The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  ‘We’re going to have a baby!’ he bayed at the moon.

  ‘Henry, for goodness’ sake!’ I hissed, my head swinging around to check for other seekers of privacy in the ceaseless churn of the city.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Henry reinforced at the top of his voice. ‘I want to tell the world!’

  I was moved, but reality was that the world could be a less than sympathetic listener. ‘Well, eventually,’ I said guardedly. ‘But perhaps we should start with my parents.’

  That thought sobered us both in a second. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ I shillied as we neared my home.

  ‘Good idea,’ Henry shallied. A sigh of relief whooshed out of him like the fast release of air from the open valve of a fully inflated bike tyre.

  Over tea and rock cakes that lived up to their names, we broke the news the next afternoon to my parents that their grandchild was on the way.

  ‘Mother, Father, I’m pregnant,’ I said, hoping my candour might enlist the same belated jubilation as it had in Henry. My mother, half an eye on the knitting in her hand – a tank top that she was making for my father – choked on a raisin. She set her craft aside on the arm of her chair and beat her chest. The increasing agitation of her movements made me fear that if uninterrupted she would progress to rending her garments, wailing and gnashing the few teeth she had left that were up to the job. However, after a good deal of wheezing and spluttering, the raisin suddenly shot out of one of her flared nostrils. Following this party trick, she was seized by an apoplexy of coughing.

  ‘I’m going to do the proper thing and marry her, sir,’ Henry said to my father over the din.

  My father’s face flushed a dark grape, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed with increasing effort. ‘You will do no such thing,’ he stormed, rising slowly and menacingly to his feet like an anvil cloud.

  We scrambled up too. Henry combed and combed back his blond fringe with spread fingers, a nervous habit of his when stressed. ‘But, sir,’ he importuned, ‘I love your daughter.’ He fingered his facial scar, another sign that he was wound up tighter than a reel of cotton. ‘I’m going to stand by her.’

  ‘Not if I can help it, you’re not,’ my father fumed, fists clenched and raised ready to punch Henry on the nose. My mother, finally recovered, kept on adding sugar lumps to her tea, until you could see the beige crystals cresting the brown fluid. ‘Our Lucilla is class. Do you think for one second I’m going to let her marry someone like you?’ Henry reeled back as if he had been physically struck by the insult. ‘You’re a worm, not a man. You won’t amount to anything. You might as well give up now, because nothing you say will persuade me to consent to this match.’

  I could see that Henry was stymied. I was weeks off turning nineteen. Without my father’s consent we could not marry until I was twenty-one. ‘It won’t make any difference if you stop us now,’ I defied him with all the hauteur I could muster. ‘Henry will wait for me, won’t you, Henry?’ Henry nodded diffidently, his ear lobes and the tip of his nose pinking in his humiliation. Then I let fly my spleen. ‘Why are you doing this? I shouted, tears of wrath spilling from my eyes. ‘Why won’t you let us be happy?’

  ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty,’ my mother croaked, putting in a word for me. ‘She’s in this … this predicament. Nothing to be done. Perhaps the most sensible thing would be to marry her off to this … this … this chap as soon as possible.’

  We both looked pleased and surprised that support for our union should come from this unlikely quarter. But then, fastening my eyes on my mother’s, on the truth encapsulated in that expression of panic, I understood. It was the prospect of her being landed with both me and the baby – a double maternal curse for evermore – that was prompting her to agree readily to our speedy marriage. The prospective husband could even be German for all she cared, so long as he took me and the baby to a distant land from where, henceforth, I would cease to be the loose thread in the fabric of her existence.

  My father had another agenda. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. Lucilla will stay with us and we’ll bring the baby up as if she was ours. Yours and mine, Harriet. Boy or girl, it will be Lucilla’s little brother or sister.’

  My mother looked poleaxed. ‘But how … how could it be,’ she faltered. ‘How could the baby be ours? I’m too old, too old to have a baby. Folks won’t believe it.’ She pulled at a greyed curl, tugged the thinning hair in her fisted hand, taking the spring out of it. ‘Besides, I’ve had a … a … I can’t have a baby. At the hospital they took my … my … well, you know …’ She widened her eyes until they were almost as big as the lenses of her glasses, willing conveyance of her delicate meaning. I guessed she was referring to her hysterectomy, the operation given out to be a lethal nosebleed. I had discovered the truth later with the assistance of a biology teacher at school.

  ‘Nobody knows about that,’ my father interjected obdurately.

  ‘Yes they do,’ countered my mother. ‘They all know. Mother and Enid and Frank and Rachel.’

  ‘Oh Enid,’ my father gave out in a hoarse whisper, adding, ‘Enid can keep secrets.’ My mother was confounded, brow crinkling and recrinkling as if trying to outdo snowflakes with the originality of each fresh expression. ‘And family will keep this buried. We’ve done it before, we can do it again,’ my father revealed didactically, leaving me to wonder what my parents had previously interred. He snorted, raised his elbows and drew them back, as if following some prescribed exercise regime. ‘Friends and neighbours will soon grow to accept the baby as ours.’

  Henry and I listened in disbelief, so floored that neither of us could summon our wits to produce the outrage such outlandish schemes warranted.

  My mother abandoned her curl and, reincarnated as a limp straggle, it sliced across her pleated brow partially obscuring her left eye. She spoke as though in her own world, her tone self preoccupied and rambling. ‘I suppose … I suppose,’ she said, reasoning aloud. She paused to take up her knitting once more, grasped the needles and hooked the wool around her index finger. ‘I suppose we could palm it off as Rachel’s. That might work what with her losing the baby and all.’

  This was too much, her plan making me jump as though I’d had an electric shock. ‘You’re not giving our baby to Rachel,’ I said, a dangerous stillness in my voice. ‘I’d rather die than let you do that.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ muttered my Henry, with a jerky series of nods that a doctor would have diagnosed as a nervous disorder. I took his hand in mine and, raising both triumphantly, gave his a squeeze, before releasing it.

  ‘Dying! Dying!’ declaimed my father with the hectic loquacity of the shed upon him. ‘Who said anything about dying? It’s birth we’re talking about.’ He gestured vaguely in my direction with snaking hands, as if he intended to conjure the infant out of my womb then and there. ‘There’s no call for any of this fuss and no question of Rachel taking the baby, Harriet. It’s ours, family, kith and kin.’ Distractedly, my mother slid the knitting needles from the row of stitches, took hold of the strand of grey wool, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, and pulled, slowly but surely unravelling the nigh on completed back to her pattern. ‘Put your mind at rest, Lucilla. But I won’t have my daughter married to a man who does … does what he has done to you before marriage.’ He fumbled in his pocket, drew out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘If he … forces her to do the … the act before they are married, what deviant behaviour, what vile perversions can we expect him to make our daughter perform to assuage his gross appetite after they are married?’

  My mother subsided, a good two thirds of her knitting piled up like spaghetti in her lap, her breaths coming in tiny pops as she worked her lips. The candy pink of Henry’s ear lobes and nose tip now suffused his whole face.

  My father then ordered Henry from the house. I wanted to go with him – but where? He lived at home, and his parents knew nothing about the baby yet. If I wasn’t working we couldn’t afford rent even for a bedsit. He
nry threw me a doleful look. Then he backed awkwardly from the room bumping into my father’s desk, and knocking some of the temperance society’s accounts onto the floor. I was prevented from showing him to the door by my father. He intercepted me and stomped after dear Henry, yelling abuse. When my father returned, my mother and I were eyeing each other like territorial cats.

  He approached me, a conciliatory expression on his sanguine face. A pace between us, he paused and opened out his arms. I flinched backwards, almost tripping over the fire surround. ‘Lucilla, you’re going to be fine. We’ll look after you and the baby.’ A small strangulated mew emitted from my mother’s blue-tinged lips. My father dismissed it and adjusted his glasses. ‘You’re best off home here with us,’ he said.

  The child in my belly kicked in displeasure and, glancing down, I realised that I still had a rock cake grasped in my hand. I dodged my father and made for the door, kicking at the accounts scattered over the floor en route. The theme tune of Champion the Wonder Horse blared out from the television in the dining room. Just where was that rearing stallion when you needed him? At the door, I whirled around, raised my fist and hurled the rock cake, scoring a tidy hit on the dome of my father’s forehead.

  As I neared the due date my father repeated his advances. It had been a hellish month. On a dim rainy day, I visited our doctor for a prohibitively late antenatal check. He harangued me, saying that I had been no end of a burden to my harassed mother. Which one? I had been tempted to reply. Which mother? The one in Wales who had carried me, or the one in London who had ruined me. ‘It is no wonder that your poor mother has been so ill with tension,’ he scolded, wagging his stethoscope at me. Lying on the examination table, my vast belly exposed, I felt at a distinct disadvantage. When I emerged, tears were coursing down my inflamed cheeks. A few days later, Henry paid my parents a second visit. This time he had his father in tow, an affable soft-spoken man with the friendly battered look of a favourite armchair about him. If Henry opened with a tone of reasonable discourse, he was hollering and scarlet with frustration by the time he closed. My father would not budge. Our marriage was outlawed. I was sent upstairs to stew in my room as if I was five. I heard the door slam on our unwelcome guests, when only a few minutes later they left.

  The following morning, my mother confronted me on the stairs, demanding what the neighbours would think. ‘What have you done? Oh what have you done, Lucilla?’ she wailed. ‘You bad, bad girl. The shame of it, the everlasting shame. How will I ever withstand the shame? What were you thinking of?’ I really did want her to stop asking rhetorical questions or I might just surprise her with an answer. What was I thinking of, with the knobbly spine of the tree digging into my back, and the aroma of overly ripe apples filling my lungs? My knickers wound about one ankle, Henry’s trousers rumpled around his knees, us groaning in chorus with each delectable thrust, and the apples thudding sweetly on the lush grass. Mostly that it was glorious, sensual and enthralling, and I wanted it to last forever. But I spared her the graphic image. Patting my Humpty Dumpty girth I japed back, ‘I’d say that was obvious, Mother.’

  My aunt Enid was equally galled, and only just stopped short of chucking stones at me. ‘You’re a harlot, Lucilla, a slut. I might have guessed. Cheapening yourself with that Henry fellow.’ Frank added his penny’s worth, telling me that I was no better than a dog. I rather liked this. Truthfully, I would have preferred to have four legs and fur, and nothing to worry about but a bone. And Rachel, who by now had suffered a second early miscarriage, ostracised me with cold resentment, saying only, ‘There is no justice in this world when whoring is rewarded with pregnancy, and respectable wedlock with miscarriage.’

  A Friday night with D day imminent. My father waylaid me when I went to bed. As I closed the door behind me, I saw him lurking in a corner by my chest of drawers.

  ‘Did I … st– startle … you? I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said.

  I saw that yet again he was inebriated. ‘Go away.’

  As I went to open the door, he moved speedily to block me. ‘I only wanted to say goodnight,’ he slurred.

  I took a few paces back. ‘I’m tired,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you are, Lucilla. There’s two of you now.’ He came closer on a whiff of whisky.

  ‘I shall scream,’ I informed him, calmly.

  ‘Let me look. Just … just let me look at you. That’s … all,’ he whispered feverishly, diving at my buttons with trembling hands.

  My teddy bear was off-duty on my bed. I seized him by his mohair legs. A hop, skip and a jump and I was at my father, whacking him hard across his face with it. Momentarily stunned, he cowered, his glasses fogged, his hand rubbing his sore head. I made as rapid an exit as my cumbersome shape permitted. Mrs Fortinbrass, her door open a few inches, peeped out, giving me a timorous victory sign as I shot by. I was on the landing when I had the sudden urgent impulse to empty my bladder. Seconds later and there was a puddle at my feet. My waters had broken.

  I’m not sure why, certainly not to deliver tea and sympathy, but my mother came with me in the ambulance. You’d have thought out of decency my father would have made himself scarce, but not a bit of it. Swaying precariously, he saw us off waving his grubby, spotted hanky proprietorially, promising to get to the hospital as soon as he could. It was as though he believed in his stupor that I was not his adopted daughter but his wife, that the baby I was about to have was not Henry’s but his.

  My mother appeared dazed on the journey to Barnet General Hospital. As I huffed and panted and moaned, arching my back and rocking my pelvis, she sat inspecting me curiously. It was as if she expected, hey presto, a pristine powdered baby to bounce out of me and into the medic’s waiting arms. At the hospital, a nurse took me into a bathroom, leaving my mother waiting outside. When we came out, me now in the throes of strong labour pains, my mother leaped to her feet.

  ‘Where’s the baby?’ she asked.

  ‘The baby?’ The nurse, Irish and as broad as she was wide, perused my mother from her feet upwards. When she reached the ridiculous hat with its spray of moulting black and white ostrich feathers, her expression was pitying. ‘We’ve only had a bath, a shave and an enema to make room for baby to come out.’ Hearing this, and feeling somewhat like a plucked chicken, I thought, oh my God, a bomb is going to drop out of my arse. A second later and I was groaning with another contraction.

  ‘So she hasn’t had it?’ my mother assayed, staring idiotically at the tub of me gyrating under the hospital gown.

  ‘Good gracious no! It’s the early stages altogether, Mrs Pritchard. It could take all night. Probably will what with it being a breech birth.’ Swimming in and out of seismic spasms of pain, my mother’s face flashed before me, a vision of bewilderment. She’d no notion what a breech birth was. It might have been laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. ‘Why not go home and get some sleep, so? Your daughter will be fine with us,’ came the nurse’s practical suggestion.

  My mother needed no second prompting. ‘Get a message to Henry,’ I gasped, as she set off down the corridor, though I doubted she would. My daughter was born in the early hours of the morning. She was unquestionably the most beautiful infant I have ever seen, with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes, blue eyes and a golden down of hair. She was 7 lb 9 oz, a good weight the midwife said, as she was wheeled away to the nursery.

  Dropping in and out of sleep, I started at my first visitor. It was not Henry, as I had hoped, come to clap eyes on the wonder of our baby, but my father. He was sitting in a chair staring at me through the large lenses of his glasses. He looked a sorry sight, eyes bloodshot, clothes and hair in disarray, as if his batteries had finally run down. I didn’t think he had changed or slept since the previous night. He was prattling. As I rose through the confusion of slumber, I was able to extract his meaning, why he was there.

  ‘Clever, clever, Lucilla. I’ve been to see her. Our daughter. The nurse pointed her out. I’m thrilled we’ve had a girl. Thrilled! I was wondering a
bout a Welsh name for her. What about Gwyneth? Gwyneth is a good name, a name to be proud of. I’ve run it by Mother. She didn’t say much but I think she likes it. Oh she’ll be along this afternoon after she’s done her bits and bobs. You know how she is. I can’t wait to take you both home. I’ve been looking at cots. I’ve a bit of money put by. How do you fancy going shopping for Gwyneth? When you’re rested, of course, and you’re fit enough to be up and about.’ He licked his lips and stood, running the rim of his trilby hat through his hands. ‘We’re going to be a proper family now, you and me and Gwyneth. Mend everything.’

  Awkwardly, I pushed myself up in the bed, ignoring the discomfort. ‘Her name’s Gina,’ I said painstakingly. ‘She’s not Welsh. And she’s not yours. She’s mine, my daughter.’ The name had grabbed me instantly only weeks earlier. It was from a newspaper article about an artist. As I spoke my visitor seemed to close up like a book. He was not my father, not the chairman of the Sons of Temperance either. He was one of the shadow men, the shabby tramps crumpled in doorways swigging from their bottles, the fallen we prayed for on our crusades in Bermondsey. I took a breath. I was so tired and wanted desperately to rest, but this had to be dealt with before sleep. I was in a ward with other beds, where other mothers lay reconfiguring their lives, wrestling with the epiphany that they were unutterably altered.

  ‘Lucilla, you’re exhausted and –’

  ‘I am not coming back to the house with you and Mother,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Where would you go, you and our baby?’ My adoptive father scratched his forehead, as if this conundrum was too much for his befuddled brain to take in.

  ‘Henry is going to look after us,’ I said, trying to convince myself.