Living In Perhaps

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Authors: Julia Widdows

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LIVING IN PERHAPS

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rbooks
.co.uk

LIVING IN PERHAPS

Julia Widdows

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ISBN 9781407040974

Version 1.0

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TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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A Random House Group Company
www.rbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain
in 2009 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Julia Widdows 2009

Julia Widdows has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781407040974

Version 1.0

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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

For my parents,
who knew the value of education

1
Names

Cora Eileen. Such an ugly name.

I can't believe it's mine.

I couldn't believe it was me they were talking about when they
read that out in court. I wanted to shout
There's been a mistake!
Maybe I did make some kind of noise. I certainly heard a ringing
in my ears. But perhaps that was just the shock.

You see, I'd always thought I was Carol Ann.

Cora Eileen. My real name, my true name.

The name my mother gave me.

I'm adopted. I didn't know that until I was sixteen. I never
dreamed it. Of course, I
did
dream, like any kid, that underneath
this too, too ordinary exterior I was really a foreign princess; that
my parents, fleeing execution at the hands of the mob, had
entrusted me as a baby to this simple childless couple, and that –
one day – all would be revealed and I'd come into my rightful
inheritance. Castles, and white horses, and more money than
could easily be spent. But I reckon that's par for the course when
you're nine years old and you've already downed too many fairy
tales.

I've got a younger brother, Brian. I never dreamed
he
was
adopted. He was much too boring to be anything but theirs.

They never told me I'd been adopted when I was growing up.
It wasn't
the done thing
, then, to let your little ones in on the
family secrets. I always thought we were flesh of their flesh. My
mother sprang it on me when I was much older. Saved it up as a
present for my sixteenth birthday. But she never told me what my
real name was. Maybe even
she
thought that would be a bit much.

It's so important, what you're called. It colours everything.
'Name, please?' some complete stranger asks, and you have to
own up. School is the worst place. They call your name out, they
tick it off in registers, they make you write it on all your books,
and it's there, sewn into every bit of uniform, for anyone to find.
And if you've got a stupid name or one that sounds like a rude
word, everybody hears it, and the smirking, snickering rumour of
it runs round like wildfire. Higginbottom. Sucksmith. Lipshitz.
There's no escape. I don't know how the parents let it happen.
Why don't they change it by deed poll, swap it for something less
visible? I can see that people might feel strongly about
the family
name
. But who needs to hang on to a family heirloom, a great
tradition, like Raper or Boggs?

I was Carol Burton. It was all right. It could have been better,
but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. At my school, it was a
mid-range sort of name. It wasn't as classy as Suzannah Grey or
Natasha Maynard. But it wasn't nearly as bad as Suki Wooster.
S
ooo
ki W
ooo
ster. Or Mildred Clark, which made you think of a
hundred-year-old charwoman.

But Carol Ann Burton – I wonder why my parents didn't get
round to making it official? Why they left me on the record as
Cora Eileen? I know they're the sort of people who aren't
confident with paperwork, who don't like to
bother
anyone
official, but even so. What did they think would happen? That I'd
sail unruffled through life and never find out?

It's quite clever, really. Coraeileen, Carolann. Slurring the
names together, letting them slip into something else. I guess they
wanted to change it, yet they didn't want to stray too far from
what I'd been used to.

I've done that. I've slurred my name, let the sounds slide
together: Carol-Ann, Carolann, Carolyn. Because Carolyn is a
much prettier name. Someone called Carolyn would be dainty
and attractive. Her pure white kneesocks would always stay up.
She'd have a pretty young mother who shared her tastes, who'd
pay for her to go to ballet classes and drive her there in a pale-blue
sports car. A Carolyn would have a feminine sort of bedroom,
with billowing curtains and a princess-and-the-pea bed. And
she'd have loads of friends, other pretty girls with shiny hair
and nice manners and gracious homes.

Sometimes with new people I tried to let them think my name
was Carolyn. Not Carol Ann. And now I find out it's really Cora
Eileen.

Brian got to stay Brian. He didn't have an alias.

Every week at home I used to read the obituaries in the local
paper, searching for someone who had died of something
interesting, or spectacularly young. I began to notice that often the
older ones had mysterious pseudonyms in brackets. You'd see
'Ayling, Ronald Arthur (Pip), in his eighty-third year, beloved
husband of ...' or 'Pope, Doris, née Mottram (Kitty), aged seventy-six,
widow of ...' And further in, after all the grieving relatives have
had a mention and the name of the cats' home, donations in memory
of to be sent to, it would say: 'Further enquiries to J & S Brewer,
Fnrl Drs, High Street.' And sometimes I'd be tempted to make
further enquiries, to telephone J & S Brewer, Fnrl Drs, and ask them
if they knew why the late Ronald Arthur Ayling was known to his
friends as Pip, or why Kitty Pope, Kitty Mottram as was, forsook the
name of Doris. I have always been curious. I have an absolute thirst
for knowledge. It's the only thing worth having.

My dad's first name was William – letters always came
addressed to Mr W. Burton – but everyone called him Ted. I never
knew why, and it wasn't the sort of family where you could
casually ask. They were great at let's pretend. Let's pretend that
what you see is what you get.

We weren't adopted from birth. I would have been five, and
Brian four, when they got us from the children's home. I imagine
it was always hard to shift brothers and sisters. Who'd want a
ready-made family, when what you truly wanted was a family
you'd made yourself ? And I'm talking about the days when perfect
white babies could be got at birth, if you were a hungry adoptive
couple, with faulty tubes or faulty sperm, with a marriage
certificate and your own house, preferably church-goers, within a
certain age bracket. Babies were yours for the picking, like fruit off
a tree. Nobody much wanted older kids, or black babies, or
children with handicaps. And since they could get a flawless white
baby with no bad habits, why should they?

It was 1960, the year they picked us. As adoptive parents,
perhaps they were a bit too old, or a bit too poor, or perhaps they
didn't have the right people to give them references. They
certainly were on the old side, so maybe they wanted their instant
family straight away. Or maybe we were a bargain. Buy one, get
one free. They could have dug in their heels, hung on for a
tabula
rasa
, a little unetched baby with a windy smile. But how long
would that take? So we were what they got: one of each, slightly
worn, five and four.

I don't remember any of this. All I know is what I've been told.
Like being given the corners of a jigsaw puzzle and being expected
to fill in the rest by yourself. Or, more likely, leave it at that: be
satisfied with the corners and never mind the picture in the
middle.

And now I find that I didn't even know my own name. My own
name, the one I started out with. If only they had bothered to
change it officially, I would never have had to hear it called out
like that, so incriminatingly, in court.

Think of how it must look, on a report, a lengthy official one,
pages and pages of it, full of the judgements of worthy, highly
qualified people, about the background and character of its
subject. And the subject's name in big black letters at the top:
Cora Eileen Burton. Now, how would that look? Wouldn't you
start to think, straight away, before you'd even read it:
Cora Eileen,
she sounds a hard-faced sort of creature?
She sounds like the type
who'd be guilty. Who dunnit.

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