The Adoption (38 page)

‘Then I’ll be kicking off a new trend,’ I fired back, rudely. And, without waiting for his reaction, I swept out into the sunshine and
strutted
proudly down the Tottenham Court Road. But the exultant inner cry of ‘I’m free’ was soused after a few reckless minutes with a more sobering thought. What the hell was I going to do, because when my mother learned of my defection she would kill me. Still, head high, I wandered on. Arriving in Leicester Square, I found myself staring in at the window of Foyle’s Bookshop, at the display of tempting novels. And then out of the corner of my eye I saw a notice headed VACANCIES. What had I to lose?

I went in and wrote my name on the list of applicants, all patiently waiting to see the great Christina Foyle. I was told that she would be interviewing prospective staff personally. Although there was a whole row of people who had more than likely been queuing for hours, before the ink was dry on my application form my name was called. I was ushered to an upstairs office, and invited by the lady herself to take a seat opposite her desk. She was an elegant woman with a wide, heart-shaped face and fine bone structure. She had cropped wavy dark hair, parted at the side and tucked behind her ears. When they rested on me, her greyish blue eyes brimmed with intelligence under their carefully shaped eyebrows. She leaned forwards and shook my hand.

‘I am Christina Foyle. This is my bookshop. And you are Lucilla Pritchard?’ I nodded glumly. Hearing my name spoken out loud invariably shattered my confidence. ‘Do you like books, Lucilla?’

I did not have to consider my reply. ‘Oh I love them,’ I gushed. She gave a smile that began and ended in her perceptive eyes.

She glanced down at my form, which I now saw somewhat self-consciously was on the top of the pile set in front of her. ‘You’ve only recently left school?’ I nodded and waited.

‘John Lewis.’ The name fell like a boulder between us. ‘What happened in John Lewis, Lucilla? You seem to have had one of the shortest careers in history with the prestigious firm.’ I fixed her edgily, but the sparkle I saw in her eyes reassured me.

I considered that it might be prudent to lie, but settled for honesty in all its bold simplicity. ‘I didn’t want to work there. My mother forced me to go,’ I blurted out. ‘They assigned me to the haberdashery department. Haberdashery! I hate ribbons and bows and buttons, and all that sewing clobber. I couldn’t stick it, not even for a day.’

‘I see,’ said Christina Foyle, and apparently she did because she hired me on the spot. I was to work in her book club. She had extensive offices from which she operated book clubs, she explained. And it would be my job to order and pack up all the books. I told my parents airily that being a shop assistant was not my style, that I had a vocation for literature. If not exactly relished, this deviation was palatable to them.

All this while, the romance between Henry and me continued … and flourished. My adoptive parents’ dislike of him had also burgeoned. By now they had abandoned all attempts at concealing how much they despised him. Our relationship was becoming as tricky to conduct as if I had been a Capulet, and he a Montague. One night my father came to my bedroom after I had gone to bed. Up reading, I was startled by his sudden entrance. Closing the door behind him, he made his way unsteadily to my bedside and sat down facing me. He was wearing his dressing gown. His face without his glasses looked strangely bare, like a wall blotted with rectangles of lighter paintwork where the pictures have been removed. He hardly ever left them off. He was leering at me oddly. His face had the hue of a steamed lobster, his hair was messed up and a sour taint hung on his breath, which I now recognised as whisky. My father had come hot foot from the shed.

I wondered if my supposedly teetotal father, chairman of the Sons of Temperance, was inebriated at some of the meetings he and my mother attended? Or was he living a double life? Dissolute at home; a paragon of virtue with the Sons of Temperance. If my mother had
detected
the not so subtle changes in the climate of my father’s demeanour, she was playing blind, deaf and dumb. What was that wartime phrase I had come across at school. Ah yes, I had it then, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ That was exactly what my mother was doing. Keeping calm and carrying on. My father was just carrying on!

‘Dad, are … are you all right?’ I queried tentatively, setting my book aside.

He blinked slowly at me, owlishly. ‘Oh ye– yesss,’ he slurred. ‘I only came to say goodnight.’ His disposition of late had been markedly erratic. Now his eyes seemed to spider over me, scrutinising every plane and bump on view.

‘Good– goodnight?’ I tested. It was not a ritual I was used to.

‘Can’t a man come and kiss his daughter goodnight?’ he asked, his diction smeary as peanut butter. He winked at me lasciviously, and shuffled higher up the bed until I was within arms’ reach.

‘Of course you can,’ I said uncertainly, made uneasy by his proximity. My cotton pyjamas suddenly felt terribly flimsy.

He began to stroke my hair. ‘I know things have been a bit awkward lately, what with you being such a big … big girl now. And going out with your young man.’ He took hold of a few strands and lifted them, then sifted them through his fingers. ‘You’re a woman. A wooomaaan!’ He extended the vowels in a wet embarrassing croon.

‘Henry, his name’s Henry,’ I clarified, fighting the impulse to slap his hand away.

‘Henry. Yes, Henry.’ A volley of spittle landed on his chin and my cheek. His thigh was pressing on mine so I curled my legs away from him, underneath me. ‘You’ve changed, Lucilla.’ He ogled me blatantly, slewing words out of the corner of his mouth. I shrank back, pulling the blanket up over my breasts.

After that day when my mother sat me down at the kitchen table and proclaimed that she was not my mother, and that my father was
not
my father either, nothing had been mentioned again. Looking at my adoptive father, at the hollows and wrinkles in his face exaggerated in the twilight, it dawned on me quite how old he was. His entire hairline had receded so that it was level with his ears, like a wig that had slipped. There was grey steeling his crinkly hair. His brow looked like a rutted lane. And his complexion was all flab and pouches.

‘My daughter,’ he mumbled thickly. ‘My daughter.’ His hand had left off toying with my hair. It had slipped and now he was fingering my face.

I gave a pantomime yawn. ‘I should get some sleep now. Work tomorrow,’ I chirped up, willing him to go. I could smell his sweat, like the feral odour of tomcats.

‘Well, give your father a hug and turn in then,’ he said. Uncomfortably, I leaned forwards, put my arms under his and laid my head lightly on his chest. His heart was racketing.

‘Goodnight, Dad.’ But when I pulled back, his arms tightened around me, an effective straitjacket.

‘This is pleasant, isn’t it?’ mumbled the father who wasn’t my father.

‘Mmm.’ Again I wriggled, wanting to extricate myself, when I felt his hands moving up and down my back. Then his hand dived beneath my pyjama top and his fingers started to knead my flesh. ‘Dad!’ I tried to shove him away but I couldn’t.

‘Just … stay … stay … still for … a minute,’ he puffed like a steam train climbing a steep hill. ‘Just let me … let me … let me …’ His wet lips mouthed my ear and, still pinioning me in position with one hand, the other burrowed into my belly, then higher and higher, until it was squirming between my breasts. I fought him off the way I would an attacker in the street, scratching aside his dressing gown, and clawing at his chest through the material of his pyjama top. With a gurgle, he fell back, then rose unsteadily. Reaching in his dressing gown pocket, he withdrew a hip flask. His roseate face was pimpled with
perspiration
. He fumbled clumsily with the screw top as he lumbered from the room. Within a quarter of an hour, I had barricaded my door. My wardrobe, my chest of drawers, my bedside table, all stacked up behind it, and standing sentry, Sammy, my balding Steiff teddy bear.

Not long afterwards, I left Foyle’s and changed jobs. As much as I loved books, I missed the outdoors and fresh air. I was taken on by Barnet Council as a gardener, working in their nurseries. My adoptive parents were predictably appalled and did all they could to dissuade me. ‘An
outside
job!’ my mother exclaimed, as if I would be labouring in among the naked writhing bodies of Satan’s fiery furnace. ‘An
outside
job gardening with men.’ In an armchair fortuitously, she did not fall down, but fell to fanning herself with her sewing.

‘We don’t like this business of you digging about in the land, ferreting around among grubs and worms and wiggling dirty things.’ Other wiggling dirty things popped irreverently into my head and I suppressed a smile. ‘Bending down and so forth, giving men ideas. Men can be filthy beasts, their minds cesspits of obscene images,’ my father warned me sternly, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of being a hypocrite. ‘You mind you cover yourself up, head to toe. And keep yourself to yourself,’ was his paternal advice. Reviewing his recent behaviour, I was sorely tempted to return this to sender, where it might be of more benefit.

My parents continued their daily diatribe against my chosen occupation, even after I had been gainfully employed in the fresh air for over a year. I came to dearly wish that I was Virginia McKenna in
Born Free
. I went to jumble sales and kitted myself out in desert boots and a safari jacket. I imagined how fabulous it would be to live in the African bush with an orphaned lioness called Elsa, how it must have felt to release her into the wilds of Kenya. I wanted someone to release me.

I was grateful therefore when attention shifted from my woeful
shortcomings
to my cousin Rachel, an undoubted success. She had met and fallen in love with a city banker, with everyone’s euphoric blessing. We had all attended the wedding at which Rachel Pritchard said I do and became Rachel Kirby. And we had all put on our glad rags, some of which I have to say, considering the ghastly dress I was made wear, were notably gladder than others. And we had all taken exorbitantly costly taxis to the glittering reception in a posh London hotel. Older than herself by ten years, her husband already owned a basement flat in Fulham.

‘Oh, Lucilla, I’m in paradise,’ Rachel had gushed at me through layers of lace, which created the impression that she was large fish caught in a substantial net. ‘Shall I tell you a secret?’ she had added in a mouse’s squeak, before being hauled into the white limousine and ferried away.

‘If you like,’ I’d returned, fairly unreceptively I have to admit. My own dress also boasted some lace, Mother not wishing to be shown up or outdone, that was rubbing my underarms raw as a prime cut.

‘Quentin wants us to start a family immediately.’ She examined my face for an amazed joyous reaction, studied my lips to see if they would emit a jubilant whoop.

‘That’s lovely,’ I managed, wanting to scratch like an ape.

‘We’re going to start trying for a son … well …’ She emitted a shy giggle and cast her eyes downwards. ‘Well … tonight.’

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, not sure quite what spin to put on my response to this.

‘Well?’ Her shiny pink lips smacked on a petulant pout.

‘That’s … that’s smashing. Good news soon … soon then,’ I stammered.

‘Yes, and you’ll be the first to know,’ she told me, as if pitching her bridal bouquet directly at me.

‘Great!’ I succumbed to a fit of violent underarm scratching that
would
have won me a leading role in
Tarzan
– as a gorilla!

The baby was now due in six months, though with the fuss Rachel was creating you would have thought it was five days. My mother embarked on a campaign of aggressive knitting in preparation (possible I promise you), the click, click, clicketty-click, as grating as grinding teeth. Though now I come to think of it, Mother’s teeth could not be relied upon to grate vindictively, slab toffee had seen to that. I resisted repeated attempts to tutor me afresh in the joys of needlecraft in honour of my cousin’s condition, lingering at work until I was forcibly evicted. The giant greenhouses were situated beside a sewage plant, the same plant that had so offended my schoolgirl sensibilities at Hillside. Henry quipped that I was back where I belonged. Ginger Tom was our tall lanky foreman. I worked with Louis, who, despite chronic rheumatism, sped to and from our glass Eden on a scooter. He became my teacher, growing the most gorgeous carnations I think I have ever seen.

I tinkered about hardening off primulas, and coaxing the closed butterfly wings of pansy buds into flower. I strolled through labyrinths of feathery green ferns. I dawdled in the altogether steamier microclimate of the exotic palms. I sprinkled seeds, pricked out spindly cuttings and tended the bulbs that bugled the end of winter. And I kept my dipsomaniacs well watered with the hosepipe and huge silver watering cans provided. At lunch we all came together outdoors sitting on plastic tubs of fertiliser. We munched our sandwiches companionably, sniffed the acrid sewage and beamed amiably at one another. Life was full of shit and I was content – even if I was only earning the princely sum of £8 weekly.

But it seemed that toiling among all that fecundity carried its risks. As I concentrated on nurturing seeds in their tiny pots, a seed of another kind was taking root within me. While my parents had attended a temperance meeting, Henry and I had given a
demonstration
of intemperance up against the apple tree in the back garden. Ginger Tom was the first to notice.

‘Think p’raps you should go and see a doctor, Lucilla,’ he advised in a low growl one Monday lunchtime.

‘And why should I do that?’ I retorted bemused, blithely unaware of the changes that my green-fingered colleagues had detected.

Louis chewed and spat. Cogitating, he stared into the heart of a modest blushing carnation. ‘Might be prudent,’ he said, adding his vote in his violin squeak.

I gave a chuckle at their joshing. ‘I don’t need to see a doctor. I’m perfectly well.’

Ginger Tom exchanged a charged look with Louis. ‘Your baby might disagree with that,’ was his only remark, nearly causing me to tumble off my tub.