Shadow Baby (28 page)

Not quickly at all. Ailsa McEndrick had had an afternoon sleep so as to be alert when Shona arrived. And she had stirred herself sufficiently out of the lethargy which seemed her new permanent condition to make a proper meal. No tinned soup. She had made a stew, the sort she used to make when all her family were at home, a stew with dumplings, and an apple pie. It had cost her a great deal of effort and she was looking forward to watching her granddaughter devour her offerings voraciously. Her first words were, ‘Sit yourself down and tuck in, you’ll be starving after that long journey.’ Shona was indeed hungry but stared in dismay at the plate of stew plonked with triumphant speed in front of her, even before she had had time to take her jacket off.

‘It’s meat,’ she said.

‘Of course it’s meat, best stewing steak, and the price now, it’s scandalous, so you tuck in, there’s plenty.’

‘I don’t eat meat,’ Shona said. ‘Grannie, I’m sorry, I really am. I should have told you. I just didn’t think you made stew any more …’

‘Specially! For you, specially for you, you’ll have to eat it.’

‘I don’t eat meat, I’m a vegetarian …’

‘There’s plenty of vegetables in there, carrots and neeps and onion, they’re all in with the meat, so you’ll be all right, now eat up.’

Ailsa’s face was red with exertion and fury. Such nonsense these

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children talked, no meat indeed. Silly, silly ideas. How did they think they would grow? Though by the look of her there was no need for Shona to grow any more. She was a big enough lassie already, she’d be putting the men off if she got any bigger. She’d changed. Ailsa saw the changes and grieved. All that bonny hair in knots, she could see it was all full of knots. It needed a good brushing. That long, thick, wavy head of auburn hair scragged back and tied with an elastic band, not even a ribbon. And she was pale, dreadfully pale, no roses any more in her cheeks. She sat there, picking out the delicious, expensive pieces of meat and putting them on the side of her plate as though they were tainted, and not even the dumplings seemed to meet with madam’s approval. But the apple pie was given the reception it deserved, which was something. Half of it eaten at one sitting, and with relish. Mollified, Ailsa settled into her armchair and said, ‘Now, tell me all about it, I want to hear every word, mind, every word, just you start at the beginning and tell me all about what you’ve been doing down there in London.’

Carefully, Shona scraped her pudding bowl clean. It was a pretty bowl, blue and white, part of a set she knew her grannie’s mother had given her as a wedding present. It was never used on normal occasions. Her grannie was treating her like royalty, making her special stew and apple-pie and using her best china. Now she wanted her reward. Shona swallowed the last morsel of the pie and took a drink of water. She could delay things by requesting a cup of tea. She disliked tea but all her grannie’s meals were followed by tea, and she was surprised it had not yet been offered.

‘Tea?’ she suggested. ‘Shall I make it?’

‘I don’t drink it any more at this time of night,’ Ailsa said, ‘it makes me have to get up to go to the bathroom. It’ll happen to you too when you’re my age. We McKenzie women have weak bladders and you’re half McKenzie. But I’ll make you some if you’re wanting it, except I don’t believe it, you’ve never cared for tea, just humouring me, were you?’ Shona smiled. ‘Now, what have I said that’s funny, miss?’

‘Nothing, just you’re so sharp.’

‘Sharp, am I? Sharp enough to know something’s amiss with you. What is it? Have you got yourself into trouble?’

‘No,’ said Shona.

Trouble was not what she had got herself into. A mess wasn’t exactly the same as trouble. She’d got herself into a mess and she

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could see no way of getting out of it. From the moment she had arrived in London the search for her real mother had taken over her life to the exclusion of everything else. She went to lectures and wrote essays without any real understanding of what she was doing and was astonished that she got away with such minimum effort. She felt like a robot but nobody seemed to notice. Within a month she had moved out of the Hall of Residence and into a bed-sitter in Kilburn, a bleak little room in the basement of a dilapidated house which would appal her parents if they were ever to see it. But she preferred living there on her own to living with other girls. They all irritated her. They were so childish, so preoccupied with utterly pointless pursuits. They distracted her. Hearing them giggle, or yell, or sing enraged her. She felt the fog that seemed to surround her penetrated by a sudden harsh beam of light when she heard their noise and it disturbed her; she didn’t want its illumination. She didn’t want to be recalled to the life of an eighteen-year-old with an eighteen-year-old’s desires. All she wanted to do was concentrate on finding her mother.

It was a point of honour not to have asked her parents a single question. They had finished the holiday in Norway in some style, the sense that something important had been achieved lifting all their spirits; and then there had only been a few months before she had gone off to London. She made phone calls and wrote dutiful regular letters, but never once did she bring up the subject of her adoption. She hugged the new knowledge to herself fiercely, telling no one, loving her secret, revelling in it. To ask questions would be to damage the constant pleasure of it. She wanted to find her real mother herself, without help, and particularly without the help of Catriona and Archie, though she knew that by excluding them she would be making her task much more difficult. But she wanted it to be difficult. She wanted to have to work hard and overcome all kinds of obstacles to discover this woman’s whereabouts, this woman who had given her away immediately she had gone through the labour of giving birth to her. The searching was like a kind of labour itself to her - the pain, the struggle and then, she hoped, the joyful delivery.

She thought she would start by obtaining her birth certificate. Surely nothing could be simpler. St Catherine’s House in Holborn was not far from University College and she found it without difficulty. She had imagined it as a grand building with an imposing, perhaps intimidating, entrance, but the doors, net-curtained, were

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like those to a block of council flats. The inside was equally unimpressive - low ceilings, grids to let light through, cheap lino strips down the middle of the shabbily carpeted floors. She wandered bewildered through the first room. Somehow she had thought the actual looking at records would be done by clerks, but no, she could handle the huge books herself-black for death, green for marriages, red for birth, yellow for adoptions.

The record books were wide and long, two inches thick, with heavy handles to pull them out of the racks where they were stored, four to each year, all arranged alphabetically. She loved the feel of these registers, the very difficulty of hauling the heavy volumes out of their nesting place and opening them, jostled on either side by other people doing the same. Such ordinary people, not scholarly as she had imagined, and all with the same intense air she had herself. There was no entry at all for Shona Mclndoe’s birth. The disappointment was sickening, but then she chided herself at once for her own stupidity - of course there was no entry in the records here, because she had been born in Norway. Would she have to go to Norway?

But she had been adopted in Scotland. Or had she? Had all the adoption proceedings taken place in Norway too? Was she adopted through a society? Or privately? Was that possible? She had to ask advice. She was assured by a clerk that the best way, in her case, to find out what she wanted was to consult the Norwegian records. Either that, or ask her adoptive parents for the papers they must have in their possession. Shona left the building disconsolate. No, she could not and would not ask Catriona and Archie for her birth certificate and adoption papers. If she did, they would know what she was doing and she did not want them to know - not because she feared hurting them but because she simply did not want anyone to spoil her secret quest. It had to remain secret. She would feel exposed and vulnerable, an object of pity, if the extent of her longing was known.

So she went to Norway. To explain her absence to her mother, who had expected her home earlier, she set up an elaborate pretence of going to stay with a girlfriend at her home in Sussex for a few days. Catriona sent her a Ł10 note to buy some little present for her friend’s mother - ‘Never go empty-handed, Shona.’ It came in useful because Shona had very little money left at the end of term and had already cut down her spending on food and fares to save the

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amount she needed for her boat and train tickets. Even with drastic economy and no other expenditure she only just managed to raise the money and knew she’d have to stay in a youth hostel once she got there.

The journey was terrible. How easy it had been to fly from Edinburgh with her parents in the spring, how horrible to go by boat across the bucking winter sea. It seemed to take for ever and once they had docked and she was in the train she still felt herself swaying for hours. The building where the Norwegian records were kept was not like St Catherine’s House, and Shona could not get the hang of how to look things up. Speaking not a word of Norwegian didn’t help, though it was true everyone she asked for advice spoke English. But again she came up against the problem of not knowing her real mother’s name, only her own date of birth and the place. It was no good trying to find her birth registered here - she would have to go back to the hospital in Bergen and ask to see their records. Another train, another freezing walk through icy streets to a hostel. But then, in the morning, when she went to the appropriate office in the hospital, the woman in charge was not helpful. Shona had thought up a romantic-sounding story, but it did not impress the official.

‘I only want to look at the entry made for my birth,’ Shona pleaded. ‘I’m a student and it’s part of an assignment we’ve been set.’

‘You are from England?’

‘Yes.’

‘You come from England on a student assignment to look at your name in our records?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why, please?’

‘I’ve told you, it’s an assignment.’

‘To gain what?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What is the point of this assignment?’

‘It’s history, I mean using records to verify what we know as facts, to check facts.’

‘And they send students to Norway?’

‘Only because I was born here. It’s just that I want to be thorough …’

‘Very thorough indeed.’

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‘Yes, very thorough. I want to impress my teacher.’

It took several more minutes of hostile staring and questioning before this woman went off to consult some superior. She returned with a form for Shona to fill in. It asked for the father’s and the mother’s names of the applicant. Shona hesitated. It would be no good putting Mclndoe. The hospital records would surely have her real mother’s name.

‘I really would like to do this the other way,’ she said, trying not to sound nervous. ‘I’d like just to look at a list of all the babies born here on the day I was born, without using my parents’ names. It would add to … to … it would be more original. Please, could I not simply look at the list? Isn’t a record kept of every day?’

‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘but the files do not work on a daily basis. This is eighteen years ago. The list for that year is under names, not times. If you do not give me your name I cannot help you.’

There was nothing to do but cry, and how Shona cried. She collapsed on to the red plastic chair in the woman’s narrow little office and wept and wept, her face buried in her arms resting on her knees. There was the scraping of another chair and the sound of the woman walking round from behind her desk. But then, instead of comfort, a constantly repeated, ‘Stop, please. I ask you to stop, please, stop.’ There was anger, not sympathy in the voice and Shona heard it. The whole thing was ridiculous and this woman knew it was and it made her furious.

‘I’m sorry,’ Shona said. There was nothing to be lost now. ‘I don’t know my mother’s or my father’s name,’ she said, voice thick with tears still. ‘I was adopted, I want to find my real mother, that’s all.’

The woman frowned. ‘There are rules,’ she said. ‘They must be followed in such circumstances. It is a very serious matter.’

‘I know,’ said Shona. ‘What shall I do?’

The woman told her to go home and ‘ascertain some facts’. Without them, no search could proceed.

And now Shona was sitting exhausted in her grannie’s Glasgow kitchen, barely able to speak of what she had been doing down in London. ‘Oh,’ she said, covering her face with her hands, ‘I’m tired, Grannie, can we wait until the morning?’

‘But you’re off in the morning, you’re barely going to warm the bed. And you’ll be off without so much as the time of day, I know you will. Your mother’s told me you have to be on that eleven-thirty train, she can’t do without you a minute longer. She’s missed you

something cruel. Have you given any thought to that?’ Shona groaned. ‘No good groaning, it’s the truth. Dotes on you, always has, the light of her life. It isn’t healthy, never was. I knew it would end like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘You wanting to be away, not wanting your mother.’

‘I do want my mother,’ Shona whispered, hoping her Grannie would not hear and read any significance into how the words had been said.

‘What? Want your mother? Never, never, you’ve never wanted her, independent from the word go, that was you. You’re like my mother, your great-grannie, dead before you were born, but you’re the image of her.’

‘How very odd,’ said Shona sarcastically. It was so tempting to tell her grannie the truth and smash all these silly ideas of inherited genes. But it would be cruel. Grannie McEndrick would not be able to bear having been hoodwinked. She would be outraged, not at the deceit itself but at its wholly successful accomplishment.

‘It isn’t odd,’ she was saying, ‘it’s obvious. You and your mother are chalk and cheese, but you and your great-grannie are as like as two peas in a pod, so you are.’