Shadow Baby (5 page)

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before her mother had finished chiding her. Skipper’s barking was frantic. Quickly, only just preventing herself from running, she hurried across the lawn and into the rhododendron bushes from where the barking came. Skipper raced out of the undergrowth to meet her and then scurried back at once down a little path leading through the bushes to the wall which marked the boundary of the garden. She scratched her face on some stray gorse growing with the rhododendrons and had to part it to follow the dog, hurting her hands in her haste. Then she stopped abruptly. There was a dip in the ground near the wall, what her mother called a dell, though it was nothing more than a hole, grass-covered and shaded over by the low branches of a beech tree. Shona and Gavin both lay in it, both naked, their clothes in touchingly neat piles either side of them. Shona was examining Gavin’s testicles with the greatest interest, first prodding and then holding his tiny scrotum, while Gavin, with his eyes tight shut, held himself like a soldier, rigidly still, his arms straight by his side, his legs clamped together.

‘Shona!’ Catriona burst out before she could stop herself. ‘What do you think you are doing? Leave Gavin alone, leave him!’

Shona looked up, not at all embarrassed, and said, ‘We’re playing doctors.’

‘Put your clothes on, now, this minute, and Gavin, put yours on.’

‘Why?’ Shona said, but Gavin, red-faced, was already into his shorts. ‘What’s wrong with playing doctors?’

‘Nothing,’ her grannie said, appearing from the other side of the dell, arms akimbo and smiling. ‘They’re only this side of seven, Catriona, have some sense.’

That was how the incident ended, turned into something amusing by Grannie McEndrick, something so funny Shona was quite delighted with herself and Gavin half-hysterical with relief. There was nothing Catriona could say or do to stop the hilarity and she felt humiliated. There she was, a woman in her forties shown how to behave by a woman in her seventies, the older woman a model of commonsense. It was impossible for her to explain that her horror had had nothing to do with the children’s nudity nor with what Shona was doing, but everything to do with the atmosphere of what she had seen. It was Shona’s intensity, her concentration, her very lack of any sniggering or squealing which had frightened her and made her react so inappropriately and violently.

Putting Shona to bed that night Catriona felt awkward and

though she did all the usual fond things - kissed Shona, hugged her, tucked her up, said her prayers with her - she did it with half her normal enthusiasm, and after all the rituals were over could not quite bring herself to leave. She sat on the end of Shona’s bed looking at her. Shona stared back, her big blue eyes not at all sleepy but instead challenging, accusing.

‘Shona,’ Catriona began, and stopped. What could she say? How could she redeem herself? ‘Your Grannie is right,’ she said finally, ‘there’s nothing wrong with playing doctors or with taking your clothes off.’

‘You shouted,’ Shona said.

‘Yes, I did. I shouldn’t have. I don’t know why I did.’

‘It was my turn,’ Shona said. ‘Gavin had looked at my wee-wee. I was just looking at his.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Did you see it?’

‘What?’

‘Gavin’s wee-wee.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yuck. It’s squidgy. Gavin says his brother says it grows and it makes babies.’

‘Yes, it does, in a way. It’s late, Shona, time to sleep.’

More cowardice. Catriona despaired. It was not that she was reluctant to describe to Shona how babies were made but that she feared the questions that would surely follow. She wasn’t ready to lie so thoroughly yet, even though she had done so before. A new set of lies were needed and she had not got them ready. It was such a long time since she had held Shona, her baby, in her arms and had no doubts or qualms about a single thing - so confident she had been, once she was a mother, once she had been blessed. Archie could have accepted their lot, their destiny to be childless, but she never could have done so, never. She had had to have a baby, it had been vital to her sanity, not merely her happiness. Each time she was pregnant the glory of it transformed her. Each time she miscarried it was a tragedy of epic proportion. And the one stillbirth, the one baby she had carried to term, had made her want to die. She had tried to die. She wanted to be buried with her baby. And then there had been Shona.

One day she would tell Shona everything. When her daughter was of an age to understand, when she had perhaps had children herself,

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then would be the time to tell her. She would have no fears then, time and Shona’s growing-up would have dispersed them and she would be able to speak freely.

They did not go again for a long time to stay with Grannie McEndrick. They were invited, in invitations that had an increasing edge to them, that were on the verge of becoming orders, but Catriona managed to be resistant to them. She pleaded her own poor health and there was nothing her mother could do about that except complain her daughter had never been really well since Shona’s birth. ‘It took it out of you,’ Ailsa McEndrick said when, instead of her daughter and granddaughter coming to visit her, she went to visit them (complaining all the way about the difficulties of the journey). ‘You were too weak after all those miscarriages, Archie should have had more consideration.’ ‘I wanted a baby,’ Catriona replied. ‘Oh. I know that? her mother said, ‘we all know that. But not at the cost of your own health. Look at you, stick-thin and no colour at all and think how you once were before.’ Catriona smiled. She’d been quite plump, she’d had a good complexion and her mother couldn’t forgive her for sacrificing both - as if weight and skin mattered beside the having of a baby. She would have offered up far more vital things to have one, her hair, her teeth, anything. But her mother couldn’t be expected to understand that kind of desperation. She had had four children and had often enough in Catriona’s childhood come near to implying this had been one, if not two, too many. Her first son had been born when she was only twenty and she had never experienced that craving for a child which had become her daughter’s own.

Walking along the beach one rare still August day, Ailsa suddenly said, ‘You should have come home, you should have been looked after properly. That’s when it all started, when you were carrying Shona. You didn’t eat, I know you didn’t.’

‘Oh, Mother, don’t hark back, it was seven years ago for heaven’s sake.’ She didn’t look at her mother at all. They were side by side, keeping an eye on Skipper and on Shona, racing ahead along the edge of the sea. They walked a bit further until, with that violence for which it was famous on this part of the coast, the tide started to rush in over the flat ground forming deep gullies round islands of sand, and they shouted at Shona and the dog and veered sharply

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inland, into the dunes. Ailsa was panting before she got over them and on to the track behind. ‘I’m getting old,’ she gasped, ‘I must be, I’m puffed after that wee hillock.’ But then she looked at Catriona and was so struck by her daughter’s pallor she stopped dead. ‘You’re not well,’ she said, her concern as ever coming out as an accusation. ‘What is it? What’s the matter with you?’

It was tedious, this endless emphasis on how she looked, and Catriona resented it. Every time they met there was this same interrogation, always leading back to the birth of Shona. Catriona had written from Bergen, where Archie was based at the time, and told her that she was pregnant again but said she wanted to keep the expected birth date secret because she was superstitious, after three miscarriages and a stillbirth, and believed that if she revealed it another tragedy would follow. Her mother rang her saying she would come at once. But Catriona had been adamant, no, her mother was not to come. The doctors had declared her perfectly fit and the maternity hospital in Bergen was excellent.

So her mother had been out of it, deprived of the whole experience. She had never seen Catriona pregnant with Shona nor was she anywhere near for Shona’s birth. When Catriona rang her and said she had a beautiful, healthy new granddaughter, Ailsa had remained quite silent for a full minute before she had said, ‘I can hardly believe it, not without seeing her.’ When she did see her, a month later, there was a sharpness in her mother’s eyes which Catriona feared. ‘Let me look at her properly,’ she had said, almost snatching the baby from her cradle. But then the sharpness had disappeared as Shona was minutely inspected. ‘She takes after Archie,’ Ailsa pronounced. ‘Look at the colouring of her. But she has your shape of face, Catriona, heart-shaped, just like your face, and see the way her right ear is a wee bit bigger than the left, that’s the same as yours.’ The birth weight, 7lb 3^ oz, was exactly the same as Catriona’s had been and so was Shona’s length, eighteen and a half inches. Once these comparisons were made, Ailsa was happy. ‘I never thought you’d do it,’ she said. ‘I thought it was going to be your cousin all over again, what with the miscarriages and stillbirth, just like her, and then nothing ever again. You’ve been lucky in the end, Catriona.’ ‘I know,’ Catriona had said, ‘I know I have.’ ‘But,’ her mother had added, reverting as she did so to her usual more hectoring tone, ‘let that be enough, will you? Don’t tempt fate, don’t try again, be grateful for what you’ve got, mind.’ “I’ll be grateful,’

Catriona promised, though privately reflecting it was far too late, fate had already been tempted and she had tempted it knowingly.

Without Archie, of course, nothing would have been possible. Another husband might not have been able to bear his wife’s obsession, he might have recoiled from the rawness, even the ugliness, of the hunger behind it. But Archie had not. He was patient and understanding and said only, ‘If this is what you want’ and ‘If this will make you happy.’ But he had been surprised. He had looked at her and his eyes had been shocked even though he said nothing. Then he had taken her hand - hot, feverish - and squeezed it and said she could have her way if she was quite sure she knew what she was doing. But she felt that she had caused him pain and was sorry for it. She knew that she had forced him into a position of surrender, though she was not entirely sure what she was compelling him to surrender. Control, she supposed. She had taken control away from him. He was not an overbearing man, for all that he commanded a ship, but he liked to do things his way. Now they were doing this thing her way, relegating him to a subservient role at this crucial point in their lives. Fortunately, once Shona was back in Scotland with them, the balance was restored, partly because it became apparent that neither of them controlled her. It amused them both, their little daughter’s independent spirit; it helped that they could see nothing of themselves in her. ‘She would make her way anywhere,’ Archie said, admiringly. He was glad their only child was a girl. A boy would have been more complicated, he felt, he would have worried about Catriona left for such long periods with a son. Leaving mother and daughter felt comfortable and he did not mind at all that he was on the periphery of their relationship for so much of the time. Catriona had what she wanted and he wanted what she wanted, simple as that.

He watched them sometimes without their knowing. Especially at first, when they came to this carefully chosen village on the northeast coast, when they were settling down and he was still anxious about Catriona’s mental well-being. He would stand outside the bedroom door, hidden in the shadows, and watch through the gap his wife nursing the baby. She couldn’t breast-feed, but she wanted to pretend that she did and so she sat with her blouse undone and the baby nestled close against her empty breast, and the bottle of milk tipped so close to her own nipple that it grazed it and the baby fidgeted, fighting the natural nipple off to get at the satisfying rubber

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teat. It moved him to see this scene; but it disturbed him, though he was not quite sure why. Catriona carried things too far. She had her baby, why did she need to convince herself she was feeding it? Why was this subterfuge important to her? Was she doing it for the baby’s sake or her own, and if for her own what did it mean? But Archie asked none of these questions; he only observed and left his wife to it.

EVIE WAS a hard worker. It was what everyone remarked on - such a hard and willing worker, for a small child, with a real idea of how jobs should be done. Give her something to clean and she’d go at it as though her life depended on it, scouring dirty old pans as if expecting it to be possible that through her efforts they could be restored to their former shining selves. It was assumed by those who gave her the work to do in the Home that she had had a hard taskmaster, or mistress, that perhaps she had been bullied and beaten into such diligence. But no. When questioned as to her past, and Evie did not speak of it unless she was directly asked, she had only words of affection for her dead grandmother. She had wanted to please her, and hard work was what had given her most pleasure, both the doing of it herself, when she had been able, and seeing Evie being like her, her exact copy.

Except Evie never forgot she was not, could not be, such an exact copy. The woman who had been her grandmother was not her grandmother; nor was Mary the mother of the woman who had been Evie’s mother. This was too complicated to explain so she never attempted any explanation. It hurt her even to remember this truth and to find it would not disappear. She had the tin safe, of course. It had gone first into the bag when the policeman stood over her, and when she came to the Home she had managed to hide it inside one of her thick woollen stockings. There was nowhere for her to put her few belongings, except the communal chest of drawers at the end of the dormitory she shared with eleven other girls, but it worried her so much, thinking of other hands finding and handling her precious tin box, that she could not bring herself to place it in any of those capacious drawers without hiding it first inside a stocking. She

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