‘Thank you,’ said Dora.
‘You did. Does that girl help you enough?’
‘Oh yes. She’s really very good. Strong. How are the girls? Are they all in bed now? Are they tired?’
‘They,’ said Cecilia, ‘they’re fine.’
‘I’m so glad,’ said Dora. ‘I think about them all at their schools and I wonder how they’re doing, who their friends are, what they’re up to in the day. They’re all so different. I don’t think I ever stop thinking about them!’
‘Nor do I,’ said Cecilia. ‘All of them,’ she said. She couldn’t look at Dora.
‘They’re really wonderful!’ continued Dora, her eyes shining, pausing as if to enumerate each girl’s particular qualities in her head. She topped up Cecilia’s nearly full glass, filling silence with activity.
‘Thank you,’ said Cecilia flatly again.
She took a gulp of wine. She half caught Dora’s eye. Repressed emotion glinted from her. Something had set it off. Yet Dora skated over the danger patches, blithely ignoring them, debatably oblivious.
‘All of them,’ said Cecilia again, unsteadily. She waited. The words sat in the silence. The fire spat. She instinctively wanted to smooth it over, but she forced herself not to. It was all too easy to regress, to become irritated and sulky yet self-sacrificing in Dora’s presence, using abnegation as a passive weapon in the face of Dora’s intractability.
Dora pressed her lips together. She breathed out slowly. A possible glitter of moisture appeared and passed in her eyes. The muscles supporting her frequent smiles sagged and aged her instantly.
Grief passed over Cecilia’s face.
‘After – after, Celie – after fifteen or so years of such intermittent contact, I can’t talk about it,’ said Dora. ‘I simply can’t,’ she said in more emphatic tones. She smiled. The very structure of her face was lifted again. She held her wine to the light, and she maintained the smile with determined focus. The glaze of denial in her eyes made her look almost mad, Cecilia thought.
‘I never stop thinking about her, you know,’ she said steadily. ‘I am going to keep on asking you about her.’
‘Who?’
‘Who? Her,’ said Cecilia, then softened her voice.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Cecilia.’
‘I loved her.’
‘You didn’t know her. You really did not know that baby. It was just a few minutes.’
‘A few minutes,’ said Cecilia, her voice strained. ‘Not even that. Seconds, perhaps. Even cats keep their litters for longer than that.’
‘You agreed,’ said Dora, as she had never said before in such direct terms, her lips tightly pressed together.
Cecilia shuddered. She fought against her own fear of her mother.
‘Did I have much choice? Did I have the choice? I was seventeen. Eighteen.’ Her voice weakened. ‘I’d just given birth. I wasn’t even booked at the hospital! No healthcare team – just a so-called “independent” midwife. I – I never even thought about all that until afterwards. You wanted me to give her up. You – you organised that, right – right from the beginning.’
‘And you agreed,’ said Dora, sitting down. Her chest rose and fell beneath her corduroy.
‘I agreed. I agreed. And I will never forgive myself,’ said Cecilia, as though talking to herself. She ran her fingers across her forehead, up through her scalp. Her skin was flushed. ‘It was all arranged for me. I did agree. I agreed. I hate myself to this day that I did. But – You never gave me time to change my mind.’
‘Well –’
‘None of you, none of you did. You – you,’ said Cecilia, catching her breath raggedly. ‘You didn’t give me any choice. I want to know why. Why, why? You were such a mother. Why didn’t you want to keep her? Want me to keep her?’
‘There is no why. It’s so long ago, Celie,’ said Dora more gently.
‘I know, I know, that’s what I can’t bear!’ said Cecilia, the clock, a hook, a pewter container appearing to enlarge to fill her vision. ‘It’s too late! It’s over! She’s twenty-three now – her childhood’s over. And who knows what it was like? That’s what I can’t bear. I just cannot bear.’ She drew in her breath. ‘What was that like? I’ll never know, I’ll never know if her childhood was all right. I just want to find out.’
‘It would have been –’ Dora twisted her fingers. ‘You know, you did agree at that time.’
‘Would have been what?’
‘Nothing,’ said Dora, shaking her head, closing her lips.
‘What?’ said Cecilia urgently, taking Dora’s arm, spilling wine as she moved. She stared at the drops on the waxed surface of the table. ‘It would have been what? Why won’t you tell me?’ She said more calmly.
‘Celie,’ said Dora.
‘Tell me who took her,’ said Cecilia. ‘Who adopted her?’ Her mouth was an oblong of pain.
‘How can I tell you that? How can I?’
‘You can. You’ve got to. I know you know! I know. It’s too late now. I’m not going to do anything.’
‘Then why do you want to know?’
‘I want to know if her childhood was – passable. Jesus.’ She put her head in her hands. ‘At least all right.’
‘I’m sure it was.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They wanted a baby very much.’
Cecilia flinched. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God.’
‘They couldn’t get pregnant. It wasn’t happening. The – contact I used told me. And there were you pregnant. Not wanting to be –’
‘I know. I know. I was –’
‘What’s done is done,’ said Dora, as she had said so infuriatingly frequently before.
‘That’s right. Sweep it under the fucking carpet. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Pretend everything’s nicey-nice, oh lovely, lovely, candles and wine. Schubert on the radio. Three lovely girls. Pretend,’ shouted Cecilia, shocked by the sound of her own voice, by how she was challenging Dora, the only person who could silence her.
‘Cecilia,’ said Dora.
‘Well tell me who,’ said Cecilia.
‘Adoption is anonymous.’
‘It fucking well wasn’t, though, was it?’
‘It was as good as,’ said Dora.
Cecilia clamped her hands on Dora’s shoulders. They were startlingly thin. She let them go, shocked.
‘I lose my temper,’ she said, ashamed. ‘I can never be as calm as you were. I’m sorry.’
Dora nodded.
‘I tried every channel,’ said Cecilia. ‘All the agencies, social services departments, records, everything I could find, and my name never came up. No child. No indexing number. I wasn’t even a registered pregnancy. You know that.’
Dora gazed ahead.
‘This was an “unofficial adoption”,’ said Cecilia slowly as though spelling it out. ‘It was by no means an adoption in the legal sense. You can’t even really call it that. Even though we refer to it as an adoption, there was no legal change of family. “Illegal fostering” at best. For God’s sake –’
Dora looked at her. Her lips parted.
‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in that,’ she said eventually, swallowing and emitting a strangled little compression of air for which she covered her mouth with her hand in apology.
‘I’m “interested”,’ said Cecilia, ‘because that means you arranged that so-called adoption without proper paperwork, let alone authority – without an interim period for me to change my mind; without, without all the counselling, fostering, the access, all the normal – the normal procedures. Dora. Dorothy. Social workers. You know, all that other birth mothers are granted because they might see sense and change their minds.’
Dora shuddered. She opened her mouth. She closed it again.
‘It wasn’t so odd in those days,’ she said in a voice weak with defensiveness. ‘Things were different. Less formal. It wasn’t all signed and sealed; there wasn’t all the bureaucracy of nowadays, you k
now.’
‘You talk as though it was after the war, with babies being given to barren sisters, to neighbours,’ said Cecilia, her voice rising. ‘ “Eee, we’ve got too many mouths to feed. Here. Have one, why don’t you?” ’
Dora shook her head. Her eyes seemed glazed.
‘When I was young, even in Kent, it happened a lot more, you know. A friend’s sister – younger sister – the mother had to go and work and she was left behind with relatives and just never taken home. It was about who could and who couldn’t.’
‘I don’t care –’
‘Many babies fell outside the system, you know.’
‘It was the Eighties by the time you –’
‘It was not so very odd. It seemed a suitable alternative to an agency.’
‘I couldn’t even put my details on a register to show I wanted to contact her! What do you think I felt when that became legal? No indexing number system attached to the adoption. And all those years, no official way of her finding me – either.’
‘You wouldn’t have been able to adopt Izzie if it had been official,’ said Dora, and again the steel entered her voice.
‘I –’ said Cecilia.
‘Do you think they’d have let you adopt if you were already on record as having given up a child?’ said Dora. ‘Not a chance in hell,’ she added.
Cecilia flinched.
‘You know. You know very well. That’s why I couldn’t pursue it,’ she said desperately. ‘You know that –’
Cecilia recalled a sliver of the past with clarity. Oxford would not defer her place. Her A level grades having fallen well below her teachers’ predictions, she had no wish to take the entrance exam again, and had applied to Edinburgh University for the following October, simultaneously ashamed and indifferent, wishing only to live as far from home as possible. In her last year there, she had stood in a phone box, the whirr, clunk, swallow of the coins, the plastic against her cheekbone as she phoned the local authorities in Devon and asked for her baby, after having written a letter to social services with her enquiry. She was three months pregnant with Romy.
‘We have no record of a baby of that name,’ came the voice. ‘Can you repeat the mother’s – your own name?’
Questions and delays followed, the ten pences, fifty pences hesitating with that rollercoaster pause before they lurched into darkness and silences were filled with the beating of her own pulse. She blew breath on the glass; hills stretched above her; students meandered past. She had known bleakness, dullness, what she had later realised was depression, in those first years after the affair and pregnancy. Her haunting by Mara began there. She saw her baby in Edinburgh, in little limbs suddenly visible in the clatter of New Town tea shops, or clinging to her as she walked the Pentland Hills, trying, trying so hard to forget the recent past. Her missing baby was in the university corridors as a piercing of guilt behind swing doors, blooming with no warning in a room and making her head grainy with panic. She was a face projected on a cloud of almost-happiness in a pub with students. She was there in other people’s buggies. She sat, fleetingly, lightly, on Cecilia’s lap in seminars.
‘Are you sure of the birth date?’ came the official voice.
‘Yes.’
‘You couldn’t have got it a day or so out? That sometimes happens.’
‘No.’
‘Then we appear to have no birth certificate.’
Cecilia was silent.
‘Nothing?’ she said.
‘No record of adoption or registration of a baby to that mother on that day,’ came the voice, and Cecilia could by then hear suspicion begin to stir. She could imagine slammed filing cabinets, alarm bells, letters winging their way to her and various authorities, and yet all the while the conversation was not entirely surprising to her: something had nagged at her, some knowledge that it was not quite right, that there had been no midwives from the hospital, just the apparent ‘community midwife’ who was one of the lodgers and who only appeared for the birth; no efficient women from the local services, just Dora wielding a piece of paper while she lay in physical pain and confusion. She had barely noticed at the time. She hadn’t wanted to notice. She had only one thought as she lay there: she was abandoned by the one she loved, and so her life was useless.
‘You got Izzie,’ said Dora now, steadily.
‘I “got” Izzie? As compensation? My replacement for my child?’
Dora shrugged. ‘If you want to see it that way.’
‘I needed to have Izzie because of – of the other. I’m so glad, so very very glad about Izzie,’ said Cecilia, her voice faltering. ‘But surely you can see I had to make up – some pathetic attempt to make up for the dreadful thing I’d done.’
‘I know.’
‘And there was this little girl – there, in the council’s care, as soon as we registered,’ said Cecilia, smiling despite her pain through her blurred vision. ‘I heard about her. That scrawny crying baby. How can you even –’
‘I know.’
‘It was Izzie! Imagine life without her! I always thought – if I can care for her, perhaps I can make up. Perhaps, then, M – the baby – was being cared for in the same way as I cared for Izzie. It would all work out, mothers sharing the care, spread across the world, linked but unknown. It sounds mad, but I thought it.’
Dora nodded.
‘Do you see?’ she said, hearing again that she sounded almost unbalanced. ‘And the more interviews with the social services we had, the more I wanted her, this Izabel, and it seemed so miraculous when there was no enquiry, no discovery of the other one. But we know why, don’t we?’
Dora exhaled loudly.
‘Your eyes are glinting,’ said Cecilia slowly.
‘Well really,’ said Dora. ‘I feel quite beaten, Celie.’
‘Well you –’ said Cecilia. Her hair had become tangled with her nervous tugging. ‘If it were known that you – you of all people –’ she laughed incredulously ‘– organised an “informal” adoption, there’d have been a police inquiry, and you’d have been arrested, wouldn’t you? To spell it all out.’
‘I –’
‘Without a doubt. And, you – It’s the fact you got me to sign a piece of paper you had dreamed up that always kills me. I think it was just a typed piece of A4, not a printed form, wasn’t it? I’ve tried to remember it so often. Fool that I was.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You know, it was only when I started the process of adopting Izzie – all those interviews and assessments, hundreds of forms and statements and so on – that I realised that mine had been nothing like a normal adoption. It took years for Izzie to be legally ours.’
‘If it had been formal, you wouldn’t have been allowed to adopt Izzie,’ repeated Dora.
Cecilia paused. ‘It’s interesting how you never mention this “contact” you always claimed you used,’ she said. ‘This contact you used to give my baby away. It’s strange there’s no trace of her, isn’t it?’
‘She died.’
‘But no one seems to have known anything about her. How long do you think I spent trawling through Ashburton for someone whose name you couldn’t quite remember, just to find that there had been a children’s home there years ago, all closed down, that woman seemingly non-existent, rumour after rumour, leads confirmed and contradicted with equal certainty? And yet nothing. After all that, always, nothing.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Dora. She breathed heavily. She shook her head.
‘I wonder if she existed.’
Dora was silent. ‘I –’ she said, and then clamped her mouth closed and said nothing more.
‘How –’ said Cecilia, steadying her breathing, her voice emerging weakly, ‘how am I supposed to relate to you? To love you? I want to look after you. I do want to – ease all this. Despite everything, I do.’
Dora’s shoulders sank. She shook her head again. Her throat tightened with a spray of wrinkles as she swallowed. ‘I know,’ she said eventually.
‘Tell me,’ sa
id Cecilia, again shocked at her own outburst towards Dora.
‘Gabriel,’ said Dora, clumsily trying a new track. ‘Gabriel never stood by you, looked –’
‘Gabriel? Oh. God, you can leave him out of this.’
‘Well –’
‘Just tell me,’ said Cecilia. ‘Just tell me. Do you think she had a nice childhood? A reasonable one?’ She glanced away. She pressed her nails into her palm.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dora, swallowing again, her eyes shining with moisture. ‘I think so. Every chance was there.’
‘And you’re not going to tell me any more than that?’
‘I don’t know any more than that,’ said Dora. She looked up at Cecilia, and her chin moved forward, the jutting chin of determination that made Cecilia queasy, and her eyes took on a skin of confusion until she appeared, thought Cecilia, quite stupid.
Cecilia slammed her glass down on the table. She stood up.
Dora looked at the table. She raised her chin again as Cecilia reached the door.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Cecilia.
Twenty-two
March
The stars, more stars than Cecilia had seen for so many years, were soaking, spraying the thatches of the hamlet as she ran back from Dora’s cottage. The raw air caught her breath. She is somewhere in this world, she thought into the darkness stretching over the tors and the spaces beyond.
A guitar was being played with expertise on the other side of the house, bringing back her father. A light dimmed.
‘Hi Ma,’ called Izzie, opening a bathroom window that scraped against the thatch and looking down, grinning.
‘That man’s there, isn’t he?’ said Cecilia, and hurried towards the back door. ‘He has to go.’
‘What? Who?’ said Izzie, hastily closing the window.
Izzie ran back to her bedroom, quickly locked the door, and scuttled back to Dan. He sat crouched cross-legged on her window seat where the snow-soft plaster threw his body’s angles into relief, and he brought in an air of dirty clothes and new mud. He plucked at a guitar, threw her smiles, and lay his head back listening to the rhythm as it slid through the air.
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