Motherlove

by Thorne Moore

  She’d known that the shadow of violence lurked in the small terraced house in Milford Haven, although she had never witnessed it. She’d only seen her mother weeping occasionally, or dabbing make-up on a bruise. Until that day, Kelly had never been the recipient of Luke’s drunken fists.

  Luke Sheldon was a well-meaning man on good days. Even affectionate. Catch him in the right mood and there was nothing he liked better than to take Kelly to the swings, buy her ice creams, promise treats, everything a father was supposed to do. But when he drank there was no holding him. Everything irritated him and then the violence would begin.

  Kelly, looking back, could understand her mother. Each time, afterwards, Luke would apologise, and each time Roz, incapable of contemplating a life alone, would accept his promise that it wouldn’t happen again. But when he hit Kelly, then the tigress inside Roz woke. While Luke went raging back to the pub, she packed a few things, bundled Kelly into her coat and walked out for good.

  It had only been a brief moment of decisiveness, but it had been enough to wash mother and daughter onto a new track, first to a battered wives’ refuge, where someone had helped Roz find a job at a supermarket. A proper job, with regular hours, fixed pay days and National Insurance stamps. Something so normal that Roz had always believed it utterly beyond her.

  Kelly knew that her mother, after walking out on her husband, had desperately longed to return to the safety of their commune days, before Luke; those gilded days when they had lived first in tepees on the hills, then in an old farmhouse, with Roger and Mandy and Bo and Tig and Pete and Ieuan and Gish and all the others. It had been a glorious time for Kelly, thriving in the messy crèche, and it had given Roz all the reassurance and support she’d needed.

  Roz’s yearning to recreate the magic of the commune had been their eventual salvation. The commune had kept animals; Roz would do the same. To begin with there were three chickens in the backyard of their new council house. Kelly took charge of them, selling the eggs. Roz had helped with the commune’s herbal remedies, so she started brewing them again, and thanks to her daughter’s brazen salesmanship, found herself supplying some of the more quirky local shops. She had practised yoga with Mandy; Kelly urged her to take a proper course. When the instructor retired, Kelly prompted her mother to volunteer as teacher. Kelly set her up as an aromatherapy consultant.

  It all worked perfectly. The adolescent daughter advertised, booked halls, paid the bills and took the money, and Roz serenely held her classes and consultations. Finally, Kelly guided her, step by step, through all the complications of getting the lease on Carregwen. Roz Sheldon might never be able to own property, but she longed for a home, not just accommodation provided by the council. A patch of Planet Earth to make her complete.

  Leaving Luke had paid off. And it had been for Kelly.

  Kelly understood her mother better now. That fantastic suspicion planted by the nurses talking of mixed-up labels, explained Roz’s anxieties. Roz had always nursed a paralysing fear of the ‘Authorities’, the men in suits, the women with thin lips and sharp eyes who were waiting to take away the only thing that really mattered to her. Only when they were finally installed in Carregwen, with their herbs and hay, and their sheep, two goats, three ducks and a dozen hens, had Roz at last begun to believe that the State might not snatch Kelly away.

  By then Kelly had been old enough to resist any snatching. A girl who knew her own mind, who could organise without being bossy, who could keep the peace without rolling over.

  Roz had even offered to let go, urging Kelly to try for university as her teachers had wanted. Urging with most of her heart and soul, and the little part of her that had hung back had rejoiced in a very shamefaced way when Kelly refused.

  Kelly wasn’t ambitious. She wanted what she already had – liberty, food to eat, enough money for today, time for tomorrow, friends and lovers, and a home so lost in the hills that no one was ever going to bang on the wall and tell her to turn the music down. To appease her mother and teachers, she had gone to the local college and taken a course in marine biology, on the strength of which she now worked part-time with the National Park. Reasonable money by local standards, supplemented by work as a barmaid at the Mill and Tuppence, occasional demonstrations of willowcraft and help with a few boat trips in the summer. Why would she want more?

  The problem was, she didn’t want less either. She didn’t want to lose her mother. Which was why she was determined to go to any lengths to sort this thing out. Solve once and for all this riddle of the switched labels.

  Leaving her mother chopping parsley, she carried the precious swab up to her bedroom and slipped it into a plastic bag, pushing it, with the forms, under her bed. One down.

  It was odd, considering how open and honest and forthright she was, that Kelly found it remarkably easy to lie.

  v

  Vicky

  Nearly dinner time. Vicky had been out all day. Gillian breathed an explosive sigh of relief when she heard the door open. She’d been nursing the worry all afternoon that Vicky wouldn’t come home at all. Now she had, and one good thing had come of her absence: it had given Gillian time to prepare. She was going to explain everything, put it right.

  ‘Vicky!’ she called up, as her daughter was on the point of disappearing into her room.

  Vicky looked down at her over the banister, her face a mask of loss and misery, and, worse than either, hatred. Gillian’s stomach tightened.

  ‘Yes?’ That cutting politeness.

  ‘Can you come down, please. I want to talk.’

  Vicky paced down, slowly, till she was eye to eye with her mother. ‘You want to talk.’

  ‘I want to explain. About the adoption.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I know I’ve left it far too late. I was wrong. I should have told you, years ago, from the start. I wasn’t trying to deceive you. I was just waiting for the right time, and it was always, always the wrong time.’

  ‘I’m sure it must have been very difficult for you.’

  ‘I didn’t want Gran to upset you.’ The bitterness Gillian felt for her own mother burst out. ‘I didn’t want her poisoning things, if I tried to explain!’

  ‘Joan has been poisoning things all my life. I don’t recall you ever stopping her.’

  ‘I tried! I did try. I know things haven’t been ideal.’

  ‘Ideal.’

  ‘If we could have afforded a place of our own, we’d have kept you right away from her. But we couldn’t, and we had to make the best of things.’

  ‘Joan isn’t the best, she’s the worst. She’s evil! And you. Everyone. You’re all evil!’

  All civility was forgotten now. Vicky was shaking as Gillian had never seen her shake. What had happened? The mention of adoption seemed to have triggered a tidal wave of resentment.

  Vicky breathed deeply, each breath a shudder. Then she ran back up the stairs.

  ‘Vicky?’

  The bedroom door slammed.

  Gillian returned to the living room, sat down on the couch and rocked, her head in her hands. She wanted a cigarette. Never, in the last twenty-five years of abstinence, had she wanted a cigarette quite so much.

  She should phone Terry at the garage. This was a family crisis, he should be here. But what was the point? Terry wouldn’t know what to do. He had never understood any of it.

  Tea. She needed tea and a Disprin. Put the kettle on, make a pot. Vicky must need one and it would be an excuse to speak to her.

  She stirred the pot slowly, pushing tea bags round and round, when she heard Vicky’s bedroom door open again. Gillian nerved herself and went to the hall.

  Vicky was standing there, jacket on, suitcases at her feet, mobile phone in her hand, thumbing the keys.

  ‘Vicky? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going back to my digs in London.’

  ‘But you’ve only just got here. I thought you’d be here for a month.’

  ‘I can’t stay here. Not wit
h that evil bitch Joan. Not with any of you.’

  ‘I’ll speak to Gran, I promise. I’ll make her—’

  ‘You won’t make her do anything. You’ll curtsy round her like you always do. But she’s not my Gran, just as you’re not my mother, and I don’t have to stay here anymore!’

  Gillian floundered. This wasn’t about adoption, this must be something more. She had to understand. ‘Please, Vicky, don’t go. You can’t go like this. Let’s talk, please. Tell me. Whatever it is, we can talk it through.’ She followed her out.

  ‘We had twenty-two years to talk it through. But you never talked. Just like you never listened and you never saw. Excuse me. I’ve got work to do. I need to concentrate. Goodbye.’

  ‘No, wait!’ Gillian followed as Vicky dragged her suitcases along the street. ‘You don’t want to go by bus. Your father will be home soon. If you really want to go back, Dad can give you a lift.’ If she could keep her here, please God, another hour, two, surely she’d change her mind.

  ‘I’m fine with the bus.’ Vicky was almost at the bus stop and already a bus was heaving into view over the brow of the hill, ready to sweep down Drover’s Way and scoop her up.

  ‘Please, Vicky!’

  ‘Just go home, Mum.’

  ‘Come back with me, please.’

  ‘No. I need to get away, okay? Go home.’ Vicky sounded so bitter.

  The bus drew up and the doors hissed open.

  ‘I saw her.’ She looked at Gillian just once, her face blank. ‘My real mother. I saw her.’

  Hiss. Doors closed. Gillian was left standing.

  Vicky found a seat. She sat, back rigid, hands gripping the handles of her bags as if she would snap them off.

  All that she’d kept bottled up for the last five years was roaring around inside her, ripping her apart. ‘Get over it.’ That was a phrase she’d adopted as her motto, cruel but intelligent. But it was a joke: she hadn’t got over it at all. It had been waiting all this time to eat her up. Quiescent before, because there was nothing she could do, but now…

  This new truth hung before her, blocking her vision. Everything she’d been through hadn’t been inescapable fate. It should never have happened. She should never have been there, with Gillian and Joan. She should have been with another mother. Her first thought, that Gillian had been an evil child-snatcher, had made it easy. But no. She hadn’t been lying about adoption. The lie had been in the tale of baby-snatching. A lie told by a woman who had wanted Vicky dead twenty-two years ago and who now slammed the door in her face.

  She was just a piece of flotsam for them to discard and pick up at will, a toy for their evil games. How could she just get over it? She was hurt, she wanted to hurt back, to give voice to this sharp bright hatred that almost smothered the pain.

  Almost.

  The bus moved off.

  Gillian stood there, remembering her daughter’s face twisting in loathing: ‘That evil bitch Joan.’

  She turned, barely aware of what she was doing until she was almost back at the gate. Then she marched into the house. Upstairs, to the big room that should have been Vicky’s. The room that needed fumigating and cleansing. Scent bottles. A porcelain figurine holding rings. Photos of Joan in younger days, with grinning men lost in the fog of time. The lewd glass clown Bill had given her. Silk scarves and fake fur. Apricot wig on its stand. Clutter that had no right to be here.

  One by one, Gillian picked them up and threw them. She picked up a brass pot and thrashed at the glass, china, mirrors. Anything that wouldn’t smash she ripped.

  Then she sank down in the mayhem and sobbed.

  CHAPTER 2

  i

  Gillian

  20th November, 1989.

  Gillian could see the date on the letter, clasped in the curate’s hands, but his thick, strong fingers concealed the rest.

  20th November 1989. Two days ago. Another wave of panic seized her. Had she got it wrong? Had she wilfully refused to see the word ‘Rejected’? She read it five, six, seven times and still she was terrified she had it wrong.

  But it couldn’t be wrong, could it, or Philip would have said so when he’d read it? Perhaps he was praying that she accept her disappointment with grace. No. She must stop doubting. And she really ought to be listening to the curate, not itching to snatch the letter back, while he was addressing the Almighty. Giving thanks, he said. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

  ‘Jesus, we thank you for seeing into our hearts and for your care of Gillian through this time of worry, of hopes and fears.’

  He was always on such cosy conversational terms with his God. Her God too, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure she believed in Him. This was absurd, celebrating her momentous news with this embarrassing chat with Jesus.

  But she’d had to tell someone. As soon as she’d ripped open the envelope and seen the words Adoption Agency, scanned down and read the verdict – Approved – she’d needed someone to tell her that she wasn’t dreaming. But who could she go to? Not her mother, not yet at least. And not Terry, until he came home from the car plant. With the constant threat of redundancies she couldn’t risk phoning him there. But she could tell Philip. He had, after all, been one of her referees for the agency.

  ‘And we know that you will be with us, always, Jesus, holding us in your hand…’

  This was the price for her hypocritical conniving. She had never been a churchgoer. Occasional visits to Sunday School at the corrugated Gospel Hall in Oswald Street maybe, when she was a child, so that Joan could get her brats from under her feet, but she had come away without any religious conviction, just some lurid imagery of lion’s dens, loaves and fishes and flaming heads. She had, of course, dutifully sailed down St. Mark’s aisle to marry Terry in her white polyester and her sprouting chrysanthemum of nylon netting, but she hadn’t been near the church again until adoption had taken over her life. Then she’d started going to St. Mark’s in earnest, even dragging Terry with her sometimes.

  It would look good on the application, she had thought shamelessly. But it was plain superstition too. If some all-powerful God really was up there, she wanted Him on her side.

  She wasn’t the only newcomer to the congregation. The ugly brick St. Mark’s, in the middle of Marley Farm, had moved in an Evangelical direction under Philip’s enthusiastic guidance. Guitars and dance and drama, and impromptu shouts of ‘Praise Him’, from the congregation, which had tripled in recent years. Out with unctuous solemnity and in with loud born-again certainties.

  ‘You know, Lord Jesus, what is best for each and every one of us. Give us your grace to believe and to trust. If it is your will that a child should be given into Gillian’s care, we know you will guide all and give wisdom where it is needed, to the mother in her hour of doubt and distress, and to the authorities and to Gillian herself.’

  Head bowed, perched on the edge of the sofa, Gillian found herself squirming. This wasn’t what she wanted, to be told that they were all puppets of a God who might, if he chose, wrench a child from its mother for Gillian. She understood that her dream required some other woman to die, or be pushed to breaking point, or have her child snatched away by police and social workers, but just for now, she wanted to see the matter in less specific terms. She wanted to be told that all manner of things would be well. She wanted the mysterious quiet of an old church and a statue of the Virgin, eternal mother, holding out a child to her. Not Philip asking his chum Jesus to sort out the bureaucracy.

  She waited for him to finish. ‘…and we put our complete faith in you, Lord Jesus, Amen.’

  He was on his feet again, beaming down on her. ‘You know that I don’t encourage child baptisms, but when the time comes, I’ll be delighted to hold a—’

  She raised a hand in alarm. Superstition again. Bad luck to speak of it as fixed. ‘Terry and I have just been accepted as potential adopters. It might be months before they match us to a child. It might never happen.’ She forced herself to say it bravely. Merely to be accepted, after a
ll those interviews and visits, all that desperate waiting, was a triumph in itself, but in reality she was still today what she had been yesterday – a childless woman, growing older, year in, year out, with nothing but desperate hope to see her through each day.

  ‘Of course, Gillian, of course. But I have complete faith in the guiding mercy of Jesus and I know you have too. I’ll pray for you, Gillian, and so will many others. We’ll see you and Terry on Sunday?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes of course.’ There would be a special loud smug prayer for them, she knew, and many ‘hallelujahs’, and she would have to smile and endure. She would have to persuade Terry to come and share the embarrassment.

  ‘And I’m sure your mother, Mrs Summers, is delighted for you.’

  Gillian stared across the room at the cork-board over his desk. Church notices, a calendar, a wax crayon drawing of a camel. Done by one of his kids at the Jesus Club? ‘I haven’t had a chance to tell her yet.’ Thinking: please, please God, give me a child to scribble camels with wax crayons.

  And then she pictured Joan. She would have to tell her. Knowing that Joan would skilfully poison all the joy out of the day.

  She went with Philip’s blessing. And with the even greater blessing of that letter. Approved, accepted, approved, accepted. She repeated it over and over as she walked. Gillian Wendle had been accepted as a potential adopter. Neither Joan nor the malignant forces of the Marley Farm estate had destroyed her chances. That was the real miracle and she earnestly thanked God. For months now, she had lived in dread of the mistimed visit, the interview when Joan would show her worst, when the estate would erupt with drunken racist yobs and police sirens, or when Terry would walk in to say he’d been made redundant. But divine providence had been with her.

  It seemed that the house in Drover’s Way had worked for her, not against. It had been Gillian’s home since the age of three, when Joan Summers, with a crippled husband, two small children and a third imminent, had triumphantly claimed the brand new council house on the muddy building site that was hatching into Marley Farm Estate. Drover’s Way was still extending along the hill, closes and crescents blossoming in the post-war drive to house the nation. Marley Primary Schools were rising from the mire, bright brick and glass and shiny tiles, amidst green playing fields. Parades of shops with maisonettes were springing up along Marley Ring. The sun was rising on a glorious new world.