The Adoption (25 page)

Lucilla imagines a keeper letting them all out, the entire zooful spilling onto the streets of London, zebras stopping the traffic crossing at zebra crossings, flamingos in the fountains at Trafalgar Square, buffalo grazing Buckingham Palace Gardens, toucans in the leafy branches of the trees bordering the Thames, monkeys rioting in the Houses of Parliament and swinging off the chandeliers. And she imagines the tigers hunting prey, their stomachs achingly empty, juices running over their glistening ivory fangs. She imagines a streak of them stalking cousin Frank, when he sets off from the house in Archway to go trainspotting. Shutting her eyes, she sees them ducking behind
privet
hedges when, sensing he is being followed, he darts a look over his hunched bony shoulders. And then, caught off guard as he turns a corner, they pounce, and set about bolting down his scrawny hide. When they are replete, they saunter off down the Mall to find a sunny spot for a snooze. An untidy heap of clawed stamp albums, book matchboxes and trainspotting notebooks fit for nothing but a bonfire – all that would be left of cousin Frank! She gives an ear-to-ear grin. London, she decides, glancing back at the tigers as they slink by, would be vastly improved with a zooful of beasts prowling the city jungle.

They travel in coaches all over England attending temperance conventions. Aunt Enid and her cousins come as well. Often they visit the seaside and stay in bed and breakfasts, or at inexpensive hotels. Lucilla hates the coach trips. Almost as soon as they depart she starts missing Scamp. And she is plagued by travel sickness. The boiled sweets her mother keeps plugging her salivating mouth with merely aggravate it. She slumps against the prickly upholstery of her seat staring glumly into brown paper bags, while her tummy does pancake flips, and a burning sourness ebbs up her throat. And sometimes the coach has to squeal to a halt in a lay-by, the motor turning over, while she rushes out to retch in the bushes. All the other passengers peer at her from their telly screen windows, and tap the glass, and clap their hands over their gaping mouths. And when it is over and she climbs back in feeling like a twisted tube, they all mumble to each other the way they did during the temperance music festival. When Frank accompanies them, the teasing about these queasy episodes is merciless.

‘You smell worse than a stink bomb, cousin Lucilla. You’re making the whole coach pong, stink bomb,’ comes his pernicious undertone as he leers over her.

On route to Brighton they stop at Beachy Head for this very purpose. While Lucilla is vomiting, the driver, lighting up a Woodbine, suggests they all get out and stretch their legs. The lighthouse is Frank’s
idea
. He is the one who wants to see it, the Belle Tout Lighthouse. ‘The name means “beautiful headland”. Did you know that?’ says Frank. Her father perks up instantly. He shares his nephew’s mania for acquiring information. ‘Building began in eighteen thirty-two after fleets of ships were wrecked and thousands of sailors were drowned.’

‘Well, I don’t know about shipwrecks but this wind is playing havoc with my hairdo,’ Aunt Enid remarks needled, anchoring her black straw breton with an extra hatpin she removes from the brim. She buttons up her jacket and rearranges her fox fur..

‘The light from the thirty Argand lamps was thrown over twenty miles out to sea. That put a stop to it,’ Frank says.

‘Twenty miles, eh?’ Her father is nodding. ‘Nearly all the way to France then.’

‘Fancy you knowing that, Frank,’ says her mother in admiration. ‘You are a clever boy.’

Frank responds to this flattery with a courtly bow and another fact. ‘I read about it in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. The chalk cliffs are five hundred and thirty feet at their highest point. That’s nearly one hundred and eighty yards.’

‘Near enough a tenth of a mile then,’ her father adds, determined not to be outdone, consulting the conversion table in his own head.

‘And did you know it was evacuated during the Second World War? Canadian troops used it for target practice. Or at least they hit it by mistake. But it’s still standing.’ Frank seems to be building up a head of steam.

‘Well I never,’ comments Aunt Enid, not listening to a word. She is examining the stiletto heel of one of her shoes, perturbed that she may have stepped in something unsavoury.

‘I think we should take a look,’ Frank proposes.

‘Might as well as we’re here,’ her father agrees. They splinter off from the main party, her parents, Aunt Enid, Frank and Rachel. Lucilla
is
nearly left behind, but Rachel, remembering her, turns back.

‘You don’t still feel dodgy?’ she calls out. Lucilla shakes her head, though she can taste the bile. ‘Come on then. We are going to the lighthouse, the Belle Tout Lighthouse.’ Her thin voice is lacerated by the wind, her long brown hair like an elaborate headdress torn this way and that. ‘Hurry up, Lucilla.’ She is wearing a greyish-blue gabardine coat with a shoulder cape. The cape keeps blowing up and covering her face, and she peels it off giggling. It is a blustery day, the wind sweeping inland off the sea. Lucilla drinks down the bracing salty moisture, letting it rinse her mouth. She catches up with them circling Belle Tout. Heads thrown back they stare at the monument, their shouts stolen from their open mouths.

‘Uncle Merfyn, let’s take a look at the view!’ This is Frank, nearly as tall as her father now, his face battered by the wind looking more middle-aged than teen.

Her father, her mother on one arm and Aunt Enid on the other, yells back, ‘OK, but do be careful.’ And they set themselves into the teeth of the blast, trudging up the steep gradient, making for the cliff edge. None of them, not even Rachel, seems aware of Lucilla any more, tussling after them. When they are no more than a couple of yards from the sheer chalky drop, her father lifts a hand and, as if at a signal from their commander, they all halt. Legs akimbo they pit themselves against the onslaught, digging out divots in the scrubby grass. They huddle shoulder to shoulder. Their trappings, flannel and herringbone, corduroy and dimity, worsted and nylon, in blues and russets and greens and creams, fan out like an inflating parachute. At a distance, her mother’s black cloche hat looks like a full stop. Their voices, indiscernible, scribble on the whirling scrolls of the wind.

Lucilla is stupefied by the brutal power slapping her face, buffeting her body. She is weak-kneed at the glassy altitude, drawn ineluctably to the brink. She has been here before, poised on the chalky brim of
her
island home. Dreaming? Has she dreamed this place, wind-thrashed, grass-quashed, on high, the sky an arm’s reach, the sea beckoning at the foot of the turret? Coming under their radar, she shuffles ahead to the very edge. When there are no more than a few feet between her and nothingness, the flying dream becomes the master puppeteer. She feels the tug of the strings on her feet, her hands, her knees, between her shoulder blades. He yanks up the crown of her head then he croons lovingly into her whistling ears.

‘You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!’ And so … and so she tips her weight over the balls of her feet, angling herself into the resistant force of the wind. Further and further she goes, giving up her territory inch by inch. At the last, the moment of flight, another force hooks the collar of her coat and yanks her back.

‘For heaven’s sake, Lucilla, are you insane? Anyone would think that you were trying to kill yourself. I can’t trust you for a second.’

‘But I was going to fly,’ wails Lucilla. ‘I was going to fly!’ They have retreated into the lee of Belle Tout, the mother and her adopted daughter. The lighthouse towers impassively over the struggling pair. The sun strikes the glass eye and it bounces back a white-gold ray. ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ screams the girl, wanting to race back and hurl herself off Beachy Head, knowing that the wind will catch her, that she
will
fly.

‘Now, Lucilla stop this,’ barks her father, sliding like a shark into looming shadow of Belle Tout.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ screeches Aunt Enid, hand on her askew hat, bumping into and out of the shade in a flap.

‘Lucilla, I’m warning you,’ bellows her mother, walloping at her gyrating form. But the strings are still attached. The puppeteer plucks them expertly, so that her arms windmill as she knees her mother in the stomach.

‘She’s crazed, a loony. She’s gone hopping mad, Aunt Harriet,’ is
Frank
’s verdict, skipping sideways outside the fighting ring, attempting to tackle his raving cousin if she makes a dash for the cliff face.

‘Don’t hurt her,’ implores Rachel, hands blindfolding her eyes, ghosting Frank.

‘Give me a hand, Frank,’ snarls her father, making a grab for her hair. ‘I’ve got her.’ But he hasn’t, only a fistful of wisps.

‘Righto, sir.’ Frank has his orders and needs no extra encouragement to pile into the fray. ‘Drat it, keep still will you, Lucilla!’

‘Somebody do something!’ Aunt Enid’s histrionics are muffled in her fox fur.

‘Ouch! She bit me, the little tyke,’ bellows her mother leaping backwards and toppling over, smack, onto her bottom, landing in an ungainly heap.

‘Harriet? Harriet? Has she killed you?’ This from Aunt Enid, rushing in, the both of them now gagged with the swinging fox pelt.

Her father has wrestled her to the ground and pinned her flaying arms down, and Frank is sitting astride her still kicking legs. Her mother is jabbering something about bad blood, and Hitler, and how both her stockings have been laddered by the SS. Aunt Enid, the most unlikely of Florence Nightingales, realising that her sister-in-law has not sustained life-threatening injuries, dives with the aplomb of a tipsy ballet dancer onto the next patient. Her daughter is weeping inconsolably. She mops up Rachel’s tears with the fox’s tail, causing her to have a sneezing fit. Frank’s face is contorted as he tries to quell his laughter. Overhead, obscuring the sun like the undercarriage of a fighter plane, comes her father’s plum face. He is hollering uncontrollably, spittle flying from his mouth ‘LUCILLA, CALM DOWN! CALM DOWN!’ And impish Ariel, well seasoned with sea salt, is frisking them all, every atom of their lashing bodies. Then the strings are cut and Lucilla’s eyelids flicker and close. As if sedated, she goes suddenly limp.

It is shortly after this incident that she comes home to the bowl of blood. And it is strange in a way, because she has been thinking about blood that very afternoon, and about her mother shouting about bad blood on Beachy Head, when all she wanted to do was fly, fly away. Perhaps some blood was dirty, though that seemed a rather stupid idea to her. Surely if it was dirty, dirty inside you, well … you’d get sick. For a moment she turned her hand palm upwards and traced the delicately raised veins she could see on her wrists. What, she pondered with real interest, about her blood? Was it good or bad? And how did people tell? Perhaps there was a test and doctors performed it when people were criminals, murderers and thieves. Perhaps that was what they told the judges in court. His blood is good and so he is innocent. But her blood, Lucilla Pritchard’s blood is very bad and she should be sent to prison for a long, long time, for her whole life in fact. Lucilla shivers.

Lost in her meditations, she fumbles for her own key tied on a ribbon about her neck these days. The house receives her in reverential silence, save for Scamp whose tail thumps on the tiled floor of the hallway. She listens for upstairs noises. Mrs Fortinbrass opening a can of beans? Lifting a saucepan out of the cupboard? Boiling a kettle? Nothing. Downstairs is as still as a morgue as well, no sounds of her mother bashing and banging utensils like cymbals, no smoke fumes overcoming her. ‘Mother?’ she cries, hesitantly. ‘Mother?’ She cannot recall ever being alone with the house. The atmosphere is not hostile, only a fraction stunned, as if it is being roused after an all-night shindig.

She creeps from room to room, feeling like a trespasser, Scamp on her heels. An investigation confirms that all are empty. Her mother may be resting? Unlikely, but possible, she deduces, hovering outside her parents’ bedroom door. She gives a faltering tap. Waits. Chews the left then the right side of her bottom lip. Taps again. The house holds
its
breath in suspense and, as she edges the door open slowly, sighs it out. A speedy scan shows that the curtains are drawn, the beds made up and empty.

These beds were friends once, corner-to-corner mattresses, their sheets and blankets laundry buddies. Lucilla cannot pinpoint the exact day that she noticed a cooling in the temperature of their ticking, that there was a rift in their relationship, a trough forming between them. All she can recall is seeing them incrementally ease apart with the changing seasons. Had one developed bad mattress odour, or an infestation of bed mites? Or had they developed extreme dandruff due to decades of being bombarded by dead skin cells? Whatever, it seems implausible now that they ever tolerated their close proximity.

She scans the floor for clues, a good detective’s strategy. For a moment she wonders if her mother has died, if she has expired in a paroxysm of zealous cleaning, Jeyes fluid pouring onto the lino from an upturned bottle. But no, it is clear. On closer scrutiny, however, as she expands her fingertip search, there is an odd object crying out to be investigated – a chipped white enamel bowl sitting incongruously on her mother’s dressing table, next to the tin of medicated talcum powder. She approaches it with caution as if it is alive. One, two, three steps and she peers inside, gasps, jumps back. The bowl is full of blood, gouts of blood, tissues sodden in blood. And look, there are more bloody tissues on the dressing table. Has an unfortunate person been massacred? But if so where is the body? For minutes, she stands and stares at the blood, at the wattle redness of it puddling in the bowl. The air smells like a butcher’s shop, fleshy and raw. Scamp butts her leg and snorts.

When her father arrives home the explanation is forthcoming. Her mother has been admitted to Whittington Hospital in Highgate. ‘She has had a nosebleed, Lucilla. A severe nosebleed. Wouldn’t stop.
Gushing
out of her. Doctor said her blood pressure is far too high. They’re going to keep her in for a few days, so we’ll have to make do for supper. But not to worry, they’re going to fix her up.’