Shadow Baby (32 page)

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the building and had nothing whatsoever to eat all day. By the time she got back to her attic, without having had the opportunity to buy any of the food she planned, she was weak and sick with hunger. The remaining two-day-old bun she still had choked her with its dryness, but she forced it down and then wept and slept. She woke rigid with apprehension but determined above all else to procure fresh food. The market she knew would be open early, so she hurried straight there and bought what she needed, consuming half a hot new loaf and a huge slab of cheddar cheese cut freshly for her on the spot, and returning home with the rest. She felt better not just because of what she had eaten but for knowing she had fresh provisions waiting for her when she returned that night.

She was not quite as tired and desperate at the end of Tuesday. The racing around and being shouted at had been the same, but she had not felt quite so invisible and despised. One of the machinists had thought to offer her some tea and she had found the few mouthfuls made a huge difference. Her name was not yet known, nor had she expected it would be, but when she was greeted once in the cuttingroom with, ‘Oh, it’s you again, look sharp with that pattern,’ she felt comforted. The cutting room overawed her. Here she felt serious work was being done. It was quieter too, though roars did still split the air when something went wrong. Paper patterns were placed on beautiful-looking materials with great precision and she hardly dared to breathe in case she sent them fluttering. She heard Mr Arnesen’s name mentioned frequently here

- he was always being expected and his arrival half-dreaded, so much so that she built up an image of this man as some kind of ogre. When, on Thursday, he came to supervise everyone’s current work, Evie was disbelieving as she heard him addressed and realised this was the great Henry Arnesen, tailor supreme, owner of this prestigious and profitable firm which he had built up, she had gleaned, entirely on his own, starting as a one-man business in Globe Lane.

He looked so gentle. Tall, though slightly stooped, and with a fine head of hair and broad shoulders, but mild-looking, his face smooth and virtually unlined and his eyes benign behind his spectacles. He did not shout. On the contrary, he spoke quietly and never raised his voice even when a disastrous mistake in the cutting of a highly expensive silk was discovered. Evie could see everyone admired him and that in spite of his apparent gentleness they thought of him as a

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tough taskmaster. She heard one of the machinists say, as he left the room after instructing one girl to unpick an entire garment, because her machining had very, very slightly puckered the material (a material so gauze-like it was almost impossible to work with), that she wouldn’t like to be his wife. He was such a perfectionist, the girl had complained fretfully, life would be impossible married to such a man. But there was a chorus of disagreement - everyone else, it seemed, longed to be Mrs Henry Arnesen and thought her a lucky woman. ‘He’s been good to her,’ someone said, ‘everyone knows that, very good to her, worships her, and his daughters, he’s a real family man, none better.’ Heads had nodded. ‘No philandering,’ this voice of authority continued, ‘not for Mr Arnesen. Content with his wife, he is, and always has been.’ A current of envy seemed to pass through the room conducted silently from machine to machine. Evie, set to pick up scraps dropped all over the room, listened avidly. ‘She’s a looker, though, his wife,’ said another voice, ‘beautiful woman, with that lovely hair. Did you see her here last week? With her hair all plaited, the French way? Lovely. She’s nearing forty, must be, but you’d never know it, she’s kept herself well, kept her figure even if she’s had two bairns and umpteen miscarriages, they say.’ ‘She’s a good mother too, bringing those girls up well,’ a voice chipped in, and another responded with, ‘I’d be a good mother if I had her looks and her Henry.’ The rest was lost in laughter and then Evie’s job was done and she left the room and went where she was told she was needed, feeling heavy with a longing she thought she had grown out of, that wretched yearning for a mother who would never now be found. She wished she had never heard Mrs Henry Arnesen being talked of.

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There was a queue when Shona arrived outside the Public Search J. Room at 8.30 am. When the double doors were unlocked, everyone moved smartly, walking straight to the counters. She went first to collect some forms. She had discovered by now that when she found her mother’s marriage entered in the ledgers she would need to fill out the appropriate form and present it to a clerk who would give her a copy of the certificate for Ł5. She took several birth certificate forms too. Her mother was likely to have children and she could surely trace them. Then, armed with her little sheaf of papers, she went through to the room which held the marriage ledgers. Slowly, she found the year books for 1957, the year after she was born, not because she thought her mother would have married then but because it was important to be thorough. Every year from 1957 up to the present one must be searched.

Her arms ached after the first hour, in which she had looked through five years of records for Hazel Walmsley’s marriage. Twenty huge heavy ledgers taken down, spread open, looked through. Not many Walmsleys at all, which made the job easier, but still she was tired from all the lifting and from the tension. The room had filled up. By the time she got to 1964 there was no space on the counter to open the ledgers and she had to lug them to other counters where a gap briefly opened up. All around she could see people finding what they wanted and scribbling details down. She carried on through another year, dully now, sullenly turning pages, hypnotised by the very writing she was scrutinising.

Nine years and still her mother hadn’t married. Shona broke off and went to wash her hands. The ledgers weren’t dirty exactly but many of them were dusty. Little puffs of dust swirled around the

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room as the big books thumped on to the counters. She found herself looking in the mirror over the washbasin and not seeing her own reflection properly at all. She stared at her face and tried to see where it would age. Around the eyes, certainly. There were faint lines at the corners already and these would deepen and so would the line between her eyebrows. Maybe her whole face would become thinner and her full cheeks disappear and the bone structure emerge. Her hair would lose its shine and colour, it would go grey and she would at last cut it - she didn’t want to be middle-aged with long grey hair. Tentatively, she leaned over the washbasin and, scraping her abundant hair right back with both hands, she thought, yes, the greatest change of all would be to have her hair grey and short, severely short. That would age her.

Back she went to the search room, hardly able to get down the ledger for the spring of 1966. January to March for that year had few Walmsleys. None were entries for Hazel Walmsley. She put it back and reached for April to June. It was missing. She looked to the right and left of her to see who was using it. A man at the end of the crowded row had it. Shona waited for him to replace it and was annoyed when he put it back in the wrong order - how careless people were. She could have asked him to pass it straight over to her, but she wanted to go through the whole ritual.

Nearly ten years now and still her mother was unmarried. What did it mean? Maybe her birth had put her mother off men for life, maybe she had remained single, an embittered spinster. Shona hated to think so. She wanted to have been a mistake from which her mother had recovered quickly, and gone on to be happy, not an accident which had had long-lasting and dire consequences. It was beginning to occur to her that instead of tracking down a woman of a mere thirty-six years of age who had settled into marriage and motherhood with such ease that the memory of her illegitimate child was shadowy, she might be discovering a woman not far off forty who had spent all these intervening years full of remorse and regret and quite unable to build any new life. Disturbed, Shona hurried to open the summer ledger for 1966. Did she want to claim such a woman as her mother? No. She would feel so guilty, to have wrecked her life, and nothing she would be able to do would make up for the sentence she had served. Her mother would become her burden and she was not looking for a burden, she was looking for the setting down of her own.

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There were twenty-seven women called Walmsley who married between April and June 1966. One was Hazel. Shona was so sunk in gloom that at first the entry meant nothing to her. Then she felt excitement course right through her as she snatched a pencil to copy the details on to the correct form. Only after she had done so, and had gone to queue at the counter where certificates had to be handed in, did she allow herself to relax and even then she could hardly bear to stand still. She wanted to shove all the people in front of her aside and bang on the glass partitions and demand instant attention. It took a full forty minutes before her turn came. She paid the fee and asked to collect the certificate at the end of the day instead of having it posted. It was agony to have to wait even those few hours ahead.

Outside, she hesitated. Covent Garden was near, she could go there and buy herself a cup of coffee and hunch over it as long as possible. She walked there and went into a cafe, propping the piece of paper upon which she had written the details of her mother’s marriage against her coffee cup. Hazel Walmsley, aged twenty-eight, had married Malcolm McAllister in April 1966 in Gloucestershire. So little she yet knew, but so much more than she had ever done. She felt such relief that her mother had married after all and to a Scot, or a man with a Scottish name. They would have children by now, she was sure they would, but of course these brothers and sisters would be very young, it wouldn’t be possible to become their friend. She felt a little disappointed at the realisation, but quickly consoled herself - it didn’t matter, in fact it would be better, it would mean she could be accepted as a proper sister without question. The moment she had her mother’s marriage certificate she would begin the search for her children.

Shona didn’t open the envelope with the precious certificate in it until she was home. All the way to Kilburn she constantly touched it inside the pocket of her jacket, feeling the thin paper between her fingers, not ever letting it alone. Once in her room she flung herself on her bed and held the envelope high, as though offering it in some kind of sacrifice before opening it. She felt her face flush and a trembling set in as she saw that Hazel Walmsley was, or had been at the time of her marriage, a lawyer. It was so unexpected and thrilling that Shona could not get over it - coincidence, yes, but surely more significant than that, surely meaning that she and her mother shared like minds just as she had hoped. Catriona didn’t have a like mind, that had always been the trouble. They did not think in the same

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way about anything and her own analytical, critical nature had endlessly come into conflict with her adoptive mother’s gentle, rambling, discursive pattern of thought. Malcolm McAllister was a lawyer too. He was thirty-two to Hazel’s twenty-eight. They had married in church on 11 April 1966. Shona was sure it had been a beautiful day - she could see it all in her mind’s eye, her mother at last happy, and lovely in her dress and veil.

She didn’t sleep at all that night. First she cried with excitement and then she cried with self-pity, for pity of the self shut out of her mother’s happiness. Around three in the morning, giving up on all hope of sleep, she dressed and made tea and then sat hugging her cup, full of new doubts. What if Malcolm McAllister had been a case of better-than-nothing, a case of her mother waiting ten long years and marrying in desperation? No reason to think so but she thought it. What if he knew nothing of his wife’s illegitimate baby? Shona pondered this long and deep. Clearly, there had been great secrecy. Everything she knew pointed to it. A baby born in Norway, well out of the way. The intention was surely to have kept the event secret and go on doing so. Why tell a new husband ten years later? But I would have to, thought Shona, I would want to, long before the actual marriage. Of course Hazel would have told Malcolm, of course. And what would he have said? About that she could not be so sure. Would it worry him, the thought of his wife’s illegitimate child out there somewhere? Maybe. But Hazel would tell him there was no need to worry, the baby had been adopted and never heard of since. Shona smiled in the darkness of her room.

The births of her three halfbrothers were quickly found the next day, Philip, born in 1967, Michael in 1969, and Anthony in late

1970, such plain names and not a Scottish one among them. No sisters, though. At first this made Shona sad but then she thought how much more special it made her to be her mother’s only daughter. She fantasised the birth of her last halfbrother and her mother’s disappointment - still no girl to replace the daughter taken so cruelly from her. I have no rival, Shona thought, and was pleased. What pleased her even more was that she now had an address (taken from Anthony’s birth certificate), which was only four years old, and it was a London address. She had never been to Muswell Hill but she knew it was in north London and not so very far east of Kilburn. The telephone directory listed an M. McAllister living at the same

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address as was on Anthony McAllister’s birth certificate - it was easy, easy: it had all been there waiting to be found.

She couldn’t afford the time to go to any lectures or write any essays - such things were trivial beside the need to lay siege to the house in which her mother lived. The nearest tube station to it was Bounds Green, which meant an irritating six stops on the Bakerloo Line, then two changes for another eight stops on the Piccadilly Line. It took forever, and yet as the crow flew the distance on the map was short. She had her A-Z of London in her hand as she came out of the tube and was mistaken for a foreigner by an eager-to-help middle-aged woman. ‘Are-you-lost-dear?’ the woman asked her, and it suddenly seemed a good idea to assume the persona of an au pair girl. She nodded, said in a ridiculously heavy French-English accent that she was and that she was looking for Victoria Grove. She didn’t need the woman’s help, the map was perfectly clear, but she let herself be guided across the street and directed down Durnsford Road towards the golf Course and Alexandra Park. If, as she stood guard outside her mother’s house when she got there, anyone approached her, she would keep up her disguise. It added to the excitement, though she needed no boost to the tension she already felt.