Birmingham Friends (42 page)

A few moments later I remembered our nightclothes and ran upstairs for my nightdress and Douglas’s pyjamas. On my way down, I paused at the top of the stairs. It was very quiet up there, except for a sound, a tiny sound I couldn’t place but which alerted me. Puzzled, I looked into Olivia’s room. I thought perhaps she might be lying on the bed, trying to settle you down beside her.

She was standing with her back to me, the blue frock vivid in front of our dark furniture. My mind struggled – for such a long, slow time it seemed – to make sense of this. The chest of drawers in front of her had been cleared, the toilet mirror now standing at a queer angle on the bed, along with her perfume, powder, lotions. I could see each end of the enamel baby bath, its bright, bluish white; Olivia’s elbows looking creamy against it. Her arms were held straight, taut. And there was silence. Then a movement of water. A tiny splash in the quiet. It was this sound, its restrained smallness which I had registered as odd and which now sliced across my mind.

You were never silent in the bath: you gurgled or screamed.

I was there in a second, my body tight and violent. Half turning, Olivia glared at me with a hard, determined expression. One of her hands was spread over your face, pushing you under the water, the other holding your body down. She had filled the bath deep. Your arms and legs were moving madly, but barely managing to agitate the water’s surface.

I grabbed Olivia by the neck and flung her across the room with all my strength. She fell and hit her head on the bedside cabinet, and I was pulling my baby up into my arms, completely possessed by panic, water saturating the front of my dress. I held you upside down, banging on your back, and a small gush of water came from your nose and mouth, then your choking, anguished cries reaching higher and higher. As I held you you thrust your head back, so beside yourself that there were seconds of silence between each cry, your spine bowing, rigid. I snatched up the little sheet and wrapped you in it and held you close to me, hearing distressed, animal sounds of comfort coming from me as I rocked you.

After a moment, hands shaking, I unfastened my dress and tried to let you suck to calm you, gulping and trembling as I did so, and your little body twitched convulsively as you began to latch on to me, too agitated to do so at first. I was oblivious to Olivia. I didn’t care if I’d killed her.

It was only as I was beginning to come to my senses that I realized she was laughing. Sitting on the floor rubbing her head and giving off high peals of laughter. Too stunned to think, I sat staring at her, still crying, stroking my little Anna again and again.

Olivia got to her feet. ‘Sorry, old girl. I’ve not had much practice bathing babies. Never even got to bath my own.’

She walked over to the window, standing with her back to me, a scrawny silhouette against the light. She lit a cigarette and stood smoking it in silence.

Then she said, ‘You want me to leave.’ There was amusement in her voice, as if she found me ridiculous.

I didn’t answer, couldn’t.

She blew out a trail of smoke. ‘By the way, there’s one more thing I haven’t told you.’ The voice floated over to me, to wherever I was.

‘I’d have spared you this, but truth does have a way of finding us, doesn’t it?’

I waited. There was nothing worse she could do.

‘That child of mine. My baby. I did know who the father was, you know.’

Indifferent to this information, I sat in silence.

‘I was in London – that January – for the Wrens. Pretty beastly it was too. Then who should I run into, fresh back from embarkation leave, but an old friend from home . . .’

I was on my feet. ‘No. No!’

‘Dents your image rather, doesn’t it? Pure, loyal old Angus. Actually, he was in a bit of a state, I thought. Terrified about the posting. And of course by the end of the night he was worse. Full of remorse, disloyal to you and all that. Katie his love, how could he have . . .’ She mocked me. ‘Of course I said he must think of it as something that meant nothing. I expect he wrote to you, didn’t he? “Ran into Olivia. We had such a nice cosy chat.” ’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I knew it was his, Katie. I was unusually busy that month. Very little time to spare for any hanky-panky . . .’

‘You’re lying to me!’ I screamed at her, so that you released me and started yelling as well, Anna. ‘Angus would never have done something like that.’ The words fell awkwardly from my mouth. ‘As a matter of fact he didn’t even like you all that much.’

Olivia laughed again, head flung back. ‘Oh, darling – they don’t have to
like
you!’

‘You’re lying.’ I could hardly breathe, was growing incoherent. ‘Why are you doing this? I’ve done everything for you . . . Tell me it’s a lie, just a story.’

But she was silent, turned to watch me, the cigarette held at a jaunty angle in her hand, her face exultant.

We stood like that in silence for a few seconds before I found my voice again. ‘Get out of my house. I want you out by midday. Otherwise you’ll be back in Arden tonight.’

I left her, holding you close to my body. I couldn’t let go of you. I wrapped you up and walked to the park, carrying you round and round in the strong sunshine, hardly knowing what I was doing. When finally I returned home, the house was empty.

It was Lisa I turned to, then. I was in a terrible state. I couldn’t bear to be parted from my baby for a second out of fear something would happen. Night after night I woke sweating, my hands grasping for you, sometimes screaming. I moved out of my bed with Douglas so that I could sleep with you, guard you. It was as if the odour of Olivia had not passed from the house and she could still harm you. And in my fear of losing you I couldn’t bear to try and imagine how Olivia must have felt in parting with her child. It was too much – such thoughts sent my emotions into too great a conflict. I pushed them out of my mind.

Douglas was very impatient and thought me hysterical. ‘She’s all right – none the worse for it.’ At least it had meant me getting shot of Olivia. That’s what he was bothered about. But I couldn’t have cared less about him. You were the only person who mattered to me, Anna. I saw everyone else close to me as a source of betrayal and I curled in on myself. I had a wall round me. I suppose now they would say I was traumatized and depressed.

Lisa was different, of course. She was full of common sense and free of illusions.

‘Look,’ she suggested, when to the fascination of her neighbours I had turned up again, weeping and distraught at her door. ‘When you’re ready, leave the littl’un with me. She can be with Alice for a bit and Daisy’ll help look after ’em. You know what she’s like with babbies. Even five minutes. It’s a start. You can’t go on like this. You’re making yourself bad with it.’

I needed help and I took her advice. I had an instinctive trust in her that I felt for no one else. Sick with anxiety the first time, I left you lying there on the blanket next to Alice. Daisy was shaking an old tin with a few dried peas in for you. For ten minutes I paced with weak legs, up and down Stanley Street and Catherine Street. When I had decided to return to you I had to hold myself back from running down the road. I dashed the final few yards across the court and went in to find you laughing.

‘See?’ Lisa said. Then added, ‘That Kemp girl needs locking up. You should’ve called the police. You’ve spared that family too much.’

‘Perhaps it was partly my fault,’ I said, holding you close to me, my legs still trembling. ‘And I don’t want them on my conscience. I want them right out of my life – all of them.’

‘But she might try it with someone else’s?’

I sat down, frowning. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Where’s she gone?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Away from me, that’s the main thing.’

Lisa gradually weaned me off my terror. When I could leave you with her for an hour, I knew I was overcoming it. But often during that time I would arrive at her house and dissolve into tears. And she was always welcoming, sitting me down amidst all the chaos of her life and letting me be there, whatever was going on at the time.

‘You’re so good to me,’ I told her. ‘There’s just no one else.’

‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ was all she said.

My mother would be no good, I knew that. I was in a thoroughly distraught state, but couldn’t have admitted it to her. And anyway, other people’s nerves usually got thoroughly on hers. I knew also that she was not the person to consult about the other decision which faced me more pressingly as each day passed. If I didn’t go to London with Douglas, I knew it would be the end of my marriage.

‘What would you do?’ I asked Lisa one day.

Lisa eased Alice up over her shoulder, the child’s head resting against her cheek. Her skin looked grey and tired.

‘In your shoes?’ She frowned. ‘I dunno. I s’pose ’e is your ’usband when all’s said and done. But ’e’s making you uproot yourself . . . ’Ow d’you feel about ’im?’

After a silence broken only by small sounds from the babies, I finally admitted, ‘I can’t stand him.’

‘Well then,’ Lisa said. ‘You can earn a good wage on your own, can’t you?’

When Douglas left we moved into our small terraced house in Florence Road in which you grew up until we moved to Drayton Road when you were eleven.

I didn’t find the courage to tell him until he insisted on us beginning to pack. We were speaking so little anyway. He said, ‘You’ve betrayed me. I always knew you would.’

I sat on our bed and replied, ‘Then why marry me?’

The communication between us remained thin and stretched through those days of practicalities. I found myself looking at him in such a detached way sometimes, wondering what, in those disturbed days of the war, I had thought I felt for him and what had kept me believing it. I was weary and indifferent. You were asleep when he left and he, your father, didn’t even go to your room to look at you. We didn’t speak. I watched him walk down the road from the house with his cases and his camera round his neck and thought that I still hadn’t been to see his parents. He didn’t write. I never pursued him for money. I could, as Lisa had remarked, earn my own. Occasionally I saw signs of his career developing in newspaper bylines and felt some shame at how little I missed him.

I was happy with you, Anna, and happy to devote my life only to us.

It was Lisa who had prepared me for my separation from you. When I went back to work I found dear old Mrs Busby. I suppose she wasn’t so old, when you were still a baby, but she was grandmotherly even in her late forties. The first time she opened the door to me and saw me standing there with you in my arms, she said, in real tones of appreciation, ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby.’ I trusted her immediately. Whenever I came to collect you you were always clean, fed and occupied, and you had Reni James, company which you wouldn’t have had at home. I owed such a debt to Edith Busby. I loved my work. Life settled and didn’t feel lacking. I had you, my job, Roland. Dear Roland – he has always been such a good friend to us.

I saw Olivia one more time, in the summer of 1962. She was back up here for a time then. Alec Kemp more or less paid to keep her out of the way, like a wayward son being packed off to be shameful somewhere distant like Africa. Except she chose London.

My morning’s list of calls included a visit to a Mrs Kemp, with a new baby. The name registered, of course, but it never occurred to me it would be her, not here in Birmingham, nor with ‘Mrs’ as the handle on the name. She was living in Moseley in one of those enormous Victorian houses that had already been sliced up inside for flats. I had to climb a flight of stairs – grand ones once, though dirty and communal now – to find the chipped door marked ‘3’.

She was holding him as she answered the door, her small frame wrapped in a turquoise silk robe, hair loose and falling all over the place. The child was very tiny and startlingly dark. I realized immediately that the father must have been from India or similar. His eyes were huge, brown and alert.

We never spoke. As soon as I’d realized who it was I was on my way back down those grimy stairs and out to the car. When I sat down in the seat I was shaking. I managed to drive back to the clinic, and handed Olivia’s notes over to another Health Visitor. I wasn’t having anything of that. Not after all this time.

For Anna

May 1981

My dear one,

I suppose I should have written this a long time ago and got it out of my system. It’s our story: Olivia’s and mine. You used to ask me about Olivia so often when you were a little girl, and what I used to feed your curiosity was a lie, or at least such a selective version of the truth as to amount to one.

You will see from her letter enclosed with this that Olivia didn’t die during the war. In a way it was simpler for me to let you think she was dead all this time, and the fact was that for me she might just as well have died. I wanted her out of my life as cleanly as death would have taken her. She’d done such damage and I couldn’t stand any more.

But I couldn’t resist telling you my happy memories. When you were young and fierce with affection for your friends it made me think of her so often and how we were together. We did have those good, happy times, Anna. I shouldn’t want you to think I had invented those. I always wanted you to know about Olivia as I knew her then, because I have loved very few people as I loved Livy.

I’ve tried to be frank with you about all aspects of my life. I’ve always admired your straightness and I know this is what you would want. Some of it you’ll already know, but there’s much that you don’t. I seem to have ended up telling you my life story – but then there’s not much from that period of my life which is not somehow bound up with Olivia.

I hoped to tell you all this at some point. I didn’t, though, expect you to hear any of it from Olivia herself. But in 1976 Alec Kemp died, and not long after that she began writing to me. They had gone very quiet, the Kemps. He stayed on the Council for a time, but he certainly never made it as an MP. I don’t recall him ever standing for Parliament again – a fact which has somehow made it easier for me to forgive him. What relations were like between Olivia and her parents all those years, I’ve no idea. But the letters started coming. She begged me to see her. She sent me bits and pieces which she must have written in London after she left Arden Mental Hospital. Some of these were rather disconnected, but the ones I have included for you speak clearly. They tell of things I barely guessed at the time: the hidden side of her life at home of which I felt the vibrations, but for many years knew nothing of the causes. Her father’s death must have prompted her to reach back into the past and try to explain it. These fragments are, though, I have to add, stamped with Olivia’s hallmark: a complete lack of remorse for her actions.