Mothers and Daughters (28 page)

‘Of course. They’ve been waiting a long time,’ came the reply, and Connie guessed they were waiting
somewhere in the building, ready to collect this unexpected treasure.

‘Can I walk her to them?’ she pleaded.

‘No,’ said the woman, restraining her. ‘There must be no contact for her sake. It only unsettles everyone … Say your goodbyes to baby here and I will take her to her new home.’

‘I must give her something so she knows how much I love her,’ Connie whispered, hardly able to breathe.

‘You have given her the gift of life and opportunity. That is enough.’ The woman lifted up the carrycot again. ‘You can keep this. It’s too warm for baby,’ she said. ‘You have all her other clothes for us,’ handing back the blanket as if to compensate for the bundle in her arms, picking up the baby’s bag. Then they edged through the door.

‘But I love her,’ Connie sobbed, blinded by terror and tears. ‘I can’t do this … I won’t.’

She collapsed into the arms of the chaplain, who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Her face was buried in the blanket, sniffing the sweetness of talcum and baby. She sobbed and sobbed until there were no more tears.

‘Time to go home, Connie.’

She didn’t remember the journey back to Green End. All her friends had left and that night she heard her song on the radio again. ‘The colours of my love I give to you …’ Connie got up, packed her bags and left in the middle of the night, walking towards Leeds
with the tune racing through her head. There was still time. She hadn’t signed those forms yet.

Connie wakes on the bench. Every detail of that afternoon
is scratched into her heart. How can a wrong
thing be done for all the right reasons? Oh, for the
wisdom of hindsight. If only she’d been strong instead
of weak, determined instead of uncertain. If only she’d
waited a little while longer, hung out for her rights. But
that was then, this is now. The young ones have no
idea what her generation went through. The past is a
different country indeed
.

The minute her baby left her that was when she
knew she’d done the wrong thing. All her life she’s
searched for her, in her dreams, in prams outside shops,
in clinics just in case there was a little sandy-haired
baby called Anna with turquoise eyes who was born on
the 25 May 1964
.

Every birthday for years afterwards, she lit a candle,
sent a card for her file, telling her all her news and her
address just in case … but no matter, there was never
any reply or confirmation that her daughter ever
received any information
.

For thirty years it was forbidden for her to make any
approach once she signed those forms. All her rights
were gone at a stroke of the pen. They wore her down.
They wore her down until she signed away her hope,
condemned to ache like this for the rest of her life. It
never went away. It tore you apart, the void at the
centre of her being, that hole in the heart where a little
icon sits behind a burning candle
.

If only she had waited, if only she’d been strong
enough to hold out those six long weeks, things might
have been different. In the small hours of the night she
prayed to her icon that they would be reunited one day.
The blanket was all that was left to remind her, hidden,
waiting. The flame at the heart of her never went out,
not even in the darkest hours. There has to be a kernel
of hope at the heart of things
.

Esme walked through the door to a pile of mail on the floor and the stale smell of an empty house. She’d been away for nearly a month, renting a room in a farmhouse outside Grange-over-Sands for a change of air, but the trip was over and all she had to show for it was a pile of washing. Welcome home! She sighed to herself, staring at the kitchen, as clean as she’d left it. She was getting used to her own company these days.

Since the big falling out in the New Year, Lily and Levi had scarcely crossed her door; the occasional duty visit and polite chitchat about nothing. The business with Connie and Neville had split the family in two, and it hurt. Heaven preserve you from ungrateful children, she sighed again. After all she’d done for this family too.

She’d been the only one to visit Ivy in that awful
place with bars at the window and seen to her comforts when she got back home. Neville’s court case had knocked the stuffing out of his mother and she’d forbidden him to visit.

Not a word of gratitude from any of them. Levi and Neville were expanding their business into the High Street without consulting her. Neville was on probation. He wasn’t speaking to her either.

Only Susan bothered to come round, wheeling little Kim to give Joy a break. The christening had been a churchy affair and not a word from anyone about Connie, for whom Susan had stood proxy as godmother. Did you ever hear such a thing! Standing proxy for someone else who was supposed to be making vows on behalf of the baby. What was wrong with adult baptism when the kiddy was old enough to know its own mind? When she’d told them her view at the buffet lunch in Rene Gregson’s fancy parlour, everyone went silent and turned away.

She was out of the loop, out of range for them to just pop in, and too proud to admit she was lonely and missing the hubbub of her errant children and their offspring. She’d not seen young Arthur for months. She was too proud to admit she might have made a big mistake in taking Ivy’s side in the quarrel.

Last night she’d had such a strange dream. Freddie was standing at the top of the stairs at the Waverley. He was asking for his daughter. One minute it was
him and he sort of merged into Connie, and then they stood side by side, identical. They kept opening and shutting doors, looking for something. She was frozen at the bottom of the stairs, unable to help, wanting to reach out to her dead son but her arms wouldn’t move. Worst of all, he kept glaring down at her as if she’d done something wrong, shaking his head, and she woke up all of a to-do … That look on his face was still there at the back of her eyes when she shut them.

On the train coming home she kept thinking about Connie and if she’d had the baby. Lily would know, and Neville, but no one was saying anything important to her now.

A quiet empty house, a house where nothing was messed up, no chatter but the wireless for company, no one to walk round the garden with sharing the view, this was what she’d returned to. A house without love and life and noise and bustle was a house, not a home. Poor Ivy lived like this in her empty little palace, peering out of the net curtains, her eyes dulled with drugs to help her nerves. Was this death sentence going to be her fate too?

Oh, Redvers, what have I done? Could I have got it all wrong? What do I do now? she sighed, looking at his portrait for inspiration.

Making a cup of tea with the milk left on the doorstep, she ferreted through the post; the usual bills, appointments, a few postcards and then the
unmistakable handwriting of her granddaughter. She tore it open and went in search of her reading specs.

Connie’s scrawl was always difficult to read but the letter was short, neat, almost a child’s writing.

Esme took off her glasses, her heart thumping. It was a sign: first the dream and then the letter. The Lord was giving her a clear indication of His will. Then she noted the postmark. It was a month old already.

Connie didn’t know how she had landed up at the hostel. All she could recall of that terrible night was walking for miles until dawn. She could have gone to Diana’s flat but there was no more energy left inside her to face anyone she knew. So she kept walking. Someone had found her lying in a doorway, her feet bleeding, bought her a cup of tea and a
bacon sandwich and taken her to St George’s Crypt in the middle of the town where the tramps and homeless found beds and food. Everything was a blur of tears and weariness, as if she was sleepwalking through the day searching, searching prams and baby shops, parks and streets, just in case she’d find Anna.

The mission found her a job selling ice cream in a park, handing dripping cones to sticky fingers – babies, children, parents, always searching their faces just in case. Days turned into weeks. Soon the summer holidays would be over and she could turn her mind to study, to filling in forms for a place somewhere, if only she could concentrate. Nothing mattered any more but putting one foot in front of the other.

They found her digs off Clarendon Road, a squalid bedroom in a back-to-back house, but it was all she could afford, and close to the university if she ever got there. People like her didn’t deserve any better. When you break the rules you had to be punished and brought into line, she thought.

She plucked up courage to take a bus to Green End to collect the rest of her things but no one she knew was there any longer, and everything had been sent back to Diana’s address. That’s when she knew she must face reality and go back to Grove Park once more. She looked in the cracked mirror at her reflection. Her hair was cropped into a bubble of curls
after she caught nits, her skin blotchy and pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She wore baggy trousers and a man’s black T-shirt. No one bothered her in the street when she looked such a scruff. Her once-beautiful breasts had shrunk to nothing. She could pass for a boy.

It took all her courage to knock on that door. Diana stood back at the sight of her.

‘Connie! Where have you been? We’ve been searching for you! I thought you’d gone home. Everyone’s so worried. Come in … Look at the state of you!’

She wolfed down her first proper meal for weeks and Diana slid a letter onto the table. ‘This was readdressed here … from Grimbleton.’

‘Does everyone know now?’ she said, not looking up.

‘Only those who knew before … and those you’ve told yourself. Is that from who I think it is?’

Connie nodded and took it into the spare room to read.

Connie froze, chilled to the core by those words. Only last month, faced with the prospect of a homeless future and a tiny baby in tow, she’d gone of her own accord to the welfare office to sign the forms of consent in the sixth week. She had hung out to the bitter end for just such news as this. Now it was too late. She had walked away from her daughter for good, surrendering any hope of them being together. Too late, Gran … Too late …

That night she made her first attempt to end it all.

She woke up in hospital with Diana looking down at her.

‘Oh, Connie … how could you do that to us? It’s not the answer … taking my patients’ pills and swallowing them. I’m ashamed of you. What were you thinking of?’

Connie turned her face to the wall. She wasn’t thinking anything at all. She just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. The pain was too much to bear.

‘I’ve rung your aunt and they’ll be coming for you. I can’t take responsibility for you now … what a
stupid thing to do! There will be other babies, happier times. You just have to put all this behind you. No use moping here. Better to go back to your family and make yourself useful.’

Connie didn’t want to hear any of this. She just wanted to go to sleep. Her throat was raw from the stomach pump. The nurses didn’t look at her with sympathy. What did they know of how she was feeling? Diana was being tough for a reason, but Connie was too tired to listen to a lecture and now the Winstanleys would gang up on her too. Why weren’t they there when she really needed them?

It was Auntie Lee and Uncle Pete who brought her home and deposited her at Gran’s house. Esme was fussing over her as if she was an invalid but no one asked anything about the baby or the adoption. The baby who never came home was a subject no one wanted to address. It was as if none of it had ever happened and now she must get on with her own life as a free agent. She slumped on the sofa and sunk herself into an old woman’s routine.

She had no appetite, couldn’t be bothered to wash or go out much. Who was there to visit? Joy and her baby were the last people she wanted to see. Granny had a line of photos of little Kim on her sideboard, and there was a postcard from Rosa, who was on a ship bound for Australia.

On trips to town she often saw grammar school girls in their gymslips and red blazers, full of confidence
and the giggles. How she envied and resented them. She felt like tapping them on the shoulder to say: ‘Don’t bother with all those textbooks. Go out and enjoy yourselves now. Don’t bother with college, it just delays the journey from one life to another.’

‘Isn’t it about time you washed your hair? It looks a mess,’ Gran nagged, handing her a towel.

Connie didn’t need anyone to tell her she looked a mess, a stick insect.

‘And put something on a little more cheerful. You look as if you’re going to a funeral.’

‘I’ll wear what I want,’ Connie snapped, knowing Esme was right. All she wore was grey or black because she felt dead inside, colourless, drab, a walking ghost, and sometimes the urge to end it all suggested itself again in her mind.
This time do it properly. Go where
no one will find you. Buy a bottle of painkillers and
some gin, anything to relieve the pain in your heart
. It was as if she was walking under a heavy grey cloud that hovered over everything she did.

Walking through Sutter’s Copse with the autumn leaves drifting down on her like confetti, she sobbed. Where was little Anna now? Why had she been so weak and let her go?

Gran shoved platefuls of pies and stews, soup and puddings before Connie, trying to make up for all that had happened but she was too choked to eat anything. Gran prattled on about Freddie, Connie’s dad, as if he was still a little boy. I didn’t know him,
she thought, and he would never know me. I abandoned my baby as he abandoned us.

Perhaps if she went to see the doctor it might help, but then the look on Paul Jerviss’s face when she was in labour froze her resolve. Lily had said he was back at Grimbleton Royal, finishing off his training. How would she cope if she bumped into him in a corridor? She couldn’t face anyone she knew. There must be other places to seek help.

It was Dr Friedmann who suggested she went to a new surgery across town where there were a team of doctors to choose from. He’d heard one of his colleagues there was good with patients with ‘depression’.

‘I’m not mental,’ Connie snapped. ‘I’m just tired. You could give me something to pep me up.’

‘You’ve had enough uppers, young lady. You need help and you know I can’t do it, not since Su and I got together. I’m family now. Dr Blackie is the man for you. He’ll give you time and prescribe, if necessary. He’s got a special interest in the mind and mental health.’

There was no choice but to make an appointment and register as a new patient. She was desperate for an instant cure, but one look at the strange little man sitting behind an enormous desk with half-moon glasses sliding down his nose and she was not so sure.

‘How may I help, young lady?’

‘I’m not sure … Everything’s an effort. I ran away
and came back home in disgrace. I was fed up and took an overdose … an accidental one,’ she lied.

‘Tell me how you’re feeling now,’ he asked.

‘Terrible. Can’t be bothered with anyone or anything.’

‘How do you intend to keep yourself – live off benefit, get a job … or sponge off your family?’ he challenged her. ‘I hear you’re related to Dr Friedmann.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Don’t be so tetchy,’ he shot back. ‘I’m trying to get the full picture.’

‘I don’t want the whole world knowing I’m here,’ she argued.

‘You are very defensive, Miss Winstanley. Why are you so angry?’ He was not ruffled by her outburst.

‘I’m not angry. I’m tired. I don’t want to talk about it any more, thank you. I just need something to buck me up so I can make some decisions.’

‘I can give you something but I do want to know why you are so angry with the world. Who has hurt you, or are you angry with yourself? In my experience, girls who overdose are crying out for help. Help with what?’

She didn’t like his emphasis on girls and being a silly teenager. He was poking and prying into her life and she wasn’t having any of it.

‘I had a boyfriend and he let me down. I thought I was going to college but I’m not fit for anything,’ she offered, hoping to put him off.

‘So now you are sulking?’ He smiled as if he had discovered the key to her sadness.

‘I suppose so. Nothing has gone right this last year and now I’m home, it’s not the same.’

‘I don’t suppose it is, young lady. So why stay around?’

‘I’ve no job, no money and no energy. It’s an effort to get dressed of a morning or eat. I don’t want to face the day, any day.’