Shadow Baby (33 page)

The house was not as imposing as she had thought it might be. It was large enough to impress but ugly, with no redeeming architectural features and built of a particularly nasty-coloured brick. The door was painted green, but the paint looked in need of renewal. The front garden had been paved over and some tubs stood on the paving stones but they had nothing much in them, only some sad-looking wallflowers. Two dustbins, both overflowing, were perched near the wroughtiron gate and there was a broken-backed garden chair to the other side of it. Why would anyone want to sit on it and look at the unattractive front of the house? Shona couldn’t understand it, but then decided that once this front garden had been a pretty place and that maybe the sun shone fully on the seat on summer mornings and it was a pleasant place to sit and watch the children play. Across the road was a church. Perfect. It had a wall round it and evergreen shrubs and a porch where notices were pinned. The whole patch where the small church stood - it was actually a Methodist chapel, she soon discovered - was in shadow on this winter morning and there was no better cover than its general murkiness, no lights on, no activity within its confines. She was

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wearing her usual black trousers and black ski-jacket and nobody would notice her.

She took up a position behind the wall, in the corner where it met another wall dividing the chapel grounds from the next house. The shrubs were thickest here, so thick that she had to peer closely through them to see anything at all. It was cold and raining slightly, but she had thought to put several layers of clothes on and was warm enough to withstand a long vigil. In fact, she had hardly taken up her position, at seven o’clock, when the door of her mother’s house opened and a man ran out. Her heart jumped a little as she watched him unlock his car, a modest Ford, and throw his bulky briefcase and thick file of papers into the back seat. He was quite a nicelooking man, this stepfather of hers, but as the very word stepfather popped into her mind she thought of Archie and recoiled from it. This man wasn’t as handsome as Archie, her real father, but Archie was not her real father any more than this Malcolm. She shook her head from side to side, annoyed, not wanting any kind of father to get in the way of her real mother. For an hour nothing else happened except for a boy delivering a newspaper, she couldn’t see what, and a postman unloading a hefty bundle of letters. She’d hoped, watching him approach the door, that he would ring the bell but he chose instead to shovel all the letters through the letter-box one by one. At eight the door opened again and she took a deep breath but it was only a girl coming out, a girl about her own age. This puzzled her. Who was the girl? A lodger? Would a couple like her mother and her stepfather have lodgers? Or a visitor? A relative? A babysitter who had stayed overnight? It disturbed her not to know and to have to indulge in such speculation.

At eight-thirty another girl came out, older this time and unmistakably some sort of nanny. She had the three boys with her, two in school uniform, dark blue blazers and trousers. They were all carrying bags and kicking each other and yelling, and the nanny was ignoring them as they followed her erratically to another car, a battered Volvo Estate. Shona saw one, the middle one, had her hair, short of course, but the same colour, surely their mother’s colour? It made her feel strange, this sight of a halfbrother with her hair, but otherwise watching the three boys walk in front of her hiding place was not the emotional experience she had imagined it would be. They were just boys, except for the hair of one of them. They were nothing to her and she felt rather ashamed of her lack of reaction.

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Half an hour went by and the nanny drove back. She went into the house but was out again within minutes wearing a long thick coat, carrying a satchel under her arm. She strode off towards the tube. An au pair, Shona thought, not a nanny, an au pair off to some course at a language school in Leicester Square or somewhere central. And that first girl would have been a friend staying the night. Maybe another day she would tail her. At ten o’clock a dowdy-looking, grey-haired woman was dropped off, by a man driving a plumber’s van. She opened the front door with her own key. A dog, a labrador, rushed out barking and was called back in. The cleaner? Probably. She felt pleased her mother had a dog and wondered what its name was.

By midday, Shona was frozen and tired. It had begun to rain heavily now and the shelter she had thought so adequate wasn’t any more. Where was her mother? Had she left her house even earlier than her husband, earlier than seven? Or was she away on business? Either that or she was working at home. That was more likely. If so, there was no point staying here, lurking in the bushes. Better to go home and come back another day. But it was hard to tear herself away when she still had such hope that her mother would be bound, at some point, to emerge. At one o’clock she forced herself to give up and retraced her steps to Bounds Green tube. At least she had seen the house and her halfbrothers, at least the six hours of observation had not been entirely wasted. All spies - she reminded herself that she was a spy - had to be prepared to spend time reconnoitring their territory, getting to know the layout in case of in case of what? Escape? Hardly, she was getting carried away. Maybe she did need to know, all the same, where there was a cafe, or pub, or somewhere warm to spend half an hour or so not far from her mother’s house; then she need not go home, but could thaw out on the spot and go back again. There was a lot she had to learn about detective work.

One thing that occurred to her when she reached the comfort of her bed-sitter in Kilburn was that she should take a camera with her. No one could possibly see that their picture was being taken if she shot from behind the shrubs. She wouldn’t use a flash and even if the pictures came out murky they would be better than nothing. The boys had passed quite close to her and had been making such a racket, a little sound like the click of a shutter would have been completely drowned. She would take the house too and have

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something concrete to hold on to when she got home. Her camera was a Kodak, an eighteenth birthday present from her parents, quite a good one, she thought, certainly good enough to turn out reasonable snaps. It was tempting to put a film in and return to Victoria Grove at once, but she resisted the impulse. She must not become obsessive and spoil everything. She had resolved to be cool and objective, not get overwrought and do something silly. It was what she was most afraid of, that she would see her mother and be unable to resist running across the road and hurling herself into her arms. The very idea made her shudder.

Every day Shona made her way on the tube to Bounds Green and then to Victoria Grove, carrying her camera. No one ever came near the chapel or challenged her in any way. After three days, she was catching the first tube and still she had not seen her mother. But the inhabitants of her mother’s house were by now familiar to her and their routine known. Her stepfather always left at seven, always in a hurry, but his return home was never regular. Sometimes it was around eight, sometimes nine, and on two days he had not come home by the time Shona observed her own deadline of ten o’clock. The children came home at four o’clock, though not with the nanny
au pair figure. They came home in different cars and were seen into the house by the drivers. The nanny
au pair had always returned by then from wherever she went and opened the door to them. Once an elderly woman drove them home and went in with them on a day when Shona had just begun to worry that the usual girl who looked after them was not back. It was only after this tall, elegant woman with a commanding voice - ‘Philip! I shall not tell you again, get out of that puddle at once!’ - had disappeared inside, using her own key, that Shona thought, of course, my real grandmother.

It shook her to realise this. Not Grannie McEndrick, not Grannie Mclndoe, but her grandmother Walmsley. And this grandmother, the real one, must know about her; she must, no eighteen-year-old could have managed to go to Norway and have a baby all on her own. This grandmother, unlike her two Scottish grannies, had been involved. Suddenly, Shona felt afraid but could not think why. Why should she be afraid of this woman, her mother’s real mother, her real grandmother, and yet not of her real mother? She didn’t like the look of Grandmother Walmsley - too organised, too powerful, too immaculately dressed. She’d noticed the boys behaved well with her, that there was none of the shouting and kicking there always was

with the young woman who ferried them about. Was she a Tartar, an ogre? But the little one, Anthony, had held her hand very trustingly. Sitting in the nearest cafe that she’d been able to locate, Shona pondered this. She had not only new relatives to meet but a whole family history to inherit. It was daunting. She would never be able to absorb all the detail, it would take years. But then she had years, she was only eighteen, nearly nineteen.

It struck her, thinking this, that her birthday would be the perfect time to make herself known to her real mother. Melodramatic, perhaps, but then how could such a meeting ever be ordinary? It was always going to be dramatic whenever it took place and however it was handled. And it made sense, to approach her mother on the very day she would surely be thinking of her. She probably woke every morning of 16 March and felt a momentary distress, however happy she really was. It would be impossible for any woman not to have carved on her heart the date she had given birth to her first child. She would always see the date approaching, the fateful Ides of March, and remember and think about that baby and feel a whole mixture of emotions. It would be appropriate to emerge out of the shadows on such a day, to present herself as fully formed and ready to be loved and to love. But her birthday was two months away still and she did not know if she could wait. It needed patience, and her patience was running out.

Her reward came at the very end of the week. It had become like a job, going every day to Victoria Grove. She sat on the tube like a commuter, not needing to look up to know she had reached King’s Cross and it was time to change lines again, and knowing her way in and out of Bounds Green so well that she could carry on reading until she was out on the pavement. She had become quite fond of her hiding-place among the shrubs in front of the chapel and had made it her own. She’d taken a collapsible wooden stool with her, and every afternoon she wrapped it in a black bin liner and left it flat under a bush. Taking it out each morning and setting it up and settling down upon it pleased her. She felt professional, less furtive, just for carrying out the ritual. She had hidden an old umbrella too, a man’s brolly, which sheltered her when the rain grew too heavy. And she had her own hours, times when she went to the cafe near the tube, twice a day, and had a cup of coffee or bowl of soup before returning to her post.

Her mother’s house was by now so familiar to her that she had

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memorised every detail. She knew not just how many windows there were but how many window-panes and how many were curtained, how many had blinds. She had noted the Virginia creeper literally creeping from the next house, and seen where the drainpipe near the roof had a leak. At home in her bed-sitter she had rows of photographs now of the front of the house, some with Malcolm leaving, some of the boys coming hurtling through the door. They were all pinned up on a cork board along one wall, the first things she saw every morning. Best of all were four close-ups which she had had enlarged. These had been lucky shots, taken when her halfbrothers had passed so near to her that she could have reached through the bush and touched them. It had been a bright, sunny morning and the car had been parked in front of the chapel. Shona had snapped quickly and the snaps had come out beautifully, three of all three boys together and one of the middle one alone, the one with her hair.

She saw, once she had had this photograph enlarged, that he also had her features. They looked odd in a young boy’s face. His big eyes swallowed his thin face whereas they were in proportion in her own, and his nose - her nose - straight and sharp-tipped, with the very full mouth beneath, just like her mouth, looked far too old for a young boy’s face. But that was the point, he hadn’t grown into these features yet - her features - and whereas her hair - his hair, their mother’s hair? - was wonderful for a girl it looked less good on a boy. The thick auburn hair had been cut very short and its natural curliness, thwarted, had a bumpy, rough look. She was sure he must hate his hair. Her mother - their mother - would tell him it was lovely hair, just like her own, but he would still wish he had hair like his brothers’, like his father’s plain, straight brown hair.

That was the big surprise when at last Shona, perched on her stool, saw through the screen of foliage an unknown woman coming out of the house and realised it must be her mother Hazel: she has not got my hair. This woman had black hair, smooth and expertly twisted into a knot at the back. Was it dyed? Shona, peering hard, did not think so. It was quite uncurled and silky, not thick-looking hair like her own. The boy’s hair must come from somewhere else in the family and so must hers. Distracted by the hair, she did not feel as emotional as she had expected and noted quite calmly her mother’s other characteristics. She wasn’t as tall as imagined but she was thinner, very fragile-looking indeed, a ballet dancer’s figure. My

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eyes though, Shona thought, and felt a surge of pleasure, and my nose, and oh, how clearly my mouth. But not the skin. Her mother’s complexion was olive-coloured. It gave her a slightly Spanish appearance - the black hair, the olive skin, the dark eyes. Her clothes were not exactly conventionally English either. Her suit was black but it had style. The jacket was tight-fitting with a velvet collar and unusually long, turned-back cuffs. She was obviously going to work, maybe to court, and she too carried a briefcase and thick files, just as her husband did. She was frowning as she got into her car and looked preoccupied.