Shadow Baby (25 page)

‘No.’

‘What? Well, if you haven’t, I have and …’

‘No, Mother, please, let’s not stop. I want to understand and I don’t. I’ve wanted to for ages.’

‘Understand? What are you talking about? There is no mystery about what happened, it might have been kept secret but it wasn’t mysterious, we behaved quite logically …’

‘That’s it. All head, no heart, no thought for the baby, not from you or from me … appalling … I don’t understand it.’

‘It’s perfectly easy to understand. You were a child yourself, you couldn’t keep a baby, and it was thought about, it was thought about most carefully, I was most concerned it should go to good people, and I was assured it did.’

‘But how could you or anyone else know? How could you know the people who adopted my baby were good?’

‘Miss Ostervold knew one of them. They had references, I expect, and…’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘It wasn’t my job, it was the responsibility of the organisation those ladies worked for.’

‘No, it was ours, yours, since I just did what you said like an obedient little girl.’

‘Hazel, are you accusing me of having failed in my duty?’

‘No. I just want to understand how you could let me, encourage me, order me really to give my baby away.’

‘You wanted to …’

‘Yes, yes, I did. I know, I certainly did. I wanted to get rid of it, true, quite true, but you were older and wiser, you were a mother yourself and knew what it meant …’

‘It meant doing the best for you, that’s what it meant. It’s what it always should mean, and that’s all I thought about.’

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‘Didn’t you ache for the baby, didn’t it break your heart to think of the poor, motherless, rejected …’

‘Stop it!’ Mrs Walmsley got up. ‘I’m going to bed, I won’t have this, it’s unseemly and upsetting.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hazel said, ‘I don’t want to upset you, but I’m upset myself. I thought I’d got over the guilt’ - her mother clicked her tongue at this - ‘a long time ago, but recently I’ve started thinking about what I did and it shocks me. I only wanted to know if it shocks you, when you think back.’

‘I don’t think back, there’s no point.’

‘Don’t you wonder about your lost granddaughter sometimes?’

‘Never. Lost granddaughter? I never think of there being such a thing. She isn’t my granddaughter, wherever she is, she’s the granddaughter of whichever family took her as their own.’

‘And when they tell her?’

Mrs Walmsley, having gathered up her book and knitting and spectacles, and being ready now to go to bed as she had announced she would, began to leave the room, ignoring this last question. But Hazel followed her and stood in the doorway and repeated it. ‘When they tell her, Mother? Tell her she was given away?’

‘She may never be told. Lots of adopted children never are, and why should they be?’

‘But if she were told?’

‘Hazel, I’m tired, let me pass, I must go to bed.’

Hazel let her pass but went on following her, up the stairs to the spare room. She shut the door behind the two of them and stood with her back to it while her mother put her things down and picked up her nightdress and turned the bed covers down.

‘What if she’s the sort of girl who demanded to know everything?’

‘Highly unlikely.’

‘Not if she’s my daughter, your granddaughter, us, not unlikely at all, she’ll demand to know, and what then?’

‘What do you mean, “What then?” I really don’t see what you’re getting at, Hazel, and I haven’t since you started all this.’

‘She has the right to make us suffer.’

‘Hazel! I cannot stand this. Now let me go to the bathroom and when I come back I don’t want to see you still here. Go to bed.’

Hazel went to bed. There was no point in trying to get her mother to help her nor any hope of comfort. Her mother had always been a woman of few doubts about her own behaviour. A blessing, really, to

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be like that, convinced that what one did was right. It made decisions simple - not the making of them so much as the bearing of the consequences. Once her baby had been ‘dealt with’ Hazel saw that her mother had obliterated all memory of her. Remorse was a word with which she had little acquaintance. The following morning, Hazel apologised. Her mother, smiling very brightly and at her most cheerful, stopped her and said she’d forgotten ‘that little scene’ already, and then she swept out to begin her deliciously hectic day.

Hazel never again assumed she might be able to form a new relationship with her mother, one based on an exchange of real feeling instead of superficial concern, which had always dictated a strange kind of wary politeness. But she knew that though seeming superficial, because it manifested itself in careful language, her mother’s concern for her was not in the least shallow. She did care deeply, she did, as she had said, do everything, in her own opinion, for her daughter’s good. What had angered her was that Hazel had challenged this. She had dared to suggest that what Mrs Walmsley had seen as the only course of action had not been the only course. Even more offensive had been the suggestion that she had had another duty, one she had failed to acknowledge, to the baby. Nothing hurt her mother more, as Hazel knew, than implying any dereliction of maternal duty. But she would not risk doing so again. The matter was closed.

In her own mind, it began to close again too. She did not do any more work connected with adoption. She went on dealing with Family Law, moving as time went on into Divorce Law, and specialising in cases where women had been beaten and abused. For months at a time she was untroubled by stray thoughts of that baby she had given away; and even when, for some reason, the memory was triggered, she was able to deal with it calmly. The older her sons grew and the more consuming family life became, the less she was bothered by her conscience. The little pricks of fear which had alarmed her disappeared, and she became serene and less wary.

That proved, eventually, to have been a mistake.

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EVIE HAD imagined Carlisle would be familiar to her but it was not. All the long way in the coach she had been remembering St Ann’s, high on the hill above the river Eden, and in her mind’s eye she had seen again the outline of the squat castle and the glint of the sun on the cathedral windows. She knew the bridge would be crowded as the coach left Stanwix and crossed the Eden into the city and that the streets round the market would be jammed with people and animals being driven home from the Sands. She expected to feel happy that she was back in her home town and was dismayed, when the coach stopped outside the Crown and Mitre, to discover that everything she saw looked different. The town hall market place was not the cheerful, friendly place she had remembered, full of women sitting beside makeshift stalls and with their children playing all around. It teemed with carriages and coaches and she was startled to see her first tram careering noisily along its iron rails. Her heart began to thud and she stood motionless, clasping her bag, not knowing what to do, and suddenly aware of the enormity of the decision she had made.

She had to go somewhere. She could not stand in front of the Crown and Mitre all day transfixed by the turmoil before her. But moving was difficult because of her heavy bag, which she could not carry more than a few yards without stopping. Her vague idea was to go back to the only place she knew, St Cuthbert’s Lane, where she had lived with old Mary, but she knew this would be foolish. Somebody else would be living in the house where she had once lived and the sight of a girl carrying all her worldly goods in a shabby carpet bag would not appeal to them. But where could she go? She had no money for a lodging-house and the only people she

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knew of in Carlisle were the Messengers who ran the pub in Caldewgate and had occasionally called in at the Fox and Hound. She supposed she could claim truthfully to be of their family and therefore worthy of shelter, but she could not go to them. They would report her presence in due course to Ernest, who would come and get her. Even if he did not, and she was sure he would, she did not want Ernest and Muriel to know where she was.

She could go to the Home, to St Ann’s, if she could get herself there, if she could beg a lift on a cart going in that direction. They might take her in, give her a bed in return for her labour. But that was another likely place Ernest might look, and besides she had only bad memories of the Home. Fleetingly, and she knew k was foolishly, she thought of the woman who had taken her to the house in West Walls on the day Mary had died.

Standing with her back to the wall of the hotel, her bag at her feet, Evie stared straight ahead as though having a vision. Nobody appeared to notice her. She was quite insignificant in her drab coat and the dark brown bonnet she wore had a wide rim which shaded her small face. She looked like a girl waiting to be collected, waiting with patience and resignation, and gave no hint of the inner terror she was experiencing. An hour she stood there, two hours, three hours. The crowds never seemed to diminish nor the clamour lessen. She heard the cathedral bells chime and watched the time on the Town Hall clock. It was already midday. She was lucky that the sun shone, though she was standing on the side of the main street which was now in shadow, and that there was none of that biting wind there had been earlier when she had left the Fox and Hound.

Opposite her she had been watching a scene she did not at first understand. There were a great many ladies milling about, all well dressed to Evie’s untutored eye, and all pointing and talking to each other. They were pointing at girls, poor-looking girls, all of whom stood stock-still, many of them on wooden crates. The ladies walked round these crates and appeared to examine the girls, who looked downcast and mournful, then they would halt and some interchange would take place. Sometimes a girl would then step off the box and follow one of the women. Evie strained to see where they went, but could never quite make out their destination - woman and girl were both swallowed up in the crowds. It took her the whole morning to work out that what she was witnessing was the hiring of servants. There could be no other explanation. She had never known this

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could happen, there had been nothing like it in Moorhouse, but now it seemed blindingly obvious that this would be her salvation.

She was worried as she dragged her bag into the space in front of the Cross, where the girls were on view, that there was perhaps some system of which she was not aware. Was any girl allowed just to appear and offer herself for hire? She saw some older, rough-looking women standing a little way off, eyeing the girls, and when one of this group rushed forward and took a coin from a lady holding the arm of a girl she had selected Evie realised she was the mother. Maybe a girl had to be owned and brought for hire by her mother. Well, she had no mother and if this debarred her from trying to be hired she would soon find out. She did not have a crate to stand on either. Instead, she stood on her bag. There was nothing in it that could be damaged, it was full of soft goods. She knew she looked odd, perched on the carpet bag, and not like the other girls. There were few of them left now, the majority had been claimed, and those that remained looked pathetic specimens. They were thin and dirty with bare feet and sorry-looking clothes. Evie, in her tweed coat and felt bonnet and buttoned boots, knew she looked too grand but she could not help that. It was the one time in her life she had felt in any way superior and this only embarrassed her. She could not bear to look directly at any of the ladies inspecting her and dropped her eyes, as indeed she had seen most of the girls do.

She did not have long to wait.

‘What have we here?’ she heard a voice say. Evie knew the question must be directed at her but kept quiet. ‘Are you for hire, girl?’

She nodded her head.

‘Look at me when you’re spoken to,’ the sharp voice instructed, and obedient as ever Evie looked up. She disliked what she saw. This lady was not like the others she had noticed. She was tall and heavy, dressed all in black, with a fierce, red face and a cane upon which she was leaning hard. She was much older than any of the other ladies who had hired girls and she was by herself. ‘Age?’ she snapped, staring at Evie.

‘Eighteen, ma’am.’

The lady snorted. ‘Eighteen indeed! And if you are, which I doubt, too old to be hired. Did you know that? So you see you should have told the truth. You are fifteen, am I right?’

Evie stayed silent and did not move.

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‘Hold out your hands.’

Evie held them out. The lady touched them, turned them over. Evie knew her hands were rough with all the time they had spent doing dirty work. They were covered in keens too, where she had cut herself and some of these cuts had festered and left little scars. But the lady seemed satisfied.

‘Open your mouth,’ was the next command. Evie opened it. She had had four teeth pulled last winter but otherwise she had all her teeth and they were sound, the travelling dentist had said so. ‘Where are you from?’ the lady asked next. Evie still stayed silent. ‘Are you a runaway? Have you left a situation?’ Evie shook her head. ‘Then how do you come to be here, miss, coming from nowhere? Were you turned off?’

‘No,’ Evie managed to say.

‘Where is your home?’ the lady said, impatiently. ‘You have to have had a home. I cannot take a girl with no home. You might be anybody, a thief, a little whore, how would I know? Where is your mother?’

‘Haven’t got a mother,’ said Evie, worrying if that was strictly true.

‘Father?’

She shook her head again.

‘Have you come from the workhouse?’

More head-shaking.

‘No, you do not look as if you have. You’ve been cared for. Out of the city?’

‘Yes,’ said Evie.

‘A long way away?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you are a runaway. The police will be on to you, or whoever. Unless you are eighteen and small and had the right to leave, I don’t know. Get off that bag. What’s in it? No stolen silver or the like?’