Shadow Baby (43 page)

He did no work for the rest of that day. His concentration had entirely gone and he could not settle to anything nor bear to be in the same building as Evie. But neither could he bear to go home where Leah languished so dispiritedly and would go into hysterics when informed of the reason for Evie’s visit and when told where Evie and her husband were to live. In Etterby Terrace, Evie would be their neighbour. She would walk down the same street as her mother, stand at the same tram stops, use the same shops. Her presence would be insupportable to Leah, who would wish to move house at once. Well, this was not an impossibility. Henry had quite often contemplated buying a better house, a house more in keeping with the affluence that had come his way, and it was Leah who had demurred and asserted herself very fond of her present house. They could move. Stanwix was not the only place in Carlisle to live, even if still reckoned by everyone to be the choicest area. They could have a new house, a house built to their specifications, in some other pleasant part of town. There were building plots for sale on the other side of the river where there would be attractive views of Rickerby Park. It would distract Leah wonderfully to have meetings with an architect and then to have rooms to decorate.

But to leave Etterby Street for those reasons would be folly. Henry knew he would be foolish and cowardly to suggest such a solution. If Evie was set on making herself visible to her mother, then nothing would stop her. It grieved him to have to admit to himself that Leah had perhaps been right, or that at least she had had some correct inkling of how, given time, Evie would respond. Leah was a very determined, odd woman; Evie, it seemed, was equally determined and strange. They were after all, in spite of the external evidence against it, two of a kind. And neither would yield. Leah would not accept Evie as her daughter, and Evie had resolved

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to force her to do so. And he was caught between them, seeing the rights and wrongs on both sides and obliged to arbitrate.

Without being aware of where he was heading, Henry had walked down Lowther Street and down to the river, and now he was striding distractedly along the bank presenting the false picture of a man who had an urgent appointment. His mind was full of wild schemes to each of which he gave only a moment’s consideration before rejecting them all as absurd. Most of these wild ideas hinged in one way or another upon engineering a meeting between Leah and Evie, locking them in a room together and making it impossible for them to escape until some kind of compromise had been hammered out. Evie would be all in favour of such confrontation, he was sure, but it would drive Leah mad and he was afraid of that madness.

Concern as to how to tell his wife about Evie’s approaching marriage made him far more weary than all the walking he had done. His footsteps slowed as he neared home and he wondered if he would ever again enter it quite as eagerly and happily as he had once done. Leah was still in her bedroom, the girls once more out, and Clara nowhere to be seen. He felt brutal but could not abide the thought of a long drawn-out performance and so marched upstairs and announced straight away what Evie had told him - all of it without pause. There was silence from the prostrate figure on the bed. No screams or sobs. Relieved, he went and sat beside Leah and took her hand. It lay in his own, limp and unresisting. Her eyes were closed, but no tears coursed down her pale cheeks. She seemed more composed than he had thought could reasonably be expected. He was pleased with her and bent over her and kissed her lightly. ‘She can do nothing to us, love,’ he said, ‘remember that. She is a troubled soul who wants what she cannot have, because you cannot give it and she will come to realise this. When she has children of her own all this need of hers will fade, you will see. Be brave, no more shrinking from the sight of her, it will not serve.’

Leah, listening, knew he thought his words very fine but to her they were entirely empty. She let him pontificate and by her silence think she agreed with him. There was nothing else she could do. But next day, when he had gone to work, she bolted the door, once Clara had come, and again when she had gone. Clara left at five, since it was Saturday. Rose and Polly were at dancing class. She had hardly locked and bolted the door before there was a knock upon it. She

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went into the hall and saw the shadow and was not in the least surprised. She stood still until it had gone. Every Saturday after Arnesen’s had closed, it would be like this - the knock, the shadow, the disappearance. They would have to move. It was intolerable to live like this, equally intolerable the thought of facing Evie Messenger out and telling her to go away and never return. She had thought of one of those speeches Henry delighted in - she had framed words of explanation in which she asked this woman for forgiveness, but begged an end to this haunting. It would never be made. Her punishment was to endure these visitations and the woman who was punishing her knew it. Nor was Henry right to imagine that, once children had been born to her, she would understand and desist. On the contrary, once she had given birth it would become more inexplicable, more monstrous that her own mother had first abandoned and now denied her. The anger would grow, not subside, and the hate intensify. And all the time Leah asked herself: in her position, would I have haunted my mother as she haunts me? She struggled to think not, but all the time Evie’s right to persecute her seemed stronger and more frightening than ever.

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THERE HAD been malice in her sudden decision, but Hazel was unsure at whom she had directed it, at the girl or at her mother, nor could she fathom the reason for it. But standing on the corner of Victoria Grove, with the girl about to depart, and hearing her mother call from her car, she had felt a sudden and violent urge to do harm - inexcusable and horrifying. She saw in the girl’s eyes a sort of hope, quite naked and somehow touching and, as she guided her towards where her mother was now parking her car, she realised it was the first time she had actually made any physical contact with her. Only a hand on an arm, but it made the girl seem vulnerable and needy, to feel the skin on the wrist where it pulled free of the sleeve of her coat.

They walked together back to the house not quite arm in arm Hazel’s hand rested on Shona’s rather than linked it - to where Mrs Walmsley stood holding a box she had taken out of her car. ‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you the eggs I promised. I didn’t expect to find you at home - I was just going to use my key and pop them in.’ All the time she was speaking Hazel and Shona were coming towards her and she had a bright, inquiring expression already on her face. ‘Mother,’ said Hazel, ‘this is Shona Mclndoe. Shall we go in and have some lunch? It’s nearly lunchtime. We can make an omelette out of your eggs.’ The three of them went inside, Mrs Walmsley talking all the time, very loudly, about her drive back from Gloucestershire and the horror of the traffic and there being no such thing these days as a quiet time on the roads unless one was prepared to drive in the early hours of the morning which, at her age, she certainly was not… Neither Hazel nor Shona spoke. Hazel was busy breaking and whisking the eggs and heating the pan, and

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Shona stood uncomfortably to one side while Mrs Walmsley laid the table.

‘I don’t think I’ve met you, my dear?’ she finally said to Shona, her smile wide and forced. She wasn’t sure she ought to say even that, but Hazel, rather rudely, had made no more than a sketchy attempt at introductions. It was impossible to know if this stranger was a friend or a new au pair, or a friend of the au pair’s, or even a client, though that seemed unlikely, and she wished very much to be given some guidance before she tried to engage her in any kind of conversation.

‘No, mother,’ Hazel said quickly, ‘you haven’t met Shona. Sit down, this omelette is nearly ready. There’s some wine open over on the dresser …’

‘Good heavens, dear, you know I don’t drink in the middle of the day and never when I’m driving.’

‘Water, then, put a jug of water on the table. Do you want salad with it, or bread?’

‘Just the omelette will be very nice, though I had no intention of eating my own eggs.’

They sat down, Shona first removing her coat. Hazel noted how shapely her figure was now that she could see it undisguised by the loose coat. Not my figure either, she thought. More my mother’s, that small waist and full bosom, more hers when she was young.

‘Mother,’ she said, as Mrs Walmsley took a mouthful of omelette and daintily dabbed at her lips with a napkin, ‘Mother, this is Shona’s birthday.’

‘Oh, how nice. How old are you, dear?’

‘She’s nineteen,’ Hazel said, before the girl could reply. ‘She was born in Norway nineteen years ago today and adopted by a Scottish couple.’

There was an absolute silence. Mrs Walmsley put down her fork with extreme care, so extreme that the metal prongs touched the wooden table with no whisper of a sound. Her face delighted Hazel. It was so rare ever to see her mother confounded, and now she was. It took several seconds before signs of life returned to the frozen features and when it did the mouth tightened, a frown contorted the forehead and a flush slowly spread across the cheeks. Shona, Hazel saw, was smiling, a bitter smile acknowledging that here, too, there had been no exclamations of joy, no rush to embrace her. She was on her feet again, omelette untouched, struggling back into her coat.

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‘Don’t go,’ Hazel said.

‘What a way to tell me,’ Mrs Walmsley croaked, ‘the shock, Oh dear.’

‘I’m sorry to be a shock,’ Shona said, grabbing her bag, ‘it’s all I ever seem to be to your family. But I’m off. I won’t bother you again.’

Hazel pushed her chair back and followed her to the front door, but she was not quick enough, Shona was out of it and off. When she returned to the kitchen her mother was still sitting there transfixed. ‘What a way to tell me,’ she repeated, this time with the beginnings of anger in her tone. ‘And how embarrassing. Did you not think of that?’

‘Embarrassment? No.’

‘Well, you should have done. You embarrassed me and embarrassed that poor girl. There was no need for it.’

‘So what should I have said?’

‘You shouldn’t have said it at all, not in these circumstances. You should have told me quietly, when we were alone.’

‘Secretively.’

‘What?’

‘Secretively. You want me to have kept it all secret still, as we did from the beginning.’

‘To confront me with that girl, to put her in such a position …’ |

‘She put herself in it by coming here.’

‘When did she come?’

‘An hour or so ago.’

‘She just turned up and announced herself?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t believe it.’ Mrs Walmsley pushed the half-eaten omelette away and got up. ‘After all this time, who would have thought it…’

‘Anyone with any imagination.’

‘She seemed a nice girl too. Is she a nice girl?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What did she want exactly? What was her idea?’

‘To satisfy her curiosity, but more than that really.’

‘More?’

‘I think so.’

‘What kind of more? Will she make trouble?’

Hazel smiled. She could see how worried her mother now was she craved reassurance, wanted to be told that Shona was a nice girl

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who would do the decent thing and, having made herself known, would also realise she was as unwanted as she had ever been and disappear. She might fleetingly have referred to Shona as ‘poor’, but there was no genuine sympathy there, nor any desire to know what had been the fate of the girl. A smooth, orderly life, that was what her mother wanted, as she had always wanted and invariably succeeded in getting.

‘What kind of trouble did you envisage?’ she asked her mother, taking pleasure in how cool she must appear.

‘Well, I don’t know, be unpleasant, want some sort of recompense

>

‘Compensation for being given away? What would that be, do you think? What form could such a thing take?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the lawyer. Money, I suppose.’

‘Money? Hardly, Mother. The law doesn’t say adoption is a crime, the law sanctions it. Everything you did was perfectly legal and above board. You couldn’t be sued for a penny.’

‘Me? Why would I be sued? I didn’t mean that, that’s silly. I meant - oh, you know perfectly well what I meant. Is this girl going to hang around you, has she some axe to grind?’

‘Would you call your mother giving you away an axe to grind?’

‘But presumably she knows what the situation was, surely she understands …’

‘No, that is precisely the point. She finds it impossible to understand. It hurts even to try to understand when she feels, as she does, that nothing and no one would ever be able to force her to give up any child she ever had.’

‘Oh, that’s just romantic.’

‘Maybe. At nineteen, you’re entitled to be idealistic or romantic. I just wish I had been.’

Round and round the kitchen Mrs Walmsley went, putting straight objects that were perfectly straight, fussing with the kettle, first putting it on and then off, and displaying without seeming to realise it her agitation. Hazel watched her, never moving from her seat, and thought that if she had believed all this pacing about was evidence of emotional distress she might have felt sorry for her mother. But what she was seeing here, she was convinced, was resentment alone. Her mother resented Shona having had the impertinence to turn up, she resented Hazel for confronting her with Shona, and now, most of all, she was resenting what she would be

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labelling her daughter’s obtuseness. She wanted Hazel to agree with her that something quite unacceptable had happened and that it must be dealt with firmly. And I am giving no sign of that, Haxel reflected, I am not showing either willingness to be organised by my mother or any eagerness to defer to her judgement and conspire with her to deal with ‘trouble’.

But Hazel was wrong. Mrs Walmsley’s thoughts were not at all along these predictable lines, and the loss of composure was indeed caused by her being far more distressed than Hazel could possibly appreciate. She was remembering and in remembering she evoked a deep-felt shame which had been her own. She was unable to turn to her only daughter and explain why she was as she was - it was too difficult, too much in the nature of confessional, and she was not in the habit of making confessions. All her life she’d striven to rise above the temptation to unload her fears and worries on to others and this had been at some considerable cost. She was labelled hard and unfeeling, was thought to care only about being efficient and respectable and keeping a masculine stiff upper lip. Her lip now felt very weak and quavering, but Hazel was so unsympathetic, it was impossible to break down in front of her and expect comfort. They did not, as mother and daughter, behave in that way. They were cerebral women who prided themselves on putting heads before hearts. Everything had to be talked about, reasoned. It was how their relationship operated.