‘Alice and your mother.’ He managed a rueful smile. ‘I couldn’t go against the pair of them, now could I?’ He took the poker to the fire again, spoiling it. ‘And in the end, it was the right way to do it. We brought him up, he was our boy.’
‘But you wanted us to know now, didn’t you?’ Marion prompted. ‘Was that because Alice and Mum are both … gone?’
‘Oh well, I’d no choice. With the will.’
‘The will?’
I knew there was something, Marion thought.
‘Alice has left the house to David.’
Eleanor frowned. ‘But how could she do that? It’s Mamie’s house too.’
‘No, it belonged to Alice. Mamie’s to be allowed to live in it the rest of her life, but then it passes to David.’
‘The house. The house in Duthie Crescent is David’s.’ Eleanor could not take this in. ‘And he got £6,000 as well – like Marion and me?’
Their father looked uneasy. ‘Quite a bit more than that. Legacies to Mamie and me, and you girls. The rest to David.’ He sighed. ‘Ach, wills cause nothing but ill-feeling. Mamie thinks you girls should have equal shares with David. She says she told Alice you were the ones came to visit, and did things for them, kept in touch, brought your bairns. Not David.’
‘Oh well,’ Marion said dryly, ‘he is her son.’
‘That’s the way Alice thought of it.’ Eleanor was nearest her father; he patted her knee. ‘And you two will get this place when I’m gone. Nae that I’ve much money to leave. But with house prices they way they are, even this far out of Aberdeen, you’ll have a tidy sum each.’
‘I don’t care about the money!’ Eleanor burst out. ‘It’s the secret – it’s not being told. I feel as if you and Mum were lying to us all our lives.’
‘Oh dear me, now see what a hornet’s nest this has stirred up. I saw how it would be.’ And her father rose, unable to sit still. ‘I tell you what, how about a dram? We could do with it.’
Marion would not have one, but he poured generous whiskies for Eleanor and himself. He downed half of his in the first swallow.
‘That’s more like it.’
‘Oh, Dad.’
‘I’m sorry, Eleanor. I’m sorry for the pair of you. But what could I do?’
‘Nothing, knowing Mum, knowing Alice,’ Marion admitted. ‘It’s all right, we’re just feeling a bit stunned. And we want to know now how it happened, all that.’
‘Oh, Mamie could tell you better than I could. At least how Alice came to have a bairn at that age, after being a single woman all her life. For she was never interested in men, that I could see. Though she was bonny enough as a young lass.’
‘Dad,’ Eleanor asked, ‘Does David know?’ A pause, while her father took another gulp of whisky.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not that we told him. We never intended to make him any different from the two of you. To this day, I couldn’t tell you exactly how he did come to know. But he does.’
‘Does he know he’s inherited her house, and Alice’s money?’ Marion asked.
‘No, he’s no idea of that. I’ve been phoning the number he gave me, but there’s never a soul there.’
‘Poor old David,’ Marion said, half laughing, ‘we should put out an SOS for him.’
‘An ad in the paper,’ Eleanor suggested. ‘If David Cairns contacts his family, he will hear something to his advantage.’
They both laughed, then stopped, looking guiltily at their father, but he seemed relieved, and smiled back. Some of the tension had gone.
‘Tell us, then,’ Eleanor prompted. Tell us what happened.’
So in the mild May evening, daylight fading behind the lilac trees, with the fire glowing, the room shadowy, their father talked, and the old story unfolded.
‘The first we knew of it,’ he began, ‘was when Mamie came to us.’
Mamie was still living in Northumberland then. Uncle Tom had died the previous year, but Mamie lived on in the police house, since it was not yet wanted for anyone else. She worked in a draper’s, and sold jumpers and cardigans she had knitted at home, through the shop. She had thought about coming back to Aberdeen, but she liked her village by the sea, and had good friends there.
‘She wouldn’t have come home at all, would she,’ Marion guessed, ‘if Alice hadn’t got pregnant?’
‘Who’s to say? Alice got in touch, and asked her to come up. “I need your help,” she said. Mamie was never one to turn away anyone that needed her. Pity, your mother and I used to say, she never had bairns herself.’
When Mamie arrived, she saw at once that Alice was pregnant.
‘She hadn’t been near us in over a month,’ John Cairns said. ‘Kept saying she was busy at work.’
So it was Mamie who had come to tell John and Faith. Their house in Aberdeen was on the other side of the city from Alice’s flat, two separate bus rides away. Mamie missed her second bus, and ended up walking the last two miles. She arrived to find Faith in the garden taking down her washing, with Marion on the swing, Eleanor toddling by her feet. It was a blustery October day, a good drying day, but a black cloud was rising from the horizon, so Faith wanted to get the clothes in and folded. She had not heard Mamie coming, and almost dropped the full basket she was holding when she turned. Mamie was not used to walking; even then, she was plump, and had arrived very out of breath. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Later, Mamie was to say, ‘I hardly needed to say a word. She was very quick, your mother. She saw there was trouble.’
In the kitchen, the women talked. Frequently, the children interrupted, and Faith had to get up to fetch Eleanor’s pot, or untie a knitted doll’s bonnet for Marion – childish, mundane things. Mamie began to think of Alice’s ‘problem’ as a baby, another life, someone who would call and cry and play like Marion and Eleanor.
‘Stay for your tea,’ Faith said. ‘We’ll get peace when the bairns are in bed.’
‘No, I don’t want to be out when Alice gets home from her work. She’s in a bad way.’
‘Upset?’ Faith could not imagine this. Nothing seemed to distress Alice; she was too cool, dry.
‘Well, yes. But not what you’d call – showing it.’ Mamie tried to find the words. ‘Buttoned-up. Angry.’
‘Angry?’
‘Aye, that’s it. She just canna get ower this happening. I says to her, it happens to the best of women, we all make mistakes. Nature has her way, whiles. But she would do anything to change the way things are. If you get my meaning.’
‘Oh no, Mamie. Surely not. But how … ?’ They knew only respectable women and doctors, though they had heard of other kinds. However, Mamie had put her foot down, a rare thing.
‘“I will help you all I can,” I says to her. “I’ll bring up the bairn myself. But I will not have anything to do with these backstreet craturs”.’
Perhaps in the end, Alice had not known how to set about getting rid of her baby. Or her nerve had failed. But she had gone on as if it were possible to keep the secret for ever. She would talk to no one about it.
‘But at work?’ Eleanor asked her father. ‘It was a scandal in those days. She was lucky they kept her on.’
‘Ach, they couldn’t in decency do anything else,’ John scoffed. ‘They had employed the fellow.’
‘Eric?’
‘Was that what he was called. I hadna minded. His surname was Foster, anyway.’ He snorted. ‘Fellow went off with more than Alice’s good name, at any rate. Took a deal of money he wasn’t entitled to as well. In the end, Peter Simpson decided to hush it up. For Alice’s sake, I whiles think. He was fond of Alice, in his way.’
‘Why didn’t he marry her, this Eric? Or was he really just some sort of criminal?’ Marion wanted to know.
It had fallen into place. The old man at the funeral, her father’s reference to the partner who had left. Eric was that partner; Eric was Alice’s lover.
‘That’s what your mother asked: could she not get married? But Mamie said the fellow had left the town already. She
was convinced he had a wife some other place. I couldn’t say. Then, as I said, it was discovered he’d taken money out of the firm. Peter blamed himself for that. I think he felt he should have kept a closer eye, noticed something.’
‘Was he prosecuted? Did you ever find him?’ Eleanor asked.
‘Peter and I did try to trace him,’ her father said. ‘At least to get some money for Alice, for the bairn. She put a stop to that. She said she wouldn’t take a penny from him anyway. Proud! She was a proud woman, by God.’
All the way through her pregnancy, Alice insisted that the baby was to be given up for adoption. Mamie tried to persuade her otherwise, offering to stay with Alice and look after the child.
‘He’ll want for nothing,’ she had said.
‘He’ll want for a father,’ Alice had retorted. ‘Brought up by two old women – no, no. Better adopted. Plenty couples want babies.’
Then, when the child was born, she changed her mind. Eleanor and Marion, trying to imagine how this had come about, found themselves daunted, unable to fill in the gaps in their father’s story. It was the gaps that mattered, Eleanor decided, but no one could tell them what Alice had been thinking. At any rate, she was no longer willing to give the child up to strangers, though it seemed she would not feed him herself. As soon as she was home from the Maternity Hospital, she gave him over to Mamie.
Then Mamie changed too. She was forty-one; she realised suddenly how demanding a baby would be. David cried. He cried most of the day and all night, it seemed to those two desperate women, Mamie pacing the floor, Alice heating Ovaltine for them both, to comfort them in the long night.
‘What do you want to do?’ Mamie had asked, and Alice replied, trying to talk above the baby’s piercing screams, ‘I don’t know. But it seems wrong to give him away. How would we know they’d bring him up right?’
‘Should we keep him ourselves?’ Mamie, jiggling the infant in her arms, so that he redoubled his efforts, screamed even louder, was now afraid of what would happen if Alice said yes.
Then everyone would know he had no father!’ Alice shouted. Then, for the first time, she broke down and began to cry. ‘No father, no brothers and sisters – what kind of life could we give him?’
Mamie never forgot that night. Alice, with black thumb-print shadows under her dark eyes, huddled on her bed. Mamie walking up and down, up and down. Finally, exhausted, she laid the baby in the pram they had bought, and suddenly, with no subsiding cries, no warning, he fell asleep. They sat together in a silence that was even more terrifying than the noise which had preceded it, and wept together.
‘In the end,’ John Cairns told his daughters, ‘your mother said we could take him. She was having no more children herself, for Eleanor had been a Caesarian section, and they told her then she shouldn’t have another. But she knew I’d have liked a boy.’ He saw the way Marion and Eleanor looked at each other.
‘However,’ he said, ‘by that time, I had my two wee girls. I’d stopped minding.’ Marion shook her head, smiling. ‘Aye, lass, I had,’ he insisted. ‘I’m proud of my girls.’ He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Well, your mother was only twenty-eight. Young. She said she would take him.’
‘And was that all right with Alice and Mamie?’ Marion asked.
‘At the time, they were mightily relieved, I suspect. You never heard an infant bawl the way David did, those first weeks.’ He shook his head, smiling. ‘And yet, you know, he was only a few weeks old when he came to us, and he hadn’t been here more than two or three days, when he settled. Your mother had him sleeping near through the night.’ He sighed. ‘So it was the best thing, eh?’
‘So, did you go on to adopt him?’ Eleanor wanted to know.
‘We never saw the need. Maybe we put it off, left it too late. We were afraid of others interfering. It was a family concern. Your mother said to me, “He’s better here, he’d be an only child otherwise.” She had been an only one herself, and her mother very possessive. Very ambitious. Her mother wasn’t best pleased when she married me, and gave up the dancing.’
Marion and Eleanor had heard this story before, and saw no need to go over it again.
‘So there was no formal adoption?’ Eleanor persisted.
‘No.’
‘But what about when he needed a birth certificate? I mean, why didn’t you just tell him the truth from the start?’
‘Neither Alice nor your mother would have it. They agreed on that. You can get a short certificate that just has the name and date and place. Nothing about parents on it. That one is fine for most things.’
‘So everyone agreed? Alice and Mum took the same view?’
‘Oh well. As long as David was a wee boy, it was fine. Or it seemed to be. Alice never interfered.’ Looking back, he thought this was both fair and true. But how little the words revealed. He would leave it to Mamie to tell the rest, he thought, finding it painful to go over the old ground. Women were better at this kind of thing.
After a year or so, he admitted, Faith had wanted to make the adoption legal, but Alice would not have it: she agreed that nothing would be said to David and she would not interfere, but she refused to give up her son altogether. Faith lay awake, worrying about it. In the end, this was what persuaded her when John wanted to buy Pitcairn rather than another house in town. They were too close, in Aberdeen; too many people knew them. Physically removed from the city, from Alice, David would be more their own. Even then, she went on worrying.
‘If she changes her mind and wants him back,’ she said, ‘could we do anything about it? Could we go to court, do you think?’
‘Go to court!’ He was horrified. This was his family; it would be impossible.
‘No,’ Faith agreed, ‘but I’d like to think we were safe.’
Yet David had caused her nothing but trouble, growing up, especially when he turned seventeen. That had been a bad time.
All through the childhood years, Alice had kept her word, and left it to Faith and John to bring up her son as they saw fit. Faith began to relax. As time went on, it became less and less likely that there would be any change. Alice wanted the best for him, she said. She would not tear him from their family now, and though she had not been happy about the move to Pitcairn, she eventually admitted to her brother that it was the best thing for David.
‘He can run wild,’ she said. ‘Boys have a lot of energy. He’s safer out here, in the country.’
She sent cheques regularly, insisting on this contribution, and just as regularly Faith paid them into a separate building society account for David. When he went to university, it would help to see him through, she said, and would not touch it for clothes or toys or food. Alice bought his bicycles, a new one every time he outgrew (or outwore) the last. Faith did not like this, but she did not resist.
‘Keep my name out of it,’ Alice said. ‘There’s no need to say where the money came from.’ Uneasily, with a sense almost of guilt, Faith gave in.
Keeping her distance, Alice had seemed content in her orderly single life. In the summer, she and Mamie went to Austria or Switzerland, once to the Italian lakes. They were active in the church; Mamie helped in an Oxfam shop; Alice chaired the Women’s Guild, and sang in a choir. Alice went on working for Simpson and Dalgarno, taking the bus to the city centre in the morning, walking home at five to get exercise. Mamie kept house and cooked. They both gardened at the weekends. They led useful, busy lives.
‘I still don’t understand how she could do it,’ Eleanor said. ‘Did she never want David to know she was his mother? I couldn’t bear that. It must have been awful.’
‘It’s a different world now, lass,’ her father said. ‘Alice hated the idea of anybody knowing she’d had a child out of wedlock. The funny thing was, even people who knew, people she’d worked with, or at the church, seemed almost to forget. It was as if she had wiped out the past. Wiped it out.’
Eleanor thought of the locket, with its hidden photographs. ‘I don’t believe that. She hadn
’t wiped it out for herself.’
‘You’re right,’ her father agreed. ‘Because when David was seventeen, she suddenly took it into her head she wanted to tell him the truth.’
‘No!’ Marion exclaimed. ‘Why, after all that time?’
‘She had a cancer scare – a lump in her breast.’ Marion and Eleanor looked at each other, saying nothing. ‘Oh, she was luckier than you, it was nothing, not malignant. She had a wee op, she was fine. But she’d had a fright.’
Perhaps, Eleanor wondered, Alice had feared that if she died, if the secret went on being kept, David would never know who his mother was, and she could not bear that. Marion wasn’t having this.
‘Oh come on, Dad, he was bound to find out.’
‘Oh aye,’ her father admitted. ‘Bound to. And did. Anyway, it was what you might call a bit of a tussle between your mother and Alice for a while.’
Faith had thought David was at a dangerous age; they were worried about him.
‘It’ll do nothing but harm just now,’ she insisted. ‘Wait at least till his exams are over.’
Alice had finally agreed to this.
‘You know that story,’ their father went on. ‘David and his exams.’
‘So did Alice agree never to say anything?’
‘Well, that was the summer he went off to London and disappeared. When he finally got in touch, Alice and your mother were so relieved he was safe – that was the end of it. They agreed to say nothing. In a funny way, all that business brought them together.’
Privately, Alice might have blamed his upbringing, Faith his father, the unknowable genes, but both women wanted only the best for their difficult son.
Marion yawned, shivering a little. ‘Oh dear, it’s too much, all of this.’
‘Time you went to bed.’ Eleanor was watchful, her father thought, always watchful of Marion these days.
‘You can speak to Mamie tomorrow,’ he said. ‘She’ll tell you more.’
After Marion was in bed, Eleanor came into her room for half an hour. She sat on the bed and they went on talking, but there could be no end to such a conversation. It would go on and on, for years to come.
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