The Partridge and the Pelican

by Rachel Crowther

  And then the dream she’d woken from slipped back into her mind; a dream she hadn’t had for years. That summer with Eve. The flatness of the fens, and the baby in the phone box. Olivia shut her eyes, feeling again the weight of suspense, the hope and dread of that August day. Dreams didn’t ever fade, she thought; the passage of time offered no protection from their power.

  She lay still for a few minutes, listening to the storm. It was only half past three, but Olivia knew she’d find it hard to get back to sleep now. Robert had stayed in London after a late meeting, so the bed felt cold, and her mind thrummed with questions, as insistent as the rain at the window. Was it the mention of Eve that had brought the phone box baby back? Or Georgie’s sad story: one child abandoned by its mother, and another a source of disgrace, taken away for its own good?

  Georgie’s plight had haunted her these last few days. Had she been allowed to hold her daughter, Olivia wondered, perhaps to keep her for a few days? She imagined Georgie, barely more than a girl herself, bewildered by the loss of her baby – and that other childless woman overjoyed to receive her, then devastated by her early death. A double tragedy, Olivia thought. Two mothers grieving for the same child.

  She rolled over and back again, trying to find a better position in the unaccustomed expanse of the bed, then she sat up. A cup of tea was what she needed. Perhaps something stronger, even, to settle her mind.

  The kitchen was full of noise: the rain ebbing and flowing, the rattle of the dustbin lid being teased up and down the passage beside the house. The moon was bright despite the storm, and Olivia didn’t put the lights on. Filling the kettle, reaching in the cupboard for tea bags, she wasn’t aware, at first, that there was anyone else in the room. And when she was, it was exactly that: an awareness. Not a sound, nor a glimpse, but the sense of someone else wondering how to make their presence known.

  Olivia turned towards the corner where they’d installed a little sofa and an armchair, a few years back. The place where everyone sat, now, when they came into the kitchen. A girl was curled in the corner of the sofa, neither watching Olivia nor avoiding her. It was curious, Olivia thought, her quality of detachment. Detachment and a kind of acceptance, like a baby lying where it has been put down, waiting for someone to do something with it. A shiver ran through her, not quite of fear.

  “Hello,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Except that she wasn’t sure whether she’d said it or not, especially when the girl didn’t move.

  “I’m making a cup of tea,” Olivia said, louder, to be sure. “Would you like one? Or a glass of whisky?”

  The girl uncurled slightly, raised her head to look at Olivia. Slowly, unhurried. “Whisky would be nice,” she said.

  Olivia put the tea bags back in the cupboard and reached instead for the bottle Robert had bought duty free on his way back from the States. Her head was still swirling with fragments of dream and memory, but it was reassuring to fall into a familiar role: the practised mother, unfazed by the unexpected. This girl was no threat, surely. She must be a friend of Tom’s. Perhaps more than a friend, if she was still here in the middle of the night.

  She carried two glasses to the far end of the room and sat down in the armchair opposite the girl. She felt a pleasurable sense of expectation now, and something else: a sort of evaporation from her mind, like the molecules coming off the surface of the whisky. A part of her floating free.

  “Laphroaig,” she said. “My husband’s a Scot.”

  “Thanks.” The girl glanced towards the window, and the moon lit her profile for a moment. Her features were small and delicate, her throat hidden by a thick rollneck jumper. “It’s horrible out,” she said. “I didn’t fancy walking home in this.”

  Olivia watched her lift the glass to her lips. She had the feeling that she could taste the whisky too, coursing down her throat like hot tar. She still hadn’t put the light on, and she wondered whether it would seem stranger to do so, now, than to leave the room in darkness. Looking around the kitchen, she noticed the way the shapes of things were distorted by the half-light: books, cups, papers, all made mysterious by the night.

  The girl shifted slightly on the sofa, unfolding her legs from beneath her. Taking care, Olivia noticed, not to disturb the cat, who was curled beside her, a perfect powder-puff ball.

  “Beautiful cat,” she said. “What’s his name?”

  “It depends who you ask.”

  “Oh.”

  “We could never agree on a name. He answers to anything, more or less.”

  “Sensible,” said the girl. She stroked the cat’s head, starting between his ears, smoothing out the ruff on the back of his neck.

  “You’re a friend of Tom’s?” Olivia said. She picked up her glass, and smelled the peat and the sea.

  “I’m Lucy.”

  “From school?”

  Lucy shook her head, made a little laughing noise. “No, I left a few years ago.”

  Olivia made an effort to smile. An older girlfriend wasn’t what Tom needed, she thought, when he should be gearing up for A levels.

  “So,” she said, “what do you do now? Are you working?”

  “I’m studying photography,” Lucy said.

  “Oh, yes? Documentary photography? Journalistic stuff?”

  “After a fashion. The purity of the image, you know.” Lucy made inverted commas in the air with her fingers.

  Olivia tried to imagine Lucy directing a photo-shoot, positioning a writer among her books or catching a politician’s expression the way she wanted it. Or in a war zone, picking her way among rubble and broken bodies. She didn’t look old enough for that. She looked tiny and fragile, her hair long but wispy, as though it had taken a long time to grow.

  “Well, you’ve got to make a living,” Olivia said.

  Lucy shrugged, and shook her head slightly, as if to indicate that money was tedious.

  Olivia wasn’t sure what to make of her, this girl; wasn’t sure how she would describe her. There was something unnerving about her, although she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Perhaps it was just the way the two of them had fallen into conversation as though they’d met somewhere ordinary, on a train or a bus. But she was enjoying Lucy’s company, nonetheless. It was a novelty, having someone to talk to in the middle of the night. For a moment she allowed herself the fanciful thought that Lucy had been sitting down here night after night, waiting for sleeplessness to drive Olivia from her bed.

  “I’ve got some prints with me, if you want to see.”

  Lucy reached into a rucksack on the floor beside her. The cat, perhaps disturbed by her movement, stood up and stretched, arching his back and swishing his tail, before leaping heavily to the floor and disappearing through the cat flap. Lucy held out a large envelope, and Olivia drew out a sheaf of photographs.

  A moment later, registering belatedly a frisson of anticipation, Olivia wondered what she’d expected to see. Some clue, perhaps? Scenes from an interior, faces, the essence of Lucy’s life? Instead she saw landscapes, black and white, beautiful. There were low sweeps of countryside bisected by hedges, stone walls with the sea beyond. Church spires, perfectly positioned.

  “These are good,” she said.

  “The purity of the image.” Lucy tipped her head in self-mockery.

  “But there are stories in the landscape, don’t you think?”

  Lucy laughed. “Whatever.”

  “Where are they?” Olivia asked. “A field trip?”

  “Norfolk. Where my grandparents live.” Lucy took another sip of whisky. “Near Diss, you know?”

  Olivia shook her head.

  “Beautiful,” Lucy said. “Empty. There are millions of people on this island, but there are still huge spaces with no one in them.”

  “Not many.”

  “Plenty,” Lucy said, “if you know where to look.”

  The whisky was starting to have an effect, loosening something inside Olivia’s head. This conversation could go
anywhere, she thought, like a party game that starts with trivia and leads deeper and deeper into the bizarre or the profound or the tragic. Truth or dare. Consequences.

  “I’m not often away from other people, I suppose,” she said. “Except that I am, these days. Alone and not alone.”

  “Being alone is a different thing. My grandfather would say if you belong in the landscape you’re never alone.”

  “What about in a city?” Olivia asked. “Aren’t they supposed to be the loneliest places of all?”

  “Maybe.” Lucy looked at her. “Are you lonely, then?”

  Olivia laughed, a strange throaty laugh that didn’t seem to belong to her.

  “No,” she said. “No, I’m not lonely.”

  But she felt it, just then. Sitting in her kitchen with a stranger, drinking whisky in the middle of the night: didn’t that amount to loneliness?

  Suddenly Lucy took the photographs from Olivia, slipped them back into the rucksack, and got to her feet.

  “I’d better be off,” she said.

  The rain had stopped, Olivia noticed.

  “We’ve got a spare bed,” she said. “I mean – “

  “No, that’s fine. I should be going.”

  “I could drive you.”

  Olivia knew as soon as she’d said it that the offer sounded ridiculous; that there was something undignified about not wanting the girl to go. Lucy was looking at her curiously: her expression made Olivia wonder whether she’d spoken her thoughts aloud. Then Lucy smiled, an attractive, crooked sort of smile.

  “It’s not far,” she said. “Thanks for the whisky.”

  Olivia followed her to the front door and watched her slip out into the night with the curious feeling that she was watching a ghost disappear. Where do you live, she wanted to ask? What were you really doing in my kitchen? Though it was none of her business, of course. She’d always kept open house for the children’s friends; it had always seemed a wise thing to do. Her unease wasn’t Lucy’s fault.

  Back in the kitchen, Olivia put the whisky bottle away and stood for a moment looking out into the dark garden. The clock stood at four thirty, but she wasn’t ready to go back to bed yet. Instead she drifted restlessly around the room, touching the surfaces, the cold steel of the draining board and the scrubbed pine of the long table, uncovered at last after years of plastic tablecloths, laid down in layers when the boys were little. When they had finally been removed, Olivia had been amazed by the pristine surface of the wood beneath, left intact among the hurly-burly of family life.

  After a while she moved back to the far end of the room and curled up in the corner of the sofa where Lucy had been sitting. As if answering her call, the cat barged back through the cat flap, his brief hunting foray at an end, and leapt onto her knee. He stretched, relaxed, settled his weight into her lap. You soft thing, Olivia crooned, stroking his damaged ear. Neither of us has much in the way of camouflage, eh?

  But his purring wasn’t enough to absorb Olivia’s thoughts. She’d hoped Lucy might banish the dream, but instead her departure had left its imprint more distinct in her mind, the memory of the phone box stark against the sparse light of the kitchen. That baby had cast a long shadow over her life. It had tainted her last years at university, propelled her too early into adulthood. Her own babies had been born sooner than they might have been, Olivia thought, because she’d picked that child up from the damp floor of the phone box and held it in her arms. Because of the way things had turned out that day. Wasn’t that why she’d married Robert as soon as they graduated from university; why she’d waited only one impatient year before getting pregnant, and then – greedy for more – pregnant again, and again, and again, until her sons satisfied, or at least submerged, the need she’d uncovered that summer in Aldeburgh?

  But even that hadn’t been enough. For years she’d immersed herself in the immediacy of breast-feeding, nappy-changing, pram-pushing; in constant servitude to the demands of motherhood. And now look what she was left with: four hulking boys with only the slimmest connection to her, unless she held tight to their resemblances and familiarity. Boys who circled her with their needs and demands before spinning off into their own orbits.

  And where am I in all this, Olivia wondered? Where am I in this perpetual motion I have created, left at the still point of the whirlpool with my bad dreams?

  The storm had roused itself to a climactic chorus of thunder, a final salvo of rain and sighing of wind, before fading gradually towards the glimmer of dawn. As silence fell again, Olivia levered herself to her feet. She emptied the dregs from the whisky glasses and washed and dried them carefully, as if she didn’t want the evidence to be found.

  Chapter 15

  “St Catherine’s asylum,” the social worker said. “A Victorian monstrosity. Somewhere east of London, out towards Essex.”

  Her name was Mary Bennett. She was a stout, motherly woman in her late fifties with cheeks that were permanently flushed, as though in indignation. Olivia had tracked her down after that morning at the Wednesday Club, the Rose of Tralee morning.

  “And that’s where Georgie was, all that time?” Olivia asked.

  “Forty-seven years: from 1935 to 1982. Hard to credit, isn’t it?”

  Mary sighed, leaning back cautiously in a battered swivel chair that was wedged tight between a filing cabinet and an ugly chest of drawers that looked to Olivia like an upended coffin. The room was tiny, shelves stacked high with box-files and books and papers, no decorations of any kind.

  “It would have been bad enough when it was first built,” Mary said, “but at least there was a park then, somewhere to walk. But for the last thirty years they had no one to look after the grounds, so it turned into a wilderness. With a great high wall round it, like a prison.”

  “Were they all unmarried mothers there?” Olivia asked.

  Mary laughed briefly, a sound like a whistle. “Lord, no. Most of them had learning disabilities. The mild end of the spectrum, usually, though after years in that place … And some had mental health problems. There were separate sections, in theory, though Heaven knows what actually went on.”

  Olivia tried to picture the place: the smell of urine and disinfectant, the long bare corridors, the isolation.

  “Cruelty,” Mary said. “Plain cruelty.”

  “Locking them up, you mean?”

  “I mean worse than that. The stories that have come out … Like a prison of war camp, someone described it. The staff free to do what they chose. No respect at all; treating the clients like animals.”

  Clients. The contemporary term jarred in Olivia’s ears: so far from the horror that was being described, she thought. But she could see now what such careful terminology was for, why it mattered to people like Mary Bennett.

  “Why did Georgie end up in Oxford?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Usually we’d try to settle people where they had a connection to the community. Georgie had been a student in Oxford, maybe that was why. Her family had washed their hands of her years before. Maybe there was just a suitable placement here for her at the time.” Mary shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know Georgie well. I met her five years ago when she was moved into her current placement, and I was asked to reassess her needs when she was in hospital recently. Fascinating woman, though. Amazing.”

  She might have been more amazing, Olivia thought, if things had worked out differently. There was a limit to what you could make of yourself if you were locked up until you were sixty-five.

  “A lot of them died, you know,” Mary said. “TB, or some other infection. Flu or pneumonia. The medical care was rudimentary, and they didn’t have much reason to keep living, most of them.”

  “Broken hearts.” Olivia felt a little foolish, saying it, but Mary nodded.

  “Broken lives.”

  “So what’s kept Georgie going, all this time?”

  Mary smiled. “Pure spirit.”

  Perhaps, Olivia thought. Perhaps pure stubbornness; a ref
usal to surrender completely. Or perhaps there was something Georgie wanted from life, still.

  “What about the daughter?” she asked. “I understand she died.”

  A frown flickered on Mary’s forehead. Olivia understood: general information was one thing, personal details were another.

  “Sorry,” she began.

  “No, it can’t do any harm,” Mary said. “She’s dead, as you say. The parents too. Georgie’s parents.”

  Mary lifted a thick manila file off the desk beside her: Olivia hadn’t realised it was there until now. She hadn’t realised how hot the room was, either. Hot and airless. No wonder Mary’s cheeks were crimson.

  “Her parents lived in Essex,” Mary said, after a minute or two. “Near Colchester.”

  She studied the file as if trying to make up her mind about something, then closed it gently.

  “Birth mothers have no right in law to information,” she said, “even when there’s been a forced adoption. Terrible, but there it is. But when St. Catherine’s closed and Georgie’s records came to us, the social worker who handled her discharge – she was a wonderful person, tireless – she traced the child. Found out what had happened. And she told Georgie. She thought she ought to know her daughter was dead, that it might help her settle. Close that chapter once and for all.” Mary raised her eyebrows, looking straight at Olivia. “That’s all she told her,” she said.

  “But?” Olivia prompted.

  Mary sighed. Behind her head a small window looked across a narrow courtyard to a row of similar offices opposite. Olivia could see people moving around inside them, answering the telephone, carrying cups of coffee. A whole building full of people in the business of managing other people’s lives, she thought. Were there so many Georgies?

  “Suppose I told you that it wasn’t uncommon for babies to be adopted within the family, in these circumstances,” Mary said. “By a sibling, say. Georgie’s surname is unusual: there aren’t many Quickshalls in Essex.”

  “So it might be possible to find out where her daughter ended up?” Olivia asked.