Shadow Baby (24 page)

The woman was thick-set and tall with long untidy hair tied back with an elastic band. The weight of the hair, which Hazel felt would normally have hung free, a chaotic mess, seemed to pull the skin of her face tight, giving it an unpleasantly strained appearance. She wanted to tell the warder to let the woman wear her hair loose, but that was silly since it might be so fiercely yanked back at the woman’s own request. Both her hands were heavily bandaged. Hazel could see a tiny spot of blood near the wrist on the left hand though the dressings looked absolutely clean, freshly done.

‘Are you the lawyer?’ the woman asked. Hazel said she was, tried to say it with a pleasant smile, showing sympathy. She was aware she was not good at sympathy, or rather not good at demonstrating it. Did this make her a bad or good solicitor? She was never sure. Malcolm always said detachment was important but she felt her failing was to appear to carry this too far and it troubled her. It was not that she was afraid of being involved with clients, particularly clients of this sort, but that she did not know how to project what she felt. More was expected of women in this situation and she could tell already that this client was disappointed in her.

‘Well, then,’ the woman said, ‘tell them they can’t take my baby away. Tell them. Tell them the law says she’s mine. I had her. She’s mine. They’ve no right. Tell them.’

Hazel sat down. The warder stood leaning against the wall, near the door, and the woman, Stella Grindley, sat opposite. They were quite close. Hazel could smell the soap used to wash Stella’s clothes. She thought Stella must be able to smell her perfume, faint though the scent was, and wished she had not worn any. It might seem tantalising, a reminder of the outside world and the kind of lives lived in it which

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Stella could not share. She felt all her own senses heightened and this led to a tension in her which she struggled to dissipate before she began speaking. Everything she was obliged to say would be resented by Stella Grindley and though she was prepared for this, she was not prepared to deal with the rage and grief her information would surely release.

She spoke as quietly but as firmly as possible, choosing her words carefully, making them as clear and simple as she was able without being patronising. What she had to tell Stella was simple enough, after all. She could not keep her three-month-old baby, just as she had not been allowed to keep the last two. A place of safety order had been obtained and the baby was in the process of being adopted. Stella had been arrested outside King’s Cross Station on charges of soliciting, stealing and common assault. She had been drunk, five months’ pregnant and had a string of convictions behind her. At the age of forty her record was enough to make it out of the question that she should be allowed to keep this latest child, born while serving her sentence. She had already been told this, which was why she had cut her wrists with a piece of broken mirror glass she had managed to secrete. The cuts were not deep, her life had never been in danger, but her intention had been serious. This, she thought, was her last baby. She had had eight and kept none of them. The first four she had had with her for their first few years but then they had been taken into care. The fifth had died, apparently a cot death (though there had been some doubt at the time and suspicions of fatal neglect were raised). The last three were all taken away at birth or soon after.

When Hazel had finished the sad recital of what the law said, Stella Grindley was silent for a moment and then, with a speed which was shocking and took even the warder by surprise, she leaned forward and spat at Hazel a great gob of saliva which landed in the middle of her white blouse. ‘You can fuck off,’ Stella shouted, ‘and so can the law. Go on, fuck off, you’re useless.’ The warder had already moved forward to restrain her but restraint was unnecessary. Content now, Stella sat still on her chair and folded her arms and smiled. ‘Stupid little bitch you are,’ she said. ‘You know nothing.’ She was reprimanded for language by the warder but ignored her. She was watching Hazel, who remained in her own chair, deliberately making no attempt either to inspect or mop up the patch on her blouse. She held Stella’s stare and did not blink - she knew that of course she should get up and go without another word but she could not do it.

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She was held by Stella Grindley’s contempt and wanted to challenge it. It was unwise, but she could not resist asking, ‘Do you think you are fit to care for a baby?’

‘She’s mine,’ Stella said. ‘I had her.’

‘Nobody denies that. But you can’t care for her. You have no home, no money, no job, you’re always drunk and you’re in and out of prison. You are not fit, are you, to care for a baby? The law is only safeguarding the child.’

‘She’s mine. I had her. I’m her mother and I’m not giving her away and I’m not letting them take her away and you can go fuck yourself.’

‘That’s enough,’ the warder said. ‘Time’s up.’

Hazel watched Stella Grindley being taken away and then followed. It was stupid of her to have hoped for any kind of rational discussion. Stella’s only argument was one of possession: she had created and given birth to the child and therefore she was hers. In her mind, simple. There had been no point after all in Hazel’s sanctimonious recital. The law was right to say what it did, but Hazel recalled most vividly the cut wrists and the yearning for the child - a yearning so powerful even if it seemed based not so much on overwhelming love as on fury at being cheated - and she was uneasy in her own mind. Efforts had been made, she knew, to help Stella cope with her children. She had been helped over and over again by the social services to reform so that she might keep her babies. Places in hostels had been found for her, grants of money procured, and even work found at one stage. But always she reverted to drinking and soliciting and stealing and, when in a temper, which was often, attempting to beat people up.

This latest baby would be adopted. Lucky baby, to escape Stella Grindley as a mother? But even while thinking this, Hazel was rejecting the underlying premise, that only good, decent, cleanliving sober women could be allowed to be mothers. She drove home knowing there was something wrong somewhere in this obvious truth. Stella had indeed given birth to her baby and it was her, as well as hers, an indisputable part of herself. That could not be contested, that fact could not be changed. It did not matter who adopted the baby, it was still Stella’s and always would be. Caring for it was different. Stella had shown she could not care for it and any anguish she felt at having it taken away was as nothing compared to the anguish a child would suffer if left in her care.

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What, then, Hazel wondered, worries me so much? Stella’s passion to keep her own baby, that’s what. For whatever reason. A passion that made her cut her wrists. A passion I never felt, not once, for that baby whom I allowed to be taken away from me. Stella Grindley would think me a monster, not just a bitch, if she knew.

And then there was the evidence of Stella’s suffering. She was suffering because her baby was being taken away, there was no doubt about that. There was always the mother’s suffering, of one sort or another, in these cases. Stella was experiencing a terrible sense of loss. And I, Hazel wondered, did I suffer? And if I did, did I have any right to?

She became obsessed, in the days that followed, with this question, to the point of several sleepless nights when she disturbed Malcolm with her feverish tossing and turning. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, but she said nothing. How could she tell him she was wondering if she had had any right to be regarded as having suffered at eighteen when she had that first unwanted baby? She did not want to return to any mention of the subject. What she had suffered from, she decided, was a failure of compassion. At eighteen, she had had no acquaintance with such a sophisticated emotion. She had thought only of herself, as young people do, of her own life being wrecked. There had never been any inclination to think beyond that.

But supposing she had thought about her baby as anything but an object to be disposed of - what then? Supposing she had had the imagination as well as the compassion to think of this baby as a person who would have feelings and dreams and desires, and to whom the deliberate denial of any attachment by his or her mother, would seem a terrible thing? She tried to think of having wanted to keep her baby, of being determined to do so at any cost to herself. It seemed to her extraordinary, all these years later, that she had never once thought of saying to her mother that she wanted to have and keep the baby. What would her mother have said? The temptation to ask began to plague her. Almost eighteen years had gone by and they had never, except for that brief moment when her mother had tentatively wondered if she had told Malcolm, talked about it. It made her realise what she supposed she had always really known, that she and her mother, by the tacit agreement of both of them, never discussed anything that was distressing or difficult. It was a habit she had grown up with and kept to without ever attempting to force a different kind of communication. But now she wanted some

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kind of confrontation all these years too late - she wanted to know what her mother had really thought and felt, and most of all what she thought she would have done if her daughter had not fallen in so obediently with her plans.

Mrs Walmsley, at almost sixty, was busier than ever. Every day she had some charity work to do, of the organisational variety, and when she was not sitting on committees she was taking her work as a magistrate seriously - it was all action, just as she liked life to be. Then there was her role as grandmother which she relished and threw herself into. Seven grandchildren, all living in or near London, so that she saw them often and had them to stay frequently. During the holidays she was much in demand, often taking her grandchildren to stay with her in her Gloucestershire cottage. She came to know the Science Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the British Museum intimately, not to mention the Planetarium and the Zoo (though she refused to set foot in Madame Tussaud’s, pronouncing it vulgar). Hazel, whenever she rang her mother, which was not as often as she felt she ought to, was treated to such a stream of approaching appointments that she felt she should get off the phone quickly. Delivering and collecting her own sons to and from their grandmother’s she had only the most hurried of chats, since her mother was, if anything, busier than her busy self. It was impossible to contemplate any level of serious conversation in such circumstances. She knew she would have to wait until the next occasion when her mother came for supper and stayed the night, something she did no more than three or four times a year.

She was surprised, when the opportunity came, how hard it was to bring up the subject that troubled her. Of course, her mother never stopped talking, so it was always a strain trying to find a gap in her energetic resume of her own activities, but when finally she paused long enough for Hazel to say anything at all, the words were slow in coming.

‘Mother?’ Hazel said.

‘Yes, dear? But not next week, I am going to be frantic next week, not a spare hour …’

‘I wasn’t going to ask you to do anything.’

‘Oh, good, because I simply couldn’t manage to take on another thing, not even for you, darling, so what was it, what was it you wanted to ask?’

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‘I’m not sure really,’ Hazel said, faltering, before she had even begun. ‘It’s awkward, rather embarrassing actually …’

‘Embarrassing?’ Mrs Walmsley said, astonished. ‘Good heavens, Hazel, how can anything between us be embarrassing, how ridiculous. What is it? What’s happened?’

Hazel heard the note of excitement in her mother’s voice. Probably she thought she was going to be treated to some tale of adultery and even now was calculating who was having a fling, her daughter, or her son-in-law.

‘It’s about when I was young,’ Hazel said.

‘Oh.’

Smiling slightly at her mother’s obvious disappointment, Hazel plunged into explanations but speaking in a staccato fashion quite foreign to her normal smooth speech patterns. ‘When I was seventeen. Pregnant. That time. And I came to you. Told you. You took over. You organised everything. Well, what if… I mean, what if I’d said I wanted to keep the baby …’

‘Absurd, you wouldn’t have been so absurd,’ burst in Mrs Walmsley. ‘It never entered your head, thank God.’

‘Why “thank God”?’

‘Why? Really, Hazel. It would have ruined your life, of course it would, saddled with a child at seventeen, eighteen when you had it. What on earth would you have done with it? How could you have gone to university? An unmarried mother at eighteen - good heavens.’

‘But if I had, Mother, if I’d refused to part with the baby once I’d had it, what would you have done?’

‘Made you see sense.’

‘So you wouldn’t have helped?’

‘No. What is this, Hazel? I don’t understand.’

‘What if I’d told Daddy …’

‘Told your father? He’d have been livid, he’d have wanted to find the boy and horsewhip him. There would have been the most fearful fuss, it makes me quite ill to imagine the scenes. No, you couldn’t have told your father, impossible. It was essential the whole thing should be kept secret.’ She paused, eyeing Hazel critically and with exasperation. ‘You’re a happily married woman, darling, with three lovely children and a good career, and here you are being silly, not like yourself at all. You’re usually so sensible, you always have been except for that one bit of madness, and now you’re plaguing yourself

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and me with all this speculation about what might have been said and done half a lifetime ago. It’s so unnecessary.’

Hazel sat quietly for a few moments, watching her mother who was perched on the very edge of her chair, back rigid, head high, face flushed, a vision of righteous indignation. It was late. The boys had been in bed for ages, and Malcolm had retreated to his study a good hour ago.

‘Let’s stop talking about it anyway,’ her mother said. ‘It’s bedtime, I’ve a long day tomorrow and so have you.’