Shadow Baby (29 page)

‘I’m going to bed,’ Shona said, abruptly.

‘Aye, you go to your bed, and I’ll go to mine because there’s no sense in staying up when you’re in this mood. Maybe a good sleep will freshen you and sweeten the sourness. There’s a bottle in your bed. I’ll wake you at nine o’clock and you’ll at least have some porridge and a civil tongue in your head, I hope.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Shona said.

‘I should think so too, disappointing your poor old grannie.’

Next morning, Shona made a huge effort. She took Grannie McEndrick her tea in bed and would not allow her to get up tor make the blessed porridge. She made it herself and took two bowls of it into her grannie’s bedroom, and they ate it together while Shona chattered away making up every word of her lively description of her life in London. No comment was made, but her grannie seemed prepared at least to pretend she was satisfied. They parted on good terms, with Shona promising to write. ‘Be kind to your mother,’ were the parting words. ‘Remember now, mind you’re kind to her.’

Kind. Shona contemplated the word all the way to St Andrews. How was one kind to one’s mother? It suggested condescension

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I IT

somehow, a faintly patronising attitude. Kind, as to an animal, or child. Catriona, she knew, did not want kindness. She wanted intimacy, as she always had done. Kindness was surely an insult. But she tried, when she arrived, to be affectionate and happy to be home which was, she hoped, a version of the kindness her grannie had had in mind. Christmas passed off well and so did Hogmanay. There were no arguments, no sulks. The three of them managed a rapport which convinced Archie that telling Shona she was adopted had brought her closer to them. Catriona shook her head but could not come up with any specific reasons for doubting this.

‘She’s trying,’ she said to her husband. ‘She’s trying so hard, and I’m thankful. But she isn’t happy, she’s changed.’

‘Of course she’s changed,’ Archie said, exasperated. ‘She’s eighteen, she’s just left home for college, it would be unnatural if she hadn’t changed.’

‘I meant in herself, her nature,’ Catriona persisted. ‘She used to be fearless and that’s gone. She’s anxious, tense, underneath.’

But Archie wouldn’t discuss such nonsense.

Shona took the dog for long walks on the beach and gradually felt better. The weather was stormy but she welcomed the biting wind scudding off the black sea and even the rain suited her. She felt busy struggling along the empty sands and she wanted to feel busy. It helped her to think. She began to see quite clearly that she had been deliberately foolish over the last few months - it had been absurd to try to trace her real mother in the way she had done. She had to put a stop to this idiotic stubbornness and use the resources available. If she did not want her parents to know she was trying to find this woman who had abandoned her, then the only alternative was subterfuge. The vital documents would be in the house. Her birth certificate, the original one, and the adoption papers - there would have had to be some kind of document - would be in a drawer somewhere. All she had to do was find them and copy them. Simple.

She was not sure where to start, with her mother’s belongings or her father’s. Archie was away so much that it was Catriona who handled all the household affairs, all the bills and so forth, but then the papers she needed did not come into that category. Her father kept their passports in his desk and she’d heard him once refer to some insurance policies in a drawer there. So she began with his desk, not even waiting until both parents were out. She waited until they were both watching television, a favourite programme lasting

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an hour during which they always said they would not move even to answer the telephone, and then she went into Archie’s den, leaving the door wide open. His desk was neat. Three drawers either side of the kneehole and one long one running above it. Each drawer was labelled. She looked into all of them in case the labels were misleading, but they were not; insurance policies were where they were said to be and so were personal documents. But no birth certificate, no adoption papers. She sat for a moment looking at her father’s passport. It had never occurred to her, when he had given her her own, that to apply for a passport a birth certificate was necessary. Archie had dealt with it and merely handed her passport to her.

She could not bring herself to search her mother’s drawers until the house was empty. Catriona had no den or desk. She had a bureau in the sitting-room, which was much too public to hold secret papers, stuffed full of bills and receipts. Shona knew it was pointless but looked through these quite openly on the pretext of searching for a guarantee for her camera which she vowed she had given her mother. The only other place in which her mother kept things was her bedroom. There were photographs there, some in a box and some in albums, and all kept on a shelf in her wardrobe. But Catriona rarely went out and if she did, wanted Shona to accompany her. With only three days of her vacation left, Shona was beginning to think she would have to risk a quick raid of the wardrobe shelf while her mother was busy in the kitchen. An appointment with the dentist came just in time.

‘You should come with me,’ Catriona said, ‘you haven’t had your teeth looked at for ages. I’m sure he’d fit an inspection into the hour he’s booked me for, a whole hour, I can’t imagine why he thinks he’s going to take that long.’

‘Make me an appointment for Easter,’ Shona said. ‘My teeth are fine just now.’

She locked the front door the moment her mother had left. It was better to risk her unexpected return and her discovery that she was locked out than have her walk in on her daughter’s spying. That is what I am, Shona thought, a spy. There is no other word for it. Spying, I am spying. She even found her palms were sweaty and her heart beating rather faster than usual, fast enough to be aware of it, as she went up to her parents’ room. Such a dismal room, all creams and beiges and with the kind of candlewick bedspread she loathed.

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The wardrobe was ugly but much valued by Archie. It had belonged to his mother and the solid oak appealed to him. The box of photographs was still in place and the albums on top of it. Carefully, noting their exact position, Shona lifted them down and put them on the bed. Behind where they had been was another box, smaller, oblong-shaped. She lifted that out too. But it was locked. She might have known it would be locked, of course it would be. The key would be somewhere in this room, but where? In something, it would be in something, in a purse or bag or some kind of holder. She ran her hands along the shelf. Nothing, nothing else there. It might be in a pocket but there were so many pockets in all the garments hanging there. No, not a pocket, the key would be somewhere more secure. Distracted, Shona looked around. Her mother had a kidney-shaped dressing-table with a flowered flounce round it. Her jewellery was in a drawer underneath it. Quickly, Shona lifted the flounce and looked in the drawer where she knew the jewellery to be. Most of it, the pearls and the gold necklace, both rarely worn, was in a white leather case. The rest, rings and bracelets of lesser value, were on an open tray, velvet-lined. Shona lifted both out. Nothing else here either. She opened the white case and looked at the pearls. Surely the key to anything important would be with other things her mother considered precious. Gently, she lifted the pearls out and experimented with the cushion upon which they had rested. Of course, it lifted out. And there was a little silver key.

There was a bundle certificates in the wooden oblong box, birth and death and marriage certificates for all kinds of people, for relatives on both sides going back a century. Catriona’s sense of family was so strong, Shona realised, that she had become its archivist. But there was no mistaking the certificates to do with her. They were at the very bottom, in a white envelope marked ‘Shona’. It felt like a moment of infinite importance, a moment she suddenly wanted to extend in time. She held the envelope tenderly, almost caressing it, before very slowly opening it and extracting the few sheets of paper inside. Her real mother’s name leapt out before anything else, Hazel Walmsley. Then her age, eighteen. ‘Eighteen,’ Shona whispered aloud. Somehow she’d known it, known her mother would have been so young. Her eyes filled with tears. Eighteen. Not her fault, then. It made the adoption seem so much more understandable. Eighteen. What, after all, could she have done, this pregnant eighteen-year-old? An abortion, Shona knew,

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was hard to obtain in the fifties, as well as illegal. Poor kid. Then there came over her a rising sense of excitement: her mother was only thirty-six now. Her real mother was young, the sort of mother she wanted. Young and like her. She must be like her.

The other sheets were the adoption papers telling her what she already knew. There was no time to copy those out. She made an exact copy of the birth certificate though, dividing her sheet of paper into the same squares and taking care to print every single word that was on the original. Then she replaced the key and the boxes precisely where they had been and even wiped them with a handkerchief as though she had been a burglar and needed to erase her fingerprints. The whole operation had taken merely fifteen minutes - her whole past laid bare in quarter of an hour. Except she knew this was only another kind of beginning. She had her mother’s name and age and that was absolutely all, that and the address of where she had been staying in Norway. But there was one other little detail. Her mother, young Hazel Walmsley, had been classified as a student. She was an eighteen-year-old English student who almost certainly had returned after the birth of her baby to England.

Shona could hardly wait to return to London. Hazel Walmsley, aged thirty-six. But probably married, therefore Walmsley no longer. Still, a maiden name and a date, or at least year, of birth was something. Quite a lot in fact. Those ledgers in St Catherine’s House would come into their own now. She could search them for the birth of one Hazel Walmsley in 1938. Walmsley was not a common name, and neither was Hazel. Or maybe she should search for a marriage certificate. She could look up all the marriages for Walmsley for the last eighteen years. Perhaps her mother had never married, but somehow she was sure she would have done. Married and had children. At that thought Shona felt breathless - halfbrothers and half-sisters to claim! The prospect dazzled her, and when Catriona returned she could hardly conceal her happiness. She wanted to dance and shout and sing, to shriek, Hazel Walmsley! Hazel Walmsley! over and over. Luckily Catriona was in such discomfort with her swollen and still frozen jaw that she did not register Shona’s exuberance, only her readily offered sympathy.

When Shona left to go back to London she gave Catriona a warm hug that almost lifted her off her feet. ‘Take care, Mum,’ she said.

‘And you take care, dear,’ Catriona said, touched and emotional at such an extravagant farewell. For years and years Shona had parted

from her with barely a backward look and certainly never with any embrace. ‘Take care,’ she said again, ‘don’t work too hard, and write. You’ll write, won’t you? And ring if you want, reverse the charges, or else I could ring you back, and …’

‘Mum,’ said Shona, out of the train window, ‘I’m not going to the North Pole, remember?’

‘It always feels like it. You’ve got such a different life now, all those people I don’t know.’

The train slid out of the station and Shona collapsed at the release of all the tension she’d felt for the last two days. She was not just going back to college, she was going to meet Hazel Walmsley. Tomorrow she would spend the whole day in St Catherine’s House. She’d be there when it opened at 8.30. Already she fantasised the meeting with her real mother - she could see her, astonishment and joy on her face, and behind her shadowy figures, sisters and brothers (Oh, she hoped more sisters than brothers, at least one sister) who would gradually emerge and become distinct. There was another fantasy of course, but she dealt with it firmly: rejection. She did not believe for one moment that her real mother would not welcome her, and only entertained this possibility in an attempt to envisage every conceivable reaction. So, it was theoretically possible. Her mother might not want her illegitimate child to claim her. She might have a life in which the appearance of such a child would be an embarrassment. She might never have told her husband or her other children. She might recoil with horror at the appearance of her first daughter and deny her entry into her world.

Nonsense. Shona knew it was nonsense. Her real mother would be like her. She would have suffered and grieved for eighteen years and now all her sorrow would lift. She would need to be reassured that Shona bore her no ill will and had no desire to make her feel guilty. Once she realised that no retribution was sought, she would be relieved. I can tell her, Shona thought as the train sped into England, that I have had a happy life with wonderful parents and that will make her feel better. But then I can add the bit she will long to hear - I have had a happy life with a devoted and loving adoptive mother, but she is not you and it is you I want. Probably, this said, there would be lots of tears. Shona smiled at the prospect.

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MRS BEWLEY died in the early hours of 15 October, but of a stroke, not of shingles. Evie was spared the sight of her employer’s dead body, though she was invited to pay her last respects if she so desired. She did not desire. She had had no respect for Mrs Bewley, though she did not of course give this as the reason for declining the invitation. She implied, without saying so, that she was afraid, and this was sufficient for the nurse and Harris to leave her alone and not press her.

A man who was said to be a nephew arrived later that day and took charge. Bit by bit scraps of information drifted Evie’s way as she let people in and out of the house, took tea in and out of the drawing-room for the nephew and other unknown persons, and in general went about her normal business. She picked up that the house had been left to the nephew, and its contents divided between three cousins. Some provision had been made for Harris, and she was to have a calendar month to get out. ‘Where will I go?’ she kept asking Evie. Evie had no idea; she was naturally more concerned that she did not know where she would go herself, though she was perfectly aware no provision would have been made for her. It was more a question of how long she would still be allowed a roof over her head and of whether she would receive a pittance when she was turned out. This seemed unlikely, since she had never received a penny from Mrs Bewley, only her keep. The nephew - she had been told his name but it was such a complicated double-barrelled name she did not absorb it - did not leave her in suspense for long. He sent for her the day before the funeral and told her she could stay until Harris departed. It was, he informed her, generous of him, some might say foolishly generous, but he was prepared to grant her