The Cuckoo's Child

  And how did I react? I think it’s true to say I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was completely numb. Like a butterfly in that vulnerable moment when it splits open the chrysalis and struggles soft and damp and crumpled into the world, I stayed quite still. I could feel my skin losing its exquisite sensitivity as it hardened in the air, the folds smoothing out, the colours sharp and new. Underneath the exoskeleton, blood banged along its pathways, all the systems ticked over, gurgling and replicating, air wafted in and out, neurons fired, but all unattended. In my head, there was a great calm. The fact was there, installed and taking up all the room, but all I could see was the image of that small child, who was me, crying in the dark, and holding up her arms in supplication, and the still figure, who was my mother, lying crushed and faceless by her side.

  “I wonder who that poor girl was?” mused Holly.

  And that, of course, was the question.

  With the shock of revelation past, the others turned to ways of dealing with the discomfort. Holly went off to make tea and check on the children. You and Neil helped Mum and Dad off the floor and settled them into their chairs, made up the fire that had burned low, fetched boxes of tissues, and supplied yourselves with beer. There was an air of bustle, the normal busyness of life starting up again all round me, while I crouched in my carapace, where sound was muffled and distant, and the heat of the burning wood did not reach.

  Mum’s tear-stained face was beseeching. “I’m sorry,” she snuffled. “I’m so sorry. My mother always told me my sins would find me out. Well, they have, but I never meant to hurt you.”

  Dad looked at me sheepishly, and I realized they were waiting for a response. Forgiveness? Exoneration? Was I supposed to say, Oh well, never mind, it doesn’t really change anything, does it? But there was a chill coming over my heart too, and the words that would have made their anxious faces relax stuck in my throat like kipper bones. As if she could sense this, Mum spoke again, sadly.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t know what came over me. I thought it would be all right, but it never has been, has it?”

  Dad broke in then. “I hoped you’d be a little more understanding,” he said reproachfully. “After all, you of all people should know what it’s like to lose a child. You go a bit mad, don’t you?”

  I stared at him in disbelief, the anger that had been swelling just under the surface erupting into a full rolling boil. I jumped to my feet.

  “Somebody took Daniel,” I shouted, “just like you took me ! Is that what you’d say to my real family? Don’t you think they’d find it hard to make excuses for what you’ve done? How do you think they felt when they lost my mother and me? We belonged somewhere, you know!”

  As I ran from the room, I had the satisfaction of seeing their faces flatten with shock.

  Outside it was very cold. It had stopped raining, and the clouds, apart from a few stray rags, had cleared. The stars were pitiless, and the moon rode high among them. Everything glittered in the strange blue light, and I could see that all the trees and shrubs, which still carried most of their leaves, were bent under the weight of the ice that had coated every surface. The air was full of noises: tinklings, like thousands of tiny wind chimes, slitherings, creakings as branches strained and sighed, followed sometimes by loud reports almost like gunshots as the branches snapped off, thudding unseen to the ground with a rush and a distant shattering of glass.

  I stood there hugging myself until a fine tremor shook me uncontrollably. My mind groped about. The question lit up a billboard somewhere in the frontal lobes, relentless flashing neon, as impossible to ignore as a strip joint in an elementary school. WHO AM I? WHO AM I? WHO AM I?

  I was really in danger, I felt, of disappearing. The ecstatic sensation that had swept over me on top of the hill in Cache Creek now seemed mere fantasy, idiotic and ugly when there was a real chance of having to recreate myself. I didn’t completely lose touch with reality. I knew I couldn’t wash out the relationship with you, that love, simply because it was founded on a lie. Nor, in fact, could I ignore my upbringing, angry though I was. I was still Neil’s wife. But how, I wondered, would Neil see me now? Even with the best will in the world, thinking to yourself, it doesn’t matter, it makes no difference, would it really be possible to carry on as if nothing whatsoever had happened? Wouldn’t there have to be a little recoil, instinctive as the snail’s horn, from contact with the unexpected and bizarre?

  As for me, I felt bereft. What is a mother without her son? What is a daughter without parents? A sister without a brother? What is a person without a name? The only thing left, it seemed, was Neil, and the suffering we had shared that bound us together tighter than joy.

  An arm descended on my shoulder, and I was suddenly aware that my body was shaking without any help from me and wouldn’t stop.

  “Come inside,” said Neil, “we don’t want a case of hypothermia on top of everything else.”

  “How about a case of mistaken identity?”

  “Ah,” he replied, “some people will do anything to be interesting. Just adds to your mysterious allure.”

  We were a quiet bunch at the breakfast table next morning. Mum moved about softly, filling cups and cutting bread, dark circles under her eyes. Dad gazed out of the window, the bristles on his chin clearly visible, a grey-and-silver stubble that lent him a down-at-heel look, as if he had fallen on hard times overnight. Even the children were subdued, and Holly soon swept them off to pack up their things ready for the trip back to Prince George. By mid-morning the roads had cleared enough to drive safely. You drew me aside just before leaving.

  “Don’t be too hard on them,” you said. “So you can’t be Wonder Woman for me this time—you bought me some good years before. And you’ll always be my big sister, doesn’t matter who you are, and don’t forget it.”

  I tried to remember the first part of your instructions when I went to say goodbye to Mum. She looked at me appealingly, waiting to see what my lead would be before she spoke. I could hardly bear her need.

  “It’s been a shock,” I said at last, then added what she wanted to hear. “But I’ll get over it. It’ll be all right.”

  Dad had disappeared. I tracked him to his workshop. He was sitting on a stool beside a vise holding a half-constructed bird feeder. The familiar clean smell of sawdust and wood stain hung on the air. On the bench in front of him lay a small square bag with a strap, rather like an old-fashioned box camera. He pushed it toward me as I stood there waiting for him to say something.

  “You should have this,” he said. “I’ve kept it all these years. Maybe it’ll tell you something.”

  I opened the catch. Inside was a child’s Mickey Mouse gas mask. I laid the grotesque thing on the bench. On the inside of the strap that would have gone around the head, someone had written R. Goodman in purplish pencil. A search of the carrying case yielded two other treasures. One was a scrap of lined paper that seemed to have been torn from an address book; it read, Sarah Murphy, 14, Morocco St., London SE1. The other was a tiny manila envelope. It contained a few seeds with feathery plumes. The outside of the envelope, worn now to the softness of old flannel, bore a very faint inscription, written a long time ago in pencil. I could just make out Stephanotis and —scot —ark. What the first letters were, I couldn’t determine. Squinting at it made it even fuzzier.

  “That was round your neck when we . . . found you,” said Dad. “We didn’t think to leave it behind.”

  “Good job you didn’t!”

  The reply came out more energetically than I’d intended. Fact is, I’d just realized that these few objects were all I had of my other self. Valuable in themselves for that reason, but if I was going to recreate myself, they were also the strands of the thread I was going to pull on until I unravelled the whole mystery and finally looked into the face of the person holding on to the other end.

  FOURTEEN

  When does wish become obsession, Stephen? At what point does a faint desire, the thought that a
lways begins, “If only . . .” turn into need? The morning after the great revelation, when Neil and I drove down the driveway through the tunnel formed by the sagging branches of the willows on either side, I was prepared to be philosophical, to accept what had happened so long ago and move on, somewhat shaken but unbowed. Above all, the morning light encouraged reason. I told myself firmly I had not changed in any way, I was still the sum of my parts as I had always been, and the awkward truth that some stranger had brought me into the world should make little difference to me or anyone else.

  But I carried the shabby little case on my lap, and its pathetic contents, though mute, were eloquent.

  In the weeks that followed I was drawn to them more and more. When sleep evaded me, I would sit at the kitchen table with the companionable hum of the fridge in the background and spread them out in a line, willing them to give up their secrets. I would finger the strap of the rubber mask and imagine myself as a tiny child compelled to wear it—I, who panic when I get stuck taking off a sweater, convinced I will stifle before I can tear the fabric away from my face. How would I have endured its clinging, smelly rubber embrace? Was I R. Goodman? Rosemary? Rebecca? Roberta? Ruth? I fancied Ruth. I would say the name out loud, testing its feel on my tongue, experimenting with the way my lips had to push out to say the first two syllables, utterly different from the tongue behind the teeth, wide smiling mouth of the name I had used for years. I tried writing it on scraps of paper, taking pleasure in the sinuous R, infinitely preferable to my angle-iron L, but disliking the row of circles in the surname, lying there like runty peas in a pod.

  And who, I wondered, was Sarah Murphy? A friend? But if a friend, why had her name and address had to be torn from someone else’s address book? The “M” tab was still attached to the scrap of paper. If the book had belonged to my mother, surely she would have brought the whole thing with her, not ruined it by tearing out a page. Was it a relative, then? The surname was different, so an aunt, perhaps? A grandmother? A married sister? The dimensions of the scrap showed that the address book had been very small, one of those that used to come with a short slim pencil to slide down the spine. It was blank on the reverse too, suggesting that the owner of the book knew very few people whose name began with M, or perhaps very few people, period.

  From Sheila, whose parents still lived near London, I borrowed an old A–Z. Morocco Street was easy to find. It curved off Bermondsey Street, and there was the Leather Market and Leathermarket Street and Leather Court and Tanner Street, and I had a sudden olfactory memory of the dreadful stench of a tanning factory. But why? And then I saw it. Just a little higher up on the map. Magdalen Street. And what had my father said? They’d turned down Bermondsey Street and run under the railway bridges because Mum was scared of them, and there they were, black lines leading straight to a big square marked London Bridge, and then they’d turned right into St. Thomas Street—yes, and there was the massive block of Guy’s Hospital straight ahead—but they’d been diverted into Fenning Street, that little narrow street just on the left, there, when they’d heard my cry. So my mother, if that was my mother, had been making her way to a street just a few blocks south of where Mum and Dad and Olivia lived when she was caught in the open by the air raid and died in the doorway of the warehouse. Was Sarah Murphy expecting her? I wondered. Did she worry when the sirens went off and the bombers droned overhead, and fret even more when the All Clear sounded but nobody came to the door?

  It occurred to me that the A–Z might throw some light on the fragmentary “-ark” name on the little envelope. A Park, maybe? I scoured the maps, and the index, patiently running my finger down hundreds of entries in tiny print until my head reeled, but I drew a blank. Whatever it was, it wasn’t in London or its immediate environs.

  I looked up stephanotis in the Shorter Oxford and learned that the name came from a Greek feminine adjective meaning “fit for a crown or wreath” and that it was any of several tropical twining shrubs characterized by fragrant waxy white flowers. Apart from the tongue dexterity I gained by saying “tropical twining shrubs,” this was unhelpful, as was the information that S. floribunda is also known as Madagascar jasmine. More to the point, the dictionary firmly pointed out that this was grown as a hothouse plant. Now that did introduce some interesting ideas.

  The only hothouse I knew of in England was the huge glass and iron edifice at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. I had seen it only in pictures, but I knew it was an engineering marvel, rivalling the Crystal Palace, and the achievement of people who did not have to worry about money, who could afford to indulge their hankering for a tropical paradise of their very own, captive under glass, kept steamily perfect with its own system of boilers and heating ducts. While the hothouse at Kew was a giant specimen, even modest ones would be expensive to run. You would not find them in backyard gardens, and certainly not behind rows of two-up-two-downs in Bermondsey. But what about all those stately homes that peppered Britain? Wasn’t that more likely? And mightn’t whatever it was—ark or Park—be one of those? Perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree altogether, deducing a mountain out of a molehill, but it was a place to start looking.

  Was I looking?

  I was.

  By the time I had squeezed this much from the three relics, I was hooked. I could tell myself as often as I liked that it didn’t matter, I had to know. The frustration then was the difficulty in accessing more information from a place like Sechelt, with its nice little library and not much else. I could feel the information out there, waiting for me, but for how much longer? The people who’d been around in the war would be getting old, if they weren’t dead already; how much longer would the memories I needed to tap be available to me?

  Events were already ganging up on me, Stephen, but I think it was Neil who actually made my decision. The brief revival of interest in Daniel provoked by the tenth anniversary of his disappearance—the release of another of those aged photographs whose strangely alien, distant features made me weep and the usual flurry of sightings painstakingly followed up by Detective Mallory, who had finally contacted us once again with the dispiriting news that there was no news—had depressed both of us. I had been toying with waiting until the end of June and spending my summer holiday in England, but the months stretched before me, grey and interminably wet, the evergreens dripping, dripping, and I knew the delay would become unendurable.

  Already I found it hard to concentrate on dissecting fetal pigs, and I was getting a reputation for absentmindedness, forgetting to read memos, forgetting appointments with parents, not completing or returning forms, all of which earned me reproachful looks from Ella and the kind of solicitous questions from Mr. Spalding that concealed a tiny Exacto knife of criticism. Perhaps they’ll be happy to give me a sabbatical. After all, I’ve worked plenty long enough to earn one. Even as I had these thoughts, I had dismissed them.

  But as I was hanging around Neil’s studio one day after school, doing a little desultory tidying, I drifted to the window, where I stood playing with the cord of the blind and staring out at the sea. It looked sullen and fretful, slopping about among the rocks. I couldn’t remember if the tide was coming in or going out, and the sea looked as indecisive as I felt.

  “You know,” said Neil suddenly, “I think you should go to England and see what you can find out.”

  How like him to cut straight to the point. I tried to do the same.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Why should I mind? You’re obviously never going to be satisfied until you’ve done all you can to find out. It’ll be an itch forever. Scratch it, for God’s sake!”

  “When should I go then?”

  “Sooner the better, if that’s what it takes to get you out of my light and to stop fidgeting so I can work. Seriously, why don’t you take a leave of absence from school, and go during the next semester? Leave at the beginning of February?”

  It sounded so easy, put that way. But.

  “I can’t just go off
and leave you alone,” I protested.

  “Sure you can,” said Neil. He turned away from his work to face me squarely. “There’s been enough hopelessness. Maybe this search will be successful. Don’t you think that would make me happy too, to see you find what you’re looking for?”

  They won’t let me go just like that, I told myself, as I wrote the letter requesting a leave of absence. But they did. Mysteriously, the board granted me leave without hesitation. Possibly it had something to do with the fact that my leave was unpaid, and they could save money on a less costly substitute for a semester. Whatever the reason, I was grateful.

  Ella was thrilled.

  “It’s just like a novel,”she enthused, “or one of those mini-series. That is so exciting !”

  Sheila was more pragmatic.

  “What will you do if you find your family and they’re not quite . . . what you expect?”

  “You mean will I accept the throne right away or let the usurper stay on?”

  “I think I mean more on the lines of what if your father’s a mass murderer, or the whole family’s spent more time in jail than out? What if they’re people you don’t like? The kind you’d never want to have anything to do with?”

  Trust Sheila to put her finger on the sore spot and keep pressing.

  “Well, none of us gets to choose our family, do we? Chances are good we won’t like them all, even if we are related. That’s not the point, really; I just want to know who they are and where I came from, that’s all. I’m missing some vital information about myself that most people have at their fingertips. I just want the same.”

  “They might not want to know you,” Sheila said sternly. “Thought about that?”

  “Of course I have! I’m not going to force myself on them! I won’t demand they put me on their Christmas card lists, for heaven’s sake. Credit me with a little sense!”