So Many Ways to Begin

by Jon McGregor

  Julia said and of course we never saw the poor girl again. He moved to clear a space on the table for the tea tray, stacking the magazines to one side, taking his mother's cardigan and laying it on the bed, putting the radio back on the shelf. Julia said Mary, wasn't it? His mother looked up at her. She was all for insisting that it only be for a few days, Julia said, but of course we never saw her again, she disappeared off the face of the earth. Very sad for the poor girl, she said, and she turned and looked him clearly in the eye. She said so when your mother asked me what to do, I said well Dorothy my dear, you'll have to keep the little darling now, won't you? She said you were such a lovely baby, and anyway we couldn't very well give you back, could we?

  He sat back down, looking at Julia, looking at his mother, looking back at Julia, gripping the arms of his chair as if he was afraid he might fall to the floor. He heard his mother putting down the tray, the cups and saucers shaking against each other.

  Oh Julia, she said.

  The poor girl hadn't even left you with a name, so we chose David, after that actor, you know the one, what was his name? said Julia, and she looked up at his mother on this last question, smiling fondly, trying to remember, looking for help. His mother was holding both her hands up to her face, covering her mouth.

  Oh Julia, she said.

  They left soon afterwards, catching an earlier train than they'd planned, leaving Julia in her room, asking did I say something wrong? Dorothy did I say something wrong? They didn't even drink the teas, leaving them on the side table for a member of staff to clear away while they walked quickly and silently down the corridor. He heard his mother crying as they walked from the home to the tube station and he reached back to hand her a clean handkerchief from his pocket. She tried talking to him a few times, asking him to slow down as he paced through the tunnels at Whitechapel and Euston, and later, on the train, asking if they could talk, if she could explain, if he would at least say something. But he kept his face to the window and he didn't say a word, seeing nothing, hearing only the sound of Julia's voice, fragments of it repeating over and over again.

  Of course we never saw the poor girl again.

  You'll have to keep the little darling.

  She disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Did I say something wrong?

  When they got back to the house, they sat in the lounge and looked out into the garden. The rose bushes had been in full bloom for a few weeks and were in need of dead-heading. The lawn was starting to yellow. The spade had been left out, sunk into the earth. They drank cups of scalding tea, and finally looked at each other.

  David, his mother said.

  She looked smaller than he'd always thought of her as being, and suddenly much older. As she spoke, her words came out on the back of long sighs, as if she'd been holding her breath all those years and was finally able to let it go. David, she said, you mustn't be angry with us.

  Later, he realised that by us she'd meant only her and Julia. But at the time, it sounded as though she was saying us to include Susan, his grandparents, Laurence, his aunts and uncles, his teachers, the neighbours, anyone and everyone he had ever known or met. He had a sudden feeling of the walls of the house being pulled down, and of everyone he knew standing there behind the settling clouds of masonry dust, sniggering and smirking behind their hands.

  Please, David, let me explain, she said. The room, the whole house, felt very quiet. He looked at the photos of his father on the mantelpiece, the one taken during the war, the one taken shortly after they moved to their new home, the one taken a few years before he died. He looked at her. Later, he would go for weeks without speaking to her, without looking her in the eye or even acknowledging that they were living in the same house. But for the moment, before Julia's words had properly begun to settle into his ruptured thoughts, he wanted to talk.

  Is it true? he asked her first. She looked surprised that he was asking. If she'd been quicker, then, or on the journey home, or in Julia's room, she could have laughed the whole thing off, putting it down to the confusion and muddle of Julia's illness. Perhaps if she'd been ready, she could easily have convinced him that the whole idea was ridiculous, and perhaps he would have thought little more about it. But her immediate reactions, and her reactions in the days and weeks that followed, were a helpless confirmation of what Julia had so casually and forgetfully blurted out. Is it true? he asked her, and what he actually meant was: tell me yourself, say the words, I want to hear it from you.

  The story was simple enough, and, when it came down to it, not so unusual. There was a girl; she had a baby she wasn't supposed to have; she gave the care of the baby to someone else and she disappeared. It happens. It has always happened. In those days, his mother said, it was considered neither unusual or fit for discussion. It was kept a secret, or else it was ignored, unstated, denied. Children grew up to realise their sister or their aunt was actually their mother, or they grew up with the names of orphanage directors who had taken them in, or the name of the street where they'd been abandoned. The tale of Moses, floating downstream in his woven rush basket, would not once have seemed so strange, in the days when baskets and blankets placed on doorsteps could turn out to contain wrinkled babies still dazed from the shock of birth. David's story, or the fraction of it which Julia and his mother had known between them, and kept to themselves all those years, did at least have a little more detail than those tales of early morning finds.

  Her name was Mary, his mother said. She was young, fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, it was never quite clear. Julia was working in the ward when she gave birth. There was no father pacing expectantly in the waiting room, and she refused to give the name of one. There was no one in fact, no relatives, not even a friend, and afterwards, when she'd come round from the sedatives they'd given her, Julia had sat and talked with her for a few minutes, held her hand, comforted her.

  Sometimes he thought he could picture her there. Young, too young, her limbs a little too long and slim for her body, the way that teenage girls' limbs sometimes are, her face small and neat and framed by a damp slick of dark brown hair. Or perhaps broad-shouldered, with taut muscles running down her arms and a slightly squared jut to her jaw. Blonde hair, or auburn, pale brown, coal black. Long hair, tied up, curled, straight, cut sensibly short around her face. Brown eyes, flecked with grey. Green eyes. Blue eyes, a pale watery blue. Sitting quietly in the bed, her chest heaving, trying to catch her breath, the curtains drawn around her and the rest of the ward quiet for a moment. She was Irish, his mother said. She told Julia she was from Donegal, and had been in London for two years, working in a big house, saving money to take back to her family. She told Julia her family wouldn't have her back if they knew, that she couldn't go back but she couldn't stay in London, she had no work, there were too many people she knew, the shame was too much. Afterwards he was surprised by how easily his mother had spoken the words. Her voice quivered a little, but she spoke clearly, and laid out the few facts for him as though she had long been practising them in her head. The poor girl asked Julia what happened to babies whose mothers left them, his mother said, and Julia told her what there was - Barnardo's, St Catherine's, social services - and the girl, Mary, said she didn't want that for a child. Julia asked her what she was going to do. Mary said that if she could go home she could find someone who would take you, without her parents knowing, and then at least she would see you growing up. Julia asked who that would be, and Mary said she didn't know, she would find someone. She said she would find someone and come back for you, but Julia told her it might be difficult to place you in a home and take you out again. His mother faltered here, bringing a hand to her face and squeezing her cheeks, and from behind her hand he could hear her whispering sorry. She breathed in sharply, put her hand down, and continued. Julia always said she didn't know why she'd done it, she said. There were plenty of hard things happened in that hospital, especially then; we couldn't let it get to us. Julia always said the words came out be
fore she knew what she was doing, she said. He watched his mother going over the well-rehearsed words, the sunlight fading through the back garden and the photos of his father looking down on them both. Julia told the girl, Mary, she said to her, you can leave him with me, I'll look after him until you get back, and before she'd even finished speaking Mary had turned to her and said can I? Will you?

  These things, the way they happen. The way they begin. Sometimes he felt as though he could hear the words being spoken. Sometimes he felt as though he had been there, sitting up in his cot, studying the two women's faces, wondering which way the conversation would go. But he hadn't been there at all. He'd been off in some other ward, a numbered baby in a row of numbered babies, sleeping or stretching or wailing, waiting to be taken back to his mother. And these words became something like a treasured fragment of parchment script, studied over and over again, handled in a humidity-controlled room, learnt by heart. It didn't matter that they were second-hand, third-hand, blurred by time and mistranslated, rubbed smoother and cleaner by his own re-telling. These broken pieces were all he had; like keepsakes pulled from the ruins. Fragile traces, dug from the cold wet earth.

  A young woman, too young, fifteen or sixteen, crying it's no use, I can't do it; one of the nurses turning to her, brushing her hot damp hair away from her eyes and saying yes you can, come on my darling, you're nearly there. Slumping back on to the bed, giving up, and the nurses saying her name, saying, come on now, come on, Mary, raising their voices as if calling her back from another room. Covering her face with her hands and crying louder to block them out. Or not even thinking of giving up, even when the pain and the fear were enough to make her pass out breathe, they tell her, keep breathing, as if her body had become so alien that she couldn't remember how to work it properly - sitting up, and grinding her teeth, and doing what young women have always had to do, her body and her choices no longer her own. Calling out for her mother, or her eldest sister, or her father. Calling out a man's name, and two of the nurses catching each other's eye. Or perhaps even in the middle of it all managing to keep such a thing to herself, not out of loyalty but out of fear and an instinct for self-preservation. Slamming her hands down on to the mattress, clutching at the cold metal rails of the bed; soiling herself, more than once, a nurse reaching quickly beneath her to clear it away, her humiliation complete, the nurses looking at her that way, knowing the sort of girl she was, thinking only that she was paying the price and it was too late to go crying now, but not saying this, maybe not thinking it at all. Praying aloud, oh dear lord Jesus have mercy on me now, her voice quiet and song-like between screaming contractions. Or not daring to pray, thinking who was she to turn to God at a time like this?

  The nurses saying come on, just a little bit more, we're nearly there now, howling out a cry which seems to burst from somewhere in her spine, and the baby is born and it's over. Looking on in dazed confusion as the baby is lifted, cleaned, examined, and the cord cut. Someone telling her to push just a little bit more, and the afterbirth being scooped up and removed. A nurse wiping her down and giving her an injection. The baby being carried away, and her eyes following it out of sight before she falls into a long, dark, drugged sleep. Julia didn't tell him any of this. Julia didn't tell him anything. Soon after the day she first let the secret slip, forgetting for a moment that it was supposed to be a secret at all, she went into a sudden decline. She forgot his name. She forgot Dorothy's name. Eventually she seemed uncertain of who they were at all, although they always told her when they arrived, and she always smiled in pretend recognition, gamely entering into conversation with them for a moment or two before losing her thread and gazing vaguely out of the window. Her body began to age rapidly. She lost weight. Her skin scrunched up into an old woman's wrinkles, her hair thinning out until there were only a few loose wisps floating around her scalp like a halo. Her eyes began to sink back into their sockets, and her shoulders started to round and hunch forward until she looked twenty years older than she was. She rarely looked at them when they spoke, and if she did she showed few signs of understanding what they said. But even when it came to feel useless, he kept asking her about what she'd said.

  Auntie Julia, he'd say, can you remember Mary? Do you remember the young girl with the baby? What was her second name again? I can't remember. Where was she from? She'd look at him, her eyes empty of expression, the makeup she insisted on applying each morning beginning to look out of place, frowning or nodding or looking right past him. Whatever happened to that girl - Mary? he'd say, hoping to catch her in one of her lucid moments. But he never did. She'd only ever gaze back at him, or out of the window, or turn and look for her cigarettes.

  I'm awfully sorry my dear, she said once, tapping ash into a saucer, but sometimes you do seem to talk such absolute bloody sodding nonsense, really you do.

  He got desperate. He asked her over and over again. He took photographs in to try and prompt her, photographs of her and his mother during the war, of his mother and Susan, of her house. Her puzzlement seemed to turn into amusement, as if the whole thing was a game. Is it time to go home yet? she'd sometimes say, getting to her feet and looking around for her coat. No Julia, he'd have to tell her, it's not time to go home, not just yet.

  There was one thing, his mother admitted to him once. There was one thing Julia told me, a few years after, she said. She told me the girl had a bad time of it, told me they thought they were going to lose her, she said. And it was obvious, after so many years of silence, how difficult it was for her to have told him even this much. But it wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough. Nothing she could ever have told him would ever be as much as he wanted to know, and so he started to fill the vast gaps for himself, to read books about London and Ireland, to buy maps and brochures and magazines, to lie awake at night until he could make a story, any story, to fit.

  Perhaps it was raining when she got off the bus, but she was already feeling better, just standing by the side of the road and breathing in the wet air. Everything feeling familiar, at last. The loose chippings on the tarmac beneath her feet. The walled-in tree where the bus was turning around. The frosted glass window of the shop on the other side of the road. The boxes of vegetables on a trestle table outside the grocers. The noticeboard by the bus stop behind her.

  The bus turned its circle and drove back up the hill, and the place was quiet except for the water running along the gutter into the drain, a steady slurping gurgle, the same song of streams and ponds and falling water that she'd always known and grown up with. She looked at the wet grey veils of the sky, smiling for the first time in weeks, months, wiping the dampness from her face. I don't mind a bit of rain, she said, beneath her breath, and picked up her suitcase.

  It was nearly three miles from the bus stop to her family's house, but the rain-sodden walk seemed to take no time at all, and the suitcase which carried the last two years of her life was as light as a handful of feathers in the clutch of her fist. Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops, as though she was clambering into the postcard she used to keep propped up on the mantelpiece of her small room at the top of the big house. The rain didn't let up, and the damp seeped through her thin clothes, clinging to her skin, the whole place wrapping itself around her, but she couldn't stop smiling and she felt like yelling her hello again into the hills. She was soaked by the time she was halfway home, but she knew that when she opened the door there would be a smouldering fire, a kettle on the stove, a slab of cake in the larder. She knew that the neighbours would be sent for, her brothers called in from the fields, the bottle of whiskey brought down from the sideboard.

  Perhaps she remembered with a sudden cold shiver why she was there now, how different this walk might have been, how muc
h colder her reception would be then, and she knew that she'd done the right thing. She told herself again that she'd done the right thing.

  She passed the house at the top of the rise, and saw old John there in his open barn, still fiddling with that useless lump of a tractor that no one had ever seen run. His wife was coming out with a cup of tea for him, a ragged cardigan wrapped around her shoulders; she called out a little hello to the two of them as she walked past. They raised their hands and gave her a how're you doing there, and then they looked at her twice and their faces lit up in recognition. She smiled, but she kept on walking. They'd be along down the road soon enough, too wise to say they were the ones who saw her first, and she could say a proper hello then.

  And then she could see her house at the bottom of the hill, caught between the road and the strip of woodland which ran along by the stream. There was a curl of faint yellow smoke lifting into the mist, and somebody moving around down in the yard. There was a good tall stack of turf by the side of the house. One of the dogs was ambling around in the yard, getting under the feet of whoever that was down there, getting in the way of whatever it was they were doing.

  She'd done the right thing, she told herself. He'd be alright where he was, he'd be safe and well, it was the right thing to do; she said it to herself like a prayer.

  Halfway down the road, while she was still far off, the man in the yard, her father, happened to turn round and catch sight of her. He looked up, lifting a hand to his forehead, as if shielding his eyes from the absent sun. He took a few steps in her direction, stretching his head forward. She kept walking. She didn't wave. Or perhaps she stood still and she waited. Perhaps then there was a moment's doubt in her mind as to how she might be received, how fast news and gossip and broken secrets might travel. She gripped her suitcase tighter and the thought that she could always turn and flee entered her head, the knowledge that with the case in her hand she could carry on her exiled life; but it was a small thought, and she did her best to blink it loose, to let the rain wash it away. She kept walking. Her father dropped the tools he was holding, lifted his head to call someone from the house, and ran towards her, his steps clumsy and lumbering, the dog barking suddenly now, confused, running a tight circle around the yard and then outpacing her father towards her. She kept walking. Or she stopped and she waited. She tried to keep the smile from breaking out all over her face, or she didn't, and when her father had nearly reached her she saw the door of the house open and her mother appear, wiping her hands on her apron, looking first to the yard and then to the commotion on the road, lifting her hands to her mouth, stepping towards them, breaking into a scurrying run. And already, while her father was still rushing to meet her, breathing hard, his muddy boots clumping on the tarmac, she could feel the all-encircling bulk of his embrace, the tickle of his woollens on her face, the rub of his chin on the top of her head, the pad and scratch of the dog jumping up to claim his place in the moment, the rush of her father's breath in her ears, the rich mumble of his voice saying ah now, Mary, it's been a while has it not? And she knew that she'd done the right thing. She told herself again that she'd done the right thing.