Shadow Baby (52 page)

Josephine wrote her father’s name boldly in the church register and her mother kept the secret of her illegitimacy because she did not dare do anything else. She had used Joseph’s surname for so long now it did not seem to matter (but she had a miserable feeling that it did, to Josephine at least). Josephine was glad to settle in London and begin her new, her very new, life. Her first son was born ten months after his parents’ marriage, to Josephine’s great

336

satisfaction. Nothing could have been more respectable, and even though times were changing and morals with them, this mattered to her. Sex did not. It appalled her to remember that it was for this that her mother had risked her good name. It was absurd. Why could she not have waited? Why could she not have made him wait? Gerald had waited. There had been no question of his not doing so. He had not even pressed her too hard and once they were married his demands were modest, to her great relief. Gerald loved her and she loved him and sex was something quite different. When, after two sons, she gave birth to her daughter Hazel, she hoped to be able to bring her up to understand this. Then mistakes would not be made.

337

IT WAS a strange, lost feeling to have her dead. All hope gone. Hope ought to have left her long, long ago, but it never quite had. It should have departed with her when she left Carlisle but always, at the back of her mind, there had been the image of herself, carrying her baby, approaching her mother’s door once more and finding it open, and seeing all the hostility on her mother’s face fade, replaced by joy as she opened her arms to welcome her grandchild as she had not been able to welcome her child. Such a pretty picture it was. It kept Evie happy. All she needed was to give birth and she could give life to this fantasy, the transformation could take place.

Only twice was a doctor called for. They could afford doctors, it was not the expense which prevented her. It was the pointlessness and then the humiliation. They were impatient, these men, with her expectations. What did she expect them to be able to do? They told her to be glad she was miscarrying for there must have been something malformed about the foetus to cause its rejection. She lay and thought about this, in the dark, with the blood seeping steadily out of her. Malformed or not, she wanted to become its mother. Her tenderness, her loving care, would compensate. But no amount of lying still could keep any of her babies inside her. They left her, as her own mother had left her, and she was helpless with grief.

Once, the child was far enough along for its sex to be plainly seen. A girl, five months in gestation. She wished to keep her, in her bed, wrapped in the shawl she had crocheted, the shawl she would be buried in, but the midwife would not allow this. Her daughter was taken away and Evie screamed and screamed and was threatened with the madhouse if she did not stop. It would be the right place for her. She felt mad. But then there was Jimmy, patient and

338

devoted, proving himself time after time, poor Jimmy forced to bear the brunt of her brutal distress. He gave up hope long before she did but pretended he had not. He indulged her fantasies and she was grateful to him. Seven miscarriages she suffered and all except two were dealt with by Jimmy, who took away the liver-like scraps which came from her and burned them. Blood became her familiar. The sight of it haunted her even when she was not bleeding and her aversion to all things red grew. She felt many a time that she was floating on oceans of blood and there was not a sheet in the house unmarked by the stains however long the linen had been soaked and scrubbed, soaked and scrubbed.

She wondered, as she lay in the midst of this blood when she was miscarrying, what her mother would think if she saw her now. Would her heart melt at last? When she saw the pain and misery and then the futility of it all? Evie talked to her, when the pain was at its worst, and was considered delirious. ‘Is her mother at hand?’ the doctor asked Jimmy and was told Evie had no mother, which was what he believed. The Arnesens’ secret was safe with Evie and if he had suspicions (for where could his wife ever have found the money for them to buy a house?) they were of a different nature and all to do with Henry, but not Leah, Arnesen. Evie told him, when first she agreed to walk out with him, that she had no mother and that was that. Jimmy was an innocent in every way, a man who accepted and never questioned. His own mother was long since dead and he thought nothing of mothers. His wife’s passion to become a mother completely baffled him.

Jimmy brought the Cumberland News home from Carlisle especially for Evie to see the announcement - Leah Arnesen, devoted wife of Henry and much loved mother of Rose and Polly, and grandmother of Charles and Josephine, on n April, at home, suddenly. Jimmy, who went on business to Carlisle often, had connections still with friends who continued to work at Arnesen’s and was told it had been a heart attack. The funeral was in three days’ time. At once, Evie determined to go. She had not been out of the house since her last miscarriage some two months since (a miscarriage which at her age of forty was indeed likely to be her last) and was still weak, but she never hesitated. Jimmy was aghast. He could not believe she truly intended to make the tiring journey and saw no alternative, when he realised she was in earnest, but to take her himself, though there was no reason for him to go again so soon to Carlisle.

339

Evie dressed in heavy mourning, as though a principal mourner, and Jimmy privately wondered what the Arnesen family would think of such presumption. The church was almost full, because Henry Arnesen was a respected figure who had been mayor the year before. Entering the church, Jimmy saw Evie was taken aback at the size of the congregation. He indicated a row at the back still virtually unoccupied, but to his consternation she began marching down the centre aisle. He followed, because there was nothing else he could do but be loyal. She went right to the front, to the first row where Henry Arnesen and his two daughters and one son-in-law and two small grandchildren were all seated. Evie stood, waiting. Jimmy clutched her sleeve, but she shook him off, and at the same time Henry Arnesen stood up and motioned his family to do likewise and they all moved along, to make room for Evie and Jimmy.

The coffin was smothered with flowers, most of them camellias, white camellias, Leah’s favourite flower. Everyone wept, except Evie. She looked through her veil at the coffin and the beautiful flowers and could not weep for the mother who had never loved her. She wanted to weep for herself, but the tears would not come. Instead, a sense of rage began to grow in her and her face behind its veil burned and she wondered the veil was not set alight by this heat. She hardly heard the words of the service and did not sing the hymn. When the coffin was taken out she was first to follow it, brushing Jimmy aside as he hesitated and cowered before the Arnesens. She knew everyone was staring at her, appalled by her impertinence and doubtless expecting Henry Arnesen to deal with her appropriately. But he handed her into the first car and got in beside her, with the two daughters whose expressions could not be seen but could easily be guessed at. No one spoke in the car. At the cemetery, Evie stood with Henry, and when the coffin had been lowered into its trench he turned to her and in everyone’s hearing said, ‘Will you come to the house?’ She nodded. Jimmy was nowhere to be seen.

She found herself to be perfectly composed once inside the house she had never been allowed to enter. There was quite a spread laid out in the dining-room with glasses of whisky for the men and sherry for the women. Evie neither ate nor drank. She stood to one side, near the window and, looking out, thought of herself once always looking in. She was aware that Rose and Polly were engaged in whispered debate with their father and knew it was about her. He

340

would tell them. He must tell them. It was why she had come. If he did not tell them she would have to do so herself and quite looked forward to this. But now, though she had, unlike all the other women, not lifted her veil, Miss Mawson had recognised her. ‘Why, Evie, it is Evie, is it not? My dear, how good of you to come.’ Evie inclined her head but said not a word. She saw that Miss Mawson positively vibrated with curiosity and the sense that something dramatic was about to happen if, with Evie’s behaviour in the church, it had not already done so. ‘So sad,’ Miss Mawson was saying, ‘so sudden, a heart attack, you know, though she had never had anything wrong with her heart.’ Miss Mawson lowered her voice even further. ‘It may have been weakened by the shock, of course. Years ago now but still a dreadful, dreadful blow at the time.’ Evie had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Rose, you know, and her intended killed in action, and then … She is a pretty little thing, Josephine.’

Henry Arnesen came between them. He bowed to Miss Mawson and accepted her sincere condolences. Then he asked Evie to come with him a moment and, watched by the entire room, the two of them went out and into the study across the hall. Henry shut the door. ‘Why did you come to the funeral?’ he asked.

‘I am her daughter,’ Evie said, proudly. She knew what he was going to say.

‘She has passed on,’ Henry said. ‘All that is finished. Do you wish to distress Rose and Polly more than they are already distressed? Do you wish to ruin their mother in their eyes now she is gone from them?’

Evie put up her veil. She looked long and steadily at Henry and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I wish to tell my sisters I am their mother’s daughter too and then I will go and never bother them again.’

‘It is cruel,’ Henry said.

‘It is she who was cruel,’ Evie said, ‘and made me suffer all my life. And your girls are mothers themselves, they should understand, one of them especially, I am told.’

Rose and Polly slipped into the study nervously and stood either side of their father with Evie facing all three of them. They had changed greatly since she had last seen them. Rose in particular she would not have recognised. The pretty girl had given way to a sombre matron, pale of face and dull-looking, where once she had sparkled. Polly had merely lost weight and grown tall. They looked

frightened, and their father did nothing to reassure them. ‘This is Mrs Paterson,’ he said. ‘She has something she wishes you to know.’ Rose gave a little moan. All three stared at Evie and waited. ‘I am her daughter too,’ she said. There was no reaction, so she repeated the words and for good measure added, ‘I am your mother’s daughter too, her first-born, before ever she married your father.’ The two women both looked up at Henry. ‘Father,’ whispered Rose, ‘can this be true?’ He nodded, unable to speak. Nobody moved. Evie waited and waited, and then she said, ‘I must go home now.’ They parted and she went out into the hall and the front door was opened for her and outside Jimmy was waiting. She made him take her back to the cemetery and there she looked again at the mound under which her mother rested, and she felt it was over at last. ‘I have no mother,’ she said, ‘I never had a mother, and I never shall be one.’ Jimmy, standing at a little distance away, on her instructions, heard only an indistinct murmur and thought a prayer was being said. He was in a hurry to get Evie home. She did not look well and whatever this attendance at Leah Arnesen’s funeral was about he wanted it over.

Evie went with him docilely enough. She had no more miscarriages. At forty-five she had an abrupt menopause and this was said to account for her unbalanced behaviour afterwards. She took to wandering the streets, knocking on doors and asking for her mother. And in the end Jimmy was forced to agree she needed treatment. Before it could begin, she died in a state mental institution, of a heart attack, quite unexpectedly.

It was in the middle of Australia that Shona suddenly felt homesick. Predictable, it was so predictable it made her smile in the midst of her melancholic turn of mind - the intense heat, the dust, the reds and browns, all so different from the Scottish coast. She sent a postcard to Catriona and Archie, saying she was missing St Andrews and would give anything for a blow along the beach in the rain and mist. At the bottom she wrote ‘and missing you both too’. It was true. All the time she’d been at university in London she hadn’t been back to St Andrews more than half a dozen times, for ever shorter periods, and yet now she was so far away she craved the place. She sat with her eyes shut on a bench outside the post office, her T-shirt and shorts damp with the perspiration which drenched

342

her by midday every day and only seemed to leave her when she was actually standing under a cold water shower. She felt not just hot but sick. She had neither the skin nor the colouring, nor indeed, she thought, the metabolism to survive this kind of climate. The two girls she had teamed up with did far better. They were dark-haired Mediterranean types who soaked up the sun and came to life in its heat.

She wanted to go home. There was no reason why not. She could begin the long journey back any time she wanted. There was nothing to hold her here. Sixteen months she’d been away and it was enough - it was time, definitely time, to halt this roaming and think what she wanted to do with her life. But she felt sick and weak and lacked the energy to leave her companions and about-turn on her own. Maybe she was ill, maybe the bug she had picked up in India hadn’t really left her stomach. She wished her mother was near, a babyish thing to wish, and she wouldn’t say it aloud or the other two would laugh. She wanted to be looked after, fussed over and, still with her eyes shut, soothed herself with a vision of Catriona applying a cold compress to her burning forehead and ushering her into a cool and darkened room. It made her feel cheap, to think of her mother only as someone useful who would care for her. Perturbed, she opened her eyes and tried to pull herself together. Some effort was needed. They’d left their rucksacks in the hostel, but now she said she was going to go back and collect hers and get a bus to Darwin and fly to Sydney and then home. ‘I’m not up to this,’ she said, and the other two accepted her verdict cheerfully. They’d only been together three weeks.