Give Them All My Love

by Gillian Tindall

  ‘Marginal?’ I suggested.

  ‘Would that be it, what a funny word, it sounds French? Yes, perhaps it would be the word: on the margins of life, I see what you mean. Oh dear. My mother. Does it sound awful to be talking about her like this?’

  ‘No. Not at all. Or rather … Yes, perhaps, but I understand.’ How easy it is to say that.

  ‘She was all right, I think,’ said Amanda, flushing suddenly. ‘I mean – she didn’t want anything from me, money or anything. She kept making that clear, although it hadn’t so much as occurred to me beforehand that she might. I did find that rather embarrassing, I must say … That’s a sign of the background I grew up in, I suppose. She wasn’t on her own anyway, she had two big sons. My half-brothers! I kept thinking about them for a bit afterwards – I’d always wanted a brother – but of course there was nothing to think, really. Like I said: after all that, just nothing really there.’

  ‘You didn’t meet these boys – young men, I should say?’

  ‘No. She took good care I didn’t. She was keen to get me out of the house before six, kept talking about the best train back. I don’t blame her really. They probably didn’t know I existed.’

  I saw again Joyce, lying weeping in the Paris hospital at the time of giving up her baby, saying that the pain of childbirth had been so awful she did not think she could go through with it again. Then I saw an overweight widow in a Midlands suburb, her life behind her. Emotionally, I could not connect the two, and yet rationally it was all entirely, depressingly convincing: long ago it had been obvious, no doubt even to Joyce, that without Evan’s wits to guide her she would just drop back into the world from which she had come. I remembered now her lying in another hospital bed, after he’d ditched her – literally ditched her – in the accident to my Simca, and how she’d talked sadly about his ‘creative temperament’, saying ‘I did try to be what he wanted me to be –’

  Yes, she had tried, in every way she could. And later, presumably, that same survival instinct had led her to adapt herself to a different person, different circumstances: a necessary degradation. An unassuageable grief denied?

  In a little while I would have to decide whether to tell Ammy about the Joyce of the past, and much more, or whether to leave most of my memories in decent oblivion. But Ammy might not actually ask very much. There had been a faint but persistent self-centredness in her description of her hunt for her origins so far which surprised me a little. I suppose that, illogically, I had expected more from someone who worked for an organization essentially concerned with unknown people and their problems.

  ‘I should think,’ I said, ‘that it must have been a pretty odd experience for her too, meeting you. I mean, there you were, large as life. And all the time in her mind she must have had that baby you once were. It’s odd enough, you know, thinking back even when your child has grown up with you all the time so the transformation has been gradual. But when it happens all at once it must be – inconceivable.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. She couldn’t cope with it, really. She kept looking sideways at me and saying ‘‘What a big girl you are!’’ I thought that was a bit much, coming from her, since she was much, much fatter herself and it was perfectly clear who I’d got my figure from. Oh, I suppose she was just nervous and didn’t know where to pitch it. I was wearing some chains round my neck, like I often wear, and she admired them at one point and said she’d ‘‘always been interested in design’’. She was a bit better dressed than people like that often are, actually. I noticed that as soon as I met her. Black and swirly, with bangles. Touch of showbiz. I suppose she’d put on her best clothes to meet me … But – oh, it was really just like talking to someone at a bus stop or in the doctor’s waiting room. You know?’

  ‘I can imagine … Did you ask her much?’ We would have to get onto Evan soon, I thought.

  ‘Well I did ask her if Amanda had been her idea for my name. I wasn’t going to be rude about it, if it was. She said no, but wasn’t it a lovely name and she’d been pleased when she heard I was called that, through Mandy Rice-Davis had rather spoilt it, hadn’t she? Ha, ha. I didn’t like the way she said that. She suddenly seemed just a little bit … Well, not so respectable after all.’

  She glanced at me in a worried way, almost like a child wanting reassurance, but then said robustly:

  ‘Though why I should care about that, God knows … Oh, she did tell me one thing I thought was a bit sad. Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘If you want to tell me.’

  ‘Well she said she’d had a little name for me herself when I was born, and it was ‘‘Penguin’’ because I flapped my hands around like flippers … She was remembering properly then, and I almost thought for a moment she was going to cry. Not that I wanted her to, I mean, I’d’ve been frightfully embarrassed, but I just thought she might … I don’t really understand what gets women about tiny babies, I don’t like them myself.’

  I was digesting this piece of information, wondering what lay behind it, when Ammy continued dismissively:

  ‘Oh, but all the rest of her chat was about how she’d let me go for my own good and what a wonderful opportunity it had been for me to be brought up by such wonderfully decent, well-off people living in wonderful East Grinstead, rhubarb, rhubarb. Just the sort of guff I got from Uncle Stanley.’

  ‘She felt defensive, I suppose,’ I said, ‘that you might be going to accuse her of rejecting you … And anyway, perhaps she was right. Would you, do you think now, have done better brought up by her? That’s the bottom line of the whole question, isn’t it?’

  Ammy flushed faintly:

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ she said after a moment. ‘Can I? I mean – I might have been different if I’d grown up with her. Mightn’t I?’

  ‘Perhaps. And she might have been different too.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ she said in a subdued voice. I began to like her a lot again.

  ‘I think I should tell you,’ I said, pompously, ‘since I am probably the only person in the world left to do so, that your mother did not want to give you up. She was persuaded into it, rightly or wrongly it’s probably not for any of us to say now, but she minded about it very much.’

  If I had hoped Ammy would be grateful for this information, I was mistaken. She said she was, and thanked me, but I sensed that at some level it did not please her. Perhaps it did not fit the picture she had formed.

  ‘I wondered about that,’ she said hurriedly; ‘I thought I might be able to ask her, but then, when I finally met her, I knew I couldn’t. I mean –’ her aggressive manner returned: ‘she was so full of shit, Tom, she really was. She gave me the impression, actually, that she’d given me up in some splendid sort of renunciation because of my father’s Art. Great, I thought; that sort of information makes you feel really important – I don’t think.’

  ‘Ah yes, I was wondering if you’d talked much about him?’

  ‘Well no, hardly at all. I was rather sorry, afterwards, when I thought about it, that I hadn’t pushed her to tell me more, but she didn’t really seem to want to talk about him. She just said he was a painter and a very creative person and that one should never hold an artist back from his Art – using a sort of phoney, special voice that she didn’t use most of the time, so I knew that wasn’t something she’d thought out for herself, but just an idea she’d picked up somewhere that she thought sounded impressive. I – I didn’t feel she was a terribly truthful person, though I had no way of checking up on her.’

  ‘Actually, he was a painter, your father.’

  ‘Oh he was?’ She looked inordinately pleased. ‘That’s interesting. It said ‘‘artist’’ on my original birth certificate I found, and I was so glad because I’d always wondered where my own painting came from. I mean, I’m quite good at it, though I hardly do any these days, but I went to Art School and had great ambitions at one time. I suppose he was studying art in Paris when I was born? But Shirley Gilchrist didn’t seem to think he
was much of a painter. She was rather horrid about him, actually … Did you think he was any good?’

  ‘Well – in his way.’ I was wary of saying much. ‘He wasn’t a great artist,’ I said at last. ‘But he certainly had a talent.’ I did not elaborate.

  ‘Ever since I discovered his name,’ she said wistfully, ‘I’ve been hoping I might see something of his in a gallery. I tried looking him up in Artists’ and Writers’ Who’s Who and one or two other lists, but he wasn’t there. Shirley Gilchrist told me she thought he might have changed his name.’

  ‘Oh? Why did she think that?’

  ‘Um – I’m not sure. She didn’t say. Well I suppose that ‘‘Evan Brown’’ isn’t really a name to set the art world alight, is it?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Proletarian style, and so forth. Kitchen sink. Regional. Roots …’ I could imagine opportunistic Evan having flourished in the self-conscious egalitarianism of the 1960s. Manufacturing ‘Street Art’ perhaps. Talking about his good friend John Bratby.

  ‘Shirley said she’d had difficulty tracing him, actually, when she needed a final signature from him for the adoption to go through. She thinks he and my mother were already apart by then. And – I didn’t like to put my mother on the spot by asking her too much, but I got the impression from her too that she hadn’t stayed with him long after I was born.’

  ‘Or he hadn’t stayed with her,’ I couldn’t resist adding, but she did not seem to hear. Looking away from me across the busy tables under the hard lights, she said softly:

  ‘I even wonder rather if he ever knew she’d given me away, till it was too late to go back on it.’

  She could have found out the truth by a simple query to Shirley Gilchrist or to Joyce herself. Presumably she had not asked because she did not want to know. She was not really asking me now; she was telling me what she wished to believe. I saw that she had managed, even out of the umpromising facts she had garnered, to fashion by selection and suppression the classic adopted child’s fantasy: my father was a finer order of being than my mother. He at least really loved me. He did not willingly give me away.

  ‘I’d love to meet him one day,’ she said sadly. ‘But I don’t suppose I ever shall.’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. I hoped very much she never did. She was not a fool. For all that she seemed to have inherited some of Evan’s flamboyance and self-absorption, I thought that she would have seen through him.

  It occurred to me only late in the evening, when we were talking determinedly about something else, that she had avoided asking me a single question about Evan’s personality or how I had come to know him.

  In fact she had not wanted me to tell her anything I knew about either of her parents. The opportunity had been there, but she had turned it aside. That, of course, was her right. But our ideas on what we want to know about our own areas of pain can change from one period to another. Might she not regret this missed chance?

  Oh well, I told myself, if she does she can find me again, through the Association. She seemed to be good at finding people. We drank quite a lot – she could put it away, for a woman, I thought – and gossiped animatedly about our fellows in Geneva, relaxing back with relief into our old companionship. I even had it vaguely in mind that it would be nice, after all this handling of an emotional subject, if … ? This was time out of ordinary life. No form of intimacy between us here need lead anywhere further. But, although she kissed me with warmth in the lobby of our hotel, I understood that this was a goodnight kiss.

  I went to my own room, only half regretful, half relieved also. I was rather tired; things might not have gone well, and I would not have liked to end up feeling like a dirty old man. I reminded myself of the last time I had held her in my arms – that red-faced baby with flapping fists on the Gare du Nord.

  Later in the night I remembered Ann too. In the morning I felt only half ashamed of myself, not quite believing I had really entertained any clear designs.

  It did not occur to me then, though it did afterwards, when I thought about it, that Amanda had probably been due to spend the rest of that night with James, another married man old enough to be her father. Evan Brown, I thought, with the vague satisfaction of censure vindicated, really had a great deal to answer for.

  ‘Shirley Gilchrist told me she thought he might have changed his name.’

  ‘Oh? Why did she think that?’

  ‘Um – I’m not sure. She didn’t say.’

  Eventually, after several weeks during which I suppose I turned the matter over in a submerged way in my mind, I looked Shirley’s number up in the book and rang her.

  As soon as she grasped who I was she sounded extravagantly pleased, which made me uncomfortable; but, having telephoned on impulse, I could only persist with my intention. She sounded less pleased then, but she answered my query.

  Yes, a girl called Amanda Goring had been to see her about two years ago. Yes, she remembered the young couple who had been Amanda’s parents and whom she had helped in 1953: ‘They were friends of yours, weren’t they? Do you see anything of them these days?’ There was a hint in her tone that I was the sort of person who ‘doesn’t bother to keep up with old friends’. I decided to make this call as short as possible.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen them for thirty years, actually. But for a quite other reason’ (I had no idea myself what I meant) – ‘I need to look the man up. His name was Evan Brown, I think …’ (Sub-text: ‘I hardly knew him, so don’t blame me for him.’) ‘But Amanda told me you thought he had changed his name.’

  There was a pause. Then Shirley said:

  ‘Yes. Well I did get that information.’ (‘There’s a lot more I could say, but I’m standing on my dignity now that I’ve realized you’ve rung me up just to find something out.’)

  ‘Could I ask where from? Then maybe I could go to the same source.’ (‘And won’t need to ring you up again.’)

  Another pause, then she said self-consciously:

  ‘Well, it was the police, actually. But I had a good reason at that time to be making enquiries for him – it was when I needed his signature for the adoption to be finalized. I doubt if they’d tell just anyone.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’ (‘You rude cow.’) ‘You mean, he was known to the police?’

  ‘So I gathered. In fact, he had quite a record. The police themselves were looking for him at that time. A fraud case, I gathered. Con-trickster stuff. Quite nasty.’ A mixture of disdain and relish. ‘The detective in charge of the investigations told me about it in confidence, as I was involved in my professional capacity.’

  ‘Oh I see. Did they ever get him, I wonder?’ (‘You don’t surprise or shock me, Shirley. Bad luck.’)

  ‘I don’t think so. Actually the same policeman got back to me quite a long time after to see if I’d traced him because they’d failed to. It was then that he said Evan Brown had probably changed his name – that people like that often do, sometimes several times. Oh, and by the way, he’d had a wife all the time. Back in Wales. I don’t think he’d ever told the girl – Joyce – that. Certainly she never mentioned it to me.’

  Of course he would be married already. It all fitted. I should have guessed that myself at the time.

  ‘And had you traced him?’ I persisted.

  ‘Well … Of course if I had known where he was I wouldn’t have thought it my duty to tell the police. I mean, my professional duty was primarily towards him and Joyce as my clients.’

  ‘Yes, yes, quite.’ (‘Don’t preach to me, you self-important prig.’) – ‘But did you know?’

  ‘Well – not really.’

  ‘And did you ever get that signature you needed? Or was it easier just to forge it?’

  There was another pause, during which I could feel her deciding whether or not to be insulted. She apparently decided against it, for she next said, almost affectionately:

  ‘Tom, you always were no respecter of rules. Really! I suppose you would have done that?’
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br />   ‘Well, why not, in a good cause? I mean, it was just a formality, wasn’t it? Everyone concerned was committed to the adoption by then, I take it … Even Joyce?’

  ‘Oh yes. Once she’d made the decision. In fact it was Joyce who got the papers passed on to Evan to be signed via some friend who was shielding him. He didn’t want her to know where he was either, as far as I remember.’

  (Or else, I thought, she didn’t want to tell you where he was, if she knew the police were after him.)

  ‘Did the adopting parents – Whatsernames? Gorings – know about any of this?’

  ‘Oh no. I kept it from them. I thought that best. I mean – nice, middle-class people like that’ (she gave the phrase an automatic sneer) ‘might have worried about the baby having ‘‘bad blood’’ or something idiotic like that.’

  Well, we won’t go into that, I thought.

  ‘– I did worry about it after, though,’ she went on, more confiding now. ‘I had sleepless nights about whether I’d done right by Joyce – whether my real duty mightn’t have been to help her to keep the child.’

  I felt I would rather not go into that either, if for a different reason.

  ‘Well, Shirley,’ I said heartily, ‘it’s all very long ago now, isn’t it? Joyce, I gather, married afterwards and had more children. As for Evan, he’s probably become a reformed character years ago.’ Some obscure impulse warned me to sound as if the whole topic was a matter of little interest or significance to me after all. Shirley Gilchrist I knew to be an obsessional character. Hearing her voice again after all these years had had an odd effect on me, almost nauseating: probably it was mostly my fault that the conversation had been so barbed. I did not want her to start applying her imagination to why I could possibly be interested in Evan Brown now.