Bad Girl Magdalene (18 page)

Bishop MacGrath was less of a friend than he seemed. His great wish was to have inherited a different name than the one he possessed. Wrong, he was certain, to hate one’s heritage, but wearing a name identifying a person with this or that stamp was particularly onerous. He had felt this right from being small, when his wealthy family had directed him to the priesthood. From his earliest schooldays he could remember nothing but the destiny that waited for him. The Church invited.

He sometimes wondered if his response to situations like this at the St Cosmo – priest taken ill, a doctor with dark hints on the telephone, nuns in residence wanting everything made different than the situation seemed to dictate – was nothing more than that of a bureaucrat confronted with tiresome in-tray documents brought by some irritating mail clerk. Should there not be more than this?

He alighted from his car, thinking he really ought to get the tyres seen to. And the inevitable draught at the left side of his chin while driving seemed beyond the wit of motor engineers
the world over. Several times he had taken it in for checking. And now here was this new Fiat, just the same, causing him a crick in the neck. He pretended to admire the gardens at the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly. So much deception, so much play-acting. A bishop must seem healthy, full of wit and vigour, in charge. More political analogy? He smiled with rue and went in, the door opening immediately.

‘M’lord.’

‘Good evening, Sister. Peace upon the house.’

‘Father Doran is in the sick room. Dr Strathan is on the telephone presently, speaking to the hospital consultant.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘Please.’

Bishop MacGrath made a brief pause in the second-floor corridor to hear Sister Stephanie’s impression of the patient’s progress, then spoke with Dr Strathan in private.

‘It is serious,’ Strathan began immediately. ‘I had the cardiac consultant here half an hour since. He is gloomy, not to say as puzzled as I.’

‘Is there any doubt about the diagnosis, Doctor? Heart attack?’

‘Of some sort. We are unsure as to the cause.’

‘Are they not spontaneous?’

‘His history gives no clue. The patient’s response gives no clue. If I were less suspicious, I would say he had taken cardiac medication, but I have spoken to his usual doctor, a GP I trained with, actually. He passed Father Doran fit a six-month since.’

‘His chances?’

‘Looking less with every passing hour.’

‘Can he be sent to hospital?’

‘Admitted? I desperately want him in, but don’t want to risk shifting the man at this stage. The consultant advises we keep him until morning.’

‘Will you transfer him then?’

‘If he’s able. I’ve provisionally already arranged it for nine o’clock. Sister Stephanie will bring in two SRNs for round-the-clock nursing.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘Yes. He wants you to.’

The bishop entered the sick room, his apprehensions worsened by the array of medical instrumentation. The priest seemed to have shrunk. Bishop MacGrath had no recollection of Father Doran being so small, almost a cartoon reproduction of a figure he once knew.

Doran was awake, and asked if he could speak in private. The nurse withdrew. The doctor also went, after suggesting the stay be not more than a few minutes.

Bishop MacGrath drew the one chair up to the bedside.

‘Father Doran? I am so sorry to find you like this.’

‘It came so suddenly.’

‘I’ve spoken to Dr Strathan.’

‘I think I am worse than I was when it came on.’

‘He says you may be transferred to the hospital in the morning.’

‘If I am spared, m’lord.’

‘You shall be, James. The whole diocese is praying for your recovery.’

‘I wish you to hear my confession.’

‘Certainly. Do you wish to compose yourself first?’

‘No. I am afraid I might withdraw from the sacrament.’

Bishop MacGrath was surprised and he hesitated. ‘Do you
wish to make a general confession, James, or—?’

‘I wish to confess.’

‘Do you want to speak to Dr Strathan first? I mean, if you think it might prove…’

‘More drugs, to ease the spirit?’

The prelate was disturbed by the priest’s wan smile. He took his stole from his case.

‘Ready, my son.’

‘Yes, Father.’

The bishop intoned,
‘Vent, Sancte Spiritus, repletuorum corda fidelium, et tui amoris in eis ignem accenda.’

He waited. The patient was still, his face turned away from the confessor. The prelate continued with the
Oremus.

‘Your confession, James.’

‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned. While in a position of trust, I abused a girl child in one of the Church’s establishments.’

‘Was this recently?’

‘It aroused suspicion.’

‘Did it concern this diocese?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘It was reported to me?’

‘I do not know. I only know you spoke to me about it.’

‘I remember.’

‘And I was then moved to my present post.’

‘Yes.’

Bishop MacGrath sat in silence. The memory was as fresh in his mind as on the day it was brought to his attention. Father Doran, it was rumoured, had been noticed in circumstances verging on the improper, in some of the homes operated directly by the Church. One incident in particular had resulted
– perhaps culminated was a more apt term – somehow in the death of a girl, who happened to be seriously ill from some form of protracted chest complaint. She had died suddenly.

‘Do you wish to detail the events, James?’

‘She was close to death.’

‘The girl?’ Bishop MacGrath hated this.

‘Yes. She had been under the doctor for some time, but medical calls proved too expensive.’

The prelate bit back his reflexive justification.

‘She was in a dormitory with one girl in a bed opposite.’

‘Yes?’

‘I went in the night to see her.’ Doran’s face was still turned away. ‘I was not sure what I was there for. I gave her some explanation.’

‘Explanation?’ MacGrath floundered. He actually felt irritated at the sick man.

‘Of a particular need a person sometimes had.’

‘And then?’

‘I used her.’

‘With her agreement?’

‘She stayed silent.’

‘And the other girl, the one in the other bed?’

‘Stayed silent. I thought asleep.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘I left.’

‘Was anything said, or a complaint made?’

‘She died next morning. She had fallen down the stairwell.’

‘Who found her?’

‘The nuns heard something, or they were roused, perhaps by noise. I don’t know what time.’

‘Did they call the Gardai?’

‘No. I believe, I don’t know, the nuns returned her to her bed. They took her away next morning.’

‘She was certified dead by a doctor-on-call, if I remember the report.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘I had left early. I do not know why, or where to.’

‘You never reported this to me, or to Monsignor O’Brien?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Did you put in for transfer to the Rosimians, in Upton, County Cork?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Was that discussed with you in this diocese by anyone, or elsewhere?’

‘No, Father.’

‘What was the outcome?’

James Doran moved his head to see the confessor. ‘I feel interrogated, Father, instead of confessing.’

‘My apologies, James.’ The prelate was silent a few moments. His fault had been to conflate his administrative and his confessorial duties. ‘Did you know the, ah, extent of the girl’s injuries or the outcome, before you made your next confession?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Did you commit the sin of presumption?’ And into the priest’s silence he said, ‘You know that despair and presumption are the two most heinous sins against God, James. They confer a character on the soul. Consider, and examine your spirit.’

‘I made a general act of contrition, Father. I fear I presumed.’

‘Have you anything further to say?’

‘No, Father. Except…’

‘Except?’

‘I wonder if the girl who was supposed to be monitoring the sick girl, stationed in the bed opposite for the night, truly was asleep.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘I’m uncertain. She remained motionless, I’m almost sure, during my…transgression.’

‘Then what changes your mind?’

‘I wonder if I recognise a face, Father.’

‘Recently?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone here? In this diocese?’

‘Perhaps. Maybe I am wandering on account of the medication I’ve received.’

‘Have you any reason to think the matter will be raised again?’

‘I do not know, Father.’

‘Your confession is completed, James?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Then make a sincere act of contrition, remembering that it is a ready sorrow for all our sins, because by them we have offended so good a God, together with a firm purpose of amendment.’

The priest began his prayer almost in silence, head back on the pillow. The prelate spoke with him, ‘
Domine noster Jesus
…’ and then to the ‘
Deinde ego te absolvo…
’ of absolution. ‘Go in peace, my son.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

The bishop rose and replaced his stole in the case. He returned to sit by the priest, whose face had taken on an ashen
complexion. He pressed the button and the nurse entered almost instantly.

‘I shall stay a while, if that’s all right, Nurse?’

‘Of course.’

‘Could you let Sister Stephanie know?’

‘Certainly. I’ll be a minute.’

The bishop sat. Prayer seemed somehow superfluous. There had not been many instances of this sensation in his life, when the raising of the mind and heart to God became a fantasy, a monstrous irrelevance. He examined the recumbent form of the man on the bed, hearing the faint bleeps of the monitors. Who knew what those traces signified?

One of the great enigmas of his own seminary days had been a study of the Ogdens’
The
Meaning
of
Meaning,
published so long ago now. It had proved a difficulty, directly forcing the reader into a competitive debate with himself about names given to objects, events, activities. It had been a major impediment to his faith for a while. Confrontations with his own seminary tutor had been traumatic. The sensation had just recurred while hearing James Doran’s confession, for he, bishop of the diocese, had taken the decision to transfer Father Doran to a safer position – safer being one where his errors were unknown. Whole governments had been party to this trick, and even in the Dail itself a government had wobbled because of similar deceptions worked to conceal the evils in the Church.

It was difficult. To allow the Church to be vilified by the ungodly accusers was tantamount to surrendering to the forces of evil. To do nothing was to perpetuate the sins being worked on the children in the Church’s care. To transfer the priest was justifiable, he reasoned anxiously, because it protected the
Church from unjust accusers, and allowed her excellent work to continue.

Excellent, though? Justifiable, though? Unjust, though?

There had been the fire at the St Joseph’s – so many St Joseph’s Industrial Schools – where many children died in a terrible conflagration there, plus, said the laconic report, ‘one old woman.’ The Church had survived, of course.

The prelate saw the nurse re-enter. He relinquished his place to her, and she went to make a printout of the patient’s indices.

He stood by the doorway another moment, then left. He wished he could go incognito into some bar and just sit a while not speaking, and maybe watch the racing results come through from Leopardstown or Fairyhouse in County Meath. Others of his ecclesiastical rank went, so why not he?

It was seriously dark outside now. He admonished himself for impropriety. It was the duty of the confessor to erase all judgement from his mind on conclusion of the sacrament, eliminate the memory, even, of the penitent’s narrative.

He collected his coat, declined the offered tea with Sister Stephanie, and left without discussing Father Doran.

Magda was truly frightened by morning. All night long she tried explaining to Lucy how she wanted the priest to die immediately, then God would have the problem. Being God, she told Lucy, He would know what to do with the priest before His celestial throne. There Father Doran would stand to say what he’d done that night, and would have to tell the truth. There was no way round it, for God knew anyway who tried fibbing that, no, God, it wasn’t quite like that, let me finish, you’ve got it all wrong. God would know straight off they were lying.

By dawn, she was in doubt. Did God give you a chance to put your case? Or He could say, ‘I know everything you did, you did this, you did that, don’t try getting out of it, so here’s what’s going to happen, Hellfire for you, or maybe just Purgatory for a few venial sins.’ That’s the way she had been told it would be.

Lucy was already up there, Magda told herself. She kept feeling sad that Lucy couldn’t tell her what went on, give her some guidance. It would have been so useful.

Arriving in terror at work, she said good morning to the other cleaners. Mrs O’Hare was in early. She had three children, all, by her frank accounts, destined for trouble in later life. They were nine, eleven and fourteen, and already causing trouble. The fourteen-year-old had been caught smoking at school, and was given some penalty points, the meaning of which Magda found difficult to understand.

‘Penalty points?’

She thought it was some kind of football thing, but girls at the convent couldn’t be doing that, could they? She asked Mrs O’Hare.

‘They give the class a bad mark, silly. Don’t you know anything at all?’

‘No,’ Magda admitted, because she had already made a terrible mistake over the priest, who wasn’t even dead from the way the St Cosmo Care Home for the Elderly was behaving this morning. She felt so hopeless. Mrs O’Hare talked over the most intimate matters – not in the nuns’ hearing, of course, but never mind who else was listening as long as it wasn’t a man – with the domestics. She was particularly frank with the two laundry women who only did mornings on account of their bad feet and being as old, almost, as some of the Elderly in the place.

‘Then the whole class gets told off.’

‘Told off?’ Magda dwelt on that a moment, getting her pail and her cleaning bottles ready and placing her two mops second after Mrs O’Hare’s mops in the rack by the sluice sink.

‘Shouted at, daftie.’

‘Who whacks them, though?’

‘Nobody.’ Mrs O’Hare stared at the girl and laughed. ‘They had to stop that after the fuss about the Magdalenes and the Christian Brothers. Don’t you even read the newspapers?’

‘No.’

‘Time you started, girl. What d’you think children would do if they started that old game again? They’d be up in arms and give as good as they got. You know what?’

‘No?’

Mrs O’Hare checked with a few glances here and there. ‘Millie – that’s my eldest – says the class lost points because two of the youngsters were necking at the back of the class in Drama. Nothing to do with the subject.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘True as I stand here, Magda. Kids do what they want these days. You’ve seen them down Great George Street and Crane Lane.’

‘No.’

‘Well, then. Here.’ Mrs O’Hare got her mops ready, tutting at a missing spare head for the smaller one. ‘You heard what went on last night?’

‘No?’

Magda felt her heart go thump. This was it, the priest dying or telling on her and the Gardai coming once she got out of the sluice.

‘Bishop MacGrath himself came in the dark hours.’

‘The bishop?’ The very word frightened Magda.

‘He heard Father Doran’s confession.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Magda moaned. He would tell on her.

‘Don’t take on, Magda. There’s precious little we can do about the poor man’s plight.’

‘What did the bishop say?’

‘How do I know? I was doing a week’s washing at home by then, wasn’t I?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Wait until you get married, girl. You’ll know what hard work really is.’

‘What will happen, Mrs O’Hare?’

‘To the priest? If he gets well enough the doctor will send him to the hospital.’

‘He will?’

Magda felt faint. If Father Doran had said his confession, he might have told the bishop anything at all, including things she had come out with while minding the priest. This was her penalty for ignorance, though she knew enough to understand that ignorance, however deep and constant, was not stupidity. Since leaving the Magdalenes, she had come round to think that her lack of understanding, even of things to do with her own self, was due mostly to poor learning, not to being thick.

‘What happens in hospital, Mrs O’Hare?’

‘They make you better. They’ll have him back on his feet in no time.’

‘Then will he come back?’

‘Right as rain, trust me.’

A third cleaner came in then, so the whole thing had to be told over again to her. Mrs Connery was a middle-aged woman who fancied herself – so current opinion ran – and who spent too much time dolling herself up. She was often reproached for being too heavily scented. The trouble was, she was a good cleaner. Unable to get as splendid a shine on the linoleum as Magda, for nobody could manage that, she devoted herself to the chapel and the furniture, and was an acknowledged class act. She said that herself, the ‘class act’ of the St Cosmo Care Home.

‘Some of them hospitals are good,’ she agreed, joining in once she had caught up, ‘but you have to be fit when you go in or your chances go down. My Jim says it’s always odds-on.’

‘What does that mean, Mrs Connery?’

‘Like a bet on the horses.’

Magda left it there because it was her turn at the sink with her mops. She always gave hers the best rinsing before starting work.

Her duties today were on the ground floor, the vestibule and the porches, front and back, then the kitchen entrance and then the nuns’ separate doorway, which was still called, for no reason she could understand, the postern door. About mid-morning, she would have to do the top floor corridor. That was the one running over the chapel – the chapel was two storeys high, its ceiling the floor of the sick-room corridor.

She set to, thinking what might happen when the priest got better and told the Gardai what she’d said in that old sick room. She would be taken away. What if they were the same magistrates that sent her to the Magdalenes in the first place for being an orphan? She would rather die than go back in the Magdalenes, even though things had changed so much now that children necked in the classrooms right in front of the teachers and didn’t get their legs black and blue for it.

Magda had always caught it on her knuckles and her bottom. That was bad enough, but nothing as painful as the thick round rulers that caught her them dreadful whacks across her thighs. They lasted for days, the bruises never seen. That was for the inspectors. She wondered about the inspectors now. What if they came into the class and found the pupils necking at the back when they were supposed to be learning their old drama like Mrs O’Hare’s daughter said?

She set to. The morning’s work was on a rota. She had to pretend she kept forgetting her glasses, though Sister Francesca, the meekest of the nuns, if there could be such a thing, usually read the rota out. Not being able to write a word had made Magda remember everything she heard, so she was always where she had been told.

The work went fine. By quarter-to-eleven she had had her places checked by Sister Rita, head of the domestics turn and turn about with two other nuns, and was free to start the top corridor. She carried her mopping things back to the sluice and left them ready, then went for her polishing stuff. The cleaners always fought for the best of those, because Mrs Connery was a right one for taking the best. She was not above actually stealing from the polish tins, which were marked with colours for different cleaning staff. Everybody said Mrs Connery was light of finger.

Magda did not pause for a break, but was hard at it when she heard what she had been listening for ever since the cleaners separated for the day’s work.

One of the lay nurses, a state registered nurse who wore two badges on her uniform, one from the Rotunda, one from somewhere Magda did not recognise, was speaking on the phone. Magda assumed it was Dr Strathan. She gave a load of numbers and mentioned something about the traces.

‘He seems more rested,’ the SRN said. ‘I think he may have stabilised.’

Pause. The nurse answered.

‘About two-thirty? Will they come to the front, then?’

Pause.

‘Yes, yes, sir. One thing. Must he be accompanied?’ A prolonged pause, then, ‘Very well, sir. I’ll have everything
ready. The transfer will happen about two? Unless you ring back on my mobile, it’s to go ahead? Transfer definite before three o’clock, then? Yes. Very well.’

The phone went down with a click. Magda got busy, so as not to delay.

About two hours later she helped to give a blanket bath to one of the patients, doing the heavier work because Mrs Borru had a tube in her nose that a nurse had to keep control of.

Magda had to hold the old lady sideways on while the nurse went for another tube. Magda was always fascinated by the way the new tube slid right into the old lady’s nose. It was like magic, such a length of it going in and in and even further in. It set you wondering why on earth God had designed us all like that, such a distance to get inside an old nose. Who’d imagine?

When time for her dinner break came, she had her sandwich from the machine in the ground floor corridor (coins were easy, the slot being the right size for only one sort) and was immediately back at her post on the top floor. She was there polishing when the time came.

Father Doran felt better, except for a serious cramp in his chest, and had asked if he could have his tea before leaving the St Cosmo.

‘You can starve for all I care, Father,’ the nurse called out cheerfully, swishing in and out and not caring how loud she was at doing anything at all. Magda admired her. The thought even crossed Magda’s mind that the nurse, with her strange badge, might even have come from a Protestant hospital, so casual was she talking to the priest.

He seemed to like her because Magda thought she heard his small bark of a laugh.

‘Not even a bite of anything?’

‘You mean one for the road? I know you lot.’

‘Don’t be hard, Nurse.’

‘It’s you being hard, Father, playing on our heart-strings crying hunger. Look at the belly on you! Gob less at dinnertime and you’d not be dying away like y’are.’

Magda gasped at the nurse’s effrontery, speaking like that.

‘That’s the spirit, Nurse.’

‘Be sarcastic all you want, you’ll not get me to shift.’

‘Where’s your charity?’

Both enjoyed the banter. Magda thought it all vaguely immoral, the nurse so encouraging and him a priest and all.

‘My charity ends with what Dr Strathan orders. He says nothing by mouth except a plain old drink without milk, until they’re sticking tubes into you at the hospital. That’s what I’ll do, so shut your noise.’

Just listen to the woman, Magda thought, aghast, losing her chances of going to Heaven in a few breaths, all for the sake of showing off with a cheeky word. She must have necked at the back of the drama class, for sure.

‘Who will be with me?’

‘In the ambulance? One of the nurses.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Are you going on about that again? There’s nobody else to mind you except me or Sister Eugenia, and she’s away with the fairies in Wicklow.’

‘Promise?’

‘Hand on my heart. I’ll travel with you every inch of the way – make sure I get rid of you.’

He did that relieved half-laugh. Magda had heard enough, and went to shake the few tablets she had taken urgently from Mrs
Borru’s small brown bottle of white tablets into water. She had a discarded pill bottle from the men’s alcoves, and had washed it out with great care while watching the singing competition from London, drying it in the Baby Belling oven, turned down after heating some soup. Tomato was the sweetest soup. That and bread with margarine. A cheap meal of an evening, but it had been the first meal she had ever bought herself once released from the Magdalenes, so it was her favourite.

She was on hand when the priest was being got ready for his transfer.

Father Doran was concerned about the tubes.

‘Do they have to stay in?’ he asked anxiously.

‘The one in your nose, yes. I plug it for the journey.’

‘And these wire things?’

‘Can’t you see I’m taking them off?’

‘Will they know to put them back in the hospital?’

‘Of course they will, softie.’

‘In the same order?’

‘Where d’you think I was trained?’

‘Will they do that artery thing to me this afternoon?’

‘I wish I’d not told you, only Dr Strathan told me to.’

‘I wanted to know.’

‘You’re an old softie.’

‘Just so I’ll know.’

‘Just to worry yourself into another attack, you mean.’

‘No, just asking.’

‘Men are worse patients than women any day of the week.’

The priest tried for jocularity. ‘I’ve been a model patient. You have to agree with that.’

‘You’ve been a babe-in-arms. Pest.’

‘What did I do wrong?’

Magda listened to the bickering, feeling sick at heart. He should have died by now, not be cheerily joshing the nurse and almost teasing, with her responding almost like a harlot with her simpering.

‘A woman would be easy and ready for the journey, no questions, just accepting.’

‘What’s going to happen?’

‘A short ambulance ride, for God’s sake. You don’t even have to walk downstairs yourself. The ambulance men will do it for you. Now you just lie back and try to sleep a short while. Ten minutes, and you’ll be off. I don’t want you worn out before you leave.’

Magda was there half an hour later when the nurse emerged and went across to the office. She smiled, deliberately getting in the nurse’s way, but only a little.