Shadow Baby (17 page)

It was autumn when she arrived but even so the first snow fell within three weeks and she was glad. Her mother had not exaggerated Hazel’s passion for snow - she loved it, not for its prettiness but for the way it sealed off noise and dirt. She liked the muffled feeling that came with thick snow, that feeling of being cocooned, of time being suspended. She liked the clothes that had to be worn, the heavy coats and thick scarves and hats and gloves beneath them she felt herself slipping away from exposure and was happy. It suited her particularly well to be garbed like this now that she was pregnant. Nobody, looking at her in her fur overcoat, could tell her condition. In the library it was so hot there was no question of keeping on her outdoor clothes, but she always waited until she was in the bay by the window, which she had made her own spot, before divesting herself of the heavier garments. Even then, she wore

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big sweaters and did not have to resort to the hideous maternity smocks until the last month.

The last month was hard. It was February and the snow lay thick on the ground and there was a bitter wind sweeping in from the sea which meant she could huddle inside her furs and not arouse any comment. But she did not go to the library any more. She did not go out much at all. The two women did not press her, only expressing the opinion that exercise was important and so was fresh air ‘for the sake of the baby’. Hazel was unmoved. She was not interested in doing anything for the sake of this baby. Why should she be? She was not going to keep it. It was her fault that she was having it; she admitted readily to herself that it was her carelessness and greed and ignorance that had led to the baby being conceived at all, but that did not make her care what happened to it. It made her angry to think she had been denied an abortion. The baby was a mistake and should have been treated as a mistake. It should have been wiped out. She blamed her mother for not being able to procure an abortion and herself for not insisting. But she had not even tried to abort herself - no sitting in hot baths, drinking bottles of gin, no hurling herself down flights of stairs, no experimenting with knitting needles. Her obedience had been her undoing and she wished she had rebelled ferociously. The anger grew in her with the baby and every time it heaved and kicked in her stomach she punched it back.

She had been to the hospital where she was to have the baby on three occasions only and otherwise had been seen once a month by a doctor. All kinds of information was offered to her about the condition of the baby and about preparation for the birth, but she absorbed none of it. She listened and nodded but said nothing. The only thing that she wanted to know was when the child would be born, and no one could be precise about that. Her own birthday was on 1 March. Her mother must have told Miss Bogeberg and Miss Ostervold because they had made her a cake, a very nice cake with icing on it and the number 18 picked out in little pink sugar roses. Miss Bogeberg gave her some writing paper and Miss Ostervold some talcum powder, and she was suitably grateful. But she went to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon that day, suspecting her mother would telephone and not wanting to speak to her. She thought she might cry and, hearing her weep, her mother might come, which she did not want. She said she was tired and told the two women to tell

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her mother, if she should ring (which she did) that she would phone her the next day.

She lay in bed on this, her eighteenth birthday, and tried to imagine her mother having her. She knew the details of her own birth but they seemed sparse to her now she was poised to give birth herself. Her mother had always been matter-of-fact: she was born on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon, after a short and easy labour at home, a much welcomed girl after two boys. Her grandmother Rose had come down from the North to see her and pronounced her the image of her dead grandfather. For some reason this had not pleased her mother who, when relating this, always added, ‘Nonsense, of course.’ Never did her mother talk about any emotional feelings to do with motherhood, and Hazel had always been glad, but now it dismayed her to realise she didn’t know how her mother had felt. Nothing had been passed on to her. Her mother had not acted as though she could recall any emotion. In a daze of misery and of apathy she spent her birthday going over what her mother had said when Hazel had confessed she was pregnant. Surely it was shocking, her mother’s apparent lack of shock? Her first words had been, ‘We must be sensible,’ and her second, the instruction to tell nobody. The whole message had been delivered swiftly and coolly: this was a practical problem to be solved in a practical way. The unborn baby was never given any reality beyond being a problem to be solved. And how grateful she had been for such a mother, never once pausing to reflect until now how unlikely such a response was. ‘Your life must not be ruined,’ her mother had said, and she had agreed. Ruin. An illegitimate baby equalled ruin. Oh, she agreed. ‘Times have changed,’ her mother had gone on, ‘even if not enough. Your life doesn’t have to be ruined.’ Quite.

She was given 16 March as the most likely date and at once made a calendar so that she could cross off the days, which she did viciously every night. The first vague pain during the night of 15 March she welcomed eagerly, and when her waters broke she was triumphant, not minding in the least the growing strength of the contractions. Getting rid of the baby was a process she so longed to have completed that she did not fight the pain but went with it, surprising the midwife and the doctor in the clinic. They told her she was very brave, for one so young, but they were mistaken, she was not brave. She wanted this over and was doing her best to help her body expel the intruder. The greater the pain, the nearer she felt

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to escape, and the problem for those attending her was to hold her back not urge her on.

She hadn’t wanted to know whether it was a boy or a girl but they told her anyway, forgetting what she had requested. But they could not make her look at it. She saw the child’s shadow on the wall but then closed her eyes and turned her head away. She didn’t open them again until she was in a room on her own and had been assured that the baby had gone. She didn’t ask where. Miss Begeberg and Miss 0stervold took care of everything. She slept blissfully that night. It was all over, the mistake overcome, her body and life returned to her. When her mother came to take her home she was radiant with relief and the impatience to start where she had left off. People back home told her how well she looked, if pale. They asked about Norway and what on earth she had done there, but she recognised their lack of real curiosity. She had only to say a few sentences in Norwegian and they laughed and made dismissive movements with their hands. It was all too easy to return without suspicion just as her mother had known. No one inquired too closely as to what she had done in her year off.

In October, she went to University College to read law. She had always supposed she would go out of London to university, to Bristol or Exeter, or Durham, all places to which her school regularly sent people, but having left London for so long, she had developed an affection for it. Her parents were pleased. They gave her the granny flat, recently adapted out of the basement in readiness for her father’s mother who was in poor health and thought unlikely to be able to manage on her own much longer. It had its own entrance and was entirely self-contained, and Hazel would be free to do whatever she liked there. There were no student parties or hordes of young people trooping in and out. There was no loud music and no crashing about. Hazel studied hard and took very little part in college activities. She was an exemplary student just as she had been a model pupil at school. Sometimes her mother looked at her and could not believe what had happened - Hazel was so unruffled, so undisturbed. A period in her young life which had been traumatic had, in fact, resulted in no trauma at all. She was the same Hazel.

But she was not. It took about a year for Hazel to appreciate that she was more unlike other young women than ever. Her original sense of being different had been to do with her desire to be self—

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contained, but now she was different through the nature of the experience she had undergone and because it had to remain forever secret. In the company of her contemporaries she felt so used and old that she could hardly relate to them or to their concerns (unless they were to do with work). Sex, sex, sex was the ever-prevailing subject of conversation and pregnancy the ever-present terror; and she had no patience with either. She knew about sex, she knew about pregnancy, but she could confess to neither rich knowledge. She wanted to stay away from both for a very long time. But keeping herself apart no longer came effortlessly. She could feel herself gravitating towards a certain kind of human contact, the kind she had had initially with George, and then shying away, afraid of where it would lead.

George had written to her, several times, letters forwarded to Norway which she had read with such detachment they seemed not to make sense. Who was this man, full of his undergraduate days at Magdalen? He was nothing to her. He was an ex-, and brief, firsttime lover and the father of a child she had not wanted. It irritated her to be reminded of his existence, and she had no intention of acknowledging it. She worried, once she was back home, that he might turn up at her house, or attempt to contact her through their mutual school friends, but he did not. It was enough, apparently, for George to receive no response to his letters for him to decide he was rejected. He had doubtless found consolation elsewhere. He did not know, she couldn’t help thinking, how very fortunate he was. In idle moments, she wondered if he would have married her. He couldn’t have denied he was the father of her baby - she didn’t think he would even have attempted to, not just because he was proud of being honourable but because it could be so easily proved. But he was only eighteen, with Oxford before him. How could they have married? There was part of George, she realised, which would have relished the agony of the moral dilemma to do or not to do the decent thing. Well, she had done it for him. She had borne and got rid of their mistake and saved him from any anguish at all. It made her proud of herself. Not many girls, she reckoned, would have been so unselfish. They would have wanted the boy to suffer. It was remarkable, too, that her own mother had not wanted George named and pilloried - most mothers, surely, would want the boy forced into facing up to his responsibilities and made to pay.

Gradually, though only in the vaguest way, Hazel realised her

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mistake had not been entirely obliterated. With time, instead of growing weaker the memory of the baby grew stronger. It was only the memory of a shadow, after all, but that shadow crept around in her subconscious and she did not know how to get rid of it.

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IN JULY, Leah went back to the village, taking Evie with her. The journey, which had seemed adventurous the year before, now seemed tedious. It passed in a daze of discomfort, as she clutched the baby to her breast to cushion her fragile bones from the brutal joltings of the coach. On the way to Carlisle, all those months ago, she had not even noticed how rough the road was as it climbed over the moors. She had no interest now in her fellow passengers and they had none in her - she was just a poor young woman with a child. Choosing to get out at the crossroads and walk the mile to the Fox and Hound, she was overcome with nostalgia, seeing in her mind’s eye her former braver self marching so confidently at Hugo’s side. Now she trudged, dreading the mission she was on and yet knowing it had to be undertaken.

There was no other way. She had waited long enough. She had sent three other letters but none had been replied to nor had any more money been sent. Those fifty guineas, which had arrived with such speed in November, were long since finished and she had become what she had resolved never to be, a dependant on old Mary. Both of them lived on the washing they took in and though the income was regular it was pitifully small, enough for one person to live on but a struggle for three. Mary never objected. She was used to hardship and found it easy to be even more frugal than usual, but it pained and shamed Leah to witness the extent to which Mary’s small comforts were gradually whittled down.

A month ago she had dressed herself as smartly as possible in the one new dress she had made after Evie’s birth (believing more money was on its way), and she had gone to Carlisle and into the bank to inquire if a money order had come from Canada for her. But

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it had not. The clerk had stared at her insolently and smiled, and she had been unable to return his stare with a similar spirit to that which she had displayed on their first encounter. She had bowed her head and retreated hurriedly.

She knew there might be all kinds of reasons why Hugo had not replied and had not for one moment imagined herself finally deserted. He could be ill or dead. Who, after all, would have been able to inform her of this? No one knew where she had gone when she left the Fox and Hound and she had communicated with no one since she had taken refuge with Mary. The only way to find out what had happened to Hugo was to return to the village and ask. The people there would know. They always knew everything, especially if it were scandalous or tragic, about anyone whose family inhabited their village. She had only to appear with her baby, well known to be Hugo Todhunter’s bastard (as Evie would be labelled), for information to be showered upon her from all sides. She was prepared for it. Whatever she learned, whatever she had to bear, no one would see her weep. She would return to Carlisle on the evening coach and so back to Wetheral and Mary and face up to whatever was to be her fate. But she had to know - it was unendurable to tolerate any further waiting.

She had never noticed before how the village blurred into the hillside. It was all grey houses, grey-green tiled roofs, grey-brown stone walls and the black road running through it. Even in summer, as now, the hardness of the stone was barely softened. There were few trees - the wind was too strong to allow all but the toughest to stand - and no flowers. It surprised her, but then she had grown used to Wetheral and its soft prettiness, the pink sandstone houses and white-washed cottages and the rich colours of the trees and flourishing shrubs. She thought, as she passed the church, now fallen into disrepair, where Hugo had ‘married’ her, that she was glad after all to have left this dour spot behind. It was no place to bring up a child, there was nothing here to lift the heart or bring joy and colour into a young life. She pulled Evie closer to her and quickened her step.