by P. D. James
But he would expect a more considered judgement than that. She added: “Perhaps because with this one I can’t distinguish taste from smell and from the feel of it in the mouth. They aren’t separate sensations, it’s a trinity of pleasure.”
She had chosen the right one. There always was a right answer and a wrong answer. This had been one more test successfully passed, one more notch on the scale of approval. He couldn’t entirely reject her, couldn’t send her back; she knew that. An adoption order couldn’t be revoked. That made it the more important that she should justify his choice of her, that she should give value for money. Hilda, who worked for hours in the kitchen preparing their meals, ate and drank little. She would sit, anxious eyes fixed on them as they shovelled in their food. She gave and they took. It was almost too psychologically neat.
Miss Henderson asked: “Do you resent them for adopting you?”
“No, I’m grateful. I was lucky. I don’t think I’d have done well with a poor family.”
“Not even if they loved you?”
“I don’t see why they should. I’m not particularly lovable.”
She hadn’t done well with a poor family, of that at least she could be certain. She hadn’t done well with any of her foster parents. Some smells: her own excreta, the rotting waste outside a restaurant, a young child bundled into soiled clothes on its mother’s lap pressed against her by the lurch of a bus, these could evoke a momentary panic that had nothing to do with disgust. Memory was like a searchlight sweeping over the lost hinterland of self, illuminating scenes with total clarity, the colours gaudy as a child’s comic, edges of objects hard as blocks, scenes which could lie for months unremembered in that black wasteland, not rooted, as were other childish memories, in time and place, not rooted in love.
“Do you love them, your adoptive parents?”
She considered. Love. One of the most used words in the language, the most debased. Héloïse and Abelard. Rochester and Jane Eyre. Emma and Mr. Knightly. Anna and Count Vronsky. Even in the narrow connotation of heterosexual love it meant exactly what you wanted it to mean.
“No. And I don’t think they love me. But we suit each other on the whole. That’s more convenient, I imagine, than living with people that you love but don’t suit.”
“I can see that it could be. How much were you told about the circumstances of your adoption? About your natural parents?”
“As much, I think, as my adoptive mother could tell me. Maurice never talks about it. My adoptive father’s a university lecturer, a sociologist. Maurice Palfrey, the sociologist who can write English. His first wife and their son died in a car crash when the boy was three. She was driving. He married my adoptive mother nine months afterwards. They discovered that she couldn’t have children so they found me. I was being fostered at the time so they took over the care of me and after six months applied to the county court and got an adoption order. It was a private arrangement, the kind of thing your new Act would make illegal. I can’t think why. It seems to me a perfectly sensible way of going about it. I’ve certainly nothing to complain of.”
“It worked very well for thousands of children and their adopters, but it had its dangers. We wouldn’t want to go back to the days when unwanted babies lay in rows of cots in nurseries so that adoptive parents could just go and pick out the one they fancied.”
“I don’t see why not. That seems to be the only sensible way, as long as the children are too young to know what’s happening. That’s how you’d pick a puppy or a kitten. I imagine that you need to take to a baby, to feel that this is a child that you want to rear, could grow to love. If I needed to adopt, and I never would, the last thing I’d want would be a child selected for me by a social worker. If we didn’t take to each other I wouldn’t be able to hand it back without the social services department striking me off the books as being one of those neurotic self-indulgent women who want a child for their own satisfaction. And what other possible reason could there be for wanting an adopted child?”
“Perhaps to give that child a better chance.”
“Don’t you mean, to have the personal satisfaction of giving that child a better chance? It amounts to the same thing.”
She wouldn’t bother to refute that heresy, of course. Social-work theory didn’t err. After all, its practitioners were the new priesthood, the ministry of unbelievers. She merely smiled and persevered: “Did they tell you anything about your background?”
“Only that I’m illegitimate. My adoptive father’s first wife came from the aristocracy, an earl’s daughter, and was brought up in a Palladian mansion in Wiltshire. I believe that my mother was one of the maids there, who got herself pregnant. She died soon after I was born and no one knew who my father was. Obviously he wasn’t a fellow servant; she couldn’t have kept that particular secret from the servants’ hall. I think he must have been a visitor to the house. There are only two things I can remember clearly about my life before I was eight: one is the rose garden at Pennington, the other is the library. I think that my father, my real father, was there with me. It’s possible that one of the upper servants at Pennington put my adoptive father in touch with me after his first wife died. He never speaks about it. I only learned as much as that from my adoptive mother. I suppose Maurice thought that I’d do because I was a girl. He wouldn’t want a boy to bear his name unless he were really his son. It would be terribly important to him to know that a son was really his own.”
“That’s understandable, isn’t it?”
“Of course. That’s why I’m here. It’s important for me to know that my parents really were my own.”
“Well, let’s say that you think it important.”
Her eyes dropped to the file. There was a rustle of papers.
“So you were adopted on 7th January 1969. You must have been eight. That’s quite old.”
“I suppose they thought it was better than taking a very young baby and having broken nights. And my adoptive father could see that I was all right, physically all right, that I wasn’t stupid. There wasn’t the same risk as with a young baby. I know that there are stringent medical examinations, but one can never be quite sure, not about intelligence anyway. He couldn’t have borne to find himself saddled with a stupid child.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“No, it’s what I’ve thought out for myself.”
One fact she could be sure of, that she came from Pennington. There was a childhood memory more clear even than that of the rose garden: the Wren library. She knew that she had once stood there under that exuberant seventeenth-century stuccoed ceiling with its garlands and cherubs, had stared down that vast room at the Grinling Gibbons carvings richly spilling from the shelves, at the Roubiliac busts set above the bookcases, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. In memory she saw herself standing at the great chart table reading from a book. The book had been almost too heavy to hold. She could still recall the ache in her wrists and the fear that she might drop it. And she was certain that her real father had been with her; that she had been reading aloud to him. She was so sure that she belonged at Pennington that sometimes she was tempted to believe that the Earl had been her father. But the fantasy was unacceptable and she rejected it, faithful to the original version of the visiting aristocrat. The Earl must have known if he had fathered a child on one of his servants, and surely, surely he wouldn’t have rejected her totally, left her unsought and unrecognized for eighteen years. She had never been back to the house, and now that the Arabs had bought it and it had become a Moslem fortress she never would. But when she was twelve she had searched in Westminster reference library for a book on Pennington and had read a description of the library. There had been a picture too. The confirmation had jolted her heart. It was all there, the plaster ceiling, the Grinling Gibbons carvings, the busts. But her memory had come first. The child standing beside the chart table holding the book in her aching hands must have existed.
She scarcely heard the rest of the counselling. If
it had to be done, she supposed that Miss Henderson was making a good enough job of it. But it was no more than a statutory nuisance, the way in which uneasy legislators had salved their consciences. None of the arguments so conscientiously put forward could shake her resolve to track down her father. And how could their meeting, however delayed, be unwelcome to him? She wouldn’t be coming empty-handed. She had her Cambridge scholarship to lay at his feet.
She said, wrenching her mind back to the present: “I can’t see the point of this compulsory counselling. Are you supposed to dissuade me from tracing my father? Either our legislators think I have a right to know, or they don’t. To give me the right and at the same time officially try to discourage me from exercising it seems muddled thinking even for Parliament. Or do they just have a bad conscience about retrospective legislation?”
“Parliament wants adopted people to think carefully about the implications of what they’re doing, what it could mean for themselves, for their adoptive parents, for their natural parents.”
“I have thought. My mother is dead, so it can’t hurt her. I don’t propose to embarrass my father. I want to know who he is, or was, if he’s dead. That’s all. If he’s still alive, I should like to meet him, but I’m not thinking of bursting in on a family party and announcing that I’m his bastard. And I don’t see how any of this concerns my adoptive parents.”
“Wouldn’t it be wise, and kinder, to discuss it first with your adoptive parents?”
“What is there to discuss? The law gives me a right. I’m exercising it.”
Thinking back on the counselling session that evening at home, Philippa couldn’t remember the precise moment when the information she sought had been handed to her. She supposed that the social worker must have said something: “Here, then, are the facts you are seeking” was surely too pretentious and theatrical for Miss Henderson’s detached professionalism. But some words must have been said, or had she merely taken the General Register Office paper from the file and passed it over in silence?
But here it was at last in her hands. She stared at it in disbelief, her first thought that there had been some bureaucratic muddle. There were two names, not one, on the form. Her natural parents were shown as Mary Ducton and Martin John Ducton. She muttered the words to herself. The names meant nothing to her, stirred no memory, evoked no sense of completeness, of forgotten knowledge resurrected at a word to be recognized and acknowledged. And then she saw what must have happened. She said, hardly realizing that she spoke aloud: “I suppose they married my mother off when they found out that she was pregnant. Probably to a fellow servant. They must have been making that kind of tactful arrangement for generations at Pennington. But I hadn’t realized that I was placed for adoption before my mother died. She must have known that she hadn’t long to live and wanted to be sure that I would be all right. And, of course, if she were married before I was born the husband would be registered as my father. Nominally I suppose I’m legitimate. It’s helpful that she did have a husband. Martin Ducton must have been told that she was pregnant before he agreed to the marriage. She may even have told him before she died who my real father was. Obviously the next step is to trace Martin Ducton.”
She picked up her shoulder bag and held out her hand to say goodbye. She only half heard Miss Henderson’s closing words, the offer of any future help she could give, reiterated advice that Philippa discuss her plans with her adoptive parents, the gently urged suggestion that if she were able to trace her father it should be done through an intermediary. But some words did penetrate her consciousness: “We all need our fantasies in order to live. Sometimes relinquishing them can be extraordinarily painful, not a rebirth into something exciting and new, but a kind of death.”
They shook hands, and Philippa, looking into her face for the first time with any real interest, seeing her for the first time as a woman, detected there a fleeting look which, had she not known better, she might have mistaken for pity.
2
She posted her application and cheque to the Registrar General that evening, 4th July 1978, enclosing, as she had done previously, a stamped addressed envelope. Neither Maurice nor Hilda was curious about her private correspondence but she didn’t want to risk an officially labelled reply falling through the letter box. She spent the next few days in a state of controlled excitement which, for most of the time, drove her out of the house, afraid that Hilda might wonder at her restlessness. Pacing round the lake in St. James’s Park, hands deep in her jacket pockets, she calculated when the birth certificate might arrive. Government departments were notoriously slow, but surely this was a simple enough matter. They had only to check their records. And they wouldn’t be coping with a rush of applications. The Act had been passed in 1975.
In exactly one week, on Tuesday 11th July, she saw the familiar envelope on the mat. She took it at once to her own room, calling out to Maurice from the stairs that there was no post for him. She carried it over to the window as if her eyes were growing weaker and she needed more light. The birth certificate, new, crisp, so much more imposing than the shortened form which had served her, as an adopted person, for so long, seemed at first reading to have nothing to do with her. It recorded the birth of a female, Rose Ducton, on 22nd May 1960 at 41 Bancroft Gardens, Seven Kings, Essex. The father was shown as Martin John Ducton, clerk; the mother as Mary Ducton, housewife.
So they had left Pennington before she was born. That, perhaps, wasn’t surprising. What was unexpected was that they should have moved so far from Wiltshire. Perhaps they had wanted to cut themselves off entirely from the old life, from the gossip, from memories. Perhaps someone had found him a job in Essex, or he might have been returning to his home county. She wondered what he was like, this spurious accommodating father, whether he had been kind to her mother. She hoped that she could like or at least respect him. He might still live at 41 Bancroft Gardens, perhaps with a second wife and a child of his own. Ten years wasn’t such a long time. She used the telephone extension in her room to ring Liverpool Street Station. Seven Kings was on the eastern suburban line and in the rush hour there were trains every ten minutes. She left without waiting for breakfast. If there were time, she would get coffee at the station.
The 9.25 train from Liverpool Street was almost empty. It was still early enough for Philippa to be travelling against the commuter tide. She sat in her corner seat, her eyes moving from side to side as the train racketed through the urban sprawl of the eastern suburbs; rows of drab houses with blackened bricks and patched roofs from which sprang a tangle of television aerials, frail crooked fetishes against the evil eye; layered high-rise flats smudged in a distant drizzle of rain; a yard piled high with the glitter of smashed cars in symbolic proximity to the regimented crosses of a suburban graveyard; a paint factory; a cluster of gasometers; pyramids of grit and coal piled beside the track; wastelands rank with weeds; a sloping green bank rising to suburban gardens with their washing lines and tool sheds and children’s swings among the roses and hollyhocks. The eastern suburbs, so euphoniously and inappropriately named, Maryland, Forest Gate, Manor Park, were alien territory to her, as unvisited and remote from the preoccupations of the last ten years as were the outer suburbs of Glasgow and New York. None of her school friends lived east of Bethnal Green, although a number, unvisited, were reputed to have houses in the few unspoilt Georgian squares off the Whitechapel Road, self-conscious enclaves of culture and radical chic among the tower blocks and the industrial wasteland. Yet the grimy, unplanned urban clutter through which the train rocked and clattered struck some dormant memory, was familiar even in its strangeness, unique despite its bleak uniformity. Surely it wasn’t because she had been this way before. Perhaps it was just that the scenery flashing by was so predictably dreary, so typical of the grey purlieus of any large city, that forgotten descriptions, old pictures and newsprint, snatches of film jumbled in her imagination to produce this sense of recognition. Perhaps everyone had been here before. This drab no-m
an’s-land was part of everyone’s mental topography.
There were no taxis at Seven Kings Station. She asked the ticket collector the way to Bancroft Gardens. He directed her down the High Street, left down Church Lane, then first on the right. The High Street ran between the railway and the shopping arcade of small businesses with flats above, a launderette, a newsagent, a greengrocer and a supermarket with shoppers already queuing at the checkpoints.
There was one scene so vividly recalled, validated by smell and sound and remembered pain which it was impossible to believe she had imagined. A woman wheeling a baby in a pram down just such a street. Herself, little more than a toddler, half stumbling beside the pram, clutching at the handle. The square paving stones speckled with light, unrolling beneath the whirling pram wheels, faster and faster. Her grip slipping on the moist, warm metal and the desperate fear that she would lose hold, would be left behind, trampled and kicked under the wheels of the bright red buses. Then a shouted curse. The slap stinging her cheek. A jerk which nearly tore her arm from its socket, and the woman’s hand fastening her grip once more on the pram handle. She had called the woman auntie. Auntie May. How extraordinary that she should remember the name now. And the child in the pram had worn a red woolly cap. Its face had been smeared with mucus and chocolate. She remembered that she had hated the child. It must have been winter. The street had been a glare of light and there had been a necklace of coloured bulbs swinging above the greengrocer’s stall. The woman had stopped to buy fish. She remembered the slab, bright with red-eyed herrings shedding their glistening scales, the strong oleaginous smell of kippers. It could have been this street, only there was no fishmonger here now. She looked down at the paving stones, mottled with rain. Were these the ones over which she had stumbled so desperately? Or was this street, like the terrain each side of the railway, only one more scene from an imagined past?