The Adoption (39 page)

‘I can’t be pregnant,’ I protested, still chuckling but hollowly now.

‘’Course you can’t,’ agreed Ginger Tom with a sarcastic wink. ‘You’re another Virgin Mary.’

Louis gave his chopped-teeth grin. ‘Immaculate conception?’ He glanced at Ginger Tom for his input, and they both nodded sagely.

‘Happens every day,’ affirmed Ginger Tom, as he tapped out a cigarette with nicotine stained fingers.

I snorted. ‘Think you’re the two wise men of Finchley, do you?’ The mayonnaise in my sandwich was making me feel sick so I set it aside with a sigh, and sipped my bottle of water decorously. As the weeks drifted by, I had to concede that Ginger Tom’s hunch had been correct. I was pregnant. A double irony. As my mother had conceived me out of wedlock, so too had I conceived this baby, boy or girl, daughter or son. Although not reckless, unprotected sex between Henry and myself had taken place. Only seldom mind, as we usually managed to skirt the main event. However, full rapturous intercourse had taken place three times: once in Coldfall Wood, once in Cherry Tree Wood and
once
up against the apple tree in our garden. This I suspected might have been our Waterloo. The temptation of the apple tree. After all it did for Adam and Eve.

It had been, I recalled, a disquieting night because we were given to believe that my parents were at a temperance meeting and would not return home until after 11 pm. And yet post that delicious night a peculiar little note was slipped under my door.

Dear Lucilla
,

You may have been spied on the other night, you and Henry
,
in garden, under the apple tree. Your father didn’t go to the
temperance meeting after all. Your mother went alone. I spotted
him going into the shed before you arrived. I wanted to warn you
but I didn’t know how. I’m sorry. Be careful
.

Your friend from across the landing
.

Mrs Fortinbrass

It was upstairs Mrs Fortinbrass, bless her. A true friend. To have a peeping Tom was upsetting, but to having a peeping father was far more dire. However he said nothing, so I assumed that he was too embarrassed by his own voyeurism to confront me. Nevertheless, it gave me pause, and we avoided the lovely fruitful apple tree following this, and became far less promiscuous. Unfortunately, the damage was done by then, the apple proving far too luscious for us both. Now it seemed banishment might lie in wait. Leaving my adoptive parents would be the attainment of a lifelong ambition. But society too might banish us, and what then? Frequently during this period, I considered the parallels between my birth mother’s life and mine. For whatever reason she was not tough enough to outface fortune. Was I?

It was autumn. I had a definite bump now, though small and neat enough to be easily disguised. Actually it was a triple irony, because
about
this time Rachel went into early labour giving birth in a toilet in Selfridges. Saddest of all, the baby, a scrap of only six months’ gestation, lived for just a few days. I went to see her in hospital. She was pale as a peeled onion, speaking in a hushed frenzied tickle of disjointed sentences about how she would take her son home. They were to call him Russell. They were planning an enormous christening party and would I come. She had so much to do, so much to buy for Russell. She had to get organised. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on her sweat-slicked forehead, and that was when I saw the eerie glint of madness in her chalk-green eyes. Naturally I said nothing of my own pregnancy, and the nagging swelling problem of my inconvenient conception.

As my winter-flowering pansies blossomed in an array of oranges and purples and yellows and blues, I did the very thing I suspect my own true mother did all those years ago on the farm. I made believe nothing was happening,
nothing
, that I wasn’t pregnant, that all I had to do was tread water till the rough seas calmed.

Come Christmas my neat bump had become a barrel, a barrel that my Mary Quant miniskirt was woefully inadequate at concealing. I told Henry. I rehearsed several times how I might gently apprise him of the fact that our lives were about to change beyond all recognition. I would say, I informed my director the moon, sitting on the windowsill in the middle of the night, ‘Henry, my love, I am with child.’ This muted truth had a biblical ring to it. The words inferred that the child was in tow, trotting happily and neatly behind me, rather than invading my body with symptoms that, like the rules of engagement, were becoming increasingly brutal.

In the end, however, I opened my mouth and let a tiger not a cat out of the bag: ‘Henry I’m pregnant.’

We were shivering in the graveyard of a nearby church, the moon again providing sympathetic lighting, gentle illumination I was grateful
for
, considering the shock that registered on Henry’s face. ‘You mean you’re going to have a baby?’ said Henry rather stupidly, propping himself up on the grave of Lance Traherne, whose life spanned 1838– 1873, the epitaph reading, ‘In loving memory of a selfless father’. As Henry’s eyes flicked over the inscription, I saw him calculating the lifespan of poor Lance, and wondering if fatherhood was the very thing that had finished him off.

‘Yes, I am Henry. I’m going to have a baby.’ In the same forthright style much to the moon’s horror (she would have far preferred the lyrical poetic approach), I went on. ‘Are you going to stick by me or ditch me?’

‘Ditch you?’ Henry echoed.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Henry, it’s a simple question requiring a simple answer.’ Actually I was so scared, so fearful that my Henry would turn his back on me and walk away that I was trembling, my shoulders locked with tension, my quick breaths misting on the cold air. The wind rustled the trees, and the lights of habitation pried over the heads of the gravestones eyeing our performance. A faint backing soundtrack was also discernible consisting mainly of London traffic. It had a
party’s over
theme running through it.

‘Are you going to keep me in suspense for ever?’ I cried, with more combativeness than I felt.

Henry clutched the gravestone cogitating, possibly on the fate of Lance. Then, like a man who determinedly casts off his crutches and takes his first tentative steps, he pushed himself off his stony prop. His face lifted in a slow easy smile and his chest puffed out. Another two steps and he seized hold of my icy hands and dragged me close, closer, closest.

‘We’re going to have a baby!’ he bayed at the moon.

‘Henry, for goodness’ sake!’ I hissed, my head swinging around to check for other seekers of privacy in the ceaseless churn of the city.

‘I don’t care,’ Henry reinforced at the top of his voice. ‘I want to tell the world!’

I was moved, but reality was that the world could be a less than sympathetic listener. ‘Well, eventually,’ I said guardedly. ‘But perhaps we should start with my parents.’

That thought sobered us both in a second. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ I shillied as we neared my home.

‘Good idea,’ Henry shallied. A sigh of relief whooshed out of him like the fast release of air from the open valve of a fully inflated bike tyre.

Over tea and rock cakes that lived up to their names, we broke the news the next afternoon to my parents that their grandchild was on the way.

‘Mother, Father, I’m pregnant,’ I said, hoping my candour might enlist the same belated jubilation as it had in Henry. My mother, half an eye on the knitting in her hand – a tank top that she was making for my father – choked on a raisin. She set her craft aside on the arm of her chair and beat her chest. The increasing agitation of her movements made me fear that if uninterrupted she would progress to rending her garments, wailing and gnashing the few teeth she had left that were up to the job. However, after a good deal of wheezing and spluttering, the raisin suddenly shot out of one of her flared nostrils. Following this party trick, she was seized by an apoplexy of coughing.

‘I’m going to do the proper thing and marry her, sir,’ Henry said to my father over the din.

My father’s face flushed a dark grape, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed with increasing effort. ‘You will do no such thing,’ he stormed, rising slowly and menacingly to his feet like an anvil cloud.

We scrambled up too. Henry combed and combed back his blond fringe with spread fingers, a nervous habit of his when stressed. ‘But,
sir
,’ he importuned, ‘I love your daughter.’ He fingered his facial scar, another sign that he was wound up tighter than a reel of cotton. ‘I’m going to stand by her.’

‘Not if I can help it, you’re not,’ my father fumed, fists clenched and raised ready to punch Henry on the nose. My mother, finally recovered, kept on adding sugar lumps to her tea, until you could see the beige crystals cresting the brown fluid. ‘Our Lucilla is class. Do you think for one second I’m going to let her marry someone like you?’ Henry reeled back as if he had been physically struck by the insult. ‘You’re a worm, not a man. You won’t amount to anything. You might as well give up now, because nothing you say will persuade me to consent to this match.’

I could see that Henry was stymied. I was weeks off turning nineteen. Without my father’s consent we could not marry until I was twenty-one. ‘It won’t make any difference if you stop us now,’ I defied him with all the hauteur I could muster. ‘Henry will wait for me, won’t you, Henry?’ Henry nodded diffidently, his ear lobes and the tip of his nose pinking in his humiliation. Then I let fly my spleen. ‘Why are you doing this? I shouted, tears of wrath spilling from my eyes. ‘Why won’t you let us be happy?’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty,’ my mother croaked, putting in a word for me. ‘She’s in this … this predicament. Nothing to be done. Perhaps the most sensible thing would be to marry her off to this … this … this chap as soon as possible.’

We both looked pleased and surprised that support for our union should come from this unlikely quarter. But then, fastening my eyes on my mother’s, on the truth encapsulated in that expression of panic, I understood. It was the prospect of her being landed with both me and the baby – a double maternal curse for evermore – that was prompting her to agree readily to our speedy marriage. The prospective husband could even be German for all she cared, so long as he took
me
and the baby to a distant land from where, henceforth, I would cease to be the loose thread in the fabric of her existence.

My father had another agenda. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. Lucilla will stay with us and we’ll bring the baby up as if she was ours. Yours and mine, Harriet. Boy or girl, it will be Lucilla’s little brother or sister.’

My mother looked poleaxed. ‘But how … how could it be,’ she faltered. ‘How could the baby be ours? I’m too old, too old to have a baby. Folks won’t believe it.’ She pulled at a greyed curl, tugged the thinning hair in her fisted hand, taking the spring out of it. ‘Besides, I’ve had a … a … I can’t have a baby. At the hospital they took my … my … well, you know …’ She widened her eyes until they were almost as big as the lenses of her glasses, willing conveyance of her delicate meaning. I guessed she was referring to her hysterectomy, the operation given out to be a lethal nosebleed. I had discovered the truth later with the assistance of a biology teacher at school.

‘Nobody knows about that,’ my father interjected obdurately.

‘Yes they do,’ countered my mother. ‘They all know. Mother and Enid and Frank and Rachel.’

‘Oh Enid,’ my father gave out in a hoarse whisper, adding, ‘Enid can keep secrets.’ My mother was confounded, brow crinkling and recrinkling as if trying to outdo snowflakes with the originality of each fresh expression. ‘And family will keep this buried. We’ve done it before, we can do it again,’ my father revealed didactically, leaving me to wonder what my parents had previously interred. He snorted, raised his elbows and drew them back, as if following some prescribed exercise regime. ‘Friends and neighbours will soon grow to accept the baby as ours.’

Henry and I listened in disbelief, so floored that neither of us could summon our wits to produce the outrage such outlandish schemes warranted.

My mother abandoned her curl and, reincarnated as a limp straggle, it sliced across her pleated brow partially obscuring her left eye. She spoke as though in her own world, her tone self preoccupied and rambling. ‘I suppose … I suppose,’ she said, reasoning aloud. She paused to take up her knitting once more, grasped the needles and hooked the wool around her index finger. ‘I suppose we could palm it off as Rachel’s. That might work what with her losing the baby and all.’

This was too much, her plan making me jump as though I’d had an electric shock. ‘You’re not giving our baby to Rachel,’ I said, a dangerous stillness in my voice. ‘I’d rather die than let you do that.’

‘Hear! Hear!’ muttered my Henry, with a jerky series of nods that a doctor would have diagnosed as a nervous disorder. I took his hand in mine and, raising both triumphantly, gave his a squeeze, before releasing it.

‘Dying! Dying!’ declaimed my father with the hectic loquacity of the shed upon him. ‘Who said anything about dying? It’s birth we’re talking about.’ He gestured vaguely in my direction with snaking hands, as if he intended to conjure the infant out of my womb then and there. ‘There’s no call for any of this fuss and no question of Rachel taking the baby, Harriet. It’s ours, family, kith and kin.’ Distractedly, my mother slid the knitting needles from the row of stitches, took hold of the strand of grey wool, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, and pulled, slowly but surely unravelling the nigh on completed back to her pattern. ‘Put your mind at rest, Lucilla. But I won’t have my daughter married to a man who does … does what he has done to you before marriage.’ He fumbled in his pocket, drew out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘If he … forces her to do the … the act before they are married, what deviant behaviour, what vile perversions can we expect him to make our daughter perform to assuage his gross appetite after they are married?’

My mother subsided, a good two thirds of her knitting piled up like
spaghetti
in her lap, her breaths coming in tiny pops as she worked her lips. The candy pink of Henry’s ear lobes and nose tip now suffused his whole face.