Shadow Baby (53 page)

In Sydney she debated whether to telephone her mother but decided not to, a surprise would be best. Catriona would be saved the worry of knowing she was flying and fearing she might crash, the kind of worry to which she had always been irritatingly prone. It was harder to decide whether to let Hazel know she was to pass through London. She’d sent postcards to the boys from every country she’d visited and kept in touch that easy way. They’d given her a great send-off when she left, all of them coming to Heathrow and waving her through into the departure lounge, with little Anthony crying. She had felt quite tearful herself and had been proud to know she had such feelings. Hazel, unexpectedly, had embraced her warmly, but she had wondered if that warmth was because she was leaving. Now, if she returned, maybe it would not be evident and she was

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surprised to realise she did not much care. She admired Hazel but she had never been sure that she had learned to understand her. She could not decide, either, whether she actually liked her. What was there to like? Her composure? Her cleverness? Her ability to distance herself from emotion? Her organisational skills? The harder she tried to list in her mind why she might like Hazel the less convinced she was that she did. And she did not love her. There was at least no doubt about that. But when she thought of Catriona, reasons for liking her tumbled into her head. She was so kind, so unselfish, so gentle, so anxious to help in every way possible - and in any case reasons were irrelevant because she saw now that the feelings she had for this mother of hers amounted to love. Catriona and she had virtually nothing in common but they were nevertheless part of each other. All her life she had been exasperated by Catriona and she probably always would feel some measure of irritation. But there was a connection between them which she now had no pressing need to deny. She’d stopped looking for a mirror image of herself in the woman who had conceived and given birth to her. She was glad to have got something straight, at whatever cost.

Going home was not as traumatic as she had feared. The welcome was just as she had anticipated and she basked in it and thought how lucky she was to be assured of it whenever she returned. And she felt well again for the first time in months, really well, not a trace of nausea. She shed the inertia which had weighed her down and became her old energetic self-a lesson learned, she told herself, and never to be forgotten. But she didn’t stay in St Andrews. She went to Edinburgh and took a job in the university’s administrative department. She’d feared it would be deadly dull and had only taken it to make a start somewhere while she sorted out in which direction she really wished to go, but she found she liked it and was rapidly promoted. She had enough money to rent a flat and buy a secondhand car, and every other weekend she went home to St Andrews, to the delight of her parents. They were ageing and she was anxious about them and liked to make regular visits to see that all was well.

They wanted to see her married, naturally. They were conventional and had no time for any other kind of liaison. She took all the inquiries about ‘romances’ in good part, and made jokes about their expectations, but when she did have her first affair she kept it secret. She was old, she thought, at twenty-four, to be having a first love affair, but then she had had other things on her mind and had shut

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herself off from men. His name was Lachlan, and she was very happy with him for six months until she discovered he was married. The disappointment was worse than the shock, and the sense of rage at being hoodwinked greater than the humiliation.

She was more careful after that. She checked men out. From the beginning, she knew Gregory Bates was divorced and had a child of three. His honesty was heartening and so was his concern for his child. She met the child, saddled with the ridiculous name of China, very early in her relationship with Gregory. It might even, she considered later, have been a kind of test - if she didn’t get on with China then there was no hope of any future with Gregory. After a year, he asked her to marry him and was most upset when she turned him down. ‘I’d like to be your wife, Greg,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want to be China’s second mother.’ So that was that, another relationship over.

She never intended to become involved with Jeremy Atkinson by this time she felt liberated enough to think only in terms of an affair and nothing else - which was why, perhaps, she had such fun. Jeremy believed in having a good time. He was not her type and yet she was more attracted to him than she had ever been to any man. He made her feel lighthearted and irresponsible when she knew herself to be serious and conscientious, and she liked the strangeness of this. Jeremy was an accountant but gave the lie to the image of accountants as stuffy and dreary. He made a lot of money and spent it on holidays and entertainment and meals out. She hardly knew herself as she jetted off to the Caribbean with Jeremy and went out with him night after night to theatres and concerts. But when she found she was pregnant she had no hesitation.

She almost didn’t tell Jeremy - there was no need for him to know - but in the end she did. He was vastly relieved at her attitude, her ‘healthy’ attitude as he called it, and insisted on paying for the abortion. It was simple enough to arrange, if costly (so she was glad of Jeremy’s money) and she felt no after-effects, physical or psychological. But, naturally, during her one day in the private clinic she thought again about Hazel pregnant with her all those years ago, in the dark ages. She had always made it clear to Hazel - well, she hoped she had - that if an abortion had been possible in 1956 she would never have blamed any woman for having one. An abortion was far preferable to giving a child away after bearing it with resentment. She felt moved to write to Hazel afterwards, though not

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to Catriona - she would never tell her mother - and received in reply the kind of compassionate response she had hoped for. The abortion at least served the useful purpose of drawing her closer to Hazel.

She married Jeremy, but not for another three years, by which time she had decided she didn’t want children, ever. She thought Jeremy might mind but he didn’t: he said he had no desire whatsoever to be a father and was only surprised Shona had none to be a mother, because he assumed all women did, it being their biological destiny. The decision made, she had herself sterilised, an operation far more difficult to organise than an abortion, which amazed her. She had it before the wedding but told nobody, except Jeremy, that is. Doubtless their respective mothers would drive them crazy in the years ahead waiting for grandchildren, but that could not be helped. She would make it clear, as time went on, that she simply didn’t want to be a mother without hurting them by revealing she no longer could be in any case.

She was a very beautiful bride, but what everyone remarked on was not Shona’s beauty but her serenity. She seemed so happy with herself in a way she had never been, and Archie could not resist saying to Catriona, ‘Everything turned out all right in the end. You were a perfect mother to her, that’s why.’ Catriona did not reply. She knew there was no such thing. Archie was only trying to reassure her with his compliment but she no longer needed such reassurance. Shona had come back to them. She had stayed close. That was what mattered, that was what every mother wanted.

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Evie and Shona, born some seventy years apart, have one thing in common: both were abandoned as babies.

Evie, born in 1887, is left to make her own way in the world when her mother, Leah, is offered the chance to better herself Shona, born in 1956, has a happy childhood, but, like Evie, she desires that special love that she believes only a real mother can provide. Both mothers fear revelation, both daughters seek emotional recompense

‘An unfailingly intelligent novel, full of lucid observation of a phenomenon, mother-love, too often seen through a gilded haze of false feelings and wishful thinking Forster is a fine storyteller’ - Lucy Hughes-Hallett in the Sunday Times

‘Enthralling—readers will plunge happily into the kind of family story for which Margaret Forster is celebrated and which she executes so well’ - Anita Brookner in the Spectator

‘A brilliant exploration of choice and consequence’ -Judy Cooke in the Mail on Sunday

MARGARET FORSTER’S BESTSELLING HIDDEN LIVES IS ALSO PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN

‘Moving and beautifully written, it had me sitting up all night’ - Mary Wesley in the Daily Mail

‘A wonderful book a slice of history to be recalled whenever people lament the lovely world we have lost’ - Claire Tomalin in the Independent

MARGARET FORSTER

PENGUIN

Fiction

U.K. Ł6.99 AUST. $16.95 (recommended) CAN. $15.99

ISBN 0-14-025836-1

91001

9”780140”258363”