by Ali Mercer
Leona shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, it’s not like I can do anything about it, can I? I have to get back and anyway, as soon as he knows I have a baby he’ll lose interest.’
‘Well, you don’t have to tell him straight away, do you? Gorgeous Jake – what a birthday present. Oh, look, I think he’s coming over.’
Jake approached with a knowing swagger that suggested he was used to girls being impressed by him.
‘Hi, Emily,’ he said, and fixed his attention on Leona. She was suddenly conscious of her bare shoulders, of the way her strappy top exposed the shape of her body.
‘We haven’t met before,’ he said. ‘I’m Jake.’
‘I’m Leona, Emily’s friend from school.’
‘Leona, like a lion?’
‘August birthday. Today, in fact. My mum’s not that into astrology, but I think she had a bit of a hormone rush after I was born.’
‘Well, happy birthday,’ Jake said, and looked at her as if he was thinking about what he might like to give her.
‘I’m going to leave you two to get to know each other,’ Emily said, and withdrew to rejoin the group of friends behind them.
Jake shook open a packet of cigarettes and offered Leona one. She had managed to give up when she was pregnant and hadn’t smoked since, but she barely hesitated before taking it. Night fell around them as they talked, or rather, as he talked and she listened. He told her about the band he was in, the famous people he’d met and toured with before they broke through, the carpentry he did to make ends meet. Every now and then he went off to the bar to buy them fresh drinks and told her not to go anywhere. It stayed warm and the light of the streetlamps was soft and forgiving, and the air smelled of beer and cigarette smoke and perfume; it was just possible to make out the beat of the music from the pub jukebox over the background hum of conversation and laughter.
When the barman called time and she said she’d have to be going, he pressed his hand against the wall beside her as if to block her way and leaned in close so that there were only inches between his mouth and hers.
‘You can’t leave me,’ he said.
‘I have to get home.’
He looked at her steadily. It was all too easy to imagine him fixing that same gaze on her as he pushed himself inside her.
‘I know you have a baby,’ he told her. ‘Emily told me when I was at the bar. I hear she’s called Bluebell. Beautiful name, and I bet she’s a beautiful baby.’
He was smiling at her. It hadn’t put him off. He didn’t care. He even seemed to think it was a good thing, something special that she had done. Leona could have cried with relief.
‘I named her after the bluebell wood near the cottage my grandma lived in in Wales,’ she said. ‘There was a spring there that used to come back every winter and vanish in the summer, and the flowers would grow right next to it. My grandma used to take me walking down there to see them. She never used to let me pick them, though. She said you shouldn’t bring wildflowers into a house. You have to leave them to grow and go and see them where they are.’
Was she babbling now? She must be drunker than she’d realised, even though she hadn’t had all that much. Out of practice. But Jake didn’t seem to mind.
‘Emily said this is the first time your parents have let you out since you had the baby,’ he said. ‘You deserve to have some fun, Leona. Don’t you think so?’
‘I have had fun,’ she said.
‘Not enough. How can you walk away now? Your mum’s babysitting for you, right? Go ring her and say you’ll be back in the morning. Tell her you’ve missed the last bus and you’ll be staying at Emily’s or something.’
And she did.
Her mum was outraged. Probably justifiably, but Leona was past caring. ‘This is typical of you, Leona, we give you an inch and you take a mile. You know how bad my back is these days, how much pain I’m in.’ Eventually she hung up. Leona walked back from the phone box to where Jake was waiting for her and Jake said, ‘You did it,’ and pulled her towards him and kissed her in front of everyone.
Then, as the crowds of people on the pavement were beginning to disperse, he broke a pill in two and gave half to her.
‘I’m kind of new to this…’ she said.
‘You really have been missing out, haven’t you?’ He took his half and swallowed it down with a mouthful of beer, and after she’d swallowed hers he kissed her again.
‘Let’s make it a birthday to remember,’ he said, and raised his bottle of beer to her. ‘Here’s to tonight, and all the other very happy nights to come.’
She didn’t sleep at all that night in the end. They went clubbing, and after the club closed he took her back on the night bus to his place. A couple of hours later she finally, reluctantly extricated herself from his embrace, let herself out and made her way back across London to her parents’ house.
Everything seemed lit up with special promise, even though the pill was wearing off and she was beginning to feel the exhaustion that would dog her until she could finally make it to bed. Well, so what? She was used to being tired. But she was also used to feeling as if all that lay ahead of her was demands and difficulties and chores. Suddenly it seemed as if, along with all of that – the nappy-changing, the making of bottles of formula and plans, the childcare she needed to take up her deferred place at university – it might also be possible for her to be loved.
The woman sitting next to Leona on the plane says, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
She’s crying. She isn’t making any noise, but there are tears on her face. She wipes them away with the back of her hand and says, ‘I’m just upset, that’s all. Nothing to be done about it, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh,’ the woman says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not your fault,’ Leona says.
The woman looks as if she would like to say more, but goes back to her book. The seatbelt warning signs have come on and they are descending, plummeting towards the ground. Leona clenches her fist tightly around the crystal Rachel had given her, so that its edges dig into her skin.
If Rachel and Viv knew the truth about why she had given Bluebell up for adoption, if they knew what she had done after she started seeing Jake, would they be still be so willing to accept her? Even among people who feel like outcasts, there’s a hierarchy. Viv is clearly blameless, a victim of history who had gone along with the prevailing medical advice of the time, and had given up her son because she believed it was for the best. And as for Rachel, whatever it was that had made her feel so unworthy of being her daughter’s main carer, it couldn’t be as terrible as what Leona had done.
There were some things you never got over. Losing a child was one of them. And so was being involved in somebody else’s death.
She closes her eyes again, and the brakes squeal as the wheels of the plane touch down. The force of the friction pins her in her seat, making it impossible to move. They slowly come to a standstill and she’s able to lean forward and get her bag from under her seat and drop the healing crystal into it.
All around her people are stirring and stretching, releasing their seatbelts, murmuring instructions or reprimands to their children, getting up to retrieve bags from overhead lockers. Her neighbour uses a postcard to mark her place in her book and closes it.
‘I hope everything turns out all right for you,’ she says to Leona.
‘Thanks. But I don’t think I deserve it to.’
‘Yes, well, we don’t always get what we deserve. Sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.’
The woman gets up and shuffles forward in the queue to leave the plane. Leona stays seated a little longer, gazing out of the window.
You have to leave bluebells to grow, her grandmother had said to her. You can go and see them and enjoy them, but you can’t take them home with you. They’re best off where they are.
Somewhere out there is her Bluebell, waiting to meet her, maybe looking at the same French sunshine.
Thirty
The hous
e where Bluebell is living is in a small town close to the mountainous border with Spain, surrounded by vineyards. Spring here is different to English spring: warm, breezy, scented, with a tension in the air that suggests the possibility of thunder later. Still, at least it is not too hot to walk. Leona wants to walk; to put one foot in front of the other, and think of nothing else.
She makes her way up and down white, hilly roads, past garden walls loaded with old ropes of jasmine and budding clematis and green wisteria. She doesn’t get lost. It is almost unbelievably straightforward. It is also completely unreal.
And then she comes to a standstill on the doorstep.
It’s a lovely house, as she had known it would be: big, square, white-fronted, with windows shuttered against the sun. Not that it really matters what kind of place Bluebell calls home as long as she’s happy and safe, but it is a kind of consolation to know she’s growing up somewhere so beautiful.
Leona reaches for the polished brass knocker on the door. It hits the wood with a hollow thud that seems too soft to summon anyone, but then the door opens and a perfectly pleasant-looking Englishwoman in a Breton striped top emerges and peers at her.
It’s Amy. Bluebell’s mother. Her other mother. The one who took Bluebell in and looked after her when Leona couldn’t, who fostered her and then adopted her.
They have spent a fair bit of time talking via Skype, planning this visit, but this is the first time Leona has seen Amy in the flesh. She looks prettier than on the computer screen. Softer. More like someone you might be friends with. The sense of being tested persists, though. Whatever Bluebell might want or not want, Leona is only here because Amy has permitted it. One false move and it’ll be over.
If it goes well, she’ll be invited back later, and meet Amy’s husband too – Bluebell’s adoptive father. Maybe Leona will even have dinner with all three of them – and then, who knows? But if it goes badly…
‘Leona. You made it,’ Amy says. ‘How did you get here? You didn’t walk, did you?’
‘I did. It wasn’t all that far.’
‘You found it all right, obviously. How was the hotel?’
‘Fine,’ said Leona, who had barely noticed what it was like, and had spent the night there not sleeping.
‘Well then, come on in.’
Leona steps into the entrance hall and Amy pulls the heavy door shut behind her. The two women stand there not quite looking at each other, as if neither of them is sure what to do next. Then Amy holds out her hand and Leona shakes it. Is Amy nervous? She doesn’t look it. But then, why would she worry? Possession is nine-tenths of love, and she has Bluebell and Bluebell will always love her.
Amy studies her with both sympathy and detachment. She’s read the files; she knows exactly what happened, and how much Leona has to regret. What must she be thinking? How can you live with it? With what you did? I know why you gave her up. And now she’s mine, and I’m glad you let her go.
Leona wants to answer her. I made a mistake, a terrible mistake. A ruinous mistake. And after that I had to choose what was best for her, and it wasn’t me.
She has so much to be grateful for. Amy had kept Bluebell’s name: she could have changed it, started over with something of her own choosing. And she has invited Leona here. She has been more than generous. More than kind.
But Leona can’t speak.
‘Bluebell is playing in the garden,’ Amy says. ‘Do you want to come through and meet her?’
Leona nods, and Amy leads the way through the house.
All the walls are white and so are the shutters, and the floors are covered with terracotta tiles; it is cool, pale and dim. In winter, though, it would be the opposite, bright and snug and warm, a refuge from the icy dark outside. Amy takes Leona past a sitting room with a brick-surrounded fireplace and into a pristine kitchen. On one of the granite worktops is a tray with small plates and narrow glasses in wrought-metal holders, the sort you use for mint tea, and a dish of macaroons.
Amy has obviously assumed that she will be here long enough to drink and eat. But what if Bluebell gets upset, or just wants her to go?
They head out through the dining room, which has French windows open wide to admit the slight breeze from the small courtyard garden. A grapevine stretches across one wall, its dry, twisted old branches covered with new green leaves. In the middle of the lawn is a sundial, and next to it is a small girl, playing.
It’s the Bluebell of Leona’s most recent photograph, suddenly here and alive and real and in reach. She’s a delicate-looking child with slender limbs and long fair hair, tied back in an immaculate French plait, dressed in a crisply pressed chambray smock and sandals. She’s kneeling at the sundial and holding her toys so they appear to be standing on its flat face; in one hand she has a small grey plush elephant and in the other a floppy pink-and-white cloth bug, well-worn and obviously much loved.
Leona recognises the bug at once. It’s the one she had packed all those years ago, when the police came for her and the social workers took Bluebell away.
Bluebell says quite clearly, ‘Now, time to jump,’ and makes the bug dive down from the sundial.
‘She has a wonderful imagination,’ Amy says. ‘Go on, go and say hello. She’s been looking forward to meeting you.’
Leona crosses the lawn and steps forward into the magic closed circle of the child’s solitary game. She’s conscious of Amy just behind her, watching silently from the small terrace, holding back for now but poised to intervene the minute she’s needed. Like a mother. A real mother.
Bluebell gets slowly to her feet and looks round. She’s the first to speak, and although she’s plainly attempting to demonstrate her mastery of grown-up social skills her voice betrays her by a hesitancy that turns the word into a question: ‘Hello?’
Something enables Leona to move nearer, as if a forcefield is flexing and giving way to admit her. She squats down by the sundial and says, ‘I’m Leona. And you’re Bluebell. And what are these two called?’
Bluebell kneels again and holds up her toys. ‘This is Bug and this is Babar.’
‘Are they friends?’
Bluebell shrugs. ‘Mostly.’
She’s looking at Leona’s tattoo, trying not to stare. Leona pulls back her sleeve and flexes her wrist so Bluebell can inspect it. She’s trembling; she hopes Bluebell won’t notice.
‘I’m not sure tattoos are a very good idea,’ Bluebell declares.
‘I’m not either. But I like this one,’ Leona tells her.
‘Is it for me?’
‘It is.’
Her hand stops trembling. Bluebell looks up into her eyes. And there it is, back again as if all the intervening years had never passed: that moment when Leona had given her up, not knowing how long it would be for or what would happen next, and Bluebell had looked back at her as if seeing more than Leona could imagine, or begin to know.
Thirty-One
Mitch
Mitch is thinking about Rachel when he rings Leona’s doorbell, and only remembers to stop scowling when she opens up.
She’s youngish, or at least, younger than him, which he knew to expect – when they spoke on the phone she had told him her story about bunking off school to go to the Provocation exhibition, and buying a postcard of his Persephone painting. He’d already become a dad by then, living in the country, past his best, his enfant terrible years lost to a fug of domesticity. Not that this enthusiastic, rather strange young woman needs to know that. Let her think of him what she will; God knows it’s long enough since he met a fan.
He’d also formed an impression of her as attractive, which, as it turns out, was not wrong.
‘You must be Leona,’ he says. ‘I’m Mitch.’
Crushingly, she doesn’t look all that excited. Is he a disappointment in the flesh? He’d had vague hopes of flattering small talk, maybe even a little mild flirtation. He should have known better, given that this whole meeting had been Rachel’s idea. She wasn’t going to set him up with a
soothing ego massage from an admirer. No way. The girl is more likely than not to be a total crank.
But still: a pretty crank. Leona looks a bit as if she’s just woken up. She’s wearing a long, shapeless dress in off-white cotton, and has a pair of those felt slippers on her feet; her arms and feet are bare. She might look prim if the cotton wasn’t ever so slightly transparent, and if it wasn’t for the messed-up hair and the tattoo and something feline about her, as if she could be about to either scratch or purr.
It’s a beautiful May morning, and warm already even though it’s not yet near noon; he is suddenly conscious that he is sweating and his jacket strikes him as unbearably stuffy. But if he takes it off, what if he has damp patches under his arms?
He is ridiculous: the past-it one-hit-wonder artist with the lone female fan, who currently appears to be completely underwhelmed by his presence.
She suppresses a yawn. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten you were coming,’ she says. ‘I’ve had quite a lot on my plate lately, what with one thing and another.’
‘Well, you’re in the throes of setting up your own business, aren’t you? It’s bound to be a busy time.’
‘Yes, there has been that to think about. Also, I’ve just got back from a trip to France.’
‘Nice time of year for a holiday.’
‘It wasn’t really a holiday. There was someone I had to see.’
Her face changes at the thought of whoever it was – a lover, maybe? Suddenly she seems even younger, and vulnerable. The moment passes and she looks him up and down as if assessing his potential to make trouble. He does his best to appear blameless, which he is, mostly. At any rate, he’s pretty sure he’s not whatever she’s afraid of. Leona Grey is safe with him, as long as she wants to be.