The Adoption (29 page)

‘There you are, Lucilla,’ says Rachel, thankfully. ‘We came after you but you’d gone. You were brilliant. That odious manager looked a riot all covered in sherbet. Did the rotter do anything to you?’

‘Nah, I was too quick for him,’ Lucilla assures, cockily, outlaw blood still pumping in her veins. Then as an afterthought she adds with pride, ‘Banned me from the Odeon.’

‘Oh what bad luck!’ says Rachel offering her a Black Jack from the few sweets she has left in her pocket.

‘Thanks,’ says Lucilla, aglow with pride. She unwraps it and pops it in her mouth.

‘Frank’s going to snitch,’ Rachel adds dejectedly. ‘I told him not to, but he said Aunt Harriet should know.’ A pause while this blow sinks in. Barbara gives a dry sob. Temporarily forgotten they both glance at
her
, as does the jeweller shooing them away through the display window.

Lucilla gives him a Black and White Minstrel wave. ‘Frightfully pretty rings,’ she mouths through the glass. ‘When I get engaged I’ll come back.’ She mimes putting one on her finger and admiring it, before returning her attention to her cousin. ‘Oh well,’ she sighs philosophically, ‘Barbara would have blabbed anyway. Still, I’m in no hurry to go home,’ she adds, grinning.

‘What d’you … d’you have to go and do it for,’ stutters shell-shocked Barbara, her breathing still rapid, her shoulders rocking with ugly emotions she has not previously experienced, closeted in the safe disciplined confines of Saint Teresa’s.

‘Aw, it was only a bit of fun,’ yips Lucilla, giving her a mock punch. Barbara flinches. But Lucilla shrugs it off good-humouredly. Her heart is still throbbing with the delirious empowering joy of it. ‘Did you see his face? Wow! He was steaming he was so mad.’

Barbara casts a mournful eye over a display of watches and wilts. ‘But he threw you out. We didn’t get to watch the cartoons. And that was the only bit I really wanted to see.’

‘Didn’t you enjoy the Western?’ Lucilla wants to know, her cup definitely half full, her indomitable spirit busting to bestride this petty world. Her tongue by this time is stained from the Black Jack, and her lips are coated with dark saliva, giving her a gothic attraction.

‘No, I was really fed up actually. Nothing but horses and guns.’

‘How can you say that?’ exclaims Lucilla, incredulous that anyone could not be a fan of Westerns. Horses and guns! And those incredible cactus, tall as prickly people. Could you honestly ask for more, she ruminates. ‘Did either of you throw any of your sweets at him?’ she inquires innocently, hoping to have led by example.

‘Three Parma violets,’ Rachel confesses shyly. ‘And … and I’m almost certain one hit him.’

‘Oh brilliant,’ congratulates Lucilla, reflecting if she only achieved one convert then all is not in vain.

Barbara shakes the brown paper bag she is clutching by the neck. ‘Of course not. It was a dreadful thing to do. And I’ve had a perfectly horrid morning.’

‘Oh don’t start up again, Barbara,’ says Lucilla, her tone defiantly unrepentant, the bright sides of this unlooked for day revealing themselves to her like a many-faceted diamond. ‘Because I had a blast. Though I’m still hungry. Typical, I dropped my sweets in the rush.’ She has finished the Black Jack and wouldn’t mind a second.

‘You can have all of mine, so there.’ Barbara shoves hers towards Lucilla. ‘I’m not feeling well.’

‘Pity.’ Lucilla seizes the bag and rifles inside. ‘You’ve still got your sherbet dip. That’s fantastic.’ Her happiness is complete. She fishes it out and proceeds to dip and suck contemplatively. ‘Do you want some?’ she says, offering round the chewed liquorice stick. A generous helping of sherbet is welded to it with her grey saliva. Rachel accepts with alacrity but Barbara’s oatmeal complexion takes on a greenish tinge.

‘No thanks. I truthfully do feel sick. I might chuck up any moment.’

‘Oh how beastly. You better not do it here. Where shall we go now?’ says Lucilla, sucking with relish. Her eyes rove about the busy street looking for inspiration.

‘Nowhere.’ Barbara pouts. ‘My hands are all sticky and I can’t wash them.’ Her voice breaks with the ghastliness of it.

‘Oh crumbs, don’t go crying again,’ pleads Lucilla. ‘My hands are sticky, too. See.’

‘So are mine,’ says Rachel in solidarity with her cousin. They hold them up to prove it.

‘Oh, that doesn’t make me feel any better.’ Barbara’s face spasms, and her eyes well up.

‘We could go to a park and look out for a pond to wash in.’ To Lucilla the remedy seems logical, but Barbara is aghast.

‘You’re not allowed. Besides,’ she hiccups tragically, ‘the ponds are full of duck poo and diseases. It’s very dangerous. I’m going back to the home.’

‘Do you want us to come with you?’ asks Lucilla, hoping that she doesn’t, that they are about to offload the tedious and temperamental Barbara.

‘No fear!’ Barbara replies adamantly. ‘I have to get back anyway. I’m going shopping with one of the nuns this afternoon.’

Neither of them make a move to impede her exit. In fact they both stand aside and make way.

‘Do you want to come again next week?’ Lucilla calls after her as she weaves her way through the weekend throng. But answer comes there none, only a backwards look generously sprinkled in malice. However, retribution is swift on her return home. Frank has lived up to his reputation and grassed her up. Her father, on a mission for the Ever Ready Company, is not present to moderate her mother’s wrath. Punch drunk from the blows to her head, she sits on her bedroom floor, stroking Scamp. Her left ear is throbbing, and it feels as if someone is spearing her eardrum with a scalding fork. She drops her head, lifts one of Scamp’s silky ear flaps, winces and whispers, ‘But it was worth it, Scamp. Oh boy, was it worth it!’

Unfortunately though, being bounced from the Odeon does not put paid to Barbara’s visits. As spring gives herself to summer and the flower beds of the London parks fill up with geraniums and marigolds, Barbara seems to snuggle ever closer into the Pritchards’ family unit. Lucilla comes home at least twice a week to find Scamp tethered up like a criminal in the stocks, and Barbara and her mother busy with some domestic project that fills her with tedium. She now regularly attends all the temperance meetings with them and everyone loves her.
Barbara!
Isn’t she a boon, they all say. Such a willing, sociable girl, so tidy and comely. So mild in nature. Lucilla’s parents parade about like farmers showing off a prize heifer. Her father holds his lapels and unzips his stained teeth in sickening smiles. Her mother picks up one of Barbara’s thick plaits. She weighs it in her hand as if such is the fantastic quality of the hair she is considering selling it to a wigmaker.

Before long Barbara is a monitor on the high table, taking notes at the meetings. She starts to win the sewing competitions, and her fine embroidery work is admired by young and old. Frank, earlier in the year immune to her feminine wiles, is now definitely taking note of her. As the esteem in which the Brothers and Sisters of Temperance hold her grows, he deigns to engage her in conversation. Lucilla gauges the depth of his feeling by the access he gives Barbara to his stamp albums and numerous collections. The Saturday they set off train-spotting together she reckons her cousin is truly smitten.

Then one autumn day during a visit from Barbara, a day like any other Lucilla assumes, Scamp escapes. He is shut in the front room, reprieved from being tied up in the garden for once. Her mother and Barbara are washing up diligently, talking about scouring saucepans until you can see your face in them – though why you should want to Lucilla has no idea. She is pleased to have successfully absconded from what she deems a tiresome, repetitive task. Campfires, paper plates and cups, that’s the way to go, she decides. Sitting at the kitchen table, her mind moves around an imaginary farmyard. The pencil in her hand slides smoothly, swiftly, as though it has been oiled. She is drawing farm animals, pigs with their slobbery snouts and a cockerel spruced up in splendid plumage. She wants to get out her paints and bring the rooster to life with reds and browns and ochre shades. But she knows it is too late in the evening for her mother to permit it.

Then comes the piercing scream, the kind of scream, identifies Lucilla, which you might give if you were being stabbed to death.
Wishful
thinking, she decides, as she springs to her feet and runs into the kitchen. Jail-dog, Scamp, has snuck out of the front room. He made a
pad
for it while her father, in an abstraction of facts and figures, wandered into the hall to fetch his briefcase. On the scent of the new-person-in-his-territory, nostrils aquiver, he heads for the kitchen. Once there, discerning its source, he hurls himself at Barbara. Jumping up as he knows he mustn’t, he cycles his front paws frantically in an attempt to conquer this challenging summit. Sniffing her panic sends his highly sensitive olfactory receptors into mayhem.

Arriving on the scene, Lucilla stares agog. There is a lunatic in their kitchen, one shriek following another as they ascend scale after scale, a choir’s worth of panic-stricken arpeggios. Barbara’s arms whip-crack about, striking anything within reach, including Lucilla’s astounded mother, who recoils as her face is slapped. Barbara’s pigtails thrash. Her limbs grow rigid then jerk violently and her mouth froths obscenely, as if, Lucilla hazards wishfully, she has swallowed poison. Her mother tries to grab the rabid girl, to contain her, only to be hit afresh, this time a clenched fist gonging against her breastbone. Lucilla rushes forwards and scoops up the bouncing dog.

‘He’s just a dog being friendly,’ she lulls the crazed Barbara. ‘Scamp only wants to say hello to you.’ Her tone is all innocence as she offers the mass of paddling fur. But the devil bat, waiting in the wings of her life, has chosen this instant to claim her soul. ‘You can pet him if you want,’ she coaxes, thrusting the canine weapon into Barbara’s gibbering face. The screaming becomes a stifled squawk and the arms slish-slash the air, doing petrified semaphore. ‘Take it away! Take it away! Oh, oh, take it away!’ Her father blunders in like a policeman from the Keystone Kops – without a truncheon but just as useless. And then the blood leaks out of Barbara’s face as if she has just been juiced, her legs go from under her and she passes out, her body hitting the floor with a resounding bang.

Scamp, streaking about like a greyhound hare racing, is caught and fettered anew. Barbara is brought round with smelling salts, and smacks to the face, liberally supplied, Lucilla notes with a twinkle, by her mother. A cup of heavily sugared tea is drunk in a deafening silence. And then without more ado, and to be fair there has been plenty of ado already, her father takes her back to the home. As the bruises appear on her mother’s face, like photo-sensitive paper washed in developing fluid, so Barbara, the imminent addition to the Pritchard household, is repatriated into St Teresa’s Children’s Home for good and all.

Chapter 20

Bethan, 1961

THE WOMAN STANDING
on the doorstep was irate, florid of face, breathing at a furious pace, brandishing the torn pinafore in her hand like a sabre. ‘Well? Well? What do you have to say about this, Mrs Sterry? That’s what your daughter Lowrie got up to at school today. If you don’t believe me, you call her down and ask her. Tell her, Rhiannon, tell Mrs Sterry what occurred.’

On cue, the girl with the freckled face and short pigtails stepped forwards. She delivered her speech in a singsong voice, as though she had been going over it all the way to the farm. ‘I was standing in the lunch queue and suddenly Lowrie Sterry shoved me over. She said I pushed in, but I never. As I fell, I heard a rip. When I went to the toilet, I saw what she’d done to my uniform.’ Performance completed, she took a deep breath and fell back. Her mother emphatically nodded her approval, the tight auburn curls springing against her wrinkled brow.

‘What did I say? There you have it, Mrs Sterry. My Rhiannon doesn’t tell lies. If she says that your Lowrie did it, it’s true. What I want to know is what you’re going to do about it. It was new this term, her pinafore was. And it cost a bob or two. I can’t mend a big tear like this.’ She folded her arms across her indignantly heaving bosom, her pretty headscarf fluttering in the autumnal breeze. Then she delivered her coup de grace. ‘I want reparation.’

‘Oh, Mrs Jenkins, won’t you come in and have a cup of tea,’ I appeased, opening the front door wider. ‘It’s so cold and I’ve just baked some scones. And I’ve a pot of home-made jam and a bit of newly churned butter.’

‘No, I’m afraid I can’t stay,’ Mrs Jenkins said, ferreting in her cardigan sleeve for her hanky and blowing her nose contemptuously. ‘The animals, I’ve an allergy you know.’ Her daughter, who was teasing Red with a stick, obviously had not inherited her mother’s susceptibility.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs Jenkins. Another time maybe,’ I offered, my heart pattering in anxiety.

‘Your daughter has a temper on her, Mrs Sterry. It’s not my affair, I know. And generally speaking I do not believe in interfering with the methods mothers use to discipline their children.’ Red yelped as Rhiannon poked him. Distracted for a moment, Mrs Jenkins told her daughter to get into the car, a blue Ford Popular parked by the barn. ‘You’ll get all muddy larking about with that dog, never mind the fleas.’ Rhiannon, shoulders slumped in disappointment at having her sport interrupted, slouched back to the car. Her mother watched her progress for a second then resumed, picking up where she left off. ‘You really ought to make her behave. It’s not right letting a child get away with such rages.’ I sighed and gave a weak smile. I felt defeated, and I hadn’t yet summoned Lowrie to hear her version of events. ‘I shall be buying a new pinafore for Rhiannon, and sending you the bill.’

‘That’s perfectly fine,’ I acquiesced without protest. ‘I’ll be glad to pay for any damage Lowrie’s caused. And I really am very, very sorry.’

‘Sorry! Sorry! I should think so too,’ Mrs Jenkins said, casting the offending garment on the tiled porch. ‘Though it’s not much good you saying you’re sorry. It’s Lowrie who should be apologising. And I’m not the only one who has complained about her recently. That girl needs a lesson in manners. So she does.’ Rhiannon honked the car
horn
. I smiled amenably and opened my hands, still floury from baking, in a gesture of reconcilement. ‘If you don’t take a firm line with her now you’ll be storing up problems for the future. You take heed.’ She re-knotted her headscarf and stared down at the crumpled navy pinafore. ‘My bill will be in the post and I expect prompt settlement if you don’t mind. Good day to you, Mrs Sterry.’ I offered her a hand, which she glanced at in disdain, before stalking off to climb into her car and drive away in high dudgeon.