Sail Upon the Land (32 page)

‘OK, Leeta. What do you want from me?’

‘Shelter.’

The word dropped between them.

‘For how long?’

‘Until the birth.’

‘What if I say no?’

‘Would you?’

‘No, not if you are who you say you are.’

‘Right, otherwise I could find a hostel and then go into hospital at the last minute as an emergency.’

‘What about the baby?’

‘I could give a false name, leave it there and go. I read about a woman doing that. It seems simplest.’

Damson couldn’t breathe properly. That her own child should be so desperate that she would plan to abandon her baby. She remembered how she had been when she found herself on the slippery slope, greased for her by efficient Margaret, to the adoption of her baby. Numb. Until the actual birth. But before that just numb, looking ahead to going back to how things had been before, because there was no room in her life for a baby.

‘Sorry to be so blunt,’ Leeta continued. ‘There is an alternative.’

Damson didn’t say anything, but she could sense what was coming. She controlled herself to appear and sound neutral, as she did with her patients, whatever Leeta should propose.

‘I could live with you until the birth. Then you could have the baby.’

In one day Damson had gone from single, childless woman, to mother, to future grandmother, to potential foster or adoptive mother. It was too wild a journey for less than twelve hours. She took a deep breath, as quietly as she could. Emotion had no place in this exchange.

‘OK, let’s get real here, Leeta. I work full time in a demanding job, and you’re expecting me to drop everything and just take on your baby? For one thing, I’m not sure what social services would say. We’ve had no relationship since you were adopted.’

‘Why do you have to tell them?’

‘Well, there are several reasons. I know they prefer to place babies and children with family members. I could take the baby for a bit maybe, until you knew what you wanted to do, but I think you need to consider including your baby in your future plans.

‘For instance, what about me looking after it until you qualify?’ Damson went on. ‘You could study somewhere up here. Then you could see your baby whenever you like.’

Leeta just looked blankly at her as if she was mad.

‘Study here? But I was planning to go to America to finish my training. Perhaps find a husband out there, like my cousins. Why would I want to stay here?’

‘Because of the baby?’

‘No. Oh no. Nothing I do can be “because of the baby”. You can’t make me. I have to go on being Leeta Delapi, not some flaky girl who sacrifices everything because she got herself knocked up during a drunken fuck. That’s not me at all. That’s you.’

Damson stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you get yourself pregnant in India? What was it, too much country wine and a big fat spliff in Goa?’

‘No, not Goa.’

Leeta’s voice was rising, her eyes wide.

‘So I’m right? You don’t have a leg to stand on. You gave me up because you wanted to go on studying, why shouldn’t I do the same?’ She was shouting now.

This strange angry creature jolted Damson profoundly. She stood up and walked towards the kitchen, stopping to lean on the wall in the passage to get her breath. She must not cry or shout. She had to remain calm, to be the adult in this situation.

Leeta hurried after her. ‘You gave me up, you abandoned me. Why? You had plenty of money didn’t you?’

She was yelling right into her mother’s face. Tiny spit drops spattered Damson’s cheeks and nose. Damson had to say something. But it was all true. She remembered her powerlessness. Her father standing in the background, wispily disappearing into the hand-painted wallpaper, as Margaret set out the programme for Damson’s ‘rescue from her moment of madness’, as she called it.

‘The agency will take care of everything,’ Margaret had kept saying. ‘You don’t need to worry about a thing. Just go and stay with Nanny until it’s born and then you can return to university as if nothing had happened. Your father and I are right behind your decision, aren’t we, Munty? Isn’t Damson being brave?’

Damson could see her father in her mind’s eye, looking sad and bewildered while his wife managed away his first grandchild and disposed of it like an unwanted puppy.

Munty was getting older now. He had four nicely-brought-up step-grandchildren via Clarrie and Noonie. How would he react to being introduced to his one true grandchild? Damson didn’t care what Margaret thought now. Family was all that mattered.

Leeta had calmed down. She moved to stand beside her mother and lean against the wall. They were quiet for a bit. Leeta was looking at her Ugg-clad feet. They were breathing in sync when Damson started speaking again. To explain.

‘If you knew how much it hurt, Leeta, giving you up. I’d made the decision to carry you to term as soon as I knew I was pregnant, so I went home to brave my stepmother and father. She took it all in her stride and simply organised me and organised me until I was back at Cambridge, a year behind, without you and miserable.’

‘Do you want me to be sorry for you?’ Leeta’s voice was low and expressionless.

‘No, of course not.’ She made the decision then and there never to tell Leeta that she was the result of rape.

Silence fell, to be broken by Damson.

‘Shall we have something to eat?’

Over the days that followed, they did talk, but it was stilted and forced. Damson would try to convince her daughter that it would be so much better for everyone if she, Leeta, let Damson take the strain, Leeta should stay with her baby. Damson was ready to make any sacrifice.

Leeta was adamant, the baby would ruin her carefully constructed life plan, and must not be allowed to do so. Damson owed it to her to make it go away, to make it right for her. It was all Damson’s fault for abandoning her in the first place. Damson would hesitate, and plough on.

When Leeta learnt one evening that Damson had been brought up in what sounded like a stately home, she became sad and even angrier.

‘Surely there was a room somewhere there, where you could have kept a baby?’ she kept saying. Then the sunny, carefree London girl would reappear and admit that she had been very happy with her adoptive parents, and the idea of being tucked away in some attic like a shameful secret would have been intolerable.

One day, Damson got tired of saying the same comforting words over and over again, and said instead: ‘You do understand, because now you want to do the same thing.’

Leeta stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Damson bit her lip so hard it hurt.

‘I just want to be sure this is what you want. After all I gave up my baby to complete strangers, albeit professionally vetted ones. At least you’re giving up yours to your own flesh and blood.’

Damson always awoke when Leeta got up in the night, but she didn’t make a sound, just listened for her daughter’s safe return to her bed. She found it hard to get back to sleep, puzzled as she was about what to do. For the first time in many years, she was not in control of her life. Looking back, that control had been pretty sterile. It involved keeping as far away as possible from anything that tweaked her nerves, like her stepmother. What had she got to show for it? A cottage, a career and lots of patients, but no one just for her. None of the joyful, messy stuff that comes with a family.

Mother and daughter lived parallel lives in Damson’s cottage, suspended in a time of waiting. The birth was the horizon, representing the curved edge of their known world. They would both sail over it together, and Damson had no idea what lay on the other side.

Leeta had been an easy guest in all practical ways, keen to cook and keep house for Damson, which surprised her. Damson wasn’t domestic, the despair of her grandmother with her larder full of jam and her freezer full of home-grown vegetables. Damson had shut down that side of herself so young. Unsexing herself, wearing men’s clothes. Eating any old thing. Making herself appear shapeless. Getting super-fit and hard-bodied by hiking, swimming and cycling. Hiding anything soft about herself. Losing a mother. Losing a daughter. Losing her own femininity. It seemed easier to remove all evidence of womanhood, as then it couldn’t be taken away ever again. She hid herself behind a strong handshake, firm voice and baggy cords and jumpers.

Damson encouraged Leeta to study, but Leeta bought magazines like
Modern Woman
and
Gossip
, and read those instead. She claimed to be resting her mind and, even in matters as unimportant as this, she resisted absolutely Damson’s attempts to influence her.

Damson also tried to talk to her about what would happen after the baby was born, but her daughter jibbed every time. She noticed that Leeta never used the word ‘baby’, never speculated about the sex, never wanted to go and buy things like car seats and clothes. Worried, and manoeuvred into taking responsibility, Damson went out one Saturday to Derby and stocked up on a basic layette, a car seat that clipped on to a pushchair, and a Moses basket and nappies. Hesitating, she also bought organic new-born formula, bottles and an electric steriliser just in case. If Leeta was behaving as if the moment of birth was somehow the end of something, there was no point in forcing her to think about breastfeeding.

Rebuffed by Leeta’s passive resistance, she wasn’t quite sure what else to do, and concealed her purchases in the deep cupboard in her room that went a long way back beside the chimney breast.

It was such an unprecedented situation. She must hold out her arms with total generosity to receive anything that dropped into them when the time came. And she recognised something in Leeta that was completely familiar. They had both been solitary inhabitants of their particular nests. Leeta’s had been feathered with love, Damson’s not so much. But they shared that essential independence and – Damson had to admit this – stubborn bloody-mindedness. Now Leeta was in flight and had barely alighted like a bird on a wire. Gone soon.

Much was unsaid, particularly about any kind of future meeting after the event horizon of birth. Anguished conversations had petered out into politeness. Leeta liked best to sit and eat her supper in front of television dramas and chat. Damson slipped into the role of quiet cherishing. She had a rushing sensation, as if the skin of her face was being blown backwards against her skull by the speed of time passing.

For years Damson had been mired deep in a life she’d chosen in response to her past. It bored her and she hadn’t been able to work out how to force a change. Now her past had erupted into her present and she lay in bed at night aware of her heart beating in little quick hops, as if trying to catch up with the tiny window of motherhood. It was only two or at the most three weeks until the end of Leeta’s pregnancy. Longer than the ten minutes she’d had in the yellow-painted room.

She would get on her bicycle and pedal furiously over the hills, coming back to herself twenty miles away, hot but not exhilarated. The now of Leeta – she didn’t dare think about the unknown baby – crashing in on her consciousness as she stood, resting for a moment by the side of a track, one foot on the ground, one on a pedal.

Watching her daughter folding sheets, ironing or standing at the stove stir-frying strips of chicken, Leeta reminded Damson of Sarah.

‘The domestic gene seems to have skipped a generation or two,’ she remarked, seeing Leeta reduce a pile of vegetables to matchsticks in moments. She’d been a frozen veg person for years. Sarah was the cook, and Damson had never had any inclination to join in.

‘Oh, yes, my mother taught me,’ Leeta would say.

Damson became adept at dodging the darts of pain that these remarks inflicted. Every day she saw more of herself in Leeta. Independence, a career that made a difference, and her own home, had been Damson’s ambitions. Leeta’s choices were different in detail, but she could recognise the same drive, the desire to have the life she had visualised and worked hard for. In addition to a career, Leeta hungered for a traditional marriage and the glow of approval that would be hers when she fulfilled all parental and religious expectations in one go. Damson could see that Leeta believed marriage would restore her to her adoptive family once more, and how important that Indian identity was to her. As far as she knew, the adoptive parents believed Leeta to be in Uganda and had no current intention of rejecting her at all. The fear was all in Leeta’s mind.

There had been no such marital pressure on Damson, even though Munty had no male heir. Once again the title would go to a distant cousin, although the law of entail had changed and the estate was no longer attached to it. As Margaret’s money had saved Castle Hey from being sold or simply crumbling to dust, it probably belonged to her stepmother by now anyway, or had been left to her in Munty’s will. The subject had never been discussed.

The DNA test results had come back rapidly, irrefutably confirming their relationship. Damson offered to put her life aside, to move anywhere in the country or even the world that Leeta fancied, to share the care of the baby while Leeta trained in the hospital of her choice. Leeta made no attempt to interrupt. She deadened the air between them with her concrete silence. Or she would stand up and leave the room.

So Damson loved helplessly, the buried pain of the yellow-painted room resurrecting like a zombie, shocking her with its gnawing intensity. She must bear it as she had borne everything else and try to live in the present.

Leeta behaved unknowingly like the princess that she probably was. Damson well remembered Ronny’s autocratic rule over his tiny kingdom, and longed to tell Leeta about him – the more interesting bits of course – but the risk was too great. She didn’t seem curious.

If Leeta wanted something, she was well able to ignore the emotional damage she or anyone else might sustain in order to get it. During one of their conversations – the baby was a small elephant in the room – Leeta had enthused about the glossy NRI lifestyle she had experienced in New York and Connecticut when she’d stayed with her cousins during her summer holidays.