by Eve Chase
She’d have gotten through to the authorities this morning if I hadn’t pulled the telephone cable out of the wall last night and said something about it coming down in the storm. And she might even be on her way to the village now, if I hadn’t been watching from the bedroom window and tipped off Mother.
“Wait,” I shout from the porch as Big Rita lowers the baby into the car. Mother runs past me—I can’t remember the last time she ran anywhere—and snatches the baby off the passenger seat.
“What’s wrong with you, Rita? The lane is blocked.”
“I . . . I thought I could drive around the tree somehow,” Big Rita mumbles. “Take her to the doctor’s.”
“What a ridiculous idea. She’s not ill, Rita! Do you want this little thing to be carted off to some children’s home? Is that it?” Mother is so full of fight again I feel like clapping. She’s back. I brought her back. I cured her sadness. By finding the baby.
“Have you any idea what those places are like?” Mother continues.
Big Rita says nothing. But something about the way she lowers her eyes makes me think she does. I can see her lungs inflating and deflating beneath her blouse. Her mouth goes tight and pouchy, like when you’re trying not to cry.
“Babies in metal cots! Rows of them! Dirty nappies. A matron who . . . who will farm her out to be fostered by any old brute. A council house! Anywhere.”
I’m pretty sure Big Rita grew up in a council house. She doesn’t say anything, though.
“Honestly.” Mother gazes down at Baby Forest, her eyes softening: she can’t stop looking at her—none of us can. She’s the most beautiful baby alive. “You’ve not had children of your own, Rita. You wouldn’t understand.”
Something crumples in Big Rita’s face then. She stares at her hands on the steering wheel. After a while she says, “It doesn’t feel right, Jeannie.”
“Right?” Mother steps back, her face sharpening. “You mean moral? Well, if you want to talk morals, Rita, we can start by discussing yours, can’t we?”
Big Rita’s knuckles whiten. The air feels crackly again.
“I know you’re writing notes on me for Walter.” Mother lowers her voice to a whisper. There’s a tremble in it. “Spying.”
My body floods with guilty heat: I remember sitting beside Mother’s bed as she slept, mentioning Big Rita’s notebook. But then Mother might have found out in another way. Marge could easily have poked through Rita’s things. She’s always scuttling around upstairs, in and out of bedrooms, clutching a stack of bed linen to her chest.
“Jeannie, if I hadn’t agreed, he’d have sacked me on the spot and hired someone else,” Big Rita stutters, her words all clumsy and rubbery, falling over each other. “I didn’t want to desert the children.”
Mother shakes her head. “I always underestimate my husband. He exploited your sweet nature, Rita. Your lack of confidence, you know that?” Something in her eyes goes flinty. “Have you written notes these last two days? Spoken to Walter?”
Big Rita nods. She looks on the verge of tears. Her neck is mottled red. “A couple of nights ago. He said the house would be ready soon, the painters are already in. And he was coming back the last week of August.”
I can see Mother calculating dates, like I am: we’ve got less than two weeks. She studies Big Rita. Her voice goes soft and a little bit scared. “Did you mention the baby?”
“I—I wasn’t sure what to say. Then the line cut.”
Mother exhales. “You did the right thing, Rita. I think it’s best the baby isn’t mentioned to Walter. Not yet. I have your word. Don’t I?”
Big Rita touches her forehead with her hand, like she’s got a headache.
“Come back into the house. Please?” Mother bends down inside the car, the baby over her shoulder. Her voice wheedles. “This baby needs you. She’s ravenous. Look at her. Sucking at my neck, like a little octopus. How about you fix her a bottle?”
Mother doesn’t do the bottles. I’m not sure she’d know how. She doesn’t change nappies, either, or wash them out in the bucket, like Big Rita’s been doing every morning before breakfast, the long pale tubes of her arms pummeling the nappy in the stinky brown water.
Finally, slowly, Big Rita gets out of the car and walks back to the house, even though the expression on her face doesn’t look so obedient. “You’re a good girl, Rita,” Mother says.
At lunch Mother eats three whole potatoes and half a lamb chop. Big Rita sits silently, burping the baby over one shoulder, and barely eats anything, which is not like her either. In the garden, the gate bangs on its hinges, like it does when someone’s just used it. Worrying that it might be Marge, I run into the forest and look left and right. I can’t see anyone. But I swear I can feel a presence—someone who hasn’t gone along the road, which is blocked, but threaded through the maze of woodland at the back.
After roly-poly pudding, oozing Marge’s seedy sweet jam, I forget about the gate, the funny watched feeling. Everything is our new normal again. Me and Teddy help Big Rita change the baby in the living room. Teddy holds his nose. A large speckled brown feather blows in through the open window and rocks on the floor. I pick it up, decide it’s an owl feather, and brush its thistle-top fluffiness against the baby’s bare foot. She curls her toes. Mother appears, all excited, holding frilly bootees and a silver rattle, which is tinkling, hooked around her little finger. Our baby’s things. The stuff Big Rita rescued from under my parents’ bed in London. “I think the time has come,” she says.
Big Rita gasps.
“Aren’t they perfect on her?” Mother bends down to tie on the little bootees and presses the rattle into the baby’s tight damp fist. She shakes it and the room fills with silvery sounds and dead-baby ghosts and my mother’s smile. She jiggles Baby Forest around the room, trailed by me and Teddy. I don’t see Big Rita go upstairs. But when she doesn’t come down for ages, I go and find her.
Big Rita is hunched over her suitcase and throwing clothes in really fast. She glances across at me—eyes pink—then carries on packing, pushing her murder-mystery novels into an interior pocket. But the terrarium is on the floor, next to another bag. I draw some comfort from this. As long as the terrarium is here, ready to be packed, so is Big Rita.
I suddenly remember an evening in London last year, a bedtime after a bad day—I’d got caught stealing at school, a twist of another girl’s pear drops—and how Rita had stroked my hair out of my eyes and told me that, as a kid, one night she’d gone to bed, all sad and angry, and the next morning she’d woken to find a harvest of buttercups growing in her terrarium. She could find no explanation for it other than that the spirit of her dead mother had sprinkled them inside while she slept. And I think how Big Rita’s the only person I know who says just the right thing, the thing you least expect. Panic charges through me again. “You can’t go.”
“I can’t stay, Hera.” She tucks in navy socks. “Somewhere there’s a young girl crying her heart out, regretting what she’s done. And someone is bound to know her. Someone is bound to tell.”
I remember the garden gate moving back and forth. The watched feeling.
“This is a small community. And if we keep the baby any longer there will be trouble—the big sort, Hera.”
Tears burn my eyes. She sounds so certain. I think about The Lawns and feel scared, balled-up inside.
“It’s not right that you and Teddy keep such a big secret from your father, either.”
“But that’s just what families are like.”
“Not all families, Hera,” she says softly, and shakes her head.
Something flares inside. “I bet you keep secrets!”
She flinches. I know I’ve got her. “What’s your secret, Big Rita?” I tease, trying to stop her packing.
Her lips twitch. “Leave me be, Hera.”
I charge at the suitcase, flipping down the
lid and landing on it with a crunch. The cardboard side caves. “I won’t let you go.”
She rolls her eyes. “For goodness sake, Hera. I shouldn’t have come here in the first place, okay? It was a mistake. Now scoot.”
“You can’t drive down the lane anyway.”
“I’ve got legs. I’ll walk.”
“What about Robbie?” I cast around desperately. “You like him, I know you do.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” she says, all lemony again.
“You’ve got nowhere to go. And—and you’ll miss us.”
She looks at me. And something passes over her eyes, like a shadow. “Terribly,” she says, almost a whisper.
I glance at her terrarium, and I’m struck by an almost overwhelming urge to jump on that too, so it shatters, and the thought scares me, the destructive force of it. Every time I feel loss—that thin, angry feeling, like a stringy bit of bacon fat—I want to smash something up.
“You’re going to grow up into the most fantastic young woman,” she says, like she can smell my fear of myself. She has a knack for that. “You’ll be just fine without me, Hera.”
My tears start to curl behind my ears. “But I keep thinking I’m going to do a bad thing, a really bad thing, Big Rita, and someone will get hurt. And you’re the only person who can stop it.” I’m not lying, not exactly. She stares at me, tussling with something. Outside the window, the woodpecker pecks tiny little holes in the silence.
23
Sylvie
After checking that Annie’s soundly asleep, I pad, barefoot, down the cottage’s narrow staircase. The dark grows fibrous and intimate. In the hush, I can hear the pulse of waves outside, the night’s high tide sucking back, millions of sand grains dancing in its wake. My breath quickens, feelings churning inside me too.
In the living room, I snap on the lamp, creating a monocle of light, and tentatively slide out the Summer 1971 folder from under an old magazine on the coffee table. My fingertips leave clammy prints on the age-washed cardboard. I hesitate and consider calling Caroline, but I know she’ll say, “Jeez, don’t open it. Mum hid it for a reason. Anyway, we made a vow, remember?” And I remind myself that I’ve waited all day for this private communion with my past, quite possibly an ugly one. I need to do it alone. Unwatched.
With shaky hands I carefully pull out the newspaper cuttings my mother has stashed away all these years. The paper feels dappled and old, well handled rather than forgotten. I read in the light, braced, waiting for the hurt to start.
“Police Appeal for Abandoned Baby’s Mother.” The appeal will fail. More than forty years later, she still hasn’t come forward or tried to get in touch. She could have. She hasn’t. The past is set and cannot be rescued. The lump in my throat is a small rock. “The baby was reportedly taken in by an unnamed local family . . .” reads the article, as lightly sprinkled with facts as my mother’s bedtime story. Yet it still somehow diminishes the rest of my life—as big and messy as anyone else’s—and recasts me to one tragic line of ink.
I wipe away a rush of bitter tears with my arm. Unable to linger in that place any longer, I curse beneath my breath, lick my finger, and turn to another cutting: “Body in the Woods.” I freeze. Even the sea outside seems to still, the waves silencing. I bring it closer, the paper crackling, my heart thumping, and read it again. I note that it’s dated three days earlier than the foundling story. Mum’s never mentioned this. And as I read, I slowly begin to grasp why.
“The death is being treated as suspicious.” Murder? The victim? I scan the copy for further details. But the report is from the immediate aftermath. “The police will not release further details at this time.” The body isn’t named. Only the house, Foxcote Manor, and its owners, the Harringtons, the name of the family who took me in.
I pace the living room’s shadowed edges, clutching the newspaper to my nose, as if I might be able to smell what happened next.
Was Mum trying to protect me? But from what? I peer out of the window at the sea, the rippling ladder of moonlight on the water, and try to arrange my thoughts into some sort of rational order. The dates suggest I was with the family at the time of the death, which might explain Mum’s evasive secrecy. After all, she sold me the fairy-tale version—“You were found one magical summer’s night”—and in the way a photograph can become a memory, replacing the event itself, that story became my story. The last thing Mum would have wanted was to bloody the sweet tale with murder, so it became something more akin to a creepy seventies movie, all The Shining dark pines and sulfurous skies. And what if the killing was in some way connected to my appearance in the Harringtons’ household? What if one of my parents was the unnamed victim? The idea riots in my head.
Turning away from the window, I sit back down on the sofa and hunch under the light. Pictures. Scissored out of larger articles, as if Mum wanted to keep their memories untainted by the scandal that surrounded them. Strange, given that she never spoke of the family at all. Nor has she ever shown me a photograph. Did I ever ask to see one? No, of course not. I’d pushed the Harringtons into the cupboards of my mind, where suppressed thoughts huddled and scrabbled like mice.
Jeannie Harrington. The wife? A thumbnail portrait. All raven hair and milky skin. She could be a vintage Elizabeth Arden face cream model, if it weren’t for the arch glint in her gaze—a hint, perhaps, of something less compliant. There’s an individual photo of a Mr. Walter Harrington too, a tall, gaunt fellow in a good suit, paparazzi-snapped, briefcase in hand, on the desperate car-to-courthouse dash, dazzled by the bank of photographers’ flashes. Not a flattering picture. Was it kept for a different, less sentimental reason?
The nicest photo, the most thumbed and dimpled, is the family standing in front of a stucco townhouse, under the drip of wisteria. Jeannie’s hugely, gloriously pregnant. Tugging on her dress is a little boy. To the left of him is an older girl, plain, plump, with an unsure smile, and an intense gaze that wires right into the photographer’s lens. Is this the girl who found me in the woods? A grim possibility starts niggling. Was she the victim? Or her cute little brother? If so, the crime might be so disturbing my mother felt she couldn’t share it.
Queasily, I flick through the remaining three cuttings. No more articles about me or the Harringtons. Just a few photographs of the Forest of Dean. I smooth the largest one with my palm, wanting, like a child, to step into the picture. It’s a grainy image of sculptural, witchy trees, the type that have contorted faces and might start talking. A woodland borrowed from antique ornate bookplates and movies featuring satyrs or hobbits. A complete and alternate world, caught within three square inches of ink, a portal into my past. And the place, I realize, with a small stifled sob, where I began.
* * *
The next morning I wake to the wheeling shriek of hooligan gulls in my old bedroom, breathing in the familiar laundered smell of my bed. Then it hits me. Body found in woods. It’s not the same childhood. Now there’s a different version.
I rub my eyes and sit up against the pillows. My body feels stiff and toxic after the stress of the last two days; it aches where the wave thundered into my hamstrings. Above my head an old, much-loved mobile turns. Wooden cutout trees, suspended by string, ready to tremble at the slightest breeze, turning my mind back to the photograph of the forest again.
I part the curtains. Outside, the sky is a fresh lawn-cotton blue, overwritten with aircraft trails. The sea is as flat as glass. It doesn’t look capable of last night’s mischief. How strange to emerge into a new day so radically different from the one before.
“Morning.” Annie appears, sleepy, yawning. Looking about twelve.
Yesterday’s declaration, I’m keeping the baby, hits me again, like a blow to the back of the head. Will she change her mind today? My determined, stubborn wonder of a daughter. Is she unconsciously trying to right past historic wrongs by keeping the baby, doing what my biological mother ev
idently didn’t? This possibility terrifies me.
A shrink would say, “Let’s talk about that.” Habit says, “Let’s not.” I simply want to press pause. Rewind. Plait Annie’s hair or comb for nits and pat her down after a bath, with a rub-a-dub-dub, and laugh as she puts her tiny feet into my high heels and teeters across the bedroom, her world still guarded and safe.
* * *
The clothes we hung over the radiator last night are still damp, so we ransack Mum’s wardrobe, tugging on her too-long jeans and swampy jumpers, which is both funny—Mum would think it a hoot—and unbearably sad. I run to the corner shop, jeans and cardigan sleeves flapping, imagining what my private clients, all those groomed SW3 ladies, would think if they saw me now. I buy croissants and milk. My phone beeps with texts from Steve, in full patriarch meltdown: FFS! Just TELL her she can’t have a baby!
At the kitchen table, where Mum should also be sitting but isn’t, Annie wolfs two croissants. I drink builder’s tea, too fried to eat, aware of the moment’s fragility. Annie’s beef may be that I never tell her the truth—and this chafes against my need to smother it—but it’s my turn to ask questions this morning. “So where did you find that folder?” I watch her over the rim of my mug. “Annie?” I say, when she stares down at the table silently.
“It was the night before she fell . . .” She looks up. Her eyes are complicated. “Granny didn’t hear me come in, you see. And she was sitting at her desk, bent over this bit of newspaper. When she saw me, she quickly slipped it back into the folder and shoved that into the desk drawer with this startled caught-out look. I thought, Hello, what’s that?” Her eyes water. She bites down on her lip. “I was going to ask. But I never got the chance.”
