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Children want their mothers when they feel poorly.
It’s a fact of life. No matter how big they are, no matter if they think themselves grown, no matter if they are grown, when they have a cold or a toothache or a fever, they want nothing more than to lay their heads in their mothers’ laps and be fussed over, like they did when they were babies.
Girls who are old enough to be courting and boys who are old enough to go out to work still long for their mothers’ cool hands on clammy foreheads, their mothers’ soft words for tired souls, their mothers’ soups for sore throats.
My nephews are exactly like it. Red, rough-and-tumble boys normally - with knees grazed and noses dirty and no ability at all to sit still - who transform when sick into wee mewling kittens, who need to snuggle with their mammy until they feel better with as much need as they have to breathe.
My sister says it’s one of her favourite things in the world. ‘Ah, it reminds me of when they were babies, Philomena,’ she says, with a dreamy look on her face. ‘I miss those days, now they’re getting so big.’
‘Of course,’ I say.
‘I suppose it’s different for your lot,’ she says.
Yes. It is.
I don’t have the time to miss my children being little; I need them to be grown enough to be left to their own devices. I don’t have the time to snuggle and soothe, not with so many to keep clean and fed. I don’t have the time to hold the hands of coughing boys and feverish girls, not with money needing to be found from somewhere to paper over our cracks.
And, anyway, even if I did, my children would rather swallow poison than ask me to hold them, or fuss over them, or baby them. No matter how sick they are, they want to look after themselves.
They have no mothers, you see.
Just me.
I can hear the doctor stomping down the hall towards my office… No doubt he’s ready to collect his fee, even though anyone with eyes could see the money would be better spent here - on any of the million things I need to spend money on - and might decide to be inclined to charity.
I don’t even know why I called him in, I know exactly what he’s going to say: ‘That boy is too thin, Mrs Cole.’ - as if we have food going spare - ‘That boy is an asthmatic, Mrs Cole. The London air is bad for him.’ - as if we have the means to send him to the seaside until his lungs are better - ‘That boy is a liar, Mrs Cole, and a fantasist. He was never touched.’
He puts his head round the door. ‘That boy has scarlet fever, Mrs Cole.’
Well, I could have told him that. It was obvious it was scarlet fever from the minute he woke up yesterday morning, when Martha wandered in with her nose in the air to tell me that his skin was red-raw and rough as sandpaper, and that he was burning up, and that I was wrong to have been so cruel to poor wee Tom Riddle three days prior, when he started looking a bit peaky.
Well, peakier than normal, that is. He’s pale as a ghost even when he’s in perfect health. He spends half the summer sunbathing - the girls all joke that he must be part reptile, because when we take them on their outings he’s perfectly content to just be left sprawled in a hot patch of sunlight, instead of being made to go and play with the others (to all the others’ relief) - but no matter how much time he spends outside he never gets any more colour. In the winter, when the sun is weak, he tends to slowly turn grey.
So can you blame me if I just thought he’d caught a chill? He often does. He was born early, you know - born tiny - and to a mother who was fragile as glass herself. He’s always had a bit of a wheeze in his chest, a bit of a hiss to his voice.
So, when he staggered in from whatever he’d been doing all day - stealing probably, like half the little terrors in this place, although he’s much better at not getting caught than the others - I wasn’t feeling very sympathetic. ‘It’s your own fault,’ I said to him, pinching his ear, ‘for running round London in November at all hours of the day without taking a jumper.’
‘If you say so, Mrs Cole,’ he said, and he knew very well that I heard him call me an ‘old bitch’ under his breath as he slithered off to his bedroom.
God, he’s a little bollocks.
I regretted it when he got really sick, of course.
Martha thinks I’m too hard on the kids. Martha has a soft spot for Tom - and good for her, because nobody else does - because she’s a great follower of the pictures, and she thinks his father must have been an actor. I can’t tell if she means because Tom already looks like a film-star - all smouldering eyes and perfectly-tousled hair and cheekbones - even though he’s only seven, or because everything he does is a performance, with only the barest bones of reality underneath.
And here she is herself, as if she knew I was thinking about her.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘what did the doctor say?’
‘Scarlet fever.’
‘Didn’t I tell you!’
‘You did, so.’
‘And you didn’t give a monkey’s. Poor Tom.’
‘He’ll live.’
He always does. When he had the flu, when he had measles, when he gets bronchitis every December like clockwork. No matter how ill he is, he always manages to will himself to keep going. The doctor says that he must have ‘some sort of perverse psychology which makes him immune to pain’. Father Brendan thinks that ‘there’s something otherworldly about that wee child, some sort of power helping him defy death’.
I don’t think either of them are right. Tom’s interest in God extends to getting into fist fights with the altar boys every Sunday, so I don’t think there’s anyone in Heaven singling him out for miracle cures. And his ability to endure pain is pure fiction.
It’s just about pride. When he’s hurt - when one of the bigger lads punches him in the face - he won’t give anyone the satisfaction of knowing. He just watches, his face completely unmoving, staring down whoever’s attacked him until they’re the one that's frightened, and then whirls off triumphantly, with his chin in the air.
But, if you know where to look, you can find him a wee while later curled up in a corner of the orphanage where nobody usually goes, running his fingers over his black eye or bruised jaw like he could cure the injury by magic. And he’ll be muttering words of comfort to himself, telling himself he’s all he needs, and he’ll be alright, and he will always, always manage to survive.
Well, he has nobody else to, does he? I certainly don’t have the time.
Martha tuts and shakes me from my pondering. ‘Scarlet fever. They’ll all have it by nightfall.’
So they will. We have outbreaks all the time. There’s always going to be disease in a place with this many children crammed in together, and that’s before we get to the fact that we don’t have enough coal for the grates and the kids don’t get to have plates as full as I’d like them to be…
But the doctor takes his share, doesn’t he? And the shopkeepers take theirs too. And I spend all my time bowing and scraping to the rich, or begging the priests, or trying to get our Member of Parliament to answer my letters, desperately looking for enough money to hold us together for another month.
Which means, whatever Martha thinks, that I don’t have the time to be worried about a boy with scarlet fever. Like a real mother would.
But, then again, what do I know about what real mothers would do? The years go on and I have no husband to make me one. ‘Ah, now, Philomena,’ my sister says, ‘you’re not even thirty. There’s still time, so.’ But I know, in my heart of hearts, that I’ll never be one for courting. If I married, I’d have to leave Wool’s - as all my best kitchen maids do, garnets and seed-pearls on their fingers - and I just can’t bear the thought of it. The thought of what would happen to the kids without me there.
Because, yes, I don’t do everything a real mother does. I know that. I don’t kiss scraped knees better or indulge wild make-believe stories. I don’t help name teddy bears or chase monsters from under beds. I don’t have the time.
But I feed them and clothe them and hope for them to have better lives as adults than they do as children, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that half of them will be in prison by the time they’re twenty-one. I say rosaries for their dead mothers and curse their absent fathers and imagine a world where we could give them proper presents for their birthdays and Christmas. And, sometimes, I just break - shatter inside like a piece of smashed china - at the weight of all the sadness which surrounds them.
I must break this time. Because, even though I need to go downstairs and tell Effie to get started on the laundry, I find myself walking up the stairs to Tom’s little bedroom.
He’s like a magpie. He collects things. He’s the one I feel worst about never being able to give presents, because he strikes me as a child who’d love being given gifts with all his wee heart. There’s a pile of shells and sea-glass on his bedside table, which I know he spent hours beach-combing for when we took them out in the summer, and a tin soldier I’m absolutely certain will turn out to have been robbed from one of the choirboys while they were distracted singing the Mass sticking out from under his pillow.
I should box his ears for it - not that it ever works - but he looks so forlorn as he lays there, his angelic little face splashed red with fever, that I can’t be angry. Lots of orphans steal. The beaks say it’s a sign of moral degeneracy, and tut at me whenever one of ours is up in front of them. I just think it’s the way of the world. They don’t have mothers to provide them toys, do they? But any normal child would want them.
I try to take his hand, and it’s a sign of how ill he is that he doesn’t shake me off.
He’s such an insubstantial child, as thin and brittle as a bird, tiny underneath the blankets, but he’s so very, very beautiful. Me and the girls have spent quite a bit of time wondering what could have happened for his father to have been interested in a woman that looked like his mammy.
‘I don’t want you,’ he says, dark eyes bleary, tongue full of pus. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Well, I’m what you’re getting,’ I say to him.
‘You ain’t worth having.’
‘And, yet, here I am.’
He sniffs and goes back to sleep. He’s a funny child. He was a funny baby, too. He never really wanted to be fussed over or held, like most babies do. Which was good in a way - we’re short-staffed as it is without the girls spending all their time clucking and cooing in the nursery. Not when there’s floors to be swept and gruel to be made.
I end up sitting by his bed for hours, watching his body grow weaker and weaker. The girls don’t complain - I bet half of them have snuck off to meet their young men while I’ve been here - not even Martha, who looks in as afternoon turns to evening.
‘His fever’s getting worse,’ I say to her, while Tom shakes and mutters, eyelids twitching, still gripping my hand.
‘I’ll call the doctor. Can we afford it?’
‘We’ll have to.’
‘Mum?’ he says, twitching and delirious, and I realise he’s crying.
He never normally does. I didn’t actually know he knew how… Whatever he’s seeing must be causing him tremendous pain. The sort of pain mothers are supposed to stop.
‘Oh Jesus,’ says Martha.
‘No, Tom, it’s just me,’ I say to him, glaring at her until she leaves for the telephone. ‘Your mam -’
‘Is dead,’ he says, eyes suddenly focusing. ‘I ain’t forgotten.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why did she die?’
‘She didn’t have a choice.’
He has a thing about death. A complex, Effie calls it. The other children are used to it - we have a lot within these walls, what with the girls dying in childbirth and the kids wasting away from fevers - but Tom becomes half mad with fear if it’s even mentioned. He hides in the attic when funeral corteges go past. His panic was so strong the last time the undertaker was in he managed to shatter a vase just with the power of his terror, and Effie needed three stitches when a piece of china pierced her hand. I’ve even had to call the doctor in once or twice, when he gets really bad. ‘That boy is not entirely right in the head, Mrs Cole,’ he tells me after such occasions.
‘Will I die?’ Tom asks me, voice raw.
‘No, Tom, you won’t die,’ I whisper against his hair, hoping I’m not lying.
Although, really, what’s he going to do if I am?
‘That’s right,’ he says, and he looks almost relaxed. ‘I’m never dying.’
He gets like this because his mammy died giving birth to him. It leaves a scar, something like that. Some children become desperate to replace what’s been lost with dolls and make-believe and clinging to our skirts when we’re trying to sweep the kitchen. Tom’s not like that. It’s like he’s locked his mother up in a box, like the memory of her or the idea of the boy he could be are too painful to view. He won’t visit the pauper’s grave we laid her in at Our Lady of Perpetual Desolation. He becomes even more sullen than usual when Mothering Sunday approaches. He won’t speak one single word about her.
Apart from when he’s ill. When he wants her.
And, instead, all he gets is me.
When Martha comes back to say that the doctor is on his way, she’s clutching a small toy rabbit, which I can see has been made out of scraps from a velveteen coat that was no good any more. Leah made it, she tells me, to have something to do this afternoon - ‘She could have darned those sheets,’ I say, but Martha ignores me - and she thinks Tom should have it. Because he’s fond of rabbits, but when well-meaning people buy them as treats for the children - as though we have the money to feed rabbits when we barely have the money to feed orphans - they never seem to go to him. Because he’s ill. Because, even though he’s not a particularly nice little boy, nobody here wishes to leave him without comfort when he’s in pain.
‘I don’t want it,’ he says.
But he takes it, grasping it tightly in one thin hand, all the same.
We will have to take it from him, when he recovers - if he recovers. The velveteen will harbour germs, and the orphanage is a magnet for disease as it is. Tom will experience another betrayal, another small comfort in his time of need ripped from his arms.
No doubt it will make his hatred of me all the worse.
He thinks I’m against him. He thinks I’m out to ruin his life. He thinks I think he’s mad. He simply won’t listen when I tell him we’d get along better if he could behave himself, if he didn’t frighten the other children and steal and lie. He’s the worst troublemaker in the whole orphanage, because he’s clever - much cleverer than the others. They only know how to use brute force, but Tom knows how to manipulate, how to peel back the layers you build to protect yourself until it’s like he’s reading your mind, how to command a room to the extent that the very air seems to obey him.
Maybe he’d always be like this. Maybe he’s got bad blood, as my mammy used to say. God alone knows where his mother came from…
But I don’t think so. I think if his mammy had lived to love him, he’d be alright, even if he was just as poor as he is now. Love just makes that bit of difference. It’s the thing my children are missing, the thing we can’t entirely provide.
‘Either his fever will break or it won’t,’ says the doctor. ‘If he makes it through the night, I’m confident of a full recovery.’
I’ll be sitting with him all night, then. Even though I’ve got so much else to do…
The clock chimes ten.
He was born at ten, in the bitter cold on New Year’s Eve.
I’ll always remember his mother. She was so thin I couldn’t believe her baby hadn’t wasted away inside her, barefoot and dressed in rags even though it was the middle of winter. She died like an animal in a pool of her own blood, and Tom stopped crying the moment her heart beat its last. Like he knew it wouldn’t do him any good to waste the energy.
He thinks she didn’t want him. He thinks she didn’t try to stay alive for him. He’d never admit it normally, but I’ve heard him whisper it to himself when he thinks nobody’s listening. He wants her and he hates her all at once. He won’t believe anyone who says otherwise, who says that she loved him, and she’s up in Heaven watching over him and making sure he’s well. But I know she did. We shared that look that only women can, just before her body gave out.
That look which says, I am entrusting my child to you.
I get that look a lot. I know the weight of it, the responsibility it puts on me. I know the unspoken prayers and secrets it contains, which countless women have shared with me when the pain gets too great for them to live anymore.
It’s a look which says, Please care for him.
A look which says, I have nothing, please give her something.
A look which says, Since I can’t, promise me that you’ll sit by my baby’s bedside, when he has scarlet fever.