by Anne Berry
I regained my composure. ‘Oh yes, I’m fine now.’
‘Are you sure?’ She lowered her voice and drew me a few steps from her gawping colleagues. ‘It’s only that we could all hear you.’
I gave a huge sigh. I had been fighting for so long, and now like a soldier, the battle done, was stunned to find that I was still here. Swallowing hard, I managed, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m OK.’ It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, walking down the corridor towards the main entrance. I felt their eyes drilling into me. But I wouldn’t look back. I wouldn’t swing round. I wouldn’t thank the oriental nurse for her solicitude. They must have thought I was bonkers, a total screwball. Or perhaps my little death scene had been played out before them as often as there are cards in a deck. Was it rare, this squaring up to a dead relative, this hostile reckoning, this accounting delivered as a caustic denunciation? Could it be that the extravagances of grief that brought you to your knees as your dear departed took flight, were the rarity?
The corridor seemed to stretch for miles. It felt more as if I was crawling along a tunnel than negotiating a corridor, a busy hospital corridor. Faces bobbed by, nurses’ outfits, orderlies pushing trolleys, visitors clutching flowers and squinting at signs, patients slumped in wheelchairs being steered around and around the maze. Life and death were vying for supremacy everywhere. I vowed that I would not end my days in an anonymous bleak mausoleum like this. I would prefer to lie down in a field of grass and let the rain soak into me, than slide into the eternal darkness here. I was vaguely aware of a source of light growing steadily brighter, sucking me in. Was this what a near-death experience was purported to be like? I mused wryly. The long tenebrous tunnel, the pinprick of light intensifying until it was a scream of brilliance.
And then I was loitering in a car park, shame at my outburst flaring on my cheeks. I dallied with the idea of going back, of tramping that long corridor in the other direction, leaving the light behind me. Should I apologise, offer some rudimentary explanation for my extraordinary behaviour? Should I wade through dozens of nurses until I encountered the one who had shown me the way to the morgue? Should I say, it’s all right, she’s not really my mother? We’ve only been pretending all these years. The whole thing was a hoax really, a sham.
But I had so much to sort out, her death certificate and my life. I hailed a taxi and told him that I needed an undertaker. He nodded as if this was a regular request on the road that ran past the hospital. As we drove, I decided that Haverfordwest, this town that had put my biological mother and my adopted mother on the same map, was rather pleasant. The undertaker, a bow-legged genial man who tried to smooth the incongruous dimples from his cheeks, took me to the registry office to fill out the certificate. Later, I rang Frank from my bed and breakfast.
‘Frank?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Lucilla. My mother has died.’ I was candid. I felt drained of emotion and my tone was impassive.
‘I thought she only had days in her. I’ll come down immediately, sort everything out.’
‘There’s no need. I’m taking care of it.’ I was perfectly capable of dealing with this. For once, Cousin Frank could take a back seat. ‘You’ll be attending the funeral?’
‘Of course,’ he replied, indignantly. ‘I can make the arrangements if you like.’
‘No, I’ve done it already. I’ve seen the undertaker.’
‘Oh!’ He sounded momentarily crushed.
‘When I’ve finalised the details, I’ll let you know.’
‘Oh!’ Now his downwards inflexion reeked of ill temper. My cousin Frank was quite out of humour. Then he reinflated, his breath voluble as a gust of north wind. ‘Well then, I suppose I’ll see you at the funeral?’
This I would savour. I too inflated, taking an unhurried lungful. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t be attending.’
‘You won’t be attending?’ he parroted back, elongating the words to exhibit his incredulity.
‘Didn’t you hear me? Have we got a faulty line?’
Oh, he was tetchy now and making no attempt at niceties. ‘I heard you perfectly well. But you can’t miss your own mother’s funeral.’
I parried nimbly, mouthing my rejoinder. She was not my mother. Then my vocal chords vibrated. ‘Yes, I can.’ I felt in control, a novel sensation when dealing with dastardly Frank.
‘I’m sorry, Lucilla, but your absence is out of the question. Being Aunt Harriet’s executor comes with huge responsibilities. She would have expected you to be there, expected me to see to it. We have appearances to consider. Now I really would like –’
‘Oh, just fuck off, Frank.’ I dismissed him and hung up. It felt liberating, the expletive on my tongue. I only hoped that my landlady had not overheard her foul-mouthed lodger.
A few days later, back in Dorking, I wrote to the vicar and made my apologies.
I had spent my teens and begun my married life in the knowledge that I had two mothers; one was the genuine article, the original, and one was a fake, devoid of any maternal instinct. And now the fake was gone. Where she had been was a gap, a vacancy, an opening to be filled. My true mother, this figure of myth and legend, doubled in value overnight. She became a priceless commodity as the prized black tulips had once been. For if one mother could die, then why not two? What if I reached the end of my quest only to be told that she had perished as well, that the two of them, once neighbours, were now companions in death. I quelled my panic by reminding myself that my birth mother was young, well … at sixty-seven younger than my adoptive mother.
Hurrying after Henry, I reflected that, four years on, hope was reborn in the guise of Bethan’s marriage certificate.
It did not take bloodhound Rosemary more than a month to find out that, on the death of her husband, Bethan had sold the farm. Hearing that a relative wanted to get in touch, the new owners were happy to supply a forwarding address in Haverfordwest. When Rosemary updated me in a phone call, I strived to digest the meat of her communication.
‘Lucilla, I am going to write a letter to her. I shall be careful, don’t worry. Just confirm that she is who we think she is, and see how she reacts.’
A month later and I receive the reply sent from my mother, my real mother, still alive and living astonishingly in Haverfordwest, to Rosemary.
Dear Miss Dixon,
Thank you for your letter. It was indeed a surprise to hear from you. And I am sorry but I have no idea who you are. My name is Bethan, Bethan Modrun and my maiden name was Haverd. I look forward to hearing from you. I hope that the news you bring will be exciting,
Yours sincerely,
Bethan Sterry
I am suddenly out of breath and I have to sit down before my legs crumple under me. What hits me so powerfully is that she seems sincerely baffled that an apparent stranger is seeking her out. If she harbours any suspicion about the unexpected communication, it is that a distant relation has decided to bequeath her a great fortune. What she is not anticipating is a legacy of another kind. It is to come in the form of a daughter abandoned in the woods of time, a daughter who has at long last found her way home. I ring Rosemary Dixon the same evening. I say that at this juncture I would like to give the reins over to Norcap, let them initiate contact. But Rosemary insists that she is an expert when it comes to these delicate negotiations, and that I am being overly cautious.
‘I think you should write to her now, Lucilla,’ she instructs. ‘Don’t frighten her. Keep the tone casual, easygoing. Tell her about yourself, your life, your family.’ This is not how such a precarious situation should be handled, my intelligence pleads. I should exercise restraint, and pay my detective no heed. But as I sit down to write to my real mother, it is my heart and not my head that dictates.
Chapter 26
Bethan, 2000
I AM COVERED in sores like a leper, my skin split and bleeding. I have these episodes when all I can do is shut myself in my bedroom, with my curtains closed, shunning the light of day.
I feel like a preserved mummy. Now there’s a black witticism. Lowrie will be here soon with her briefcase. She will ask me how I am keeping. She will examine me. She will diagnose severe eczema. She will prescribe a cortisone cream and a course of steroids. She will say that eczema, like asthma, is exacerbated by stress, by anxiety … by contrition? I can tell her exactly what I am suffering from. A baby’s worth of my skin has been peeled off me. She will say that eczema can be psychosomatic. Oh, she’s clever my second daughter, my echo baby, my minder.
Finders, keepers, losers, weepers. Who am I? I am not a finder. That would be the adoptive parents. They went looking and found a baby, a daughter going spare, Lucilla. And Lowrie? Well she is the keeper. The baby who wasn’t given away. The one who stayed put. Losers? Ah, this is more difficult. I have come to the realisation that we are all losers on this Monopoly board. I have lost my gift baby and there is no health in me. Lowrie? Well, she has lost her mother, her mother who from her birth has been residing elsewhere, her psyche trapped in a delivery room at New End Hospital. As a child, instinct told her that no matter how tightly she hugged her mother, she could not hold on to her.
I took Leslie’s, my husband’s, introverted character as an indication that he was emotionally stunted, retarded, that there was no passion in his male body. But then there were three of us in the bed. My husband could not compete with an absentee German POW, with Thorston, the man his wife was really in love with, the man who in remembrance had been elevated to the status of a god. Leslie is dead now. I am a widow. He died of a stroke, a last indignity that left him wheelchair bound, and a captive audience to his unloving and unlovely wife. But in retrospect I believe I can say that he, too, was a loser. His wife committed adultery in thought several times each day of their married life. So what of the weepers? Oh, this is a crowded category. Countless weepers, though I hold the record for mourning that well exceeds Penelope’s as she wove her shroud for Odysseus.
Lowrie chose medicine as her career. It was a resourceful decision and I admire her for it. She couldn’t tinker with our minds, heal our fevered brains, so she turned, pragmatically in my opinion, to an area where she might prescribe an efficacious remedy. She was midway through secondary school when she deduced her antisocial behaviour was serving no one, least of all herself. Overnight, our she-devil turned into a swot, her bedside lamp burning into small hours as she pored over textbooks. Leslie was overjoyed.
‘I knew she was bright as a star,’ he told me, as he surveyed glowing end-of-term reports. ‘She needed to find something that she loved, something that fully engaged that busy head of hers.’
She needed to find something that she loved. I often mulled over those words when Lowrie was at school. And they boomerang back to me today. She needed to find something that she loved. Or did my second daughter need to find something, or more pertinently, someone who loved her back? In any case, once she had found her métier there was no restraining her. She became a slave to chemistry, physics and biology. She attended Cardiff University, embarking on a medical degree. I remember her relaying with glee the grisly details the day she dissected her first corpse. Some of the male students were clowning about, tugging on tendons, which made icy grey fingers twitch and bend. It sounded repulsive. Apparently, a few became queasy and had to leave the room. But not our Lowrie. She has a strong stomach. She did say that she was curious about him though, the man she dissected. She said it was sad to come to this at the close of your life, a corpse in all his discoloured grey splendour being sliced into segments by diligent, nauseous, medical students.
‘He had tattoos. A mermaid on one bicep and the Eiffel Tower on another. I think he was a sailor. Roaming the seas and sailing back to this inglorious disposal of his body.’ That was all she aired. But I suppose it was compassion of a kind. She spared him a thought.
I smoke twenty a day. I have done for years. I feel like a heaped ashtray inside. I have a smoker’s hack and a smoker’s husky voice. Lowrie has peered down my trachea and scrutinised my larynx. She says I have nodules and polyps on my vocal cords. She says I should have them properly checked out. I can’t be bothered, though it’s touching that she cares. And I’m not going to give up my fags however much she nags me.
‘It’s not good for you, Mother,’ she berates each time I light up. ‘It’ll kill you, Mother.’ Ah well, when you have known a fate more terrible than … Brice has become the most unlikely of companions lately. He shows up in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep for ghosts. He brings a gun, and fires shots in the air until they have all gathered up their silverfish entrails and glided off. Leslie, Mother and Father, the dogs, Fflur, Gwil and Red, Thorston, and Jessy the horse, and, of all animals, the cow that got stuck in the mud that day. She ambles in still coated with brown sludge, smelling of dung, craning her neck and lowing mournfully. And I can see him now, my German lover, bare-chested, his skin prickling with the cold, pimpled with raindrops, the rope knotted about his hips as he scaled the bank. All of him, every nerve and atom, was bent on saving that cow, while my father looked on scornfully. The beast went to slaughter just the same though, but somehow that didn’t diminish his feat. Still, Brice has no patience with all the animals.
‘This place looks like a squalid farmyard,’ he criticises, reaching for his gun. ‘Your bedroom is turning into a pigsty, Bethan.’ He sits on the end of my bed and rambles on about the war. His voice is like a sail full of regretful sighs. Some nights we share a cigarette.
‘Was it hell?’ I ask, and he draws his lips into that oh-so familiar groove. ‘I was lucky really. Taken out before I had a chance to make friends with depravity.’ I fix on the tip of his cigarette glowing like a firefly in the night.
‘Only you could think that way, be philosophical about death, your own death,’ I say, giving my raw skin a good scratch.
‘Let’s face it, Bethan, the war wasn’t a breeze for you either.’
‘The war was fine. Thorston was fine. The feel of his skin was fine. Lovemaking in a nest of snow was fine. Do I disgust you?’
‘Disgust me?’
‘Fraternising with the enemy.’
He shrugs. ‘We were both young men fighting for our countries. We wore different uniforms – that’s all.’
‘I think it’s generous of you not to condemn me.’ I lower my voice so that it is barely perceptible. ‘I want to wind back the years. I want to run into the Church Adoption Society and snatch my baby up from that lady’s stiff arms.’
‘I know you do, I know. But you can’t, Bethan, cariad, any more than I can have back my youth.’
So because we cannot unmake the beds of our lives, I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling the rough wool of his uniform caressing my cheek. We play pass the cigarette. He tells me war stories of daring dos and daring don’ts. And gradually my skin irritation lessens and I sink into a fitful doze. In the morning he is gone.
‘Mother, you look ghastly,’ Lowrie says, studying me when she arrives. She has made me a nice cup of tea and a slice of toast. She has spread it with honey. She draws back the curtains and I wince. She strides across the room, the floorboards creaking under the pressure of her assertive steps. She sets down her briefcase, lifts my arms one by one, rolls back the sleeves of my winceyette nightgown, and snorts through her nose.
‘You’ve been scratching again,’ she says, her brow puckered with displeasure. ‘I’ve told you not to scratch. It only aggravates the rash.’
‘I can’t help it,’ I plead, pathetically.
‘You make it spread.’
So here she stands, my grown-up echo daughter. She is tall like her father was, with a square plain face, homely – though to what she attributes this domestic slant I cannot say. Our home more closely resembled a war zone than a hearth to snuggle up to. She clicks open her case and rummages through it. She did make a tepid attempt at mastering psychology. She tackled it in her fourth year, the year in which they gain experience in hospitals treating living, breathing patients
. But she said it was depressing. She practised medicine at Bangor, Wrexham, Swansea and Cardiff. She has elected to work in intensive care, resuscitating lives that are only a wavering candle flame. She likes to bring people back, she says. I wonder if they like it.
‘I’m going to write you a prescription for another course of steroids. This time remember to take them,’ she says, scribbling on a pad. Her dark hair is worn in two plaits coiled in fat circles at the sides of her head, like earmuffs. She wears transparent pink-rimmed glasses. The small rectangular lenses make her look dauntingly intelligent. And she is dressed in a trouser suit, grey pinstripes. She looks very commanding. ‘And you are to rub this on three times a day,’ she orders, producing a tub of ointment as large as a tankard. I nod meekly.
She is gay, my daughter, my second daughter. She thinks that I don’t know. But I guessed when, in her twenties, no young men came to call. There was only a succession of women – one woman now. She has been with for her for some years. Glenice. They live together in a modern flat in Cardiff. I expect she thinks I would disapprove. Or perhaps she feels it’s none of my business. She doesn’t want children. She’s told me that much. ‘I haven’t the patience,’ she says. But I don’t think it’s that. It’s a surplus of love she is missing. She daren’t slosh it about. What she has she must guard wolfishly, for fear of depleting her already meagre supply. Besides, I do not hanker for grandchildren. Her choice does not rankle with me. In fact, I envy her – to be childless by design, to avoid the risk of having your heart steamrollered.
She has Glenice and is extremely private about their relationship. I won’t pry. I haven’t earned the right to share her secrets. I didn’t share mine with her. With both my parents gone and Leslie as well, my secret will die with me. My mother had a form of dementia leading up to her death. Her short-term memory was irreversibly damaged, but past secrets surfaced with chilling frequency. That’s how I learned about the letters. Thorston wrote to me three times. There was a second letter slipped behind mine to Thorston that day, and two more, which my father also destroyed. She told me he wanted me to go to him, to go to East Germany where he lived. She said he never stopped loving me, never stopped wondering about our baby. What I wish most of all is that she had died with that secret.
