The Crimson Rooms (31 page)

“Do you think I can bear to see my children and then leave them again? I thought they was comin’ ’ome.”

“It was explained to you very clearly after court that the judge had ordered that you have a visit. Nothing was said about the children coming home. There is a long legal process to be gone through first.” I spoke sharply and she said nothing more but stared sullenly out of the window.

The home was set behind a pair of gates bearing the sign in wrought iron: GOOD SAMARITAN HOME FOR DESTITUTE CHILDREN. There was a yard with hopscotch marked out before a gray-brick building with high windows and double front doors set in a Gothic-style frame and painted green. “That’s why I chose it,” said Leah, “because I seen the hopscotch.”

We sat in the entrance hall, where a flight of stairs rose dead-center, divided on a little landing, and then continued to left and right. The unplastered walls were painted dark green to shoulder height, cream above, and there was a hospital smell of antiseptic covering up something less palatable. Although the building was quiet, there was a definite atmosphere of lives held in abeyance.

The matron kept us waiting for several minutes, which I thought ill-advised. Leah could not sit still but crept again and again to the foot of the stairs, peering up as if expecting her daughters to come running down from the landing. The quiet was punctuated by the occasional distant closing of a door or the echo of a woman’s voice, and by Leah’s loud sighs and rummaging in her bag. Sometimes she fiddled with her hair and twitched at her skirts or glared accusingly into my face. Thanks to my father, I was all too familiar with the symptoms of one overfond of alcohol but deprived of the bottle. By the time we were summoned into the office, Leah was wild and my heart was in my boots.

The matron, Miss Buckley, was dressed in a formidable costume of pale gray linen with a silver badge on the lapel: an engraving of the home complete with its cathedral-like doors and the Latin motto
Ut prosim
above it. Her hair, cut in a chin-length bob, was brushed into a shiny gray helmet. Considerable effort had therefore gone into her appearance and yet she had achieved what most women would strive to avoid: an air of utter restraint that betokened a kind of negative vanity. I sensed that she would be rigid.

When she opened her mouth, I knew we were doomed. Her voice was too high and girlish for a woman well into her forties, and though she smiled a good deal, her eyes were hard. Her desk was completely empty except for one closed file, and she indicated that we should sit on two hard chairs opposite. I thought with surprising nostalgia of my basement office stuffed with files and papers, which at least showed that for decades Breen & Balcombe had been grappling with human transactions. Surely this room ought to have some sign that its business was children? But no, the only obvious reference was a pious painting of a child at prayer beneath a crucifix, on which a lurid figure of Christ hung with blood dripping from brow, hands, and feet. For a moment, I was distracted by the memory of Meredith’s drunken disclosures about her vocation and had an absurd urge to laugh—today she and Prudence were off to the British Empire Exhibition. Did Prudence really not know that Meredith was a Roman Catholic, and therefore a viper? And once again I was flooded with dread of Meredith. She sickened me utterly, the way she had insinuated herself, used her son to win our trust, and then attempted to destroy my brother’s memory.

“I think it’s wonderful, Mrs. Marchant, that you should have come to visit your little ones. You’ll find them in very good spirits,” said Miss Buckley.

Leah nodded eagerly, setting a pair of ornamental cherries wagging on her new hat. For the time being, she was very composed in her dark clothes, her hands folded tightly on the bag as if it contained her pent-up excitement.

“There are just one or two things I need to say,” added Miss Buckley in her oversoft, overmodulated voice, “before I bring the girls in.”

“I’ll see them alone. By the way, we’ll be private, won’t we?” said Leah.

Miss Buckley acknowledged the interruption with a slight lift of an eyebrow. “Ah, no, not this time. As I was about to say, we have very strict rules about visits from our parents. It can be upsetting for our little ones to see their mothers, and your two, Mrs. Marchant, have only just started to settle. In some ways they’re coming on beautifully—you’ll see that Ellen has completed her first sampler and dear little Cathy is learning her alphabet. We think she’s very clever.”

“She is clever,” said Leah. “They both are. I want them home.”

“Shall we talk about that afterward?” said Miss Buckley quietly.

“I think it would help Mrs. Marchant to accept the current situation if there was some hope.” My voice, abused by last night’s unaccustomed alcohol and lack of sleep, sounded rusty. “Perhaps you can explain the process to her.”

“She will need to show that she can provide a good home for the children, of course. Where is the husband?”

“We are attempting to contact him. He is at sea.” So far we had sent three letters to shipping companies, inquiring after Sam Marchant, all of which had been sent back stamped NOT KNOWN. “But even if he is unavailable, I think we will be able to prove that Mrs. Marchant has provided the children with a comfortable home and we are checking to see that there are places for the girls in a local school.”

“Well, that all helps. We have to be sure that we are returning our children to safe homes, where they will be cared for as well, if not better than here. But for the time being, I want you to listen to me very carefully, Mrs. Marchant. You shall have fifteen minutes precisely with the children. We are very strict about a first visit. Miss Gifford and I will be with you at all times. It’s appropriate to give them a little present, if you have one, and ask them about their studies. When they come in you may shake hands and later you may kiss them good-bye, but otherwise we discourage physical contact because the children find it too disturbing. And I must warn you that if you fail to keep to any of these very easy rules, we shall be forced to end the interview early and the board will be notified. As I said, we have learned from painful experience, the shorter the better at first.”

Leah said nothing more but sat with her head back and her bottom lip clenched in her teeth. I felt nauseous. Miss Buckley rang the bell, there was a few minutes’ silence, and then the door opened and two little girls were ushered in by a mistress dressed head to toe in beige.

They were aged perhaps seven and five and wore identical gray frocks and white pinafores. The younger had brown hair pulled into a tight tail at the back, the elder’s fine, near-white hair was parted at the center and worn in two thin braids. In her right hand was a scrap of canvas. Both had huge, greenish eyes. At sight of their mother, they stood stock-still, hand in hand.

“Oh, my Gawd. Oh, my precious girls,” breathed Leah.

The girls didn’t move but the younger turned her solemn eyes toward the matron, who nodded. “I’ve been telling your mother that you know your ABCs, Cathy. She’s very pleased.”

The child stood, watching.

“Give Mother your ABCs.”

Both little girls stood as if frozen to the spot, hands tightly clasped, watching their mother.

“Cathy,” said Miss Buckley in her soft, sweet voice, “do as I say.”

Nobody moved. Finally, the matron said: “You may shake hands with your mother then, if you can’t remember your ABCs, and with Miss Gifford.”

The older girl’s gaze flickered to me, and my lips managed a frail smile. The child was an inch or so shorter than Edmund, but whereas his eyes were trusting and inquisitive, this little girl was expressionless as she came up to me, sister in tow. One after another, I felt their small hands in mine; both were cold and neither returned the pressure of my fingers, then they were quickly withdrawn.

“I believe your mother has brought you a present,” said Miss Buckley.

Leah produced the bag of grapes, squashed so that the juice had bled into the brown paper, and the chalks in a little cardboard box. Both packages lay in her lap.

“The girls will be allowed to share with their friends after tea,” said Miss Buckley. “And now I think, as nobody has anything to say, our time is almost up so . . .”

One of the children gasped, as if she had been holding her breath all this time, and at the same moment Leah’s spine seemed to collapse and she held out her arms. The spell broken, the children hurled themselves at her and all three were knotted together, their heads pressed close.

“Very well,” said Miss Buckley. “It’s time to part now.”

They were sobbing, covering each other with kisses, arms wound tightly together.

“Come, Ellen,” ordered Miss Buckley. “Bring your sister away.”

The group tightened, the sobs grew louder. I pushed aside my chair and backed to the wall. Had Leah not been between me and the door, I believe that I would have walked out of the home into the cab rather than face that scene. The matron marched up and tried to pull one of the girls away but she stuck fast. “Help me,” Miss Buckley commanded and when I didn’t move, opened the door and called sharply: “Miss Hands.”

“Oh, good God,” I cried, “this is inhuman. Could she not have five minutes alone with her children?”

“It’s because I am human that I won’t allow this. The judge promised in his letter that the mother would behave herself. Have you any idea how long it will be now until these girls settle again? Night after night the older one soils her sheets.”

The other woman came in and there followed a nightmarish attempt to wrench the children from their mother. Their fingers were unpeeled one at a time from their grip on her clothes and hair, their eyes were wild as they felt themselves torn away, struggling, howling, writhing, but at the last moment Cathy, the youngest, got a hold of her mother’s skirt again and the pair once more clung to each other.

At long last and much too belatedly, something in me broke. “No,” I shouted. “No. This cannot be right. Miss Buckley, if you leave them alone, I undertake to return these children to your care in five minutes.”

Her immaculate hair had come adrift, her collar was askew. She stared at me venomously and returned to her task.

“I shall report you to the board for cruelty to these children,” I said, very quiet now. “You are perhaps unaware that we have powerful friends.”

“We have rules.”

“Yes. You have rules, but in extreme cases I believe rules have to be bent. Even I, a lawyer, believe that.”

Miss Hands, the minion, had given up the struggle and was looking at her fingernails as if to detach herself from the proceedings. Leah now had both girls on her lap, tightly clasped, the grapes a sodden, purple mass on the floor beside her foot.

And then the matron abruptly gave up and left the room, followed by Miss Hands. I closed the door. “Leah. You have five minutes. Five minutes. If you don’t let the children go after that, I can guarantee that you will never get them back. Do you understand me?” She was whispering into their hair, showering them with kisses. Their crying quietened.

I went to the window overlooking the yard and the treacherous hopscotch. Again I remembered the conversation in the boat with Meredith and I recognized the danger; because of what had happened at the art party, I was a different woman this morning and there was no telling what I might do next.

As if in proof, I now began to look around the room. In one corner sat Leah. The youngest child was telling her about Sunday tea, at which they had jam and sponge cake. And in the morning was church. According to Cathy, the service was three hours long at least. My hand rested on Miss Buckley’s empty desk with its inkstand and ledger complete with fresh blotting paper and behind it a filing cabinet. On one wall was the crucifix, on another a very bad painting in oils, presumably of the Good Samaritan at work. And to the left of the window was a notice board with a dozen or so typed or handwritten lists and memoranda pinned to it.

Three minutes had gone by. Somewhere upstairs a handbell was rung and then carried some distance along a passage, still jangling relentlessly. The girls were attentive as rabbits to a dog’s bark. “Playtime,” said Cathy. “We go out to play now.”

“Hopscotch?” asked Leah.

“Skipping. We skip.”

When I have read every notice on this board, I thought, I will tell Leah that it is time to go. There were details of the local doctor and hospital in case of emergency, a list of board members, weekday and weekend timetables (two visits to church on Sunday, morning and evening), and the dates when a nurse would come to inspect the children for nits. And pinned to the bottom right corner was a handwritten page:

I looked from the notice to Leah and her children and remembered Carrie Morrison’s warning and, in the boat last night, Meredith’s scathing judgment of the government’s emigration policy. Was this to be the fate of these children? What if Leah could not resist the bottle and her drunken husband was never found?

The filing cabinet was unlocked, and when I peered inside, I found that the partitions were neatly labeled: ACCOUNTS, MEDICAL, BOARD MEETINGS, CHILDREN ADMITTED 1920, 1921. And in the third drawer I found what I was looking for—MIGRATION
—
and in a folder:

I crushed the page into my pocket. My time was almost up. Frantic, I again scanned the notice board and found the somewhat yellowed sheet: