Shadow Baby (6 page)

thought of keeping it under her pillow instead, as she had been used to doing, but that was not safe either. Girls stole things and hid what they had stolen in or under the pillows, and so these were regularly inspected. Nor could she keep it in her apron pocket - it made a bulge and would be remarked on. There was nothing for it but to ask Matron to keep it for her, a solution far from satisfactory and one she had to be driv en to after several days of feverishly moving the tin around.

Matron was rarely seen by the girls in the Home, but she was always known to be there, a formidable presence in the background, built up into an ogre by the rest of the staff. It was a big Home, St Ann’s, housing at any one time a minimum of sixty and a maximum of a hundred girls between the ages of five and fifteen. It was meant to be a place of safety for orphaned or abandoned girls, but in effect had become a house of correction too. There were girls there who had been convicted of stealing and other minor crimes (though to hear the thundering of the magistrates the theft of a penny bun sounded very major indeed), or of persistent vagrancy. Several were there for soliciting and these inmates took some managing. There was one attendant, referred to by the girls as the Handler, to each dormitory, women of low intelligence and sluttish habits who ruled their own little kingdoms with a mixture of brutality and favouritism. Evie was of no interest to Madge, her Handler, and so she was left mercifully alone except to be made extra use of when her capacity for hard work became noted. ‘Proper little worker, are we?’ Madge sneered, but soon she left her alone. Evie was first up in the mornings, no lying abed for her, and first to wash in the freezing cold water, without a word of complaint. She laid the tables and washed the dishes and swept the floors with an enthusiasm marvellous to see and was marked out very quickly for future promotion to Monitor when she should be old enough. Madge approved of her and Evie saw that she did, though no word of praise or admiration was forthcoming.

But she could not take her tin box to Madge. She did not trust her. Madge herself, she soon knew, stole, though she was so hard on those girls discovered to be thieves. She took from her charges any sweets or cakes that came their way, on the grounds that they were bad for growing girls, but what was worse was her filching of the small and treasured items they had managed to bring with them. So Evie could not and would not give her tin box to Madge. She would

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not give it to Matron who, for all she knew, might be just as untrustworthy but had not yet proved herself so. The problem was

how to gain access to Matron. She was virtually invisible in the home. Evie had seen her once only, to be checked over (a matter of Mice, rashes and sores) and officially registered. She had been taken to Matron’s room but was not sure she could find it again.

For a young child the scheming necessary to visit Matron without anyone else knowing was impossible. Evie could not imagine how it could be done. But one morning she was seen hurriedly shifting her box from one stocking to another in the big bottom drawer of the chest and Ruby, the girl who saw her, gave her good advice. Ruby was older, nine to Evie’s six, and she had already been in the Home nearly three years. She was quick and clever but, unlike Evie, she was lazy. Madge hated her for the cunning with which she could evade work as surely as Evie welcomed it, and for the intelligence with which she exposed half of Madge’s own evasions. Ruby put her hand over Evie’s as it struggled to transfer the box and said, ‘What you got there?’ Evie froze. ‘Something you’re hiding,’ Ruby whispered. ‘Show me, I won’t tell.’ Wordlessly, Evie was obliged to let the little box peep out of its hiding place. “S only a box,’ Ruby said, ‘isn’t it? What’s inside, then? Not money? Sweets? What’s inside? I won’t tell.’ Evie, hoping it would satisfy Ruby, murmured, ‘Ribbons, just ribbons,’ but Ruby was intrigued. ‘Let’s see, are they pretty, then? I’ve never had a ribbon, never.’ She looked over her shoulder as she said this, to check that Madge was not bearing down upon them, which comforted Evie. Ruby was evidently disposed to keep her secret. Carefully, she lifted the lid and in a moment of inspiration offered Ruby one of the three ribbons. Ruby’s face crinkled into a great smile and she lifted the red ribbon out of its nest. So eager was she to have and hide it that her sharp eyes missed the layer of paper under the ribbons, and Evie was able to put the lid back on before any more questions were asked.

Ruby was so happy with her ribbon. She would never be able to wear it, for fear of Madge, and her hair was shorn so close to her head (she had had nits) that there would have been nowhere to tie a ribbon, but this didn’t matter. ‘You can’t keep on doing this,’ she admonished Evie, ‘you won’t get away with it for ever. Madge’ll find it. What you going to do?’ Evie shook her head miserably. She didn’t dare say she wanted to give her treasure to Matron. But Ruby thought of it herself. ‘What you want to do is give it to Mrs Cox,

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that’s what you want to do, give it over to Mrs Cox, Matron, that’s her.’ Evie confessed she didn’t know how to arrange this and Ruby took charge at once.

They finished getting their stockings from the drawer and dressed rapidly. Beds had to be made and then it was breakfast in the huge kitchen and then washing-up, but after that there was a chance. Madge and the other attendants were always preoccupied after breakfast with sorting out the different chores for the day and there was a brief lull for the girls while tasks were disputed and assigned. Ruby took Evie’s hand and led her out of the long corridor, where the washing-up was done at a row of stone sinks. She seemed to know exactly where to go, racing up stairs and down passages as though following a trail and bringing her in a minute to a door with MATRON clearly written on it. Ruby even knocked for Evie, who was much too frightened to do so, and when a surprised voice called ‘Come in’ she opened the door and pushed the terrified Evie in. ‘What are you doing here, girl?’ Matron said. She was drinking her tea and hated to be disturbed. The effrontery was so appalling she had not yet entirely taken it in. But she could sense already that she would have to react to it with a fine degree of rage so that it would never happen again. Meanwhile she had the most pathetic apparition standing before her, a child literally trembling, utterly ashen-faced and without, it seemed, a tongue in her head, a head Mrs Cox quite failed to recognise, which made this visitation even more outrageous.

Maud Cox was not an unkind woman. She had little of the Madge in her, but she lacked imagination and the feat of empathy was beyond her. ‘Now there’s no need to take on so, whatever it is,’ she said, after she had watched with fascination how Evie trembled. ‘What have you done? Who sent you to me?’ Evie shook her head. ‘Nobody sent you? Then you are very bold, coming to me like this, it is not your place. What is your name?’ ‘Evie, ma’am.’ ‘Well, Evie, speak up, or I shall have to look your name up in the register and call for your dormitory monitor to take you away.’ Evie closed her eyes and with a great effort thrust the tin box at Mrs Cox. ‘What? A box? Is this about a tin box? Did you steal it? Let me look.’ Surprised at her own curiosity, Mrs Cox took the box and examined it. It was quite unremarkable, a cheap thing with a gaudy picture of a dog of doubtful breed on the lid. She shook it. It made no sound. Without asking Evie’s permission, she opened it. Unlike Ruby, she was aware immediately that there was something under the ribbons.

Watched by Evie, whose eyes were now wide open with apprehension, she went to the table near the window and took the remaining two ribbons out, laying them side by side. ‘Now what have we here?’ she murmured. ‘What is all this fuss about?’

There was a long silence. Evie wanted to cry but she was experienced at withholding the noise of weeping. She saw Mrs Cox smooth out the flimsy piece of paper which had nestled in its envelope under the ribbons and study it. She studied it a long time. Her manner, when finally she put it on the table, also changed. ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked, her tone peremptory. Evie shook her head. ‘Who gave it to you?’ ‘My grandmother,’ Evie whispered and then was in agony, knowing as ever that her grandmother was not her grandmother and therefore she was telling a lie and would be punished if this was discovered, which it was bound to be. She choked in her agitation, but Mrs Cox ignored this and started looking in a folder. ‘Something will have to be done,’ she said. ‘You belong to a family after all.’ Evie felt a little leap of hope, hope not for something grand but for all this to pass over quietly and her box to be protected. She had not yet spoken of why she was here, but now some courage came to her, she blurted out, ‘Please, ma’am, will you keep it for me?’ ‘Keep it for you?’ said Mrs Cox, irritated. ‘Of course I’ll keep it. I have to keep it, and attend to it. Now go away and don’t come again until you are told to.’

It was such a long time until Evie was sent for that she was convinced she never would be. Ruby had pleaded to be told what had happened in Matron’s room but some innate sense of caution had prevented Evie from telling her. All she had said to her new friend was that Matron had said she would keep the tin box safe and yes, she had been cross and told her not to come again. The two of them were back in the kitchen and were milling about with the other girls before Madge noticed their absence. Evie was grateful for Ruby’s cunning and cleverness. She only worried that Ruby would want something in return - everything in the Home, every act of apparent kindness, had its price - but the ribbon seemed to suffice. All Ruby wanted, apart from that, was to be her best friend but Evie was sadly inexperienced in friendship. She did not know how to indulge in cosy, intimate chat, she had no confidences she wished to share, and Ruby was disappointed. There were no larks with the solemn Evie, no possibility of fun at Madge’s expense. Evie was too much in awe of authority to become Ruby’s true apprentice and was

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soon abandoned in disgust. ‘You’ve nothing to talk about, so talk to yourself,” Ruby announced one day and that was that.

Evie thought about Ruby’s accusation carefully. It was not true, she did have things she wanted to say but she saw no point. She wanted most of all to speculate about what was going to happen to her but she could not bring herself to do so. When she had lived with her grandmother she had never considered the future, she didn’t know what it was, but now it loomed frighteningly ahead all the time. She looked at the older girls and wondered if she would live at this place until she was like them, and the thought gave her a strange feeling in her stomach. She wanted also to ask about school, about whether she would get any schooling. Girls went to Lowther Street School from the Home every day but they were all older than she was and she wondered how old she would have to be before she, too, went with them. She and twenty or so others attended lessons in the schoolroom for two hours in the morning, but often the attendant who was supposed to teach them was needed for some other task, and they were set to copying letters on their own. They sat on benches and held bits of slate on their knees and copied the alphabet, which was tedious when you knew it already as Evie did. If only she could become one of the school party she felt she would not fret so much about what was in store for her.

Sometimes she was one of the girls taken into the city and she found this painful. At first it had been exciting to be told by Madge to put her coat on and pick up one of the baskets that hung from nails at the end of the washing-up corridor and wait on the doorstep, because they were going to market. Only the most biddable and docile girls were chosen to go to market and usually they were older than Evie, so she knew she was privileged. Eight of them walked, two by two, behind Madge and one of the other attendants down Stanwix Bank and across the Eden Bridge and up into the market; all the way Evie looked about her, recognising the cathedral and the castle, and her heart beat furiously with a disturbance she did not identify as nostalgia. In the market itself, seeing the butter women, or waiting for Madge to buy eggs and put them in her basket, she could hardly bear the memories. She wanted to leave not by the door they had entered but by the other door, the one at the top of the little cobbled hill in front of the butcher’s stalls, the one that led out into Fisher Street and to the Town Hall and across the square to the lane where she had lived. She was pulled fiercely in this opposite

direction and was harshly reprimanded by Madge for lagging behind. ‘If you’re going to be a lagger you won’t come again,’ Madge admonished her. So Evie controlled herself, as she always did, and marched resolutely back to the Home. So many thoughts she could have spilled out to Ruby but they all stayed in her head, and at the end of each day, especially market days, she went to bed confused, her head aching and heavy with so much suppressed emotion. She fell asleep eventually, convinced she would never escape back into the lane, back into a real house and household, but that there was nothing she could do about it. Fatalism was what her grandmother had dinned into her most successfully of all.

She had been in the Home a few more months after the tin box had been given to Mrs Cox when Madge came into the dormitory one morning and, after yelling at everyone to jump to it and get up, she shouted, for everyone to hear, that Evie was to go to Matron’s room straight after breakfast. Madge stood over her while she washed and dressed, and personally brushed her hair, complaining that it was no wonder Evie always looked as if she were pulled through a hedge backwards with hair like hers. It would be a blessing, swore Madge, if Evie got nits and had to have all her dreadful hair shaved off, that would cure it. Satisfied that no more could be done to make Evie fit for inspection, Madge let her go down with the others, but Evie noticed Madge watching her and then the other attendants staring and whispering. This attention was sufficient to alert all the girls to there being suddenly something special about scraggy little Evie, Miss Never-says-a-word. She felt a tension around her which, instead of alarming her as it normally would have done, somehow pleased her. She felt important and it was a rare experience. She ate her porridge slowly and drank her tea (more water than tea and not much of it) and then went to Madge and said she did not know how to find Matron’s room. One of the big girls was sent to guide her and Evie trotted dutifully at her heels far more cheerful than on the occasion when she had gone with the breathless Ruby.