Down the Garden Path (3 page)

And it must be admitted there were some advantages to his clerical allure. Our larder was always “proper bursting” at the seams with gifts of appreciation. Pork pies, crabapple and quince jellies, green tomato chutney, gingerbread, and brandied peaches were handed through the kitchen door into a very uppish Fergy’s often floury and always ungrateful hands. What did some people think she was doing draped over the cooker all morning, drying her hair? Her lack of appreciation may have been the reason some of the offerings were left in wicker baskets, covered with tea towels, small notes attached, on the back doorstep. Which brings us, very clearly I must say, right back to how I was Begot—for it was in a wicker basket that I was discovered on the vicarage doorstep. Only in my case the note was pinned to a white hand-knitted blanket.

Such were my origins. Heaven only knew where or what I had come from! Of course Mum had told me the story from the time I was very small and I had never tired of her relating how she had come out for the milk and found me, and how she had rocked me all that day, scared that someone would come and take me away. I loved to tell the story myself until one of the girls at school screwed up her face and stuck out her tongue, jeering, “Why, that’s even more stupider than the stork in Wellington boots fib. You need to buy your mummy a book on where babies really do come from.”

That incident occurred shortly before Mum died. She was ill at the time but I remember lying on her bed, feeling her thin arms around me, and her telling me that not only did she and my father love me, but that the woman who had given birth to me had also loved me. “She had her reasons for bringing you to us,” Mum said. “Sometimes when I am half asleep I almost remember: I see this face—we’re sitting side by side talking like friends. Nice, nice face, but then it’s gone, I’m looking out a window and it’s raining—all dark and blurry.” I stayed with Mum for a long time after she fell asleep. The wind was gusting outside, battering against the grey stone walls of the house, but I was always safe and warm wherever she was.

About a month after Mum’s funeral the Tuesday meetings of the Joyful Sounds resumed. With one week of the summer holidays still remaining, I was at home, not only unhappy but bored. My dog, Slobber, was at the vet’s being treated for some minor ailment and I could not bring myself to play with my other old companion—my doll, Agatha Slouch. Mum had made Agatha for me, and it hurt every time I looked at those crooked embroidered eyebrows and the button nose with four nostrils instead of two.

So there I was sitting cross-legged in the wash house, peering through a crack in the kitchen doorway listening with all my might. Fergy’s conversations were always stimulating, running the gamut from who had to get married that month to who had been caught shoplifting at Boots. The ladies were all seated royally around the cloth-covered kitchen table, and I spotted a newcomer in their midst. A thin woman with a chin like a shoehorn and eyebrows like poor Agatha.

“A right treat this is an’ all, your joining us, Mrs. Stark.” Fergy was pouring tea in a thin golden stream into fluted china cups from the sitting room cabinet. “Hope you an’ yours will have nothing but happiness in Kings Ransome. Not but you won’t find it a proper dead-in-alive-hole if ever there was one. Nothing happens here. Never has. Excepting for the business of our Tessa. You’ll have heard about that, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Stark opened her mouth but Fergy rode right on. “Talk about give a woman a fit! There she was right next to the milk bottles, not more’n four or five days old, doctor reckoned. The prettiest baby I’ve ever laid me eyes on. Dressed up like for a christening, she was.”

Fergy poured a cup for herself, stirred in three lumps of sugar, and blew on it. “Bless me, if I didn’t die of shock! Not what the doctor orders for a woman with my weak heart, let me tell you! I couldn’t as much as lift a feather duster all day. As for the Missus, she was carrying on like it was the virgin birth. Doctor had told her, you see, after she had her ‘overalls’ took away, that she was finished as far as all that was concerned. “

Mrs. Stark was trying to arrange her spoon in her saucer so it wouldn’t fall off with an uncouth clatter. “Turned out all right, has she? Never stops being grateful like, I suppose, for being tooken in and given a good ‘ome.”

“Not on your life!” Fergy gave a royal snort. “Proper little madam she is; as a rule, that is, a bit off form at the moment what with the Missus being taken. But if she don’t grow up to rob Buckingham Palace, I don’t know knickers from a fur coat. Like to see a photo of her, would you, Mrs. Stark? Can’t fetch her down to meet you—the rules is against children at the meetings, but won’t take me a sec to tootle up and fetch one of the snapshots off me dressing table.”

At the closing of the kitchen door a heavy silence settled on the room for exactly three seconds. “What I says”—this from Mrs. Baker, the bank manager’s char, wearing the red satin toque—”and I don’t care who ‘ears me—it’s all right, she’ll be ‘alfway up the stairs by now—if I’d bin Vicar nor ‘is Missus I’d ‘ave been a mite more cautious about taking something off the street like that! Why, you all know me, I won’t buy floor polish door to door. And as for a mongrel pup off market—you couldn’t pay me! When I got my Corgi I forked out four quid, would ‘ave bin ten but for ‘im only ‘aving one ear, but I got papers. That way I knew what I was bloody well getting.”

“ ‘Course you did.” Mrs. Salmon, a woman with four chins and a face as red and scaley as her name, nodded. “Stands to reason, don’t it?”

“Correct me if I should haippan to be wrong,” wheezed posh Mrs. Smythe. (Her husband’s name was Smith.) “But from what I haive overheard by way of the grapevine, so to speak, the little girl is worse than plain naughty. There’s something not quite right there, if you asks me. Mentally, I mean! Let Jimmy Edwards’s butterfly out of the jar he was carrying to school, she did. Said she would report him to the RSPCA.”

Mrs. Stark gave an unassuming little cough as she gripped her spoon in both hands. “I know as ‘ow I shouldn’t say nothing, being a new member and Mrs. Ferguson so gracious in ‘er ‘ospitality, but did any of you ladies see that film years ago, called
The Bad Seed”?
Ever so frightenin’ it was. The nicest couple you’d ever wish to meet adopted this pretty little girl and ...”

“Sad, really.” The bank manager’s char had a cautious eye on the door as she spoke. “Her own mother not wanting her and now this one gone. Still, I suppose it ain’t the same really. Couldn’t be. As I always says, if you don’t suffer to ‘ave the little blighters you can’t love ‘em.”

“Oh, how true.” Mrs. Smythe nodded as the kitchen door creaked open and Fergy came in with her snapshot.

Hands clasping her ample middle, Fergy watched complacently as the photo made its round of the table to “Oohs” and “In’t she lovely—should be on telly or in one of them Pears’ adverts.”

“Well, I never,” said Mrs. Stark. “What my Bill wouldn’t give for some of that ‘air. Sort of like an ‘alo, in’t it?”

“A halo? On our Tessa? That’ll be the day!” Fergy took the frame back and wiped the glass with her apron. “Worse than a gnat bite she is—enough to drive you right up the wall. Still, between you, me, and my dead Uncle Harry, I always says the goody-goodies either need their tonsils out or a good dose of salts.”

* * * *

My conviction that Fergy would be a lot better pleased if I grew up to be a striptease dancer than a doctor or Member of Parliament could not take the sting out of the other women’s comments. At several points I had been tempted to get up off the cold stone floor of the wash house and rush into the kitchen to beat them up. But wouldn’t that only prove to them how wicked I was? A bad seed. I stayed put and thought about my mother. Not Mum, but the woman who had brought me into this horrible, critical world. Why had she given me away? It could not be because she had not liked me, surely—because Fergy had said I was a pretty baby. And if my wicked tendencies came from my biological mother, she could not be expected to object to them.

Any thoughts I gave to my birth father at that time were fleeting. The male role in reproduction was still what Fergy termed “mercifully vague,” so to me this man—whoever he might be—was very much a bit player in the drama of my existence. Later I dabbled with him a bit—tacked on a black moustache and a French accent, or rendered him a hopeless invalid—to suit whatever story I was weaving about my mother. But he was never real to me because, I think, Dad was real. I could touch Dad. I could hold on to him. He would climb a ladder, even though he was afraid of heights, when my budgie flew out the window and the other birds pecked at it from the top branches of the copper beech.

Dad was working on his sermon when I crept out of the wash house that afternoon. The study was my favourite room in the house; untidy, rather dark on account of the narrow latticed windows, but friendly. Right for talks. And we had a special talk that afternoon. I sat on the footstool in front of the fire and he told me how much he and Mum had wanted a child. “Tessa, when you send a present, does the mode of transportation matter? Does it matter if the postman drives up in a van, comes pedalling along on a bicycle, or walks?”

“No.”

He reached out and touched my hair. “So, should it matter what mode of transportation God uses to deliver his children, as long as he gets the names and addresses right? Those women in the kitchen—you should feel sorry for them, Tessa.”

“Sorry?”

“Think how small the world is to people who pass through life sticking labels on others. Think how many special, interesting people they miss knowing. As blind as me without my specs—they never see all the miracles big and small that happen every day. Miracles!” He gave a wistful chuckle. “You were your mother’s miracle, and mine—although, coming as you did on the twenty-seventh of December, Mum liked to call you a Christmas box from my employer.” He took off his glasses and polished them, his grey cardigan buttoned wrong as always. “What a day that was—soft and hazy. No frost in the air. We’d had an unusually mild winter and there were still a couple of roses blooming on that bush near the back door.”

“Tell me again about Mum ... asking you to have the church bells rung.”

He kept polishing the glasses. “You remember old Greenwood, Tess. He came on a bit uppish at doing overtime—all bluster, mind, he would have slept with his bells if he could. Mum wanted them rung for two reasons—to express our joy and to let whoever had left you know you were safe. We were certain she was somewhere close by, waiting. That little hot water bottle in the blanket was still quite warm, so we knew you could only have been left minutes before Mum went out for the milk.”

“But Greenwood did ring the bells, didn’t he?”

“Indeed he did. Kept them ringing until half the county started telephoning to ask if a war was beginning or ending.” Dad put his glasses back on. “What a day! Your mother glowing. Fergy ‘coming over queer.’ The doctor arriving and sending me off to boil water—for tea! No one who hasn’t been through the disappointment of being turned down by one adoption agency after another can know how Mum and I felt. We’d married latish, as you know, and her health not being tiptop, we’d been told our prospect of becoming parents was practically nil. I had almost resigned myself, but not Mum. She told me that she found herself talking to strangers in shops, in queues, on buses about her longing for a child. She never gave up. She kept right on praying for that miracle.”

Unable to speak, I moved off my stool and curled up against Dad’s knees.

“The best thing that ever happened to us; that’s you, Tessa.” Dad stroked my hair. “Our only concern at first was that we might not be allowed to keep you. But that note pinned to your blanket won the day for us in court. Remember what it said, Tessa?”

“Tell me again.”

“ ‘Dear Reverend and Mrs. Fields. This is your daughter, Tessa. I want none but you to have her.’ You were a gift from a loving woman. Don’t let anyone ever make you think otherwise.”

I knew Dad was right. But questions remained. Questions that I did not ask him because he could not have the answers, and even to raise them would have seemed disloyal. He had enough to bear without me adding to his problems. I smiled and kissed him, telling him I was fine, but I went up the narrow, rather dark staircase dragging my feet.

If my mother was such a loving, good woman, why had she parted with me? Poverty? Fergy said no one was poor anymore, but I supposed it was possible. Or could my mother have been weeks away from death—the victim of a rare disease? No. I didn’t like that idea. Don’t even think about death: I
had
to be able to find her. I wanted her healthy, and rich, and beautiful.
That
would be something for the Joyful Sounds to choke on. What if... what if Russian spies had been after her and, terrified they would get her baby, too, she had done the only thing a noble, wonderful mother could do—sought sanctuary for me at the church? Our history class had read about people doing that. Of course, the vicarage doorstep wasn’t the church proper. But I liked the idea. Mum would have liked it, too. She was always reading what she called cloak-and-dagger books.

The idea of becoming a sort of detective in my own interest took hold of me that late afternoon. I see now that my motives were mixed, that I had both the desire to discover where I came from, and a need to do something that would keep my mind off the emptiness in the house. I went over to the window seat in my bedroom and picked up the basket that had been my first cradle, and which was now occupied by Agatha Slouch.

Sitting her down on the window seat I turned the basket upside down in the hope of finding some previously missed clue. A name cleverly woven into the wicker perhaps. Nothing. But I was not done yet. Down the hall I went to Mum’s room (Dad now slept in the box room) and opened up the top drawer of her dressing table. Carefully lifting out a pile of blouses I held them against my face for a moment before putting them down and picking up the note which I knew was underneath. Dad had repeated its message accurately, and indeed I already knew it by heart.