For the next few days Irene went about in a state of unreality. When she woke up in the morning it took her a moment before she remembered and then emotion would rush in, a happiness she’d never experienced before. Then came the doubt, the fear of rejection. She went over and over the situation. Gwen Copeman had made everything very clear. Her stepdaughter had made a mistake. Irene was the mistake. She had been given away. Mrs Copeman had saved Alice from ruin, and she’d become fulfilled and happy in her work. Now Irene knew that she was a doctor, the wife of a distinguished and handsome surgeon and mother of three dear little boys.
She tried to remember exactly what Mrs Copeman had told her, but couldn’t. It hadn’t been explicitly said that Mr O’Hagan hadn’t known about Alice’s secret child, but this might be the case. What the woman had said clearly was that the reappearance of Irene would not be welcome to Alice. Now that she knew Alice’s whereabouts, that thought was devastating indeed. What should she do?
The days went by, became a week, then two weeks, and a feeling began to grow in her. She needed to know more about her mother. She had the photograph that Mrs Copeman had given her and she gazed at it from time to time, trying to fit it to Thea’s frustratingly thin description. Thea studied it, too, but said she wouldn’t have recognized it as Alice O’Hagan as she appeared now. She handed it back to Irene saying, ‘The only way you’re going to be satisfied is if you see her in person. You don’t have to say who you are. Why don’t you go and see her at her surgery?’
‘That’s what I wondered,’ Irene said with relief. ‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know. Look it up in the telephone directory.’
Flicking through the directory in a nearby post office, Irene was frustrated not to find a Dr O’Hagan, only Mr F. O’Hagan, and a number for the house. She jotted that down in her engagement book in case she ever needed it and after a moment’s thought turned to Copeman. She was lucky. Dr A. Copeman & Partner was listed. She asked the woman behind the counter for a map and consulted it quickly. The surgery was somewhere off Streatham High Street. She returned the map and walked back home, deep in thought.
*
It was a further day before Irene plucked up courage to make the telephone call to the surgery. The woman she was put through to spoke in a businesslike tone, but her accent was local.
‘Could you tell me the times of Dr Copeman’s surgeries?’ Irene could hardly breathe for nervousness.
The woman told her the times, morning and evening, but was only able to give her the rota for the current week. ‘Would you like to make an appointment?’
Irene scribbled down Dr Copeman’s times, but declined to make an appointment. ‘It’s . . . it’s for a friend,’ she said, flustered. She quickly ended the call and studied her scribbles. Wednesday. So there was a surgery on her afternoon off.
*
The ensuing Wednesday at half past four found her lurking in the rain under a copper beech tree in a road of terraced houses, some of which, like the surgery, were business premises. It was starting to grow dark, but it was still easy to read Dr A. Copeman and Dr M. Symmonds on the brass plates next to the front door of the surgery. Soft gold lights burned within, but the glass set in the door was frosted and the blinds were down in the front room so she couldn’t see inside. People went in and came out, but none of them matched her idea of Alice Copeman and she wondered what to do. She closed her eyes briefly and imagined venturing inside and asking to see the doctor. No, she couldn’t. Suppose her mother didn’t recognize her. Or suppose she did, but sent her packing. She shivered. The rain had eased off now. Surgery finished at about six, she knew, and it was after that now. She’d wait a few more minutes then go home.
*
Alice glanced at her watch and sighed. Five past six. The last patient, Doreen said. There were no notes for her, just a name, Nora Fellows. It meant nothing to her. There came a shy knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ she said, and glanced up from her desk, ready with a polite smile.
A young woman came in and shut the door behind her, then regarded her nervously.
‘Hello. Miss Fellows, isn’t it? I’m sorry you’ve had to wait. Do sit down.’ Dear me, the girl did seem bothered, her hands shaking as she took the chair by the desk and set her handbag on the floor. A nice-looking girl, not much wrong with her. Her complexion a bit pasty, maybe, but the card said she was an office typist.
‘Thank you,’ the girl whispered. ‘I’ve come because . . . I can’t tell our usual doctor. A friend recommended you. It’s . . . I’ve started a baby and . . . he can’t marry me. My parents will be livid. I don’t know what to do.’
‘I see,’ Alice said gently. She studied the girl, her neat, plainly dressed appearance, the dignified way she held herself. Not one of the sillier sort. ‘Let’s have you up on the bed, and I’ll examine you. Then we can talk about what we might do.’
Her fingers probed the girl’s abdomen. She could feel the fundus easily. Eleven or twelve weeks, she thought, and made her other checks quickly. When she confirmed her findings to her, Nora nodded miserably. With gentle questions she unravelled the girl’s story. The business where she worked was a stationer’s, the young man concerned a printer’s representative, very charming. She’d not had a boyfriend before. He’d swept her off her feet. The usual story. Made promises it turned out he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep. After she’d told him about the pregnancy, he vanished. When she’d telephoned his place of work they said he’d left without giving notice; no one knew where he’d gone. It was the poignancy of her heartbreak that touched Alice, the small details of her individual tragedy. His mother had died recently and she’d wanted to comfort him. He could make beautiful things out of scraps of paper like the Japanese, a swan, a waterlily, had read her a story from a book because he said she reminded him of the girl in it. Tears pooled in her eyes as she spoke of this.
Alice advised her, gave her telephone numbers of an organization that might help, offered to come and speak to her parents. After Miss Fellows left, grateful, happier-looking, and Alice came out into the hall stretching wearily, glad that surgery was over, Doreen stared at her reproachfully, but Alice merely smiled back. Doreen disapproved of Alice’s failure to admonish these girls who could not ‘keep their hands on their ha’pennies’, as the older woman put it, but she also loved Alice and would have defended her to the last if anyone else criticized her for it.
Alice hated it when Fergus passed comment on any such case she mentioned, or if he had to save a woman on the operating table after a botched backstreet abortion. It was, she knew, the way he’d been brought up. It was the way that she’d been brought up, too, that it was the woman’s fault, the woman who was ruined by pregnancy out of marriage. And the sins of the mother were passed on to her child who suffered the stigma of illegitimacy. Alice knew, though, that she herself had no right to condemn any other woman, and the memory of the way Barbara died was ever in her mind as something to save others from.
‘I’m off home now, Doreen, unless there’s anything you need me to do?’
‘No, you’re all right, Doctor. You hurry off and see those children of yours.’
*
Outside, Irene saw the door of the house open and drew a sharp breath as a woman carrying a doctor’s bag emerged and hesitated briefly on the step to pull up the collar of her coat. In that moment, lamplight fell on her face and Irene felt her heart jump. This was Alice, older than in the photograph, more tired and serious, but definitely Alice. Her mother. The woman glanced towards her, unseeing, then set off, the brisk sound of her footsteps cutting the air. She climbed into a motor car and was gone. Irene recovered herself and set off in the opposite direction for the bus stop, hardly noticing her journey home.
*
Usually, Alice was able to put her work out of her mind once she arrived home, but this evening the image of Nora Fellows haunted her. As she helped Nurse bathe the boys, sang to the baby in his cot and read a story to Robert and Ned, the thought of Nora’s plight disturbed her. Fergus was on call tonight, and sleeping at the hospital, so she spent the evening alone, mending a tear in Robert’s school blazer and writing letters. She’d recently received a letter out of the blue, from her old nursing friend Jane. Jane’s husband had died a month before and she thought Alice might want to know. As she read the sad words she felt guilty for letting the friendship lapse. It had been Jane who fed it every now and then with a card at Christmas and once a photograph of her two dear little girls, now almost grown up, Alice calculated.
She knew why she hadn’t kept up the friendship. It had been because Jane had known Jack – at least, she had met him in the hospital at Camiers. Alice sighed, then put down her pen and rested her chin in her hands, remembering. She was visited quite suddenly by the whisper of Jack’s voice, the soft way he spoke his consonants. It came as clearly as though she’d heard it yesterday, and now she saw a vision of his dear, clever face, the wry twist of his lips, his dark eyes, sparkling with humour. She’d tried so hard across twenty years to push him out of her mind, but, in this unguarded moment, here he was.
With a massive effort Alice picked up the pen once more, managed a further couple of sentences of sympathy, issued a vague promise that they should meet up and signed her name. Poor Jane, she thought. Odd that their situations were reversed, that Jane was bereft while she, Alice, had Fergus. She addressed the envelope, found a stamp in the desk then switched out the lamp and went to bed, leaving the letter on the hall table for posting in the morning.
She lay in bed thinking for some time that night, thoughts chasing through her mind, unable to sleep. When she finally dozed off, her dreams were wild and frightening, tender and funny. They were of the war long ago. And Jack.