You (29 page)

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 know.’

‘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,’ said 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.

‘I can picture a bab on your lap as you play the guitar,’ she said.

He nodded, and didn’t reply, but he smiled at her again, and her lamp shone in his pupils. She gazed at his cattish pale eyes and graceful body in black clothes faded to patches of brown and silver-green.

On his rare visits to the house, he landed upon her, alerting her from outside her window or scaling a wall and throwing earth at her pane, or he let himself in through the back door and crept socked inch by inch through this house of lengthy creaks. He possessed a tense-shouldered vitality that made him restless.

He eyed her lazily.

She sidled up towards him, glancing almost shyly at his feet. He had brought skunk. He ruffled her hair, and drew her to him, resting his head against her, then he reached out and circled her wrist.

‘Let’s hide you,’ she said in a low voice as she heard her mother on the stairs.

Dora sobbed for two minutes in her cottage. She rubbed an old Bannan tea towel against her eyes, then pressed it harder into the lids until her eyeballs ached.

There was a knock on the door. She had heard no one on the path and she jumped.

‘Elisabeth,’ she murmured as an automatic whisper in her own head, but wearily, the hope weighted with anticipated disappointment. It was Katya. Dora patted her arm and guided her in.

I am lovesick, she thought. I am radiation sick.