Shadow Baby (48 page)

‘Hardly.’

‘To my mother they are.’

‘I’m your mother.’

Hazel said it quite deliberately. She wanted to claim to be Shona’s mother precisely at the moment her identity was confused. It was a crude but effective way of reminding Shona that motherhood had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with nurturing. Catriona was her mother and all Hazel’s efforts were towards forcing her to acknowledge this at last. But Shona wouldn’t, not then She corrected herself and refused to receive the message. She rang Catriona there and then with Hazel still in hearing and in giving her the necessary information about the train was so curt it sounded offensive.

‘Is that how you always talk to your mother?’ Hazel asked.

‘No, it’s how I talk to Catriona,’ snapped Shona.

‘Why do you do it? Why do you hurt her?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I’ve just admitted that. I don’t understand but I’d like to.’

‘I don’t think you’re capable.’

‘God, you’re insolent, Shona,’ but Hazel laughed even as she objected. ‘Very, very insolent, and childish, for one so clever. You’ve been spoiled, grossly overindulged. You think Catriona loving you so completely gives you some sort of licence to insult.’

‘No, I don’t. I think she understands, whatever I say or do, so I don’t have to watch my step. That’s different.’

‘I can’t think why you ever wanted to leave this saint and claim me as your mother.’

‘I haven’t left her …’

‘Home to her once, in months, for forty-eight hours? A scrappy letter once every six weeks? And if you telephone, which I doubt, it hasn’t been from here since you moved in. I think she thinks you’ve left her. You’ve deserted her, abandoned this mother who loves you so much, for me.’

There hadn’t been any reply to that. Hazel realised she was always pushing Shona towards a quarrel so violent she would feel

compelled to leave, hurling words of hate as she went. But the moment never came and it was in Shona’s abrupt departures, her lack of retaliation at the crucial time, that Hazel saw herself. Cutting off, in the midst of what seemed unstoppable fury, was their technique. It could never be mistaken for defeat or associated with giving in - it was too strong, too deliberate, this absenting of oneself, this ostentatious rising above taunts. So Shona had left the room in which they had been sitting and had gone off into the garden where Malcolm was making a half-hearted stab at weeding. She went and helped him and Hazel saw how Malcolm became instantly alert, how his previously languid movements changed to a vigorous bending and digging with his trowel. They weeded together for half an hour and then Malcolm went to collect the boys from the swimming baths and Shona went with him, though there was no need to and it would mean Conchita squashing up with the children in the back seat. Clever, Hazel reflected, she’s clever, she is making herself indispensable in the most subtle way, vital to this family’s, my family’s, sense of well-being.

When Shona was away in Scotland Hazel felt liberated. She had her home to herself again. Her mother appreciated this. She had refused to be drawn into the admiring McAllister throng round Shona, and once the girl had moved in (which had naturally horrified Mrs Walmsley) she had taken care always to check she was not expected to be there before she herself came round. Hazel had told her how foolish this was.

‘Shona can’t be ignored any more, Mother,’ she had said, very early on, just as Mrs Walmsley’s attitude was becoming marked.

‘I am not ignoring her,’ her mother had said, ‘I’m simply keeping out of it.’

‘That’s the same.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Well, whatever your interpretation, it’s still silly, cutting yourself off from us because of Shona. You’re hardly seeing the boys at all, you’re cheating yourself and they miss you.’

‘They don’t miss me. They’ve got her.’

‘Oh, Mother, really. She’s just a novelty, they’re excited. They’re so young none of the implications occur to them. They can’t work out why you don’t want to be with Shona too, when she’s so lively and such fun.’

‘I know all that, but I can’t help it. She alarms me.’

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‘Shona? Oh, and what is alarming about her?’

‘You know.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes, you do. I’m sure she alarms you too, she must.’

‘Must? In what way “must”?’

‘The way she’s taken over your family.’

‘It’s hers, her family, that’s what you’re missing. She doesn’t see herself taking over, she thinks she’s fitting in, she’s just slipping into a gap she sees as always having been there.’

‘Well, it wasn’t there. That’s her mistake. There wasn’t any gap. You know that, I know that. You should tell her so.’

‘I’m not going to tell her anything. It would be fatal. Let her work it out eventually.’

‘But she won’t, she’s determined. You’ve got her for life now.’

She’d told her mother not to be so melodramatic, but Hazel privately thought those words prophetic. Inviting Shona to move in to their house had been the first step along the for-life road. Malcolm, in suggesting it, had, she knew, expected resistance from her and she had been very careful not to offer it. Instead, she had gone to great lengths to make their tiny attic flat as attractive as possible. They had had tenants there before, students who baby-sat and did some cleaning in return for a very low rent, but once au pairs had come into their household, the attic rooms had been kept empty, for visitors only. Now Hazel had them decorated and graciously asked Shona to choose the colours for paint and a new carpet. Malcolm was pleased. It felt right to him that Hazel should prepare a nest for her daughter and make her feel truly wanted. It was a significant gesture, recognised as such by all parties. Then there was the matter of holidays. The McAllisters had good holidays. They both worked very hard indeed and holidays were not just for pleasure but for recouping lost energies and preparing them for the rigours always ahead.

‘I was wondering,’ Malcolm had said, that first year, as the time for booking flights and villas approached, ‘about Shona. She’ll want to come, won’t she, as one of the family? So we won’t need Conchita. She can go home for that month.’ Hazel had raised her eyebrows. ‘What? You don’t think Conchita will like that? Surely she will.’

‘Oh, I’m sure Conchita will, but what about Shona? Will she see herself as an au pair for a month?’

‘She won’t be an au pair, don’t be silly.’

‘If we haven’t got Conchita, she’ll have to be. How else will we cope? What about all that time to ourselves we get, with Conchita looking after the boys?’

‘I didn’t mean Shona won’t want to be with the boys, but that won’t make her an au pair, she’s their sister, it’s different.’

‘Very different, different enough for her not to feel the least obliged to spend all day on a beach with three young boys if she doesn’t want to.’

‘But she mil want to, she loves them, she plays with them for hours as it is.’

‘That’s her choice, her whim. Once she’s expected to, she’ll think differently. The point is, Malcolm, you won’t be able to depend on her doing it, and if she doesn’t, you have no way of making her.’

‘So you don’t want her to come?’

‘I don’t care either way. All I care about is you and me having free time really to relax.’

‘I’ll discuss it with her.’

‘You do that.’

Shona came on their summer holiday with them, but so did Conchita. Malcolm paid for Shona of course, though with a good deal of secret swearing about the ruinous extravagance. It was not a success. Even Malcolm acknowledged this. The boys were normally quite happy with Conchita, but not if Shona was there. They wanted their half-sister all the time and when she grew tired of them, which she did quite quickly, within a week, they took their disappointment out on poor Conchita, who began to say she wanted to go home for good and thought she had been with the McAllister family long enough Then Malcolm thought it not fair to treat Shona like Conchita and so in the evenings Shona came with them when they went out to restaurants. They were suddenly a threesome at the only time they could count on being just a couple. Hazel grew quieter and quieter, Shona more and more animated. She loved Italian night life - they had rented a villa near Sorrento - and her enthusiasm was so touching to Malcolm that he reacted by making sure they went out far more than usual. Shona was dictating the pace.

It had, some time soon, to come to an end, Hazel reasoned. Shona was a student. At the end of her three-year course she would have decisions to make, and by the end of her second year was already

doubting whether she would carry on with law. Malcolm wanted her to. He told her she’d make an excellent defence lawyer and urged her to come and work as a legal clerk in his firm in her vacation. This would give her an idea of what legal aid work was about and he was sure would inspire her to try for articles. But Shona demurred. She said she felt she had made a mistake and should have done something with languages. She wanted to travel first, whatever she ‘ decided to do after her degree; and at the word ‘travel’ Hazel felt hopeful. But there was no sign of any travelling meanwhile. It struck Hazel as odd how much Shona stayed at home. She was twenty, twenty-one nearly, but she behaved like a middle-aged person, seeming uninterested in any of the social pursuits common to her age group. And where were her friends? There were none to be seen. No one came home with her or visited. Even Malcolm, so happy that Shona liked to be with them at weekends, thought this unusual. ‘She’s so attractive,’ he said, ‘I can’t understand it. The men in her college must be blind.’

No, they were not blind, Hazel could sense that. They were not so much blind, these unknown men, as struck dumb by Shona’s singlemindedness which would manifest itself in all kinds of off-putting ways. Shona had her studies - she seemed a serious student whatever her doubts about law as a career - and she had her new family and nothing and no one else was allowed to interfere. She would not be able, Hazel reckoned, to take on any relationship even if one were offered, not while she had this sense of mission to become one of the McAllisters. It was like a job to her and one at which she worked hard. Hours and hours had to be devoted to becoming part of the very fabric of this family of her mother’s, and only when belonging had become effortless would she have room for anything else. It must exhaust her: watching Shona, observing her ever more closely, Hazel was sure of this. And all for what? What was she getting out of the struggle that made it worthwhile?

Sometimes Hazel envisaged how things would have been if she had kept Shona. Never, during all the lost years before Shona appeared on her doorstep, had Hazel ever fantasised about being a single parent, but then that dignified term had not existed. In the fifties there had been only ‘unmarried mothers’. It had never occurred to her to wonder how she would have made out alone with a child. But now she grew fascinated by the possibilities and saw herself in retrospect exercising great ingenuity in doing what she had

done while being a single mother. It was possible, she told herself, that her father, had he been told the truth, would have supported her; possible she could still have taken a degree and worked; possible that when she met Malcolm she would have had an eight-year-old daughter. This would not have put Malcolm off. He would have accepted and loved Shona. She would have been his readymade daughter, they would have been a family from the beginning. And that was when her fantasy became interesting to Hazel - imagining Shona not desperate to become part of a family from which she had been excluded, but on the contrary desperate, in the normal adolescent and young adult way, to escape family ties. Especially maternal ones. Running from them, Hazel envisaged, running away, not towards, doing the rejecting herself.

She wished, often, that she could have proper discussions of this sort with Shona, but there was no chance of those. By the time Shona had lived with them for almost two years, Hazel knew her well enough to realise there never would be such an opportunity. But what was somehow comforting was the far deeper realisation that there never would have been either - even if Shona had been with her from birth, there would have been this reluctance on her part to engage in emotional encounters in which the unsayable might be said. Shona was her grandmother all over again. There never would have been any true connection. Hazel saw herself as stranded between the two of them, her mother unable to give and Shona to receive. The link, the link motherhood was supposed to give, was believed by Shona to give, was not there. She could not love Shona and Shona could not love her, but this lack of love had, in Hazel’s opinion, little to do with what had happened in the past. Brought together now, as two adults, it was clear that with the exception of certain traits of mind and personality they were not alike and shared no common interests or attitudes. They would always have been destined to grow apart if, through the circumstances of intimate family life, they had been forced for many years to be close. Shona might have been denied her true mother but that mother would not have been true in any meaningful sense at all.

Hazel felt better. The more convinced she became that Shona and she would never have fused together, just as she herself and her own mother had never done so, the less guilty and anguished she felt about having given her daughter away. The shadow lifted and with it her resentment at Shona’s very existence. She felt quite tender

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towards Shona and was able to demonstrate this in new ways. From being always on the alert and watchful, she felt she could afford to turn away and let the new family mixture settle down. It was settling in any case. The boys were growing up. Philip was mature for his age and in the two years he had known his half-sister he had naturally changed dramatically. At first he had admired and been fascinated by her, but gradually he began challenging her, competing with her, and in his arguments with her Hazel heard a determination not to let Shona dominate either him or his family. He got to a position where he had very nearly moved on to the attack, and it gave Hazel the opportunity to defend Shona and demonstrate sympathy. Philip was furious with her.