Emily rose from her seat near the back of the chapel the moment the funeral service was over, and was able to slip outside without having to speak to anyone. There was to be a reception, but she didn’t want to eat or drink anything within the crematorium’s grounds and among people who worked with Doctor Cleary, or who had known his wife. She didn’t know how anyone could eat and drink in such circumstances. Then, being the doctor’s secretary, people would have come up and spoken to her, for many of them had been surprised at the suddenness of Mrs Cleary’s death.
It was late afternoon, with the sky already growing dark. At the bus stop opposite the crematorium gates a cold wind stirred flurries of fallen leaves; no one else was waiting. Emily peeled off a glove and slipped a hand inside her bag to touch her rosary. The beads were made from real rose petals, and the faint perfume they transferred to her fingers was a familiar comfort. Large black birds flapped and shrieked in the treetops further along the road, as Emily said the Our Father and three Hail Marys for the dead woman. The bus appeared then, and a short time later she stepped with relief into the eerily empty interior of the automat.
Emily rarely saw any staff at the self-service café, though she assumed there were people working behind the scenes – there would have to be. The thing she loved about it was that you could fit coins into a slot, turn a knob or press a button, and the glass doors fronting the compartments filled with sandwiches, pieces of pie, and cellophane-wrapped slices of cake, would slide aside, so that you could reach in and take whatever you had chosen. In Emily’s life there had been so few opportunities to choose what she would eat, or to choose anything at all, that this simple procedure struck her as the essence of luxury. Also there was no need to make conversation with a waiter, or at the checkout. Of course, the food always had a faintly stale taste and texture from being kept, and if you wanted a hot meal this late in the day you were out of luck.
Emily peeled the soft leather glove from her right hand – the gloves, a parting gift from Sister Lucy, gave her a throb of pleasure each time she put them on or took them off. She stowed it in the pocket of her green coat, pressed a coin into the slot of a vending machine and turned a knob to release a slice of cold apple pie; the pie would do for her evening meal. Emily waited while a machine dripped coffee into a thick white cup. The china here was chunky – less likely to chip, she supposed – though if she ever chose cups and plates for herself she would like something finer, something with a pattern.
Settled at a table with her back to the darkened windows, she started gratefully on the pie. Eating now would save her from the ordeal of tea time at the rooming house, which today, of all days, she wished to avoid. Old Mrs Swithing, her landlady, loved to pick over the details of a funeral – how many were there, what the casket was like, the flowers. Emily imagined the old woman’s whiskery chin tilted towards her across the table, the claw-like forefinger hooked in the handle of a bone china cup. The sharp black eyes would bore into her as she awkwardly spooned up vegetable soup, or that dreadful broth that smelled of old dishcloths the cook sometimes inflicted on them, and which Emily believed was a punishment, though what their crimes might have been was beyond knowing.
If she timed it right she could slip upstairs while they were all in the dining room. Then if anyone knocked at her door she could say she had a headache and was going straight to sleep. It was a nuisance being surrounded by people who favoured endless rounds of cards to reading, who watched the worst television programs, or simply sat and nattered about their dull present lives and duller pasts. Emily had a new book from the library; it was about the interpretation of dreams. Reading it would take her mind off things.
Her first weeks as a medical secretary had been alarming. She’d had to learn a complex vocabulary of illnesses and medications; then, after typing letters and notes that documented the relentless creep of various diseases, it wasn’t long before she’d begun to experience her own unpleasant symptoms. Emily would finish a letter and then open the medical dictionary – it had been given to her to help with spellings, but she had started using it to research her suspected illnesses. When Sam the cardiologist’s secretary caught Emily looking up ‘brachycardia’, she had burst out laughing.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said, “we’ve all had it. We’ve had everything! It’s a side effect of the job, but it eventually passes.”
Sam and Mel and Maureen, the personal assistants of doctors with different specialities, had been typing these letters and notes for years.
“We’re survivors of every disease in the dictionary.” Mel smiled. “We’re practically immortal.”
They explained to Emily that having been privy to the intimacies of medical examinations, and personal records, they had now seen and heard everything.
“And some things twice!” Sam gave her snorting laugh.
Being a medical secretary was an education, Maureen said. The things people got up to, you wouldn’t believe!
Timidly at first, Emily had begun to join in their conversations in the small, windowless room where they took their morning and afternoon tea breaks, gradually getting to know the other secretaries and their situations – Sam, thick orange foundation applied over white, acne-damaged skin, was in her early thirties, and anxious about having children; Mel, as fine-boned and flighty as a young filly, was grieving the recent death of her father; Maureen, gooseberry-green eyes and a sharp tongue, was homesick for Ireland and regretted leaving it to follow a younger lover. Between them, they had, as they often reminded her, seen everything, but Emily privately thought that none of them had seen anything quite like the death of Mrs Cleary.
At the end of Emily’s first week, Sam had found her in the tea room with her hands shaking as she poured herself a mug of strong black tea.
“Is everything all right?” Sam said. She was a farm-bred girl, ruthless in her dealings with the patients but kind and caring with colleagues.
“Yes,” Emily said, swallowing hard. “I’m just recovering from an esophagogastrectomy.”
“Oh, nasty,” Sam said. “Here, have a chocolate digestive.”
Emily had bitten into the biscuit and gulped a mouthful of the too-hot tea, puzzled about why she hadn’t confided the real reason she was so upset. It hadn’t been the complications of the cancer she’d been typing but an abrupt break in the recording, with Doctor Cleary’s dry, measured voice interrupted by a series of clicks, and then a hoarse whisper, a woman’s voice, in Emily’s ear.
If you hear this message, if he doesn’t find and delete it, I beg you to listen. My husband is—
Emily had thought she must be hallucinating. She had reversed the tape, tapped replay: there it came again, the same urgent whisper, abruptly cut off. A shiver ran through her. Could it be true? Was it an accident? A joke? At the time, Emily had concluded that the voice must belong to Mrs Cleary, for who else would have access to the doctor’s dictation machine?
During the funeral the vicar had said that Mrs Cleary, whose name was Erris, had been fifty-three. A colour photograph at the front of the chapel beside a cascade of orange flowers had been too far away for Emily to gain more than an impression of straight brown hair framing an angular face. In the tea room on the morning of the funeral, Mel had whispered that she’d thought Doctor Cleary’s wife could have been older. None of them had seen her in recent times. A weakness for alcohol was mentioned. The longest serving secretary, Glenna, had added that poor Mrs Cleary had let herself go. Emily had supposed she meant that the doctor’s wife was overweight, but now she thought that Glenna might have meant something else.
All the specialists at the public hospital worked long hours, and they often dictated their letters at home, even though for confidentiality they were not supposed to. In the weeks following that first encounter with the woman’s voice there were other incidents – once, in the middle of a letter about gallstones, the voice broke out in the background, an incoherent babble that dissolved into a howl. The dictation had been halted, the tape rewound a little, and the gallstones letter begun again in a tired voice. But Doctor Cleary hadn’t wound the tape back carefully, so that the interruption had not been entirely erased. Twice more there were furtive messages addressed to whoever was typing the doctor’s correspondence.
If anything should happen to me, I want you to know that my husband—
Though frightening in its intensity, the voice was well-spoken, and Emily sensed someone who might, under ordinary circumstances, appear calm and capable.
Each time Emily was about to unburden herself to Sam or Mel she was overcome by reluctance. She hardly knew Doctor Cleary, yet his gaunt face, his rounded shoulders tensed like those of a man walking in a rain storm, had roused her sympathy. He had a haunted look, and there was a frailty about his slender wrists that made it difficult to believe he could ever be violent. Nevertheless, Emily had put those tapes into a yellow envelope, and slipped them into an empty pocket in her filing cabinet.
Doctor Cleary had not played the organ at his wife’s funeral as he often did when there was a special service in the hospital chapel. Emily had seen him play twice, and had thought how relaxed he looked, leaning forward to read the music while his fingers roamed the keys with a sure touch. Perhaps it was the sound that cheered him, for the measured tread of a hymn could calm even the most agitated soul. Or else it was the pale yellow light falling through the stained glass windows, the intricate red and gold embroidery on the altar cloth.
Having all her life attended twice-daily prayers, Emily had soon established a routine of sitting for a few minutes in the hospital chapel after work, and she sometimes slipped in there during her lunch break. After the island, there were so few quiet places in this new life of hers, and the scent of candle wax, the perfume of the fresh flowers arranged by a team of elderly volunteers, was soothing – if she closed her eyes she could imagine she was at home. Except that there was no Sister Lucy, no Mother Stella Marie. Sister Lucy had warned her that she would be lonely at first, but all these months later the ache of their absence was undiminished.
“Just remember, love, how you are making us proud!” Sister Lucy had said. “And how we will pounce on you with hugs and kisses when you come back to visit!”
Emily had been saving so that she could return at Christmas. The other secretaries were already making holiday plans: Sam’s enormous family all converged on the farm; Mel was taking her widowed mother out for Christmas lunch at a posh hotel; Maureen was flying to Ireland, and Sam said she’d be surprised if she ever came back. They’d asked Emily what she was doing, and she’d answered that she would be spending Christmas with family. They knew she came from the island, but she had never yet spoken about the Star of Bethlehem. Mrs Swithing knew, of course, being a distant relative of Mother Stella Marie. Over the years, a steady stream of young men and women from the home had travelled to the mainland; they had stayed at the rooming house at a special rate while they settled into their first jobs and found their feet. To Mrs Swithing’s credit, she had never spread it around where they’d come from.
Whenever the little buzz of panic began in her chest, Emily would close her eyes and visualise something she loved at home. Often it was the statue of Mary holding the infant Jesus on the wall of the small courtyard: the pair stood in a boat, for this was Our Lady Star of the Sea. There were nearly always fresh flowers laid across the boat’s prow, or at Mary’s beautiful plaster feet, sometimes put there by the nuns, but more often left by the wives and children of the island’s seagoing fishermen, those silent, salt-roughened men who on sunny days sat mending their nets along the quayside. The faces of the mother and child were exquisitely moulded, and Emily had liked to pretend that this was her own mother, and that the infant Jesus had been modelled on her when she was a baby.
The Star of Bethlehem stood on a spit of land that jutted from the island’s rugged coastline. At high tide it was cut off, unless you were prepared to risk the path through the dense belt of blackthorn, and the bracken-laced pines that covered the hills behind. For decades, troubled women had plodded across the wet sand at low tide. On dark mornings, or evenings, drenched with salt spray, they had left newborn babies for the nuns to find, or sometimes handed them over to Mother Stella Marie in broad daylight. When the tide was high a brave and desperate woman might tackle the path through the woods. Sister Lucy thought Emily’s mother must have come that way late one night, for the tide had been full when Emily was discovered on the kitchen step at dawn. She’d been well wrapped up, not crying, an infant only a few hours old.
The kindness of those women who had raised her was a light inside Emily – bright and steady as the flames of the votive candles at the foot of the blue-robed Virgin in her niche inside the chapel, or the tall candles on the altar that had never been let go out since the chapel was consecrated. Their affection sustained her on days when her pride in holding down a job, in her precarious independence as a young woman with her own door key, even her pleasure in the books she devoured in the evenings, and the modest luxury of the automat, threatened to collapse. In those moments Emily was herself an island; a girl alone; a girl whose mother had struggled through a pitch-dark wood to deliver her to strangers.
At times the weight of this knowledge threatened to crush her, as it had crushed others who had been raised at the Star of Bethlehem, soft boys like Arthur – who might yet be alive somewhere – bright girls like Linnie, who was not.
Before she died, Doctor Cleary’s wife had been admitted to hospital; she had come in through the Emergency Department late at night, and by morning had been moved to Intensive Care. Emily had absorbed this information in silence, sipping strong black tea during the morning break.
“Was there an accident?” Mel asked Sam.
Emily held her breath as she waited for Sam’s reply, afraid that what she was about to hear would compel her to take some action she could not yet visualise, though she knew it would mean telling about the tapes.
“I heard it was a brain haemorrhage,” Sam said.
Emily breathed again. Surely a brain haemorrhage amounted to natural causes; it was nothing to do with those tapes, and the wild allegations of harm.
When the others returned to their desks Emily sat on for a few minutes in the empty tea room, since she had no letters to type that morning. With her eyes closed she ran through the home things that held her steady: Our Lady in the little boat with her child; the window at the turn of the first floor stairs where you could watch the wooden boats of the island’s fishing fleet bravely setting out at dawn and coming home again at dusk. She and Linnie had often squeezed onto the window seat after prayers to watch for their favourites. Emily’s was yellow and green, a fishing boat called Gypsy Dancer; Linnie’s had been red, the Bonnie Bride.
The tight feeling came in Emily’s chest. Sister Lucy had told her she mustn’t dwell on the things that hurt, especially Linnie. So obediently she pushed away the image of Bonnie Bride beating towards the harbour on a dull afternoon with the gulls circling, and their warm breath fogging the window glass; she pushed away Linnie’s grey eyes with the little bruise-coloured shadows underneath, and the thing she’d said that time.
“You’ll dance at my wedding when I’m a bonnie bride.”
Emily thought instead of the framed scroll on the wall of Mother Stella Marie’s study – the Hippocratic Oath that had belonged to her doctor father. He had gone to the First World War and was killed in France after only a week. His death had seemed unbearably tragic at first, but in time Emily had reasoned that at least he hadn’t suffered in the trenches for years, only to be killed a week before the end of the war.
Emily had learned to read her first words from studying the scroll while she waited for Mother Stella Marie to finish her work. The nun might be going over the kitchen accounts, or writing to children who had left the Star of Bethlehem and were making their way in the world, as Arthur and Linnie had, as Emily was now.
How remote that prospect had seemed in the days when she lay on the rug sounding out the hand-inked words on the scroll. Since she’d been on the mainland she’d had two letters from Mother Stella Marie. Emily had torn them open in a flush of excitement, and while she was reading they had brought home close. But the feeling had faded, and afterwards home had felt even further away than before. It was not just distant in miles, but obscured somehow, concealed in a fold of time that would be difficult to reach, or even, perhaps, impossible ever to find again. It gave her a little bump of fear in her stomach. Perhaps that’s how it had been for Linnie.
In the days after the funeral, Doctor Cleary seemed to Emily to have a new spring in his step. His shoulders were no longer so hunched, and Emily didn’t actually hear him whistling, but she saw that his lips were pursed as if he had wanted to whistle but had stopped himself in time.
She remembered how he had sat with his wife in the intensive care ward. Emily had been summoned there to collect his dictation tapes for typing, though he had left them for her at the nurses’ station, so she hadn’t got even a glimpse of Mrs Cleary. Intensive Care was not as brightly lit as most other hospital wards; it was a tense, ominous place that Emily had been glad to hurry away from.
Eventually, Mrs Cleary had taken a turn for the worse.
“They switched off her life support this morning,” Sam said.
“How awful!” There were tears in Mel’s soft brown eyes.
Glenna sighed. “In some ways it’s a blessing.”
Emily had felt the bump in her stomach again. Would it have been Doctor Cleary’s decision to turn off the machines that had kept his wife alive? She had waited for Sam or Mel to say something about Glenna’s remark that it was a blessing, but neither one of them had spoken.
The latest batch of letters was ready for signature. The doctor surprised Emily by pulling up a chair and signing them on a corner of her desk instead of taking them into his office.
“I’m in a rush, and I have never yet found a mistake in anything you’ve typed.”
He scribbled his initials on the last letter and returned them to her with the flicker of a smile.
He must have been good looking once, Emily thought. What can his life have really been like with his wife – those howls, the accusing whispers?
Before he left he drew another tape from his pocket and handed it to Emily.
“There’s no end to sickness, or to letters, I’m afraid,” he said. “Luckily these aren’t urgent, because I must have forgotten to bring them in for typing, what with everything …”
When he had gone Emily pressed the tape into the machine and pulled on her headphones. She had been typing for perhaps a minute when the doctor’s voice was interrupted by the now familiar clicks, and the voice Emily dreaded.
Please, I beg you, if you hear this I need you to tell …
The letter went on again, and then thirty seconds later there was another break.
If you do nothing, and he kills me, it will be your fault!
The voice in Emily’s ear was speaking to her directly, its previously pleading tone now pointy with spite. Emily took off the headphones and ejected the tape from the machine. She had done nothing, and Mrs Cleary was dead. Was that her fault? And what action was she to take? If only she could ask Mother Stella Marie, or Sister Lucy, but they seemed so far away, unreachable. It would have been a comfort to have talked to Linnie.
Reluctantly, Emily retrieved the tapes from the filing cabinet, and went next door to Glenna.
Glenna was tidying her desk. “I’m just getting ready for the onslaught after the next clinic,” she laughed.
Emily slid onto the visitor’s chair and cleared her throat. “Has Doctor Cleary had many secretaries?” she said.
Glenna hooked her long fine hair behind her ears, and her eyes dropped to the tapes in Emily’s hands.
“Well … yes,” she said. “None of them lasted too long. But sometimes girls don’t take to hospital work, or they don’t get past the transfer of symptoms stage, and so they look for something else.”
“You see …” Emily hardly knew how to go on, for what she was about to say sounded monstrous in this place where all of their lives were pitched towards helping people battle disease and injury. It will be your fault! She had to speak.
Glenna stood up and closed the door. “It’s about Mrs Cleary, isn’t it?” she said quietly.
Miserably, Emily nodded. “She must have taken his dictating machine out of his pocket.” She found it easier to put it this way than to jump right in with the woman’s allegations.
“Look, he’s a wonderful doctor,” Glenna said. “If I ever get cancer, God forbid, I will want to be treated by Doctor Cleary.”
“But his wife …”
“Emily, listen, I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to spread it around.”
Emily shifted nervously on the chair. “All right,” she said.
“Mrs Cleary used to work here in the Blood Clinic. She was a vivacious woman, smart, and good at what she did. But she quit very suddenly, and stayed at home. People said she’d had some kind of breakdown.”
“I’d heard she was an alcoholic,” Emily said.
“I’m sure. There have been so many stories, some of them quite improbable.” Glenna sighed, and her freckled, good-humoured face looked sad. “Things went bad between them. If you ask me it was because they had no children, and it drove Mrs Cleary mad. Anyway, after a while she became involved in a scheme where babies waiting to be adopted were sent to her to be cared for, a sort of short-term fostering.”
Emily waited, since Glenna seemed reluctant to go on.
“Didn’t that help?” Emily said.
Glenna leaned closer, her face tense and pale. “There were two or three cot deaths,” she said.
“Two or three?”
“Three.”
The silence in the room rang in Emily’s ears. The buzz of panic began in her chest. That woman with the hoarse and frightening voice taking on the care of motherless babies.
“Why did they let her?” Emily whispered.
Glenna shrugged. “On paper she was capable, married to a doctor, the perfect candidate. There were inquests, but nothing could be proved.”
Emily thought of Mother Stella Marie’s exquisitely moulded eyelids, the kindness and calm that shone from her sea-coloured eyes. She thought of Sister Lucy’s cheerful bulk, her sturdy back bent over their rows of summer vegetables, the grace of her blunt grey head bowed in prayer. Over the years there had been one or two nuns she had learned to steer clear of, but those few aside, the sisters had received Emily with joy and had raised her with affection – how fortunate she had been to have fallen into their capable hands. Such a start wasn’t any guarantee, of course. Poor Linnie’d had the same, and they had been told she had recited those lines of Saint Patrick’s prayer, the ones she would say at night to get herself off to sleep – Christ in every heart thinking of me, Christ on every tongue speaking to me, Christ in every eye that sees me – before stepping out of a fourth-floor window at Pullman’s shirt factory. She had worked there just over a week.
As the panic picked up its beat in her chest, Emily clung to the image of the scroll on Mother Stella Marie’s wall, its ancient oath, and the phrase that leapt out at her now was Primum non nocere – First, do no harm. Doctor Cleary would have sworn that oath when he graduated as a doctor. Mother Stella Marie often said it was a wonderful motto for anyone to live by, and for her sake Emily had resolved to honour it.
There was a knock at the door then, and Sam opened it and stuck her head in.
“I’m going to the shops at lunchtime. Can I bring you anything?”
Glenna smiled and shook her head. “Not unless it’s a winning lottery ticket.”
The two of them laughed, and under cover of their merriment Emily slid the tapes out of sight into the yellow envelope. After work she would sit in the chapel; she would say a prayer for Linnie, who would never be a bonnie bride, and for Arthur, that he would let them know if he was still alive; she would pray for all the Star of Bethlehem children, past, present, and future, and for herself, too. Then she would take the bus to the automat, and eat there in the quiet.