Sail Upon the Land (31 page)

‘We know that she needed to return to her studies. That’s all. We know nothing about your father, except that he was Hindu.

‘If your Papa had been conservative, he would never have consented to any kind of adoption. In the old days I would have been put aside as a barren wife, useless.’ Mira looked stricken. ‘And your Dadima would have been right behind that, I can tell you! She always wanted a submissive wife she had chosen, whom she could boss around.’

‘Do you know what my birth parents looked like?’

‘We were shown a photograph of her, but we have no idea what your father looked like. He must have been tall I think. She didn’t look very tall and had fair, short hair.’

‘Was she pretty?’

‘It was difficult to tell. Just a snap, and she wasn’t smiling. Her face looked pleasant, I think.’

‘OK.’

Mira had dried up and Leeta was frustrated as an insatiable need to know more opened like a wound inside her. Remembering her manners, and the shocked look on Dadima’s face when she had burst into the sitting room, she said: ‘Do I have to come back downstairs and face Dadima again?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ll tell her it’s all been a bit of a shock and that you’ve gone to bed. I’m sure Papa will have been furious with her. It was a mean thing to say.’

Leeta hugged her mother close, nuzzling into her neck. Mira smiled, pushing her gently away. ‘You always did that, you little pussy cat.’

She sighed.

‘Now let me go to bed, Mummy, I’m so tired.’

Mira went back downstairs. Leeta threw off her clothes and climbed into bed naked, rebelliously. Who the hell was she, if she wasn’t Leeta Delapi? An English mother? Why had she given her baby away? What would she herself have done if she had found herself pregnant at university? An abortion probably – anything to get rid of the shame. Well, her unknown mother hadn’t got rid of her at least, she’d allowed her to grow in her reluctant body, and then given her to Papa and Mummy, who’d loved her. She tried telling herself it wasn’t all bad.

She had drifted off to sleep that night not sure she would ever want to meet the oddity of an English birth mother. She’d worried that Mira would feel hurt and rejected if she did. But this unknown woman would hold the key to the pale skin, the bony wrists, the grey eyes, the very size of her in comparison to Mira. She used to think there was something wrong with her, but Mira reassured her and just said that a lot of second-generation Indian babies in the UK were much bigger than their parents had been, it must be something to do with the food. Many of her Indian immigrant patients had had to have caesareans because the babies were too big to be born naturally.

‘Did you have a caesarean, Mummy?’ she now remembered asking.

‘No, darling. I didn’t.’

A young mother picked up her toddler and made for the door clutching a prescription for Amoxicillin for his swollen tonsils, and Damson pushed the buzzer on her desk.

‘Is that it, Tina?’

‘Yup.’

‘OK, you can go. I’ll lock up. Thanks.’

All the other doctors in the practice had gone home an hour ago, as usual pleading family responsibilities. Damson was late due to the double shift, and anyway she was always last, not having any family to take responsibility for. But what now? She wondered if she should have pleaded illness earlier and gone home with Leeta, but with Dr Symes off sick it would have been impossible. And she had needed a little time to think, away from the overwhelming physical presence of Leeta.

She had been distracted all day by the knowledge that Leeta was waiting at Swine Cottage, while patient after patient filed through her consulting room. She had tried to concentrate, refer, prescribe, diagnose, sympathise, while her mind flitted back and back to the tall, slender, pregnant girl who had burst into her well-ordered life that morning.

A very small part of her considered it was some kind of psychotic episode brought on by her recent mid-life broodiness, and that she’d hallucinated the whole encounter. She had rung her own home number mid-afternoon, and there had been no answer. Now she dialled again, shaking with anxiety. She realised she had seldom or never rung her own landline in all the years she had lived at Fenning. There had been nobody there to answer it before.

‘Hello?’ It was that voice, somehow familiar.

‘Leeta? Damson here. How are you?’

‘I had a rest, and I went out to the shop to get some food as there didn’t seem to be much here. I’m making some supper. What time will you be home?’

It all sounded so normal and practical that Damson was invaded by a sudden onrush of joy. She paused to let it sink in, that her Mellita had grown into a complete woman without any help from her. Now, as Leeta, she did need her help. Damson was ready and willing. But she was frightened of what the immense gap in time, space and natural expectation had done to any potential mother-daughter relationship. They probably could not have one, but even being in the same house would be beyond anything she had expected.

‘Sounds lovely. I’d like to do a bit more here, can dinner wait about forty minutes? Do we need anything else?’

‘There isn’t much milk.’

‘OK, I’ll pick some up on the way home.’ The conversation was as if Mellita had been in the habit of dropping in on her mother regularly ever since she went away to university.

When she had registered for contact, for weeks afterwards she had checked repeatedly to see if her child wanted to know her. It hadn’t occurred to her that the child didn’t know she was adopted. It had been a blow when no message arrived. It didn’t matter in the slightest that Leeta had now been driven to her by desperate need, rather than a desire to meet her birth mother. Any crumb was good enough for Damson.

She also knew perfectly well she must find out for sure that Leeta was Mellita, and not some imposter preying upon a lonely woman, however unlikely that seemed. She had considered just trusting Leeta, whoever she was. Using the stored-up love that had never had a channel along which to flow to carry her to whatever safe place seemed right for her. The idea of checking up on her baby seemed so intrusive.

She knew in principle what DNA testing entailed, but it too seemed intrusive. In a small town in the depths of Derbyshire, DNA testing was a closed book. No one had consulted her on whether she thought their babies had been swapped in hospital or their embryos in an IVF clinic, and no father had ever wanted her confirmation that the child he was supporting was his blood and bone. It seemed the stuff of tabloid nightmares.

Leeta had, with great daring no doubt, tracked her down – easy enough with a unique name like Damson. She knew she wanted very much to believe she was who she said she was, but Damson wasn’t stupid or gullible either.

DNA testing was easily accessible these days. If she had needed to find out about Leeta even ten years ago, it wouldn’t have been nearly so simple. She typed ‘dna testing maternity’ into Google, and what confronted her came straight from the worst bits of
CSI Miami
. She read about the need to freeze faecal matter, about the benefits of Juicy Fruit chewing gum over other flavours for DNA collection, about making sure the person whose used handkerchiefs you were filching did not have an infection.

It was like some twenty-first century witch’s recipe: dried umbilical cords, teeth and bone, refrigerated condoms, ear wax on cotton buds, exhumed tissue from deep within the thigh, ‘properly collected blood stains’. The site seemed to expect everyone to be wading in the murky waters of disputed inheritance, child support and infidelity, even murder. And the home page was decorated with five jaunty three-dimensional stars – the right-hand points very slightly clipped – to demonstrate very nearly five-star customer satisfaction with this sinister service.

Damson shook her head and applied herself to finding a UK service. There were several advertised, each claiming to be the best in the country. The difference in the tone was stark. The UK sites went into none of the details of what samples were most useful and in what form. On the ‘maternity testing’ page there was a nice picture of a (potential) mother hugging her pretty little (potential) daughter and only three conceivable reasons why anyone might want such a test: adopted children reunited with their mothers (Leeta and her), IVF mix-ups and swapped babies. For the ‘peace of mind’ option it was only £140, as opposed to the legal one which was more like £500.

The tone was far less alarming too. It discreetly talked about ‘in-home testing characterised by the self-collection process’ – no midnight grave-robbing horrors here. She noticed there was a ‘free testing kit’ which, it was promised, would arrive in twenty-four hours, by which time she should be ready to use it. Then she clicked around the site a bit more. Even if she wanted to, the UK sites did not allow for the sneaky stealing of a hair complete with follicle that the US sites advocated. You had to get permission from both parties, and anyway she was not at all sure how she would finesse the taking of swabs from inside Leeta’s cheeks without an explanation. Leeta was a medical student, she would know exactly what Damson was up to.

What would her reaction be if she was in Leeta’s position? Leeta was a clever girl, she should simply understand that if Damson was going to commit herself to a mother’s role, financially and emotionally, she would need physical proof that she was a blood relation. She decided to risk it, and clicked ‘send’ to get the kit. The results would arrive within a few days of posting off the samples.

When she got home, it was strange to knock on her own front door as she stood in the damp October dusk. It swung open, and there was Leeta, wearing soft grey jogging bottoms and a T-shirt. She had managed to light a fire, and Damson’s home was warm, fire-lit and suffused with a delicious scent of frying onions that made her mouth water. The very first time she had ever been welcomed into Swine Cottage.

‘Hello,’ Leeta said, holding the door open for her. ‘I hope you don’t mind me making myself at home?’

‘No, not at all,’ Damson replied. ‘That’s exactly what I meant you to do.’

She looked around as she stripped off the yellow poncho and cycling helmet. Then she looked at the girl who said she was her Mellita. Again she had a strong desire to touch her, hug and kiss her, even though she was still a stranger, or a bare acquaintance at best.

‘Would you like some tea? I’ve made a pot.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

They walked through the arch together, and Damson found her kitchen full of unfamiliar smells of cooking.

‘I couldn’t find a tea cosy,’ Leeta was saying, indicating what looked like a pile of drying-up cloths. She poured the tea from the pot hidden underneath into a couple of mugs.

‘Do you like sugar?’

‘No, thank you.’ Damson was quite bemused. This was so completely unlike her usual way of living, as if an ultra-polite alien had crash-landed its spaceship through her roof.

‘I don’t like sugar,’ said Leeta. ‘But since this,’ she indicated her belly, ‘it seems to make sense for some reason.’

They went back into the sitting room to sit down on either side of the fire.

‘How was your day?’ Leeta ventured.

Damson looked at her in amazement. Chatting seemed a bit strange at a time like this, and they did need to communicate properly.

‘Well, it was quite something in fact. Leeta, we do need to talk.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

The girl looked down, her curtain of dark brown straight hair falling forward and hiding her face.

‘Look, Dr Hayes.’

‘Please call me Damson.’ She wondered for a moment what it would be like if Leeta called her Mummy or Mum.

‘Damson, I realise this is an awkward situation, and I am truly sorry for bursting into your life like this. You must think it was a mean trick that I planned to play on you deliberately, pretending to be a patient. I’m sorry.’

‘No, it’s fine.’ Damson would forgive Mellita anything just for the sake of spending any time with her at all.

‘Well, the thing is, I wasn’t thinking of deceiving you, I just wanted to be alone with you for a few minutes. You understand? I couldn’t think of any other way to do it without you suspecting something. In case you didn’t seem like the kind of person I would want to spend any time with or even like. If you’d been cold and disapproving or something. I don’t know. If I had hated you, I would have simply left without telling you who I was. But in fact Mummy and Papa are both GPs so it seemed so easy and familiar that you are too.’

‘I remember now, I was told they were doctors. Made it easier somehow. My grandfather was a GP too. You said you were on your way to residency?’

Leeta sat up. ‘Well, I’ve done my first three years at Cambridge, and I need to move on to the next stage. I took my A levels early and didn’t have a gap year.’

‘Do your parents know where you are?’ Damson realised too late that this was a stupid question.

‘No, of course not.’ Leeta spoke as if it should be obvious to Damson. ‘Why would I be here if they did? If my parents found out, they would reject me, and I couldn’t bear it. I love them, you see. I’ve always loved them so much. It was the three of us, always. It’s been so ghastly finding out they weren’t my parents. I couldn’t bear to disappoint them and let them down when they took me in and looked after me and paid for my education and everything.’

‘So what happened? How did you get pregnant?’

‘Oh God. I was so miserable, it was as if my world had come to an end. I went to a friend’s Valentine party and drank a lot of gin. Stupidly, I let myself be taken upstairs by some guy I knew and quite fancied. We were kissing and before I knew where we were, he was inside me. It got out of hand. I pushed him away because it hurt. I didn’t think it was enough to get pregnant.’

‘Didn’t you think of the morning after pill?’

‘I suppose I was in denial. And for weeks and even months, it didn’t show. But then it did, and baggy jumpers weren’t enough, so I pretended to my parents that I wasn’t sure I wanted to complete my medical training. That I was thinking of being a banker. I lied to them, told them my tutor had recommended I did a year of voluntary work so I could think about where my life was going. I told them I was going to work in a clinic in Uganda. I went and got a job as a waitress in Bournemouth. But then I was so pregnant and I just didn’t know what to do.’