The Doorstep Child

by Annie Murray

  ‘She all right now?’ Rita asked, nodding towards Ann.

  ‘I asked Doctor Holmes to have a look at her,’ Shirley said, adding importantly to Evie, ‘he’s my boss – ever such a nice man. It was a bit of a favour, like. She’s been poorly. He says she’s on the mend – nothing to worry about. They pick up everything at school.’

  They all sat drinking tea. Rita and Shirley talked about their lives, everyday things. Mom moaned about Mrs Butcher who lived across the road. None of them wanted to know much about Evie. But for now, Tracy and Ann were hand in hand and Andrew and Wayne seemed to be getting along all right, tittering together over something in the living room. And Mom had been nice to her.

  Evie felt herself begin to breathe more easily. Could she tell herself she had come home and that she might fit in at last?

  Forty-Five

  December 1971

  They waited at the school gates in the cold wind, the sky gun-metal grey. Evie had her collar up, scarf pulled tight, hands in her pockets.

  ‘I’m surprised you feel it if it’s so cold in Canada,’ Shirley said in the snide tone she used now any time Canada was mentioned. She was jealous of her younger sister’s experience, bitter that she had never got out and gone anywhere.

  ‘It is,’ Evie said. ‘Much, much colder. But the wind’s mean today.’ It blew round the shabby brick buildings of the little school and seemed to worm its way in between seams and buttons, into the core of you.

  ‘Huh,’ Shirley said, not looking at her. She smiled at one of the other mothers, but it was a fake kind of smile, Evie thought.

  It was so grey and dismal. The children kept asking when was it going to snow, like in Canada? And when was Dad going to get here? To the second question she gave vague answers, putting off the time she had to tell them the whole truth, which for all the upset and Jack’s stony rejection of her in their final weeks, she still could not fully believe herself.

  She had promised the children that she would be there with Shirley on the last day of term. Shirley went to the school every day, between morning and evening surgeries, but Evie had already missed the nativity play because she was at work. Today she had taken an afternoon off specially.

  There was the usual chatter of mothers and crying of younger children who had been dragged out into the cold.

  The doors opened and out into the winter light came the colourful stream of children. Evie soon saw Tracy, in her blue anorak and cream pom-pom hat, hurrying towards her as if she was bursting with information, carrying something importantly in front of her. Dawdling behind, with a sulky expression, was Ann. Somewhere at the back would be Andrew, with the little ones.

  ‘Mom, Mom!’ Tracy was excited. ‘Look what the teacher gave me!’

  She held out a flat parcel, wrapped in bright paper.

  ‘It’s a prize! She gave it me because she said I’d settled in so quickly!’ Tracy beamed up at her. Most of Canada had, in three months, almost entirely disappeared from Tracy and Andrew’s accents. Evie was so proud of them. They had become Brummies almost overnight once they were at school.

  ‘Ooh, isn’t that lovely!’ Evie said, delighted for her. She had been so anxious, with all the changes they had had all at once, about sending them to this new school. But Tracy’s teacher, a young woman called Miss Barnes, had been very good with her and Andrew was so young he had adapted quickly as well.

  ‘I think it’s a colouring book – and crayons,’ Tracy said.

  ‘I never got anything like that at school,’ Evie told her. ‘It was different in them days.’

  ‘That’s ’cause you never did anything,’ Shirley muttered. ‘Half asleep most of the time, you were.’

  Ann came up then, tense with annoyance, her pale face sulky.

  ‘She got a prize!’ she stamped furiously.

  ‘Hey!’ Shirley snapped. ‘Watch it – you nearly got my foot!’

  ‘But why does she always get everything?’ Ann snarled. She looked with loathing at Tracy.

  Tracy’s face clouded. Things with her cousin were not as easy as Evie had hoped. Tracy had made friends with a girl in her class called Sharon. Sharon was a sweet, plump girl, black, or sort of – her dad was black and her mom white. Evie had wondered about her at first but Sharon was a good-natured girl with an infectious giggle and she soon warmed to her. But Ann was jealous and the remarks made by the rest of the family about Sharon made Evie blush with embarrassment. ‘That blackie friend of yours’ and ‘eat a lot of bananas, does she?’ and Mom said much worse, crude things that made Evie curl up inside.

  ‘You can use it as well,’ Tracy said, to appease Ann. ‘We can go and do some colouring together at Nanna’s, can’t we?’

  Evie was often amazed by her daughter’s sweetness, the way she chose, somehow, to believe the best of everyone. She put it down to all the kindness of the people they had known in Canada.

  ‘I don’t want to use your stupid things,’ Ann said nastily, turning away with her nose in the air.

  ‘Oh, shurrit, Ann,’ Shirley said wearily. ‘Let’s get home – it’s freezing out here.’

  Andrew came up and slipped his hand into Evie’s. ‘You all right, babby?’ she asked him. He nodded silently. She worried about him constantly, knew he was missing his father, that he found all the changes draining. But he was little and Canada now seemed like another life to them all. He was doing all right at school.

  She took each of their hands and followed Shirley, who had Ann stumping sulkily beside her. But at least today, the kids didn’t have to go to Mom’s. Most days Shirley picked them up and they waited at her mother’s house until Evie finished work for the day. At first Evie had been happy that they had offered to do this. It felt as if they were really making her and her children part of the family. But gradually she was coming to feel uneasy about it, seeing how spiteful Ann could be. And the house was chaos with all Rita’s boys there so much of the time. When she asked Tracy and Andrew if it was all right, though, they never complained.

  Evie had a strong sense of gratitude to her children, for their strength, for being nice kids. She clasped their hands tighter and bent down to whisper, ‘I’ve bought some nice fat crumpets. Let’s go home and toast them on the fire, shall we?’

  It may have been a sputtering old gas fire in their lodgings, but with a knob of butter and them all cuddled up, it would feel like a feast. Today they could just be the three of them.

  Her first weeks back in England had been a blur of busyness.

  She applied for a job on comptometers again, at a firm out on the Bristol Road, called Kalamazoo, which made, she was told, a wide range of office equipment. The person who greeted her when she went to see about the job was a kindly, apple-cheeked lady called Maureen Benson. Evie admitted she had not done comptometer work for some time, but Maureen reassured her.

  ‘If you could do it before, you can do it again – like riding a bike. They’ve updated them – they’re electric ones now – but they’re still the same really.’ She assumed Evie had been at home with her children, which was most of the truth. ‘Anyway,’ she added with a wink as she saw Evie out after giving her a job, ‘it’s the blind leading the blind round here. They’re a good crowd, though.’

  Her search for lodgings was also soon rewarded. In this – what seemed to be – honeymoon period with the family, she wanted to be near, for her children to share their lives with her cousins. Her father had seemed quite pleased to see her, though she had been shocked by how much he had aged.

  ‘So, you’re back then, wench?’ he said, when he first saw her. Evie was so busy trying to reconcile this almost toothless, tired-looking man with a scant fuzz of dirty grey hair, the bloated cheeks full of broken veins, with the father she remembered that it took her a moment to reply.

  ‘Yeah . . . Dad,’ she said. ‘Well, for the moment.’

  She just couldn’t tell them what had happened with Jack. She was full of shameful feelings that she had failed in her marriage. And d
espite everything, she still ached with missing him and all that they had together. Even though she was an ocean away, there was a part of her that could still not believe that it was all over. At night, once the children were asleep, she often had a cry. She found herself waiting to hear from him, for him to ask them all to come home and start again.

  They were living not far from her mother and father in Weoley Park Road. It was a big house, owned by a kindly couple called Eric and Jean Grant. Their children were grown-up and had moved on, and now Mr and Mrs Grant had decided to rent out some of their rooms. Mr Grant worked at the colleges nearby in Selly Oak and they were keen Baptists, originally from Yorkshire.

  Mrs Grant was a faded, gentle lady with wispy grey hair in a bun.

  ‘We thought it wrong to have all this empty space,’ she told Evie. ‘With so many young people needing homes.’

  She reminded Evie a little bit of Mary Bracebridge, with her dutiful Christian kindness. Looking them all up and down, she said, ‘Hello, children. I’m sure we’ll all get on famously, so long as there’s no running about upstairs late at night.’

  Evie assured them there would not be and she and Tracy and Andrew took two bedrooms upstairs. They shared the bathroom and had another room at the back as a sitting room. All the rooms were of a good size. Mrs Grant told Evie that she could use the kitchen but that she was just as happy to cook for all of them in the evening for a modest payment.

  ‘I must admit, I miss cooking for my own family,’ she said. ‘I always like to see everyone gathered round the table of a night.’

  Evie was very pleased to agree to this. The house looked as if it had not been touched in any way since the 1940s, with its Bakelite switches, coffee-coloured walls and brown linoleum, covered in places with rugs, trodden wafer thin. Their rooms upstairs were all in the same drab colours.

  ‘Everything’s rather old,’ Mrs Grant said as she showed them round. ‘But it’s all perfectly serviceable.’

  But there had been a nice smell of baking apple pies in the house all through the autumn.

  ‘There’s a tree out the back that produces in great profusion,’ Mrs Grant told her. ‘I don’t like to see them go to waste. There’ll be plenty of pies so I hope you like them?’

  They did – and ate them most evenings, with Mrs Grant’s thin custard.

  The children slept in one room and Evie in another, both rooms a sea of brown shades, with yellowed card lampshades clinging to the central bulb in each room. But for the money, it was luxury. And the Grants were kind and did their best to make them welcome.

  At first it seemed a good idea to have the children at the same school as Ann, the only other girl in the family. Rita’s tribe went to the Catholic school, St Rose of Lima. Her in-laws, the Hennesseys, had also moved out to Weoley Castle and she and Conn had come out to live next door to them, even though Rita seemed to spend most of her days over here with her mother. Rita talked about ‘going to Mass’ and other things about the church in a dramatic way, as if she had stepped into a superior realm.

  ‘Joseph and Sean have made their First Holy Communion,’ she told Evie proudly. ‘It’ll be Jimmy’s turn soon.’

  Evie could see that one of the reasons Rita was so desperate to have a girl was so that she could have a frilly white First Communion dress.

  Motherhood had made Rita feel very important and in the Catholic Church, motherhood was made much of. Rita thought she knew best about everything, especially when backed up by Conn’s mom or one of the fathers at the church. And she was doing the right thing, breeding lots of new little Catholics into the estate, so she received approval all round. Rita, now awaiting the birth of her fifth child after Christmas, seemed to be having the time of her life.

  This was not so true of Shirley, who had found herself living back home because, working part-time, she could not afford to do anything else. She was envious of Evie having a job which paid better but snapped anyone’s head off who suggested that she might do the same.

  Sometimes Shirley came round to the Grants’ on a Saturday night, bringing Ann and staying so late that Evie had to ask her to leave. At first Evie had been pleased to see her, thinking Shirley wanted to spend time with her. What she really wanted was to get away from Mom and Dad’s weekend drinking habits – at the pub, at home, almost non-stop. But having her there meant that it was hard for Evie to get her children to bed. And she worried that their moving about would disturb the Grants.

  She and Shirley would sit with cups of tea by the gas fire. Shirley hardly ever asked Evie anything, so she didn’t even have to lie about Jack. Shirley spent most of the time moaning about her own life – about Howard and how she had been left on her own and how none of it was fair. It didn’t even seem to dawn on her that Evie was staying rather a long time now she was back, with no sign of a husband. Finally, just last week, she had told her.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ Shirley had started off, sitting on the sofa in Evie’s rooms with her legs tucked under her. Being Shirley, she still looked striking even in the old jeans and shirt she had on. ‘You’ve got a better job . . .’ She was about to embark on one of her long moans.

  In the end, fed up with all this, Evie blurted out, ‘I don’t know what makes you think that. In case you’re wondering, Jack’s left me – for someone else. That’s why I’ve come back, all right? So you needn’t think life’s a bed of roses for me either.’

  ‘He’s left you?’ Shirley looked stunned for a moment. She pulled herself more upright and Evie saw a movement in her lips, an upward curve of triumph. ‘Oh ho, that’s rich, that is!’ She burst out laughing. ‘Takes you all the way over there and leaves you! No wonder you never said before!’

  Evie saw the spite in Shirley’s eyes. It was a horrible moment, a memory reviving fast. Why was it like this? Why was she not kind and sympathetic? It was possible, she knew now. Some people were kind. Hadn’t she come back with some hope of finding kindness in her own family?

  ‘So,’ Shirley declared with relish, ‘that means you’re no better than me then, doesn’t it?’

  Forty-Six

  They woke on Christmas Day to another grey, bitter morning.

  Andrew had been up in the small hours, excited, and Evie managed to lull him back to sleep, saying Santa wouldn’t come if he was awake. So it was Tracy who came first in the morning and sat on her bed. Evie felt the little girl’s weight arrive near her feet and she rolled over and sat up.

  ‘There’s still no snow,’ Tracy whispered. ‘I looked out the window.’ She had thought it must snow at Christmas, when in Canada the snow sometimes arrived as early as September and went on for months.

  ‘Hello, lovey. Happy Christmas.’ Evie sat up.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Mom.’ She was wearing soft red pyjamas with white edging round the cuffs and a pink cardi over the top. Her hair hung loose and Evie melted at how sweet she looked. But she saw that Tracy had not started to open the little stocking she had laid for her and she was frowning in a troubled way. She wouldn’t meet her mother’s eye.

  ‘What’s up, babby?’ Evie asked.

  Tracy looked at her then, her eyes filling with tears. ‘When are we going back home?’ she said. ‘When’s Dad coming?’

  Evie felt a lurch of dread inside her, the dread of having to tell your children news they don’t want to hear. She couldn’t keep fending the two of them off, evading the questions, especially now Shirley must have told everyone. Most of the time they did not seem to miss their father, as he had spent very little time with them. But today . . . Jack had always been there on Christmas Day, the four of them on the bed in the morning, unwrapping presents. She leaned forward and took Tracy’s hands in hers, looking deep into her eyes.

  ‘You know, don’t you, Trace, that we’re not going back to Canada?’

  Tracy’s eyes overflowed, the tears running down her cheeks, silver drops on her cardigan. On a sob, she said, ‘And Dad’s not coming here, is he?’

  Evie’s own eye
s filled at seeing the grown-up look on her little girl’s face. She missed Jack at that moment, missed him as if they were still together, still happy, like at the beginning. If she had not had these beautiful children, would they still be happy? She doubted it.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I think Daddy wants to stay in Canada.’ She released a hand to wipe her cheeks.

  ‘But why don’t you want to stay there too?’

  This was hardest of all. Evie looked down at the pale pink coverlet.

  ‘Thing is, Trace . . . you know in the stories, when the girl meets the prince and they live happily ever after?’ She glanced up.

  ‘Sometimes they’re a frog first,’ Tracy pointed out.

  Evie laughed through her tears. ‘Yes, they are, aren’t they? All I mean is, life’s not always the same as that. Your dad . . . he wanted to be with someone else.’

  Tracy stared at her. Evie wondered what was going on in her mind. ‘He does know where we live, though?’

  Evie felt another pang. ‘Yes, love, he does.’

  Tracy did not ask the other question – did he send us a present? Jack had never written or sent a card to the kids. Not once, not even for Christmas. Jack had moved on, it seemed, the way Jack did, as if he was catching the next bus.

  She saw Tracy taking this in solemnly. In the end, she said, ‘It’s quite nice here. I don’t mind staying. I like Sharon and my other friends – and Ann,’ she added, though this sounded a little bit forced.

  ‘We’d better not tell Andrew, had we?’ Evie said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I think he knows – sort of,’ Tracy said. ‘Mom? Are we going to Nanna’s today?’

  ‘Yes – I told you. Why?’

  ‘No . . . nothing,’ Tracy said, looking away. ‘I was just asking.’

  Evie wondered what Tracy thought. For her own part, Evie paid short visits, always with the children, always pulling a protective inner screen round herself. So far, Mom had been all over Tracy and Andrew almost as if Evie herself barely existed. And she had avoided her parents at their worst, when the drink was in.