Shadow Baby (9 page)

Kirsty’s and lona’s mothers were suddenly not so fond of Shona. They began to say she was too old ‘in her ways’ for their daughters to spend so much time with. In lona’s family in particular this new antipathy was marked, but then lona had a fifteen-year-old brother who could not take his eyes off Shona Mclndoe’s skirt. Shona, Heather Grant agreed with Jean Macpherson, was even less like her mother than ever and now hardly like her father either. But at least her parents were strict even if they failed to control how she dressed. If Shona stayed the night her mother rang to thank Jean or Heather but they both knew she was ringing to check up that her daughter was really with them.

There was, in fact, no need for her to check up, not then. Shona held hands with the occasional boy but she had not yet been kissed; and though the bolder boys had put an arm round her in the back row of the Old Byre theatre, it was doubtful whether Shona was as interested in boys as they were in her. If there was any sexual response on Shona’s part it was well concealed. Her mother suspected, and was relieved to suspect, that Shona was not as mature as she looked - her startling body did not yet know what it was about. And then, having been comforted by this thought, she was

thrown into sudden confusion. Had she been like this? Had she been like this, the woman she had tried so hard not to imagine all these years? Had she been unaware of her own power and suffered for it? And would Shona do the same, for the same reasons, whatever they had been, in the same way?

Panic filled Catriona. It was time to speak, of course it was, she had been a fool to think that time would never, need never, come. It had come, far sooner than she could have anticipated. Yet she stayed silent, eternally vigilant but silent. She simply could not bring herself to destroy what she had come to believe was truth.

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AT THIRTEEN Evie left school but, since she had only managed to be there less than half the time she was supposed to be, it did not make much difference. The transition from schoolgirl to working girl was hardly noticed. Evie had grown very quickly used to being kept from school, never counting on walking the two miles to the schoolhouse until the very moment she was grudgingly told to go. At first, she had minded her poor rate of attendance greatly, but after the first year it had mattered less. School was not the paradise she had once imagined. There were only two rooms, both enormous and divided by partitions, and the noise made her head ache. The partitions were thin and the poetry Class i was reciting in unison fought with the recitation of multiplication tables by Class 2 until those sitting in Class 3, as Evie was, found it hard to concentrate on memorising the geographical facts they were required to do.

But Evie, though disillusioned, made the most of her time at Moorhouse Board School. She learned to add and subtract, to multiply and divide. Being a girl she was not expected to master equations, as the boys were, but she struggled with simple fractions and succeeded in understanding them. Ernest was pleased with her. He tested her regularly, sitting with a stick beside him on the table and rapping her knuckles if she got his questions, as to five times nine and the like, wrong. Evie’s knuckles were rarely rapped by him; which was fortunate because they had already been rapped by her teacher and were often red raw. Other girls cried when they were taken behind the blackboard by Miss Stoddard and caned with her stick, which was pointed at one end and thick at the other, but Evie did not. Other girls sometimes screamed that they would tell their mams and their mams would come to the school and play war with

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Miss, but Evie, of course, never did. She wondered what it would be like to have a mam to tell. She told Ernest’s wife Muriel nothing. There was no point. Her heart pounded when Miss called her out because she had got something wrong but she taught herself to endure the punishment which followed without flinching. Miss Stoddard promptly caned her twice as severely in an attempt to make her weaken. But soon there was no cause for caning. Not even Miss Stoddard could fault Evie for anything except her attendance record and since, when the school officer visited the Fox and Hound, Ernest and Muriel gave adequate excuses she could not be blamed for that.

She made no friends during her intermittent years at school. ‘Who are you?’ she was asked when first she arrived, and ‘Where do you live?’ When she said she was Evie and lived at the Fox and Hound on the Carlisle road she was asked another question, one she couldn’t answer. The question was ‘Why?’ Evie was obliged to say she didn’t know. ‘Does your dad work there?’ her tormentors persisted, and when she said she had no dad they moved on to inquire about her mam, and then they pronounced her an orphan and sneered. ‘She’s got no dad, no mam, and she doesn’t know who she is,’ they sang. Evie listened to this chorus and was puzzled but not upset. What puzzled her was why having no dad or mam made her the object of ridicule, in the first instance, and then indifference. But at least she was left alone and rarely bullied. There was neither fun nor satisfaction in bullying Evie. She was not frightened, she didn’t weep or turn red, nor did she attempt retaliation. She slipped in and out of school all those years like a shadow and was hardly remarked on.

Except for her singing. Evie’s pretty voice was discovered by accident. She hadn’t even known she possessed one since she had never had anything to sing about and had never been invited to. One day, all three classes on the first floor were brought together to sing carols just before the Christmas holidays. The partitions were opened up and all ninety-six pupils were lined up and ordered first to recite the words of ‘In the Bleak Mid-winter’ which they had been set to learn. Outside, the winter that year was very bleak indeed. Everyone had struggled to school through the snow and more could be seen swirling round the high windows of the vast, cold schoolroom. There was an oil stove at one end, near the teacher and the pianist, but it was making a poor job of heating the further

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reaches of the room. The coughing was unremitting and the breath coming out of ninety-six mouths into the freezing air caused little clouds to develop all along the rows.

Evie, because she was small, was in the front row and therefore lucky, since she did not feel as cold as those at the back. She was as near to enjoying herself as she had ever been. The teacher, a Miss Hart, was the nicest teacher in the school, young and kind and pretty in her pink frock. Everyone adored her and consequently behaved well for the duration of the time they spent under her gentle instruction. Evie, her eyes fixed on the lovely Miss Hart, felt dreamy and relaxed and not her usual alert, tense, terrier-like self, always on the lookout for trouble, always anticipating persecution or at least disapproval. She swayed slightly in time to the music and hummed the tune of the carol as Miss Gray played it through. ‘Now,’ said Miss Hart, ‘I want each row to sing the first verse, row by row, and then we’ll try to sing it together. Ready, the front row?’ The front row had ten children in it, eight girls (including Evie) and two boys. ‘One, two, three,’ said Miss Hart and then dropped her hand as the signal that the front row should begin. Only Evie did. She had closed her eyes as soon as the signal was given and therefore did not see Miss Hart cancel it, with another wave of her hand, because the pianist had dropped her music. Out it came, Evie’s sweet, soaring soprano voice and everyone listened spellbound until, realising she sang alone, she faltered and opened her eyes and stopped.

But Miss Hart was charmed. She made Evie sing the whole carol and clapped at the end. In a sense, this appreciation was too much and Evie would rather it had not been given. She didn’t like to be the focus of attention. Attention of any kind was dangerous. Yet she could not stop herself feeling a rush of pleasure which continued for days afterwards. She had a voice, she could sing, she wasn’t useless. Miss Hart kept her behind and complimented her and asked who she got her voice from. Evie was flummoxed. ‘From, Miss?’ she managed to ask. ‘Yes, who in your family can sing like you? Voices are usually inherited, you know, they tend to run in families. Does your mother sing?’ Suddenly, everything was spoiled. She had to begin again on the doleful saga of having no dad, no mam and living at the Fox and Hound with two people whose relationship to her she had never had properly explained. She thought, that day, of asking Muriel if her mother had had a voice but she could not bring herself to the point. She knew by then that a woman referred to as Leah had

been, or was, her mother and that she had lived at one time in the same house as Ernest, her cousin, though whether it was in the Fox and Hound or not had never emerged. Neither had any clue as to what had happened to this Leah. Evie listened carefully to every mention of her and sometimes concluded she was dead and sometimes alive.

The strangest things provoked a reference to Leah. Ernest measured Evie each New Year’s Day, up against the kitchen doorpost. ‘She’s still small,’ he grumbled, ‘she’ll never be as tall as Leah, never. She’ll be lost behind a bar, she’ll never have the strength to draw a pint like Leah could.’ And then there was her shyness, still acute after four years at the Fox and Hound. ‘Goddamn it, lass,’ Ernest shouted at her, ‘don’t jump like a frightened rabbit just because a stranger speaks to you. What good is that, eh?’ And later Evie heard him complain to Muriel that she would never have a way with her, not like Leah who could charm the birds off the trees. Interestingly, Evie then heard Muriel say, ‘Maybe just as well, birds weren’t all Leah charmed and look what happened to her.’ There was a silence. Ernest grunted. ‘She’ll be safer,’ Muriel went on, ‘being shy.’ ‘She’ll be useless,’ Ernest said, ‘no good to us at all at this rate, there’s no future to her.’ ‘She works hard enough,’ Muriel said, ‘you can’t deny that, she’s worth her keep.’ ‘Aye,’ Ernest said, ‘but I thought she’d be worth more in the long run.’

The work Evie did while she was still of school age was mostly housework, the same kind of cleaning and preparing of food that she had such a dim but happy memory of doing with her grandmother, only altogether harder. Muriel was a stickler for cleanliness and though Evie’s own nature approved of her high standards and responded to them, sometimes it would strike her that what she was set to do was after all absurd. Muriel liked pans scoured till you could see your face in the bottoms of them. It was very, very hard to get the bottom of a pan clean enough to act as a mirror, and as she scrubbed and scrubbed, and peered and peered at her own vaguely emerging shadow of a face, Evie ruminated on the lack of sense in this exercise. It was the same with the silver forks, they too had to have faces visible in the handles, but at least that job was easier. Evie quite enjoyed cleaning the silver, spreading it out on the felt cloth kept for the purpose, and applying the paste and then polishing with a soft cloth. It was a restful task and, since she often felt very tired, a

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welcome one. And so was the sewing Muriel gave her to do, though at first she found it difficult to stitch a seam straight enough to satisfy her teacher. Muriel had the highest standards when it came to plain sewing. She would accept no slipped stitches and they had to run in lines as straight as a ruler.

Muriel sometimes paused from her own labours to talk to her at such times. There was no real affection between the two of them but as Evie had grown older, and proved so obedient, Muriel had become more companionable. She was not exactly kind to her but on the other hand she was not harsh or unfeeling and upon occasion showed a measure of real concern for Evie’s welfare which always surprised her and left her somehow nervous. ‘It isn’t much of a life for a young girl,’ she suddenly said one morning as she watched Evie scrubbing the stone floor of the kitchen, ‘but then we’ve all had to do it, all our kind anyway, work, work, work, eh, Evie?’ Evie looked up. She wanted the job over, she didn’t want interruptions of this sort. ‘You’ve missed a bit of mud there,’ said Muriel, pointing with her toe. Relieved, Evie set to and eradicated it. ‘Not much of a life,’ Muriel repeated. ‘You’d be better off behind the bar, where Ernest wants you if only you’d grow.’ There was another pause. ‘How old are you now, Evie?’ ‘Eleven,’ Evie said, ‘next month.’ ‘Oh yes,’ Muriel murmured, ‘March, I remember it was in the autumn she left, that would be right, she would just be showing with you.’ Evie scrubbed, rhythmically, but she willed Muriel to go on. Something was being said, something of importance if only she could get hold of it. ‘But you’re small for eleven, that’s likely why you haven’t come on yet.’ Evie paused, only vaguely aware of what was being said. ‘That was when the trouble started,’ Muriel said, and added with a sigh, ‘It usually does, if it’s going to. It did for your mother once she was a woman, right from then the men fancied her, though I didn’t know her, mind. I saw her often enough later but I didn’t know her properly then, it’s only rumour, what went on.’

Evie knew it was the perfect opportunity to ask Muriel about Leah, to try to sort out all the enigmatic statements made about her and inquire once and for all if this Leah was indeed her mother and alive or dead, but it was too hard to begin. How should she begin? ‘Who is Leah? Was she, is she, my mother?’ She realised that she was afraid of the answers and even of there being no answers - it was preferable to have this hazy, shadowy, somehow soothing idea of a mother than be perhaps cruelly disappointed. There was such

yearning within her for a mother, she so loved her fantasies of having one, that to risk losing them and having to substitute some harsh truth was not to be endured.

But this very failure to ask the questions about her own background, which most girls would have found irresistible, worked in the end in Evie’s favour. If she had been openly curious, Muriel was the sort of woman who would have withheld information simply because she loved the power of knowing it when Evie did not. Ernest had told her to say nothing about Leah to the girl. He was quite adamant - ‘Best if she knows nothing,’ he had said, ‘it might give her ideas, it’d lead likely to trouble and there’s been enough of that.’ But by the time Evie was thirteen, and on the edge of womanhood whatever she still looked like, Muriel knew that she would never be any trouble. She was thoroughly docile, without a flash of temper in her. It was safe to tell Evie anything at all, knowing both that she would never repeat it, because she had no one to repeat it to, and that she would not be unduly shocked or distressed. So Muriel, from then onwards, began to let things slip, little facts about Leah dropped into her monologues ready for Evie to pick up should she so wish. Muriel was not sure whether the girl did wish or not. Her expression betrayed nothing. And yet she thought she detected an extra stillness about Evie at these moments of revelation that alerted her to the girl’s deep interest. It became a kind of game, trying to get some reaction from her, and the more Muriel played it the more careless she grew.