The Cuckoo's Child

  Charles Grover looked up from his newspaper at the other side of the staff room, alerted by the raised voices. I subsided. Miss Penfold clasped her hands together.

  “Well, I think it’s very romantic,” she said, “just like the knights of the Round Table setting out on a quest, not knowing what they would find or even if they would succeed but going anyway.”

  I rather suspected Miss Penfold of being a secret admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites and Lord Tennyson and did not quite see myself on a charger, tilting at hostile knights in black armour who wouldn’t let me cross fords for no apparent reason apart from bloodymindedness, but I held my tongue, reluctant to spoil her vision. Sheila had no such compunction.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “or one of those heroes, setting out on the journey full of trials with his tatty old sandals in his hand, ready to face the monster and save the world!”

  The gas mask case and its trivial contents flashed across my mind, and I saw myself boarding the plane with them, heading for the unknown, a strange country, strange people, interrupting the story of their lives with the melodrama of my own. Did I have the right to do that? Was my wish to know the only right I needed to intrude and possibly throw their placid existence off course? But surely I was part of their story too. A missing part? A part they had got wrong all these years? Wouldn’t they want to set the record straight too? My confidence in the enterprise was oozing away.

  “I just want to know my own story,” I said lamely.

  Ella was her usual practical self.

  “And you probably will. Just don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work out. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.”

  “Yes,” Sheila added, “and don’t forget to change the colour of the sails when you come back!”

  So in February, I left for England, the gas mask case at the bottom of my carry-on bag. Neil saw me off at Vancouver Airport on a raw day, when the cloud ceiling pressed close to the sea and the mountains were invisible. The tops of taller buildings poked into the mist, and the air was full of droplets that clung to hair and eyelashes and ran hesitantly down chilled skin.

  We stood together in that awkward space just before I walked through security and had to leave him behind. Neil’s hands were jammed in the pockets of his pea jacket, his shoulders hunched about his ears. I looked at his familiar long head, the pale hair, tinged now with grey, like a scattering of wood ash, committing him to memory just as he was.

  “I’d better go through,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He looked like a disconsolate heron. “Sooner you go, the sooner you come back, I guess.”

  “I’ll be back,” I insisted, kissing him. “Look after yourself. Don’t forget to eat.”

  “Right.”

  I had to end this inane exchange. I turned away, bumping into another woman with a fat, swinging shoulder bag. The apologies got us both past the X-ray machine and the metal detector, and when I turned for a last wave, Neil had already gone. Then I felt miserable, leaving him with so much unsaid, all the fears and regrets hovering between the clichés. I knew he wondered who would be returning; I knew he had even admitted the sneaking anxiety that I wouldn’t return, that I would find something over there that would hold me as fast as Calypso hung on to Odysseus, dimming my memories of him, and his claim on me, finally erasing them.

  Just to say this could not happen was not enough, nor was it honest. The one reassurance I might have given, that Daniel was a tie that could never break, was the one thing I could not say. So I said nothing, and added my silence to the list of wounds I had inflicted on my husband.

  FIFTEEN

  I nearly gave up before I even started, you know.

  I set out with such resolve, so much romantic claptrap about finding The Truth, finding myself (as if I weren’t hiding in plain sight all the time). All fuelled by intense curiosity, of course, but less noble things too. Resentment. Anger, even. Those months between Thanksgiving and leaving weren’t easy, were they? No matter how often all of you told me nothing was different, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe you, not really, deep down. I felt confused, so it seemed everyone must be lying. From the nicest of motives but still faking it. And I was furious that I could do nothing for you, Stephen, and that the fact that I could do nothing had been there all along while I sailed on, seeing myself as your saviour. A cosmic joke. I could hardly bear the thought of you searching out another donor while I had to be just a spectator, as useless to you as I was to Daniel.

  So I set off with a fine head of steam, but it’s amazing how fast it dissipated. You never consider how hard the little ordinary things are when you’ve left the familiar.

  First my suitcase got rerouted to Glasgow. It caught up with me the next day, but only after I’d stood by the carousel at Heathrow and watched everybody else’s bags whirl round without seeing mine. There I was, in a panic before I’d even left the airport!

  Then I had to find myself a semi-permanent perch. I had booked a room in a small hotel near the British Museum, thinking that a week there would give me ample opportunity to find somewhere more reasonable. Two days were enough to induce despair. My hotel room, though adequate, was expensive. And cheerless. It was on the third floor, at the front of the building, so the noise of traffic filtered up day and night. The room was very small: a bed with the most unyielding mattress I’ve ever encountered took up most of the floor space and crowded a desk affair that supported a tiny television, a straight chair with chrome legs, and an armless chair upholstered in Regency stripes into an uneasy line under the window. The only way to circumnavigate the room was sideways, and I banged my leg on the corner of the bed by the door until I had a permanent bruise that didn’t fade for weeks.

  One look at the ads and a few calls and I was consumed with anxiety about finding a place to live that wouldn’t bankrupt me before I even started looking for any long-lost relatives. Almost immediately, I twigged that there was no such thing as a cheap hotel in London, even when the exterior or the surroundings suggested that the owners couldn’t possibly charge much with a straight face. My options took a downward slide. I found myself scouring the Rooms for Rent ads for Kings Cross and Brixton and Lambeth, checking stations farther and farther out on the branch lines, considering the YWCA and youth hostels. At night I would roll about the bed like a billiard ball, hearing the clamour from the street, wondering why I had come at all.

  It was the chambermaid who rescued me. Her head, beaming like the Cheshire Cat’s, popped round the door one morning. I was slumped on the bed trying to summon the energy for the day’s search.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I t’ought you’d be gone. I’ll come back later.”

  Her cheerful black face was already retreating. I didn’t want the warm Jamaican accent to follow suit.

  “No, come in!” I shouted. “If you can get in with me here,” I added as she edged round the door.

  “We be all right long as you stay on the bed.”

  “Kind of defeats the object, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled and gestured at the litter of classified sections surrounding me.

  “You want me to take these out of your way?”

  “You might as well,” I said, “they’re not doing me much good.”

  “Are you looking for somet’ing special?”

  “I’m looking for a room to rent that doesn’t cost the earth, somewhere I don’t need an armed guard if I’m out after dark.”

  She laughed.

  “Hard to find that somewhere. Have you t’ought about places outside London? Somewhere like Wimbledon? Kingston? Try the local papers, and places where people put up adverts—laundromats, newsagents, like that. They’re the ones don’t cost so much, not like these,” and she rattled the papers in her hand.

  So it was that I set out for Wimbledon and started a search for those boards covered with plain white cards and torn scraps of paper in the corners of windows
crammed with cheap sweets and toys, newspapers and plastic pens, or hanging over the worn chairs and cracked laundry baskets, vying for wall space with the detergent and bleach dispensers, the industrial-sized dryers and the boxes full of odd socks.

  In the end none of these produced anything worth pursuing. I gained an indelible impression that the entire population of Wimbledon were semiliterate owners of aging cars dying to get rid of their white elephants. There was a thriving business in the exchange of baby garments and nursery furniture “like new,” and a somewhat less flourishing trade, to judge by the dinginess of the cards, in gents’ suits, bridesmaids’ dresses (fuchsia satin, worn once), and assorted LP records (mono only).

  Depression was setting in once more, when I caught sight of a tiny store a little way down a side street. It was a grocery of a kind long since mown down by the supermarket juggernauts. It resembled one I could dimly remember Mum going to before we moved to Canada. I wondered if this one had tins of broken biscuits, big drums of dusty currants, and a gleaming bacon slicer? Maybe even bags of Smith’s Crisps with a twist of salt in dark blue waxed paper?

  The interior was dark, and the only thing I could see through the window was a display case for Mr. Kipling’s cakes and a refrigerated cabinet full of Coke and 7 Up, disappointingly modern. There was an old-fashioned counter, dim in the background.

  On the inside of the door, where you couldn’t avoid seeing it as you went in, was a single white card. It was written in a beautiful angular hand. It read:

  For Rent

  Single room in a large house in an older residential neighbourhood. Suitable for mature lady. References required. Applicants should be able to climb stairs and tolerate animals. Enquire within.

  I pushed open the door. A bell jangled discreetly. The shop was overcrowded, the result of modern packaging and promotion techniques at war with the solid fixtures of an older style. I squeezed past piles of Tide and Omo. Packets of Ryvita and Jaffa Cakes mounded in front of tall dark wood shelves that wouldn’t have been out of place in a library. I was breathing in the smell, which was exactly right despite the Coke cans and the thoroughly modern freezer compartments, when the owner parted the bead curtains at the back of the store and took her place behind the counter, the long strings of beads clashing behind her.

  “Can I help you?”

  She was a small woman, deft and contained. She looked at me, head slightly tilted, dark eyes bright and alive. Like a wren.

  “I’ve come in to inquire about the card on the door,” I replied. “I’m looking for a place to rent.”

  “You realize it’s just a room?”

  “Well, yes, that’s all I really need. I just want a place to call home while I’m in England.”

  “That’s all right then. I didn’t want you to go round and then find it wouldn’t suit. We don’t want to disturb the ladies for nothing.”

  “The ladies?”

  “The house belongs to three old ladies, regulars of mine, been coming here for donkey’s years. Between you and me, I don’t think they really wanted to rent out, but I suppose they find it hard to keep that great barn of a place going. You’d think they’d sell and move somewhere smaller, but they’ve lived there for years and it’s hard to change when you get older, isn’t it? Did you want the phone number, then?”

  A short call from a public phone at the station got me the address from a gentle, refined voice after it had asked me a preliminary question.

  “Do you have strong legs?”

  I wondered what kind of tower this room might be in.

  “I think they’re in tolerably good shape.”

  “They would need to be,” said the voice. “This is how you get here.”

  The house, I was delighted to learn, was a ten-minute walk from the station. But going there from the noisy main street and the busy railway lines was like entering another world. Prosperous Victorian merchants and businessmen had built these houses for their large families and small armies of servants. They would use the newfangled railway to get to their offices in the city, but could retire at night to an almost rural calm, surrounded by fields and heath and small villages. Life in the country for the landless but wealthy bourgeoisie.

  The street was lined with huge old trees, limes and chestnuts, and sycamores as I learned later. The houses were all tall, three storeys at least, a fantastic miscellany of architectural styles from Gothic arched windows with stained glass to black-and-white Elizabethan half-timbering. The overall effect was confused, but a confusion that time had softened to an endearing eccentricity, backed as it was by the certainty of so much enduring red brick.

  My destination was a case in point. The long driveway, much obscured by dripping laurel bushes and rhododendrons, led to a circular gravelled area outside the front door. Like its neighbours, the house was built of brick, but here the dominant influence was medieval. The windows were white stone, Perpendicular style, and the panes were leaded. The front door was a Gothic arch, at the top of a flight of worn steps. More steps led down to a basement or cellar door.

  There were three floors as well as the basement. The edge of the roof, far above, sported crenellations like miniature battlements, and I could just see tiny dormers in the roof, which indicated an attic. Was the room up there?

  A further eccentricity was the tower at the corner of the house. It was attached to the house proper by a colonnade at ground level, rose up foursquare, punctuated by lancet windows, and culminated in an open belfry. There was even a bell. It reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of Tuscan churches.

  A large white cat sat on the top step. It stared at me with eyes green as peeled grapes.

  A gargoyle head of brass hung on the door, but I opted for an ancient bell push. The house was so large, I thought, the ladies probably wouldn’t hear my knocking, not even if it reverberated like the sound of doom in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

  The door swung open silently, and a face peered cautiously round its edge as the cat shot inside.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “I’ve come about the room. I phoned just a little while ago.”

  The face, and the hand clenched on the door, relaxed visibly. The door opened wider.

  “Of course, do come in. You got here much sooner than I expected. May I take your coat?”

  I decided to hang on to my coat. The air in the dim hallway was decidedly chill.

  “Come through this way, my dear. We tend to stay the other side of the house mostly. Come and meet the others. Mind the umbrella stand, it always takes people by surprise.”

  It did. Suddenly a massive stand with receptacles like elephant legs at the bottom for umbrellas and a rack of hooks and pegs, branching out like moose antlers, at the top for hats and coats loomed out of the darkness. My guide was disappearing down a long hallway and I feared losing her altogether, but then she flung open a door and a stream of light showed the way.

  “Girls, here’s the young woman about the room.”

  There was an instant twitter of anticipation. By the time I entered the room, my guide had joined the other ladies, and the three of them stood in a line facing me, beaming nervously. One of them was holding a ginger cat firmly in her arms. Its tail was lashing furiously, and it was struggling to find purchase with its back feet and writhe out of her grip.

  “Hello,” I said, “you seem to have a problem there.”

  “Oh, my dear,” said the cat’s jailer, “he’s being so naughty. I just can’t get him to take his medicine. He’s had an abcess at the back of his neck and he’s supposed to take antibiotics, but do you think he’ll cooperate? How are you going to get better, Orlando,” she continued sternly, addressing the flailing animal, “if you don’t take your medicine like a good boy?”

  I suggested wrapping the cat up and offered my help.

  One of the ladies hurried away and returned with a large towel. I took the cat and swaddled it so that its legs were all contained and only its head was sticking out, then tuck
ed it under my arm, feeling like Alice with the flamingo. The cat behaved in much the same way as that uncooperative bird, but I managed to hold it reasonably still and cooed to it while it concentrated all its hostility into a furious stare and one of the ladies gently introduced the dropper into the side of its clenched mouth. Most of the medicine went down, to cries of approval, and I let the cat loose to escape.

  “That was kind of you. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. You’d think three of us could manage something between us, wouldn’t you? And we haven’t even introduced ourselves yet! What must you think of us?”

  The lady who spoke was Evelyn Hoar—“as in frost, dear, not the other sort.” The lady who had let me in was Mildred Plover, and the third, plump and girlish, was Isobel Rowntree. They were very different, physically, yet gave the impression they would all bear the same trademark if you tipped them up and looked for the stamp on the soles of their feet. All three wore light tweed skirts with deep pleats fore and aft, rather baggy in the seat, but good for many more years of wear. Their feet were shod in sturdy, sensible walking shoes, brown to go with the tweed, and polished to a high gloss. Each one wore a blouse with tiny pearl buttons up to the neck, blue for Miss Hoar, pink for Isobel, and a strange greenish fawn for Miss Plover. Lambswool cardigans in neutral shades of grey and oatmeal completed the outfit. Isobel wore a string of pearls and a turquoise ring, Miss Hoar had a gold signet ring, and Miss Plover wore no jewellery except for a small gold watch with a fine guard chain. They might have been wearing the uniform of the girls’ boarding school they had undoubtedly once attended.

  “Would you like some tea?” chirped Isobel. “Do say yes, we get so few visitors.”

  Miss Plover intervened.

  “Perhaps Mrs. Alvarsson would like to see the room first,” she said firmly. “We can think about tea after that.”

  “Oh right,” said Isobel, “that’s me all over, getting the cart before the horse. I’ll just put the kettle on while you’re upstairs, then.”