by Janet Tanner
‘Aren’t you curious, though?’ he asked, trying another tack.
‘I guess so.’
‘Well there you are then! What do you have to lose? Go and see her – or write to her at the very least. Tell her you know who you are.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘For Chrissakes, Mac, I’m curious if you’re not! Go see her next time you’re ashore. I would!’
‘I’ll think about it,’ was all Mac said.
He did think about it and in the end he decided there might be something in what Steve said, though for quite different reasons from those advocated by the American.
As he had said, Mac expected nothing from Dinah and he certainly had no desire to benefit financially. If she offered him money now he thought he would take it as an insult, a sop to her conscience, a bribe to try and buy back what she had given away all those years ago. But he was curious, just the same, and the desire to know that in spite of all his fears to the contrary she had had a good reason for giving him up haunted him. To Mac, that was what mattered. Not her success, not anything she could offer him in the present or the future. Simply a reassurance about the past that had filled him with uncertainty ever since his parents had told him, at the age of sixteen, that he was adopted.
Would it have been different, he sometimes wondered, if he had always known? Perhaps not, but he could still remember with almost frightening clarity the shock and disbelief he had felt when they had finally sat him down one day and confessed.
His parents had known, of course, that it was the wrong way to go about it. The social workers had all counselled that the precious baby they had wanted and prayed for for so long should be raised in the knowledge that he had been chosen, not born to them. But somehow they had been unable to bring themselves to do it. Better for him that he should not know that in this respect he was different from the other children he played with, they had told themselves. Better for him to feel utterly, completely secure. And they had scarcely admitted, even to themselves, that the reason they kept silent was more for their own sakes than for his. Soon after they had adopted Mac they had moved to a new town where no one knew Mac was not their own son, and they guarded their secret jealously, feeling somehow that it would diminish them in some way to admit they had been unable to produce a child of their own.
Sometimes they worried about the fact that he did not know the truth, sometimes they put it so completely out of their minds that they almost believed the lie themselves. But as Mac grew older they realised the day was coming when he would need his birth certificate for some reason or other, see that it was out of the ordinary and ask for an explanation.
The day they chose to tell him was his sixteenth birthday. They had bought him a ghetto blaster, a personal computer and a pair of expensive trainers he had been wanting, presents that out did even their usual generosity, because they felt guilty about the bombshell they were about to deliver and hoped the gifts would be proof, if proof were needed, of how much they loved him. They let him open them, his father pulling heavily on the pipe that he did not usually smoke until the evening, his mother hovering, a jumping bean of nervous tension. And then they told him.
Mac listened to their stumbling words in stunned disbelief. At first he did not question, or in fact say anything beyond: ‘ Oh!’ He was too shocked. The first emotion he experienced was dismay, nothing more, filtering through that haze of swirling disjointed thoughts. Then, unexpectedly, he felt horribly embarrassed, and all he wanted was to escape to his room where he could be alone.
He picked up the ghetto blaster, still in its torn wrapping paper.
‘Are there batteries in this or do I need a plug?’
His mother and father exchanged glances. The need to escape became more urgent. Without waiting for an answer he grabbed the ghetto blaster and ran, taking the stairs two at a time, went to his room and slammed the door behind him. There were batteries in the ghetto blaster; he turned it full on and threw himself down on the bed.
Other emotions were beginning to pierce the fog of shocked disbelief now, but he was unable to identify them and he did not even try. He only knew his world had fallen apart – nothing was as it seemed. He opened his eyes, looking around the familiar room, and even that seemed subtly changed – the scarlet and black duvet and matching curtains, the ebony furniture he had been allowed to choose when he had become a teenager, the carpet, wall-to-wall gunmetal grey – his room, his den, his retreat, and yet somehow not his any longer because it belonged to the son of the couple downstairs and he was not that son.
He turned over, thrusting his fists against his temples to try and stop the chaotic thoughts but he could not. He did not belong here. He never had. He wasn’t Stephen MacIlroy at all. So who the hell was he?
After a while he got up and went to the mirror that stood on the chest, peering at his familiar reflection but seeing it through new eyes. It had never occurred to him before that he bore no resemblance to the people he called his parents; now it seemed a total stranger looked back at him. His face, framed by light-brown hair, the dark-brown eyes, the hint of a cleft in the firm chin – where had they come from? He knew that in the days and weeks to come he would continue to wonder, yet for the moment his curiosity was almost a thing apart. It was the destruction of his world that was important, not what might take its place.
How could they have kept it from him for so long? he wondered – and felt the first sparks of anger. They should have told him, he had a right to know. But they had not told him. They had allowed him to live a lie and now, with a few well-chosen sentences, they had swept the ground from under his feet.
I hate them! Mac thought, and even as he thought it knew he could not even take comfort in that most basic defence. They had always been good to him; he had wanted for nothing. It was wrong to hate them when they had taken him in and given him a home. But they should have told him. They should have told him!
Round and round went the waves of conflicting emotions, round and round the crazy spinning thoughts, the confusion and the sense of loss akin almost to bereavement, round and round the sense of being disenfranchised, of not belonging, here – or anywhere.
There was a tap at the door. Mac barely heard it above the cacophony of heavy metal issuing from the ghetto blaster. He swung round angrily as the door was cautiously opened and his mother looked in – no, not his mother, a stranger who called herself his mother.
‘Stephen …’ Her face was crumpled, anxious, she looked as if she might have been crying. ‘ Stephen, are you all right?’
No! he wanted to yell. I’m not all right and I never will be again!
He did not answer.
She came into the room closing the door behind her. ‘Stephen, please don’t take it like this! I know it has been a shock for you, but …’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘We didn’t want to upset you. And we’ve never thought of you in any way other than our own son.’
He let that go. He wanted to say he did not believe her, that he couldn’t believe anyone could possibly forget that they had not given birth to the child they were holding, but he did not. She looked so upset that in spite of his own hurt and anger he shrank from hurting her this much. He glanced back at his image in the mirror, at the compact frame in the rugby shirt and blue denim jeans.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Who am I?’
She shook her head, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold, though it was very warm, almost too warm, in the room.
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know. When you adopt a baby you are not allowed to know who the real parents are. It’s all highly confidential.’
He stared at her as if he did not believe her, and she went on falteringly: ‘All they tell you is a little bit of background. She was a student, your real mother, an art student, I think. She was very young and she didn’t have any family to support her. I supp
ose that’s why she gave you up – she couldn’t look after you all on her own. But I’m so very glad she did, Stephen. All these years I’ve been so very grateful to her for that …’
He ignored the remark. ‘And my father?’
‘I don’t know anything at all about him. There were no details – I expect she wanted to keep his identity secret.’ Her voice petered out. She did not want to express the fear that had always haunted her, that perhaps Stephen’s real mother had been promiscuous – art students often were, she understood – and had not even known who the father of her baby might be.
‘Stephen,’ she said, going to him and trying to put her arms around him, ‘you must understand none of this matters. We are your family – we have been since you were a few days old. To us, you are our son.’
He did not answer. He could not. Tears were choking him.
‘The fact that you weren’t born to us doesn’t make any difference …’
And then he found his voice, thick and harsh with all the unshed tears.
‘Oh yes it does!’ he said bitterly. ‘Not to you, maybe – you’ve always known. But I didn’t know. All these years and I didn’t know! To me it makes all the difference in the world!’
And of course it did.
For Mac it was the beginning of a year of rebellion, a year which began with questioning every single thing they wanted him to do and ended with him leaving school, against their wishes, to take up an engineering apprenticeship. He rebelled because he was hurt and angry, because he had lost his sense of identity and somehow needed to re-create himself. The old image would no longer do, he wasn’t who he had thought he was. Even his name was not his own. For the first time he wished his friends did not call him ‘Mac’ – ‘ Mac’ was short for MacIlroy and MacIlroy was their name, the name they had given him.
In his pain and confusion he hit out at them again and again.
After a while the wound began to heal. Days at a time went by when he did not think about it, then weeks, and his old easy-going nature began to reassert itself. Except that now there was a new hard edge to him that had not been there before. He papered over the rift with his parents and they thanked God that he had accepted the situation and there was no more need for lies and deceit. They honestly believed that the status quo had been resumed. And because he did love them and wanted to save them from hurt he never let them know that he still felt oddly incomplete or that he sometimes longed in the quiet hours of the night to know the identity of the mother who had given him life and the reason why she had given him away to strangers.
When the introspective mood took him he wove fantasies about her, picturing a waif-like girl, abandoned, frightened, pregnant and alone. And when he was old enough he applied for a copy of his original birth certificate.
Holding the paper containing the relevant details in his hands at last had been an emotional moment. And then he had looked at it and the blood had begun to sing in his ears.
Dinah Marshall. His mother was Dinah Marshall. Hers was a household name, as well known as any style innovator or captain of industry. Mac had no interest in fashion; well known as Dinah’s name was it might have meant nothing to him except that just a few days previously he had been reading about Vandina and the huge annual profit margin it had turned in in the financial pages of the newspaper he read each day from cover to cover. He stared in disbelief, checked the newspaper article, checked again. Dinah Marshall. Could there be two? But the address on the birth certificate put her in the right part of the world, and her age fitted. Besides, the Dinah Marshall had once been an art student. This was more than coincidence. This was for real!
After his initial disbelief had worn off, Mac found that his overwhelming reaction was anger and a renewal of his innate sense of rejection. Dinah Marshall was no penniless waif. Yet for some reason she had willingly given him up to strangers and gone on to live her life – very successfully – as if he had never existed. Any thoughts he might have had concerning getting in touch with her were forgotten now. That sort of woman he would not want to know. That sort of life he could do without.
Now, however, some years on, lying on his bunk on the oil rig, leafing idly through the pages of Mayfair and thinking again of what Steve Lomax had said, he wondered if perhaps his friend was right.
Perhaps he should make himself known to Dinah, if only to satisfy his own curiosity and try to heal a deep and festering wound. Perhaps next time he was ashore he would go to see her. Then he would put her out of his mind for ever.
The last thing Mac wanted to do was to simply turn up on Dinah’s doorstep and announce himself as her long-lost son. It would be too much of a shock for her, he reasoned, and might well be embarrassing for both of them. And so he sat down to write a letter, explaining who he was, how he had discovered Dinah was his real mother and asking if he could come to see her.
The reply arrived by helicopter with the rest of the mail a week later, but it was not quite what he had expected. In his wilder dreams he had hoped for some expression of joy from the woman who had given birth to him; more realistically he had prepared himself for total rejection. This was neither. Typed on company letterhead and signed not by Dinah but by her husband, Van Kendrick, the letter simply stated in formal terms that if Mr MacIlroy would contact the writer on the above telephone number he would be pleased to arrange a suitable time to meet.
Mac was surprised and puzzled, but at least it answered one of his nagging worries – that Dinah might have kept her illegitimate son a secret from even her closest family and in breaking cover he might cause her distress and upset an applecart or two. But that, it seemed, was a groundless fear. Van Kendrick clearly did know about him, and, more astonishingly, was the one who had written to ask for a meeting. That, Mac felt instinctively, did not bode well. If Dinah was keen to see him again then surely she would have been the one to write? There may be a good reason, of course – he remembered reading in a profile somewhere that whilst Dinah was the innovator Van was most definitely the organising power behind Vandina. It could be that the habit of the years was too strong to break. But he did not care for it all the same.
The next time he came ashore for his two weeks off Mac managed to hitch a lift from Aberdeen to Bristol with a commercial pilot who made the mail run five nights a week and with whom he had become friendly. It was dead of winter, bitterly cold, with snow in Aberdeen and thick heavy cloud further south. The pilot, concerned with making a safe flight in atrocious conditions, talked little and Mac was glad. Beneath his customary calm demeanour he was beginning to be apprehensive about the coming meeting and it was a relief not to have to carry on an inconsequential conversation.
The twin-engined aircraft put down at East Midlands Airport at 11 p. m. and was on its way again after a two-hour break. By 2 a.m. they were in Bristol. Mac stumbled out on to the apron where the plane had parked for unloading, muttering his thanks and wondering where he could spend what was left of the night.
‘Any ideas which hotel might give me a room at this hour?’ he asked.
‘Any of the big ones in town, I suppose. I never use them myself. How do you plan on getting there?’
‘Taxi.’
‘Forget it.’ His pilot friend fastened his flight bag and slung it over his shoulder. ‘You’d better come home with me. You’ll have to sleep on the couch, but it’ll be better than nothing. Now – let’s get going. I’m frozen stiff and bone tired.’
Life on an oil rig had taught Mac to be adaptable if nothing else. The sofa was barely long enough to stretch out on but when he had wrapped himself in a tartan blanket it felt like heaven. He was asleep almost before the other man’s footsteps had creaked quietly upstairs and he slept without interruption until morning when the pilot’s wife woke him with a cup of tea.
‘Sorry to disturb you, but I have to get on.’ Her tone was slightly cool – she was less than delighted to find a stranger in her front room, he guessed.
When he had drunk his tea he g
ot dressed and folded the tartan blanket neatly. The pilot’s wife, relenting a little, offered him breakfast but he refused – he did not want to impose on them any more than he already had and his friend the pilot was obviously sleeping in after his late-night flight. Mac had a quick wash and shave and left, catching a bus into town and booking into the first hotel he discovered. Then, fortified with a pot of tea and a plate of eggs and bacon, he telephoned Vandina and asked to speak to Van Kendrick.
‘This is Stephen MacIlroy,’ he said when the receptionist put him through. ‘I wrote to you about the possibility of meeting Dinah Marshall.’
‘Ah.’ The man’s voice was deep, less than welcoming. ‘So – you came.’
‘I’m in Bristol, yes,’ Mac said. ‘I flew down from Aberdeen last night.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Unicorn. Just off the centre.’
‘I know where it is. Do you have transport?’
‘No, but I can get it. I can hire a car, no doubt.’
‘Very well. We’ll meet this evening. Take down this address. It’s an apartment in Cotham. Do you think you’ll be able to find it?’
‘I expect so,’ Mac said, irritated. ‘What time?’
‘Seven thirty.’
‘I’ll be there.’ Mac replaced the receiver, angry with himself for allowing the man to rattle him. If they did not want to see him they had only to have said so and he would not have made the long journey from Aberdeen.
He spent the morning wandering around Bristol, bought himself lunch in a pub, and hired a car. Then he returned to his hotel and took a nap to catch up on some of last night’s lost sleep.
