‘I know it’s difficult, and I’m sorry. But when the baby has become an adolescent you could find it hard to cope, Mrs Lacy. I see a lot of that in my work, a woman on her own, no father figure in the home. I know you have a caring relationship with Betty, Mrs Lacy, but the fact can’t be altered that you’re alone in this house with her, day in day out. All I’m saying is that another case-worker might comment on that.’
‘There’s Miss Custle too.’
‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Lacy?’
‘There’s a lodger, Miss Custle.’
‘You have a lodger? Another woman on her own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Young, is she?’
‘No, Miss Custle isn’t young.’
‘An elderly woman, Mrs Lacy?’
‘Miss Custle still works on the Underground.’
‘The Underground?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see, Mrs Lacy, what might be commented upon is the lack of playmates. Just yourself, and a woman who is employed on the Underground. Again, Mrs Lacy, I’m not saying there isn’t caring. I’m not saying that for an instant.’
‘Betty is happy. Look, I’m afraid I’d rather you didn’t come here again. I have things to do now –’
‘I’m sorry to offend you, Mrs Lacy.’
She had stood up, making him stand up also. He nodded and smiled at her in his patient manner, which she now realized was professional, he being a counsellor. He said again he was sorry he’d offended her.
‘I just thought you’d want to hear about Norma,’ he said before he left, and on the doorstep he suddenly became awkward. The smile and the niceness vanished: solemnity replaced them. ‘It’s like putting a person together again. If you know what I mean, Mrs Lacy.’
In the kitchen Betty printed her name across the stomach of a whale. She heard voices in the hall, but paid them no attention. A moment later the door banged and then her mother came into the kitchen.
‘Look,’ Betty said, but to her surprise her mother didn’t. Her mother hugged her, whispering her name. ‘You’ve been washing your face,’ Betty said. ‘It’s all cold.’
That afternoon Bridget cleaned the Winnards’ flat, taking Betty with her, as she always did. She wondered about mentioning the trouble she was having with Norma and her husband to Mrs Winnard, who might suggest something for her to say so that the matter could be ended. Mrs Winnard was pretty and bespectacled, a kind young woman, full of sympathy, but that afternoon her two obstreperous boys, twins of two and a half, were giving her quite a time so Bridget didn’t say anything. She hoovered the hallway and the bathroom and the four bedrooms, looking into the kitchen from time to time, where Betty was playing with the Winnard boys’ bricks. She still hadn’t said anything when the time came to pack up to go, and suddenly she was glad she hadn’t because quite out of the blue she found herself imagining a look on Mrs Winnard’s sympathetic face which suggested that the argument of Norma and her husband could not in all humanity be just dismissed. Bridget couldn’t imagine Mrs Winnard actually saying so, but her intuition about the reaction remained.
In the park, watching Betty on a slide, she worried about that. Would the same thing happen if she talked to Father Gogarty? Would an instant of hesitation be reflected in his grey features as he, too, considered that Norma should not be passed by? Not everyone had experienced as awful a life as Norma had. On top of that, the regret of giving away the only child you had been able to have was probably a million times worse than simply being childless.
Not really wishing to, Bridget remembered how fate had seemed to her when she was a girl: that it began with the kind of person you were. ‘We’re greedy,’ Liam had confessed, speaking of himself and the woman. ‘I suppose we’re made like that, we can’t help it.’ The woman was greedy, he had meant, making it cosier by saying he was too.
She watched Betty on the slide. She waved at her and Betty waved back. You couldn’t call Norma greedy, not in the same way. Norma made a mess of things and then looked around for other people: someone to look after a child that had been carelessly born, the Samaritans, the man she’d married. In the end Norma was lucky because she’d survived, because all the good in her had been allowed to surface. It was the man’s love that had done that, his gentleness and his sincerity. You couldn’t begrudge her anything. Like Liam and the woman, fate had come up trumps for her because of the person she was.
‘Watch, Mummy,’ Betty shouted from the top ot the slide, and again Bridget watched her sliding down it.
Eventually Bridget did speak to Mrs Winnard and to Father Gogarty because it was hard to keep the upset to herself, and because it worried her even more when she kept telling herself that she was being imaginative about what their reaction would be. Mrs Winnard said the couple’s presumption was almost a matter for the police; Father Gogarty offered to go and see them, if they could easily be found. But before either Mrs Winnard or the priest spoke Bridget was certain that the brief flicker she’d been dreading had come into their faces. There had been the hesitation and the doubt and – far quicker than thought – the feeling that a child belonged more suitably with a young married couple than with a lone middle-aged woman and an ageing employee of the London Underground. In continuing to talk about it to Miss Custle herself, Bridget could swear she experienced the same intuition: beneath all Miss Custle’s outrage and fury there was the same reasonable doubt.
The telephone rang one evening and the young man’s voice said:
‘Norma hasn’t done anything silly. I just thought you’d like to know that, Mrs Lacy.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m glad she’s all right.’
‘Well, she’s not really all right of course. But she does take heart from your caring in the past.’
‘I did what a lot of people would have done.’
‘You did what was necessary, Mrs Lacy. You understood a cry for help. It’s an unpleasant fact, but neither she nor Betty might be alive today if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Oh, I can’t believe that for an instant.’
