Shadow Baby (7 page)

There were two people with Mrs Cox, a man and a woman. Neither of them looked comfortable. The man in particular shifted about from foot to foot and was forever turning his cap in his hands. Evie dropped her eyes. It was rude to stare and indeed she had no desire to. She saw only that this man was quite old and bald and had a very red face. The woman was younger but, again, Evie allowed

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herself only a quick glimpse, enough to take in that she was small and plump, and then looked at the floor.

‘This is Evie,’ Mrs Cox said. ‘She’s a good girl, everyone here speaks well of her I’m pleased to tell you. You’ll have no trouble. And she’s a hard worker for one so young, we’ll be sorry to lose her and I can’t say that for many of the girls here.’

‘She’s little,’ the man said, ‘and thin, desperate thin, not much on her bones. Is she healthy?’

‘Perfectly healthy,’ Mrs Cox said, sounding quite indignant. ‘You can’t go by appearances with young girls, let me tell you that.’

‘Did she bring anything with her when she came?’ the woman asked. ‘Any trappings?’

‘No, nothing,’ Mrs Cox said. ‘We took her in what she stood up in and a bag with a change of clothes.’ And the tin box, Evie silently added, but Mrs Cox didn’t mention it. ‘Well then,’ the woman said, ‘it can’t be helped. Will we take her now, is she ready? There won’t be a carry-on, will there, there won’t be a lot of bawling?’

There was no bawling. Evie was told, there and then, in front of the two strangers, that she was a very lucky girl and thanks to the prodigious efforts of Mrs Cox and the Authorities she would be going to live with her newly located family.

‘Do you know what the piece of paper in your ribbon box was, Evie?’ Mrs Cox asked. Evie thought it best to shake her head. ‘It was your certificate of birth. It showed who your mother was, and where you were born. This, Evie, you will be thankful to know, is your mother’s cousin and his wife, and they have kindly agreed to make a home for you. What do you say?’

Evie looked up. Three faces confronted her, all expectant, none wearing a smile. What should she say? ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ she said.

‘You’ll have to pull your weight, mind,’ the man who was her mother’s cousin said. ‘It won’t be a holiday.’

‘Go and get your bag,’ Mrs Cox said, ‘and wait at the front door.’ Evie didn’t move. ‘Evie, did you hear?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Still she stood there, not knowing how to ask for her box but seeing Matron frown she just said, ‘My box, please, ma’am,’ as a statement rather than the request it should have been.

Fortunately, Mrs Cox was amused and said to the cousin and his wife, ‘It’s a tin box she had, with ribbons and the certificate in it’ ‘No money?’ the man interrupted - ‘No money. Someone had obviously impressed the child with its importance and she brought it

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to me for safe-keeping.’ The box was produced and handed to Evie, who then did a quick bob of a curtsey and backed towards the door.

The man and woman were waiting for her at the front door when she came down from the empty dormitory with her bag. There had been no one to say goodbye to and indeed she had no desire for farewells. She wanted just to slip away before anyone noticed and before her departure turned out to be a mistake. ‘Come on, then,’ the man said, ‘we’ve wasted enough time.’ She followed him and the woman to a cart outside. ‘Get in,’ the woman ordered, but however hard she struggled Evie was too small to reach the single step. Hands seized her from behind, strong impatient hands, and dumped her without a word on the wooden plank seat. The woman got in on the other side, with the man in the middle holding the reins of the horse standing patiently in the shafts. ‘Settle yourself,’ the woman said, ‘it’s a long ride, hang on to that bar on the corners and going down hills, and if you fall out don’t expect us to stop, you’ll have to run behind all the way, won’t she Ernest, eh?’ And they both laughed so heartily Evie wondered how she’d missed the joke. Ernest. Her mother’s cousin was called Ernest. She wished she knew the woman’s name, but not another word was spoken during the whole long, long journey.

Evie had no idea where she was. The cart turned the other way from the city and was soon in the country. At first it was thrilling to be bouncing along between green fields that stretched far away to the hills on the horizon, but when not a house had been in sight for what seemed hours Evie began to feel uneasy and even afraid. The fields were pretty, there was nothing alarming about them, and the outline of the hills blue and smudgy, not at all grim, but there was no life anywhere. She felt she was being carried away to oblivion and with every mile her sense of herself, never strong, diminished. The woman, who was Cousin Ernest’s wife, paid no attention to her but there was at least some little comfort in her squat presence. And Evie was pressed hard by Ernest’s flank and though it was uncomfortable it was also reassuring - while someone so solid was next to her she could not disappear. Once, she was handed a piece of cake wrapped in greaseproof paper. She was so surprised she almost dropped it and even when she had unwrapped it from the grubby paper, she still did not eat it for several minutes. She wanted to look at it, at all the raisins and currants embedded in its yellow flesh. There had never been this kind of cake in the Home, only very

occasionally a hard, dry kind of gingerbread which left a gritty taste in the mouth. This cake was beautiful. Evie ate it in tiny bites, savouring every last morsel. She would have licked the paper if she had been on her own, but the woman took it from her as soon as she saw the slice of cake was finished.

It was dark before they arrived on the outskirts of a long village. Evie was exhausted and had several times dozed off only to jerk herself awake in case she missed the arrival at wherever the cart was going. Twice she had thought that moment had come but the stops had been to water the horse and for the man, Ernest, to put a coat on. When they stopped for good, Evie was still not certain that they would not trundle off once more, and it needed the woman to lift her down to convince her this journey was over. She was lifted down and set on her feet and her bag was put into her arms, and then the woman opened the door of what Evie could dimly make out was a house of some strange kind. ‘Mind the step,’ the woman said. ‘I only whitened it yesterday, I don’t want mucky footprints on it.’ Obediently Evie lifted each foot carefully over the white part of the step. She knew about whitening steps and about rudding them too. Her grandmother had whitened her own step once and Evie had loved to help. She thought about offering there and then to whiten this woman’s step the next day but as usual the words would not come as spontaneously as she would have liked, and by the time she had thought them out they were in a living-room and the woman was saying, ‘Straight to bed, there’ll be plenty to do in the morning. Take your shoes off here and follow me, I’m dog-tired myself.’

Evie followed her up one flight of carpeted stairs, the rough carpet feeling scratchy under her thinly stockinged feet, and another, uncarpeted, into the smallest room she had ever seen. It was a slot of a room with a skylight in its sloping roof and the bed filled it so completely that the door had to open outwards. ‘You’ll be all right here, it’s a good bed, too good for a child. You’re not frightened of the dark, I hope? No silliness?’ Evie shook her head. ‘Good. I’ll knock you up in the morning and I want no shilly-shallying when I do. There’s a chamber-pot under the bed, be careful you aim properly. I’ll show you tomorrow where you empty it. Go on then, into bed with you ‘ Ev ie hesitated. The only way to get into bed was to climb on to it from the doorway. She clambered up and turned herself round and hesitated again. The woman was still watching her, the lamp she was carrying held high so that Evie was in the

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shadows of its glow. ‘You don’t sleep with your clothes on, I hope,’ said the woman. ‘They haven’t brought you that low in that place?’ Evie shook her head again and began to unbutton her pinafore at the side and then the neck of her thick woollen frock at the back. The woman put the lamp down on the floor outside the open door and, surprisingly, said, ‘Here, come to the end of the bed, I’ll help you.’ Evie had never been helped to dress or undress in all her life in so far as she was able to remember and was embarrassed, but she did as she was told and the woman unbuttoned her down to her liberty bodice. ‘Do you keep this on?’ she asked. Evie nodded. In the Home, liberty bodices were only removed once a month for a washdown of the whole body.

She found her shift in her bag and put it on and got into the bed. The sheets were cold but they were proper sheets and not the bits of bleached sacking used in the Home. The blankets were heavy and she felt trapped, they were tucked in so tightly. ‘Goodnight, then,’ the woman said, and then, ‘I notice you haven’t said your prayers, Miss, unless you’re being lazy and saying them lying down.’ Evie remained still. In the Home, they had all knelt in rows at the foot of their beds, repeating their prayers aloud. But where could she kneel here? On the bed? She began to struggle to get out from between the covers but the woman stopped her. ‘Say them in bed,’ she said.

Evie slept at once. She slept soundly and deeply but was nevertheless awake before the woman came to knock her up as promised. The light coming through the tiny diamond-shaped skylight directly over her head woke her. She stared up at the dark grey sky, slowly becoming paler, and felt excited. There was no Madge shouting, nobody crying or coughing, none of that cloying smell that hung in the morning air of a dormitory where twelve girls slept with the windows tightly shut. She felt alert and fresh and eager. She got dressed and then with great difficulty made her bed and folded her shift and put it under her pillow - a soft pillow, not stuffed with horsehair as in the Home - and then she sat crosslegged on top of the bed and waited. The moment she heard feet coming up the stairs she was at the end of the bed and had opened the door and presented herself before the woman had got anywhere near knocking upon it. ‘Goodness me,’ the woman said, startled, ‘all dressed without so much as a cat’s lick unless you’ve found your way to a sink which I doubt.’ Evie hung her head and stood still. She knew that was always the best way should she be accused of

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anything. “I’ll show you,’ the woman said, ‘and we’ll say no more about it.’ The sink was on the landing, built into a little alcove. ‘You’re lucky,’ the woman said, ‘running water on every floor in this house. I bet you haven’t had that before, have you, eh?’ Evie shook her head. ‘And we’ve a fixed bath but you won’t be using that, it’s for Ernest.’ Evie followed the woman on down the rest of the stairs, relieved that in spite of the evidence of the day before this person was clearly a talker. Life was always better, easier, if a talker was in charge of you. It was those like Madge, glowering and silent except for her sudden spells of shouting, who were dangerous. Madge could be provoked by a returning silence on the part of any of the girls, whereas those Handlers who had been talkers had only needed to be listened to and they were satisfied.

Ernest was having his breakfast already in the kitchen, a great plate of bacon and egg and sausage. He didn’t speak to Evie, just went on dipping pieces of fried bread into the yolk of the egg and ramming it into his mouth. She was not invited to sit down and did not presume to do so. ‘Here’s your porridge,’ the woman said, ‘and the milk is on the table.’ Carefully, Evie took the bowl and carried it nervously to the table, to pour some milk on the top, then stood clutching it, not knowing where to go to eat it. The woman indicated with a nod that she was to go through the door behind Ernest. Evie edged past him, eyes on the bowl she was carrying, and found herself in a small scullery where there was a stool in the corner upon which she perched. It was quite a dark hole of a room but this did not trouble her. She liked being on her own to eat, privately, she enjoyed her food more that way. The porridge was as good as the cake had been, smooth and not glutinous as it had been in the Home, and the milk was rich and creamy. As she ate, slowly and neatly, concentrating on the task, she heard Ernest say, ‘Not a scrap like her mother, not a scrap. I’d never have believed she was hers, never.’

‘But then you never knew him when he was little,’ the woman said. ‘She might look like him when he was young.’

‘Not like her mother, any road.’

‘You said.’

‘And I’ll say it again, I’d never have believed it.’

There was a pause and then the woman began talking again. ‘She’s only little, mind, she’s time to change.’

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‘She’ll have to change a damned sight more than she’s ever likely to if she’s going to turn out looking like Leah.’

‘You don’t know what Leah looked like at this age either, don’t let on you do because you don’t.’

‘I didn’t say as I did but I knew her at ten and ten’s not that much more than Evie is now, I knew her then, when they brought her from Carlisle. I can see her still, pretty as a picture, the hair on her. Now look at this one’s hair and tell me she’s Leah’s.’

‘Her hair hasn’t been looked after.’

‘Wouldn’t make that much difference, it isn’t hair like Leah’s that I can see.’

‘You don’t see much. When it’s washed regular and brushed regular and braided up it’ll improve a treat.’

‘You’re going to do it, are you, all this messing about with her hair? That’s what this is about, is it? That’s why you wanted her?’

‘It wasn’t a case of wanting. I don’t know how you dare say it was, it was a case of duty, and your duty too, you know it was.’

‘Duty? It was a case of training up an extra pair of hands to be useful in the pub, that’s what it was, that’s what it is, lass. Never mind her hair, there’s a pub to run and never enough hands. She’ll have to earn her keep pretty soon.’

‘She’ll have to go to school first, she’ll have to learn to read and write and add up.’

‘She won’t be at school all the time, there’s plenty she can be trained to do before school and after school, and on a weekend and in the holidays, or anyways I did when I was her age and so did you, and if you’d had bairns that’s what we would have had them doing, so I don’t want any soft talk, right?’