The Adoption (16 page)

‘Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ says Mrs Parish glancing at her gold wristwatch, and then frowning at a snag in her stockings. She has a pug dog’s nose, Bethan observes. ‘Will you be all right finding your way back to Paddington? Only I’ve an appointment.’ Her thin mouth stretches like a rubber band and snaps back. ‘I’m sure the society will keep in touch. Anyway it’s been very nice meeting you … Miss Haverd.’ She shakes hand but only with her fingers, as if she is concerned that she may sully herself. And then abruptly she ditches her outside the court.

For a minute Bethan just loiters at a loss, as though she has been jilted. She knows she has a train to catch, and that she should get a move on or she will miss it. But she doesn’t care. She isn’t bothered. She may stay here and lie in wait for them, for her baby, and follow them home. She may kidnap her own daughter. Or she may wander the streets like a bag lady. She may beg for a copper or two to buy a cup of tea. She may sleep on the clipped grass in St James’s Park and dream of the green valleys of home. But even as she toys with this inviting inactivity, her feet begin to tramp towards the underground station. On the ride home, she sheds her skin. The woman who loved a German soldier and lay with him, the woman who conceived his baby and carried it to term, the woman who gave birth in New End Hospital
in
Hampstead, the woman who nursed her baby through gastroenteritis as if both their lives depended on her daughter’s recovery, that woman has gone as surely as if spades of earth are being thrown on her coffin lid.

Before she chugs into Newport she comes to herself. I am like the cloth doll that has been mauled by a rabid dog. I have holes and through my holes all the stuffing of me has come out. It would be a wasted effort to try to stitch me up. I am undone. I must make do. No one will notice I’m not really here. And she is right, they don’t.

15th September

Dear Miss Haverd
,

I do hope you managed to find your way to Paddington, and that you had a leisurely journey home. We were so glad to find such a nice couple to adopt Lucilla. I am sending you some snapshots of the baby. These were, of course, taken earlier in the year but I expect you will be interested to see them
.

With very best wishes
.

Yours sincerely
,

Valeria Mulholland

Secretary

Chapter 11

Harriet, 1950

SHE HAS BEEN
such a good baby up until recently. Merfyn is garrulous in his praise for
our golden girl
. And let there be no mistake, so was I to start with. I have encountered some minor irritants, but none that compete with the magnitude of her Germanic ancestry. For example, it is a pity that her hair is so straight. My preferment would have been for curls, natural curls. Still this is not without remedy. When she is older I will simply have to perm it, to make it curl. As for her features, she is developing into a plainer child than I had hoped for. But she eats well, and sleeps well. And life, I am pleased to say, more or less is continuing on its accustomed round. What more can we ask for? Yet as things go on, I cannot rid myself of a heightened uneasiness in respect of our adopted daughter.

‘I don’t know what you were making such a fuss about, Mother,’ says Merfyn one night as we sit by the fire. ‘She is ideal.’

I nod and crease my lips in a thin smile. I dislike him calling me
Mother
. I am not his mother. And in reality I am not Lucilla’s mother either, not genetically anyway. Therefore it seems nonsensical to let this new maternal role define me altogether. But if I argue the point he may take offence. He can be sentimental about such things, so I let it be.

Merfyn’s job for the Ever Ready Company means that he is
employed
for lengthy hours, alternate Saturdays included. I’m not saying his adulation is misplaced, but he misses the minutiae of Lucilla’s emerging personality – like hangnails these traits are not necessarily a cause for rejoicing. I pride myself on keeping a sense of proportion. And granted they are only tiny indiscretions. But then if Adam and Eve had been more vigilant we might have avoided original sin. I don’t wish to state the obvious but Merfyn is a man. So he is hardly best qualified to judge the progress Lucilla is making. I, solely, am alone with her all day. I am the one who has to spend tedious mornings and afternoons correcting her misdemeanours.

I am not dim-witted. I fully comprehend that infants do not arrive house-trained as it were. But the incontrovertible fact is that we have a problem. Frankly, I would talk it over with Merfyn, but it is rather delicate. At twenty months exactly, I started potty training our daughter. One month passed and Lucilla was doing magnificently. Two, then three, and really I was feeling quite smug. She appeared to be clean and dry, except at nights and that was understandable for the present. Please excuse the crudity of what I am imparting, but in the lieu of a mother you have to deal with these distasteful bodily functions.

However, as she approached her second birthday I am sorry to say I detected a deviation. Generally, she has a bowel movement after tea, and is accustomed to sitting on the potty while I run her bath or turn back her cot. Then one night she refused to stay seated, hopping up after only a few seconds. I peered inside the bowl. Empty. Meanwhile she was gambolling off down the corridor like a spring lamb.

‘Lucilla!’ I called. ‘Lucilla, come here!’ My tone was perhaps more peremptory than I intended, but then it was a situation that warranted it. This kind of thing must not under any circumstances be allowed to escalate. I heard a clatter of footsteps, and she peeped around the bathroom door. She was naked, dragging her toy bear behind her. ‘
Lucilla
, sit back down right now.’ She stood for a moment, head falling to one side, those odd turquoise eyes of hers unreadable. ‘Lucilla, do you hear me?’ I said imperiously. ‘None of this silliness, miss.’ I pointed at her and directed her to the potty. It is white plastic, and was sitting like a giant eggcup on the linoleum of the bathroom floor. She crossed to it and gingerly lowered her bottom down on the seat. ‘You will sit there, miss, until you perform,’ I said, wagging a finger warningly at her.

She screwed up her eyes and hung her head as if she was trying to do a complicated sum. We waited and waited and waited, me tapping a foot by now. I glanced at my watch. It was 6 pm. We had a temperance do on that night and I needed to get ready. ‘Push,’ I ordered taking a threatening step towards her. ‘Go on, push! Take a big breath and push.’ She took a breath obligingly, and puffed out her cheeks until they looked rouged. ‘Hurry up, Lucilla.’ My patience was being stretched to its limits. ‘Lucilla!’ I shrilled.

She closed one eye and looked up at me with the other. ‘Can’t,’ she whimpered.

‘You can,’ I insisted. I knew what this was – a war of wills. And I would be the victor. If there was any dragon slaying to be done, mine would be the killing stroke. ‘Do it or you’ll have a smacked bottom.’ Another five minutes crawled past, then ten. ‘Lucilla!’ I rasped, my voice now hoarse with anger.

Her little mouth set firm. ‘Can’t,’ she said again.

I flew at her, lifting her by one arm off her potty with such force that her feet left the ground for a moment. Once more I scrutinised the interior of the bowl. It was clean as a freshly scrubbed basin. I glowered at her and undiminished she stared back. Was that defiance in those lucid turquoise eyes? And then suddenly I had it. I sent her to her bedroom in disgrace. Grasping the towel rail for support, the unwelcome realisation trumpeted in my head. It was deliberate. The
child
was resisting me on purpose, in order that she might spite me.

This obstinacy, and please don’t assume I am overreacting, this obstinacy was a source of pleasure for her. She liked to see how it irked me. She liked the power it gave her. Well, we’d soon counteract that. Cod liver oil and syrup of figs – that would do the trick. And if they gave her tummy ache so much the better. Fair punishment for her naughtiness. There is a stubborn streak in that child. She will have to be cured of it. She is half German after all. It is vital that this carry-on is sorted out without delay. If I give way on this, if I let her believe she has the upper hand, where will it end? I have come to the conclusion that the remedy is more prayer. Each night I prescribe that our daughter confess her sins. ‘Kneel down, Lucilla, and ask God to forgive you,’ I say. We go through her day together and I make a list of her transgressions.

‘Knees hurty,’ is her usual whine. But not until she has repeated the catechism of her wrongdoings, not until I’m sure she is truly repentant, do we say our amen.

‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity’, Ecclesiastes 1:2. A new biblical quote each week. So much more beneficial than bedtime stories, don’t you think? We commit it to memory before selecting another. Yet my anxieties are not wholly allayed. Call me a pessimist but I think this is a forerunner of the future, of insurrections to be visited upon us in days to come.

‘She’s a pearl and she’s all ours,’ Merfyn says, as he sits after supper doing the crossword. ‘We’re so fortunate, Mother. “The Homeless Child for the Childless Home”. The Church Adoption Society’s slogan. It’s very catchy, isn’t it?’ The question is rhetorical and Merfyn does not pause for a reply. ‘We’re proof that it really does work,’ he adds, setting his paper aside and reaching for a malted milk biscuit. I let this pass without comment.

Chapter 12

Lucilla, 1998

THE CLOSE OF
August and already the year is turning. The air has a lemon juice tartness to it. The flowers are looking papery and flyblown, like tipsy ladies on the town after midnight. Soon the trees will be weeping copious tears of butter yellow, of moth brown, of blood red, tears that drip-flutter-drop into the crumbling dusky-skinned earth. I want to capture the fire of it in oils, something of its richness, its decadence. Watercolours simply won’t do. Too insipid. They lack that gamey high pigment, the rich meat of the oily shades. The magpie nursery rhyme pops into my head.

One for sorrow, two for joy;

Three for a girl, four for a boy;

Five for silver, six for gold;

Seven for a secret, never to be told;

Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss;

Ten for a bird that’s best to miss
.

I’m fond of it. I knew it by heart as a child, sang it out in skipping games. ‘Three for a girl.’ It’s special for me. ‘Three for a girl.’ You see, three is my lucky number. I like the lopsidedness of it, the fact that it undoes that most hare-brained of human aspirations – the attainment
of
perfection. No such thing. It is the errors, the accidents, the mistakes that should be celebrated.

Brightmore Hall has a stately sweeping drive lined with green beech trees, seventeen to each side. You feel like a great lady even if you’re only cycling up it on a battered pushbike. But you know what I love the most about the vista. All those years ago when the saplings were planted the gardeners bungled up. They must have been inattentive, had a lapse in concentration while they cocked an ear to a thrush in full song, or closed their eyes the better to bask in the mellow sunshine. Because one of those trees isn’t green at all. It is a full-bodied wine red. A copper beech has snuck in to stand tall and proud among the frippery of green. I recollect how comfortable I felt when I first set eyes upon that tree, how I was instantly at ease with the asymmetrical avenue. As I say three is an eccentric number, the
numero tre
that upsets the symmetry, that tips the scale, that sinks the ark, and has Noah ripping his hair out by its roots. It is the arrival of three that makes an unpredictable crowd of two.

I am strolling in the grounds with Merlin, all he can manage these days with his endearingly drunken gait. We are soaking up the autumnal splendour, when I see a wisp of a girl playing at hopscotch on the path ahead. She wears jeans and a pink sweatshirt. She must be about seven, I estimate. One of the braids that her long brown hair has been plaited into is unravelling. Her cheeks look carnation pink and there is the tail of a yellow ribbon dangling from her fisted hand. When she spots us approaching, her eyes brighten, dancing with interest. She skips up to Merlin.

‘Oh he’s lovely. May I pat him?’ she asks, crouching down, her voice high and energetic as her young self. Merlin deigns to halt, and waits with an air of nobility for his female admirer to pay him abeyance.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘He’s awfully friendly.’

She strokes his head gently. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Merlin.’

‘Like the magician, King Arthur’s magician.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’ve read stories about him at school. It suits him. His fur feels like my hair when it’s loose.’ I smile. ‘Why is he panting?’

‘Oh, he’s quite an old gentleman now,’ I inform her.

‘So was Merlin. But he’s still very handsome,’ she says and my patrician Merlin licks her in appreciation of the munificent compliment. ‘Is it rude to ask why that eye is a bit cloudy?’

‘No, not rude at all. I’m afraid he is going blind. It’s sad, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He copes with the other good eye. He likes licking the cream that’s left around the neck of the empty milk bottles. He’s very adept at it. You’d find it funny to watch.’

She laughs. ‘I wish I had a dog,’ she says, feelingly.

‘Well, you must ask –’

But here I am interrupted. A woman comes running from the direction of the house. She is screaming like a banshee. ‘Lucy! Lucy! Get over here! Where have you been, you naughty girl?’

The child springs up, all traces of her previous enjoyment expunged in an instant. Her eyes are wide and alarmed. She bites her lower lip, bites and bites at it, and suddenly I notice how inflamed and sore it is. ‘I’d better go,’ she says. And she pivots and sprints up to the harridan. A minute or so later and the woman is still shrieking at her, pulling her by the arm towards the house. And in a trick of time I am that child again, alert, on guard, a constant swilling in my tummy, never knowing when to duck.