Shadow Baby (40 page)

‘But you obviously don’t want me here, I was wrong to think you might.’

‘Yes, you were wrong, but you are here and that changes everything. I can’t ever feel the same again and I don’t know that I would want to. I’m going to go and take these clothes off and ring my office again and then maybe we could go for a walk, do you think? It’s strange sitting like this. It would feel more natural, well, comfortable, to be outside and …’

‘Yes, it would to me too.’

All the time she was changing and telephoning Hazel found herself worrying about the imminent arrival of her mother, who was coming over to drop in what she referred to as ‘real country eggs’ brought back specially from her weekend in Gloucestershire. She had her own key and would just march in, expecting nobody at home, to put the eggs in the kitchen. It would be appalling to have her arrive while Shona was here. Hazel hurried, aware too that she was somehow hoping, even expecting, to hear the click of the front door, the sound of Shona running away, but it never came. She’d given the girl her opportunity to escape but she had not taken it, so that was that. Or maybe, thought Hazel, that wasn’t what I was doing at all, maybe I was doing the running away and it hasn’t worked, and now I must face up to the consequences and act appropriately. She came back downstairs, wearing trousers and a sweater, determined to do that. She would go through what had happened all those years ago and invite questions and then with a clearer conscience she would bid Shona goodbye. It was no good thinking she could, or ought to, pretend affection and gladness. She couldn’t. She would have to be honest and get this over.

They walked down the road, Hazel relieved to have escaped her mother’s arrival, their long strides matching and the dog straining at the leash in front of them, without talking. The flurries of sleet had stopped, but it was still a grey, ugly day, the sky heavy and murky.

‘Are you warm enough?’ she said to Shona as they entered the park. ‘That coat looks quite thin for this weather.’

‘This weather is nothing,’ Shona said, ‘I was brought up in Scotland, on the northeast coast.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You knew? How?’

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Hazel was silent for a good stretch. She could sense Shona waiting. This, she thought, is going to please her, it will give her some satisfaction. ‘Oh, some years ago, a long time ago, in fact, I can’t remember exactly when, I had nightmares about you. They got worse and worse. You as a baby, though I never actually saw you, I didn’t want to. And anyway, Malcolm, my husband, thought if he could find out that you were well and happy the nightmares might stop. They did, actually. I haven’t had them since.’

‘What happened in the nightmares?’

‘Nothing in particular. Just a baby, you, or a baby I knew to be you, crying, howling.’

‘How did he trace me, your husband?’

‘I don’t know. He’s a lawyer too, he has access to various ways of finding things out. I didn’t ask him.’ There was a long silence. The dog bounded about and Hazel watched him, thinking what a hopeless park this was, not at all a substitute for real country as Hampstead Heath could be on such a weekday morning. She knew perfectly well that Shona would be working out the significance of what she had told her and she waited with interest rather than apprehension to see what she would say. But the girl said nothing at all. Stealing a sidelong look, to check if she was perhaps weeping again, she saw no sign of tears. ‘Were there things, questions, you wanted to ask me?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Ask, then. I suppose you want to know who your father was and< why I…’

‘No, I don’t. I don’t want to know about any father, he doesn’t matter.’

‘Well, if you say so, but his part is surely relevant. He was a schoolboy, no, between school and university …’

‘I don’t want to know, I said.’

‘Fine. But I want you to know he never knew, about you, I mean. Maybe one day you mill want to know about him and that’s what you should get clear.’

‘It’s the other bit.’

‘Why I gave you up?’

‘Yes. I mean, I know you were very young, younger than I am now, and I know abortion was illegal …’

‘I hardly even thought of abortion, it was something other girls had to do in back streets, that kind of thing, too dangerous and

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impossible. I would have been too frightened even if I’d known how.’

‘Yes, I realise. And you were only eighteen, so how could you keep a baby?’

Hazel listened to the tone of sympathy. It was tempting to allow the girl to paint the attractively pathetic picture she was conjuring up. ‘I didn’t want to keep you,’ she said, ‘that’s the truth.’

‘You hated me?’

‘No, not hate. I just wanted you cancelled out. I wanted to get home, back to my real life. Those months in Norway were, well … they were … I can’t seem to think of a word to describe them.’

‘Hell.’

‘Near to hell, I thought. But that’s too violent. It was the numbness, being suspended in time, it was more an in-limbo feeling, and that scared me.’

‘But then you came home and you were happy ever after, so that was all right.’

The hint of sarcasm is my own, Hazel thought, it is precisely how I deal with hurt. Either I am sarcastic or contemptuous and she is only a girl and can’t risk open contempt. But she suddenly felt less constrained, the girl’s sarcasm helped. ‘I wasn’t happy for a very long time afterwards,’ she said. ‘I was lonely, though I’d always been quite a lonely sort of person, I mean a person who preferred to be on her own, not the same at all. And I just became more and more like that. Cynical, I was a little cynic too. I felt I’d learned my lesson. I was better on my own. I’d tried relationships, I’d tried one, that is, and it had messed up my life. I concentrated on working hard and keeping myself more and more to myself.’

‘How sad.’

More sarcasm and now also that hint of contempt. Hazel smiled slightly. ‘Yes, a little sad.’

‘But you didn’t think about me.’

‘No. I was easily convinced you were happy somewhere and even if you weren’t it wasn’t my fault. I was told you’d go to a couple who desperately wanted a baby and I thought that would be a lucky thing, for you to be wanted so much. You can call it a hard attitude, if you want, but that’s how it was.’

‘Hard.’

‘Yes, hard then.’

‘But then you had nightmares.’

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‘My punishment, you mean? Later, I told you, a very long time| afterwards.’

‘When you really were happy, married to Malcolm, on 11 April, in a pretty Gloucestershire church.’

Hazel didn’t bother asking how the girl knew such a detail. She could imagine the visit to St Catherine’s House and the excitement of locating the entry in the ledger and getting the certificate. < ‘I remember now,’ she said, ‘it was after I’d had Philip, my first baby …’

‘Second.’

‘Second. My first son.’

‘You must have been so glad he was a boy.’

‘I was.’

‘And the third and fourth, both sons.’

‘Not so glad with Anthony. Malcolm wanted a daughter.’

‘But not your daughter.’

‘That never arose. You were adopted and settled, and …’

‘And a secret.’

‘Not from Malcolm.’

‘You did the decent thing, of course, and confessed. So noble. How did he take it?’

She wants me to rise to this sarcasm, Hazel thought, but I will! not. ‘Well, he said the past was past.’

‘Original. Not bygones will be bygones too?’

‘Not quite.’

‘And he didn’t think any less of you for your disgraceful secret?’

‘He didn’t think it was disgraceful. He understood.’

‘What did he understand?’

‘That I hadn’t intended to get pregnant, that I was very young, that adoption had been the only solution, that …’

‘Best.’

‘What?’

‘Best solution, not only. Adoption wasn’t the only solution. You weren’t a poor, penniless waif out of some nineteenth-century novel who’d been done wrong.’

‘No, I wasn’t. I didn’t pretend I was.’

‘But Malcolm, dear Malcolm, understood and forgave you and bore you not the slightest grudge.’

‘Not a grudge, no. But something. It disturbed him to think of a

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child of mine out in the world somewhere, however well looked after. He has always felt it wasn’t right, which I haven’t felt myself.’

‘Except in nightmares.’

‘Did they mean that? Not necessarily.’

Everything had changed. The girl walking beside her was no longer just an attractive but somehow neutral person - her very voice, young and light though it was, had become charged with menace, but even though Hazel found her stomach tightening with nerves, she also found the real emerging Shona exhilarating. She liked being challenged, she wanted to be. Defence was a way of life to her and she excelled at it. Others might feel that having their backs against a wall was an uncomfortable position to be in, but she didn’t. If this girl had one unassailable right it was to attack, so she must be encouraged.

‘You’re imagining, of course, what you would do,’ Hazel said, ‘in the position I was in.’

‘I’d have an abortion.’

‘So would I, if I were eighteen and pregnant now.’

‘But if I’d been you and couldn’t because it was illegal or too difficult to arrange, then I would have to keep it.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘No, not easy, but for me there wouldn’t be any choice, I couldn’t give away my own baby.’

‘Not even for the sake of the baby?’

‘That’s just trickery, that sort of ‘tis-a-far-far-better-thing-I-do sort of argument, it’s despicable.’

‘There’s no point in discussing it …’

‘I don’t want discussions.’

‘What do you want, then? Remind me.’

‘I wanted you, that’s what I wanted. My mother. It’s natural, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

They turned and began to walk back. This had gone on long enough. Hazel longed to get home and go through the awkward business of saying goodbye. It wouldn’t be over, of course. She realised that. This girl might part with her believing she would never return, but she undoubtedly would. She’d go home, in a state of fury and misery and crushing disappointment, and then the resentment would build up inside her and she’d be unable to prevent herself returning. She would have to feed on that sense of being

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cheated which she was so transparently suffering from now. Hazel saw how it would be and was resigned to her own prognosis

‘Have you always known you were adopted?’ she suddenly asked.

‘No. I only found out last year, on my eighteenth birthday, well,: almost on it.’

‘That’s interesting. Why tell you at all if it had been kept so secret, I wonder?’

‘Dad thought it was time. He hadn’t thought it should be secret, but Mum was ill when she had me, I mean got me, and she made him promise. They pretended to everyone, even my grandmothers.’

‘True deception, then. And you grew up perfectly happy and without suspicions. No harm done, after all.’

‘So, applause for you, you mean, with your far-far-better-thing | stuff.’

‘No applause for me, but relief.’

‘But the point is you couldn’t have known. You gave me away without being able to know I’d have good parents. Anyway, I don’t | care about that even if it sounds as if I do. I really don’t, whatever I’ve said. What gets me is that you didn’t think of me at all. I didn’t haunt you except for those nightmares, which didn’t last long. That’s what’s so awful. To have a child growing in your body and going through giving birth and knowing it is yours, your flesh and blood, and then just giving it away. It’s obscene, that’s what it is. And even now, I turn up, and you’re not fussed, not really, just a little thrown but you can’t wait to get rid of me when you think you’ve been reasonable and civilised enough It isn’t right, it isn’t oh, I can’t think what …’

‘Understandable”

‘Yes. It isn’t possible to understand the mentality of women who give their babies away when they don’t have to and then when they’ve done it they don’t suffer.”

‘You want me to have suffered the tortures of the damned, to be still suffering them.’

‘Don’t mock. I didn’t say anything about tortures. I just - I just want to have meant something to you and then I could forgive.’

‘This is getting a little heated, you’re shouting …’

‘Certainly I’m heated, I’m shouting, why shouldn’t I? We’re in a bloody empty park …’

‘It doesn’t matter where we are, I don’t respond to shouting.’

‘You don’t respond to anything, you’re cold and unfeeling.’

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‘Maybe. You see what you escaped. You could have been brought up by a cold and unfeeling woman instead of your mother. I’m sure she is neither.’

‘She isn’t. She’s warm and kind …’

‘There you are, then.’

‘No, I am not, I’m not anywhere, you miss the point again. I thought you were a lawyer, but any lawyer would see the point. It doesn’t matter about Catriona being warm and kind and all that, or about your being cold and unfeeling, or whatever. The point is, you are my real mother and that makes the difference. I’m looking for myself and I never could find me in Catriona.’

‘Lots of girls are totally unlike their mothers. I’m unlike my own. We have nothing in common.’

‘I’ve seen her.’

‘When?’

‘Bringing your sons home. I watched, I’ve been watching your house, just to see. Spying, I’ve been spying. Shocking, isn’t it? And pathetic.’

It was both, but Hazel knew she must not agree with the girl. She was touched in the strangest way by this confession - hiding somewhere, watching, spying, and all to see her own mother. She thought of all the scheming and planning that must have been involved, and then she recalled how bitterly cold and wet it had been recently and imagined this girl shivering as she stood concealed behind some tree, or building. She couldn’t just say goodbye to her. It was becoming more and more inevitable that she would have to invite her to meet Malcolm, but she couldn’t bear the idea. Malcolm would love the girl. He would be fascinated by her and be eager to get to know her. And the boys, what would the boys think? They would take their lead from their father and, besides, they were too young to have the desire to make judgements of their own, they would not understand all the implications implicit in the sudden introduction into their lives of a fully grown half-sister.