Chocolate Girls (35 page)

Janet looked up at his face, saw it shining in the firelight. She knew he could see life spreading out, opening up. He was like someone reborn.

‘You want me to come with you? Really?’

‘
Yes.
Oh my darling, how could you think anything else? Of course! I want you at my side whatever I do!’

Quietly, calmly she said, ‘Then we’ll go.’

Over the stew and potatoes, Martin told her what he knew about the job, which at that stage was not a great deal, except that he would be in principal charge of a new medical centre in a village called Ibabongo. The village had a mission station, maternity care and a leprosy hospital, but although there were qualified nurses, there was as yet no doctor. He knew his experience in the tropics would count in his favour. ‘Although, of course, Africa has a repertoire of diseases all of its very own!’ he laughed. ‘There’ll be a tremendous number of challenges.’

Janet drank in everything he was saying. She would go to the Congo. That she was agreeing to leave everything behind for an entirely new life, taking a risk of immense proportions, was not something she could fully take in. They could worry about what was ahead later. But what was so wonderful about the evening was their sitting talking, laughing together, planning a future, and seeing Martin so excited. Letting something new begin. She began to fold her preoccupation with children away in her mind. It would always be an ache, a deep sadness, but somehow they had to make a new kind of life.

When they got into bed that night, Martin lay on his back and let out a long sigh, as if a great load of tension in him was beginning to melt away. She lay facing him, smiling, and he put his arm round her and looked into her face with a slightly puzzled expression.

‘I bet not many people would just say, “OK, let’s go to Africa,” like that, straight away.’

She looked seriously into his eyes. ‘I can’t bear to see you so unhappy. I want us to be happy and I want to be with you. It’ll be an adventure.’

Putting her hands each side of his face, she kissed his lips. She saw him close his eyes, felt his hands begin to move over her breasts, and she pressed close to him, hearing his happy sigh of desire.

‘I want to see you,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long.’ She knelt up and he lifted her nightdress over her head, exposing her rounded body, full hips and breasts, hair curling down over her shoulders.

They made love that night in a way that they hadn’t in such a long time. As they lay together afterwards, warm and close, Martin kissed her and murmured, ‘What a woman you are.’

A few days later, Edie experienced another of those moments which threw her so badly off balance that for a few seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say.

David waited, across the table from her. Between them lay a dish containing the golden remains of a bread and butter pudding.

‘Well, yes, of course you have – somewhere,’ she managed, after a moment.

‘Where is it?’ He watched her in his intense way. ‘Can I see it?’

Edie could feel Frances’s eyes on her. She took a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Davey—’

‘Oh, please don’t keep calling me that!’

‘David. Sorry, love . . .’ Edie spoke as lightly as she could. ‘Of course I’ve got your birth certificate somewhere. But what with moving here from Stirchley, and the war, I’m not sure I could lay my hand on it . . .’

Edie felt as if someone had their hand squeezed round her heart. A blush seeped up hot through her cheeks. God in heaven, he must know she was lying! How could anyone mislay their only child’s birth certificate? She forced herself to smile.

‘I’ll have a look through my things, see if I can find it.’

‘OK.’ David scraped up his last mouthful of pudding and pushed his chair back. ‘Thanks, Frances, that was lovely. And I will come and dry up. Just want to get my last bit of maths finished.’

‘That’s all right,’ Frances said. ‘Don’t rush it. The drying up will wait.’

The two women watched him go. David had grown into what Frances called the ‘in between stage’, tall and thin, when the body’s growth seems to have temporarily outpaced its ability to coordinate itself. His eyes were still large and dark brown, the most attractive feature of his face, which had otherwise long lost its boyish chubbiness for the more chiselled outline of adolescence. He was a lovely-looking boy, Edie thought, and would be a handsome man. He was a rumpled-looking character, never quite tidy, the sleeves of his jumpers seldom properly turned back, shirt often hanging out and shoes scuffed. He was always far too wrapped up in passionate interest in what he was doing or reading to bother with appearance. The door closed and they heard him running upstairs, two at a time.

Edie laid her hand over her heart.

‘It shouldn’t be such a shock, should it? Him asking me things. I know I’ve got to tell him some time. It’s just the longer I leave it the harder it gets.’

It was a conversation the two women had had many times during David’s upbringing. Edie had always said that she would know when it was the right time to tell him, but now it had become a block in her mind. So far as anyone else knew, she was bringing up a boy she’d adopted. People didn’t tend to ask how it had come about and soon it was simply taken for granted that she had a son. The thought of David finding out that he was not her child sent her into a most terrible panic. He had begun to grow away from her in so many little ways: his studiousness, the way he had swept effortlessly into the grammar school and was learning French, Latin, German, his interests in engineering and mathematics, clever books he read, the way he didn’t want to be babied with the name Davey any more. If she told him the truth, he might be angry, and reject her. Her boy, in whom she’d placed all her hopes and who was the focus of all her love. He was still her little Davey in her mind. What would she do without him?

‘I expect his birthday coming up made him think of it,’ Frances said, getting stiffly up from the table. Edie immediately got up to help. Frances’s beautiful thick hair had turned almost pure white, with only a few streaks of silver in it, and she still wore it pinned up in a soft, attractive style. She was still beautiful, though she walked now with a slight stoop.

‘Let me do it,’ Edie said. ‘You sit down.’ Frances reluctantly agreed.

‘It just all comes over me sometimes,’ Edie said, stacking the plates. ‘I know I’ve been a mother to him, and I love every bone in his body. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? I’m the only mother he remembers. But I hardly know the first thing about him. I can’t see things does and say, “Ah well, he’s like his grandfather or his uncle . . .” Because he’s not part of the bloodline. And here I am telling him it’s his fifteenth birthday tomorrow, and I don’t know exactly when he was born or how old he is . . .’

Frances watched her face. Though her body was ageing now she was in her seventies, her mind was as lively as ever. She had been a friend, protector and substitute mother for Edie and the two women had long enjoyed a deep trust and comfortable understanding with each another.

‘I know it’s hard, dear.’ She passed Edie a dish across the table. ‘It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But the time is coming for him to know the truth, isn’t it?’

The first occasion when this happened had shaken Edie up a good deal more, partly because it was the first time and also because of the intimate nature of his question. It was when David was eleven, only a week after he had started at the grammar school.

He came home that night, proud in his new uniform. Frances said he had been unusually quiet. When Edie got in from work she went to find him. Putting her head round the bedroom door, she saw him bent over the table in his bedroom doing his homework.

‘Hello, love. Have a nice time at school?’

‘Umm.’

‘What did you do today?’

‘Lessons, of course.’ He didn’t even look round and there was a savage edge to his tone which was completely unlike him. Edie stood, hurt and uncertain, the edge of the door held against her cheek. She thought about telling him off, but she sensed he had not meant to be rude.

‘We’ll have a natter when you’ve finished.’ And she went downstairs.

He was almost silent through tea. It was only when he was in bed that she got to the bottom of it. It was always the time he was at his softest. He was the big man in the day when he was with his friends: at night he was still the little boy who wanted a cuddle.

She found him lying with his face turned away from her, curly hair, recently shorn to go to the new school, dark against the white pillowcase.

‘Night, night,’ she said.

There was no reply.

‘Can’t you find a kiss for me, Davey? Is summat wrong?’

Eventually he rolled over, frowning and she sat on the bed.

‘What is it, love?’

He still couldn’t get the words out. He tried to blink away his tears.

‘Has someone been nasty to you at school?’

‘No – not really nasty,’ he managed to say. ‘It was just – after rugby . . .’

The story jerked out of him. In the showers, one of the other boys had noticed something about him, something he’d never known about himself, started pointing . . .

‘My – you know . . .’ He waved his hand over the lower part of his body. ‘My
thing
. . . Is different from everybody else’s.’

Edie’s mind raced. Was Davey different? Blushing at the nature of the conversation, she thought quickly back to any other man’s willy she’d ever seen. Not many, when you came down to it. Her father’s – never. Rodney, whose napkins she’d often changed and bathed him, and Jack . . .

‘They said I’d been circumscribed – or something like that.’

Circumcised! It dawned on her. Yes – of course, he
was
, though she’d never given it much thought before, just taken it that that was the way he was. Weren’t lots of men circumcised?

‘Then they saw that two of the other boys were the same and one of them, Dan, said it’s because he’s Jewish. Does that mean I’m Jewish as well?’

Edie felt herself floundering. She was gripped by terrible panic.
I don’t know. I don’t know who you are or why they did this to you
. . . What should she know about boys being circumcised? Rodney hadn’t been done, that was all she was sure about.

‘No! No, of course it doesn’t!’ She tried to laugh, taking his hand. ‘You said there was another boy as well – what did he say?’

‘He didn’t. He didn’t seem to know. Why am I? Why were they laughing at me?’

‘Well, sometimes the doctors just think it’s the right thing, when you’re born . . .’

‘But did you ask them to do it?’

His gaze seemed to burn into her. She withered inside. Oh heavens, more lies. What could she tell him?

‘No, but they thought it was the right thing,’ she said firmly. ‘It really doesn’t matter, love. You’re not the only one, are you? Now you mustn’t let them upset you. If they say anything, you just say, well, that’s the way I am, eh? They’ll soon forget about it.’

He was still frowning. ‘Circumcised,’ he said slowly.

‘Look, sweetheart, it’s nothing.’ She kissed him goodnight, babying him. ‘You go to bye-byes now. It won’t seem so bad in the morning.’

The next evening after work she went home and asked Frances if she could borrow Janet’s old boneshaker of a bike to cycle into town. Gripping the handlebars and trying to get used to the wonky brakes, she toiled through the backstreets in the dying evening, the air full of smoke from the chimneys. She reached Highgate, the streets a hotch-potch of terraces and cramped back-to back houses around communal courts. The streets were alive with children playing out before bed and she had to brake hard as a metal hoop, pursued by a young girl, came flying out into the road right in front of her.

‘Watch it!’ she shouted, screeching to a halt, her heart thudding.

‘Watch it yerself, missis!’ The girl shouted smartly, disappearing down an entry on the other side.

Another street away and she reached the place where Martin had his surgery. She knew he often worked late, and hoped he’d still be there, though he and Janet lived further out in a little house in King’s Heath, a more suburban area. Martin had chosen to go into general practice in a poorer district.

As Edie leaned her bike against the wall of the large terraced house, she saw through the blind that there was a light on in his consulting room at the front. A wizened rose bush splayed against the wall by the front door, and just above it were two plaques displaying the names which shared the practice: Doctors M. A. Ferris and J. R. Weller.

Dr Weller, a pale, but kindly looking man about Martin’s age, answered the door and Edie was shown into Martin’s room. As she entered he looked up from the shadow behind a pool of light thrown on to the papers in front of him by the desklamp. For a moment as he looked up, she saw in his face an unguarded moment of sadness, of enormous weariness, as if to say, ‘What now?’ But seeing who she was, he immediately got up, face lightening into a smile.

‘Hello there, Edie! This is a nice surprise. Thanks, Jonathan.’ The other doctor went out, closing the door, and Martin offered Edie a chair. ‘Come and sit down. Let me put the light on so we can at least see each other.’