by Patrick Gale
‘We should,’ Barnaby said, ‘shouldn’t we?’ at once invoking their ethical responsibility and passing the onus of decision to Dorothy. ‘At least, I think we should be thinking about it.’
He left the letter and photographs where she could see them and of course Dorothy looked them over and was instantly drawn in to the terse, terrible dramas they suggested. They were not all adorable – a couple were particularly plain – and several were quite old, old enough at six or seven to be traumatized and to arrive with a catalogue of challenges for their new parents. But she found herself returning to a one-year-old boy with a winning grin and black hair standing in a tuft. Parents Unknown, his notes said. Found in hold of boat. So either his mother had died during the dreadful voyage and been thrown overboard or had fallen overboard alive and drowned or, saddest of all, had tucked her baby into what she hoped was a safe place so as to brave her new life unencumbered. Dorothy thought of Carrie at that age, her clinginess, the difficulty of setting her down anywhere for long without having to unpick the tight grasp of her little fingers unless she was asleep. She could not begin to imagine simply putting down a baby and walking away.
‘I think this one,’ she told Barnaby at lunch. ‘Him. PL. He’s smiling. I like his face, don’t you?’
‘A boy?’
‘Yes. Then we’d have one of each.’
‘You’re sure, though?’
‘Well … Would you rather have another girl?’
‘No. I meant are you sure about adopting?’
‘I don’t really know,’ she told him. ‘Yes. I think so. And as you said, we should. There are so many children in need of homes. We should probably all be adopting.’
‘Yes. And you think a Vietnamese will cope growing up here?’
‘He won’t be Vietnamese. By the time he’s old enough to know what’s what, he’ll be as Cornish as Carrie!’
He came round the table to hold her and kiss the top of her head, so that she felt a flush of answering warmth within her and thought, Yes. The right decision. A good decision. We love each other and we will love him.
After consulting the unfamiliar international section at the front of the phone book to ascertain the time difference with Hong Kong, which turned out to be eight hours, they worked out that Sister Bernard might not yet have gone to bed. They telephoned. Barnaby did the talking, Dorothy at his side. It was a pet hate of his to have someone chipping in or calling out things when he was on the telephone, so she had to clutch the back of his chair and simply hope Sister Bernard was giving him the information he wasn’t requesting. When he said, ‘Good. Oh good. That’s excellent news. So what do we do next?’ she realized her blood was humming in her ears.
PL stood for his Vietnamese name, which his mother had written on a card tucked into his bedding. Phuc Lan. Neither of them was given to swearing and when Barnaby said the first name he pointedly pronounced it to rhyme with book. ‘He’d probably need an English name anyway,’ he said, ‘to help him fit in here. Phuc really would be impossible. He’d be teased to death.’
‘So can we have him?’
‘Well nobody has moved to adopt him yet. And the period has passed during which his relations can claim him. Bernard will set things in motion at her end. We’ll be sent a heap of paperwork to sign and so on. She was most insistent that we’re committed to nothing until we sign the papers and send them back, and she wanted us to feel free to show them to a solicitor first.’
‘But we want him, don’t we?’
‘Don’t we?’
‘Well I think so!’ And they laughed and kissed and a giddy excitement came over them.
She told Carrie that evening as she was seeing her to bed. Carrie was confused at first then seemed a little doubtful. ‘Are you pleased?’ she asked Dorothy.
‘Well yes. I’ve always wanted a brother for you.’ Dorothy showed her his picture and she examined it closely, frowning. ‘He looks happy,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Why did you choose him?’
Dorothy wondered. ‘He was smiling. He chose us really. And he’s still only a baby so it should be easier for us all to adjust than if he was older.’
‘Does he speak English?’
‘He won’t speak anything much yet. But he’ll learn English the same way you did.’
‘What’ll we call him?’
‘You have a think and let us know. He’ll be your brother as well as our son.’
Dorothy had worried about how to tell other people. The village was no problem. Now that Carrie knew, Carrie told her friends who told their mothers and soon diffident, slightly confused congratulations were being offered. Her own mother was harder.
‘What do you want to do that for?’ was her immediate, so most honest response. Once she heard that Barnaby, who could do no wrong these days, thought it was right, she changed tack and decided the baby was an object of pity. ‘Poor little thing,’ she said whenever she looked at his picture. (Dorothy had made everyone copies to assist in the bonding process even before the baby arrived.) ‘Poor little monkey.’ Like any farmer’s wife, she couldn’t help her dynastic fantasies and, just as a daughter was not the same, neither was an adopted, Vietnamese son. Dorothy thought it best not to tell her he was called Phuc.
Paperwork came from Hong Kong and London and, a few weeks later, a phone call from Sister Bernard, borrowing a tame banker’s phone line, told them that all the formalities were complete and they had a date for the baby’s arrival. Happily this was the week after Easter, so both Carrie and Barnaby would be on holiday.
They left her mother at home but took Carrie and travelled up on the sleeper to Paddington, which in itself was an adventure and a new experience for all three of them. Dorothy did not sleep. She had Carrie softly snoring in the bunk above her and found that every time the train braked, she rolled towards the void on her right and was wide awake again. Barnaby had opted to save them money by spending the night in a seat in an ordinary carriage, but then he had the enviable gift of being able to sleep anywhere, seemingly at will.
So she contented herself with simply lying there in the semi-darkness left by the blue glow of the compartment’s nightlight, preparing herself. She imagined him flying across the world to find her, imagined the small, hungry warmth of him, the scent of his hair, the feel of his little hands. She had brought along changes of clothes for him, nappies (because she had no idea how advanced his potty training would be), warm layers because, coming from Hong Kong and the fug of an airplane, his own clothes would almost certainly not be warm enough. She had knitted him a little hat – on the large side because she had no idea how large he would be. All these and a bottle and a selection of baby food were packed into Carrie’s old pushchair, which Dorothy had retained as evidence of hope. She could reach out and touch it where she lay, for it filled half the scant floor space beside her bunk. She thought of the photograph and imagined him in the pram looking back at her, smiling, yawning, asking for her.
She slept eventually, at some point in the night when the train came to a halt somewhere, and she had convoluted dreams, all anxiety, in which she was not allowed to take the baby from his Chinese escort’s arms at the airport because she could not name him. In the dream he knew who she was and was holding out his hands to her and screaming but the officials and his stern escort wouldn’t allow her to step forward and take him because no name she came up with matched what they had written down. Part of the reason the dream was so unsettling was that her dreaming self knew they were in the right, that she was unfit and unprepared to claim him.
Jolted awake as they started out of Bristol, or Reading, or whichever station’s siding they had been waiting in, she touched the pushchair for reassurance and thought about names. They had agreed that the right name would come to them the moment he was with them. She had seen the sense in this; she knew it was best not to form too many preconceptions but simply to ready her heart for him like a sort of nest. But now she found herself restlessly trying names on for size. Thinking i
t might be a good idea to retain his initials, she tried thinking of name combinations starting in PL. Philip. Patrick. Paul. Peter. Piers. Petroc. The Ps came easily enough but she found the finding of L names a worry as she could muster only Leo and Lionel and Leslie, none of which she liked. Relief came as she remembered Lawrence, but she rejected that almost at once for the nasty thought of Lawrence’s martyrdom, roasted on a grill. It was almost as bad as Blaise, ingeniously torn apart with metal combs. By the time the steward knocked on their door and passed in their breakfast trays, Dorothy was up and dressed and grateful for the brief diversion of a teapot and some biscuits and the need to rouse Carrie before they arrived into Paddington.
There were hours to kill before they had to be at Heathrow as the flight wasn’t due in until one thirty, and it seemed important to give Carrie attention too that day, so they took her for a walk around Kensington Gardens to see the Peter Pan statue and the Serpentine and the Albert Memorial, Albert Hall and Kensington Palace (from the outside, which cost nothing) as it was her first visit to London. Then they gave her a ride in the top of a double-decker bus back to South Kensington where there was the added thrill of a trip on the Underground out to Heathrow.
Dorothy was too embarrassed to admit that it was her first visit to London too and was careful not to betray her ignorance in the face of Barnaby’s blithe assumptions. She loved the park, marvelling at the towering size of the plane trees compared to the stunted blackthorn and hawthorn that passed for trees at home and the way they seemed able to grow equally huge when growing out of small holes in the pavements. But she found the noise and crowds on the streets oppressive and was glad when they were back in the relative quiet of a train but out of the frightening tunnels.
His escort was a tiny Chinese nurse, reassuringly nannyish in her white uniform and black cardigan and sensible shoes but not remotely stern. As instructed by Bernard, they had written out a large card with their surname on it, which Carrie was holding up as they waited at the barrier. The nurse shook hands all round, with a slight bow each time, introduced herself as Mary Thien and said, ‘And this is your little boy. Fast asleep because the journey has worn him out. And of course he’s eight hours ahead of you …’
He was tucked into a carrycot, furled in a blanket donated by Qantas. He looked immensely solemn in sleep – used as Dorothy was to his laughing photograph – and he was beautiful – why had she not expected that? – with a shock of jet black hair and tawny skin and a dimple in his chin. It was doubly astonishing that nobody wanted him and in the hour that followed the three of them were unusually quiet, awed by the shock of his physical perfection. Mary Thien noticed, it seemed, and joked, as they were completing the last pieces of paperwork in the immigration office, ‘Don’t worry. He won’t seem quite such a little Buddha in an hour or two. He’ll start crying soon enough.’
She would be flying back to Hong Kong in a few hours, she told them, but several of her cousins had come out from London to have an airport meal with her and help her pass the time. They weren’t to worry about her. ‘Off you go,’ she said, ‘with your little bundle of joy,’ and she had them pose with the carrycot propped up between them while she took a few photographs for Sister Bernard on the smallest camera Dorothy had ever seen. Then they all shook hands again, Carrie included, and she waved them on their way, a family of four suddenly.
The trip to the airport and back had taken longer than expected so they had to run across Paddington to catch their train home, Carrie shouting with laughter as Barnaby gave her a ride on her brother’s pushchair, and they clambered into their carriage only just in time. The journey back to Penzance took hours, of course, so inevitably he needed changing and feeding. Waking up, he clearly wondered where he was and who these strangers were and began to cry. Dorothy carried him to the lavatory where she changed his nappy. He calmed down after that, especially when she fed him, and he began to take them in, staring at each in turn. She held him for a while, then Barnaby walked him up and down the carriage. But it was when she settled him on Carrie’s lap that he finally began to smile and gurgle. Perhaps he had spent so much time with other children recently that it was with them he felt most secure.
He was so attractive, so pet-like, that of course people kept stopping to admire him and inevitably some asked what he was called. ‘Phuc Lan,’ Barnaby told them. But after the third time he turned to Dorothy and said, ‘We have to give him another name.’
Dorothy told him about her experiments with PL combinations and he liked the idea of Peter Lawrence but then Carrie suddenly said he should be James, at which the baby laughed.
‘That was the name of your great-uncle,’ Barnaby said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘What about my family?’ Dot said, smiling.
‘How about James Sampson?’ he suggested. ‘For my lovely uncle and your lovely parents?’
And so it was agreed and the next passer-by who stopped to admire him and asked his name was told James Sampson and didn’t look surprised or say oh, which seemed a kind of blessing on it. So James Sampson he was, and Barnaby christened him the following Sunday in a church still full of daffodils.
Father and son bonded swiftly. James was still so tiny, small for his age, far too small for the knitting she had done for him, that Barnaby could comfortably carry him in a sling and took him on walks and even short bicycle rides around the parish, stopping to introduce him at every opportunity. Dorothy worried his evident pride, which somehow seemed more proprietorial, more overtly fatherly, than any she remembered him showing in Carrie at the same age, would hurt Carrie’s feelings but Carrie’s only gripe was at being deprived of constant access to the pushchair and its contents. Having had no interest in dolls, a flesh-and-blood brother had her transfixed. She wanted to help change, wash and feed him, do it herself if possible, and was soon parading him, in an echo of her father, before troops of girlfriends from school and their curious hangers-on. She had never wanted a pet – satisfied all her petting urges with the farm animals and semi-domestic cats – and was practical and unsentimental on the subject of the ducks’ likely mortality rates and probable deliciousness when cooked. But she cooed over James, whom she rapidly took to calling Jim or Jim-me-lad, as over a kitten, and lit up at his gratifyingly warm responses to her.
Even her grandmother, a woman incapable of dissembling, took to him, demanding he regularly visited her end of the house to sit on her lap and be read to from the battered Patrick annuals whose pictures had always left Dorothy faintly nauseous but which seemed to combine with the older woman’s lilting accent and the cosy fug of her wood burner to bring a heavy-limbed comfort to her son.
Her son. It was a fact. He was hers now and always would be. Happy photographs had been sent to Hong Kong and published in the parish newsletter to prove it. One had even found its way into The Cornishman, showing Dorothy dandling James on her knee on the stone hedge in Morvah churchyard, with the odd caption My Vietnamese Joy. But her heart had yet to take him in. She had been under no illusion, she knew that love grew slowly and fitfully between an adoptive mother and her child, that there might always be a shortfall in affection where a mother had not benefited from the long preparation of pregnancy. In the weeks before his arrival she had even thought she might be able to breastfeed him for a week or two. She held him to her breasts to still him when he cried. If milk arrived suddenly, as it had in the past when she had held friends’ babies, it would have felt quite natural to unbutton her blouse and offer him a nipple. But none did and, in any case, he stared up at her with that face which, however sweet, offered her back no reflection either of herself or of one she loved, so that what should have felt tender seemed briefly unnatural. And to look at him was only to remember the son who had died. Harold. The true son.
Her guilt at this was savage. Her failure to love him, simply to love him without compunction, revealed a stony side to her nature she had not guessed at. A secretive one too; she kept all this to herself. She prayed more hungrily a
nd selfishly than she had ever done before, that love would yet surprise her, stealing into her heart the way James’s little hand often now stole into hers.
Meanwhile she understood that she must be fair and balance out the deficit in her love for him with a compensation of kindness and support. She would never raise her voice to him, as she often felt she must with Carrie, whom she loved unquestioningly and for whom she would die without a moment’s hesitation. She would never criticize him. If he at least appeared to be a little god to her, perhaps, just perhaps, the sharp instincts of childhood would not sniff out her treachery.
BARNABY AT 40
For some years after his affair, Barnaby descended into a self-made hell. This began straightforwardly and predictably enough with guilt at what he had done and shock that something blundered into with such giddy thoughtlessness should have such an irreversible effect. But then, far from crumbling with prayer and confession and the mercy of time, the first room of his hell turned out to open into a second and that into two more. It was a windowless, many-mirrored mansion.
He told Dot what had happened and she forgave him. Not immediately, of course. She was upset and angry. She tried blaming herself. But then she could see that it was over, could see that it probably made him a better priest, having discovered he was no less an animal than other men. She could see it had left him unhappy. She did not want to know who the woman was. ‘If I don’t put a face to her,’ she said, ‘it won’t feel so real.’
