She placed the flask between the seats and the droop of her head, the tremble of her hands, was heartbreaking to witness. I caught wind suddenly, and for the first time, of her keen isolation, the bravery it must take for her to be there, alone with the boy.
‘There must be practitioners within reach,’ I said. ‘You’re not that far from Belfast, are you? A couple of hours’ drive? Even Dublin, if you had to. You could quite feasibly find—’
‘It would be tricky,’ she cut across me, looking away, out of the window, at where her son was running through the wet field, dragging a fallen branch after him.
I took a breath. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I get it.’
‘You get what?’
‘I get why it would be tricky. I know who you are. I didn’t know yesterday, when we changed the wheel, but it came to me last night, when Mrs Spillane let slip your name. I don’t know why the penny didn’t drop straight away. I suppose the last thing I was expecting to find here was, well, you.’
She bit her lip. ‘I have to ask if you—’
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone. I can keep a secret.’
‘Can you?’
I nodded. ‘Sure.’
She brushed some strands of hair off her face and lifted her chin. It was a gesture that would become infinitely familiar to me, but I didn’t know that at the time.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and the words had an air of finality to them. I could see that the conversation was over: she had extracted as much as she could from me and now she would return to whatever it was she had here. I could see that I would step out of the car, say my goodbyes, drive back to the B-and-B, then travel on to America, home and work, the task of finding an apartment, and the struggle to see my kids. This encounter in the middle of nowhere with a woman of ineffable mystery would, in a few weeks, have taken on the quality of something dreamt, something made up. Had I really sat in the car of Claudette Wells and looked out with her into the rain, into the mountain and the flat, steely waters of Lough Swilly beyond?
I was swigging the dregs of my cup, looking around for a place to put it, about to take my leave, when the car door opened and Ari clambered in, hair plastered seal-like to his scalp, jacket wet and glistening.
‘Will you come to the beach with us?’ he said, with perfect clarity, a huge grin on his face, looking from me to her and back again. ‘We’re going there n-n-now and we’re going to have f-fish and chips and then we’re going to—’
‘Ari,’ his mother murmured, ‘Mr Sullivan probably has other things to do. He is on holiday and we mustn’t—’
‘It’s Daniel,’ I said. ‘Call me Daniel. And I don’t have anything else to do. I’d love to come to the beach.’ I gave Ari a smile, then allowed myself to look his mother full in the face, for the first time that day. ‘As long as that’s OK with you.’
I stand now in our kitchen as my coffee brews. I look at the phone, resting in its cradle. I look at Marithe’s coloured pencils, standing upright in their pot, tips sharpened to arrowheads. I examine a stack of laundry, a skyscraper of folded vests, leggings, sweaters. I am a detective at the scene of a crime. Nothing escapes my gaze. I look again at the faded chinoiserie curtains, at the women endlessly crossing and crossing their bridges, and it all falls into place. I know exactly where Claudette will have gone.
The Logical Loophole
Maeve, Chengdu, China, 2003
Maeve wakes with a jolt. She is lying on her side and it is stiflingly, oppressively humid: she is damp with sweat and tangled in the sheets. The room is filled with a strange, shrill noise, like that of a malfunctioning machine or burglar alarm. It seems to drill into her ear canals and vibrate there at a persistent, painful frequency. She sits up and leaps from the bed, almost in one movement.
There is a silhouette across the room. Maeve can see its cut-out shape against the never-quite-dark hotel windows. It is a child, standing in a cot, hands gripping the bars. Maeve fumbles for the bedside lamp and clicks it on.
The situation becomes illuminated.
She is all the way across the world, without Lucas. It is the middle of the night. Hard to tell what time exactly: the road outside seems to grind all hours, with lights and lorries and horns.
She is alone in a hotel room, with a child.
The child is making a noise.
It isn’t so much crying, Maeve thinks, as she stands there, because that would involve different notes, pauses for intakes of breath, tears even. This is more high-pitched. It is one-note. There is no let-up in its timbre, no pause. It is a call of distress, of grief, of abandonment.
Maeve puts out her hands for the child and lifts it into her arms. This is what you’re supposed to do at such times; she knows this. She tries to emulate this lift and hug but the baby has other ideas. It arches its back, leaning away from her, as if to get a better look at her, as if to assess whether it wants to be held by her. Its eyes are black, wide, terrified, the skin around them drawn and wet.
‘It’s OK,’ Maeve tries. She pats the baby’s back. ‘Ssssh, it’s OK.’
The baby’s arms are held out stiffly from its body and it turns its head from one side then the other, as if to look for someone in a position of higher authority, someone it recognises.
‘Don’t cry,’ Maeve croaks, although crying herself now. ‘It’s me, Maeve.’ Then she corrects herself: ‘Mummy, I’m Mummy, remember?’
The child lurches back in her arms, heels pressing into Maeve’s abdomen. Everything about its body is saying: I don’t want to be hugged by you. I don’t like you. I don’t know you. Amazing, one part of Maeve’s mind is telling her, how a child of only a year and a half – or two perhaps, impossible to know exactly – can express this without a single word.
Maeve inhales. She must remain calm. She must keep it together. Everything is going to be all right.
Maybe the baby is hungry.
Maeve seizes on the idea. Hungry! Of course! Why didn’t she think of that? Just hungry, that’s all: she doesn’t hate Maeve, she doesn’t want Maeve to put her down, she just needs a bottle.
Maeve puts the baby back into the hotel cot and goes into the bathroom, where she prepared the feeds earlier. She takes one of the bottles, all brought from home two days ago and sterilised this morning (can it only have been this morning, the same day as this one? It feels like weeks, months, lifetimes ago) and counts in the right number of scoops.
She’s doing this, she really is, she’s coping, she’s being a parent. A mother. She wishes, not for the first time today, that Lucas was here, that Lucas was with her, not waiting uselessly at home.
She comes back into the bedroom, walking with new confidence and purpose, shaking the bottle.
‘Look what I’ve got for you!’ She hears herself trying a new, sprightly voice. ‘Milk!’
The baby is still in the cot, still standing, still making the endless noise, which is beginning to sound a little hoarse, a little desperate and mad, but Maeve wills herself not to be discouraged.
‘Here!’ Maeve says and goes to pick her up again, then gets halfway before seeing it isn’t going to work because she’s holding the bottle and so has to clumsily lower her back down, turn, place the bottle on the bedside table and pick her up.
Again, she feels horror and reluctance reel through the child. Maeve grits her teeth, sits down on the bed, trying to manoeuvre her into a sort of sitting position in the crook of her elbow. That’s how you feed an infant, isn’t it? They are supposed to bend in the middle somehow and use your body as a kind of chair but this one doesn’t seem to bend. She is rigid, livid, stricken. Maeve has got herself a non-bending baby.
‘There, there,’ Maeve hears herself say. She hooks one arm around her shoulders and makes a lunge for the bottle, which she has positioned just out of reach, a movement that elicits a scream from the child, a proper noise of fear, so by the time Maeve has got the bottle in front of her face, she is too upset, too rigid with panic to drink it.
Maeve tries putting the teat into the child’s mouth but her lips are stretched out in a scream and won’t join together to suck. She tries wetting her open mouth with a few drops of milk, so the baby gets the idea, but it just drips out again and down her chin.
They stare at each other, Maeve and this baby, alone in a hotel room, far from home. Maeve sees: black eyes, creased into crescents, but still seeing, still knowing. She sees hands, heartbreakingly small and soft, with fingers clenched and thumbs outstretched, each nail just a shade too long and ingrained with some kind of blackish substance. Should she have bathed her after all? She had balked at this, after they had made it back to the room, the baby and her, after they had staggered through the odyssey of their day: the long wait at the Social Welfare Centre, the endless checking and rechecking of forms, the handing over of the envelope of cash (clean, unmarked, new American dollar bills, so many of them, more than Maeve had ever seen), and then the door opening and a facilitator coming towards her holding what looked to Maeve like a mannequin with black hair held up in a single elastic band and a face with an expression that was devastatingly grumpy, wary, sceptical.
What, though, had she been expecting? That the child would toddle towards her, beaming, arms outstretched, ready to be swept into a hug, ready for all the affection and desperation and fierce craving that builds up, as behind a dam, from – count them – fourteen years of childlessness, five rounds of fertility treatment, three near-but-not-quite adoptions?
Maeve has thought about the moment when she would meet her child for the first time, over and over again, mostly when she is alone. She has taken the idea out, like a gift, and viewed it from all angles, invented and embellished and pursued every possibility. Ever since she and Lucas, exhausted and worn down by UK procedures for adoption, had decided on adopting from China, she had pictured herself and him waiting in a clean but functional orphanage entrance hall. It would be grey concrete, Communism-sparse, with kindly young staff in uniforms, rows and rows of iron cribs, plastic toys lying on the floor, yellow curtains, the smell of rice cooking. There they would be and there would be babies. Hundreds of them, lined up, each with shining hair and tiny faces and one would be for them. It would be theirs. They would pick it up and take it home and then they would all live happily ever after. Simple.
What she had not imagined was being bussed, with other parents-in-waiting, to a place like the Social Welfare Centre, which looked like a department store or shopping mall, with an enormous, towering, apricot façade and a fountain outside with statues of featureless concrete children endlessly pouring urns into scummy water. She had not imagined waiting in a room that seemed more suited to low-budget civic weddings than adoption hand-overs, with swags of metallic-bright fabric, fake rubber plants in brass pots, long trestle tables with white cloths, a dais in the corner with an empty microphone stand. She had not imagined that the children would be brought in, one by one, held up like raffle prizes, the names of the intended parents shouted out loud so that you had to concentrate, you had to listen, so as not to miss your cue. What a thought: to have come this far and then be scuppered, left babyless again, after a moment of inattention or a failure to understand a Chinese-accented pronunciation of your surname. She had not imagined doing this without Lucas but the last two times – two! – they had come to Chengdu, having been told that there was a child, a baby for them there, they had found that by dint of actually being in China they had missed a crucial telephone call on their home phone in Cumbria, which, remaining unanswered, meant that their baby had been allocated to someone else.
The logical loophole of this had floored Maeve but not Lucas. You go, he had said, when they’d opened their post to find a picture of a small Chinese girl with a blunt fringe and a yellow romper suit. You go and I’ll stay by the phone. I shan’t leave it for a minute. I won’t even go to the loo. Maeve had giggled at this and said, what will you do instead? and Lucas, without missing a beat, said, I’ll get a bedpan, one of those big, Victorian porcelain ones, and you’ll have to empty it when you get back.
Maeve has to grip the bottle hard, so hard she’s worried she might crack it, with her need of him. What would he say to her, what would he think, seeing her handling this so badly?
Maybe, she thinks, as she looks down at the hysterical and miserable child in her arms, she just isn’t meant to be a mother. Maybe she should take her back tomorrow – she should catch that bus again to the place with the apricot façade and find the people who gave her the child and say, I couldn’t do it. I was no good, she doesn’t like me, I can’t do it.
A minute later, Maeve has laid the child on the bed and picked up the phone, dialled a number, waited for the purr-click-purr of an international connection trying, trying, trying its best to make it, to succeed, to get where it wants to be and then suddenly, miraculously, Lucas is speaking into her ear and she is replying.
‘The child hates me,’ Maeve says. There is no good way to break it to him, she has reasoned, there is no way to soft-pedal the fact that they have come to the end of this road, the end of all roads, and are going to have to return the baby. ‘She’s miserable. She hates me. I can see it in her eyes. We have to give her back.’
Lucas says: ‘Where are you?’
Maeve says: ‘The hotel.’
Lucas says: ‘Go and see Claudette.’
Maeve does as she is told. She pretty much always has: first by her parents, then teachers, then lecturers, then bosses, then doctors and a whole host of other, less medically qualified experts in the business of conjuring babies, either from your own body or alternative sources. And see, Maeve thinks, where it’s got her. Here. Nowhere. Worse than nowhere.
She picks up the baby, however, keening now with a hoarse, rending cry, goes out of her room, along the corridor, and knocks on another door.
Her sister-in-law opens it. Her face is creased with sleep and she is wearing a nightdress, a loose white thing.
‘Oh,’ she says, pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘OK.’
She ushers Maeve through the door, past the sleeping form of Ari, who is stretched out under a sheet on Claudette’s bed, thumb in, fox by his side, and into the bathroom.
Claudette shuts the door.
‘Now,’ she says, turning round, ‘what’s up with you two?’
Maeve answers by bursting into tears, the first tears she has allowed herself all day, possibly because of the lovely, inclusive sounding ‘you two’, possibly because Maeve cannot take this sound any more, not a minute more – she has come to the end of her tether, the end of her rope, the end of the road. There is no more – of anything.
‘Shall I take her?’ Claudette asks tentatively, not wanting to grab the child, Maeve sees, against all instincts. Maeve nods, then watches as Claudette lifts the child, the baby, into her arms, watches as Claudette balances on the edge of the bath and sits the child on her knee, expertly, Maeve thinks, competently. And all the while Maeve tries to explain, tries to make Claudette see the magnitude of this disaster: she won’t stop crying, not at all, she doesn’t like me, doesn’t want to be with me, she’ll have to be given back, all a terrible mistake.
‘Might she be hungry?’
‘I tried feeding her,’ Maeve wails, brandishing the bottle, which she finds she is still holding. ‘She didn’t want it!’
Claudette presses her palm to the child’s cheeks, her brow, runs a finger round her collar. How calm she is, how good at this she is. How the child there, on her lap, presses against the white nightdress and makes the curve of her pregnancy evident.
When Lucas had called Claudette to ask her to go to China with Maeve to collect the baby, for moral support, he said, to help on the flight – wasn’t it easier for her to travel, these days, now that she had a married name she could hide behind? – Claudette had said yes, her voice hesitant, careful. Maeve was listening from the other side of the room and she already knew what was about to happen. There is one thing, she’d heard Claudette say, and
Lucas had looked at Maeve across the room and he loudly cleared his throat over the ensuing utterance. Maeve had waited a moment, checking herself, checking herself all over, as a person might after a fall down a flight of stairs, but she had at the time been filled with a joyous optimism about the photograph of the toddler in a yellow romper suit so had shrugged and nodded at the same time. It didn’t matter, she’d said to Lucas, as he held the phone to his ear, frowning. It’s OK.
He had asked her again later, as they booked the flights, as they scoured the guidebook to find a hotel different from the one they had stayed in before, which had been infested with cockroaches. Was she really OK to go with Claudette, who was now pregnant? Maeve looked at him. Claudette had pulled off something astonishing, breathtaking, escaping her old life and resurfacing, like a diver, into something new: a new house, a new country and, most surprisingly, a new husband. Of course she’s pregnant, Maeve said to Lucas. You didn’t see that coming?
Now, she doesn’t feel so blasé, so generous, sitting there in a stifling, boxy bathroom, with a child who loathes the sight of her and her beautiful, expectant sister-in-law, who already has one child and will be able to go on having them, as many as she likes, whenever she likes.
‘You know what,’ Claudette is saying, starting to unhook the fabric loops on the child’s jacket. ‘I think she might be hot. What’s she got on under here?’
Claudette peels off the jacket and drops it to the floor. She lifts a jersey over the child’s head. Off come padded trousers, leggings, tights. A second jersey, a shirt, a T-shirt, a pair of socks. Maeve sees the child, her child, emerge from layer after layer of orphanage clothing.
When Claudette finishes and the baby is sitting on her knee, wearing just a nappy and a vest, Maeve has her hand over her face.
‘Oh, God,’ she says, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. What’s wrong with me? How could I have put her to sleep like that, in all those clothes?’
This Must Be the Place Page 26