The Adoption (15 page)

But when the baby became sick, very sick with gastro-enteritis, they were both frantic. They forgot about who should have a bond and who should not. She was treated in the hospital. Bethan was petrified that she might die. The thought of living in a world robbed of her baby made her lose her balance and fall to the floor. As her mam helped her up, a look passed between them. In that instant their limitless love was seen for what it was, an indelible brand on both their lives. Her mam owned her treachery and prayed that Brice would forgive her. Bethan owned the betrayal of her baby, and prayed that one day she would have absolution for the premeditated act she was going to commit. They did not share with each other their deep-rooted suspicions that Eira Heppell had in some devilish way doctored the baby’s feed, that she had tried to poison it. From then on the baby was never left unattended.

During the pregnancy they had both avoided giving the baby a name. They knew the power a name would bestow, the undeniable sorcery of it. A name would transform their fairy child, their changeling into a human girl knitted not of angel dust, but flesh and blood, skin and bone, with a tiny pumping heart in the jewel box of her chest. In the event a café supplied it. It served fruit buns, teacakes and jam tarts, tea and coffee, and it was called Lucilla’s. They all frequented it, all three of them.

‘If it’s a girl shall we call her Lucilla then?’ Bethan suggested as they paid their bill one afternoon, only days before her confinement.

Her mam nodded. ‘Mmm … why not?’ she said. ‘Lucilla will do.’ They both felt indifferent to the name. They did not consider what to call the baby if it was a boy.

‘It’s quite pretty really,’ they muttered in overlapping voices and the deal was done. Bethan had a moment of weakness in the Registry Office in Hampstead. Asked to provide the baby’s name, she threw her head back and gazed at the ceiling. She didn’t actually like it. It was too elaborate, too complicated. Saying it made her feel all breathless, as if she was suffocating. But like everything else it seemed a bit too late by then. So on 16 January her daughter’s name was registered as Lucilla Haverd.

Her mam rang the Church Adoption Society and spoke to their contact, a Miss Mulholland, Valeria Mulholland. She said that the baby had been born, that it was a healthy girl, that they had called her Lucilla. Miss Mulholland gave effusive assurances that they were on the lookout for the ideal home for Lucilla. They realised how pressing the situation was, that it was a race to remedy their plight and locate a secure home with excellent adoptive parents.

They asked Bethan to fill out a form, to sign a certificate. She had stared at it for nearly a quarter of an hour. Phrases had leaped out at her and tolled in her head like the church bells had done at funerals: ‘
Adoption
of Children (Regulation) Act (1939). To be furnished by a registered Adoption Society to every parent or guardian who proposes to place a child at the disposition of the Society. If an adoption order is made in respect of your child, all your rights and duties with regard to the child will be transferred permanently to the adopter.’ She had been sitting in the Church Adoption Society’s office, the office where the secretary, Miss Mulholland, typed letters to suicidal young women. It was the office where she answered the telephone and arranged for the babies to be collected, like undelivered parcels that were returned to the post office.

Her mam had been with her. She had also studied it, puzzling over the unfamiliar vocabulary. Since arriving in London, having the baby, tending to her, actively avoiding physical contact, as if Lucilla had leprosy and was not the most beautiful thing in all creation, Bethan had struggled to think coherently. She sometimes entertained the delusion that she had been in a car crash and was now brain-damaged. Her thoughts lacked logical progression, the snowballing ideas fragmenting or dropping into nothingness long before she could extract any sense from them. Her head wasn’t wired. She had blown a fuse, more like a dozen. It was a bother and a blessing besides, because nothing concluded. She couldn’t stay aboard trains of thought, ride them like bucking broncos till she broke them in. They threw her off in seconds. Oh the train went hurtling on, disappearing in the distance. But where it was going who knew? She was left in the fog, in the humane fog.

She pounded her brow hoping to hone her concentration. She might be back at school, chomping on a pencil end, hunched over an exercise book working out her sums. And they had been so baffling, she remembered, all those numbers to add, divide, multiply, subtract. She was subtracting that moment. Last year, she’d been adding, adding Thorston into her life, adding the heat of his body to hers. And then
she
’d been multiplying. Isn’t that what the Bible said, go forth and multiply. Well, she had multiplied. She’d become two, Bethan and a baby. And then she’d been divided from her baby when Lucilla was born. She’d wanted to keep her inside for eternity. But that was obviously idiotic. And now, last sum of all, but inversely the most difficult one, torturous she might say, she was subtracting, subtracting the baby from her.

‘It should all work out, dear,’ she recalled her teacher telling her, her distant eyes zipping over the disastrous workings Bethan had scrawled on the page. ‘Have another go and you’ll see, it will all work out.’ But it hadn’t and it wasn’t. The answer was wrong, and no matter how many times she did the complicated sum, she got the same result.

‘If you have taken out an insurance policy against funeral expenses for your child, the insurers will be able to advise you whether the policy can be transferred to the adopters.’ That’s what it had said on the form, really! She’d only recently given birth and now they were talking about her baby dying. It had to be a joke, and like all jokes there was a grain of truth embedded in it. Because this birth felt like death. It did. She didn’t care if it was a morbid thing to dwell on. And now they had presented her with their form, as if creepily they were telepathic, asking her to anticipate the costs of her baby’s funeral. But it didn’t feel as if Lucilla was in mortal danger, in spite of being so sick with the gastric upset. Gazing into her turquoise eyes, so like her own, like her grandfather’s honestly, Lucilla exuded life force. It was Bethan who had received a fatal wound, Bethan who was fading with every passing hour. ‘I hereby certify that I received from you a memorandum headed “Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act, 1939”, and that I have read the memorandum and understand it.’ And the dead person she had mutated into, the spectre, took up the pen and signed.

She had more in common with her brother, Brice, now that she was nearer death. They were both as good as ghosts, shadows of their
former
selves. Afterwards, after giving her baby away, she wished she hadn’t insisted on seeing them, on physically putting her daughter into that woman’s arms. She could have made them perfect if she hadn’t done that, perfect parents for her perfect baby, and not been witness to their flawed selves. They were old. They appeared more like grandparents than parents. And the woman was sort of stolid and lifeless, like a felled tree. Not fat exactly but broad and wooden as a heavy door. Her hair, shoulder length, was a frizzy lifeless cap. It was no shade at all really, not brown nor grey, but an indiscriminate mix of the two. Most disturbing were her eyes. They
were
brown, brown as coffee grits, passionless, eyes that the soul, if she had one, did not reach. Both she and her husband wore glasses, the lenses thick as paperbacks, making them seem still more detached and aloof. The man was wearing a suit like her father’s Sunday best, the one he saved for church. And he had his finger stuck in his ear, wiggling, as if he was giving his brains a stir.

More depressing, there was something used about them, weary, a stifling properness that made her want to fight for air. It would smother her daughter. They would systematically douse the light in those stunning turquoise eyes. She may not, by deliberate design, have known the intimacy of her baby suckling from her breasts. She may have shunned holding her. She may have held her breath when Lucilla came too close, in case she inhaled that unique, intrinsic, indefinable scent that was her daughter’s, but she had locked eyes with her. And in that clasp a whole discourse of love had been spoken, a lifetime of it. She could no more quash her love, no more sever her emotional tie, than she could take a knife and hack off her own legs.

In her baby’s eyes chapters of faraway tropical oceans were inscribed. And there was a gossamer dreaminess, a whimsical insight that would resist any kind of alphabetical order. She had a fey quality that meant, like her own mother, like herself, Lucilla would forever be
spellbound
. She would marvel at the way a field of ripe wheat could ripple like an amber sea, would marvel at the way the sky was the changing tide of your emotions. She didn’t have to glimpse a crystal ball to know what was going to happen. Her daughter would not be allowed to run barefoot in the grass, to scramble up trees and swing in their upper branches, to ride horses bareback, feeling their warm flanks heaving against the grip of her thighs. These were the kinds of parents who made rules, who demanded obedience, who made you conform, who forced you into a mould. They would wait for years if that’s what it took, for you to set. They would clock-watch. They would extol absolutism. They would be the dictators. They would yoke Lucilla’s spirit. Her daughter would strive to battle her own nature. In vain she would try to resist gazing up at the unique character of each day, try to withstand the temptation of stringing the stars into necklaces and bracelets, try to still her imagination from pencilling a smile on the mottled silver moon.

But with full knowledge of all the tomorrows lining up like dominoes, Bethan did it. She let her go. She gave her baby into another’s arms. And then she turned and walked from the room. She did it the way the condemned climb the steps to a gallows, the way they accept the eternal darkness of the hood, the way they raise their head to the collar of the noose. When they got back to Bedwyr Farm it had been rebuilt, her family substituted for another. Her mam no longer chatted comfortably with her. She treated her in the guarded way you might a dog that has bitten you, handling her carefully.

Her dad would not meet her eye, and in the unconscious curl of his lip was repugnance. He drove her relentlessly, from the second she was shaken from her sleep while it was still pitch black outside, to the second she fell, faint with weariness, back into her bed. He made her work on the land harder than she had ever done before. She did the job of a man twice her age and twice her size. He spied on her every
waking
minute. By taciturn agreement, she kept mute. It was something like solitary confinement, she thought. And she was never, never ever permitted to be alone with the farm labourers her dad had taken on in their absence: thickset Barris who spat into the mud when she was near, and lanky Jestin who sneered behind her back.

Towards her dad for his brutal treatment of her she felt nothing but gratitude. He was meting out the punishment she deserved. She bore it with the joy of a martyr. The more he pushed her, the less able she was to unpack the burden of her guilt, the less able to review the prospect of her life sentence. When the summons came for her to go to London in September to witness the adoption, she was overcome with disbelief. It was a second thrust of the knife in a fresh wound. Her dad was adamant that she could not be spared, not even for one day. But the the Church Adoption Society was equally adamant that she must obey, that the adoption would not go ahead without her, that the Justices would not be thwarted. And so he finally consented to the trip, but only if she left on the night train to Paddington on 13 September, returning to Newport by the midday train the following day.

The station is deserted when she arrives in the early hours of the morning. She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten or drunk. She feels light-headed, dehydrated, giddy as a revolving door. She sits in the waiting room and memorises its drabness. Saucepan-grey walls, varnished wooden benches, a concrete floor. She listens to the echoing announcements. Her stomach rumbles and she is taken by a wave of nausea so powerful that she retches, though all she can bring up is a mouthful of bile, brownish yellow and bitter. Her limbs are starch stiff and her bottom is numb from sitting too long. She has a crick in her neck and she can smell her own sweat. But it is not clean and honest, the way it smells at the end of a day on the farm. The stink is offensive to her, like the rank smell of an infection. In the toilet she undoes her blouse and tries to wash under her arms with a damp
paper
towel. But it falls apart, and when she finishes the stink is still with her.

Afterwards, she finds her way to the tube and travels underground with the rush hour. It’s insanity. All the people are racing to their places of work and she races as well, carried along with the flow of them, rushing to her exam, the subtraction of her baby. She has the sudden impulse to interrupt a couple of women who are nattering about their children. She wants to tell them that her daughter has the most extraordinary turquoise eyes you have ever seen. She doesn’t of course, but she dearly wants to.

Holborn and she stands by the red post box outside the premises of the Church Adoption Society. I hate this city, she thinks. I don’t want to come back. I don’t want to hear its name uttered in my presence ever again. It is September and the leaves are turning red and yellow and orange. Strands of silky white cloud are stretched across the loom of a duck-egg blue sky. Car horns blare and a welter of people jostle and chatter, purpose in their steps. A lady, Mrs Parish, salt-and-pepper hair piled high, comes and claims her. She asks her if she’s had a comfortable trip, and if she has eaten breakfast. Bethan nods to both enquiries. Mrs Parish steers her to the juvenile court, Petty Sessional Division of Highgate, sitting at Avenue House in Finchley.

And she is here. Her baby Lucilla is here, and so are the adoptive parents, the parents who look like grandparents. She did not expect to see her, her beautiful daughter now eight months old. They are sitting to the rear of the courtroom, the woman clutching her baby. All she dares is a quick glance in their direction while she is being led to her seat. But the image that burns her retina will remain for a lifetime. Lucilla is restless, grizzling, squirming in her arms. And the woman is jigging her up and down, up and down. She doesn’t like it. Her daughter doesn’t like it. Why doesn’t someone tell her to stop it? Why don’t the Justices order her to desist? The impulse to turn and walk
slowly
towards them, to take her baby back, to hug her close and run from this frightful place is overwhelming. But the formal setting, the intimidating suited men, the Justices staring down at her with their long sober faces, the booming chesty voices speaking legal jargon she does not begin to understand, all these inhibit her. She keeps her eyes down, her body rigid, the scream in her throat gagged. Too fast. It is happening too fast. They race through the proceedings. And then she is summoned to sign her name on a document. And it is done. They hurry her out, leaving her baby, her daughter, her precious child behind her for the second, the final time.