Give Them All My Love

by Gillian Tindall

  I resolved that at least I would be kinder to Ann. Or at any rate less unkind.

  As if in some telepathic response to this, Melvyn himself called to see me at my office a few days later. He was not wearing the studied jeans-and-jerseys he usually wore to work (and of which I disapproved, because I don’t think that teachers, doctors, psychologists and similar power figures should try to fool their customers by dressing down to them). He was, for once, in a suit; his small beard was neatly trimmed and his manner was quiet and polite, almost diffident. As a matter of fact his manners in general were rather disarmingly good, a fact which I always forgot from one encounter to the next: the odd result of this was that I always felt more charitable towards him immediately after meeting him face to face than when his name came before me at other times.

  He made no mention of the fact that I had refused to endorse his Place of Safety application, though I am sure he had come to know about this. (Perhaps even from Ann, I suddenly thought?) Instead he was ostensibly there to consult me on another matter, an uncontentious one to do with home-tuition for sick children.

  After he had left, with enquiries after Ann and expressed hopes that we and he and Birgit would meet again soon, I could not decide whether he was genuinely, amiably unaware of my suspicion of him, or whether he had timed his visit carefully to defuse the lurking enmity he sensed coming from me. If so, I had to give him better marks for duplicitous tact and caution than I would have expected to.

  Then, for the rest of the winter, work consumed me again. Or I thankfully allowed myself to be consumed by it, visiting schools near and far, going from one committee meeting or day-conference to another, fulfilling my expected rôle on a Government working party. I abandoned, temporarily, that blind, intuitive search for something quite other that I could not yet define – that sense of impending obligation which had preoccupied me recently and of which I had spoken obscurely to the boy Jeffrey. When the uneasy shadow of it crossed my mind, I told myself that it was all part of an anxiety-syndrome of seeking trouble where it did not really exist. I thought I might perhaps be judging the world, and even myself, too hardly, in the vain attempt to reach some certainty, some stripped down core of meaning which, at my stage in life, I really knew to be unreachable.

  In brief, for no particular reason that I could tell, I got a bit better again.

  I also told myself that to see plots and mysteries in life’s chronically unplanned course is a sign of paranoia or religious obsession or both.

  Then, in the late spring, I went to a conference in Geneva –

  Part Four

  Then, in the late spring, I went to a conference in Geneva about prisoners of conscience. I went because I was asked and it seemed churlish to refuse, because I hoped to meet a couple of other people who were also interested in the fate of Piotr Mihailovitch Malenko. And because five days away by a Swiss lake in April seemed an attractive prospect.

  The conference was (as we said to each other) very jolly, more so than I had expected it to be; and since it was being conducted bilingually in French and English I was able to make myself useful to the organizers. In the five-and-a-half years since Marigold’s death my French, through lack of use, had atrophied, and, with it, my sense of having another identity across the Channel. Now both of these expanded again. I listened to everyone’s complaints about each other’s national failings, and did a great deal of extempore interpreting, some of it diplomatic. As I say, I enjoyed myself and, for the moment, forgot about everything else. The temporary stage-set of lake, mountains, Old Town, hotels, cafés, flower baskets and jette d’eau might have been a brand new life into which I and my companions of fortune had escaped for a timeless eternity. If Aunt Madge’s Other Side was supposed to be like this, I could see the appeal.

  My chief companions were the President of the historical association I too was representing, who was a wistful history lecturer of White Russian parentage, together with the paid Secretary to the much larger organization which had sponsored the conference. She was one of those lynch-pins on whom such gatherings depend: I had not met her before, but sought her out on the second morning in the conference office, needing her to arbitrate in a brewing Anglo-French dispute about speakers overrunning their time. The International President, a Frenchman given to high-flown oratory himself, was for letting them have their head; James – the history don – felt that in this case the timetable would disintegrate, but ‘couldn’t face being the chief frog-offender’. I was inclined myself to the hard line that every speaker knew in advance he had twenty minutes only, and should abide by that. I did not mind, I said, climbing onto the platform myself like Old Father Time to snatch the papers bodily, if necessary, from the hands of over-garrulous Distinguished Contributors, but if I was to do this I felt I wanted a back-up authority. I hoped that the Secretary, Annie-something, would provide this, and she did.

  ‘Of course they’ve got to keep to time. What on earth are Serge and James thinking of? If you don’t bully people on these occasions they become impossible.’ I was not sure if it was the President and James or the horde of Distinguished Contributors that needed to be bullied, but I warmed to Annie. I learnt later that she was about thirty, but something about her – her complexion, perhaps, her rather awkward movements, her slight plumpness – suggested a younger woman, almost a schoolgirl. She was no schoolgirl however but a natural organizer, and source of information on prisoners round the world.

  ‘You tell Serge and James I say so,’ she said, pushing long, curly hair out of her eyes. It was nice hair, I thought, but for some reason it was a deep reddish-purple. This crude signal of a desire to outrage combined oddly with her intelligent but rather pasty face and her brisk Home Counties accent.

  ‘Tell them I said that if the session overruns each day like it did yesterday we’ll find ourselves charged thousands of pounds extra for keeping the staff and the cleaners overtime. That’ll shake Serge, anyway. He pretends he’s a great man of letters and above such considerations, but actually he was wetting himself last Christmas when we weren’t sure if we’d costed the Conference right.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘Yes, thank goodness. There’ll be a surplus. I’m awfully pleased actually. We were going to have to launch a huge appeal to get our legal fund up again after all those African cases, but now we may not have to … But don’t ask me if it’s true about the cleaners. Let’s just say it is.’

  ‘I won’t ask,’ I said, entertained, and wondering at the back of my mind whom she reminded me of: another woman – a man? A child? It was hard to say. I would have liked to linger in the office and talk to her, suddenly bored by the thought of going back into the hall to listen politely to people making speeches in tongues that were often not their own, but she was already attacking her typewriter with an angry vigour: she must get through ribbons quickly, I thought.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said. ‘Oh not again.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Mmm. It’s me really, not the machine, but I’m furious. The professional organizer here said we needn’t bring any typewriters, that it would all be laid on, and so it is – but these machines say Awertz, not Qwerty.’

  ‘Awertz?’ I was lost. It sounded like computer-speak, something I had recently decided I was too far on in life to bother to learn.

  ‘Yes, Awertz.’ Impatiently. ‘You know. There’s a Z where the Y ought to be and an A for the Q because it’s a silly frog machine – as James would say. Oh dear! Conferences do make one childish, don’t they? James says it’s because it’s like being back at prep school, all rules and prefects and compulsory fun together. Jolly luxurious prep school he must have been at if the hotel reminds him of it.’

  ‘Where were you at school?’ I was still vaguely thinking that I knew her face because she might have passed through one of my schools years ago. She put on an expression of grotesque disgust.

  ‘Oh-h-h- Cheltenham. But I wasn’t much of a success there. I rebelled, and so forth.’r />
  Hence the accent, I thought. And, now, the deliberately shocking purple hair.

  After that I began to gravitate towards Annie, as I still believed her to be called, at the parties which were held every evening in hotel bedrooms (‘Bring your toothglass’). It really was, as James said with enthusiastic nostalgia, rather like dormitory feasts; except that afterwards we would go out, in fours and fives and sixes, to restaurants overlooking the light-pricked lake, where we ate expensive and delicious Swiss food and felt extravagant but carefree, and glad to be there and not at home.

  It was not till the last evening, when the party was a formal reception in a grandiose public building, with waiters, and the Mayor, and an old and famous novelist from a nearby mountain, that I discovered that Annie was not called that.

  ‘Yes, it’s really Ammy,’ she said resignedly when someone had corrected me. ‘I didn’t tell you earlier because lots of people mishear it as you did, and it really doesn’t matter. I don’t like my name anyway.’

  ‘What’s Ammy short for, then?’

  ‘Amanda. Amanda Goring.’ She made her disgusted face. ‘Now you see why I don’t mind when people get it wrong.’

  Another man joined us, and the conversation moved on. It was several minutes before the notion that I had learnt something momentous began to surface in me. My mind went back over the months to that day in Court when another Amanda-Something, criminal and profoundly alienated from her adoptive family, had stood briefly before me and I had begun to remember. Now I felt as if that non-event had, after all, been the beginning of things, some sort of unfocused preview for this.

  ‘You must excuse my asking,’ I said, as soon as I could get her alone in a corner. ‘It is a very presumptuous question – but are you by any chance adopted?’

  Yes, was the answer, of course, yes. It did not even seem revelatory. Perhaps, at some point long ago, I had heard the name ‘Goring’ and it had lodged unrecognized within me, in that vast obscure filing system of the memory we hardly consult – except under some strange pressure of circumstances.

  Amanda looked fearful. It was as if she, too, had at some level long foreseen this day, and her own emotion was not so much surprise as the tension of expectation realized. She gazed at me, her puffy face a little pale, and nibbled at her already well-gnawed nails. In inappropriate contrast, her stubby fingers were ornamented with silver rings.

  ‘Yes, I’m adopted. How did you know?’

  ‘I think I knew your parents.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’ She sounded resigned, but devastated also under the impact of something that always might happen and now had. It did not occur to me till afterwards that she might have wondered for a moment if I, I myself –

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said, as if I were a young man and she desirable to me. ‘Let’s go and eat somewhere on our own.’

  Outside, the week’s shining weather had broken and the temperature had dropped many degrees: a fine, cold rain blew across the lake. Huddled in inadequate coats, we made our way a couple of hundred yards along the quay, and then took refuge in the first eating house on offer, a garishly lit brasserie. The neon strips made her hair more virulently purple, her face paler. She was wearing some sort of double-breasted pseudo-male gear, I think, and dangling earrings, but I knew now why I had, all the week, subconsciously expected her to appear in the dusty black of the Left Bank in the 1950s.

  On the wet quay, while she clutched my arm, I had established corroborative facts, places and dates. Now I said:

  ‘I remember your parents well.’

  ‘I’ve met my mother,’ she said, surprising me. I think I sensed even then from her tone that it was her father she really wished to meet.

  ‘Met her – how?’

  ‘I wanted to. Once I was grown up. Well, you know the Law’s been changed. You’re allowed to look for your parents now.’

  ‘I’d forgotten that.’ Although of course I knew about changing ideas, the Law changing to suit, I had gone on unthinkingly believing that some impenetrable barrier still separated now and then. I must have stared at this over-weight, uneasy, half-attractive young woman with amazement, for she said defensively:

  ‘Perhaps you think I shouldn’t have?’

  ‘No – oh no. On the contrary. I would have wanted to, in your place.’

  ‘For a while I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Or at least, I did years ago when I was younger – fourteen or fifteen. You know how you are at that age … And I didn’t really get on with my parents. I mean Mummy and Daddy, the ones who adopted me. We’ve always been uncomfortable with each other. I think they were disappointed in me. They’d wanted a dear little girl, I expect, and I didn’t fit … Oh don’t say ‘‘Often born children feel like that about their parents too’’, I shall vomit if you do. I’m so sick of that well-meaning line.’

  ‘Yes. I can understand that. I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘Then, later,’ she said, ‘I was at Art School and having a good time, and I forgot all about my real parents for a bit. But then later again, after other things had happened … Ideas hang about in your mind and come back to you, don’t they?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘It was quite difficult,’ she said, more matter-of-fact now, ‘to trace my real parents.’

  ‘I can’t quite think how you did?’

  ‘Well, I knew Mummy and Daddy would go into a frightful after-all-we’ve-done-for-you routine if I even mentioned it to them, so I didn’t. I mean, I don’t see them that often, and it wasn’t really their business … But they had an old friend who was a lawyer and who’d been my godfather, wouldn’t you know. A fussy old stick, and gay as they come I rather think – not that Mummy and Daddy would have noticed that – but not a bad old thing. He always gave me money at Christmas, proper cheques, I liked that. He’s dead now … My family’d always stayed stuck in East Grinstead and never gone anywhere or done anything, so I was pretty sure Uncle Stanley (that’s what I called this old boy) would know something about my adoption, and I turned out to be right. Oh, he huffed and puffed a lot and said I ought to ‘‘leave well alone’’ and ‘‘might turn up some distressing facts’’ but in the end he told me where I could look up my original birth certificate and even told me the name of this social worker who’d been my Guardian ad litem. My parents hadn’t gone through a proper adoption society or the Council or anyone. I suppose they thought that was ‘‘only for the working classes, my dear’’. I mean – honestly.’

  ‘People didn’t have to go through formal channels in those days. Did you meet the social worker too?’

  ‘Yes. I tracked her down. It was quite difficult because she’d just retired. It was by a fluke really that I found her – a friend of mine turned out to have worked with her. Anyway she wasn’t awfully pleased to see me, at first. But then she sort of changed and was all over me. I thought she was a bit peculiar, actually. She’d got some fancy religion, and kept talking about taking me to her church … I managed to get out of that one. She was kind, really, as if she did want to help, but there seemed to be some emotional agenda to it that turned me off, like with some dykey old mistress at boarding school. I don’t think she was a dyke, though. She kept talking about redressing the balance of the past and living with one’s mistakes and ‘‘facing reality’’ and I began to feel that I might count as one of her mistakes.’

  ‘This was Shirley Gilchrist?’

  ‘Yes – that was her name. How did you know?’

  ‘I’ll tell you by and by. I’m glad she helped you, anyway.’

  ‘Well it was she who really put me on the track of my mother. I knew what her name had been by then, of course, it was in the records I’d looked up, but Shirley Gilchrist knew that she’d married afterwards and what her new name was. Otherwise I’d probably never have found her, even though I’m very determined when I try. Luckily her married name wasn’t a common one. She hadn’t moved far, actually, any more than Mummy and Daddy have. I mean, she was bor
n in Kettering and I eventually found her in the ’phone book in Northampton. I can’t think how I came to be born in Paris: my birth was first registered at the British Embassy there, it was a real surprise when I discovered that. Oh – but perhaps you can tell me why?’

  ‘Perhaps I can. Shall we have that later? You go on now. You met your mother – ?’

  ‘I met her.’ Amanda’s tone was quite subdued now, as if the momentousness of that encounter had led to inevitable anti-climax, or just was not expressible. ‘I wrote to her at the address in the ’phone book, and after a while she wrote back. So I went up to Northampton. A little semi-detached house. Not too bad. But just a bit – dreary. Well, like her, I suppose …

  ‘Fat – not that I can talk, I’d better watch it, hadn’t I? Oh – you know: a middle-aged woman. Just anyone, really. Surprised, and a bit flustered and reticent about my coming to see her. Not nasty or anything – I mean, she let me come, and even had a cake for me – but not specially nice either. Not anything really. I – I know it sounds silly, but I was awfully disappointed.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I’d expected it – her – to be somehow special to me, I think. After Mummy and Daddy and East Grinstead and everything … But it wasn’t. Not really.’

  I remembered Joyce selling Evan’s paintings on the streets of Paris in her picturesque black clothes. I thought of her wistful enquiry to me about Sartre and Madame Bovary. Then, for some reason, I thought of Humphrey and Carmen.

  ‘You said she’d married again?’ I said, and then corrected myself: ‘I mean – she’d married?’

  ‘Oh yes. Only a couple of years after I was born – that’s how Shirley Gilchrist knew about it, she was still in touch with her then. But she’s a widow now. She and her husband kept a café at first, she said (only she called it a coffee house and went on about how it had been the first one in the Midlands, which sounded daft to me). Then they kept a pub at some point, and then ran some sort of old people’s home, but that’s gone bankrupt or been shut down, I think. And then her husband had died. Of drink, I rather gathered, although she didn’t spell it out. Just talked about ‘‘bad luck’’ and everyone having their ‘‘weaknesses’’. She was fearfully sort of respectable, genteel I think it’s called – a bit self-consciously so, I thought afterwards – but there was something about her rather … I don’t know exactly how to say it. Not as strong as ‘‘shifty’’, but …’