How the Penguins Saved Veronica

by Hazel Prior

  I don’t miss Aunt Margaret or my schoolfellows or my lessons. But I do miss the meager amount of freedom I had before. I miss the open countryside. I still miss my secret trysts with Giovanni, and I miss Mum and Dad more than ever.

  Fri, 24 April 1942

  I don’t write much more in here, do I? What is the point? I’m only writing now because I’m bored and I wish it was all over.

  I don’t have to do washing anymore. I’m confined to a small, dark room. An alternating trio of nuns visits to make sure I am still alive. They bring me a diet of white bread, powdered eggs, stew and brown broth. They keep constant watch and check that I don’t wander from the bed. I’ve tried to open the window, but it is locked and the key is taken away. They seem bent on keeping fresh air and daylight out of the room.

  My body is no longer my own. It’s a vehicle for a new force that nobody can stop. My skin stretches round the bulbous creature that is expanding inside me. No matter which way I turn, I can’t get comfortable. When I manage to sleep I dream of Dad and Mum and my beloved Giovanni and they are slipping away from me down a great landslide. I wake myself calling out to them. I will not be weak, though. I will not cry.

  Outside the closed walls of my current life, war rages on. There’s never any word from Aunt Margaret.

  I don’t feel like myself anymore. I don’t feel like a human being at all. The growing presence in my belly sucks all life from me. I try to imagine the bump as a little person with a future stretching out ahead, full of promise—but I can’t. I just want it out of me, a separate entity, and then I might be able to think again.

  Monday, 4 May 1942

  I’m not alone in this world anymore. I’m a mother! I have a tiny, beautiful baby to love. If only my own mother was here to see him! And Dad. Dad would have adored him. And Giovanni. I can imagine him holding our little son aloft, his eyes sparkling with pride. How I wish he was here.

  The blood and pain were truly terrible. Earth-shattering. I don’t want to remember that now, though, because now everything is different. He is here: a new life, my very own boy. Red-faced, wriggling, but perfect in every way. I marvel at his tiny fingers and tiny toes, and each time I look at him, I’m shocked by an onrush of extreme love. It’s a different kind of love from any I have ever felt. It is fierce in its intensity . . . and yet so tender it’s almost painful.

  “You are . . . you are sort of rubbery . . . and so strange . . . but you are delicious!” I whisper to my baby. He gurgles back at me.

  I have decided to give him an Italian name, but I only know two: Giovanni and the name of Giovanni’s father.

  “Enzo. Are you an Enzo?” I’ve just asked him. His hands are punching the air in excitement. I fancy he enjoys the staccato sound of the word.

  I’ve managed to locate the pair of scissors that Sister Molly used to cut the umbilical cord. I have gently cut off a few wisps of Enzo’s dark hair for my locket.

  There, right beside your daddy’s hair, little Enzo. You will meet him one day, my darling Italian boy. I’m sure you will.

  1 Jan 1943

  Another year has ended, another year begins. I am sixteen now and still live here in the convent. Enzo and I do all right. We look after each other. More than that; we delight in each other. I am never lonely now.

  “It’s you and me against the rest of the world, my little darling,” I whisper to him. “Until your daddy comes. Just until your daddy comes . . .”

  The nuns don’t take much notice of Enzo. I am working again in the laundry, and I keep him close. Most of the time he wriggles and giggles in his cradle or reaches up his little arms and makes patterns in the air as if playing an imaginary violin. I set him on the floor whenever I can and watch him crawl around, exploring everything. When he laughs, I laugh with him. When he cries, I hold him against my heart until he is happy again. When he soils himself, I use masses of fresh, damp cloths to clean him and make him spotless. His nappies give me extra washing work, but I am far happier serving him than those stupid nuns.

  I abandon the laundry often to rush over to take my Enzo in my arms and rock him. I sing “You Are My Sunshine” or any song that comes into my head, and he loves it. He puts his little fingers around my thumb and holds on tight or grabs at my stray coils of hair. I only get half the amount of work done that I did before.

  Poor Enzo didn’t have any toys at all, but now I have made him a puppet out of an old sock. I stayed up late one night sewing a cat’s face onto it, a face with a big smile and woolen whiskers. Whenever I put the puppet over my hand and make it meow, Enzo shrieks with joy.

  I have also discovered there’s a library at the convent. It’s mostly religious books, but there are some classic novels, too, which I love. In the evenings I read Ivanhoe aloud, rocking my son on my lap. He gazes up with his big, dark eyes and cuddles close, soothed by my voice. Then I tell him everything about his handsome daddy and how the three of us are going to live in Italy together one day and eat splendid olives.

  • 33 •

  Patrick

  BOLTON

  What? That’s it? There’s nothing more. Just a load of blank pages.

  I can’t believe it. Why did she just stop? I’m totally baffled. It seems like she loved that kid, seems like she adored the socks off him. Yet I know that at some point she gave him up for adoption. What the hell . . . ?

  It all just keeps spinning round and round in my head. I’m going to have to meet up with Granny V when she gets back from Antarctica and see if I can get her to tell me more. I don’t understand the woman at all.

  • 34 •

  Veronica

  LOCKET ISLAND

  Something is happening to my shriveled old heart. After seven decades of inaction it is apparently waking up again. I can only attribute this to the constant presence of a small, round, fluffy penguin.

  Indeed, I adore Penguin Patrick far more than I should and far more than I am prepared to admit. Our joint care of him seems to have brought me closer to Terry, too.

  It is the evening of Boxing Day. I only have a few more days on Locket Island before I must depart for Scotland and leave them both. Terry is sitting next to me on my bed, and little Patrick is draped over my knees, both flippers outstretched. We have just given him a dinner of mashed fish fingers, and his expression is one of beatific bliss.

  Terry picks up the empty dish. “I suppose I’d better go and do something useful.”

  “No, don’t go yet!”

  She puts the dish down again and looks at me curiously.

  I’m experiencing a completely novel sensation: a wish to open up, to both Terry and the penguin. I decide to humor myself. What is there, after all, to lose?

  I start in slow, measured tones and carefully structured sentences. I speak of things that I never imagined would pass my lips. I tell my audience of two all about my evacuation to Derbyshire, to Dunwick Hall; tell them of Aunt Margaret, of my so-called friends, Janet and Norah, of the terrible death of my parents. I tell them about Harry and about Giovanni. I reveal my teenage pregnancy and my consequent banishment to the convent.

  Patrick shuffles, intrigued that I am talking so much. It is a most unusual state of affairs. He rolls onto his side so as to view me with one eye. His feet slither off my lap, and Terry, who has subconsciously moved closer, gently lifts them and places them on her knees, so that he is bridging both of us.

  I do not look at Terry while I am talking. It is easier that way. Instead I fix my eyes on my little penguin chick, stroking his chest absently with one finger. I derive some solace from his face, so young and eager.

  The next part is hard.

  I never thought I’d share with anyone what happened about my baby. Yet somehow now, in this field center on Locket Island in the Antarctic Peninsula, in the company of a bespectacled scientist and a diminutive penguin, I do. It’s as if, regardles
s of me, the narration has acquired its own current and cannot be quelled until it has reached its conclusion.

  I talk of Enzo. In short, splintered, ice-cold words that can’t express the tiniest fraction of what he meant to me. What he means to me.

  “The twenty-fourth of February 1943. Enzo was in his cradle, fast asleep. I was busy boiling soiled cloths when I heard them. Jovial voices, strong, with a foreign twang. Talking about looking at some specimen herbs before they finished their visit. Sister Amelia ushering them down the corridor to the courtyard garden. I’d left the laundry door open to let out the clouds of steam. Stupid, stupid me, to leave the door open . . . to let them see him . . . If I had only closed that door . . .”

  I gather myself together and continue. “Their faces, peering in. A man and a woman, much older than me. Declarations of surprise and delight when they saw my little Enzo, sleeping there snuggled up in his blanket. They asked if they could hold him. I grudgingly said yes. How could I know? How clueless I was then! They scooped him up and cooed over him. His mouth puckered into a smile, a lovely smile, a smile they gazed at for too long. Then two weeks later . . .”

  I am right back there, in the past: March the eleventh, 1943. A sixteen-year-old mother, scarred but strong. Still full of hopes and dreams, despite everything that has happened. Fire running through my veins. A little weary, though, this afternoon. Busy putting nuns’ habits through the mangle, winding the handle slowly, watching as the drums go round, streams of water pouring out into the bucket. My mind is on Enzo. Sister Amelia has taken him to the study because a doctor is here to examine his first, new teeth. For some reason I feel uneasy. I lower the pulley of the rack and spread the habit out to dry. I do the same with a second habit, then a third, then a fourth: a row of damp black shadows hanging before me. On the fifth I begin to worry that all might not be well with Enzo’s teeth. By the time I reach number nine, he still hasn’t been returned to me. I’m starting to panic. I abandon the heap of sodden habits, the mangle and the rack. I race through the convent and rush upstairs to the study. Silence, an empty desk and blank walls. I dash back down again, my feet hammering on the stairs. I run slap-bang into Sister Amelia in the hall.

  “Where is Enzo?” I hear myself demand in a tight, shrill voice.

  She shakes her head slowly. Her fingers lock together round the silver cross that dangles on her chest.

  I stare at her, crazed. “What have you done with him?”

  Then she tells me.

  My screams echo down the corridor. My baby.

  My baby.

  • 35 •

  Veronica

  LOCKET ISLAND

  “Oh! Oh, Veronica!”

  Jolted by Terry’s wailing, Patrick the Penguin slithers toward the floor. He lands elegantly on his feet and starts waddling about, sticking his beak into things.

  “How could you bear it?” asks Terry. “To have your own baby taken away like that?”

  How do you bear anything?

  “I had no choice,” I reply. “The nuns said it was for the best. They believed they were doing the right thing. In their eyes, the fact that the visiting couple desperately wanted a child was a God-given opportunity. They had been wondering what to do about us, anyway—they couldn’t look after us forever, and I just wasn’t in a position to care for a baby on my own. I had no money, no job, no husband, no prospects. My son had gone to a good, Christian family, they assured me, and he would have a much, much better life than he could ever have with me, a disgraced teenager. They may have been right, for all I know. In those days, everything was very different. More different than you can possibly imagine.”

  Terry has no idea what it meant in the forties for a girl to have a baby when she didn’t have a husband. Your life was ruined on every level. The shame attached itself to you, and you could never shake it off. It became a part of you, like leprosy. People wouldn’t want to touch you. They would cross over the road rather than have to speak to you.

  “But those nuns tricked you!” she cries indignantly.

  “Because they knew I’d never, never—not even if it killed me—let my baby go otherwise.”

  I am conscious of my locket hanging heavy against my skin. In the caverns deep inside me, something is struggling like molten lava trying to find a way out.

  Terry listens, appalled, as I outline my life after Enzo was taken away. How I managed to break loose from the convent and stumble on with life, getting a job in a local bank, working my way up. How I silently grieved for years on end. I kept my past well hidden. Nobody had any inkling about what had happened to me. I shunned any contact with the people I’d known before or during the war. I never set eyes on Aunt Margaret again.

  I tried so many times over the years to locate my son, but adoption legislation in those days made it impossible for a birth mother to trace her child. Besides, Enzo’s new parents had changed his name and made an agreement with the nuns to keep their own identities hidden. I believe money was involved, but in any case, the nuns absolutely refused to share the information with me. Even when I applied to the same convent ten years later, they claimed to have lost the details of the family he’d gone to. I treasured the hope that Enzo himself, once he’d grown up, might eventually find a way to contact me, but that never happened. My twin hope was that Giovanni would return for me one day. If he was still alive and still loved me, surely he would come and find me? As a married couple, our chances of locating Enzo would be much stronger. But the years passed, and both hopes, starved of information, withered and died.

  Yet pallor and skinniness seemed to suit me just as much as rosy-cheeked enthusiasm had done. I attracted a great deal of male attention. I recoiled from it all. I gained nothing except the reputation of being a cold fish.

  There was, however, one man who didn’t give up. A proud conqueror of many women, he set his sights on me the very first moment he saw me. It was obvious from his whole demeanor when he walked into the bank that day, and he found excuses to come back and flirt every day subsequently. Never in all my years at the bank had I seen so many pointless financial transactions.

  “Hugh Gilford-Chart was a charming, forceful, good-looking man,” I tell Terry. “He was powerful in more ways than one, a well-known property magnate. And he flattered my vanity. He didn’t give two figs about my brusque manner and constant refusals. He actually seemed to like them. Anyway, he showered me with compliments. And compliments are always nice.” I wasn’t immune. To have a man so interested in me despite my disregard for his feelings was undeniably gratifying. It had been twelve years since I’d seen Giovanni by then. I knew that he was never going to come back for me.

  I wasn’t in love with Hugh, but I was drawn to him. When he proposed to me along with champagne, diamonds and the offer of an immediate trip to a swanky hotel in Paris—well, it wasn’t difficult to decide. I accepted. I certainly didn’t expect a perfect marriage, but I appreciated the security he offered.

  He improved my life in countless practical ways. I acquired a plush lifestyle, a number of household staff, holidays in exotic places. I took an interest in my husband’s work, as well. I managed to educate myself, reading about money, investments and properties. Seeing that I had a shrewd business acumen, my husband put me in charge of the rural side of his company. My chief role was buying country cottages and letting them out to tenants.

  Unfortunately, my husband loved all the ladies, not just me. A year into the marriage he had his first affair. I knew about it at once. He was slovenly about covering up his tracks, and she left lipstick stains and lacy suspenders all over the place. She was his secretary. It was such a cliché. I was sickened by it, although not wholly surprised. After he’d tired of the secretary, my husband’s affairs were as numerous as wood lice in a rotten log. I became fed up with it, and eventually, after eight years of tolerating his lies and infidelity, I filed for a divorce. With my experience
at the bank, I knew every last detail of his financial affairs and I did well out of it. I was able to keep on many of the rural properties.

  “I have since sold most of them. That’s how I came by my millions,” I inform Terry. “I’ve invested money wisely over the years, and I spend very little on myself.” I classify it as little, anyway. Although I spend far more than, say, Eileen. Or Terry.

  “I was never tempted to marry again.”

  Terry’s eyes are two clear pools, brimming with sympathy. “I can’t say I blame you.”

  “Years later I did receive some news of my son. A cousin of the adoptive family tracked me down. But it was only to inform me of his death.”

  I remember the day so well. Checking the post and getting that three-page letter that summarized Enzo’s life, or the life of Joe Fuller as he had now become. Learning that he had died in a tragic mountaineering accident and there was now no possibility of ever getting to know him.

  Terry is blotting her eyes with the end of her sleeve. “My heart just goes out to you. You’ve been through so much! But you—you never cry, Veronica.”

  “No.”

  It’s quite true. I have not shed a single tear since the day Aunt Margaret told me crying was a weak thing to do. I didn’t want to be weak. I still don’t want to be weak. I have always despised weakness.

  “But never to cry! I would have thought it’s impossible. How do you manage it?” Terry asks with a loud sniff.

  “Years of practice,” I tell her. “Years and years.”

  I resume. “The letter informed me that Enzo had no children of his own, and I had no reason to doubt it. But it recently occurred to me that an adoptive cousin might not have known this with absolute certainty. I took it upon myself to double-check. And that’s how I discovered my grandson, Patrick.”

  The other Patrick stops in his tracks and turns to look up at me again, recognizing his name. I reach out my hand to him. He sidles up and rubs his head against my fingers. I am glad of the touch, glad of the small, spiky beak and tousled baby fluff.