Shadow Baby

SHADOW BABY

‘Compelling … Forster’s complex and moving narrative mirrors our

knowledge of the tangle behind that generalized notion, “family

feeling’” - Melissa Benn in the New Statesman

‘The cumulative tension she winds up is extraordinary … Evie and

Leah’s strange story reads like one of Dickens’s darker narratives

rewritten by a woman of sense instead of a man of sentiment’

- Patrick Gale in the Daily Telegraph

‘Undeniably gripping … the way Forster demonstrates the way a single

act can spawn many fatal consequences is both moving and impressive’

- Leo Colston in Time Out

‘Forster mixes calm historical detail with powerful emotional drama’

- Sally Emerson in The Times

‘Gripping … she lights a crackling firework of emotions, skilfully interweaving the historical with the modern’

- Anna-Katharina Peitz in the Yorkshire Post

‘There is nothing fantastic or implausible about this novel. It is firmly

rooted in ordinary human experience: the things that people do to each

other and the festering - often secret - suffering which can result …

Forster at her finest’ - Susan Elkin in the Literary Review

‘Margaret Forster has the knack of choosing cracking good subjects for her fiction’ - Caroline Moore in the Sunday Telegraph

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1938. Educated at the County High School, she won an open scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read history. Her many novels include Georgy Girl, The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury, Private Papers, Mother Can You Hear Me?, Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady’s Maid, The Battle for Christabel, Mothers’ Boys and Shadow Baby, all of which are published by Penguin. Margaret Forster has written numerous works of nonfiction, including a biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie, entitled The Rash Adventurer, a highly praised ‘autobiography’ of Thackeray, published in 1978; Significant Sisters (1986), which traces the lives and careers of eight pioneering women; a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Award for

1988 under the Heinemann bequest; a selection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry; her critically acclaimed biography Daphne du Maurier, which was awarded the 1994 Fawcett Book Prize; Hidden Lives, a family memoir, which was nominated nine times in 1995 as Book of the Year and is also published by Penguin, and, most recently, Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin.

Margaret Forster lives in London and the Lake District. She is married to writer and broadcaster Hunter Davies and they have three children.

SHADOW BABY

Margaret Forster

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Putnam Inc , 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 1(H)14, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published by Chatto & Windus 19%

Published in Penguin Books 1997

10

Copyright Š Margaret Forster, 1996 All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

MY SISTER-IN-LAW

MARION 1939-1995

LEAH STOOD still. The stairs were narrow and steep, the whole flight, fourteen steps in all, quite straight. The light was not on in the vestibule, nor in the parlour opening off it to the right, but there was a dim glow seeping from under the door to the kitchen at the end of the passage Without that one feeble band of light there would have been no shadow to torment her. It was five o’clock on a dark and wet December afternoon. All was black in the street outside. The street lamp was broken, destroyed by boys throwing stones, and was now without glass except for some shards still clinging to the casing.

She couldn’t rmne until the shadow moved, and it was quite frighteningly motionless. It was so familiar, the outline, hardly a shadow at all. There was nothing blank or flat about it, nothing insubstantial. Solid, it was to Leah, solid, hard, especially the head, like a lump of iron behind the glass of the door. Over and over again she had told herself to change that front door, to have the two glass panels removed and replaced with wood. Then there could never be any shadow But a greater fear always stopped her. If there were no shadow, there would be reality to face. She might be caught unawares, she might answer a knock some innocent-feeling afternoon, and be confronted. In daylight, of course, she could always see more, though the glass was not plain. It was tinted green, pretty glass, with a pink rose engraved at the bottom of each panel. But it allowed a good deal of vision, especially on a sunny day. It gave her warning of who was there and she could not bear to do without this.

The shadow moved, the knocker rang out, the brass ring lifted and lowered three times, as always. She was so regular, the shadow. Twice more she did it, always three slow, deliberate knocks. Then

she would go, the ritual complete. Leah went on standing there, clutching the handrail, waiting. She never moved first, never left her position. She could have gone into her bedroom and closed the door and the curtains. But she never did, she had to bear witness: it was her duty, part of her punishment. There. It was gone. Nothing at all to be seen now, except the door itself, wood and glass, harmless once more. Sometimes she had visions of the door being broken down, of her visitor becoming so demented, so incensed with grief or anger that she smashed the glass and thrust her strong hand through to open it. She imagined violence all the time but the shadow was never violent. Henry had always said she had the wrong idea, that she had nothing to fear in that respect, but she had never believed him. He was a man, he did not understand. All the time, all these years, she had asked herself what she would want if she had been the shadow and she had no doubt of her answer. Henry said if only she would agree to a meeting … but the idea threw her into paroxysms of terror. Let Henry meet her (as indeed he had done).

How tired she felt, an awful exhaustion quite different from any other she had ever experienced. She could hardly get herself into the bedroom, even the act of levering herself on to the bed, sitting first, swinging her legs up afterwards but failing, having to lift each one on to the slippery blue eiderdown, was almost beyond her. She did not expect to sleep. Nobody as guilty as she knew herself to be could ever sleep after such visitations. Sleep would come later and the bliss now, as she lay aching inside and out, was to know that. Soon, she would fall into such a deep sleep it was as if she entered another state of being altogether. Often, she wondered if this kind of sleep was akin to death, a sleep quite dreamless, slipped into with such unconcern, without struggle. She could always feel it about to happen, and she would feel herself smile as she went eagerly over and into the welcoming oblivion. Even waking, a long satisfying time later, was pleasant. She felt calm and sensible. She was thoroughly refreshed, restored by this sleep of relief.

She ordered herself to be still, to let time pass, to endure the fear and misery with fortitude. This was always how it was and how it would be until one of them died.

It would have been the perfect crime except no crime was committed. Hazel knew she had done wrong but she had learned to

live with this awkward knowledge quite quickly. It always seemed to her when she looked back, though this was something she tried (rather successfully) not to do, that her mother had conspired to make her feel she had done no wrong except to herself. And yet she had tried, always, to be honest and to make no excuses. ‘It was my fault,’ she had said, without weeping, though not entirely dry-eyed, ‘it was my fault, not his, don’t blame him, please.’ But she had no need to beg that he should not be accused in any way. Her mother didn’t even want to know his name. From the very beginning, after her confession, her mother had made it plain that only one thing was vital: absolute secrecy. She and her mother would share this secret. Nobody else. Certainly not her father or her two brothers and never, never, the man in question. All would be well if this was kept absolutely secret. It could be managed, and, eventually, obliterated.

Managed it was. Her mother excelled at such management. Hazel felt herself so soothed by her mother’s efficiency that she was in danger for a while of thinking she had done something of which to be proud rather than ashamed. What she remembered most vividly from that time was not the moment of confession but the moment of realisation which came much later, the day when it had finally penetrated her consciousness, that what lay ahead was going to be painful and distressing. Her mother had gone. She had brought her to this bleak place and now she had gone, leaving her in the care of people she did not know but who, she was told, were ‘utterly dependable’. Two women, quite elderly. One had been a nurse, one a teacher. How her mother had found this couple Hazel never knew. They were part of what her mother called ‘a network of women who help other women’. Once, when Hazel had asked if these two women were paid for looking after her those five months, her mother had laughed in astonishment and said of course they were paid, why else would they have done it, how else could they have been trusted? Confused, as she often was by her mother’s strange logic, Hazel had said nothing more but it had upset her, this late evidence that the care of her had amounted to a job, a financial transaction.

The pretence was that she was learning Norwegian. ‘Norwegian?’ her father had exclaimed. ‘Good God, why on earth does the girl want to learn Norwegian, nobody wants to learn that language, why on earth would they?’ Her mother had thought it all out, her thoughts so complicated and devious they had the peculiarity of apparent truth. Hazel had always been ‘fascinated by the Vikings’,

had she not? From a tiny child, loved tales about them. And she loved snow and ice. She never wanted to go to Mediterranean countries, did she, always begging to go to Scandinavia, so extraordinary. And now she wanted to go to university and read the Norse languages, so what better than actually to go and live in Norway and learn the language, or try to, for a few months? Her father had been exasperated but he had been amused too. ‘This is my daughter Hazel,’ he said to people when he introduced her, ‘going to live in Norway to learn their ridiculous language, can you believe it?’ Mostly people couldn’t. Hazel grew tired of their bewilderment, even sometimes their irritation, and could hardly tell them she shared it. Why not France? Why not Italy? she had asked her mother. Why not Spain? ‘Catholic countries, darling,’ her mother said, ‘don’t you see?’ Hazel hadn’t done, not really. It was not as though she were seeking an abortion, so why did it matter whether the country she was hiding in was Catholic? Her mother said, ‘Think,’ and she did, she thought and thought and still it didn’t make sense.

Perhaps the whole success of her mother’s plan had depended on its bizarre nature. Told that Hazel was going to Bergen in Norway for a few months to learn Norwegian, people had queried only the oddity of her choice. Nobody had thought there could be any other reason for a seventeen-year-old girl to spend half a year in Norway. Even afterwards, when she didn’t go to university to study Norwegian, or any other Norse language, but went to read law, nobody had been suspicious. ‘Glad you came to your senses,’ her father (a lawyer) had said. It only seemed to prove, somehow, how genuine the Norwegian episode had been. The two women in whose house she had stayed had died soon after she returned, one of a heart attack, the other five years later of Alzheimer’s disease Her mother had been quite triumphant: no one would now remember Hazel or her sojourn there. As if it mattered

And yet somehow it did matter, especially to her mother. She wanted the whole ‘episode’, as she referred to it, to have been wiped out. The deaths of the two women were important. Only they had known Hazel’s name, though even there Mrs Walmsley had covered her tracks. The women never saw Hazel’s passport They believed her ‘real’ name was Geraldine White. Her mother relished all these complicated subterfuges, she made the whole ‘episode’ seem like a game. But she was not there when the playing got rough. She never

saw me, Hazel used to reflect, when it came to the end, how battered I was, how suddenly wretched and despairing and guilty. By the time her mother had come to collect her, she knew she had looked much as she usually looked only paler (that Norwegian winter) and fatter (that Norwegian food). ‘All right, darling?’ her mother had asked, admittedly anxious for once, and ‘Fine,’ she had said, ‘fine, thank you, Mummy.’