Shadow Baby (47 page)

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thought it most unlikely that Evie would ever realise this other door existed. It was covered in ivy and looked unused. Leah saw that it was kept in this state, resisting all suggestions from the gardener whom she had hired that it should be cleared and made accessible.

It took Evie a long time to come at all, so long that Henry wondered if the move had been more successful than he had ever hoped. She came late morning, as the maids were leaving, which made Leah suspect she had called before in the afternoon and found the gate locked. To come in the morning was perhaps more difficult and had taken time to arrange. The girls let her in and when one of them came to tell Mrs Arnesen she had a visitor Leah knew at once. ‘Give me the key, Amy,’ she said, ‘and go, leave the gate today.’ Then Leah backed inside and shut and bolted the front door, to the astonishment of Amy, who knew Mrs Arnesen must have seen the young woman who had come to call, already walking up the path. But she obeyed her orders, dodging past Evie in an embarrassed way, and catching up with Dora who had gone ahead.

Leah hardly heard Evie knock. She was in her bedroom at the back and instead of the sound of the knocker vibrating through the house as it had done in Etterby Street it barely travelled this far. But the next time she was not so fortunate. Once more Evie chose late morning, having clearly learned by now when Amy and Dora left, and she persuaded them to let her through the gate before they locked it. They were not happy about doing this, since they recognised this woman as the one who had made Mrs Arnesen act so strangely, but Evie seemed so gentle and harmless that they let her through. Then they carried out the instructions they had been given to the letter: once Evie was through, they locked the gate, as they had been told to do, and went round to the side entry to slip the key under the old door, as they did daily. Why they did this they had no idea, but ignorance did not bother them.

Leah, coming out into the walled garden, as she did every day when her maids left, saw the front gate key lying in its usual place, pushed through by Amy, and collected it. She stayed in the garden a moment, cutting some roses, and then she walked back into her house and went looking for a favourite jug into which she liked to put these pink roses. The knock caught her entirely unawares.

She stood still, half-way across the broad hall to the dining-room door. She could see the shadow as she had not seen it for months now, the distinct shape looming through the stained glass. Head

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bowed, roses falling from her hands and scattering petals at her feet, she waited, eyes now closed. Three knocks of course. Then the pause, then the retreat, somehow, past or over the locked gate. Leah did not move for several minutes and when she did it was to climb the stairs, slowly, and go into the spare room at the front to look out. Evie was there, but so far away she did not seem as threatening as she had done formerly. Leah did not wait to see her leave. She went into her own bedroom to lie down.

Henry, coming home before his daughters that day, had no inkling of the visitation. Since the weather was fine he had thought to take Leah for a drive to Dalston and Bridge End and for a walk by the river. But, as soon as he entered the house, he sensed a change of atmosphere and, calling for his wife and hearing her faint response from their bedroom, he suspected the truth. He found Leah lying down on her bed.

‘But how did she get back through the gate?’ he asked when she had told him the story. Leah said she supposed Evie had climbed over it, which presented to Henry’s imagination such a distressing picture that he was shocked - the gate was solid and high, and a woman, with her long skirts, was not equipped to do such an unseemly and ungainly thing as climb over it. What would anyone witnessing this have thought? ‘You must not lock the gate again,’ he said, ‘it is pointless now. She has found you and she is determined and no locked gate will keep her out. You must be satisfied with your locked door, Leah.’ He took the lack of reply as unspoken assent.

The gate became an unlocked gate, as it had always used to be. Henry removed the padlock. Leah took back the key from Amy. Nothing was said. More months went by and Evie did not reappear. Henry wondered if finally she was expecting. He had such faith that a child of her own would reconcile Evie to being rejected by her mother that he looked to this event as a complete solution in spite of Leah’s warnings. What Leah envisaged, as the weeks and weeks went by, was that Evie had indeed become pregnant, but that she was ill. Perhaps she was following her own mother’s tendency to miscarry.

Then, one day, there was a knock at the door. Leah was alone in the house. When she heard it, she knew it was Evie, returned at last. But louder knocks, impatient, several taps one after the other, told her it could not be. Evie’s pattern of knocking never varied. Going

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hesitantly to the front door, Leah saw through the glass panels a shadow far removed from that of Evie, saw the outline of a woman wearing a magnificent hat, and was reassured. She opened the door with something close to pleasure, ready with apologies for having no maid in the afternoons, and without the faintest idea as to identity of her visitor.

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Everything happened so very gradually. After the drama of that first shock, it was extraordinary how slowly and calmly events unfolded (except that, since nothing so solid as actual events took place, it was more a matter of a kind of emotional progress). Hazel marvelled at the apparent ease with which Shona made her way into their family. She had never, the day of that first meeting, thought her capable of such control and nor had she guessed how astute she could be. All the time, all the remaining time, that Shona was at UCL studying for her degree, Hazel felt she was the one suddenly marginalised. Shona was the centre, the one around whom Malcolm and the boys revolved and she had managed all this with the greatest of charm.

Malcolm had been the easiest to charm. His capitulation was no surprise to Hazel - that, at least, she had anticipated. Malcolm, after all, was a man of forty, and men of forty fall easily at the feet of beautiful nineteen-year-old girls. Since Shona was his stepdaughter he had no need to hide his adoration of her, but what amused Hazel was his assumption that in praising her daughter he praised her. ‘She’s so lovely,’ he said, and ‘She’s so clever’ and ‘She has such personality,’ and then he seemed to wait, Hazel thought, for her to look pleased and show she felt personally complimented to be this girl’s mother. But she did not feel complimented in the least. She felt wary, suspicious, and never more so than when Malcolm was at his most effusive. He wanted to introduce Shona as his stepdaughter right away and in doing so already thought nothing of telling the tale of the adoption as though it was a mere anecdote, quickly, hardly pausing before relegating it to an unimportant part their family history. It escaped him entirely that people’s

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astonishment - ‘what, Hazel had an illegitimate baby at eighteen, Hazel?” - might offend his wife.

She saw it on everyone’s face, this incredulity. People could not believe it of her. She saw them looking at her as though they had never seen her before, as though she was another and quite strange person. They were trying to imagine her reckless and daring, trying to place her in the past as having been the very opposite of what she had grown into, a serious, quiet, dependable woman to whom acts of carefree abandon were, in their experience of her, quite unknown. She felt angered by this and wanted to proclaim her own steadiness, wanted to tell them she had always been as she was now and that no essential element in her had changed. But it was impossible to launch into such a defence; instead, she smiled and by her silence though she hoped it was noted there was nothing apologetic or defensive about it - tried to show she was above the sort of idle speculation in which they were indulging.

Shona, she saw, went along with Malcolm’s delight in introducing her as his newly discovered stepdaughter. She was proud of her status in his eyes. She knew she had filled a place which had been waiting to be filled for a long time - she was Malcolm’s longed-for daughter. But she was faithful to her adoptive father all the same, never referring to Malcolm as Dad, even when nudged in that direction. Archie Mclndoe was her father and no other. Once, when they were alone, soon after Shona had moved in with them - it was Malcolm, of course, who had insisisted she should give up that horrid little bed-sitter and come and live on their top floor without any question of rent or contribution to bills - Hazel had been stung, by something carelessly said, into asking Shona why she did not want to know who her real father had been.

‘It isn’t the same,’ Shona said.

‘But it takes two to make a baby. I didn’t create you on my own.’

‘No, but you gave me away on your own.’

Hazel smiled. She liked Shona’s sharpness. ‘True, but you could argue it was your father’s fault I had you at all and needed to give you away. It’s just strange that all the blame …’

‘Blame? I never mentioned blame. I don’t blame you, not for the accident of having me, only for what you did afterwards and he had nothing to do with that. You said yourself you never even told him you were pregnant.’

‘I would still have thought you’d want to know who he is.’

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‘Well, I don’t, even if you’re determined to tell me.’

Little spitting scenes, that is what these interchanges always were. Nothing very terrible was said but the tension was there, unrelieved at the end. They would part, each leave whatever room they were in and take care to come together again only when others were present. Hazel wondered for a while whether she was suffering from nothing more complicated than jealousy, but dismissed this as ridiculous. She was not jealous of Shona, neither of her youth nor her looks, nor, more to the point, her success as a stepdaughter and half-sister. It made life easier that her daughter got on so well with everyone and that her presence, far from arousing resentment, or feelings of awkwardness, seemed on the contrary to breed a greater harmony. The boys were fascinated by her and saw her as some kind of fairytale princess who had come at last to claim her kingdom. She was like a present given to them and their attitude was their father’s. When Shona left them to go back to Scotland for holidays they were furious with her and moped until she returned.

Hazel spoke to Catriona Mclndoe once on the telephone. She had asked Shona what her adoptive parents had said when she had told them, as she was bound to do, of what had happened, and how she was now living with her real mother. Shona had shrugged and turned red before admitting the great distress this had caused Catriona. ‘I’m not surprised,’ Hazel had said. ‘Poor woman, all that love and devotion thrown in her face.’

‘I haven’t thrown it in her face,’ Shona protested. ‘It hasn’t altered anything. I still love both of them.’

‘I shouldn’t think it feels like it to them, especially her,’ Hazel said carefully.

‘You haven’t a clue about her so don’t think you have. You’re not a bit like her, you can’t possibly understand her. She’d never have given her baby away, never, she’d rather have died first.’

So when Catriona did ring Hazel was prepared. The voice was soft, hesitant. ‘Mrs McAllister?’ it said, and Hazel guessed, the Scottish accent and the worry in the voice identifying Catriona at once.

‘Mrs Mclndoe?’ she said, trying to change her own tone of voice from the customary clipped one she always found herself using. ‘How nice to talk to you.’

This seemed to take the caller back. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, and

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nice to talk to you too. I would not be bothering you, but I was wondering about the train Shona is catching …’

‘Hasn’t she let you know?’

‘No. Well, it’s been a wee while since she wrote and the last letter just said the seventeenth and as it’s the sixteenth today I… well… I don’t want to bother you, but I’d like to meet her train and …’

‘I’ll get her to ring you when she comes home.’ The moment she’d said the emotive word ‘home’, Hazel knew she should not have done so, but to apologise for it would double the hurt. ‘Mrs Mclndoe?’ she said quickly. ‘I am glad to talk to you. I’ve often thought about it but I imagined you wouldn’t want to hear from me.’

‘Och no, not at all. We can’t carry on like that, now can we? It wouldn’t do Shona any good. What’s done is done and we must all just adapt.’ The words were sensible but the voice shook.

Hazel knew the phone would be put down with a polite goodbye any moment. ‘Mrs Mclndoe?’ she said again.

‘Catriona, please.’

‘Catriona, perhaps we could keep in touch now we’ve talked?’

‘Yes, of course, for Shona’s sake.’

Not at all for Shona’s sake, Hazel thought, as she replaced the receiver. Not for her sake, for our own, for my sake in particular, and then she could not think why she was so sure of this.

‘How nice Catriona sounds,’ she said to Shona that evening and was somehow indecently gratified when she saw the effect of her innocent-sounding comment. ‘She rang, to find out which train you’re going to catch.’

‘She’d no need to do that, she knew I’d ring tonight,’ said Shona angrily.

‘Well, maybe she wanted to speak to me.’

‘What? Why on earth would she want to do that? She hates you.’

‘She didn’t sound as if she did.’ Hazel knew beyond any doubt that Catriona Mclndoe had never passed any opinion about her whatsoever. It was a foolish lie of Shona’s and she followed it up with another.

‘Well, she does. She told me she never wanted to speak to you, ever, or know anything about you.’

‘Odd, then, that she should telephone my house.’

‘She’d think you’d be out during the day.’

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‘She’d think you would be out too, surely. Who would she be hoping to get, do you think?’

‘Some servant, to leave a message with for me.’

‘But we don’t have servants. Have you said we do?’

‘Conchita and Mrs Hedley are servants.’