The Fish Ladder (6 page)

‘Actually, I was adopted as a child, and my name has been changed, but I know the name on my birth certificate: Marie Therese’, and I mentioned my surname. The two nuns lifted their arms in unison, white puppets acting surrender.

‘Sister Marie Therese!’ they both said. I looked over my shoulder, thought perhaps someone was standing there. There was nobody.

‘Sister Marie Therese?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ the older sister said, and turned to the younger woman next to her.

‘Could Sister Marie Therese help me?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said the older nun.

‘Can I meet her?’

‘No,’ said the younger sister. ‘She’s died, ten years ago. But we know who you are.’

And as we stood in the hallway they told me the story, finishing one another’s sentences, of the midwife who had been left, quite literally, holding the baby and of the mother who had fled the hospital. The younger sister seemed to be as familiar with the details as the older nun who had witnessed them. The midwife’s name was Sister Marie Therese and she had taken charge of me, and looked after me, and kept me until a home could be found for me. ‘She baptised you and she gave you her name.’

Whether this was Sister Marie Therese’s own name, or one that she had taken on entering the Convent, I didn’t think to ask. There was no time for me to register any feelings about the discovery, and loss, in under a minute, of my namesake. The idea, the fact, that I had one.

The sisters were gentle, animated. They seemed to be not at all surprised by what was happening, no matter how unlikely. They took an almost childlike pleasure in the continuance of an interrupted narrative. They showed me the room where I had slept, the cupboard where my nappies were stored, and where the baby food was kept. They showed me the room where I was born, which was now an office. Grey-metal filing drawers belched disorganised paperwork. I noticed a heavy glass paperweight with the three-tiered crown and crossed keys of the papal coat of arms. A tree filled the window. ‘It would have been here already on the day of your birth. It would have been the first green thing you saw.’

I had got the idea that this must have been a Catholic mother-and-baby home, and presumed my story to be a common one. But no! The sisters were even a little put out by the suggestion. It was a hospital, a private nursing home, just as the ladies on the beach had said it was. Why was I trying to reduce this extraordinary circumstance, to render it commonplace? The sisters would have none of it; I was the only one, Sister Marie Therese’s baby.

There were more sisters now. They didn’t stop what they were doing, the internal pathway of their lives adhering to a proscribed invisible order, but they looked, pausing briefly in their steps. Word had gone about: ‘Tis Sister Marie Therese’s baby, and she’s come back to us!’ I felt their curious eyes, their kindly faces, those who had joined the Convent in more recent years seemingly as familiar with the story as the older nuns. I had a sensation of being contained within a mechanism. My unveiled hair and dark clothes, which trapped the scent of the outdoors – of wet leaves, of sea, of woodsmoke – seemed brash among the detergent white of their habits. I felt hot, faint. A smell of bleach and polish, which I had noticed on entering, now felt pervasive, oppressive. I asked if there was a garden and yet I didn’t want to be an inconvenience; but the sister who had become my guide said I wasn’t disturbing her. She worked in the local hospice and her working day had ended. I found her at her leisure. A nun’s leisure: I realised how little I knew about the working of this order, any order. But I understood, or thought I did, that she had come here at this moment to be of help. Some of the older nuns were well into their eighties, and it would be getting time to prepare the evening meal. I had the impression that she remained, on the pretext of being social, to share, and thereby lighten, their burden.

She opened a door into a garden, adjuring me to stay as long as I wished. We could have tea, if I liked, when I was finished.

A dream. Clouds, talc, soap, milk. A veiled woman dressed in white, turning slowly towards me. I always woke before I saw the woman’s face and felt that, if I did see it, I would die. Yet here she was, the veiled woman, made of concrete and painted glossy white. Green-black moss covered one side of her nose. It frosted the beads of her rosary. Lichen bloomed about an enigmatic smile. Pots of shrivelled geraniums clustered around her feet and her dress was spattered in compost, displaced by a watering can. But there was another part to the dream, another fragment: a real woman, a blue coat over the whiteness, her hair a pale blonde flag. The flag of hair had blotted out the light as she bent down to lift me from my pram. Summer tar, cracking wood, the peppery scent of tomatoes. Glasshouses, row upon row of them. This woman, bending down to me, I had assumed she was my birth mother. The smell of washed linen and, beyond her shoulder, the glasshouses, and that green hot reek of tomatoes. I know exactly where I was the first time I articulated this memory, the only time I told it to somebody else. I was in Bluebell Wood catching minnows with my cousin, Susan, string handles tied about the necks of our jam-jars, the silver fishes jabbing at the thickened glass, jerky as compass needles. I thought perhaps my cousin might have known the lady. I thought the lady might have been my mother. I can’t have been more than four because after that we moved away from the village, and never went back to Bluebell Wood.

But as I turned away from the concrete statue I found myself looking at the glasshouses, row after row of them, the wooden frames splintered, the panes all but gone, and I realised that the woman in my dream with the flag of pale hair was not my mother, but a sister, probably Sister Marie Therese, and that the beloved face, which had always eluded me, was hers. Not hair, then, but the veil; the crisp white cotton of the Augustinians.

‘I’ve made some tea!’ It was the sister who had become my friend, and I followed her back into the house, the sunlight folding as we entered the panelled hallway. Her name was Maria, but before she joined the order it had been Katherine. My name had been Marie, but had then been changed to Katharine. I was born in the Convent and had then gone out into the world. Sister Maria had given up the world in order to enter it. We laughed at the inverted symmetry of our lives, our names. Sister Marie Therese had been Maria’s special friend, and had cared for her as a novice, had cared for both of us.

‘She prayed for you every day of her life,’ she said, and I had no idea what to do or say so simply sat there, the teacup slipping across the yellow saucer until the sounds of the kitchen and a smell of frying onions made me conscious that I should be on my way.

When I left we exchanged addresses. Sister Maria said that this was my first home, and that I would always be welcome here. Later she wrote to me with a photograph of Sister Marie Therese and a baby, although she couldn’t be sure if it was me.

The newborn Taliesin had regarded his discovery in the river mouth by the poor man as a most propitious event. For the man. For though he was only one day old Taliesin miraculously spoke, chastising the man for being sad over his empty net, adding that in the time of need he, Taliesin, would be worth more than three hundred fish. Later he spoke to the poor man’s father, and gave the most colourful account of his provenance:

Into a dark leathern bag I was thrown,

And on a boundless sea I was sent adrift;

Which to me was an omen of being tenderly nursed,

And the Lord God then set me at liberty.

Taliesin was one for whom the cup was decidedly half full. The wondrous story of his life, which – after all – he wrote himself, has survived for fifteen hundred years. He was without self-pity as he acknowledged, and slid over, his humble origin as Gwion. The pathway from lost boy to mighty bard was bright and packed with adventure, for which Taliesin took all of the responsibility and all of the credit, although he thanked God for his release.

I too began my life at the mouth of a river. I had found a missing piece in the broken vase of my history, accounting for the lost months of my babyhood. I had been born in this place and now, by chance, I had returned. It was as though I had been given a coat that turned out to be a perfect fit without ever having realised that I was cold. I found it hard to remember that the gift was new, and that yesterday, or even an hour ago, I didn’t have it.

Yet, at the same time, I had stumbled on heartache. I had no recollection of a loving birth mother who had given me up against her will. I had no more fragments. The shard of memory I had conserved, of a woman looking into a pram, was not of her. When she married she became as carefully hidden as Gwion’s grain of wheat, her husband’s name as common to the Welsh as John Smith is to the English. I had never found her and no one, as far as I knew, had ever looked for me. The day of her wedding was the day of my adoption. I presumed she was aware of this. When Anne Boleyn was executed, upright, on her knees, with a fine French sword, her successor, Jane Seymour, was trying on her wedding dress. Which was yellow. Not quite the image of the English rose that has been so carefully handed down. Perhaps if she’d lived long enough she’d have shown her colours.

This sounds bitter. It is. Although I felt no ill will – the opposite in fact. I was thankful from the bottom of my heart for my existence, although not to her, the gift of life unintentional, abortion illegal. But in her desire for anonymity, be it conscious or feckless, my birth mother had also hidden me from my natural father, and I could not tell what hurt the most, the two things rushing against one another, noisy, confluent. All I could see, from looking in the glass, was that I was most likely of Celtic origin. And even that could not be certain, although I have always passed for such.

I was sorry not to have known my foster-mother, Sister Marie Therese, but it was her goodness, and an unexpected sense of my own completeness – or rather normalcy – that I took away with me that day. The rest I left on the shore; a life I could have known, but never did, its myriad possibilities suspended.

We walked along the beach, Evie making zigzag tracks in the sand, which I did my best to follow. Mum came behind us with her stick, her footsteps and the circular divots made by her cane running in a median line between our undulating ones, and I thought of sine waves and Aboriginal paintings. One of the Antonys was wearing a cardigan, another a scarf, one had a pair of socks on his hands, while another had a Tesco bag tied about his wrist. We sat on a concrete wall and ate our lunch, wind tickling the greaseproof paper. You had to chew the brown bread and crumbly Cheshire cheese for a while before it became something tasty, melded into something good, and Evie just munched the middle out of her sandwiches and discarded the crusts, impatient with the process. The tide was coming in. Some of the Antonys slipped below the waves, their clothes loosening.

Evie was the first to reach the playground.

‘Grannie,’ she called, ‘there are four swings!’ A man dressed wholly in red, including a prize-fighter’s belt and a scarlet baseball hat from which stiff dreadlocks protruded, stalked past us in the direction of the shore. Two workmen in Day-Glo overalls ate ice cream. One photographed his 99 cornet with his mobile phone while the other, holding an ice-lolly, laughed. Two robust identical orange-haired boys scaled monkey bars. Their mother was pale, with dark smudges under her eyes, as though the twins had sucked the goodness from her. We stopped for ice cream at the kiosk by the playground:
Soft Ice-Cream Sold Here. Lolly Ices. Cold Cans. Slush. Hot Drinks. Popcorn. Candy Floss & More
. Then, ice creams in hand, we made our way back over to the swings. Mum laughed at the sign that said only children under the age of fourteen could use the playground, and then graciously, but firmly, ignored it. She used the hook of her walking stick to bring one of the swings within reach, and then Evie held the seat in place while Mum manoeuvred herself onto it. Evie and I then sat on the two swings flanking her, and the three of us rocked to and fro, gazing seaward, eating our ice creams. Mum wore a woolly hat to keep her hair from the wind. She laughed when she caught me looking at her.

Mum had always been an enigma to me. Throughout my childhood she had remained unfathomable. When I was Evie’s age, possibly younger, Mum would bounce light from a compact mirror around the living room, swearing it was a fairy, and when I tried to touch the flickering image she snapped the compact shut and, laughing, dropped it into her handbag. It took me for ever to realise it was a trick. It was only now that Dad had died that Mum was starting to afford tightly angled views into herself, although she remained very difficult to read. She had an easy love of simple things, like swings, and ice cream, classic novels. Walking through wet leaves. Driving. She was uncomplicatedly happy. I had never seen her cry. It was her extraordinary engagement, her zest for life, that had drawn Dad to her, that drew all of us. I had always known that Mum wasn’t my ‘real mother’ and, for a long time, as a child, I had tried to make sense of our relationship, the word
mother
connoting something both formal and alien to me. For some reason Dad had been exempt from this sense of ‘otherness’. Perhaps because no one mentioned the possibility of my having another father, so for a long time he was the only candidate. It was only as an adult that I had grown curious about the man whose identity remained hidden, concealed behind the hyphen on my birth certificate.