Shadow Baby (4 page)

But Evie was incapable of giving any information and the young woman knew she would have to go into the house and see where this sick grandmother was. Hesitantly, holding her baby with one arm, putting it back on her hip, she took hold of Evie’s hand with the other and allowed herself to be led up the stairs. She knew before she saw the old woman that she was dead and she stopped in the doorway of the bedroom and turned round. ‘You’ll have to come with me,’ she said, her tone now sharp and not as caressing as before. ‘Have you a key? We can’t leave the house open.’ Evie did know where the key was, a big iron thing hanging behind the front door and rarely used because they so rarely went out. The woman put it in her pocket. She seemed bad-tempered now, but Evie herself was calmer knowing responsibility had passed from her hands. She followed the woman down the lane eagerly, in her relief hardly noticing the cold. The woman hurried, her skirt flapping and her head bowed against the wind. Furtively, Evie looked about her. It was strange to be moving so fast instead of patiently keeping pace with her grandmother’s slow amble. It felt exciting, urgent, and she no longer felt terrified. She wondered where they were going but did not dare ask in case she was cast off.

They passed St Cuthbert’s church and came out on to West Walls, hugging the crumbling old wall, keeping out of the narrow

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road itself. But then, past Dean Tail’s cut, the woman veered right and stopped at a door and knocked on it. It opened quickly and another woman, also young, stood there and said, ‘You’ve taken your time, you’ll be late.’ ‘I know I’ll be late,’ Evie’s rescuer snapped. ‘It can’t be helped, it’s this kid, standing crying fit to burst in the lane and saying her grandma’s sick.’ Here she dropped her voice and whispered in the other woman’s ear. ‘What could I do?’ she went on, ‘I couldn’t leave her. And now what can I do? Who’ll I tell?’ They were all still standing on the doorstep but now the two women went inside and Evie followed, though they paid no heed to her. She had never, to her knowledge, been in any other house but her grandma’s, first in the village, that dim memory, and then in the lane. She peered about her nervously, feeling it was wrong to stare. The room wasn’t much better than her grandma’s, it was just as small, but there was a good fire burning, bigger than her grandma ever allowed, and a good smell of some kind of cake cooking. And there was a brightly coloured rag-rug on the stone floor with two small children sitting on it playing with pan lids and pegs, and making a great racket.

‘What’s your name, pet?’ the woman who lived there asked, turning aside from a whispered consultation with her friend.

‘Evie.’

‘Oh, she has a tongue. Mine’s Minnie, and this is Pearl. Now what are we to do with you? Where’s your mam?’

Evie didn’t know what to say. Did she have a mam? She wasn’t sure, she had never been sure. If she did have one then she’d gone. ‘Gone,’ she said.

‘Where?’ asked Minnie.

‘Don’t know.’

‘When? When did she go? Early this morning?’

Evie shook her head and twisted her skirt in her hands. Finally, she said, ‘I’ve never seen her, if I have a mam,’ and began to cry again. Both women told her to shush, but kindly. Minnie gave her a piece of bread and a small mug of tea, and told her to get them down, she’d feel better. Another whispering session followed and then Minnie, who seemed to be in charge, said, ‘Pearl’s got to go now, so you can help look after little George. You can help me this morning till we see what’s what.’

Evie enjoyed the morning helping. She spent it on the rag-rug playing with George and the other two children. She put the

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wooden pegs into a pan, a battered old tin thing, and put the lid on and shook it about and then emptied it with a flourish. The babies loved it. She did it again and again and they never seemed to tire of the rattling noise and the surprise, a surprise every time, of the pegs cascading out. ‘You’ve a way with you,’ Minnie said approvingly. Later, she fed all three children. Minnie gave her a bowl of porridge and she made a game of feeding it to them. When one of them crawled or rolled off the rug she had to persuade them back on to it and she loved the feeling of the warm, soft, wriggling bodies. She hugged them and they hugged her back, their hands catching in her untidy hair and pulling it but she didn’t mind. ‘Got little brothers and sisters, have you?’ Minnie asked Evie shook her head. ‘Big ones, then?’ Evie shook it again. ‘Oh dear, you are an odd one,’ Minnie said. She watched Evie carefully. It was as clear as crystal what would happen to her, what the situation was. The grandmother was dead, Pearl was sure, the stench in the bedroom alone had told her, and unless some relative stepped forward it would be the orphanage up above the river for poor Evie. It was a shame, she was a pathetic scrap of a thing, she deserved better, but better was unlikely to be available.

Pearl, on her way to work in Carr’s factory, reported the situation she had found at 10 St Cuthbert’s Lane that morning, and the temporary address of the little girl, Evie. The body of Mary Messenger was removed before noon. A policeman came round to Minnie’s house in the afternoon and asked (in front of Evie) if she was willing to keep Evie. Minnie said she was willing but that she couldn’t, she had no room Evie would have to go somewhere else but she hoped the child wasn’t to be sent off without her things The policeman said he’d take Evie back to her grandmother’s house first, before handing her over to ‘them up above the river’ (with a significant look at Minnie) and she could take some clothes and anything else of hers that was small enough to go in a bag. Minnie made each of the babies kiss Evie, then told her she’d see her one day and to try not to take on too much, she would only make it worse.

The policeman took Evie home and made a list of what the child took from the house. It was not a long list. Two dresses, two pinafores, two shawls, a pair of clogs, some woollen stockings and a tin box. These all went easily into a bag with a drawstring which Evie produced from behind the bedroom door. She found a coat,

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which she put on, a shabby article but thick and warm-looking, and a tam-o’-shanter which hid her hair completely. ‘Ready for your travels?’ the policeman asked her, but she neither responded nor nodded, she just stood there obediently, evidently quite composed. Knowing nothing of the weeping Evie had already done that day, he thought it odd she didn’t shed a single tear. She seemed quite passive and he was glad: it made his job so much easier. She followed him, he thought quite happily, out of the house, never a backward look, and down the lane and across the Town Hall square and up Lowther Street and across the bridge. The noise of carts on the bridge was so loud and the crush of people so great that he took her hand for fear he would lose her. It was a steep hill to climb, up Stanwix Bank, but she managed it without faltering. They came to St Ann’s House just as it began to rain and the policeman hurried her into the shelter of the doorway. He knocked on the door several times before it was opened by a stout woman wearing a dark blue apron.

‘Here you are,’ the policeman said, ‘another for you. Her grandma’s been found dead and there’s nobody to have her, not yet anyway.’

‘I haven’t been told,’ the woman said indignantly. ‘There’s been no notification.’

‘Well, there should’ve been, it’ll come,’ the policeman said, and turned and left.

That was how Evie came to St Ann’s House. She stayed there six months before she was claimed.

Shona’s father was a seacaptain. She was proud of him and boasted about him continually Nearly every father in the village was a sailor but there was only one captain and that was her daddy. She was like him in looks, not her mother. She had his red-gold hair, his very pale blue eyes and his full lips, though in his case these were hidden by a moustache and beard. All she had taken from her mother was a certain fragility which belied her true nature. Shona was as tough as her father, every bit as tough as Captain Archie Mclndoe both in body and in mind. She only looked frail, ‘a delicate wee girl’ people said, but they were wrong.

The Mclndoes had come to this remote part of northeast Scotland when Shona was a baby, only a month old to be precise. Her mother, Catriona, was still recovering from the birth which every woman in the village quickly learned had been a difficult one. Catriona was so weak afterwards she hadn’t been able to breast-feed her baby and the other young mothers, all of whom had ample milk and to spare, had felt sorry for her. But Mrs Mclndoe was not young, they noticed, she was surely only just the right side of forty and unlikely to have any more children. Shona, they predicted, would be an only child and they were proved right. She was an only child, greatly adored, who, everyone agreed, ruled the roost. It was an extraordinary sight to see her at the age of four dominating both her parents. Even in the kirk Shona exerted her authority, choosing where to sit and which kneeler to have.

Captain Mclndoe was slow and quiet, the sort of man who could, and did, sit for hours over a pint of beer and a whisky without saying a word. Aboard ship he was said to be careful, cautious, a good man to sail with, never panicking in any emergency, always reliable: the

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women in the village liked their men to sail with him. And Mrs Mclndoe was equally lacking in any spark, equally colourless though pleasant enough. She was in the Women’s Guild and helped at bazaars but she was not sociable, she kept herself to herself and that self was thought of as a bit dull. So where, everyone given to such curiosity wondered, had Shona got her fire from? ‘Is she like her grannie?’ women sometimes asked Catriona after witnessing one of Shona’s more extravagant displays of temperament and contrasting it with her mother’s placidity. ‘Is she after following in her grannie’s footsteps?’ Catriona would smile and say, ‘A little, maybe,’ but she never went so far as to say, as she was expected to say, that Shona was a throwback, the spitting image of one grannie or another. Another question was a common one put to the Captain himself when Shona’s physical resemblance to him was commented on. ‘Do you have any sisters, Captain?’ But no, he didn’t. No sisters whom Shona took after.

The Mclndoes lived in a stone house above the harbour, bought outright when they arrived in 1956. The Captain was in the merchant navy by then but was known to have distinguished himself in the war when he had served with the Royal Navy working in Xcraft (midget submarines) off the coast of Norway. It was the nature of his job that he was away for long spells throughout Shona’s childhood and that his daughter therefore lacked the strong fathering she could be seen to need. But then most fathers in the area were away at sea and it was the mothers who had to do the best they could with the help of the wider family. It was felt to be unfortunate that in the case of the Mclndoes that wider family lived so far away.

Shona only became properly acquainted with her grannies when she was seven. She and her mother went to stay with Grannie Mclndoe in Stranraer and Shona didn’t enjoy the experience one bit (nor, in fact, did Catriona, but she never said so, being much too polite and discreet and much too aware of how dangerous it was to let Shona know). Grannie Mclndoe found it hard to tolerate her young granddaughter’s tantrums and wondered aloud why anyone else did, particularly her mother. ‘Archie was never like this,’ she proclaimed. ‘His father would have thrashed it out of him. Where does she get it from?’ Weakly, Catriona said she didn’t know, but she was sure Shona would calm down as she grew older. Things were a little easier when they went on to Glasgow to Grannie

McEndrick, Catriona’s mother, but even in that household Shona’s energy was a strain. ‘Is she never still?’ Grannie McEndrick asked. ‘You were such a still child.’ But though Shona was never still, at least this grannie found her amusing and was briefly entertained by her antics so long as they did not go on too long (though, alas, they often did).

It was at Grannie McEndrick’s, however, that Shona disgraced herself and caused the greatest alarm. A neighbour’s child, a boy called Gavin, the same age as Shona, had been invited in to play. The two children had seemed to get on tolerably well, once Shona’s boasting about her father the Captain was capped by Gavin’s pride in his father being Provost (which baffled but impressed Shona), and they had been sent into the garden to run around before tea. It was a big garden and the two children disappeared, not entirely to Catriona’s pleasure. ‘Och, you fuss too much, Catriona,’ her mother said, ‘it doesn’t do to be fussing. You should be thanking the Lord wee Shona’s not a clinger. You were a terrible clinger, so you were, wouldn’t let me out of your sight, clung to my skirts all the time.’ Catriona remembered, she needed no reminding, and flushed at the contempt in her mother’s voice. ‘She’s a grand wee soul,’ her mother said. ‘Come and we’ll take the chance to put our feet up and have a quiet cup of tea.’

The tea was made, and drunk very quietly indeed. Catriona could never think of anything to say to her mother when they were alone together. She made inquiries about other family members and that was it. It never crossed her mind to share with her mother her true anxieties, knowing, as she did, that since these were all wrapped up with Shona’s waywardness her mother would be scornful. There was no one Catriona could talk to about her fears except Archie, and he had little patience with them. She sometimes thought that if she had been able to find the right words to express her unease, then Archie would have listened to her, but as it was, even to her own ears, her sense of there being something not quite normal about Shona sounded silly. They sat and had tea and the weak, wavering shafts of sun came through the open window and warmed them.

The moment Skipper began to bark Catriona was on her feet. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’ her mother said, exasperated. ‘Look at you, the wee dog barking and you’re all of a tremble. It’s seen a cat, that’s all, sit down, Catriona.’ But Catriona could not sit down. She was out of the room and down the steps into the garden