The Whipping Club by Deborah Henry Page A

returned to the shed, wondering if Officer Dolan’s curiosity about her twilight activities would finally arouse him. After lights out she heard muted footsteps, his black shoes buried in soft moss, and without a word, he entered, shutting the door behind him. They looked at each other for a minute before Nurse found her tongue and said, “I’ll be going now. I was just finishing up the cleaning of the shed.”
                  “You’ve taken to fixing up after hours?”
                  “The mess does my head in,” she answered. “It needs doing.”
                  As she moved past him he held out his thick arm, and she stopped. It was then that he kissed her on the cheek, moved to her mouth with the finesse of an awkward teenager, and she responded to his advances. He smelled of smoke and Brut, and she was touched, never before noticing his appreciation for aftershave.
                  “Go on now,” he nodded toward the door. “Wouldn’t want to get you into trouble,” he said.
                  “No, no,” she said as she quietly left the shed, going back out into the crisp night air, back into her small room. She sat there on her cot, impressed by the gentlemanly quality he possessed, certain of his concern for her well-being.
     

~ 7 ~
     
     
    Marian returned to Inchicore and the Silverbridge Orphanage with a compulsion, hoping to spot her son. She noticed a boy, around four years old, who looked as if he was a recent arrival, standing in the middle of the dirt lot staring at the older boys playing cards on the side wall. Two teenage girls were sitting together on the steps that led to the main building, each with a box of shoes by their feet to be shined. Small children in scratchy knickers twirled on an old roundabout. A thick concrete wall surrounded their playground, closing them off from the schoolchildren down the road who walked by in their proper uniforms for outings at Mulvin’s Sweet Shop without so much as a glance at the orphanage kids.
                  For days after her visit with Nurse at Castleboro, Marian said very little. It was as if she’d been flung down a hole and she was lost in that foggy place and couldn’t clear her head.
                  “I’m going to bed early,” she told Ben and Johanna many evenings now. “I must have come down with something,” she said as she cleared the dinner plates. Leftovers and a can of Heinz beans again was all that she could muster. “I’ll take a cold tablet, get to bed early,” she repeated and excused herself.
                  Why had Nurse kept Adrian a secret from me for so long?
                  As time shoved on and pushed her life into the busyness of the present, Marian had thought very little about Adrian, hadn’t cared to interfere in his pleasant life, either. It was enough to have known that he was living in America, and she had been secretly proud, too, that she had provided a child with such a life. She had moved on, or so she thought. Wasn’t that right? No. It wasn’t. I know that isn’t true, come on. It had never been true. Something had been missing, something she liked to pretend coincided with the death of her father but had never been that alone. What about that first year, peeking into other people’s prams in the hopes of seeing a glimpse of him? And throughout their marriage, there had been her secret comparisons between Adrian and Jo as infants, and worse, the secret anger that she must pretend Jo was her first.
                  On her fourth visit to the orphanage, Marian was sure she saw him in a rowdy group of boys of all sizes and shapes, pushing and shoving each other, poking a fat one in the stomach. They seemed completely disinterested in a bunch of girls gathered nearby giving them a giggle or two. A stout nun named Sister Agnes tapped the butts of little boys and girls with a stick to