The Adoption (34 page)

‘That dog has cost a fortune one way and another,’ her father groused, sitting beside her on the bus as they rumbled home. He was jotting his calculations down in a small notebook. ‘When some men don’t earn enough to feed and clothe their families, we spend more than you would on a child to keep our dog.’ Lucilla stroked Scamp as he lay in her lap, nursing his hurt paw. And as she did so a shadow moved across her sun, a premonition. She drew the warm body a little closer. The limp did become less pronounced as winter settled in, but it was not eradicated.

*

One Christmas, Mr Ireland paid them an unexpected visit. On recognising who had come calling, added to the normal concerns any student might have if a teacher of theirs appeared uninvited on their doorstep, was the fact that it coincided with an evening when her father had been to the shed. He did not go to the shed every evening, which made it all the more nerve-wracking. Still, it could not be helped. Mr Ireland, unaware that anything was amiss, sat in the front room and drank tea. Lucilla eavesdropped at the door. She heard him say, ‘Your daughter is gifted. She is an artist. I want her to sit a scholarship for the Royal Academy. I think she’ll get a place. And if she succeeds, her fees will be paid for.’

An interminable hiatus followed this. The clock struck seven before her father said, ‘I see.’ Then he said, ‘It’s int– inter– interesting that you think –’ To Lucilla, rapt and drinking in every word, it was apparent that the belt of her father’s diction had been loosened by his sojourn in the shed, though thankfully it had not quite become unbuckled.

‘It’s more than interesting,’ interrupted Mr Ireland and his gritty voice became a rumble. ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you? Lucilla has an ability that is out of the ordinary. Exceptional. We need to do all we can to nurture it.’

‘Would you like a macaroon, Mr Ireland? They’re home-made.’ This, the high condescending voice of her mother, playing at being genteel.

‘No, no thank you.’ Mr Ireland sounded nonplussed. ‘Look, Mr and Mrs Pritchard, may I speak plainly?’

‘By all … means,’ came her father’s slack riposte.

‘I have taught art for many years. In all of my career, I have not encountered another child with a talent like Lucilla’s. When I describe her as exceptional, I mean it.’

Her mother gave a blocked-up nasal laugh. But it was her father who was their elected spokesperson. ‘Once again, Mr Ireland, we are grateful to you for making the effort to come and see us, but … but –’ He appeared to lose his thread, and Lucilla was humiliated into a hot-cheeked blush.

Mr Ireland used her father’s meandering syntax as the opportunity of a second interruption. Lucilla imagined her toes digging into the chalky scrub of Beachy Head, the salted wet wind slapping her face until she was quivering, her blunt senses awoken. Let it be, let it be, let it be, came her speechless invocation. She pressed her forehead into the hallway wall, inhaling the frowsty taint of antiquated wallpaper. To her right, she glimpsed a photograph of the Royal Family. The tiny Royals clustered around the skirts of the Queen, Her Majesty’s face a mask of ordered maternal tenderness, the Duke looking masterfully on. An image of her own family barrelled in like an apocalyptic thundercloud, her father tottering out of the shed to juggle blurred numbers into the dead of the night, her mother’s knitting needles clicking, slab toffee scraping the enamel off both of their browned teeth. And she thought of her art, how it shouted out to be expressed.

She came back to the muted conversation that was deciding her future. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ireland, but it’s not really what … what we want for our daughter.’ Another plunge of the knife from Brutus.

‘But, Mr Pritchard, surely this is about what Lucilla wants. She’s growing up. She’s nearly an adult. Soon she will be able to make choices for herself.’

‘But not yet, Mr Ire– Ireland, not yet.’ A cautionary flintiness in her father’s tone, which made her flinch, arrives with a spray of spit beyond her sphere of vision. ‘As her parents we must make choices for her.’

‘Art for a hobby, maybe, but not a career, surely? You can’t possibly expect us to sanction Lucilla chasing some hare-brained scheme to become a painter,’ her mother twittered.

‘Be sensible, Mr Ireland. There’s no money in it, no security,’ her father continued and so did the spit. ‘We want Lucilla to have a stable life, one where she does not have … have anxieties over living expenses.’

‘That’s not necessarily true, you know.’ Mr Ireland debated his corner with a terrier’s tenacity. ‘She might have to struggle to begin with. But I believe Lucilla’s art is so unique that recognition would only be a matter of time.’

‘But how much time? It could be years of hardship. And in the interim who would have to support her? Mr Ireland, I’m sorry. Our … ans– answer is no.’ Her father was unyielding, a chord of childish perversity humming as the belt widened to hook a last tenuous notch.

‘Do please take a few days to discuss this.’ Mr Ireland’s pitch hit a trough of dismay. It made her want to weep. Scamp rounded the bottom of the stairs and limped to her side, nosing her leg in empathy.

‘We have considered it, Mr Ireland. And re– rejected it. We’re sorry, but we would be grateful if you did not raise false hopes in our daughter.’ Her father’s breathing was audible in the short interim that the stand-off now afforded the trio. Then he cleared his throat as if signalling the meeting was concluded.

‘Besides, Lucilla is bound to get married and have a family. And really, what more could any woman want than a home of her own and children?’ Her mother expounded her ethos for a rewarding life. ‘There’s nothing stopping her doing a bit of painting now and then if she likes it.’

‘She needs training! The artist has to hone their skill, develop it. If you don’t let Lucilla sit the scholarship you will be stunting her growth.’ Poor Mr Ireland was getting quite overwrought.

‘I think we have had a reasonable exchange of views and that we, my wife and I, Lucilla’s parents, have … have made our position clear. Now if you don’t mind, we have things to do.’

Things to do? Back to the shed her father would go, surmised Lucilla, with a cynicism well in advance of her years. They were getting to their feet. It was done. The dice had been rolled and she had not won. Lucilla dashed to the understairs cupboard and hid in it, leaving the door ajar an inch or two. She heard their footfalls on the hallway tiles, felt the drop in temperature as the front door was opened.

‘There is nothing I can say to make you reconsider?’ A pause in which she guessed her mother’s head was shaking resolutely, her father’s rolling from shoulder to shoulder. ‘Well then,’ her art teacher said, with finality, ‘well then, there is one last caution I must add. If you do this, if you stand between Lucilla and her art, she may react strongly.’

‘Please don’t tell us how to bring up our daughter. These are family matters, Mr Ireland, and you … you are interfere … interfering,’ her father declared, biting his lazy lolling tongue so savagely it would bleed until a second dose of antiseptic might be sought from the shed. But he was numb to the sting.

Behind the cupboard door, Lucilla faintly heard a valiant grumble. ‘But she may –’

‘Good evening, Mr Ireland,’ her father cut him off.

‘Good evening,’ her mother seconded with a raven’s caw. Mr Ireland, having spent his words, having intervened for the sake of art, Lucilla’s art, was now as mute as if he had merely been a signpost that a driver opted to disregard.

Lucilla woke the following morning to find blood in her bed, blood soaking the crotch of her pyjama bottoms. She realised what it was. Her periods had started. The girls at school spoke about them like a rite of passage. Her tummy felt swollen and there were dull cramping pains that came and went. She felt rather nauseous too. Overnight she had shucked off the cocoon of girlhood.

‘You’re late down.’ Her mother was curt as she mooched into the
dining
room. ‘I’ve made you porridge and it’s been getting cold. Sit down and I’ll fetch it.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ admitted Lucilla, sniffing scorched oats.

‘You need something hot on a cold –’

‘My periods have started,’ Lucilla bugled, packing books into her schoolbag.

‘Don’t talk such rubbish.’ Lucilla saw the blush rise to her mother’s gaunt cheeks and reaped some small reward. ‘How crude you are and what a liar.’

‘They have,’ she reinforced prosaically. ‘Go and look if you don’t believe me. My sheets have blood on them. My pyjamas as well.’ Wagging her head as if some demented weevil was crawling around and around in it, her mother escaped to the kitchen and slammed the door.

At school, Lucilla made do with wads of toilet paper. Returning home in the afternoon, she found a belt and a packet of bulky sanitary towels on her bed. It was Friday. Unusually her father was home early. As a treat her mother said that she had made roast lamb.

Lucilla filled the kitchen doorway, fidgeting her thighs together. The bulky sanitary garment wedged between her legs made her waddle like a duck. She had spent five minutes fiddling with the damn contraption in the toilet. The sensation of her blood soaking into it was foreign, weakening. And as it flowed out so her animosity flowed in. She breathed in the smell of burned flesh and the queasiness that had been with her all day hit her with knee-buckling ferocity. I shall puke, she thought, puke my guts up, chuck up the lunch of sandwiches that had sat below her midriff undigested all the afternoon.

‘Mint sauce,’ piped up her mother merrily, holding out the jar. ‘Pop it on the table will you.’

‘No,’ declined Lucilla. ‘I want to sit the scholarship. I want to go to the Royal Academy. I want to be an artist.’

Her mother flung wide the oven door and smoke billowed out, making them both cough. ‘Has that awful Mr Ireland been putting crazy ideas in your head?’ Hands wadded in oven gloves, she hefted out the piping-hot metal dish bearing the overdone roast. The fat sizzled and smouldered and spat. She set it down on the sink’s draining board with a bang, and fanned away the bluish-grey haze. ‘I know it’s rather … rather … rather chilly, but I think we’d better open a window,’ she hacked.

‘Why won’t you let me go?’ accosted Lucilla. Her mother bobbed her head, making Lucilla want to tear out a handful of her now page-boy styled hair. ‘If I win a scholarship you won’t have to pay any fees.’

With a patronising laugh her mother released the metal catch on the sash window. ‘If only it were as easy as that, Lucilla.’

‘But it is,’ she argued. She felt suddenly woozy, vertiginous. And again the pull of Beachy Head was on her, that ineluctable force sucking her into its vortex. ‘It is that simple. Just let me go!’ She found that her voice had run up a scale, that she was screeching in a shrill falsetto.

‘Don’t you raise your voice to me, Miss Mousey,’ her mother castigated, wearing an expression that suggested her daughter had changed overnight into a giant unwelcome rat. She swung her arms about as the cold air blasted in. Her glasses had fogged up, and the misty rings scanned for the insurgent in her midst. ‘Must have, won’t have. Gratitude, that’s what you ought to feel towards us, gratitude. All we’ve done for you, and you’re not even … not even …’ She wheezed to a stop.

‘Not even what? Not even what?’ Lucilla yelled. ‘That’s all you ever do, find fault.’

The mist was clearing. As her mother’s brown eyes came into focus, Lucilla recognised enmity in them. The kitchen had gone from a sauna to a freezer in a trice. Scamp yap-yapped and hobbled after his tail.
Lucilla
could have sworn she detected a lump on his leg the other day, slight, but nevertheless sufficiently swollen to feel.

‘Drain the sprouts, Lucilla.’ Despite ‘or else’ being missing from this injunction, she realised it was an ultimatum.

‘Oh stuff the bloody sprouts!’ she threw back, hammering on the door frame with a fist. ‘They stink, all waterlogged and stewed and smelly!’

‘Don’t you dare blaspheme. I don’t know what’s got into you these days.’ An instant later the lips in her mother’s puce face winched up into a slow knowing sneer.

‘I want to be an artist!’

Her mother tipped the saucepan of steaming sprouts over the sink, into the metal colander. ‘Tell your father dinner’s ready.’

She went reluctantly, escorted by crippled Scamp. She relayed the message. ‘Bit of a drama,’ her father commented mildly, tipping out his pipe into the ashtray. She shrugged and he glanced at his watch. ‘Mother’s three minutes late today,’ he observed, pinching his nostrils censoriously.

‘Dad, please, I want to sit the scholarship. It’s an honour to win a place at the Royal Academy. And I really think I could.’

‘Ears burning, eh? Prying on adult conversations? Tut-tut!’ Her father did not even look up. He ran a forefinger down a column and gave a nod. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ he said. She moved like an automaton to the dining room, where the acrid smells of burned meat mingled with the soggy steam from the overboiled vegetables. Her parents filed in, paused behind their chairs, pulled them out and took their seats. But she remained obstinately upright.

‘Sit down, Lucilla,’ her father commanded, taking up his cudgels, the carving knife and steel. He began sharpening the knife. Lucilla gritted her teeth as the blade’s edge ground rhythmically. Her father
looked
like a toy soldier beating on his drum. ‘Roast lamb, Mother. Looks very tasty.’

She eyed the blackened leg sceptically, while her mother preened and patted her damaged hair. ‘No it doesn’t,’ disputed Lucilla, with a suddenness that made both her parents start. ‘It’s burned. It’s always burned, whatever she cooks.’

‘Don’t be so insolent, girl.’ Her mother gnashed her teeth, a viper rearing up in her seat.

‘You’ll go to your room if you can’t behave in a civil manner,’ was the sentence of her father. Grist-grust went the knife and the steel. Grist-grust. Grist-grust. Grist-grust. Scamp began
wheeking
piteously, whether in pain, or in hunger, tormented by the smoky odours of cremated meat, who could tell. The ants that hatched in her toes that day at the cinema had infested her entire body, and she was alive with the itch of them.