Shadow Baby (44 page)

And now it was not operating at all. Hazel was sitting there looking aloof and detached, whether because she had taught herself to be so - or been taught (and if so, by whom?) - or because this was her. There was no reaching her.

‘I’d better go,’ Mrs Walmsley said. ‘I didn’t intend to stay in any case.’ She picked up her car keys and without looking at Hazel, and struggling to seem more like her usual self, said, ‘I expect you’ll tell Malcolm.’

‘Of course.’

‘Very wise, in case she turns up again. Will you get in touch with her, do you think?’

‘I haven’t her address or telephone number.’

‘Poor girl. If I hadn’t been so terribly shocked …’

‘Yes?’

‘I should have said something. It wasn’t kind.’

‘No. Neither of us was kind.’

‘Hazel, do you feel anything for her, for the girl?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Oh, are you upset? It’s impossible to tell, and I feel so upset myself, it must be the shock, there’s really nothing to be upset about.’

The rest of the day seemed very long. Hazel went to work and was busy, but still the hours dragged. She realised she both dreaded telling, and yet was eager to tell, Malcolm about the extraordinary visit she had been paid. His reaction was easy to predict. He would be desperate to meet the girl and would not be able to credit that she had been allowed to leave without revealing her address or phone number. But that would present no problems to Malcolm - he could track the girl down in no time given her name and age and the single fact that she was a law student at UCL. Then what? Would he go and see her? Would he persuade her to come again, to meet the family? And what of the family, their boys? Malcolm would insist upon telling them. He would enjoy it, the explaining, and because they were so young what he had to tell them about their mother would simply seem a story having nothing to do with pain or distress. It might even be salutary for her to be present while Malcolm did the explaining - it would make everything seem comfortingly ordinary after all.

Yet it was not as simple and straightforward as she had imagined, to acquaint Malcolm with the facts about her daughter’s reappearance. There seemed no way into the subject. Evenings were so chaotic and exhausting in their house, with all three boys demanding and noisy, food to be made, and the next day’s work hanging over both her and Malcolm. It was usually eleven o’clock before they had time to exchange any but the most perfunctory news. At midnight she made some cocoa and took it up to his study where he was still poring over documents, head in hands, looking grey and tired. He barely murmured his thanks before turning another page and did not even glance at her. Only the fact that she went on standing there caught his attention after a while and finally he looked up and said, ‘Mm?’

‘Come down to the sitting-room,’ she said.

‘I can’t. I’m in court tomorrow, have to be, on this one.’

‘Come down for a break.’

‘I’d never get back to it, I’m nearly asleep anyway.’

‘How much longer will you be?’

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‘An hour, I don’t know, you go to bed.’

She stood, sipping her own cocoa, watching him. Whisky would have been better, she didn’t know why she’d made this sickly milk drink. He was drinking his quite greedily though, in great gulps. But, she was annoying him by hanging about.

‘What is it?’ he said, irritated. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Good. Go to bed then.’

She did. She went downstairs and washed her mug out and put all the lights off, but didn’t tidy up, that could be done in the morning, it was what Mrs Hedley was paid for. She quite liked the look of the house at the end of the evening, the evidence there of living going on. Her mother’s house had always seemed dead, with none of the debris of family life littering the place. Then she went upstairs and looked in on each of the boys, more mess, more things strewn everywhere on the floors, so that she had to take care not to trip in the half dark. She put her bedside lamp on and propped herself up to read, but she hardly took in a word. She liked her bedroom. Everything in it was her choice. Malcolm had views about the rest of the house, but not about their bedroom. It was mainly a green room - pale green carpet, dark green linen blinds, a white and green cover on the bed. It always soothed her. In spite of her tiredness she felt a little refreshed after she’d lain there a while. Malcolm would be too exhausted when he came to bed; it wasn’t fair to tell him anything important, but if she waited he would be angry with her later and vow that he was always ready to be told vital things whatever his state, whatever the hour. It was no good thinking she would tell him in the morning, the mornings were hopeless, as disorderly as the evenings with the added pressure of everyone needing to depart on time. She would have to tell him now, here, peacefully.

He didn’t come to bed until two o’clock and was startled to see her still sitting up with the light on. ‘Why on earth are you awake?’ he said. She put her book aside and watched him as he undressed. He was putting on weight. In his suit this was hardly noticeable but naked she could see the flab beginning. His whole life was stressful and unhealthy, but he loved his work and could not be persuaded to take time off for leisure. ‘I hope you’re not going to keep that light on when I get into bed,’ he said, ‘I can’t sleep with the light on, you know that, and I’m dead-tired.’ It crossed her mind that he was

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imagining she might have been staying awake to make love and that he was warning her of disappointment. That made her laugh - she had so little interest in sex these days - and so it was with a smile of amusement and a little derision that she said, as soon as he had got into bed, ‘I’m sorry, it won’t take a minute, there hasn’t been a good time all evening, but even if you’re shattered, I can’t let you go to sleep without telling you what happened this morning.’

She told him as quickly as possible, managing to reduce the whole trauma of these hours to a few succinct sentences. Malcolm became alert immediately. He jumped out of bed and came round to her side to face her and put back on the light which she had just switched off. Then he scrutinised her face for what seemed ages before saying: ‘So you’re not upset?’

‘Not really, no. Disturbed but, no, not upset in the way you mean.’

‘You haven’t said what she looks like.’

‘Not like me. She has beautiful auburn hair, she’s tall, and her figure is like my mother’s used to be.’

‘Attractive, then.’

‘Yes. Oh, she’s attractive.’

‘But what is she like?

‘I don’t know. It was impossible to tell. She was very strung up and nervous and then she became quite defiant and sarcastic …’

‘Hardly surprising.’

‘No.’

Malcolm put the light off and got back into bed and lay with his hands behind his head, as she was doing, both of them staring into the dark. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s get some sleep. I can’t think straight, I can’t think what we should do.’

‘We don’t have to do anything. It’s been done. It’s still up to her.’

Malcolm groaned and repeated that they must get some sleep and promptly turned over and began breathing deeply.

They were both very quiet and polite in the morning, holding themselves clear of all the confusion. It was a day when both of them left the house together, an unusual occurrence. Hazel found herself automatically scanning the bushes in front of the chapel, remembering the girl’s reference to herself lurking there. Abruptly, she told Malcolm this as they got into his car and he was horrified, and she wished she had never mentioned it. ‘Pathetic,’ he said, over and over again. Pathetic. All day, fully occupied though she was, she heard

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that word thumping in her brain, its rhythm insistent and strong. She fought it, not wanting to associate pathos with the girl, wanting to admit that it was only the spying and not the person who spied to whom the description pathetic could be applied. She told herself the girl wasn’t a waif, she was an intelligent, able law student with a good home and loving parents who on her own admission could not have been more fortunate in life. That was not pathetic. That was lucky. It all came down to whether being mothered by your actual mother mattered - no, it all came down to whether being disposed of by her mattered - no, it all came down to whether being rejected by her when you had found her at last mattered.

Yes. By the time Hazel went home her analysis was complete. It mattered. This was what was crucial, how the girl was treated now, by her mother. She had not behaved well when the girl - oh, this must stop, when Shona - came to claim her. A great deal of her treatment yesterday was excusable but not all of it. It was perfectly excusable not to have pretended delight where she had felt none. It might be sad that she had not been able to fling her arms round her daughter’s neck and embrace her passionately, but it was excusable. She had merely been true to her normal self and could not be blamed by Shona or anyone else for that. But she had not tried to empathise with this newly discovered daughter of hers. She had been wary and distant and from the first, she knew, had given off strong messages that she did not want any involvement. She had not really given Shona a chance to explore her own feelings, but had more or less dictated terms to her. And that was not excusable. She owed her some kind of welcome even if it could not be effusive. It was cowardly to freeze her out. The result could be that she would go through the rest of her life far more damaged by her mother’s disinterest than she had ever been by her original rejection. It was not the adoption which hurt but the discovery of it, the sickening realisation that she, Shona, was valued even less as a fully grown person than she had been as a characterless baby. A baby was nobody, Shona was somebody. A mother who, face to face with her own creation as a person, turned away could not be excused.

Before Malcolm came home, Hazel had done her own detective work. Shona’s name made looking for her easy - one phone call and it was located on the student list and her address and phone number given more freely than Hazel thought right, even if her voice, as a middle-aged, middle-class woman, could be said to arouse no

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suspicions. She thought that if she telephoned she might do more harm than good and if she wrote she would be ignored. The only thing to do was what Shona had done to her, turn up, unannounced, and plead. The moment she had decided this, she could not bear to wait. She asked Conchita to wait until Malcolm came home before going out to meet her friend. Then she dashed out to her car. Shona’s street in Kilburn wasn’t far away, but the traffic was heavy and it took her forty-five minutes. Then, when she had parked in the street and found the house she suddenly felt she should not be empty-handed. Did Shona drink? All students drank, surely. She found an off-licence and bought a bottle of the best champagne they had.

It was good for her, she conceded, to have to wait on Shona’s doorstep as Shona had waited on hers the day before. Humbling, that is what it was. She was the supplicant now, unsure and uncertain of her reception, afraid of having doors slammed in her face, nervous as to how she should proceed, what she should say. Yet still, compared to Shona, she had the advantage. She was secure and had nothing to resolve, whereas she had seen how Shona felt: she could not know herself without knowing her true mother. She was wrong, Hazel was convinced, but was it up to her to demonstrate that? She was still debating this with herself. What she must do was give Shona reassurance, the sort of reassurance which would come only from being made to feel valued if not loved.

It was a mighty mission and Hazel half smiled at herself as she stood on the doorstep. She was no crusader. Neither in her personal life nor in her work - where it would have been welcomed - had she ever shown any sense of mission about anything. She had never felt inspired, she had always followed rather than led, or else stood quite apart. Now she felt that she was engaged on a conversion of great importance and that only she could manage it. It was crucial to get Shona to see I do not, after all, matter, thought Hazel, and neither does my lack of love for her.

The door was opened by an elderly man, which surprised her. She told him she was here to visit Shona Mclndoe and he directed her down the stairs to the second door on the left in the basement. She realised she should have gone down the outside steps to Shona’s own door and apologised. ‘Happens all the time,’ the man said, ‘not that she has any visitors, she’s no trouble, it’s the other one, hordes of them coming to see her.’ The window beside the basement door

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had wooden shutters barring it. Probably wise, given the area, but how dark it must make the room. Hazel knocked on the door but there was no sound from within, though she waited and repeated her knock several times. Maybe Shona was not back from college yet, maybe she had gone out. Leaving the champagne on the doorstep was not a good idea and yet she wanted to do that. In her bag she had a pen and paper and now she leaned against the door and scribbled a note - ‘I came to drink this with you. Please get in touch

- Hazel.’ She thought about signing it ‘Your mother’ but that would have been outrageous. Then she laid the champagne sideways on the doorstep with the three empty milk bottles that were there in front of it. It was dark, nobody would see it unless they came and looked. She felt curiously elated after she had done this, as though something had been achieved, though it had not.

Malcolm was home early, for him. He was sharp with the boys, ordering them to bed before nine o’clock and allowing no television programmes. And he did not go to his study. He was in one of his rare clearing-up moods and rushed around tidying like a demented housewife, saying, as he always did in this mood, that his mother would have a fit if she saw this place. Hazel let him carry on. This was all too obviously a prelude to the kind of serious-talk sessions Malcolm loved to set up. Sometimes she was amused when he started his staging, sometimes so deeply irritated, she withdrew. Tonight she was neither. Malcolm’s fussing was part of him, the lesser known part. It had to be endured just as her own detachment had to be when it was carried to similar extremes and used as a weapon. She watched him plump up cushions and straighten chairs and let him make and bring coffee.