Bay of Secrets (23 page)

When Tom didn’t have work, he chipped in and did his bit and at weekends they did everything together. Like a real
family, something whispered to Vivien – or she whispered it to herself, maybe. Like a real family …

At first, she lived in a state of semi-permanent fear, half waiting for Laura’s return. Sometimes when she was feeding her, she held Ruby almost too tight, as if anticipating that moment when she’d be gone. How would she cope? She would have to smile as she handed Ruby back to her birth mother and pretend that her heart wasn’t breaking.

After a while though, Vivien began to relax. She knew what she had seen. Laura was young, irresponsible, in love with a boy who wasn’t interested in the daughter she’d had with another man. Vivien must have been like the answer to a prayer. A woman without children and yet desperate for them. A woman whose very yearning must have shone out of her eyes like a beacon.

And yet. Every so often Vivien would get the shoebox out of the wardrobe where she’d tucked it out of sight, so it wasn’t a constant reminder. She looked at the plectrum and the crocheted baby’s bonnet. So tiny … Even now, it no longer fitted Ruby’s blonde head. She looked at the photographs – Laura holding Ruby in her arms, happy and unaware at this point that her mother had died; Laura with Julio, Laura in the VW van. And she looked at the love beads. They told her all she wanted to know. Laura had loved little Ruby – in her own way. She might have given her up, given her the chance of a different kind of life – given herself the chance of a different life too. But Laura had certainly loved her.

Which meant – didn’t it? – that one day, Laura might come back.

Vivien closed her eyes and rocked the baby. Ruby was just out of her bath and smelt of talcum powder. Vivien inhaled deeply. The scent of a baby’s skin … Was it so wrong of her to want Laura to stay with Julio on some foreign beach somewhere? She supposed that it was, because a baby needed her mother, didn’t she? The maternal desire that flooded through Vivien’s veins when she held Ruby was no excuse. Neither were the years of frustration and longing, nor the overwhelming love she felt for the child. No. There was no excuse. Apparently she wanted Ruby on any terms she could get. She really was as heartless as she feared.

Tom wasn’t happy – Vivien could see that. It wasn’t Ruby, nor the fact that Vivien had given up her job – which was only temporary; Penny said she’d have her back any time. It was more of a moral issue. ‘We should try to find Laura,’ he said. ‘It isn’t right, this, and it isn’t fair. The child’s not ours.’

Vivien didn’t need reminding. But she didn’t want anything to change. ‘Laura doesn’t want her,’ she said, praying that if he did try to find Laura, he wouldn’t succeed. ‘She won’t look after her properly – she doesn’t want to.’ Vivien didn’t care if it was emotional blackmail. She’d do what she had to do.

‘Even so,’ said Tom. But when Ruby woke up, gurgled and looked up at him with blue forget-me-not eyes – well, the poor man didn’t have a hope. He was smitten.

*

The days slipped by. A few folk – neighbours mostly – asked where Ruby had suddenly sprung from, and Vivien said she was fostering. No one appeared to have seen Laura since her return to Dorset, so no one knew she’d even had a baby. Only Frances knew the whole story.

Ruby was growing. Vivien stashed money from the housekeeping and bought her a few new clothes. She’d started her on solids too. The baby stayed awake for longer during the day, and had taken to staring up at Vivien in a way that should have been unnerving, but wasn’t. Vivien loved it. She began teething and Vivien rubbed extract of oil of cloves on her flaming gums. She tried not to enjoy this new life of hers too much, just in case it was suddenly snatched away. But the truth was that having Ruby had transformed her world.

One evening, Vivien had sung the little one a lullaby before putting her down for the night and she looked up to see Tom standing in the doorway of what had become Ruby’s room – at least in her mind. There was a look on his face that Vivien understood only too well.

‘What, Tom?’

‘We’ve no official rights, love,’ he said. ‘It’s not just Laura. If the truth ever comes out, Ruby might be taken into care.’

Vivien shuddered. She couldn’t face that. Along with Ruby, she had been handed a responsibility. Pearl’s grandchild was not going to be given over to some stranger for adoption. It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘We’ll have to move,’ she told Tom. ‘Out of West Dorset
and away from here. We can’t risk losing her – not now.’ Fear was making her desperate.

Tom stuck his heels in – as only Tom could. He had his business to think about, he said. He’d spent years building up a client list; he couldn’t just chuck it all away. Did Vivien want him to work for some company fixing other people’s windows and skirting boards? And this was his childhood home – the place he loved. He wouldn’t give it up – not even for Ruby. ‘She’s not ours, love,’ he told Vivien. ‘And that’s the truth of it.’

That might be the truth of it but Vivien did persuade him to a compromise. They moved to East Devon – only twenty miles away but at least in another county and he could keep all his clients and work-base. The only person Vivien kept in touch with from Pride Bay was Frances.

‘Is there anything else we can do?’ Vivien asked him. To be safe, she meant.

Tom balled his fists. ‘We could make her ours.’

‘But how?’ They were getting ready for bed, Ruby safe in her cot next door.

Tom took her by shoulders. ‘We could adopt her ourselves, Viv,’ he said.

Adopt her themselves? It sounded like the perfect solution. But wouldn’t they have to ask Laura’s permission? And would they be able to find her? Vivien wasn’t sure she wanted to risk it.

‘And if we can’t do that … ’ His expression changed. ‘Then we’ll have to hand Ruby over to the authorities
eventually. We can’t just go on pretending she’s ours.’

Vivien stared at him. Like hell, she thought.

‘Viv?’ Tom was giving her a strange look.

But she couldn’t even speak to him. In that second she almost hated the man she loved. It scared her what else was she was thinking.
Over my dead body.

*

Vivien never knew how hard Tom had tried to find Laura because she didn’t ask him. Something had changed between them that night. For the first time Vivien had been willing to put Tom second in her life and he had seen it. They didn’t acknowledge it, but there was no more talk of handing Ruby over to any authorities. It wasn’t an option. End of story.

As Ruby grew into a sturdy, blonde-haired toddler, Vivien often thought about Laura. Where was she? What was she doing? And she worried. Had they done the right thing? They had Ruby. But would there – one day, when Vivien was least expecting it – be a price to pay?

Tom – ever practical – was the first one to realise that without a birth certificate for Ruby, there would be problems. She would have no official name or identity, no nationality even. And how could they get a copy when they didn’t even know exactly when or where she’d been born?

‘We’ll have to get one made for her,’ Tom said, as if he was talking about one of his commissions – an oak table, perhaps, or a mahogany chest of drawers. ‘Otherwise how will she be able to get a passport or a driving licence? She won’t exist – not legally.’

They looked at one another in horror. They really hadn’t thought this through.

‘But how can we? That’s not how it works, is it?’ Vivien could hear her voice rising in panic. How could people like them find out how to get a birth certificate made? And it would be illegal, of course. She shivered. But what else could they do? Here in Devon, they had passed Ruby off as their own child. She seemed like their own child. Some days Vivien could hardly believe that she wasn’t.

‘There must be a way. Forgery’s an ancient art, isn’t it?’ But Tom looked as helpless as she felt.

Forgery?

Tom put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Don’t you worry, my lovely,’ he said. ‘We’ll get it sorted. It’ll all work out – you’ll see.’

But it was Vivien who grappled with the problem late at night when she couldn’t sleep. How could they get a birth certificate? Vivien remembered Laura saying that she’d never even registered her daughter’s birth. Which meant, didn’t it … ?
That no one could prove Laura was her mother?
Vivien didn’t want to think it, but it just slipped into her head. It was a way of making everything safe.

And that’s when she talked to Frances. She took Ruby back to Pride Bay one afternoon and had tea with Frances in the café on the beach.

‘What happens,’ she asked her, ‘if someone doesn’t register a baby’s birth straight away?’ Frances was a nurse – she’d know about these things. There must be plenty of mothers
who didn’t get round to it – especially those, like Laura, on the fringes of society.

‘You can get a delayed registration.’ Frances explained how it worked. ‘But if you have a hospital birth it’ll be registered automatically.’ She caught Vivien’s eye and Vivien saw her twig.

‘You’re thinking of Ruby.’

Vivien pulled the buggy closer. ‘Yes, I am thinking of Ruby. We need to get her a birth certificate, Frances. And if we tell the authorities what really happened … ’

Frances nodded. She didn’t have to say it. ‘What about trying to trace Laura?’ she asked. ‘She wouldn’t object, surely?’

‘We’ve tried.’ Vivien was certain they could have done more. But at what risk?

Frances stared at her. ‘You want to apply for a delayed registration and say that you’re her birth mother.’

Vivien watched the waves beat on to Chesil Beach. Olive grey and inexorable. Some things never changed. ‘It seems the best thing,’ she said.

‘For you?’ Frances asked. ‘Or for Ruby?’

Vivien sighed and met her friend’s steady gaze. ‘For us both,’ she said.

*

She had worried that it wouldn’t be possible, but in fact it proved surprisingly easy. The authorities wanted children’s births to be registered, they disliked loose ends, and Vivien’s story of a home birth and post-natal depression, of not getting round to registering the birth and even of not consulting
a doctor when she was pregnant, was apparently not as unusual as she’d thought it would be when concocting it. She even managed to persuade Frances to be a witness.

‘I don’t like it, Vivien,’ Frances said. ‘But I’m doing it for you and Ruby. Because you’re a good mother and because she needs what you can give her. That’s all.’

‘Will we tell her, love?’ Tom asked Vivien when the application was in and they were just waiting for it to be displayed publicly and then approved. ‘Will we ever tell Ruby what we’ve done?’

‘Why not?’ When she was older, she would understand. Her birth mother had more or less abandoned her. All they had done was stepped in.

But Tom shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon I can,’ he said.

Vivien couldn’t really believe that they were doing it either – although by now she thought that maybe she would do anything to keep this child. She had never – to her knowledge – stepped outside the law before. She and Tom, well, they just weren’t like that. But what choice did they have?

‘Oh, Tom … ’ For a second, Vivien allowed her head to rest on his shoulder. Was it really going to happen? Could she let herself believe that now Ruby would be theirs?

She wanted to, but the very last image that danced behind her eyelids that night as she tried to sleep was of Laura. And Laura’s voice as she said those final words. ‘Look after her for me.’

*

Once it was done – once Vivien held the crisp birth certificate in her hands, seeing their names written in as Ruby’s parents – Vivien forced herself to put it out of her mind. They hadn’t done anything so very bad. It was illegal, yes, but who would ever be able to prove they had lied? In the end it made little difference. Ruby had belonged to them for a long time. This piece of paper just made it a bit more official. It would protect them and protect Ruby, that was all.

But as Vivien put it away in a drawer, her fingers lingered on the brass handle. ‘Forgive me,’ she whispered. Whether she was saying it to Ruby, to Laura or to Pearl, she didn’t know. ‘Forgive me.’

*

Tom persuaded Vivien to move house again back to a place just outside Pride Bay. He missed the golden cliffs, he told her. They had been away for long enough. He wanted his daughter to grow up close to Pride Bay as he had; it was important to him. And they were out of danger now. Laura would never come back – why should she? Even Penny had given up the post office and general stores and moved away to Norfolk. Nobody – except Frances – would ever know what they had done or that Ruby wasn’t truly theirs. Frances had been sworn to secrecy. They were safe.

Barcelona, 1951

Even while Sister Julia was aware of the changes taking place in her mother country, even while Spain slowly recovered from the damage and desecration of the Civil War and its bloody aftermath, she was aware that her monastic community, the community of Santa Ana, functioned much as it had five hundred years ago. They still lived in a medieval building, they still ate simply, they still spent most of their time praying to God. Prayer, psalms, catechism, Holy Communion – this was what made up the everyday life for her sisters. All their pursuits were ordered; routine was the structure of their days. A bell signalled the end of each activity – be it prayer or work or repast. And the day always finished with night prayers. It was a ritual that Sister Julia found comforting.

Since the nuns at the convent did not indulge in idle talk, they did not discuss how they had come to be where they were. Sister Julia sometimes wondered though. Had they joined the order because they wanted to commit to God, because they desired a life of contemplation and prayer? Or had they joined the sisterhood for security – to ensure that
there was one person fewer in the family to feed? Perhaps the fact that she still asked such questions – even inwardly of herself – indicated something lacking in her? Did she lack the passivity that was necessary for true faith and surrender to God? Would she never be able to give of herself in the way that the rest of the sisters in her community gave so willingly? Perhaps she had simply been born too curious? Or perhaps her work for Dr Lopez had made her question things that should not be questioned?