by Liz Harris
A movement to the left of her caught her eye. She turned towards the sash window just in time to glimpse a girl with long brown hair disappearing from sight.
She turned back to the door. At least she wouldn’t be on her own in the Home, she thought as she waited for the door to open. That was a relief: she hadn’t relished the idea of it being just her and the people in charge. There was a sound of steps approaching the door. A bolt of fear shot through her, and she gripped her suitcase more tightly as the door opened.
‘You must be Patricia Carstairs,’ a thin, angular woman said. ‘My name is Miss Waterson. Come in.’
Trembling, she stepped out of the sun into the dark house. Miss Waterson closed the front door behind her. ‘Follow me,’ she said, and led the way along the narrow hallway, her footsteps reverberating loudly on the black-and-white marble tiles.
Trying not to make too much noise with her feet, Patricia followed her to a room at the far end of the hall. As she passed the foot of the staircase, she heard the sound of a baby crying on one of the upper floors, and she paused and looked up at the landing at the top of the flight of stairs.
‘Try not to dawdle, there’s a good girl,’ Miss Waterson said, her hand on the door to her office. ‘I’ve got some papers for you to sign, and I’d like to get you sorted out before lunch.’
‘Well, that’s your part of the administration out of the way, Patricia. Your father has already dealt with the financial side of things,’ Miss Waterson said, making a neat pile of the documents that Patricia had signed. She gave her a brief smile. ‘You’re a fortunate girl to have such supportive parents. Not all of our girls are in the same happy position. But to move on because time is short, for the time that you’re with us, we would like you to look upon this as your home, not as a prison.’ She paused and smiled again.
‘Thank you,’ Patricia murmured, feeling that she was expected to say something.
‘But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any rules, I’m afraid. Just as an efficient house is run according to rules, so, too, is this Home.’ She held out a sheet of paper. ‘I would ask you to study our rules and to abide by them. I feel that I should warn you that any infringement of the rules will result in the withdrawal of your television and radio privileges, and possibly in restrictions on your right to use the telephone. I think you’ll agree that that is not unreasonable.’ She paused again.
‘No, Miss Waterson.’
‘If you have any money with you, I’d like you to leave it with me. If you wish to use the telephone or buy anything from the Home, you can ask me for the necessary sum.’
Patricia shifted awkwardly in her chair.
‘As far as visits are concerned, I expect your father will have told you that your parents are not allowed to visit you while you are here. We find that visits from the outside are too upsetting for the girls. You won’t see your family again until you leave the Home, which will be approximately six weeks after the birth of the child. Now, do you have any questions that you wish to ask?’
‘Nothing, thank you,’ Patricia said quietly.
‘Good. We’ll leave it at that then. Perhaps you’d leave your purse with me now.’ She paused and waited for Patricia to put her purse on the desk. ‘As I said before, we want you to feel at home during what will obviously be a difficult time for you. You mustn’t hesitate to come to me if you have any problems, and if there’s anything I can do to help, I will.’
‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you.’
‘One of the other girls, Valerie Merton, has been assigned to you, and she will give you a timetable. We follow the same routine every day, with the exception of Sunday, when you will be taken to church in the morning and you will not have to do any cleaning that day. However, if you break any rules, you might find yourself losing your free time on Sundays.’
She got up, walked past Patricia to the door and opened it. ‘Ah, good, you’re here, Valerie,’ Patricia heard her say. ‘Be sure to explain the system for cleaning the Home to Patricia, and show her the duty rota. Her name is already on it.’ She turned back to Patricia, and smiled again. ‘You may go to your dormitory now,’ she said. ‘Valerie will take you there.’
‘Hang on to those smiles – you won’t get any more,’ Valerie murmured under her breath as she led Patricia up the stairs to the room in which she was to sleep. ‘And I’m Val, not Valerie. The old cow knows that. Are you Pat or Patricia or something else?’
Patricia found that she couldn’t answer her for the lump in her throat.
There were about twenty girls in the house, Val told her. Their dormitory was full and like the two of them, all of the girls in it were in the last weeks of their pregnancy. The girls who’d already had their babies slept in a different dormitory and weren’t allowed to mix with the girls waiting to give birth.
‘Why not?’
‘So they can’t tell us what’s it like in the hospital and how awful the nursery is, I ’spect. Last week, when none of the Gestapo were around, I got talking to a girl who had her baby a couple of weeks ago – she lives on my street – and she said that it’s bloody cold in the nursery, not to mention dirty. Typical of this lousy dump.’
‘I thought Miss Waterson seemed all right. Can’t she do anything about it?’
‘Ha! You’ll see how all right she is soon enough,’ Val said. ‘Now, let’s go and eat.’
Later that night, as she lay on her back beneath a thin blanket, Patricia closed her eyes and waited to see Kalden’s face, just as she’d done every night since the night when he’d fallen to his death. But for the first time since she’d lost him, she couldn’t see him. Stiff with grief and fear, she lay on the hard bed and waited all night for Kalden to come to her. In vain.
The following morning, Val showed her the rota and pointed out that she and Patricia were down to clean the hall floor after breakfast.
‘It’s like we’ve got to be punished. We have to work every day like you wouldn’t believe,’ Val told her as they each took a metal bucket full of water and a scrubbing brush from the scullery and went out into the hall. ‘And we’re meant to be grateful to them ’cos they let us live in this shithole and take us to hospital to have the baby.’ She clumsily got down on her hands and knees at the entrance to the hall. ‘Right, I’ll show you what to do.’
‘Are your parents making you give up your baby?’ Patricia asked a few days later when she and Val were scrubbing the marble tiles of the hall floor for the second time that week.
‘In a way, but not really. I mean, I’m only seventeen, aren’t I? I don’t really want to be saddled with a kid at my age when I’ve never even looked after myself. I suppose I might have thought about keeping the baby if my mum and dad would have helped, but they don’t want to know, do they? I can bring it home, they said, but I’d have to look after it myself. And I can’t do that on my own. It’s not just the money – you can get a bit from the government, though it’s hardly a fortune – it’s all the things you’ve got to do for a baby.’
‘But whatever your parents said, they might feel differently when the baby was born.’
‘Too dodgy. Suppose they don’t? And I want to go out and have some fun, and get married. Who’s going to want to take on someone else’s kid? No, it’s probably just as well that I can’t keep it.’
‘What about your baby’s father?’
‘That was just a one-night stand, nothing serious. I got unlucky. But I can tell you one thing – I’m not going to do it no more with no one, not till I’ve got a ring on my finger. That’s for sure.’
Behind them, they heard the office door open and footsteps come towards them. They bent their heads over the floor and scrubbed harder.
‘Don’t forget the staircase, you girls, when you’ve done the floor. You’re down to polish it today.’ Miss Waterson stepped on to the patch of floor that they’d just washed.
They sat back on their heels, their scrubbing brush in their hands. ‘No, Miss Waterson,’ they s
aid in unison.
‘I want to see my face in the banisters when you’ve finished. If I can’t, I’ll ask you to do it again. Now I suggest that you stop talking and concentrate on what you’re meant to be doing. And I, too, need to concentrate, which I can’t do whilst you’re making such a noise.’ She turned and went back to her room.
‘The cow,’ Val muttered angrily. ‘She’s just in this for the money. Maureen and Brenda did the staircase yesterday. It doesn’t need doing again today, and she knows it. And what’s she want to see her face in the banisters for, anyway? She’s a right ugly bitch.’
When they’d finished the hall floor, they collected some rags and paraffin from the scullery and lumbered slowly to the top of the wooden staircase. They were panting hard by the time that they reached the upper landing, and having checked that no one was around, they sat down heavily on the top stair.
‘What about you?’ Val asked when they’d recovered their breath.
‘What do you mean, what about me?’
‘You know. The same as you asked me. Are your parents forcing you to have your baby adopted?’
‘They said that I could choose what to do, but if I wanted to keep the baby, I’d have to leave home and manage on my own without their help. That’s what I was going to do at first, so I went to the National Assistance people and they said that I’d get some money, even though it wouldn’t be a lot.’
‘You can say that again! They’re so stingy, you don’t even get three pounds.’
‘I liked the woman who interviewed me – she didn’t preach or look down her nose at me. She did say, though, that I should think seriously about what was best for my baby. A married couple wanting a baby would be able to offer it much more than I could, she said. They’d give him a good home and love him. But she said it nicely. When she could see that I’d no intention of giving my baby up, she told me about the benefits and suggested that I ask the Council about social housing. She did warn me, though, not to get too hopeful.’
‘And did you go to them?’
‘You bet. I applied the next day. And what do you know, I’m unmarried and I’m having a baby, so I’m obviously no better than a prostitute, and the Council certainly wasn’t going to help people like me.’
‘Smug hypocrites.’
‘So much for that, I thought, and I decided to see what I could rent on benefits. Honestly, Val, you’ve never seen anything like some of the bedsits I went to, and they weren’t that cheap, either. There are lots of people looking for places to rent, and landlords can charge what they want for dingy little rooms, with everyone in the house sharing the same dirty bathroom. Some of the houses were even full of rats. I couldn’t take my baby into places like that.’
‘Of course you couldn’t. And your parents really wouldn’t help you when it came down to it?’
‘They were only prepared to help if I gave my baby up for adoption.’
‘That’s really mean of them.’
‘I don’t know that it’s mean, as such. My father’s convinced that he’s making me do what’s best for me. The trouble is, he doesn’t really understand what I feel; how much I want my baby. That’s not being mean. It’s being wrong.’ Her voice caught.
‘We’d better stop talking about our babies or we’ll both start blubbing,’ Val said, with a forced laugh. ‘Come on, Pat, you rub the paraffin into the wood, and I’ll dry it off with the cloth. Then we’ll take turns rubbing the polish in. We’ll pretend we’re grinding old Waterson into the wood, and that’ll make us feel better.’
Slowly they worked their way down the staircase, sitting on the stairs whenever possible to take the weight from their knees. When they finally reached the bottom, Patricia stood back and surveyed the sheen that ran up the flight of stairs. Stretching herself, she leaned back and tried to rub the small of her back with her hand.
‘Thank God, that’s done,’ she said wearily. ‘Fancy them making us work as hard as this in our condition.’
‘What would your dad say if he knew? Would he tell you that you could go back home at once? Mine wouldn’t – he’d say that it’ll teach me a lesson.’
Patricia thought for a moment. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m certain that he wants me to be treated well, and he thinks that that’s happening. In fact, I think he’d be very angry if he found out that I wasn’t being properly looked after. On the other hand, though, he doesn’t want anyone to know that I’m pregnant, and if I went back home looking like this, they would. I don’t really know what he’d say, but as I’m not going to tell him, I’ll never find out.’
‘You might be wrong about what he’d say. Why don’t you tell him? It’s awful here and you might be able to escape.’
‘But I don’t want to leave. I want it to be awful. Maybe not quite as awful as it is, but I want to be punished – not punished for being pregnant, like they’re doing here – but punished for agreeing to give my baby away.’
‘But you didn’t have much choice, from what you said.’
‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I don’t know anything any more. Anyway, let’s go and have our tea now.’
That night, as Patricia lay in her bed, her eyes closed, she wondered if that would be the night that Kalden would creep into her mind again. But as with every night since she’d moved into the Home, he failed to come. She opened her eyes and turned her head towards the cupboard where she kept her handbag. Her photo of Kalden was in the bag.
She knew that she could get up, open the cupboard door, take the bag out and look upon his face again. But she hadn’t done it on any of the other nights and she wasn’t going to do it that night. She wasn’t going to do it while she was in the Home, nor when she was in the hospital. Maybe she wasn’t going to be able to look at his face ever again.
She lay back on her pillow and gazed up at the ceiling. This was no place for Kalden. She was glad that he wouldn’t come to her while she was there: she didn’t want him to see what she was about to do.
Eight weeks later Patricia walked down the stone steps that led from the Home, went through the gate and on to the pavement, her suitcase in her hand.
Her father stood next to her mother on the opposite side of the road, facing her, waiting for her. She crossed the road and walked up to them.
‘I called her Nima,’ she said. ‘My baby’s name is Nima. It means the sun.’
PART TWO
Chapter Twenty
London, August 1995
Patricia sat in the chair by the window in her small upstairs room. Her heart beating fast, she read the letter again.
Dear Patricia Carstairs,
My name is Amy Stevens. I have reason to believe that we are connected.
I am 32 years old. I was born in Highbury, London, in May 1963, and my birth name was Nima Carstairs.
If you believe as I do that there is a connection between us, and you feel that you would like further contact, you can get hold of me at 62 Ainger Crescent, Primrose Hill, N.W.1. My telephone number is 0171 9768.
Yours sincerely,
Amy Stevens
Nima. She said the name aloud when she finished the letter, and she turned and stared through the window. The sun was shining brightly. Her Nima. She might soon be meeting her. Meeting her child. Her stomach churning, she looked back at the letter and read Amy’s words for the third time. Her hands fell to her lap.
Had Nima – No, Amy; she must think of her as Amy now. Had Amy been adopted by people who loved her and treated her well? Had she been happy? What would she think of her?
Her heart missed a beat. Would Amy blame her for not keeping her? Would she be angry that she’d been given away and hate her for what she’d done? She’d have to make her understand that she’d had to do what she did. She couldn’t have done anything else.
Or could she?
She felt nauseous. As the years had passed, that question had come into her mind more and more frequently. She’d always managed to push it away – what had
happened, had happened, and that was that; she’d done the only thing she could do in the circumstances. But would her daughter agree? Would she understand that she’d had no choice?
She looked down at Amy’s address. It was a Primrose Hill address. Camden Town was no distance at all from Primrose Hill. If Amy had always lived there, she would probably have shopped in Camden Town on occasions – they could even have been in the same shop at the same time, and not known.
She glanced out of the window again. Over the years, people had kept on telling her to get out more, to make a life for herself, but she’d ignored them all – the past was where she’d wanted to be, and that was where she’d stayed. But if she’d listened to them she might have met Amy. If she hadn’t always kept her eyes on the pavement when she’d been out of the house, she might have seen her in the street, in a shop. She’d have known her at once – her baby had Kalden’s eyes.
Clutching the letter tightly, she got up and started to pace the small room. She’d reply to Amy. Of course, she would – Amy was her child and she wanted to meet her, was desperate to meet her. But what should she say? How much should she put in her first letter?
She went over to a shelf, picked up a pen and pad, went back to her chair, opened the pad and stared at the blank piece of paper. Then she started to write.
Dear Amy,
Thank you very much for your letter. I can’t deny that it came as a huge shock, but a very welcome shock. I’m really thrilled that you’ve contacted me.
There is nothing in the world I want more than I want to meet you and get to know you. I can’t tell you how much I hope that you feel the same.
With best wishes,
Patricia (Carstairs)
She read through what she’d written, then she carefully folded the letter, put it into an envelope, stamped and addressed the envelope and hurried down the stairs and out of the house. As she made her way along the street to the post box, her eyes scanned the face of every person she passed.
