The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  She closed one eye and looked up at me with the other. ‘Can’t,’ she whimpered.

  ‘You can,’ I insisted. I knew what this was – a war of wills. And I would be the victor. If there was any dragon slaying to be done, mine would be the killing stroke. ‘Do it or you’ll have a smacked bottom.’ Another five minutes crawled past, then ten. ‘Lucilla!’ I rasped, my voice now hoarse with anger.

  Her little mouth set firm. ‘Can’t,’ she said again.

  I flew at her, lifting her by one arm off her potty with such force that her feet left the ground for a moment. Once more I scrutinised the interior of the bowl. It was clean as a freshly scrubbed basin. I glowered at her and undiminished she stared back. Was that defiance in those lucid turquoise eyes? And then suddenly I had it. I sent her to her bedroom in disgrace. Grasping the towel rail for support, the unwelcome realisation trumpeted in my head. It was deliberate. The child was resisting me on purpose, in order that she might spite me.

  This obstinacy, and please don’t assume I am overreacting, this obstinacy was a source of pleasure for her. She liked to see how it irked me. She liked the power it gave her. Well, we’d soon counteract that. Cod liver oil and syrup of figs – that would do the trick. And if they gave her tummy ache so much the better. Fair punishment for her naughtiness. There is a stubborn streak in that child. She will have to be cured of it. She is half German after all. It is vital that this carry-on is sorted out without delay. If I give way on this, if I let her believe she has the upper hand, where will it end? I have come to the conclusion that the remedy is more prayer. Each night I prescribe that our daughter confess her sins. ‘Kneel down, Lucilla, and ask God to forgive you,’ I say. We go through her day together and I make a list of her transgressions.

  ‘Knees hurty,’ is her usual whine. But not until she has repeated the catechism of her wrongdoings, not until I’m sure she is truly repentant, do we say our amen.

  ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity’, Ecclesiastes 1:2. A new biblical quote each week. So much more beneficial than bedtime stories, don’t you think? We commit it to memory before selecting another. Yet my anxieties are not wholly allayed. Call me a pessimist but I think this is a forerunner of the future, of insurrections to be visited upon us in days to come.

  ‘She’s a pearl and she’s all ours,’ Merfyn says, as he sits after supper doing the crossword. ‘We’re so fortunate, Mother. “The Homeless Child for the Childless Home”. The Church Adoption Society’s slogan. It’s very catchy, isn’t it?’ The question is rhetorical and Merfyn does not pause for a reply. ‘We’re proof that it really does work,’ he adds, setting his paper aside and reaching for a malted milk biscuit. I let this pass without comment.

  Chapter 12

  Lucilla, 1998

  THE CLOSE OF August and already the year is turning. The air has a lemon juice tartness to it. The flowers are looking papery and flyblown, like tipsy ladies on the town after midnight. Soon the trees will be weeping copious tears of butter yellow, of moth brown, of blood red, tears that drip-flutter-drop into the crumbling dusky-skinned earth. I want to capture the fire of it in oils, something of its richness, its decadence. Watercolours simply won’t do. Too insipid. They lack that gamey high pigment, the rich meat of the oily shades. The magpie nursery rhyme pops into my head.

  One for sorrow, two for joy;

  Three for a girl, four for a boy;

  Five for silver, six for gold;

  Seven for a secret, never to be told;

  Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss;

  Ten for a bird that’s best to miss.

  I’m fond of it. I knew it by heart as a child, sang it out in skipping games. ‘Three for a girl.’ It’s special for me. ‘Three for a girl.’ You see, three is my lucky number. I like the lopsidedness of it, the fact that it undoes that most hare-brained of human aspirations – the attainment of perfection. No such thing. It is the errors, the accidents, the mistakes that should be celebrated.

  Brightmore Hall has a stately sweeping drive lined with green beech trees, seventeen to each side. You feel like a great lady even if you’re only cycling up it on a battered pushbike. But you know what I love the most about the vista. All those years ago when the saplings were planted the gardeners bungled up. They must have been inattentive, had a lapse in concentration while they cocked an ear to a thrush in full song, or closed their eyes the better to bask in the mellow sunshine. Because one of those trees isn’t green at all. It is a full-bodied wine red. A copper beech has snuck in to stand tall and proud among the frippery of green. I recollect how comfortable I felt when I first set eyes upon that tree, how I was instantly at ease with the asymmetrical avenue. As I say three is an eccentric number, the numero tre that upsets the symmetry, that tips the scale, that sinks the ark, and has Noah ripping his hair out by its roots. It is the arrival of three that makes an unpredictable crowd of two.

  I am strolling in the grounds with Merlin, all he can manage these days with his endearingly drunken gait. We are soaking up the autumnal splendour, when I see a wisp of a girl playing at hopscotch on the path ahead. She wears jeans and a pink sweatshirt. She must be about seven, I estimate. One of the braids that her long brown hair has been plaited into is unravelling. Her cheeks look carnation pink and there is the tail of a yellow ribbon dangling from her fisted hand. When she spots us approaching, her eyes brighten, dancing with interest. She skips up to Merlin.

  ‘Oh he’s lovely. May I pat him?’ she asks, crouching down, her voice high and energetic as her young self. Merlin deigns to halt, and waits with an air of nobility for his female admirer to pay him abeyance.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘He’s awfully friendly.’

  She strokes his head gently. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Merlin.’

  ‘Like the magician, King Arthur’s magician.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve read stories about him at school. It suits him. His fur feels like my hair when it’s loose.’ I smile. ‘Why is he panting?’

  ‘Oh, he’s quite an old gentleman now,’ I inform her.

  ‘So was Merlin. But he’s still very handsome,’ she says and my patrician Merlin licks her in appreciation of the munificent compliment. ‘Is it rude to ask why that eye is a bit cloudy?’

  ‘No, not rude at all. I’m afraid he is going blind. It’s sad, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He copes with the other good eye. He likes licking the cream that’s left around the neck of the empty milk bottles. He’s very adept at it. You’d find it funny to watch.’

  She laughs. ‘I wish I had a dog,’ she says, feelingly.

  ‘Well, you must ask –’

  But here I am interrupted. A woman comes running from the direction of the house. She is screaming like a banshee. ‘Lucy! Lucy! Get over here! Where have you been, you naughty girl?’

  The child springs up, all traces of her previous enjoyment expunged in an instant. Her eyes are wide and alarmed. She bites her lower lip, bites and bites at it, and suddenly I notice how inflamed and sore it is. ‘I’d better go,’ she says. And she pivots and sprints up to the harridan. A minute or so later and the woman is still shrieking at her, pulling her by the arm towards the house. And in a trick of time I am that child again, alert, on guard, a constant swilling in my tummy, never knowing when to duck.

  ‘Explain yourself,’ demands my mother. And that is what I do, back-to-front words scatter falteringly from my trembling lips. The onslaught continues unabated. I have misbehaved. I have shown her up. ‘Wicked child,’ she hisses. ‘Wicked, wicked child!’ Then her close-up voice comes from all corners. ‘You are a little liar.’

  The back-to-front words go heels over head out of my mouth. ‘I didn’t. I never. I wasn’t. I haven’t. I can’t.’ But even when they form an orderly queue it is futile.

  Over the last months, I have stopped using the name Lucilla in an experiment of sorts. I won’t call it my name because it isn’t. It is
not my size, like shoes that are too small. It pinches my toes and stunts my growth. I am calling myself Laura now, Laura Ryan. Denying Lucilla is causing a disproportionate amount of confusion. Henry’s adapted without much kerfuffle. Well aware of how much I loathe Lucilla, he has always abbreviated my name to Lucy. But like a severe allergy, exposure even to a syllable has begun to rankle. At work in the estate’s gift shop and in the café, they are discomfited by this new pseudonym.

  ‘It’s not the name on your payslip,’ the manager told me huffily the other day when I asked her outright not to call me Lucilla.

  ‘I realise this. But I want to be known by the name of Laura now,’ I petitioned with a winsome smile. And it took pluck because she’s a battleaxe, her blade blunted with felling a forest of staff.

  Her mouth narrowed to a plughole of disapproval. ‘It doesn’t seem proper messing about with your God-given name,’ she continued disregarding me. And, oh, I did not have to simply bite my tongue here, but eat it up, every last taste bud of it. Because God didn’t give me that frilly, fussy, lisping name, a name that spoken in anger is a scream, a snake’s hiss of a name. If God had known, if he was a decent sort of bloke, he would have hurled a javelin of forked lightning, and intervened, shaking the columns of his heaven. He’d have taken it away, not given it to me. He’d have boomed, I created her and anyone can see she’s not a Lucilla. Now the manager, still in full throat, is called Constance. And it’s obvious that God didn’t just give her that name, he chucked it at her. ‘And besides’, she went on, ‘it’s muddling when I’m dealing with the council or the tax man.’

  I inhaled as if it was the last cigarette before giving up the habit evermore. My heart was slamming in my throat, or so it seemed. All I was requesting was that she called me Laura. ‘It may seem a trifle out of the ordinary but that’s what I want.’ She worked her mouth, and the shoulder pads of her jacket shifted as if readying themselves to make a break for freedom. So far she’s avoided calling me anything at all, but I’ll fence to the end of this duel. Win or die, that’s my motto.

  Maybe it is the magpie rhyme, it being three years since I got in touch with the Salvation Army, or maybe it is hearing a little girl whose name is Lucy being harshly berated for petting a dog, or possibly it is a combination of both that are the triggers. Paradoxically, I am mired in the present, unable to proceed unless I reverse. Gina is now thirty-one. I can scarcely credit it, and mother to our beautiful grand daughter, Lisa. And Tim is in and out of relationships with the ease of someone switching seats on a bus. Our children are moving on, establishing their own families, planting their own gardens. And as the demands of being their mother lessen, as their needs are met elsewhere, the void expands. I feel like an empty gourd.

  For archaeologists excavating the past is irresistible. So it is for me. I kid myself that after the dig is complete, after I have finished examining the detritus of days gone by, I shall be free to decamp and vault back into the here and now. All I want … all I want is to tailor my own shadow. Is that so much to ask? And when I have, Lucilla won’t possess the tiniest particle of me. And so I get in touch with Norcap, the adoption support agency. It is the new cook in the café who refers to it quite by chance, relaying how helpful they were to an adopted friend of hers. Research on the internet soon leads me to the door of this organisation. I speak to a lovely lady on the phone, Patricia. She asks me to write in summarising my situation, and enclosing the now ubiquitous photocopies of all documentation that I currently possess.

  I close by telling her how desperate I am to locate my real mother, and how welcome any assistance they provide will be. I also include my joining fee of thirty-five pounds. A week later and an information pack thuds on our mat. Now that I am a paid-up member of Norcap, membership number 34806, it feels as if my investigation has been legitimised. My contact leader is Hermione. Norcap advises me that adoption is frequently romanticised in fiction, in plays and in the media. They stress that the reality of tracing my birth mother may be the antithesis to any fantasy I am feeding. They underscore the value of keeping emotions reined in. They emphasise how crucial it is for the initial contact to be made by an experienced intermediary. If I do track down my mother, they urge me to come back to them and let their experts handle that fragile thread of communication on my behalf, lest, God forbid, it breaks. Shuffling through the pack again a tiny slip of paper flutters from its pages.

  CHILDLINK – 12 Lion Yard, Tremadoc Road, London, SW4 7NQ.

  CHILDLINK holds the records of the following society:-

  The Church Adoption Society of Bloomsbury Square and Vauxhall Bridge Road.

  A sudden pressure on my chest as if some demon has selected that moment to stamp on my heart. Childlink may have my records, my full adoption records. I may unearth more from them than I have so far from my uncommunicative adoptive parents, my conceited cousin Frank, Dorking Social Services, and the Salvation Army, from Norcap itself in fact. How many pieces of my puzzle they may supply is dizzying after so many decades. I should be euphoric. But I feel as if, out without a brolly, I have been drenched in a deluge. There is only one thing more dire than not knowing – knowing! I will write to Childlink. I will open the box and let the evils of the world fly out, all in the name of hope. But not this afternoon. Just for today let Lucilla and her history slumber on.

  Chapter 13

  Bethan, 1950

  IT IS SUNDAY. We go to church. We go every Sunday. I used to get bored, but now I don’t mind so much. Oh I don’t pray. I can’t pray. But I do listen. I’ve noticed that the minister preaches a tremendous lot about hell, that he gets a bit carried away describing it. His face goes red as ripe tomatoes, and his hair becomes untidy he throws his head around so much, like he’s imitating a musical conductor. He’s ever so clever with his adjectives, because I can really visualise it when I close my eyes. All fiery pits and pitchforks and people screaming in agony. Not so different from working down the mines really, I reflect wryly. Aeron gave my letter to Thorston to her dad that same day, and he gave it to my dad the next time they met. After the court, when the adoption was legal and there was no going back, he confronted me in the lounge, the letter open and in his hand. He didn’t shout. It was more vile than that. He smiled. He was smiling when he told me he’d had it all this time, since a few days after I entrusted it to Aeron, that he’d read the filth of it so often he could recite it in his sleep. He tore it up in front of me and threw it in the fire.

  ‘I saw two letters, Dad!’ I cried. ‘One hidden behind my letter.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’ My dad denied it, riddling the fire so that the scraps of paper went up in a whoosh.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I did! I saw another letter in your hand. Who wrote that letter? Was it for me? Did he send it to me?’ I was shouting as I witnessed the flames burning brighter, gobbling up my last shred of hope. ‘Please tell me if it was him, if it was from Thorston? I have to know!’ I made a dash for the fire, but my father blocked me. I was beating my fists against his chest, and I do believe if he had stepped aside I would have thrown myself on the pyre. He shoved me backwards and I fell to floor.

  ‘You’re a slut,’ he said, with a smile so broad it almost fell off his face. ‘A whore. You confess your sins every day to God. You hear me, Bethan, every day you pray for forgiveness. You shan’t go to heaven, daughter. But maybe God will spare you hell and send you to purgatory, eh?’

  I just nodded meekly and stared at the black ashes. There were no tears left, see. I was dry as baked stone. I couldn’t shed one, not a single one. My letters were burned up, mine to him and his to me. My dad would prefer to die than tell me where he was, where we might be reunited.

  ‘I shall, Dad. I shall fall on my knees and pray for forgiveness every day. I’m not good enough for heaven. I know that, Dad,’ I confessed, my head drooping. Ah, it was so heavy, my head, and I was so tired having to hold it up, so shattered with the effort.

  The minister doesn’t concern himself much with
heaven though, so it’s not so easy to envisage that. But I do have a go sometimes. I sketch green fields in my head, dot them with flowers, all colours, very pretty, you know. And the air is perfumed with the fragrance of dry hay on a warm evening. There are babbling silver streams, and a haze of lavender mountains, and a sky that’s like a wash of buttermilk. I stroll along barefoot. There are no stones and the grass is cool and spongy like a cushion under the soles of my feet. What strikes me about my feelings as I wander through heaven is that there aren’t any. No hunger, no thirst, no tiredness … no anguish, and no guilt. No guilt! The thousands of nails of guilt that have been embedded so deep into my flesh that I don’t think they’ll ever come out, aren’t there. I’m smooth as a peach.

  Anyway I don’t want to go to heaven. I’ve made up my mind. It’ll only be full of Brice, and Mam and Dad, and the adoptive parents, and my baby. I’m going to roast in hell. It’s where I belong. By the way, I can’t spot God in the heaven I’ve constructed. I’ve had a good hunt but he’s nowhere to be seen. I’m not dreadfully sure what he looks like. But I am certain that I’ll recognise him if he appears. My knees throb after the service and that’s a good sign of repentance, don’t you agree? Despite not being able to pray, I do believe God might take that into account. Sore knees. When we get back to the farm, it’s my habit to head upstairs to change into my dungarees and start work. Then a Sunday morning arrives when Dad waylays me.

  ‘Not today, Bethan. I want you to stay dressed up,’ he says terrible serious.

  I pause and swivel on the stairs, bewildered by his request. ‘But, Dad, there’s so much to do,’ I protest. I can smell dinner cooking. We’re having roast pork, and the delicious aroma is making my mouth water.

  ‘Never mind that,’ my dad tells me. ‘We’ve company coming for lunch. I want you to look presentable.’