The Adoption (45 page)

‘Lucilla, I am going to write a letter to her. I shall be careful, don’t worry. Just confirm that she is who we think she is, and see how she reacts.’

A month later and I receive the reply sent from my mother, my real mother, still alive and living astonishingly in Haverfordwest, to Rosemary.

Dear Miss Dixon
,

Thank you for your letter. It was indeed a surprise to hear from
you. And I am sorry but I have no idea who you are. My name is
Bethan, Bethan Modrun and my maiden name was Haverd. I look
forward to hearing from you. I hope that the news you bring will
be exciting
,

Yours sincerely
,

Bethan Sterry

I am suddenly out of breath and I have to sit down before my legs crumple under me. What hits me so powerfully is that she seems sincerely baffled that an apparent stranger is seeking her out. If she harbours any suspicion about the unexpected communication, it is that a distant relation has decided to bequeath her a great fortune. What she is not anticipating is a legacy of another kind. It is to come in the form of a daughter abandoned in the woods of time, a daughter who has at long last found her way home. I ring Rosemary Dixon the same evening. I say that at this juncture I would like to give the reins over to Norcap, let them initiate contact. But Rosemary insists that she is an expert when it comes to these delicate negotiations, and that I am being overly cautious.

‘I think you should write to her now, Lucilla,’ she instructs. ‘Don’t
frighten
her. Keep the tone casual, easygoing. Tell her about yourself, your life, your family.’ This is not how such a precarious situation should be handled, my intelligence pleads. I should exercise restraint, and pay my detective no heed. But as I sit down to write to my real mother, it is my heart and not my head that dictates.

Chapter 26

Bethan, 2000

I AM COVERED
in sores like a leper, my skin split and bleeding. I have these episodes when all I can do is shut myself in my bedroom, with my curtains closed, shunning the light of day. I feel like a preserved mummy. Now there’s a black witticism. Lowrie will be here soon with her briefcase. She will ask me how I am keeping. She will examine me. She will diagnose severe eczema. She will prescribe a cortisone cream and a course of steroids. She will say that eczema, like asthma, is exacerbated by stress, by anxiety … by contrition? I can tell her exactly what I am suffering from. A baby’s worth of my skin has been peeled off me. She will say that eczema can be psychosomatic. Oh, she’s clever my second daughter, my echo baby, my minder.

Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. Who am I? I am not a finder. That would be the adoptive parents. They went looking and found a baby, a daughter going spare, Lucilla. And Lowrie? Well she is the keeper. The baby who wasn’t given away. The one who stayed put. Losers? Ah, this is more difficult. I have come to the realisation that we are all losers on this Monopoly board. I have lost my gift baby and there is no health in me. Lowrie? Well, she has lost her mother, her mother who from her birth has been residing elsewhere, her psyche trapped in a delivery room at New End Hospital. As a child, instinct told her that no matter how tightly she hugged her mother, she could not hold on to her.

I took Leslie’s, my husband’s, introverted character as an indication that he was emotionally stunted, retarded, that there was no passion in his male body. But then there were three of us in the bed. My husband could not compete with an absentee German POW, with Thorston, the man his wife was really in love with, the man who in remembrance had been elevated to the status of a god. Leslie is dead now. I am a widow. He died of a stroke, a last indignity that left him wheelchair bound, and a captive audience to his unloving and unlovely wife. But in retrospect I believe I can say that he, too, was a loser. His wife committed adultery in thought several times each day of their married life. So what of the weepers? Oh, this is a crowded category. Countless weepers, though I hold the record for mourning that well exceeds Penelope’s as she wove her shroud for Odysseus.

Lowrie chose medicine as her career. It was a resourceful decision and I admire her for it. She couldn’t tinker with our minds, heal our fevered brains, so she turned, pragmatically in my opinion, to an area where she might prescribe an efficacious remedy. She was midway through secondary school when she deduced her antisocial behaviour was serving no one, least of all herself. Overnight, our she-devil turned into a swot, her bedside lamp burning into small hours as she pored over textbooks. Leslie was overjoyed.

‘I knew she was bright as a star,’ he told me, as he surveyed glowing end-of-term reports. ‘She needed to find something that she loved, something that fully engaged that busy head of hers.’

She needed to find something that she loved
. I often mulled over those words when Lowrie was at school. And they boomerang back to me today.
She needed to find something that she loved
. Or did my second daughter need to find something, or more pertinently,
someone
who loved her back? In any case, once she had found her métier there was no restraining her. She became a slave to chemistry, physics and biology. She attended Cardiff University, embarking on a medical
degree
. I remember her relaying with glee the grisly details the day she dissected her first corpse. Some of the male students were clowning about, tugging on tendons, which made icy grey fingers twitch and bend. It sounded repulsive. Apparently, a few became queasy and had to leave the room. But not our Lowrie. She has a strong stomach. She did say that she was curious about him though, the man she dissected. She said it was sad to come to this at the close of your life, a corpse in all his discoloured grey splendour being sliced into segments by diligent, nauseous, medical students.

‘He had tattoos. A mermaid on one bicep and the Eiffel Tower on another. I think he was a sailor. Roaming the seas and sailing back to this inglorious disposal of his body.’ That was all she aired. But I suppose it was compassion of a kind. She spared him a thought.

I smoke twenty a day. I have done for years. I feel like a heaped ashtray inside. I have a smoker’s hack and a smoker’s husky voice. Lowrie has peered down my trachea and scrutinised my larynx. She says I have nodules and polyps on my vocal cords. She says I should have them properly checked out. I can’t be bothered, though it’s touching that she cares. And I’m not going to give up my fags however much she nags me.

‘It’s not good for you, Mother,’ she berates each time I light up. ‘It’ll kill you, Mother.’ Ah well, when you have known a fate more terrible than … Brice has become the most unlikely of companions lately. He shows up in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep for ghosts. He brings a gun, and fires shots in the air until they have all gathered up their silverfish entrails and glided off. Leslie, Mother and Father, the dogs, Fflur, Gwil and Red, Thorston, and Jessy the horse, and, of all animals, the cow that got stuck in the mud that day. She ambles in still coated with brown sludge, smelling of dung, craning her neck and lowing mournfully. And I can see him now, my German lover, bare-chested, his skin prickling with the cold, pimpled with
raindrops
, the rope knotted about his hips as he scaled the bank. All of him, every nerve and atom, was bent on saving that cow, while my father looked on scornfully. The beast went to slaughter just the same though, but somehow that didn’t diminish his feat. Still, Brice has no patience with all the animals.

‘This place looks like a squalid farmyard,’ he criticises, reaching for his gun. ‘Your bedroom is turning into a pigsty, Bethan.’ He sits on the end of my bed and rambles on about the war. His voice is like a sail full of regretful sighs. Some nights we share a cigarette.

‘Was it hell?’ I ask, and he draws his lips into that oh-so familiar groove. ‘I was lucky really. Taken out before I had a chance to make friends with depravity.’ I fix on the tip of his cigarette glowing like a firefly in the night.

‘Only you could think that way, be philosophical about death, your own death,’ I say, giving my raw skin a good scratch.

‘Let’s face it, Bethan, the war wasn’t a breeze for you either.’

‘The war was fine. Thorston was fine. The feel of his skin was fine. Lovemaking in a nest of snow was fine. Do I disgust you?’

‘Disgust me?’

‘Fraternising with the enemy.’

He shrugs. ‘We were both young men fighting for our countries. We wore different uniforms – that’s all.’

‘I think it’s generous of you not to condemn me.’ I lower my voice so that it is barely perceptible. ‘I want to wind back the years. I want to run into the Church Adoption Society and snatch my baby up from that lady’s stiff arms.’

‘I know you do, I know. But you can’t, Bethan,
cariad
, any more than I can have back my youth.’

So because we cannot unmake the beds of our lives, I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling the rough wool of his uniform caressing my cheek. We play pass the cigarette. He tells me war stories of daring dos
and
daring don’ts. And gradually my skin irritation lessens and I sink into a fitful doze. In the morning he is gone.

‘Mother, you look ghastly,’ Lowrie says, studying me when she arrives. She has made me a nice cup of tea and a slice of toast. She has spread it with honey. She draws back the curtains and I wince. She strides across the room, the floorboards creaking under the pressure of her assertive steps. She sets down her briefcase, lifts my arms one by one, rolls back the sleeves of my winceyette nightgown, and snorts through her nose.

‘You’ve been scratching again,’ she says, her brow puckered with displeasure. ‘I’ve told you not to scratch. It only aggravates the rash.’

‘I can’t help it,’ I plead, pathetically.

‘You make it spread.’

So here she stands, my grown-up echo daughter. She is tall like her father was, with a square plain face, homely – though to what she attributes this domestic slant I cannot say. Our home more closely resembled a war zone than a hearth to snuggle up to. She clicks open her case and rummages through it. She did make a tepid attempt at mastering psychology. She tackled it in her fourth year, the year in which they gain experience in hospitals treating living, breathing patients. But she said it was depressing. She practised medicine at Bangor, Wrexham, Swansea and Cardiff. She has elected to work in intensive care, resuscitating lives that are only a wavering candle flame. She likes to bring people back, she says. I wonder if they like it.

‘I’m going to write you a prescription for another course of steroids. This time remember to take them,’ she says, scribbling on a pad. Her dark hair is worn in two plaits coiled in fat circles at the sides of her head, like earmuffs. She wears transparent pink-rimmed glasses. The small rectangular lenses make her look dauntingly intelligent. And she is dressed in a trouser suit, grey pinstripes. She looks very commanding. ‘And you are to rub this on three times a day,’ she
orders
, producing a tub of ointment as large as a tankard. I nod meekly.

She is gay, my daughter, my second daughter. She thinks that I don’t know. But I guessed when, in her twenties, no young men came to call. There was only a succession of women – one woman now. She has been with for her for some years. Glenice. They live together in a modern flat in Cardiff. I expect she thinks I would disapprove. Or perhaps she feels it’s none of my business. She doesn’t want children. She’s told me that much. ‘I haven’t the patience,’ she says. But I don’t think it’s that. It’s a surplus of love she is missing. She daren’t slosh it about. What she has she must guard wolfishly, for fear of depleting her already meagre supply. Besides, I do not hanker for grandchildren. Her choice does not rankle with me. In fact, I envy her – to be childless by design, to avoid the risk of having your heart steamrollered.

She has Glenice and is extremely private about their relationship. I won’t pry. I haven’t earned the right to share her secrets. I didn’t share mine with her. With both my parents gone and Leslie as well, my secret will die with me. My mother had a form of dementia leading up to her death. Her short-term memory was irreversibly damaged, but past secrets surfaced with chilling frequency. That’s how I learned about the letters. Thorston wrote to me three times. There
was
a second letter slipped behind mine to Thorston that day, and two more, which my father also destroyed. She told me he wanted me to go to him, to go to East Germany where he lived. She said he never stopped loving me, never stopped wondering about our baby. What I wish most of all is that she had died with that secret.

That is my only terror, Lowrie discovering that before her there was a gift baby, that she was the consolation prize. It would be over for us if that happened. The tenuous structure of our scaffolding lives would collapse under the burden of truth. She would comprehend all of it in a minute, that she was a substitute baby, that she did not make the
grade
, that as far as I was concerned she was only an echo of the real thing, an echo of my firstborn, an echo of Lucilla. I would prefer to die than that she has to come to terms with this. It may not be much but I can give her some peace of mind. At least let her have the pretence of her family intact. I have determined to take my gift baby with me to my grave.

I fumble for my cigarettes, for the packet on the bedside table, for my lighter. ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ says Lowrie as if scripted. ‘It’s not good for your heart.’

‘But it’s good for my soul,’ I cackle in return, lighting up and inhaling deeply through dry lips. I have a bad heart by the way. When this was confirmed to me by some cardiac specialist in hospital, I’m afraid I laughed. He looked perplexed. ‘I thought you were making a moral judgement,’ I commented dryly. He didn’t even smile. I have come to the conclusion that a sense of humour is a rare commodity in hospitals.

After Lowrie has gone, I reread my letter, a mysterious letter from a lady called Rosemary Dixon. It is all laid out very formally so I’m pondering if she is a solicitor – though there is no heading on the writing paper. And of all the people to enter my head, comes little Tilley Draper, our evacuee. The prospect that she may get in touch, that we may resume our friendship after all these years, is almost as enticing as finding out that I have inherited an indecent fortune. She was as fortifying as a tablespoon of tonic.