Shadow Baby (2 page)

Fine. She was fine. There was nothing melodramatic about Hazel. Slight in appearance, in character she was as solid as the stock from which her father so proudly told her she came. She got on with her life after this aberration and never made the same mistake again, never took the same risk. She wasn’t morbid or sentimental, nor was she given to the kind of flights of fancy in which her mother indulged. This pragmatic outlook saved her, though not entirely. Certain things could trigger off such total recall of pain and loss that she would wonder if she knew herself at all. It was often a question of smells - a particular disinfectant, a brand she had never smelled since that night, and the scent of a drink, a drink with cloves (or something similar) in it, which she had been given to drink afterwards. And of shadows. The room had been all white, startlingly white, floor, ceiling, everywhere sterile and white, but since it was dark outside, the blinds - they were white too, everything white - were drawn and lights were on and she saw huge shadows when she briefly opened her eyes. She had tried not to see them, she had wanted everyone to remain unrecognisable, but her eyes had opened involuntarily at the moments when she lost control and then the shadows had danced on the wall in front of her.

That was what remained in her mind for ever. One shadow. Indistinct, an outline only, quickly whipped away. It swung in front of her appalled gaze and then was gone. Never put into her arms: that had been agreed. She heard the gurgling cry, knew the shadow had a voice, but she never felt the body from which it came. She did not weep, not then, she felt too frozen, hypnotised by the enormity of what she had done. A feeling of outright panic mixed with a new fear in her, the fear of one day being called to account, and her mother not being there to manage everything.

IT WAS a narrow little house in a narrow lane, one of many all squeezed together, leaning on each other in what seemed such a cosy way. The lane ran between the cathedral and the town square and was much frequented. It was not at all a quiet street. Indeed, it was not really a street. It was paved in giant blocks of sandstone, unusual for a lane, but otherwise it had no pretensions to being a proper street. Mr Dobson, taking the census, hated lanes like this. They made his work difficult. Invariably the inhabitants of lanes like this were not at all clear as to how many people lived with them. They were vague or confused, or both, and yet his question was so simple: on the night of 8 April, how many people resided in this house? The householders were meant to have filled in the appropriate form, delivered by his own good self (therefore let there not be any question of a form not having been received), but in these lanes the job had rarely been done. Often, the form had been lost; another had to be produced and then the effort of memory would be mighty, though fewer than twenty-four hours had gone by.

Mr Dobson was patient and understanding, or so he judged himself. He had at least enough imagination to be aware that to many householders he was also alarming. Nobody was ever cheeky; impertinence to an officer of the Crown carried too great a risk. They were on the whole respectful but resentful and he had to cope with this. He was particularly kind to women, especially to the elderly widows who lived in this lane. He wanted the census form filled in correctly: that was of prime importance. When an old woman opened the door of No. 10, Mr Dobson immediately doffed his hat, smiled and identified himself at once, producing his badge of accreditation. The woman, a Miss Mary Messenger, looked feeble.

She was also, he quickly realised, more than slightly deaf. Instead of bawling at her, Mr Dobson flourished a census form, pointed to the date and then to what was required by law and hoped Miss Messenger was not also short-sighted. She stood so long staring at the form that Mr Dobson began to wonder if she were illiterate, not uncommon with these elderly women. Fortunately she was not. After her long perusal, Miss Messenger shuffled off down the passageway and re-emerged clutching the original form delivered days before.

She put it into his hand without a word. Mr Dobson looked at it. To his surprise, it was filled in. The only occupant of No. 10 on the night of 8 April had been Miss Messenger herself. Mr Dobson thanked her and backed away as she shut the door. But he saw, just before it closed, the face of a small girl appear round the corner of the door at the far end of the passage. Only the briefest and most indistinct of glimpses but indisputably real, the face of a young girl, a small white blob of a face framed by a good deal of untidy dark hair. He stood for a moment, thinking. Had the old woman concealed the fact that a child lived with her? But why would she do that? Mr Dobson walked slowly down the lane reflecting that whether there was a child residing at No. 10 or not was of no great importance. She might be only a visitor, a relative there for the day. There was no reason to conclude that she lived there. Residents in lanes like this were forever hiding things from landlords, terrified that rents would be raised if it were discovered they harboured paying lodgers. One little girl living with an elderly woman was neither here nor there. He was not a landlord, thank heaven, nor a policeman. It was not his duty to pry, only to collect. The census form had been collected and that was that, but he went on his way faintly worried.

Mary Messenger, aged eighty (as stated on the census form), was still standing behind her front door, listening. She had her good ear pressed to the wide crack in the door, only recently emptied of the rags which had filled it all winter. She heard the census man’s footsteps go off down the lane and was satisfied. But when she turned and saw Evie standing there, she shouted at her. ‘Didn’t I tell you, eh, didn’t I say stay in the kitchen, eh, what you playing at, you want taken away to the poorhouse, eh?’ Evie withdrew and Mary muttered her way after her, into the small dark kitchen at the back of the house. ‘Nothing but bother, you’re nothing but bother, and what

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thanks do I get these days, eh?’ Evie ignored her. She stood on a stool and kneaded the dough on the table, her little fists barely making any indentation, though she was trying so hard to do what her grandma did. The sight of the child’s ineffectual kneading recalled Mary to the task at hand. She picked up the dough and slapped it about, her hands no longer shaking, as they did when they were not busy, but suddenly strong and skilful. Evie watched and admired and, without needing to be told, smeared lard on the inside of the bread pan. There was silence until the dough was shaped and moulded into the pan and then Evie hopped on to another stool and, using an old dishcloth, carefully opened the door of the oven in the range. In went the bread and Mary sighed and sat down and said, ‘You’re a good girl when all’s said and done. We’ll have a cup of tea and you can sugar it.’

She watched Evie take the blackened kettle off the hook over the fire. Very careful, the child was, did everything she was told carefully and liked to do it. There was no sulking, no impudence, not yet, but then she was only five, only just turned five. Not pretty, never would be, Mary had seen that from the beginning, but she was healthy, that was the main thing, and strong, and she had a cheerful disposition, so far. The tea was made and they both sat in front of the steaming mugs with a measure of contentment which each could sense in the other. ‘Well, Evie,’ Mary said, watching the child blow the steam and warm her hands on the mug, ‘I don’t know what’s to be done about you. I haven’t said you’re here, don’t you worry, but it can’t go on for ever, can it, eh? Not for ever. I won’t live much longer, that’s for sure, my time’ll be up soon, then what, eh?’ Evie said nothing at all in reply. She appeared quite unperturbed by her grandmother’s ramblings and only looked up from her tea at the ‘eh?’ sounds, as though not understanding the rest. Any ‘eh?’ commanded her attention, as it was meant to. Sometimes Mary said ‘eh?’ in no context at all, a sudden, harsh querying of nothing.

Evie went on blowing the steam which rose from the tea and stirring the sugar she had been allowed to put in even though it had long since dissolved. She liked the faint tinkle of the spoon on the side of the mug, a sound too faint for her grandmother to catch and object to as she objected, inexplicably, to so many things. Each day, it seemed to Evie, was full of traps, of things she must not do or say. She must not get up until she was told, unless she needed to use the po and even then she was expected to hop back into bed sharpish

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until given the signal to rise. Her grandmother slept in a double bed which took up most of the room and Evie slept on a mattress at the foot of it. There was room for three of her size in the bed with her grandmother, but she was not allowed to share it. ‘I might smother you,’ Mary said, and Evie accepted this as she was bound to accept everything.

She knew this old woman was not in fact her grandmother because she had been told so, not long ago. ‘Am I your grandmother, eh?’ Mary had barked at her, sounding angry. She had nodded dumbly, though aware as ever of verbal traps. ‘No, I’m not,’ the old woman said. ‘Good as, used as, but I’m not, now don’t you forget, eh? You haven’t got a real grandmother and what do you need one for when you’ve got me willing, eh? You’ve got me willing, I dare say I’ll get my reward in heaven.’ And then, later, equally unexpected and sudden, she had said: ‘If anyone asks, mind, I am your grandmother, eh? You remember that, don’t you forget, it could be more than your life is worth.’ Evie’s heart had thudded a little at those words. It wasn’t the contradiction which frightened her - first she had a grandmother (all she had) and then she didn’t and now she did again (only sometimes, only if asked) - but the mention of her life. What was a life? How could anything be worth more? But she merely nodded, as though she had understood, and said nothing.

Evie, just turned five, was an expert at knowing when to say nothing. They were the first words she remembered, the first instruction - ‘Say nothing.’ She remembered being bundled into shawls and taken by Mary to the market and being told, ‘Say nothing, if anyone talks to you, say nothing, eh?’ She had obeyed, though it had not been difficult since all that the other butter women said to her was ‘Are you cold, pet?’ and ‘Are you hungry?’ and in both cases a shake of the head was sufficient. She sat on a little stool behind the old wooden bench that served as her grandmother’s stall and watched the people coming to buy. She was seated so low down, almost on the ground, that what she mostly saw were skirts and feet, an endless procession of long skirts and black boots. Seeking to see something more interesting and of greater variety she gave herself a crick in the neck, peering upwards so hard and earnestly at all the faces looming over her grandmother’s eggs. At the end of the morning, when she was carried to the cart and they trundled all the

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long way back to Wetheral, she fell asleep and never saw anything of the return journey to the village.

Those days, the days of going to market with her grandmother, were already a long way off in her young mind. She could only just recall the green in the village and the big houses round it and the plains above the river where they had lived. But she knew she had preferred it: that country life, and the presence of someone else, some other woman whose face she could not recall. All that had gone. Here, in the city, she stayed in the house almost all her time, with her grandmother. They went out to shop once a week to that same market where once they had sold flowers and eggs. On Sundays, the cathedral bells, so close by, vibrated through the house but she and her grandmother did not go to church. She had never, to her knowledge, in her short memory, been inside a church. She was sure she should go to church and did once suggest it but her grandmother told her there was plenty of time for her to be a churchgoer in the future if she wished. ‘Any road,’ Mary had said, ‘you’re baptised, you can rest easy, she saw to that at least, baptised, all proper, in Holy Trinity, does that satisfy you, eh?’

It almost did. Evie knew where Holy Trinity was. It was the big church at the junction of the two roads in Caldewgate, outside the west wall of the city. She felt proud to have been baptised there and could see herself being held over the font and almost feel the holy water on her baby forehead. She longed to go into Holy Trinity and she resolved that one day she would indeed get inside the church and see the font. She had pictures and that was all. Her grandmother had a bible, even if she never went to church, and inside was a little illustrated booklet about Holy Trinity. One picture, very grainy, showed the font and a woman holding a baby and the vicar about to baptise it. Maybe the baby was her; she could at least pretend it was. But who, then, was the pleasant young woman holding her? Not her grandmother. There was a man in the picture too, standing a little behind the woman, his hat in his hand. Who was the man? Impossible to know, as most things were.

‘You’ve made a meal of that tea,’ Mary said. ‘Sup it up, there’s work to be done and half the morning gone. Get the tub, get that kettle back on, get the soap.’ Evie got everything. She had to drag the heavy tin tub along, it was too heavy to carry, but she managed successfully to position it under the tap in the yard. The yard was tiny, barely three feet wide and five feet long; and at this time on a

bleak spring morning it was bitterly cold. The fronts of the houses in the lane were protected from the wind by the high buildings opposite but the backs were not. The east wind, scudding down on to the city direct from the Pennines, hopped and skipped over the walls of the yards and, once inside them, ricocheted from end to end forming a whirlpool of dust. Evie went back inside and found her shawl and fixed it over her head and across her chest, fastening it with a safety-pin. Then she was ready.

She got the washing and put it into the tub and ran cold water on to it, and Mary appeared carrying the big kettle and added its contents to the tub. The water coming out of the spout was boiling but all it did was reduce the freezing cold of the water already in the tub. Mary made it clear that donating this hot water was a matter of being kind and that when she was a girl like Evie she had had to do the washing without its benefit. She stood and watched as Evie took a bar of soap and began soaping the clothes and pummelling them about and she sighed, as she always did, and said, ‘I miss my washhouse, I should never have left that washhouse, eh?’