‘Finbarr’s filled me in on some of your history. Things I didn’t know. I daresay Archie doesn’t even know. Does he?’
Was this a threat? I moved to shoot an accusing glare at Finbarr, for telling Agatha what so few people knew. Then she said something that surprised me: ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you in Ireland.’ She still had her hands over mine. ‘Dreadfully sorry. A travesty. Abhorrent. An outrage.’
It occurred to me this was the first apology I had ever received, from anyone, regarding my stay at Sunday’s Corner. And I knew, and know still, it wasn’t connected to what she said next.
‘You won’t tell anyone where I am?’
‘No,’ I promised. ‘I won’t.’
In all the years since Agatha Christie disappeared, amidst all the conjecture about her state of mind, and her activities, and her motives, not one single person has ever come to me for answers. People like to follow a very particular script. It never occurred to anyone that she and I might, after all, be friends. That the reason she stayed quiet, forever and always, was not to protect herself, but me.
Eventually, she would move beyond all this. She would marry again (a significantly younger man) and become successful beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings. Things would work out for her in ways they never would work out for me. In ways they seldom work out for anyone.
For now we sat, staring at each other across the narrow table, the fire in the stove crackling cosiness. Refusing to say what the other most wanted to hear. While Finbarr sat with us, thinking his mission well on its way to accomplished, not knowing that one day soon, no matter what was said and done, my name would be Mrs Christie, too.
Here Lies Sister Mary
FATHER JOSEPH LOVED England. In 1919 this made him an unusual Irishman. That June a small British patrol was attacked in Rathclaren and during his sermon he interrupted his usual screed against lust to bellow his opposition. ‘Crown and country,’ he said, pounding the podium. ‘It’s what we went to war to defend, and now these ninnies are trying to upend it all.’
‘It’s a relief, isn’t it,’ Sister Mary Clare said to me one afternoon, ‘that they don’t hold being English against us. I’ve sometimes thought about going home, to an English order. But with Father Joseph in charge it hardly seems necessary.’ She smiled more to herself than at me. ‘In truth I believe it makes me his favourite. My being English.’
She was walking beside me as all the girls filed through the corridor for Holy Hour, a ritual that took place on the first Friday of every month. Sister Mary Declan looked back at me and frowned, but it was a nun talking to me, not another girl, so I went ahead and answered.
‘Does it?’ I tried to make my tone sound idle, but felt the blood leave my face, worried that being English might draw his attention to me.
‘It’s just a flash in the pan, all this IRA business,’ Sister Mary Clare went on, not noticing my discomfort. ‘I’ll be shocked if it lasts another month. You’d think these boys might have had enough fighting, mightn’t you, seen enough horror, to be causing more of it in their own country.’
‘Does Father Joseph know about me? Being English?’
‘I’ve never heard him say a word about you one way or the other.’
Her words should have given me relief. And I did seem to be invisible to Father Joseph – as if a magic cloak protected me from his notice – but I remained terrified this would change.
Sister Mary Clare squeezed my hand and walked away before we entered the chapel, humming her usual, eerie tune. She had a pretty voice, even though she never attached words to her songs. I could hear her as I stood with my fellow penitents, still as could be, for fifteen minutes, our arms outstretched at our sides as if we were hanging on the cross. If anyone twitched, Sister Mary Declan made us start again. On this day we were in the chapel for a full hour. It was hard work not to tremble, thinking of the priest’s love of England. I could feel my baby’s little hands, pressing against the walls of my womb, and I was grateful she hadn’t ever glimpsed the world outside.
A new girl arrived on a Tuesday and on the Friday she escaped, exactly how nobody could say. She simply vanished from our midst without a confiding word to anyone. The bells clanged and the nuns flurried. I took heart when she never returned. The next day, working in the nuns’ graveyard, I looked through the bars to ascertain the route she’d taken. Through the fence that surrounded the graves I could see the entrance to the convent, the wrought-iron gate that opened to let in visitors. And I noticed at the corner, where the gate met the cement wall, one bar had rotted away and fallen into the high grass. The space it left was still too small for my pregnant self to slip through. But I wouldn’t be pregnant forever.
The two other girls worked in obedient silence, pulling weeds and cleaning lichen from the headstones. I kneeled and pulled the bar into place, lodging it in so the cracks wouldn’t be visible unless examined closely.
That afternoon Sister Mary Clare sat down beside me in the sewing room, where I worked alongside a group of girls, mending old uniforms. Other girls – who unlike me were handy with knitting needles – worked on the tiny matinee coats the babies would wear to keep warm. I prayed my baby would never have one of these. I’d get out of here too soon for the nuns to dress her. Whatever clothes my child wore, they would not be manufactured at this convent.
‘Dear Nan,’ Sister Mary Clare said, perched on the same backless stool the rest of us used. ‘You don’t seem yourself.’ She patted my arm. Two nuns came in carrying babies, and the girls they belonged to put their knitting aside to nurse them.
‘What would you have been,’ I asked Sister Mary Clare, as I executed a clumsy stitch, ‘if you hadn’t been a nun?’
‘Why, a mother, of course.’ She smiled over at the nursing babies then quoted Coleridge, though at the time I believed they were her own words. ‘A mother is a mother still, the holiest thing alive.’
I let my work drop into my lap and covered my face with my hands, thinking of Bess. Was she still the holiest thing alive, now that her baby was dead? ‘Bess,’ I said. ‘Poor Bess.’
‘There, there. Don’t you worry about Bess. Why, she’s a wife now. She can have another baby, one that can be baptized properly. She can have ten babies, all fat and happy, gathered round her feet.’
I broke down sobbing, and Sister Mary Clare rubbed my back in gentle circles. She would have been a good mother. ‘Take heart. Bess’s young man turned up for her. Could be yours will too. He’ll have read the letter I sent him by now.’ She handed me a handkerchief and I blew my nose.
‘Here,’ she said, reaching into her sleeve. ‘I’ve brought you a treat.’ She pressed a piece of soda bread into my hand, still warm, and slathered with fresh butter, a luxury I hadn’t seen since I left home. I looked at the other girls apologetically.