That was why she went to Kingsfield. Morally inadequate, they called it. Pregnant and unmarried so they locked her up.’

‘Oh God. But your parents…’

‘Signed the forms. There was little hesitation. There were many girls like Nora. Young girls. She was only sixteen, little more than a child herself. She had the baby, a little girl, taken from her at birth, taken to be adopted.’

Agnes’ niece.

‘You never saw the baby?’

‘Oh, no. I visited Nora secretly. My mother thought it best to stay away.’

‘So Nora stayed there after she’d had the baby?’

‘Yes. I don’t think they ever said exactly how long she was expected to be there. It was a punishment, you see, rather than treatment. She’d broken the rules. There was no compassion.’ She tore a little strip off the edge of her paper sheet and began to roll it into a cylinder in her fingers. ‘Nora had been seduced by an older man, a business connection of my father’s. He continued to do well.’

‘So, they didn’t find him guilty of moral inadequacy.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said ruefully. ‘It was cold, very cold, the last time I visited her. There was no snow but one of those easterly winds that cuts right through you. I’d brought her cakes and a ribbon. It was a harsh regime. Most of the girls worked in the laundry, Nora worked in the kitchens.’

Her hand stole to the brooch on her lapel, kneaded at it through the paper, then returned to work at the frills of paper on her lap.

‘I arrived just after lunch. They’d finished clearing up. Someone suggested I try the dormitory. She had a bed by the window – huge great windows they had, covered in bars. If she wasn’t there I’d put the cakes under her pillow and hope no one stole them. It was quiet up there. The place was deserted.’ She cleared her throat.

‘Nora was there. She was hanging from the curtain rail. She’d torn her apron into strips and her dress. She just had her shift on. A thin cotton shift. I remember thinking she must be so cold up there, with her poor bare arms, so cold.’

I shivered. I thought of all the mother’s daughters. Nora, whose mother had agreed to her incarceration; Nora’s girl child, who would never know the circumstances of her birth; Olive, who had died in infancy and who Lily had called for in her last waking moments; Tina, whose death had been sudden and brutal. And now in the depth of the night there’d be mothers bearing daughters and daughters mourning mothers, and those railing at each other’s shortcomings, and I wanted to be home and warm with my own daughter close by while we still had the chance.