The Adoption (7 page)

We are having the bitterest of winters. Tonight I can’t settle for fretting about Thorston, all alone in that tumbledown outbuilding with the icy gales whistling in through the cracks in the windows. He stuffs them full of old newspaper but it still seems to slice in. I slip out after supper, leave Mam dozing by the fireside. Dad has braved the conditions to visit a neighbouring farm, the Mortimers. Their son, back from the Far East, has been taken bad with some mystery fever. I
trudge
through the snow to bring Thorston a flask of hot tea and a couple of extra blankets. I knock on the door and when he opens it the wind fair blows me in. He battles to close it behind me, quite a feat, and stands staring at me, sort of bemused, like he’s just woken up.

‘Bethan? Is everything all right?’

‘Oh yes. I brought you a couple of blankets and a flask of tea,’ I say, breathless with cold. I stamp the snow off my boots, offering him the small comforts.

He is wearing his spectacles, wire-rimmed, and he looks so bookish and lonely. ‘That is most kind of you,’ he says, taking them from me. He sets the blankets down on the wooden bed he made for himself, and puts the flask on the small table in the centre of the room. I found him a spare mattress, and a box to keep his few things in, a couple of chairs and the table. There is an oil lamp placed there, casting eerie shapes on the wall. Outside the wind is having a fit of the heebie-jeebies, screeching and yowling. Heebie-jeebies! That’s an expression I learned from an American soldier when I was shopping in town. It means an extremity of nervous agitation coming over you. He told me so with a twinkle in his eye. We are walled in with heavy snow, mislaid in the amnesia of the whiteout.

I wring my hands to try to get the circulation going again. ‘It’s so … ssso … cold,’ I stutter. Thorston takes them in his and rubs his own heat back into them. And the friction of his skin on mine, the pressure of his fingers is like the electric shock I got trying to lever a plug out of its socket once. And then he stops, but carries on holding them. He looks like a golden boy, his thick jumper, the lumpy knit of it, his skin, his hair. I can smell the cigarettes he smokes, and wool, and the male scent of him. Even his blue eyes seem gold. Our breaths mist the air, and they mingle and gleam, a spin of golden motes.

‘Would you like to stay and share the tea?’ he asks politely.

‘I’d better get back,’ I say but do not move. I slip my hands from
his
. My eyes stray to the table. On it lies an open notebook, a pencil, a penknife, some wood shavings and a small carved wooden horse, the hind legs unfinished. ‘Can I have a look?’

He nods, hastily clearing a few folded clothes from off the two chairs. I sit down, my fingers exploring the smooth wood.

‘It’s not very good. My knife is blunt and I have not any talent,’ he excuses his craft, his tone self-depreciatory.

‘No, it’s so … so fine,’ I sigh, all the stiffness of my mind gone with the slide of the polished oak.

‘You judge this to be accept?’

‘
Accept
. Oh yes it is accept,’ I echo his faulty English as if it is the highest praise. His face lights up at the unlooked-for compliment. ‘It looks real, alive, just like Jessy.’

‘I enjoy to make things, to … to draw.’ He fiddles with an arm of his spectacles, adjusts it around his ear. ‘Mmm … if … if it had been different, I should like to have been an artist.’ He comes to stand beside me. I pick up the notebook. ‘I do not think those are accept. Not worth your attention.’

I catch my breath as I turn the gilded pages and see picture after picture of Bedwyr Farm, the animals, the sheep, the pigs, the chickens, the cows and Jessy the horse, from every angle. I study the trees and fields I know like my own body, the valley, the sky turning the land on its head, the changing seasons, and me … me … drawings of me. I pick up the book and inspect it more closely. Me at all my tasks observed in intricate detail. It is over three-quarters full. The last sketch is a portrait of my face, my strawberry-blonde hair loose for once and not bound up in a scarf. My eyes look wistful, distant, focused on something only I can see.

‘You are very gifted, Thorston. You have captured such a likeness.’ And the utterance is low with admiration and respect.

‘And you,’ he responds, his voice the rustle of corn cobs tousled by
a
breeze on a summer’s day, ‘you … you are most beautiful, Bethan.’

He takes the book from me, closes it and places it back on the table. He pulls me to my feet, undoes the buttons of my coat and slides his hands inside it until his arms encircle me. My heart is jumping and every inch of me seems grated raw. I lean into him, my body craving his, wrapping him round here … and here … and here too. And then I know what it is to have our lips come together, to feel his energy sprint like a hare beyond the plodding tortoise of me, to have it tunnel into my belly, then lower … and lower. He undresses me under the coat. Then he lifts me, still folded in it onto the bed, and covers me with the blankets while he sheds his own clothes. He is molten gold, the lamplight ladling gold over the hollows and ridges and plains and arches of him.

When he climbs in beside me, I try to remember who I am. You are Bethan Modron Haverd. You are the only surviving child of Seren and Ifan Haverd. Your country has been at war with Germany for almost six years. German soldiers killed your brother, Brice. You are lying naked in bed with a German soldier who might have shot your brother, who would certainly have murdered him if he’d had a chance.

‘I am Bethan Modron Haverd,’ I mutter. ‘I am Bethan Modron Haverd.’ But my identity lies under an avalanche, and the snow press beyond our little shack rubs out my name.

‘
Schatz
.
Ich liebe dich
, Bethan.’ His words scald my ear and make my reason deaf. Thorston kisses a fugue, light as clouds, into every cell of my body. I am floating into him. He is breathing into me. Who am I? I am snowmelt. I am the coming of spring. I am the conception of life. In some distant part of my senses this registers, as, with a momentary tear of pain, his seed sinks into the virgin earth of me.

The times we lie together in the coming months may be counted on my fingers. I know a dreadful reckoning is coming. I sense the chemistry of me changing. I stare at the shivering pools of amber light
flickering
on the walls, and I follow our shadows making love. I know this is my entire harvest of happiness, these hours, these minutes, these seconds, spent here with him. There is the rough of the blankets, abrasive on my bare skin, and me soaking up the scent of him like blotting paper, making him mine, and the song of the keening wind whistling away all caution. Soon I will have gambled all of myself, and the remainder of my days will be taken up with repaying the debt.

Chapter 6

Lucilla, 1995

‘The Homeless Child for the Childless Home’

The Church Adoption Society

(Founded in 1913 in Cambridge by Rev. W. F. Buttle, M.A.)

Telegrams

4A BLOOMSBURY SQUARE
,

BABICHANGE, LONDON

LONDON, W.C. 1

Telephone HOLBORN 3310

21st April, 1948

Dear Mr and Mrs Pritchard
,

We have heard of a little girl, although we do not have her full documents in our possession, and we are wondering if you would feel interested in her. If so, we could arrange for you to see her in the very near future and take her home if she appeals to you
.

The baby is Lucilla Haverd, born on 14th January, 1948. She weighed 7lbs 6oz at her birth and is now about 9lbs 7oz. Her medical report is satisfactory and Wassermann blood tests are negative
.

The baby’s mother is 20 years old, unmarried and lives at home helping on her father’s farm in Wales. The baby’s father is 26 years old and has been working on the farm for the last few years. He was a German prisoner of war. Both parents are said to be in good health. The baby has fair hair and blue eyes
.

We look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible, letting us know whether you are interested or not. We have to find Lucilla a home in the very near future, and it would be a great help to us if you could telephone your decision
.

Yours sincerely
,

Valeria Mulholland

Secretary

I HAVE READ
the letter in so many frames of mind, analysing every word, every comma, every full stop. What made me sob when I first saw it was not learning that my father was a German prisoner of war, a POW, but that they had concealed this from me all these years.

Henry was a tonic, telling me that deep down he had sensed a tantalising foreign allure in me that he found altogether irresistible. As if in testimony, he made love to me so tenderly and attentively that I began to wonder if he was telling the truth, that my interesting ancestry gave me added sex appeal. The fact of it, far from distressing me, made me timidly curious. Already my mind was preoccupied with this new German father; blond, blue-eyed, I hazarded. And I pictured him in a dark grey trench coat, leaning over the deck rail of a ship (I’m not sure why), his cap at a rakish angle, smiling out at the wide, wide ocean and the broad, broad sky. The problem was not with me. I rather liked the thought of distant relatives across the seas. It was the family, my family. They had known, my adopted parents, my grandparents, my aunt Enid and very probably my cousins too. If as children Frank and Rachel were kept in ignorance of this sooty sheep in their midst with her part
Teutonic
ancestry, they had certainly been informed later on. The war is all history to me, if not ancient then out of my realm. It was over by the time I arrived. I harbour no hatred, no prejudice. I have no one to grieve. But my mother’s parents were both killed in the great wars, and my aunt Enid’s husband grew ill and died as a result of battle fatigue and a weakened constitution. Even my grandmother had harboured hatred, a dark residue left over from the First World War.

‘So much of it makes sense to me now,’ I tell Henry, as we sit together at the dining table that overlooks the small garden, enjoying our coffees after a sandwich lunch. That’s one of the nice things about working and living on the estate. Henry comes home for lunch and we pool our morning’s events, his of the vagaries of gardening, mine of customers and tourists. ‘She often relayed to me in gory detail the fate of her own parents.’ Henry has heard this before, but repeating it now with my newly acquired knowledge gives it fresh meaning. ‘A mother who had died in a Zeppelin bombing raid in the First World War, and a father who had perished in a car accident during the blackout in the Second World War.’ I shake my head ruefully.

Henry blows on his coffee then sets down his cup. ‘Mmm … your mother, with her dislike and mistrust of anything foreign. Now it all falls into place.’

‘My mother who blamed the wars for depriving her of her parents,’ I contribute.

‘Your mother who believed the Nazis were in league with Lucifer,’ Henry continues my train of thought, the two of us only just starting to grasp the far-reaching effects of my paternal origin. ‘She lived through the Second World War, slept in air-raid shelters, listened to the British propaganda, probably sang the anti-German songs. There must have been more than a few people she was acquainted with who had lost their loved ones.’

I felt suddenly uncomfortable with my mother’s deep-seated
prejudice
. All around us were the colours of hope, the harlequin green of virgin grass pricking the wakening ground, a tub of pansies, their heads wavering in a tumult of lavender blues, thistle and plum purples, and creamy yellows. The sky was a jubilant shout of blue that made you want to kick off your shoes, throw yourself down on the earth, lock your hands behind your head and let the aerial show hypnotise you. But there was an adjustment to be made in my perception that currently handicapped me, preventing such freedom of expression. Another ghost from the past, my father, had arrived to perplex me. ‘She would have monitored me closely for any indication that the blackness was in me, my German blood. In her twisted way, she would have seen it as inherited evil.’

Henry drinks his coffee and we both contemplate the letter in my lap. ‘It’s the casual, offhand style of writing that bothers me,’ he says when he has finished. ‘It’s as if you were a commodity, a model baby to be viewed and judged as either appealing enough to take home, or a disappointment to window-shopping prospective parents. Actually we wanted one who was a bit more … a bit less … she isn’t really what we … we’d prefer it if she wasn’t so … you can’t help but notice …’ He sighs and strokes his beard sagely.

‘But I was a baby, a living breathing human being. Not a puppy who might have desirable traits bred into me, and who could be bludgeoned into obedience.’ I offer Henry another cup of coffee and he declines.

‘I must get back.’ His tone is apologetic, as if he would like stay the afternoon and tend to me and not his plants. He stoops to kiss my cheek, his whiskers tickling me. ‘You’re not to brood,’ he commands, remembering that I have the afternoon off. ‘Go and work on your painting.’

I nod and rise as if I mean to act on his advice. But as soon as he is gone I sink back down into my rattan sun chair. Some of the weave is
unravelling
on the arm, and I pick at a strip until it is also at a loose end. I paint. I am an amateur artist. I should like to have been professional, but like so many other things it wasn’t to be. But today had I the skill of Michelangelo all I could manage would be a coat of emulsion on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I ignore Henry’s appeal and give myself up to a storm of memories.

I was fourteen when I found out that
Mum
was not my mother, that
Dad
was not my father, that the genetic imprint in me came from neither of them. I returned home from school one day, and Mother said that she needed to speak to me.

Sit down, Lucilla. I have something to say, she announced. And I did. I sat down at the dining table. She stood opposite me and I stared up at her. I breathed in a rotten sulphurous smell. She had burned the eggs again. She frequently dished up peeled hard-boiled eggs with salad for tea, the whites discoloured to a disconcerting pebble grey or even a witchy green, or burned sausages, which were marginally tastier. Burned sausages with burned chips: a makeshift supper. Or burned toast that was like eating charcoal dust. She was more pyromaniac than cook. And then she told me – just like that, and I forgot about the stink-bomb smell.