Shadow Baby (8 page)

There was silence, broken only by the clattering of dishes and the noisy slurping as the man drank his tea. Evie heard a chair pulled back and Ernest saying, ‘I’m off.’ She had finished her porridge. She decided to wash the bowl in the stone scullery sink but the moment she turned the tap on the woman shouted through at her, ‘Don’t waste water! There’s water standing here, bring it through, you can wash it with the other dishes, now jump to it.’

Evie jumped.

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WHEN SHONA was eight, the Mclndoes moved to St Andrews, a move which pleased them all. Shona was much happier. She still had a beach to run on, a wider and longer beach, but now she went to a school which satisfied her more. There were twenty-five girls in a class, all her own age and many of them as lively and energetic as herself as well as equally clever. She had real friends, Kirsty and lona, for the first time and though she tried to dominate them, as she tried to dominate everyone, she did not always succeed. Kirsty and lona were equally bossy and the three of them had to learn to give way occasionally to each other. It relieved Catriona to see this happening and she encouraged the friendship. They all lived near enough for the girls to walk to and from school together and visit each other’s houses without needing either transport or supervision. Shona gained a new kind of independence and thrived on it.

Of the two houses she preferred lona’s, though Kirsty’s was bigger and grander. lona lived in the Old Town in a narrow close near the ruins of the cathedral. It was quite a small town house, its door opening directly on to the street, and it had no garden, but it had a pretty cobbled yard at the back with an open staircase going up to the door and a pantiled roof and dormer windows, and Shone thought it looked like an illustration from a book of fairy tales she had. She liked Jean, lona’s mother, who was young and attractive and smiled all the time whatever anyone did. She looked exactly like lona, or rather lona looked like her, the mirror image as people said, both of them with fine, sleek dark brown hair and large hazel eyes and delicate features.

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‘lona’s mammy is beautiful,’ she said to her own mother, ‘and she’s young. I wish you were young.’

Catriona for once had the good sense to laugh. ‘Well, I was once.’

‘When?’

‘Don’t be silly, Shona - when I was young, of course, when I was lona’s mother’s age.’

‘When was that though?’

‘Oh, about twenty years ago, I suppose, I don’t know how old Jean Macpherson is, twenty-eight or nine maybe.’

‘Why didn’t you have me young?’

‘I tried, but you just came when you were ready and that wasn’t for a long time.’

Shona frowned. She recognised the tone in her mother’s voice without being able to label it and she didn’t like it, it made her feel cross, though she couldn’t understand why. She felt she wanted to attack Catriona in some way, so she did. ‘Why haven’t I got brothers or sisters? It’s not fair.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘It’s your fault too.’

‘Fault doesn’t come into it, Shona. I’ve explained before, I lost my other babies.’

‘Why didn’t you find them then?’

‘You’re being silly now, you know what I mean when I say “lost”. I told you all about what happened and how sad it makes me talking about it.’

‘Where did you have me?’ Shona suddenly asked, in that abrupt, intense the way she had, the way that always disturbed her mother because it seemed as if a much older child was speaking.

‘Where?’

‘Yes. Was it upstairs?’

‘Upstairs? Good heavens, no, it was in hospital.’

‘But where?

‘Abroad.’

1 Where abroad?’

‘In Norway.’

‘Where in Norway?’ Shona was almost shouting now.

‘Really Shona, the name of the town would mean nothing to you.’

‘I want to know.’

‘Bergen. There you are, you see, it means nothing to you.’

‘Why did you have me there?’

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Once more Catriona told the well-known story of Shona’s birth and once more Shona hardly listened. Her mother never seemed to tell her what she really wanted to know, but then she didn’t really know what that was. She craved detail, the kind of detail Kirsty boasted about - ‘My mammy was making a cake and she’d just cracked an egg on the side of the bowl and she felt me drop inside her, and my daddy said she looked funny and he told her to lie down, but she said she had to finish baking the cake and she did and he phoned the doctor and she put the cake in the oven before she went upstairs to have me, and just as I was born two hours later the oven timer pinged and the cake was ready and …’ There was nothing about cakes or ovens pinging in Catriona’s account of Shona’s birth. Shona didn’t want the hospital described, it didn’t mean anything to her The only part of the story of her birth that she liked was the bit at the end, when her father came rushing in to see her and said, ‘She’s the loveliest thing I ever saw.’ She told that bit to Kirsty and lona only to find it didn’t go down at all well. ‘Babies aren’t lovely when they’re born,’ Kirsty announced. ‘They’re ugly wee things, all of them, I’ve seen them, I saw my sisters just when they were born and they were horrible, screwed up and red and yuck all over their heads.’

‘Well,’ said Shona, ‘I was lovely, that’s all.’

To her fury, Kirsty and lona mimicked her and laughed and she didn’t know how to stop them.

Often, when she was walking home from Kirsty’s or lona’s house she wished she were going somewhere else, especially when her father was away. She’d walk along the shore road and look out to sea and think first of her father and then of where she had been born. It was like a speck in her mind’s eye, fixed far away on the horizon, and she wanted to travel towards it and see it open up into something recognisable, the way lumps of blackness became land the nearer you approached them in a boat ‘One day,’ she told her mother, ‘I’m going to go and see where I was born.’

”Where you’re born isn’t important,’ Catriona said, ‘it’s just a place. It’s where you’re brought up that matters and you know all about that, you remember the village, of course you do, and now you’re in St Andrews and you won’t ever forget this. You’re a wee Scottish girl through and through.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Shona said.

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‘What did you mean, then? Sometimes, Shona, I think you talk nonsense, you don’t think before you speak - ‘

‘I do so.’

‘ - and it can be very upsetting.’

‘What’s upsetting? “I don’t know what you mean, you talk nonsense, you don’t - ‘

‘Shona!’

Shona was stopped, for the moment. Her ninth birthday came and went and was tolerably satisfactory, but she preferred the treats her father gave her. He took her all the way to London once, on the sleeper, and showed her Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard and they stayed in a proper hotel and went to Madame Tussaud’s, and Shona at last felt in tune with herself, the self that had always wanted to dash about, to be among noise and bustle. She wished, aloud, and passionately, too passionately for a young girl, that she lived in London. Watching her, listening to her, sitting on the train all the long journey home, Archie was touched. It struck him that this was the difference between his own attitude to Shona and his wife’s: Catriona was never merely touched by their daughter’s restlessness and fierceness. Every flash of defiance, every symptom of some deep-seated rebellious spirit, and Catriona was full of despair and apprehension. She didn’t see a clever lively young girl questioning and querying everything and everyone around her, but instead a potential disaster happening when Shona got ‘out of hand’ as she put it. She thought of the good years being over already, those years when Shona could be treated like a doll, when she could be made to a great extent in her mother’s own image, when the force of her own personality had not yet become a real factor in the treatment of her. It wasn’t, Archie knew, that Catriona wished to dominate or subdue Shona but that she wanted her daughter to be in step with her. She wanted harmony and intimacy in their relationship and the prospect instead of a growing discord frightened her.

It was supposed to be Archie’s job, on these trips he took with Shona, between the ages of nine and twelve, to run the restlessness out of her so that when she came back to her mother she would be a different creature - docile, pleasant, agreeable. But it did not work out like that. Archie saw very well how, on the contrary, being away from her mother and her stable, staid life in St Andrews only made Shona want more of the same. She never wanted to go home, not

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even after the less successful excursions. It sometimes seemed the girl would rather be anywhere but at home with her mother, and yet Catriona was such a good mother, kind and gentle and absolutely devoted. Remembering his own mother, who had been remote and austere and never once, in so far as he could remember, capable of demonstrating affection, Archie was dismayed at how easily Shona spurned all that was so readily offered to her. But he didn’t think anything could be done about this state of affairs. It was natural. Perhaps when Shona was older she would appreciate her mother more, perhaps when she had children herself… but it was best not to think along those lines. He had always told Catriona to live more in the present, and not to torture herself with anguished speculation about the future, but she was unable to follow his advice.

By the time Shona was nearing thirteen and already an adolescent, developing far more rapidly than her friends of the same age, Catriona was overwhelmed by her, helpless in the face of her wilfulness. Motherhood still fascinated and absorbed her but she was increasingly frightened of what it involved. She couldn’t talk to Shona about the things that needed to be talked about and felt constantly that she was failing in her own idea of her duty. Her mother was impatient with her. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Catriona,’ said Ailsa McEndrick, exasperated, ‘what are you fussing about? The girl’s got eyes and ears, she’s smart, there’s nothing you can tell her she doesn’t already know, and I suppose you mean it’s sex that is worrying you, is it?’ It was. Even hearing her mother refer so openly to sex, as was her defiant habit, made Catriona despair. She had always been so embarrassed by Ailsa’s unusually frank attitude to sex. She had never been able to share it and now that there was Shona to instruct this worried her even more than it always had done.

She had not enjoyed sex since she had known she would no longer be able to have children. While she had been fertile, even if her fertility ended in disaster, there had been a feverish excitement to sexual intercourse. All the time Archie was thrusting away she was visualising those little sperm poised ready to swim into her womb and at the moment of climax - Archie’s, not hers - she saw the egg pierced and conception happening in a shower of stars. She always lay very still afterwards, holding within herself the life-creating

moisture, and as it began to seep out of her she would feel sad. Only the thought of that egg perhaps already fertilised stopped her from weeping. But after Shona arrived, when she was told her tubes were now so damaged that conception would be impossible and that her fertility, on the edge of forty years of age, would be low, she lost the only interest she had had. There was no longer any thrill. But she was a good wife and she loved Archie and so she said nothing. She never turned away from him, never repulsed his advances. It was not distasteful to be made love to, but nor was it pleasurable. It simply no longer had any meaning for her.

Now that Shona was thirteen Catriona was almost fifty-three. She was post-menopausal and glad of it - all those night sweats, all those embarrassing hot flushes, all those symptoms she seemed to have so severely while other women had virtually none. She hadn’t spoken to Shona about any of them nor explained her listlessness and general poor health. She didn’t want to disgust or depress her with talk of the menopause. But she was obliged to tell Archie, who was equally obliged to notice her general debility and her sudden marked aversion to sex. He was understanding, as he always was. It occurred to Catriona that he might have another woman and though she recognised such a thought as unworthy, since she knew Archie, she found she did not care. It seemed fair enough to her. If she couldn’t bear any sexual congress during her menopause and Archie found the lack of it month after month intolerable - well, then. All that worried her was that she, a non-sexual being, was in charge of a nubile thirteen-year-old at exactly the wrong time.

Catriona was not jealous of her daughter but she was afraid of what seemed to her to be Shona’s blatant sexuality. She was too young, surely, to give out these signals, to look so sultry and to be perfectly aware of the effect she had on boys and men. She was no longer slight and delicate in build. She had grown tall and developed large breasts and pronounced buttocks - her figure was unfashionably Edwardian, with its tiny waist and exaggerated curves. But there was no fat on her: her stomach was flat, her legs slim. She wore her hair, a deeper auburn now, pulled back from her face, but when she released the hair from the combs which held it, it fell forward in a great mass of waves and curls half obliterating the fine-boned face and lending her an allure Catriona found disturbing. ‘Why not have your hair shaped, Shona?’ she would say. ‘It’s so unruly, such a bother for you to wash and brush, why not have it cropped, it would

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suit you.’ But Shona wouldn’t. She wouldn’t have her hair touched. She took great care of it, indulging in all kinds of shampoos and conditioners and brushing it until it crackled, until it sang with life and all over her head tiny, thread-like tendrils sprang up like a halo.

Shona knew she was attractive and suffered from none of Kirsty’s and lona’s teenage angst over their looks. Out of school uniform she looked like an actress, a little like a red-headed Sophia Loren. To her mother’s distress she wore clothes completely unsuitable for her, clothes bought not in St Andrews or Edinburgh shopping with her watchful mother but in Carnaby Street on yet another trip to London with Archie. ‘Why did you let her buy that ridiculous skirt?’ Catriona raged at her husband. ‘And those boots, white boots, for heaven’s sake, Archie, what were you thinking of, look at her, look at her.’ Archie looked and saw that his wife was right. Shona looked disturbing. The skirt hardly existed and she was the wrong shape for it, and the boots merely drew attention to the barely covered bottom. ‘They’re all wearing them down there,’ he said, lamely, knowing he would be told, as he was, that Shona was not down there, she was here, shocking the whole of North Street and South Street whenever she paraded down them.