‘1957. We were in Australia around that time.’ She shook her head rapidly. ‘But I don’t think so. It would have been totally out of character. Even if she had managed to keep such a major event from me, she would certainly have held on to you, whatever the circumstances. She was a brave woman. No, my dear.’ She paused, looked into Helena’s eyes and held her gaze. ‘You know, Emily would have far preferred you to have sprung fully formed as you did, like Athena from the head of Zeus, than to have you leap from her womb. That was far more her style. And she certainly considered you no less her real daughter than if you had.’
Helena smiled. It wasn’t the reassurance she was looking for. She had no qualms about Emily’s love.
‘And Emily was really rather opposed to any arguments from heredity. Though she did like to think she was like her grandmother.’
‘Her grandmother?’
Mrs. Fenton nodded. ‘I met her once or twice, in the early thirties it must have been. Tall dignified woman. Not unlike Em in some ways. Though rather more eccentric I suspect. Or perhaps just Viennese. You know what those Viennese were like.’ She tittered putting her hand over her mouth with the gesture of a naughty girl. ‘But tell me about you, my dear, you’re not spending all your time worrying about your ancestors, are you?’
‘No,’ Helena laughed. ‘Just a little of it. I suddenly felt I should know.’ She started to gather up her things.
‘It’s a strange old world,’ Mrs. Fenton sighed, ‘Those that have their families spend much of their time wishing they weren’t there. And those that don’t, spend it wishing they were. Still, you’ll come and see me again, won’t you?’ she smiled as Helena stood, ‘And tell me if you discover anything.’ She looked at her with a little frown. ‘It’s too bad those Sisters of Ste-Marie were sent off to the four corners of the world. I know Emily tried to find out more about your parents at one time. She was fretting about this very eventuality. Though she herself was quite adroit at cutting herself off completely from her own mother, soon after her father’s, or was it her grandmother’s, death. Because of Rafi Lever, I guess it was. He was a Jew, you know.’
She tsked under her breath, ‘All so long ago.’
Helena bent to kiss her. ‘I’ll come back soon. Oh, and I almost forgot. I thought you might enjoy this,’ she dug in her bag for an invitation she had received to a lecture at Conway Hall.
‘Thank-you my dear. If it’s as good as that last one I met you at, I shall enjoy myself enormously. What a clever young man, he was.’
As she cycled slowly home through the early evening drizzle, Helena tried to digest what Mrs. Fenton had told her about Emily, her parents, her Viennese grandmother. She had a sudden image of a vast string of generations doubling up over each other - like the lampposts on the street reflected in their wavering and fractured puddles. Each generation was haunted by the spectres previous ones had battled with. Each somehow lived out prior dreams or fears with unexpected twists.
Emily had co-opted her into a chain, even if she didn’t quite belong there, and she carried that strong-minded women with all her rebellions and evasions within her more fully than any parents she had never known.
She shivered away the notion that Emily, through her Viennese grandmother had brought her back to Adam rather than to Max Bergmann.
Nonetheless, now that she had begun, she wanted to plumb her own childhood further.
Sunday dawned with the soft brilliance of early spring. As soon as she pushed open the shutters, Helena knew that today she would make the trek. She shooed the cats away, rushed up to the library and pulled open the drawer she had had more than one occasion to rifle through of late. There it all was, in Emily’s neat hand, the bare rudiments of her trajectory. And the list was topped with the relevant address.
At a whim, Helena rang Claire, told her of her destination and asked if she could borrow her car for the day.
‘You sure you want to do this alone?’ Claire asked a little querulously.
‘Positive.’
A little after nine, Helena was already easing her way across the Thames, over Barnes Common and onto the motorway which led towards Hampshire. The traffic was light and she made good time in Claire’s little Citroen, still relatively new despite an interior which crackled with the remains of crisps and an assortment of chocolate wrappers.
As suburbs gave way to gently rolling country, her spirits lifted. Here and there, clusters of almond in glorious bloom burst on her line of vision. The copses were a pale feathery green, their buds plump, on the cusp of leaf.
Close to Winchester, she turned off the main road to skirt the city and parked in a lay-by. Her map in hand she traced the route to Farley Chamberfayne. It wasn’t far. She was there within half an hour: a village that had exceeded its limits to become a countrified suburb. What had it looked like some twenty-five years ago? She had no recollection.
She even doubted now that she would recognize the premises of the Sisters of Ste Marie Home for Children, but it felt odd to pull up at a garage or a pub and ask. She drove through the narrow high street, past a little wooded incline, and was just about to retrace her steps when she saw the beginnings of a long brick wall. She followed its curve to an opening. There was a sign: Farley School for Girls.
With a quickening of the pulse, Helena turned into the gateway. What more logical than that the orphanage, the convent, should have become a girls’ school? She passed a playing field: a number of girls in brown gym slips were engaged in a desultory game of field hockey. They looked up as she drove slowly by.
The road after that was bordered by an old yew hedge, thick and dark, so dense that when the house came into view, it took her by surprise.
It was a Victorian building of no particular beauty, rather squat and solid with a bow towards gothic excess in its turreted central part. She remembered nothing of it, not the broad steps which led towards the main door, nor its heavy wood which creaked slightly as she pushed it open. The front hall was strangely empty. But a door to the side bore the sign ‘common room’ and taking a deep breath, Helena knocked.
There was no answering call, but suddenly a voice behind her, asked ‘Can I help you?’
She veered round to see a stern woman with greying hair, in a checked skirt and twin set.
‘It’s not a visiting day, you know.’
‘No, no, of course not,’ Helena mumbled, reminding herself that she had lived so long with a headmistress that she really ought not to feel that little twinge of pure terror which went through her.
‘I’ve really come with a different kind of visit in mind,’ she tried a smile, tried to keep the tremor out of her voice as she quickly explained how she had been here as a child, in the home, and wanted really to speak to anyone who had been here for a long time, twenty-five years to be exact.
The woman scrutinized her carefully and Helena breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that she had at the last minute decided against her jeans and put on a pair of sensible navy trousers and a good matching woollen jacket.
‘Well you might as well wait in here,’ she opened the door to the Common Room. ‘Everyone’s at chapel, but Mrs. Fisk, our music teacher, might be able to help. She comes from the area.’
Helena’s profuse thanks were met with only a nod. She settled herself under that watchful eye in a chair by a window, but it was only when the woman had closed the door behind her, that she dared to look out.
She was confronted by a rectangular courtyard, shadowed by the sides of the building. One corner of it was a chapel. In the centre of an expanse of lawn stood a fountain. She gazed at it, hoping for memory. But again, there was nothing. Perhaps she had come to the wrong place.
The girls were pouring out of the chapel now. Brown girls, in brown blazers over brown tunics, the occasional woman amongst them.
Helena waited.
At last the door opened and a tiny whitehaired woman poked her head in.
‘Mrs. Fisk?’ Helena asked.
; ‘Are you the young woman who wants to know about the Sisters?
Helena nodded.
The woman had a cherubic smile in a face that was all pink cheeks and crinkly blue eyes.
‘Well, how can I help you Miss…?’
‘Latimer. Helena Latimer,’ Helena took a deep breath. ‘Though I believe I was Helena Stevens when I was a child here, some twenty-five years ago. And I wondered whether there was still anyone here who might remember that time. Might know something about how I had got here. Who my parents might be.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Mrs. Fisk shook her head sadly. ‘Wasn’t all that in your file?’
‘No,’ Helena murmured.
‘No, well I don’t suppose files were kept so strictly then.’
The woman gave her a puckish smile and then settled into an armchair.
‘There isn’t much in a name, in any event. I imagine a lot of people gave false names.’
‘Did you work here then?’ Helena asked.
‘Only in a manner of speaking. Sister Richard let me play the organ in the Chapel. I lived in the village, you see. And it was the only one. Then I started to do music classes with the children. Singing mostly. My own were off at school and I was a little bored, to put it bluntly. Sister Richard was very kind. Strict, mind, but very kind. We became great friends. I was so sorry to see her go. We corresponded for a while and then…’ she lifted her hands in a dramatic gesture.’
‘My adoptive mother told me that I may simply have been left, on the doorstep, or…’
‘In the chapel,’ the woman suddenly looked up at her queerly. ‘There was a babe left in the chapel sometime around then. A few years before the place closed its doors. A girl. It could have been you,’ she smiled winsomely, and Helena had the sudden sense that she might be inventing all this for her benefit.
But she was rushing on now, ‘I can’t remember the name they chose for her. All the sisters fussed over her. They saw it as a benediction. At Christmas, it was. A sweet, little girl with a tuft of white-gold hair. And there had been a death a few months earlier. One of the big boys had drowned himself in the pond. Horrible. So this was a benediction. Even Sister Richard was quite besotted with the child. She was so quiet, you see, never cried. And she’d come in a beautiful basket.’
The woman leaned towards Helena with a mischievous air. ‘And all the sisters had fanciful notions about where she’d sprung from, whether it was from some poor estranged love-sick snip of a girl or a great lady trapped by an illicit passion.’ Helena suddenly had a vision of a gaggle of nuns in long habits and elaborate headdresses preoccupied only with her romantic origins. It all seemed a little exaggerated.
‘My own pet notion,’ Mrs. Fisk couldn’t be stopped now, ‘was that the poor little creature was the babe of a young woman’s in the village, Hetty Musgrave. She had gone off to America a few years before, all hoity-toity and full of herself, but she came back around that time, very pale, wouldn’t speak to anyone. Only stayed a few weeks and then vanished.’
‘Did anyone ever come to visit this foundling?’ Helena intervened.
‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you about that, my dear. I wasn’t here all the time.’
‘Did men ever come here?’ Helena realised the absurdity of the question as soon as she had voiced it.
‘Oh yes. It wasn’t that kind of a place. Though the sisters quarters were off limits,’ Mrs. Fisk pointed across the courtyard. ‘It was all very busy and quite jolly, really. There were about a hundred children. Perhaps more. Almost no tiny ones, though.’ She examined Helena again. ‘My, my, just imagine if Sister Richard could see you now. I’m sure she’d be able to recognize you.’
She stared at her again with those bright blue eyes, ‘I wish I could say I remembered you. But I don’t. Never was much good at babies,’ she laughed at herself. ‘And everyone else from those days has vanished. Still, there we are. You seem to have done well for yourself.’
Helena smiled politely. ‘Do you think I might wander round a bit?’
‘Feel free, my dear. The classrooms are that way. The girls’ rooms over there, though I don’t imagine Mrs. Prendegast would like you in there.’
‘And the chapel, the grounds?’
‘Oh yes, I can’t see any harm in that. I’ll show you the way.’
The old woman rose nimbly.
‘You know, in all the years I’ve had a link with this place, there have only been two other people who have come back to have a word about it. Strange that, really, if you think about it. And it wasn’t a bad orphanage, as they go. The Sisters were very good to the children. A lot of prayers, mind. But as for the rest…’
‘Well, thank you for your time,’ Helena stretched out her hand to Mrs. Fisk, as she pointed out the door to the courtyard. ‘It’s all given me a lot to think about.’
Had it, Helena wondered as she made her way towards the Chapel. None of it felt quite right. Nor did it hold any resonance for her. No sooner had Mrs. Fisk mentioned this Hetty Musgrave as the prospective mother of the foundling she purportedly was, than she knew she had absolutely no interest in tracing her, or indeed anyone else.
She had read about orphans and adopted children who had obsessively pursued their biological parents, sometimes, though not always, with dire results. As she imagined herself confronting this Hetty Musgrave or any other designated mother, she had a sense of mingled awkwardness and disinterest. It wasn’t a mother she wanted. She had had that in Emily and had no desire to see her displaced.
And in fact, except in order somehow to place that feeling she had about Max, she had no particular interest in another father either, a Mr. A. or B. or C. Or indeed in the story of her origins, whether romance or tragedy or simply tawdry, mundane tale. What her search was about was a source for that hallucination which had taken her over in Germany, that sense that Max was her father.
Or was she deceiving herself out of a fear of what she might find?
Helena gazed at the fountain in the centre of the courtyard. Some muscular Neptune, surrounded by nymphs shaped by a not particularly dextrous hand. Hardly an appropriate set of characters for a convent or a girls school.
She walked on quickly, pushed open the heavy door of the Chapel.
It was strangely quiet in here, dark, but for the shafts of splintered sunlight which fell through the high stained glass window. The altar was spare: a wooden Christ, a white embroidered cloth. To the side, a painted statue of the Madonna looked somewhat out of place. The ceiling was vaulted, graceful, and there, on a balcony, she saw the organ, Mrs. Fisk had presumably played.
She sat on one of the unadorned benches and imagined a basket, a baby within it, placed on one of these benches, imagined a man gazing at it, fleeing; then a nun entering the Chapel and finding the child. Nothing. The scene unfurled before her like one of those melodramatic silent films, eliciting no emotion except humour mingled with a kind of archival enjoyment. She had no connection with it.
Helena rose slowly, let herself out the door and walked into the grounds behind the Chapel. It was prettier here. An ancient mulberry tree arched its gnarled branches over a smattering of crocuses. Beyond, there was a little copse, and a drop in the terrain. She walked towards the crest of the hill, made her way down a path and across the still moist ground.
It was when she got to the first oak that the shiver ran through her. There was something about this spot, the lay of the land, the gothic tracery of the branches, spreading, soaring. A sense of vertigo suddenly overtook her, made her dizzy. She leaned against the tree, dropped slowly to the ground and looked up through the fan of dark oak to the sky. She felt it then, as certainly as she had felt nothing before. She had been here. Here in this very spot, her hands on this prickly earth, on these stubby clumps of grass. And that smell - moist, slightly sweet. She breathed it in.
In the distance, up the hill, she could see the roof and top floor of the School. It looked massive, solid. Too big. And from the neighbouring tree came a whiff of
something like excitement, danger and pleasure at once. As if some presence both expected and unexpected were about to emerge. She felt it so fully that she was certain it would materialise.
It was then that she remembered that image she had had: a child playing hide and seek amidst the trees; a big man with a mane of hair. It was here that the scene had unfolded. Here on this very spot. And was the man who had caught her in his arms Max?
She could have no proof of this until she saw him.
Slowly, she continued her tour of the grounds, but no other memories besieged her. But for that one spot, it might as well be as if she had never been here.
That Thursday evening, Helena left the office early. She knew that if she didn’t, she would allow herself to get entangled in work and the moment she had steeled herself to would be put off yet again. She was afraid, she acknowledged that. Her palms were moist as she dug for her tube pass.
The journey in the rush-hour train amidst a sea of tired faces seemed to stretch out endlessly, as if London no longer had any boundaries. When her stop appeared, she was a little surprised, yet her feet carried her automatically up the escalator and round the corner. The bus stop was still there. Nothing had changed. No, that wasn’t true. In the old bomb-site round the corner, where Billy and his friends had once chased her through brambles and dusty foxgloves, there now stood a sleek supermarket, signal of the Eighties. The old council blocks round it, however, were still there, if anything more dilapidated, their sooty brown brick punctuated by the eternal net curtains.
Helena leapt off the bus, walked past the apartment buildings, turned into a street of shabby terraces, then another.
Last week on the off-chance, she had looked up both her first foster family and her second in the telephone directory. She had rung all the R. Willoxes and met with no success. But the Moores were still at the same address, though there hadn’t been a phone in her day. She hadn’t used it now either. She had a feeling they might refuse to see her if she announced herself.
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