They brought her down to Dovercourt to sell her unborn child.
Mrs Albemarle’s Home For Moral Welfare did not have a sign to proclaim itself outside the door. A wandering eye might have caught the curtains closed during the day, and the neighbours could not overlook the steady stream of girls who passed through its doors, but to passers-by it was just another palatial home off the seafront, a double-breasted affair of Georgian design with whitewashed walls and balconies garlanding its bedrooms. To Cathy, who had known nothing of it even as she was bundled on to the omnibus this morning, the door had a magical effect: by filling her body with dread, it somehow quelled the nausea she had been feeling for days.
They stood in silence outside the door, with seabirds wheeling overhead. Cathy’s mother flicked her finger, and Cathy knew without asking that this was an instruction to knock. She did so tentatively, hopeful she might not be heard. But such good fortune had been in short supply this winter. After some time, the door drew back, revealing a hallway bedecked in floral designs. The woman in the frame was wearing a bright gingham house dress. Her square shoulders and significant chin gave the appearance of a woman unused to idleness – and, indeed, her sleeves were rolled up, her forearms dusted in flour and shreds of dough.
‘You must be Catherine,’ she said, acknowledging Cathy’s mother with barely a flutter of her eyes.
‘Cathy,’ Cathy began. It was the most defiant thing she had said all day.
‘When the time comes for you to reside with us, you’ll be Catherine,’ the woman returned. ‘We deal in propriety here.’ At this, she stepped aside. ‘Come in, Catherine. We’ll have this sorted in a trice.’
The Home had once been a minor hotel, and in the common room the décor had not been changed. Cathy sat alone in the bay while her mother and Mrs Albemarle (for so the woman had introduced herself) spoke about the essentials of Cathy’s future stay. As they were speaking, other sounds drifted through the common room, past the little table with its pile of dog-eared Reader’s Digests and Lilliput magazines. Somewhere, in this building, babies were squalling. There were no words, only shrieks of glee, the bleating of a creature still growing used to the sound of its own voice. Cathy was listening to them so intently that she did not hear Mrs Albemarle calling her name. It was only when her mother added her flinty tones that she turned.
‘This way, Catherine.’
There was no choice but to follow. Mrs Albemarle led her along a back hall and into the cramped office at its end. Here, behind a desk on which sat a tarnished typewriter, Mrs Albemarle took a chair. She had produced a form with black boxes and now she ferreted in a drawer for an ink pot and pen. When none was forthcoming, she settled on a pencil, using it to direct Cathy into a seat.
‘How old are you, Catherine?’
Catherine. That had been what her mother called her as well. Her father had been unable to utter a word.
‘She’ll be sixteen by the time you take her,’ interjected her mother, but Mrs Albemarle lifted an admonishing finger. ‘She must speak for herself, Mrs Wray. If she’s old enough to be in this position, she is old enough to do that.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps you had better …’ Out came the pencil again, to indicate the door. Flushing crimson, Cathy’s mother retreated into the hall.
‘There, that’s better. We can speak freely now, can’t we, Catherine?’
‘I’m fifteen,’ Cathy said. ‘And my name is Cathy, not—’
‘And the date of your birth.’
‘The twenty-fourth of May, 1891.’
Mrs Albemarle made notes, stopping intermittently to press her tongue to the end of her pencil. ‘And how far along are you?’
For the first time, Cathy’s skin darkened.
‘Catherine, dear. It isn’t a test. Do you know how far along you are?’
‘No.’
‘But you have visited a doctor.’
She had, because her mother had taken her. His fingers had been gnarled and cold; she had felt his wedding band icy against her inner thigh.
Deciding to take a different approach, Mrs Albemarle asked, ‘How did you know you were carrying a baby, Cathy?’
By God, but she hadn’t. It was her mother who’d come to her, because it was her mother who brought fresh linens each month. She had been feeling unsettled for days, hardly wanted to eat, even when her sister was baking rye cakes on the range, but only when her mother crept into her bedroom at night had the pieces fallen into place. You’re late, she’d said, in hushed but virulent tones. By the look of her, she’d been brooding on it for days. She’d even waited until Cathy’s father was away, drinking in that squalid little hole down by the cockle sheds, just in case she was wrong. But no: the moment she said it, something broke inside Cathy, something made sense. There was a chasm inside her – she wanted to call it an emptiness, only that was the opposite of what it was. Something was growing; a seed had sprouted shoots. In that moment she knew that there were the buds of arms and legs, the four tiny valves of a heart. She had sensed it beating as she tried to embrace her mother, but her mother had staggered backwards, refusing to be held. She’d probably said things after that, but sitting here now, Cathy couldn’t remember. After her mother was gone, she had turned around and been sick into her bedsheets. Strange how you could keep hold of it when the sensations were without explanation. As soon as she knew, it came out of her in floods.
‘And the father?’
Those were the words which jolted her back into this cold, stark room.
‘I’m presuming you do know who the father is.’
‘Now, look here—’
‘Understand, Catherine, that we need to know these things. They’re the sorts of questions people ask. Why, nobody wants to bring a cuckoo into the nest. They want to know where their baby comes from. They want to know about the mother and the father, if they’ve got breeding.’
‘He’s a local boy,’ she admitted. ‘He’s my—’
‘You’re courting.’
No, she wanted to say. It wasn’t like that. Daniel lived in the house at the head of the lane, the house with the big gables and the grounds and the wrought-iron gates she had stopped to peer in every day on her way to school. By rights they should not have been friends. And yet they had been friends since they were small, and that summer her mother worked in the grounds. Theirs was the purest form of friendship: the one that begins even before you can talk; a friendship of gestures and grunts, toys quietly offered and toys eagerly snatched away. They had walked to school together and caught first trains together. They had gone carolling, picked dandelions, eaten pastries at the harvest festivals (held in the grounds of his home, such a lavish affair) – and when, one afternoon, she had met him by the back gate and they had done other things together, well, it didn’t feel unusual and it didn’t feel like courting at all. Even afterwards, when she had decided it was a thing they would not do again, it did not feel so very strange. She did not know, even now, why a thing like that had to change the world.
She realised she had tears in her eyes. That wasn’t Cathy’s way, but there was another creature inside her; possibly these were its tears, and Cathy merely the conduit.
‘Has he taken responsibility?’
‘His father wouldn’t allow for it, not with a girl like me.’
‘A girl like you?’
‘You mustn’t marry down, Mrs Albemarle.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Albemarle. ‘They won’t marry down but, when it comes to the rest, they wouldn’t care if you were scullery maid or debutante. What about the boy himself? This … friend of yours. Put up a protest, has he? Cast off his considerable inheritance to look after his bastard born?’