The Adoption (30 page)

I stood for a lengthy moment, mentally girding up my loins for yet another wearying confrontation with Lowrie. Red padded over and snuffled the ruined garment with interest. I wiped my hands on my apron, and then with resignation I stooped and picked it up. I closed the door on Red. Stepping into the vestibule, I spied Lowrie crouching at the top of the stairs peering down at me through the banisters. ‘Lowrie, were you listening to that exchange?’ I asked. She shrugged, peering at me with her inscrutable brown eyes. ‘You heard what Mrs Jenkins said?’ Another shrug, this time more exaggerated. Her hair, dark, thick and unruly, fell across her face curtaining her sullen expression. She made no move to tuck it behind her ears. I crossed to the bottom of the stairs and held up the pinafore, sliding my hand into the slash as if I was pushing it into a wound. ‘Did you do this?’ I enquired trying to keep the accusatory note from my inflexion. A sulky silence. ‘Lowrie, did you do this?’ I repeated, losing the struggle to keep my tone level.

‘So what if I did?’ came the pouty reply. ‘She deserved it. She stepped in front of me. Silly bitch!’

‘Lowrie! You hush that tongue of yours or I’ll tell your father.’

‘Don’t care if you do.’

‘Did it mean that much?’ I said, my spirit for this confrontation already flagging.

She tossed her head, released the banisters and pivoted on the step
she
was perched on so that she faced me. ‘I told her to join the back of queue but she ignored me. Well, I wasn’t having that and so I pushed her. I didn’t plan to rip her stupid dress. It was an accident.’ The rounds of her cheeks had darkened to a strawberry blush, and her expression was openly hostile.

‘It was wrong. It was wrong to push her. Next time you see Rhiannon I want you to say sorry.’

She looked away from me with undisguised scorn. She was wearing a brown corduroy skirt that she pulled over her knees, humping them against the fabric. ‘I shan’t,’ was all she said.

‘I’m going to have to pay for a new pinafore to replace the one you ruined,’ I told her. A sudden wave of exhaustion made me want to abandon this futile attempt at instilling some remorse into my daughter. Clearly she felt no regret for what she had done, no guilt. She would undoubtedly do it again if Rhiannon, or anyone else, antagonised her. ‘School uniform is awfully pricey,’ I disclosed, tears filling my eyes. Lowrie climbed to her feet and deliberately snubbed me, showing me her back. ‘I haven’t finished, damn you!’ I hollered, striking a pathetic chord though I say so myself.

‘I’ve got homework,’ came her unlikely excuse, mumbled over her shoulder through her mass of hair.

‘You can blinking well use your pocket money to pay half of it.’ Her pained sigh was audible. ‘And I don’t care how many months it takes,’ I added with a touch more conviction. But my daughter was already stomping off in the direction of her bedroom. A moment later and her door slammed. I trailed disconsolately into the scullery room, sank into a chair and, elbows propped on the table, rested my throbbing forehead in the palms of my hands. My ears were singing, the precursor to a full blown earache. To think once I had fretted that Lowrie, a self-contained infant, would not venture out of her shell. It seemed she had been biding her time, storing up her resentments.

Her father could see no fault in his daughter. And indeed in his company you might be forgiven for assuming that here was a loving devoted child, who would, as she matured into a woman, prioritise her filial duties. But it was me who was burned by Lowrie’s fireworks, me who was called to school because our daughter had bitten another child, and, the teacher told me, shaken, had actually drawn blood. It was me who picked up the pieces of the Wedgwood vase, a rare treasure my mother had given me on my wedding day. Something blue, see. My daughter had thrown it in a temper. I had concealed the breakage from Leslie, hiding the pieces under old newspapers in the rubbish bin. And it was me who played the part of a martyr, clearing up the mess she left her room in after one of her turns. I was called when she had an argument in an art class and hurled a pot of black paint over a friend’s painting. I collected her from parties only to be told she was having a tantrum because she hadn’t won a prize.

Most distressing of all, her teacher, Miss Duggan, had asked to see me on three occasions in the spring and summer terms. She wanted to discuss Lowrie bullying a new girl who had recently joined the class. She reported to me that my daughter’s loutish displays had progressed through name-calling, to pinching, graduating to tripping the child up and sending her flying down a flight of stairs. ‘Lowrie was lucky she didn’t seriously injure her,’ she told me when I arrived to pick the reprobate up from school, clearly shocked by the incident. For this abhorrent act she was justly punished. Miss Duggan made her learn by heart several passages from the Bible, as well as filling a notebook with the line, ‘I must be kinder to my classmates and help my friends.’

‘Is there something wrong at home?’ Mrs Crunn, the headmistress, a wiry astute woman, had put the question solicitously, even tactfully. But I had seen the sharpness in her green eyes. ‘Something that might be causing Lowrie distress?’ I blinked rapidly and made an effort to look confused, as if I was hurriedly sifting through a file of benign
family
memories. We stood uncomfortably surveying my daughter wandering the playground kicking at stones. School was finished for the day, but I had been kept behind, an increasingly frequent occurrence, to discuss my Lowrie’s latest offence. This time there had been no living casualties. The victim was school property. She had stabbed the nib of her pen into her desk, carved her name into it, leaving the wooden surface permanently scarred. ‘Has something upset her? The death of a pet maybe?’ she jogged me, eyebrows raised quizzically.

‘No,’ I replied, eyes avoiding hers. But then, seeing the opportunity for a reprieve I added, ‘But living on a farm, I suppose she might have seen something that bothered her.’

‘It’s just the child seems so angry. There’s such a lot of pent-up emotion there. And although I’ve tried, she refuses to open up.’

‘I’ll talk to her,’ I promised.

‘See that you do that, Mrs Sterry,’ Mrs Crunn advised sternly. ‘It would be a shame if she started secondary school with such a bad attitude. And I have to tell you they may not be as patient or as tolerant as we have been.’ I nodded knowing she was speaking the plain truth. Then I went to claim my mutant child, feeling as bleak as the day was.

Now, sitting at the kitchen table, the torn pinafore slung over the back of my chair, I grew aware that my brow was no longer cradled in my hands. Unconsciously, I was drawing the features of her face on the polished veneer with an index finger, Lucilla’s face, the face of my gift baby, of my firstborn, the child I had given away. In London that couple have Lucilla. A girl with my blood in her veins, and the imprint of me and of her father, Thorston, tattooed on her very soul. I wondered … no, wondered was an inadequate description of my obsession.
Wondered
suggested unsteady vague concepts, flyaway thoughts light as spider’s silk. I did not wonder, I agonised over what my daughter looked like today, because today, 14 January, was her
thirteenth
birthday. Was her hair long or short? How did she like to wear it? Was she a fan of the new fads in music? What was her favourite colour, her favourite food? Did she have any hobbies? What was her best subject at school? How did she dress? Did she follow fashion? Had the signs of puberty started, the stirrings within that would change her from a girl into a woman? And what of the parents I had presented her to? They seemed so old to me back then. Thirteen more years would be ingrained on their lined cautious faces today.

Part of me despised her, my throwaway daughter. Lucilla was like a cloud over my vision, a cataract that greyed any life, leaching the light from my days. And, like the shadow of a bird of prey falling on a mouse as it scurries across a field, I wanted to flee it, to escape. But there was no escape. My own life, the hollowness of it, fenced me in. It was as if all the savour was gone from the meal of it, as if hour by hour I was supping on dry oats. I stiffened in my seat and placed my hands solemnly over Lucilla’s imagined face. I still had the snapshots of her as a baby, but they’d worn away to ghosts now. I hid them behind the mirror of my dressing table. The damp had got to them. It’s dreadful damp in Wales. You couldn’t even see her face any more.

Because of her I could not give myself to my echo baby. I could not love her unconditionally as I knew a mother should. Maternal love should be passionate, and willing to combat destiny if necessary for the sake of a child. But I felt none of it. I realised the gargantuan emotions I ought to feel for Lowrie, because habitually each daybreak I was swamped by the love I had for Lucilla. I had followed the rules but the discipline was wasted pitted against such a force of nature. I might carry her, but then I must not gaze into her eyes. Or I might gaze into her eyes, but then I must not touch her. It was almost a superstition with me in those sorry days that followed her birth. I would swim in those turquoise eyes that reflected my own, my arms straight as rulers at my side. Or I would hold her close, drinking in the
sweet
tender smell of her, willing myself to be blind. A communion of eyes and flesh would have knitted us together for life. It would have meant that a parting, a severing of that umbilical cord was inconceivable.

I was lying to Mrs Crunn when I said I couldn’t think of a reason for my daughter’s outbursts. Lowrie was not, as I had initially thought, a dullard. She was introspective, but that was not the same thing at all. She was also intelligent, certainly intelligent enough to comprehend that there was something amiss in her life. One of her parents loved her without reservation, but one of her parents didn’t. This fact had not gone unobserved. Her mother gave no sign of her indifference, no hint that she was not the daughter she had always wanted. Her mam did everything that good mothers do, was attentive to all her needs and wants, sometimes too attentive – as though she was trying to salve a pricking conscience. I would have said that no one else had noticed that I was a mother in deed, but not in thought. But then my own mother assembled herself in my mind’s eye.

Lowrie stayed with her grandparents increasingly, especially during the long summer holidays. My mam’s love for her granddaughter put my lukewarm fondness to shame. She doted as I could not. And Lowrie returned her love in equal measure, as children often do when they sense genuine affection. When I dropped her off on her last visit during the Christmas holidays, while she went off with her grandfather to feed the horses, I drank a cup of coffee with my mother. We talked for several minutes about the weather, as people do when they are skirting the sinking sands of veracity. We were sitting in the front room where I had sat all those years earlier with Dad and Leslie, squirming under my suitor’s attentions. I thought my mother looked drained these days, the strain showing in the fine fretwork of crows’ feet at the corner of her eyes, on the cracked paintwork of her skin. I asked her if she was having one of those headaches that had been troubling her of late.

‘No dear,’ she told me, fidgeting with her coffee cup, raising it to her lips and then lowering it again. She took a meditative breath, frowning before she spoke. ‘I worry about you, Bethan.’ I broke her searching gaze and my eyes roved the room. I might as well have been at Carwyn Farm the surroundings were so similar. A cottage suite, tapestry-covered cushions, wine-red curtains, a busy woven rug. My mother set down her cup and reached a hand towards my arm. At her touch I reared back. When I raised my head I saw she was hurt. ‘Are you happy?’

I gave a sharp yell of laughter and her injured look intensified. The mantel clock ticked the seconds of my life away. ‘Am I happy? What a strange question to ask me, Mam,’ I commented. Then added, a rind of bitterness in my tone, ‘After all these years.’

‘It’s not,’ she said, defensively, pulling her myrtle-green cardigan tighter about her. ‘You’re married to a good man,’ she went on, and now it was she who glanced away.

‘Yes, Mam, he’s a good man. I s’ppose I should feel obligated to him, indebted to my parents for arranging our marriage.’ I set my own cup of coffee down in its saucer on the table between us. The taste galled.

‘We tried to make it right. And you’ve a lovely daughter, don’t forget that,’ she reminded me. She rubbed her hands together and, as if feeling the chill, rose to put another coal on the fire.

‘Which one?’ I said under my breath and she spun round.

‘Bethan don’t,’ she hissed looking beyond me, as if expecting Lowrie to come running through the open door. She moved swiftly and closed it.

‘Why not?’ I said, challenging her.

She took a step nearer to me. ‘Because we made a pact to keep it secret. Think of the child.’

‘A pact? Is that what it was, Mam?’

Her frown blackened. ‘Does he bring it up? Does Leslie mention it?’

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t condemn you for it?’ I gave a small shake of the head. ‘Then why must you condemn yourself?’ she said brusquely, annoyance in her crisp diction.

‘I’m not maligning myself,’ I told her slowly, as if talking to a simpleton. ‘I’m remembering.’ I straightened my back, set my head at a proud angle, before twisting the knife with my next words, a suggestion of insolence in my cadence. ‘Lest we forget. Have you forgotten your son? Have you forgotten Brice?’ She winced and I felt glad.

‘Of course not. But that’s different. He was ours, born in wedlock, your brother, part … part of our lives. The … the …’ She trailed off unequal to tonguing the truth.

‘The baby,’ I volunteered. ‘Though of course she wouldn’t be a baby now, would she, Mam? She’d be nearly thirteen, a teenager.’

‘It was never meant to happen.’

‘But it did happen,’ I shot back, defiant.

‘It’s in the past. We saw to it that she was settled. She’ll be happy with her own family. Why can’t you be?’ She plucked the loose skin at her neck and I thought how fragile she was looking, how worn out. Sixty-two years old and it was as though she was gradually blurring, all definition to her features gone.