me.’ Lucy nodded. ‘The police were here this afternoon, asking about some of the items that have gone missing from the club recently, in particular Lady Weston’s silver photograph frame. Do you know anything about it?’
‘Just because I’ve been in the nick before, you assume it’s me?’ Lucy said angrily, but the defiance was half- hearted.
‘Did you take it, Lucy?’ Celia asked patiently. Lucy nodded. ‘And the other things? The scarf and the money.’
‘Yes.’ She looked up, and Celia saw the panic in her eyes. ‘What will happen to me, Miss? Will I have to go back inside?’
‘Not necessarily, Lucy. The police will have to know, of course, but I’ll help you all I can if you’re honest with me now. Tell me why you took those things. None of them were worth much, so why put your job here at risk?’
The girl shrugged. ‘It’s hard to explain, Miss. I don’t really know myself why I took them, but the little girl in that photograph—she looked so much like mine. I know it was wrong, but I just wanted something to remind me of her, something that I could keep.’ She looked up at Celia, desperate to make her understand. ‘These women— they’ve all got children to love, and someone out there’s got something of mine—I just wanted to take a little bit back for myself. The baby made me feel special, you see—she’s the only person who’s ever looked to me for help, who’s ever made me think that I might have something precious to give.’
She began to cry, and Celia moved over to sit beside her, angry with herself for having been too busy to notice Lucy’s distress before now. ‘Why did you give her up if you were so attached to her?’ she asked gently.
‘It didn’t feel like I had an option, Miss. Everyone said it was for the best, and I just got carried along with it. It sounds daft, I suppose, when I already had a prison record, but I was worried about what people would think of me and what that would do to the baby. Anyway,’ she added, as if trying to convince herself, ‘how could I ever have looked after a little girl?’
How, indeed, Celia thought. ‘What about the father? Couldn’t he have helped, at least financially?’
Lucy scoffed. ‘He denied she was his—the family told him to. They said it was my word against his, and no one would ever believe a con.’
‘And your own family?’
‘Oh, my mother believed me all right. She said I’d brought disgrace on the family twice, and there was nothing she could do about the prison sentence, but she’d bloody well do something about the kid. She wouldn’t tell my father, said the shame would finish him off if he ever found out—he still doesn’t know he’s got a granddaughter out there somewhere.’ She wiped her hand across her eyes. ‘It’s probably best—he doesn’t deserve to feel like this.’
‘And neither do you.’
‘Don’t I? That’s not what my mum says. She told me it was my own weakness that got me into this, and she was right, I suppose. You get used to doing what you’re told in prison, but that wasn’t new for me. I’ve been doing it all my life. That was what got me into trouble with the baby in the first place, and that was what made me give her up—I was too weak to argue. I used to dream that somebody would come in at the last minute and save us from being separated, but dreaming doesn’t get you anywhere, does it? The prison brought some woman in to arrange it all. She always seemed to be in a hurry, rushing it all through in case I changed my mind. I hated her, you know, for making a living out of taking my baby away from me.’
‘I expect she was trying to help, Lucy. She was just doing a job, like the rest of us—providing a service that she thought you needed. It’s easy to blame the messenger, but it wasn’t her fault.’
‘I know, I know—and it was myself I really wanted to punish. It sounds wicked, Miss, but I almost wished the baby was dead. It would have served me right.’
Celia knew that it was impossible for women to understand or even to imagine the disgrace of an unwanted pregnancy if they hadn’t been through it themselves; even so, she was shocked. ‘Surely you didn’t really think that it would have been better if she’d died, Lucy?’
‘At least then I’d know what had happened to her. As it is, I don’t know if she’s happy or sad, rich or poor, ill or healthy. I don’t know what she looks like, or what she’s been told about me—if she’s been told anything about me at all. She
Uncertainty was, perhaps, the cruellest form of grief. During the war, Celia had known women who, having given boys up for adoption earlier in their lives, had scanned the newspapers every day, terrified that their son had been lost in the trenches: it was a hopeless task, with no familiar name to look for, but they scarcely seemed to care, so great was the suffering caused by ignorance. Lucy had lost her child, but the fact that the girl lived on with someone else had obviously added a bewildering twist to the grieving process; what she didn’t know, and what Celia could not bring herself to tell her, was that her feelings were likely to intensify with time, that the guilt and sense of self-blame would get worse rather than better. Instead, she just listened, sensing that Lucy had rarely had an opportunity to talk about how she felt. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for not saying more to her when I had the chance,’ the girl continued, ‘but it didn’t feel like she was my baby to say anything to. I should have insisted on knowing what sort of life she was going to have, at least. Anything could have happened to her. I read what that woman upstairs is writing—I know I shouldn’t have looked at it, but I couldn’t stop myself. What if something like that happened to my baby?’
There was a hysterical note in her voice now, and once again Celia cursed Josephine for her interference in the past. ‘It’s fiction, Lucy—she doesn’t understand what she’s writing about and anyway, it was a long time ago. Things like that don’t happen these days—there are laws and systems to make sure they don’t. You have to believe in your heart that what you did was for the best.’
‘You sound just like the rest of them,’ Lucy said scornfully. ‘Everyone told me to put it behind me and pretend it never happened, but they only did that so I wouldn’t embarrass them any more. No one would talk to me about it afterwards, not even Marjorie. You could almost hear the sighs of relief from everybody that life could go back to normal—they don’t seem to understand that mine never can.’
‘You’re still very angry, aren’t you, Lucy?’
‘I’m angry with all of them, yes. They made everything worse.’
‘In what way?’
‘By being so unkind. Sometimes I think I might never have grown attached to her if people had been more understanding, but it was just me and my baby against the world. In the end, I dreaded her being born because I knew I’d lose her; while she stayed inside me, we were together and nobody could do anything about it. If I hadn’t landed myself in prison, things might have been different.’
‘Oh, Lucy,’ Celia said, and put her arm round the girl, noticing that she trembled with grief and rage. ‘People think that cruel to be kind is the answer, and it’s not just because you were in prison—only someone who had experienced what you were going through would have been any use to you.’ She remembered thinking at the time that Amelia Sach’s weakness had been exactly that: she understood the pain of women who longed for children, but not the distress of those who were talked into giving them up; if she had, she could never have put the babies so callously into Walters’s hands. ‘You can’t torture yourself with what might have been.’
‘But it’s the unfairness of it all. When my sister had her little boy, my mum worked her fingers to the bone knitting shawls and boots. She was so excited, but she never even saw my baby—and would it really have hurt her to try to understand? Would it have hurt any of them? I wanted to scream at them, Miss, and worse. Because of them, that barren bitch had my child—I wanted them all to suffer like I have, teach them what pain really feels like.’
Celia looked down at her, surprised and unsettled by the strength of feeling. ‘Even Marjorie?’ she asked.
Lucy nodded. ‘Yes, even Marjorie, with her job and her prospects and a string of people after her. And what do I have? Nothing. Sometimes I hate her more than anyone, because she seems to have so many choices. Me, I was still trapped even after we got out of the nick—not by bars any more, but by what was going on in my head.’ Lucy’s grief had a desperate quality to it, and it occurred to Celia that this might drive the girl to go further than stealing trivial souvenirs of someone else’s life. She knew she would have to tell Penrose that he was right about the thefts, no matter how badly it reflected on the club, but should she also tell him what Lucy had just said about making people suffer? What would he read into that, and how would he treat her? Lucy would never have the wit to defend herself if the police suspected that she had killed Marjorie, and there was no guarantee that they would take into account her state of mind after the loss of her child. Could she really bring herself to set all that in motion? ‘It’s mean of me, I know,’ Lucy continued, embarrassed by her outburst and beginning to calm down a little. ‘It wasn’t
