The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  ‘You did receive a list in the post, didn’t you?’ Miss Merrall continued.

  ‘Yes,’ confessed Lucilla. Outside the window the crane flies hovered. And through the narrow opening, the stench of sewerage seeped, driving out the more wholesome smells of chalk and books.

  ‘Then why don’t you have the correct uniform on?’ This was the voice of logic and common sense.

  She had no answer for it. ‘My mother knitted it,’ she mumbled, lamely, under her breath.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Miss Merrall, tidying the brown curls at the back of her neck.

  ‘My mother knitted it.’ She elevated her voice and heard it fracture with shame.

  Giggles broke out in the front row of desks, and licked across the room like a fire consuming touchwood.

  Instantly, Miss Merrall was on her feet clapping her hands. ‘Be quiet! In a moment I am going to collect up your exercise books, and anyone who has not finished will be staying in at break time.’ Silence descended with the agility of a falling axe. Miss Merrall stooped and spoke in a confidential tone. ‘I’ll write to your mother. See me at the end of school to collect the note. Understood?’ Lucilla nodded. Privately, she reflected that no power on earth could persuade her mother to remove the offending jumper. But she was mistaken.

  ‘What’s this?’ demanded her mother suspiciously, as she tore it open and read it. She was propped up against the dining-room table where tea was laid out by the time she had finished. She collapsed into a chair, as the intelligence of the communication penetrated. ‘Well, I never! I can’t believe it. A perfectly good jumper. No, a jumper that’s a great deal better than those shop-bought, machine-made efforts. I’ve a good mind to go into your school and take this Miss Merrall to task.’ No, oh no, Lucilla standing close by quailed inwardly. And a shiver ran through Scamp’s small body huddled by her feet.

  However, that Saturday another trip was made to the shops. To Lucilla’s amazement, a school jumper, roomy enough to conceal several narrow waists, was acquired. Her mother’s neglect was also uncovered in the routine medical examinations that took place at Hillside. Lucilla had never had a dental check up, and like a crumbling sea wall it took eight fillings to shore up her teeth. Nor had she been immunised against any of the childhood diseases, causing the indignant nurse to make a pin cushion of her with frantic injections. When Miss Merrall took her mother to task on both counts, she had only simpered foolishly in reply, as if she had pulled off a splendid practical joke.

  But Lucilla’s relief at her form teacher’s dominion over her mother was to be brief. The Christmas holidays came and she announced that she would be giving Lucilla’s intractably straight hair a perm. ‘Please, Mother, don’t,’ pleaded Lucilla. She was still pleading head over the sink, as she applied the brown liquid. Her scalp tingled and fumed rather worse than the sewerage plant was wont to do on midsummer days. The harsh chemicals worked savagely on her fine hair.

  ‘You are going to look lovely, Lucilla,’ her mother proclaimed, brooking no dispute. She separated out strands of damp hair and wound them with tissue paper around pink and blue rollers. After a couple of hours, during which Lucilla felt her scalp was going to split open like a hatching egg, it was time to rinse the vile concoction off. Head bent, spluttering with the scorched odour, she prayed for a speedy death. Flattening by a bus would do. A preferable fate to returning to Hillside. A minute later, lukewarm water streaming off her face, her eyes running because some of the perm solution had got into them, she was yanked up, as if from a ducking stool.

  ‘I can’t wait to see how it turns out. You might look like Barbara,’ her mother declared with misplaced optimism. ‘Do you recall her glorious wavy hair? Imagine, with the help of a perm and some dye you could be her twin.’

  She did not want to imagine. For once she wanted her mind to be stagnant, incapable of projecting forwards or backwards any emotions or images at all. But the final rinse completed, Lucilla did make believe. She was a blind girl, her sight lost for ever in an inferno that torched both her father and her mother, though it spared Mrs Fortinbrass … and Scamp. She bore the deformity of her scars with fortitude. Half bald, the shreds of her fried hair patching her head, she thanked God for his infinite mercy. The loss of her vision meant that she would not have to find the valour to gaze in the mirror ever again. The daydream evaporated.

  If her father was surprised by her appearance, he made little comment. ‘Oh dear, Mother. I think you’ve overdone it. Never mind, it’ll soon grow out.’ Et tu, Father, Lucilla thought, betrayed.

  On the Monday, she went unwillingly to school. Her hair, what was left of it, was a startling orangey-yellow, interspersed with pale green, so that her head from behind looked like a sucked mango pip. Her scalp was inflamed, itching torturously. And when she succumbed to the irresistible temptation with a fit of manic scratching, she shed hairs as though struck down with alopecia. She was mocked and jeered by the entire playground it seemed, as she ploughed through the welter of spiteful faces. Even the teachers on duty looked askance, watching her weave her sorry way to the comparative sanctuary of her classroom. I know what Jesus felt like with his crown of thorns, she reflected, mournfully, as she stuck her head gratefully into the hollow of her locker. But eventually she had to emerge. Miss Merrall took her in, her light-brown eyes so wide that their lashes brushed her fringe.

  She was called to the now familiar front of the class, the stage for the unfolding theatrics she was the unwilling star in. With a tentative hand and the lightest of touches, Miss Merrall took a shrivelled lock of her hair and ran it through her fingertips. ‘Who did this to you?’ she probed gently.

  ‘My mother,’ said Lucilla, not daring to meet her gaze. The angry flare in Miss Merrall’s complexion was quickly diluted. She left the class in no doubt that anyone found teasing the girl with the thatched head would be severely dealt with. Another note was scribbled. This her mother read alone in the confines of her bedroom. Its contents remained private, but when she came out Lucilla observed that her skin had a greasy pallor to it. Next day, Lucilla was kept home without explanation. In the afternoon, they visited a hairdresser who snipped and snipped with shiny scissors at the tangled mass. When she had finished, Lucilla surveyed herself with shy pleasure. She looked like Peter Pan. And although here and there her hair still resembled coconut fibres, it was survivable.

  That night she dreamed again of flying, of standing on the precipice of Beachy Head at night, with the Belle Tout Lighthouse at her back. The great glass Cyclops revolved blinking dispassionately. On, off, on, off, on, off. Dazzled by the light coming and going, by the distant murmur of the restless sea, she keeled over into the wind, let it bear her up on beating wings. She might have cried out, ‘I’m flying, flying off Beachy Head!’ But no one came, so perhaps it was part of the dream.

  As the sea gusts bore her away to distant lands, to another life, she glanced back in the moonlight and saw them, her father and her mother. Only they weren’t, weren’t her father and her mother. They looked like toy people standing there with Belle Tout towering over them, mouths agape as this child who was not theirs soared up into the silvered dusk. She didn’t wave and neither did they. She was leaving them behind, jettisoning them. They were sure she would plummet and smash to bits. They had wanted to grab her back, to harness her, to keep her on a short rein plodding in step with this counterfeit family. But she hadn’t crashed on the shingle far below. She tipped herself up and poured herself out into the salty wind. She slithered off her skin, her shredded skin, and let her liquid spirit go, swept high by the up current that scaled the chalky cliffs.

  Bizarrely, the hair fiasco liberated her. Now she was shorn there were no more fantasies about Rapunzel. Besides she did not want to stay cooped up in this oppressive tower growing back her hair. She loved … what did she love? Her dog, her books and her roller skates. Oh, she did love her roller skates. With them strapped to her feet, she would alight from the bus while it was still moving,
and hang on to the pole, letting it drag her the last few yards to her stop. Not the remarks of other passengers, ‘Cheeky devil’, ‘What a saucy madam’, ‘Needs a good thrashing that one’, not the bellowing of the furious bus conductor, not a telling-off from a local bobby made an ounce of difference.

  The previous Christmas she’d been given a record player, a Dansette. She’d taken it over to the Friedmans to show it off. ‘I got a record player,’ she boasted. Then her smile fell. ‘Mother says I don’t deserve it because I am so wicked.’

  Mr Friedman’s brow settled into three deep pleats. ‘Have a pretzel. You’re not so bad, Lucilla. Why ever should your mother think that?’ His octopus hands plumbed the air searching for a solution. Lucilla shrugged, unable to solve the riddle for him.

  But change, like the nip of winter, was pinching. The year she became a teenager, the ground under her feet shifted. On Guy Fawkes Night, her father came home with a five-bob tin of Pains fireworks. He made a great to-do of setting them up in the garden. Afterwards, he spent a mysterious hour in the shed, before rejoining the preparations. And it struck Lucilla on his re-emergence, that the loose-limbed slap-dash approach he subsequently acquired was something of a liability around explosives. Mother tweaked the curtains and said that there were folks coming, that she had such a lot to do she didn’t know where to begin. Shortly afterwards, the Friedmans arrived bearing sparklers and chicken soup. Then Aunt Enid and Rachel and Frank fetched up with a tray of toffee apples. Mrs Fortinbrass crept downstairs for while, but after sipping a cup of soup, she stole upstairs again, saying that the view was better from her window.

  There were Catherine wheels that spun, bowling colours into the wintry night, and rockets that took off with a whiz exploding an instant later in a puff of light. There were jumping crackers that, once lit, zigzagged after you like sparking snakes. And there were Bengal bursters, whirl wheels, Italian streamers, jewelled fountains and humming spiders. Frank helped her father co-ordinate the display, shooing her and Rachel away, commanding them not to meddle for their own safety. He was frightfully grown up now, nearly an adult himself, studying for his O levels.

  ‘Why don’t you girls write your names in the dark with your sparklers?’ suggested her father, with grin that continued stretching all the way across his face like elastic pastry thinned by a rolling pin. His deliberate almost fastidious style of speech was unsettling Lucilla. It was as though, as a result of some temporary mental aberration, this accomplishment, previously taken entirely for granted, had for some obscure reason morphed into a linguistic challenge. Lucilla hoped the guests, most especially Rachel and Frank, did not notice anything out of the ordinary about their Uncle Merfyn. Fortuitously, they both seemed otherwise occupied with the celebration. Rachel smiled at her and, gripping her sparkler like a pen, began signing her name. But Lucilla made no move to copy her. She grimaced down at her own sparkler, at the spitting luminous snowflake, and watched it die.

  ‘Why didn’t you do it?’ Rachel wanted to know. ‘Sign your name?’

  ‘It’s not my name,’ divulged Lucilla. ‘It’s code for my real name.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Frank haughtily, overhearing them. ‘Like it or not, Lucilla Pritchard is your name.’ He had a box of sparklers in his hand, and he prodded her between the shoulder blades with it. ‘What tosh you do talk.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like it and it isn’t my name, so there,’ came Lucilla’s riposte, dropping her dead sparkler in disgust. ‘Anyway it’s none of your bees’ wax. You shouldn’t be listening in.’

  ‘Touchy!’ teased Frank. ‘Have another sparkler and try again,’ he goaded. ‘If you can’t spell it, I’ll tell you the letters.’

  ‘Oh buzz off,’ muttered Lucilla. Rachel raised her eyes to the night sky, used to this sparring between her brother and her cousin.

  ‘Dear, dear, we have hit a raw nerve,’ Frank sneered, sauntering off. Then changing key, his voice mellifluous as runny honey, ‘Scrumptious food, Aunt Harriet. What a wizard cook you are.’

  ‘Why don’t you like your name?’ asked Rachel, the question sincere and artless. ‘I think it’s rather pretty.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Lucilla shot back, her assertive tone allowing no room for manoeuvre. ‘It sounds like a scream, like someone’s in pain.’ Rachel tilted her head to the side, testing the validity of this. She pushed her lips together and fastened her eyes interrogatively on her cousin’s. ‘Well, the way my mother says it, it does. The way she speaks my name sounds … sounds …’ She teetered on the brink of saying too much and pulled back. ‘It just doesn’t sound very nice, that’s all,’ she wound up with a mumble. ‘Sparklers look so pretty when they’re alight, but they are dreadfully ugly when they’re dead,’ she broadcast into the vast coldness.

  ‘Mmm,’ agreed Rachel, accepting Lucilla’s exposition, and her cousin’s reticence to say any more. She sucked her lip, an affectation that looked charming on her. Playing along she enquired, ‘If your name isn’t Lucilla, what is it then?’

  ‘Laura,’ Lucilla told her without hesitation. ‘My true name is Laura.’ She had been inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little House on the Prairie.

  ‘Do your parents know that you’ve changed it?’

  Lucilla shook her head. ‘It’s top secret,’ she said. ‘Swear on your life not to tell.’

  ‘I swear,’ vowed Rachel gravely. Then she winked and mimed zipping her lips. ‘I’ll get a couple more sparklers from Frank, and then you can have a go at writing your real name behind the apple tree.’

  But when she trotted back, lighted sparklers in both hands, Lucilla crossed her arms and shook her head. So Rachel drew abstract shapes instead and tied bows, and made a compass of her sparkler describing diminishing circles. Her mother gave them both burned hot dogs, and Lucilla crunched through hers feeling as if she was biting into a piece of coal. The stars above London were very large, like silver-white urchins spiking the black cave of the night. Scamp rushed about snapping at the fading sparks overhead, his eyes neon. A few days later, she woke to an apparition, Scamp, with all his fur lying the wrong way. His eyes had an unnatural sheen to them and he was limping. They took him to the vet and, when he prodded the swollen forepaw, Scamp yelped in pain. A fragment of a sparkler, an inch of fine metal wire had worked its way into his footpad. The vet administered a local anaesthetic and extracted it with tweezers. He prescribed a course of antibiotics.

  ‘That dog has cost a fortune one way and another,’ her father groused, sitting beside her on the bus as they rumbled home. He was jotting his calculations down in a small notebook. ‘When some men don’t earn enough to feed and clothe their families, we spend more than you would on a child to keep our dog.’ Lucilla stroked Scamp as he lay in her lap, nursing his hurt paw. And as she did so a shadow moved across her sun, a premonition. She drew the warm body a little closer. The limp did become less pronounced as winter settled in, but it was not eradicated.

  *

  One Christmas, Mr Ireland paid them an unexpected visit. On recognising who had come calling, added to the normal concerns any student might have if a teacher of theirs appeared uninvited on their doorstep, was the fact that it coincided with an evening when her father had been to the shed. He did not go to the shed every evening, which made it all the more nerve-wracking. Still, it could not be helped. Mr Ireland, unaware that anything was amiss, sat in the front room and drank tea. Lucilla eavesdropped at the door. She heard him say, ‘Your daughter is gifted. She is an artist. I want her to sit a scholarship for the Royal Academy. I think she’ll get a place. And if she succeeds, her fees will be paid for.’

  An interminable hiatus followed this. The clock struck seven before her father said, ‘I see.’ Then he said, ‘It’s int– inter– interesting that you think –’ To Lucilla, rapt and drinking in every word, it was apparent that the belt of her father’s diction had been loosened by his sojourn in the shed, though thankfully it had not quite become unbuckled.

  �
��It’s more than interesting,’ interrupted Mr Ireland and his gritty voice became a rumble. ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you? Lucilla has an ability that is out of the ordinary. Exceptional. We need to do all we can to nurture it.’

  ‘Would you like a macaroon, Mr Ireland? They’re home-made.’ This, the high condescending voice of her mother, playing at being genteel.

  ‘No, no thank you.’ Mr Ireland sounded nonplussed. ‘Look, Mr and Mrs Pritchard, may I speak plainly?’

  ‘By all … means,’ came her father’s slack riposte.

  ‘I have taught art for many years. In all of my career, I have not encountered another child with a talent like Lucilla’s. When I describe her as exceptional, I mean it.’

  Her mother gave a blocked-up nasal laugh. But it was her father who was their elected spokesperson. ‘Once again, Mr Ireland, we are grateful to you for making the effort to come and see us, but … but –’ He appeared to lose his thread, and Lucilla was humiliated into a hot-cheeked blush.

  Mr Ireland used her father’s meandering syntax as the opportunity of a second interruption. Lucilla imagined her toes digging into the chalky scrub of Beachy Head, the salted wet wind slapping her face until she was quivering, her blunt senses awoken. Let it be, let it be, let it be, came her speechless invocation. She pressed her forehead into the hallway wall, inhaling the frowsty taint of antiquated wallpaper. To her right, she glimpsed a photograph of the Royal Family. The tiny Royals clustered around the skirts of the Queen, Her Majesty’s face a mask of ordered maternal tenderness, the Duke looking masterfully on. An image of her own family barrelled in like an apocalyptic thundercloud, her father tottering out of the shed to juggle blurred numbers into the dead of the night, her mother’s knitting needles clicking, slab toffee scraping the enamel off both of their browned teeth. And she thought of her art, how it shouted out to be expressed.

  She came back to the muted conversation that was deciding her future. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ireland, but it’s not really what … what we want for our daughter.’ Another plunge of the knife from Brutus.