The Cuckoo's Child

  Following the wall even farther brought us to another gate, of the five-barred farm variety this time. A driveway curved out of sight between two fields. A large herd of Friesians grazed in one, and the other lay fallow, the heavy clods of earth hardened just as the plow had turned them in the fall. Another sign announced PUBLIC PARKING, JUNE 1–30, and an arrow pointed mutely to the drive.

  “This is probably the way in,” said Miss Plover, parking neatly on the grass verge. “Shall we try?”

  Suddenly I wanted them gone. I had become very fond of them, and I was grateful, but this was something I had to tackle on my own, not accompanied by a gaggle of elderly ladies as if I needed support but had few resources to choose from. I urged them to go and visit the church since the park obviously opened to visitors only one month in the year, so they wouldn’t be able to wander around while they waited for me.

  “Didn’t you plan to do brass rubbings?” I asked. “You’d better get started; don’t they take a long time?”

  “Are you quite sure you’ll be all right?” Miss Plover looked anxious.

  “Stop twittering, Mildred, she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. Got a brain and a tongue in her head, hasn’t she? Leave her to get on with it; she doesn’t want us around for this. It’s private. Besides, she’ll tell us all about it later.”

  I could have hugged Miss Hoar for her bluntness and acuity. Miss Plover subsided, and we made arrangements for them to pick me up at the gate later in the afternoon. I watched them pack themselves into the car and smiled at the three faces turned my way.

  “Good luck!” Isobel mouthed as the car bumped slowly off the grass and three hands waved simultaneously as if conferring a blessing. I turned quickly without giving myself time to reconsider, climbed the gate, and set off up the driveway.

  Canada is a land that puts its inhabitants in their place where scale is concerned. I’m used to insignificance against vast skies and forests and seas that might cover the face of the earth for all you can see an end to them. Yet I’ve never felt so vulnerable as I did toiling along that narrow road in the midst of a pretty, domesticated landscape straight out of one of the Gainsboroughs I’d seen in the National Gallery. I half expected to find a complacent young gentleman, dressed in silks and lace, his dogs at his side, leaning nonchalantly against a noble oak, his outstretched hand directing my eyes to the expansive woods and fields picked out in loving detail behind him, his knowing smile saying, “Mine, all mine. See how important, how successful I am?”

  I was quite alone, in fact. The cows near the fence watched me pass with the heavy attention of their kind that makes you think their blood must be like molasses, sliding slowly through their veins. I could hear their breathing and soft snorts as their wet rubber noses tilted and dilated at me, and one or two, bolder than the rest, took ponderous steps closer to the wire to inspect the alien.

  The road wound around a stand of trees, rising gently. Open fields lay to my right as far as I could see. In the distance, a tractor no bigger than a toy crept along a track, but I saw no other evidence of people. The road I was on plunged into a wood, full of new leaf, and my footfalls were deadened by the mast lying on the ground. There were tracks through the trees, too narrow to have been made by men, and where one of these opened into a shallow ditch I met a hare. We both stopped dead, he rigidly upright, trembling with tension, one black eye watching intently as he held his Roman nose in profile. Then he was gone, back the way he had come, and in the still moment before I started walking again, I heard a sound.

  It was a bird, but not one I had ever heard before. The two-note call came again, distant but quite distinct, ahead of me. I knew what it was because it told me. “Cuckoo,” it said, “cuckoo,” the second note a third lower than the first, exactly like someone calling, “Cooee!” but the tone full and liquid, not shrill and high. I stood listening, looking about, hoping for a movement or the flash of a wing, but there was no sign of the bird, and when it called again, it had moved farther off. I felt absurdly pleased to have heard it and went on, smiling.

  Soon I came upon signs of occupation, if not life. The road emerged from the trees, and I found myself walking beside a grassy expanse bordering an artificial waterway. The grass had been tended, but the low stone walls and steps that guided the water down the slope were covered in moss and there were long curtains of algae in the pools. I followed the watercourse, thinking that the house must be somewhere close by, but all I found was an old tennis court by the stream, cracked wooden posts at each side with the remains of a net trailing from them.

  A man was bending over one of the posts. He straightened up as I approached and looked at me expectantly.

  “You haven’t come about the tiles, have you?” he asked obscurely.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Pity,” said the man, then added hastily, “not that it isn’t a pleasure to see a lady, of course.”

  “Of course. But tiles are uppermost in your mind today.”

  “Well, yes, though I’m trying to make up my mind about this too. Should I turn it into a swimming pool, d’you think?”

  I thought of the algae and wondered who would look after a swimming pool.

  “Awful lot of upkeep,” I said, “chlorination and such.”

  “Yes,” he said doubtfully, “there is that. Weather’s usually bloody awful too. Have to think about it.”

  He was about my age, with a thin brown face and hazel eyes with remarkable eyelashes. He was very tall, attenuated as a Masai, and dressed in filthy jeans, mudspattered Wellington boots, and an ancient sweater with a large hole at the right elbow and fraying cuffs.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked. “We’re not actually open to the public this time of year, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m hoping to see Mr. Goodman, Magnus Goodman. If you could tell me where I’d find him.”

  “Oh,” said the man, “come to see the boss, have you? Just follow the road around. You’ll come to the stables, well, they used to be stables, more storage for equipment now. You’ll probably find him around there.”

  He was pointing the way with his left hand. I couldn’t help noticing that his watch was a Rolex.

  I left him tugging at the frayed rope on the post and returned to the road. As he had promised, it soon brought me to a sprawl of buildings, dark inside, still smelling faintly of horse but inhabited mostly by sacks and boxes and farm machinery. I wandered through a gateway in a high wall of rosy brick and found a row of greenhouses surrounded by bins of soil, stacks of seedling trays and punnets, barrels and pots, wheelbarrows and carts. A man emerged from a shed carrying a garden fork. He looked much too young to be Magnus Goodman. He stared at me curiously but would have passed with a mumbled greeting if I hadn’t asked him where I could find the head gardener.

  “He’ll be in his office, I reckon,” he said, “down the end there, last one.”

  Office was an overstatement unless you understand it simply as a place of work. The greenhouse was the way they used to be: brick base, wooden frame, and real glass. Some of the glass had been whitewashed to cut down on the glare, and the greenhouse had an enclosed, separate feel to it like a cave. The benches on each side were covered with trays, many sprouting seedlings, and underneath huddled tanks of water and longnecked watering cans.

  There was a space at the far end of the greenhouse. An old wooden table had been shoved into a corner and was littered with papers, many smeared with earth, and skewered on spikes, balls of twine, plant labels, and small tools like secateurs and knives. A large cabinet of tiny drawers with brass handles and nameplates stood in the other corner, and in between was a bench with a number of sticks lying on it, arranged in a neat row. Sitting in a sagging chair with his back to me was a large man.

  “Mr. Goodman?” I ventured.

  The massive shoulders twisted and his face peered round.

  “Yes?”

  Now that I had come to the moment I’d been anticipating fo
r weeks, I was mute. How was I going to introduce this topic? “I have reason to believe” sounded far too much like the police to make a good impression. “You are my uncle,” too challenging by far. Launching myself at him with glad cries of “I’m your long-lost niece!” just asking for rejection. In the end, I made use of Deirdre again.

  “I think Deirdre has already mentioned me to you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, I’m the one who thinks . . . no, that is, I’m pretty sure I’m related to her. I know it sounds impossible, but I think I’m your niece. You did once have two, didn’t you?”

  He swivelled the chair around so he could see me better. His bulk filled the chair, and he looked immovable as he sat with his feet in their heavy boots planted firmly wide apart and thrust his large head at me, bracing the weight of his upper body with his hands on his knees.

  “Not only sounds impossible but is,” he said, “and I’ll tell you for why so’s we don’t get ourselves in a bother for nothing.”

  I said nothing and let him take his time. I could tell already he would be impossible to hurry; even his speech, with its lovely broad vowels and lilting cadence, was leisurely, although there was a force to it, and he wanted no argument.

  “My younger sister was killed in an air raid in London in 1941,” he began. “She shouldn’t have been there, but there you are, those things happen. She had a little girl, one year old or so, maybe less. The child died too. They were found together and identified eventually, and my dad brought them back home to be buried, lying together in the same coffin. I don’t think he ever got over that; he were a sad old man the rest of his days. And I saw them laid in the earth. I stood beside my dad, and we saw them home together, and I cried, I don’t mind saying. And there’s the headstone on the grave, plain as a pikestaff for all to see, with the two names. My old dad put his foot down about that, insisted, he did, and got his way for once, poor old chap. So you see, it doesn’t add up, does it? I’m sorry if it’s a disappointment, but it’d be best to forget the notion and lay it to rest.”

  “But you haven’t heard my story yet.”

  “That I haven’t, but there’s no getting round those two bodies in that grave, is there? My dad saw them both. He knew.”

  “I’m sure there are two bodies in the grave. In fact, I know there are. It’s just that the baby wasn’t your sister’s child.”

  “What are you saying?” he asked, then went on to tell me, “You’re saying that some baby was buried by mistake with my sister? How am I to believe that? You expect me to believe there just happened to be another baby on that street? And what happened to my niece, then? Got up and walked away, did she? Come on now, you’ll have to do better than that! My dad had to identify them. And he did. Said he just had to take one look at my sister even though . . . and the baby’s red curls. D’you suppose he’d say they were his kin if they weren’t?”

  “I don’t suppose that for a minute. But think a bit. It’s not always easy to identify people, especially when they’ve died from head injuries, especially when some time has elapsed before you see the body. I don’t suppose they were knocking on your door with the news right after it happened, were they? Maybe your father recognized your sister some way and more or less assumed the baby was hers. Babies look alike. It would be a reasonable assumption.”

  He was looking at me strangely.

  “How did you know that?” he asked slowly. “How did you know she died of head injuries?”

  I was caught. The detail had slipped out heedlessly. The small fact had seized his attention; I could tell he was no longer disposed to usher me out without listening. But I wouldn’t be able to capitalize on his curiosity without telling him about Mum and Dad’s strange role.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “I’m listening,” he said grimly and settled back with his arms folded, as imperturbable and incorruptible as a cricket umpire.

  For a while there, I became Scheherazade, fighting to keep a reluctant Sultan hooked. Not that I was trying to entertain; it was much more a question of the hard sell to a cynical customer. But we had one thing in common, that inventive strategist and I: a desperate wish to keep ourselves alive, she literally, and I, well, wasn’t it literal for me too? Wasn’t I struggling to inhabit a life that had been waiting for me all those years? And if I failed to convince this monolithic slab of a man that I was his niece, what would remain but a retreat into what I could only think of as an alias? I would be like a permanent ward of the Witness Protection Program.

  I told him everything. At first he listened sternly, witholding any hint of involvement. There was no more give in him than there is in a glass slipper. When I explained how I had stumbled on the fact I was not related to the people I had always called my family, a shadow crossed his face, and his arms, which up to then had been tightly folded as if to keep himself intact, relaxed. By the time I reached Mum and Dad’s flight with a dead child through the air raid, he was reaching into his pocket for a pipe and an oiled silk pouch, banging the dottle from the pipe on the corner of the bench, and filling it one handed with tobacco that smelled as sweet as any flower. His hands froze, holding a lighted match, when I told of their discovery in the doorway in Fenning Street, and his exclamation and violent start as the flame burned his fingers punctuated with impeccable timing my account of Mum laying down her dead child and picking me up.

  I pointed out my similarity to the dead child that enabled Mum and Dad to maintain the fiction I was their daughter. I explained their lack of contact with any sharp-eyed relatives or neighbours who might have noticed a difference, the way their real daughter’s ration book, identity card, and birth certificate gave an unarguable foundation to my identity and prevented any problems that might have arisen, and how my own youth made me the perfect accomplice and war the perfect setting.

  Finally, I laid the gas mask and its case, the scrap of paper, and the tiny envelope on the bench by his elbow and told him that these had been found with me and were the only clues to my identity. He settled a pair of half-glasses on his nose and picked the items up one by one. He grunted, an involuntary bark of surprise, when he found the name written on the strap, but he flashed a look over the spectacles at me and shook his head.

  “R for Ruth,” he said almost to himself, then looked at me. “’Twasn’t the child’s name, you know,” but then, as if he couldn’t help himself, “but ’twas her name for the little maid, right enough.”

  I was longing to ask what the name should have been, and why my mother hadn’t used it, but I didn’t want to interrupt his inspection. My caution paid off. He picked up the scrap of paper with Sarah’s address on it and stiffened.

  “My oath,” he breathed and laid his pipe, which had gone out, on the bench. Still holding the paper, he reached for the envelope and peered at the faint writing. A strange little noise escaped him and his hand went to his mouth. I was stunned to see a tear trickling down his cheek, but still I kept silent.

  “I thought you were just having me on,” he said finally, “though why you’d bother, I can’t rightly say. But I believe you now, and I’ll tell you, it’s not your clever story as did it, it’s these here”—gesturing at the paper and envelope—“I know where this bit of paper come from. I should. I tore it out my very own self, stole it from Mother’s book to give to my poor sister. And this here”—fingering the packet of seeds—“I’d know that hand anywhere. Don’t I see it every day of my life? Look here.”

  He pointed to the cabinet full of drawers.

  “That’s my dad’s writing on all those labels, see?”

  I bent closer to look at the elegant copperplate, written with a fine pen, the downstrokes broad and the upstrokes mere threads of ink. Magnus held the envelope close to one of the drawers.

  “Now,” he said, “see here.”

  The label on the drawer read STEPHANOTIS. The name on the envelope was like an echo, faint but unmistakably the
same. He slid open the drawer and inside lay the same downy seeds I had found in the packet. It wasn’t proof of anything, yet it felt like a smoking gun. I looked at Magnus. He looked at me.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “it’s a facer, but I seem to have found a niece, and I never thought to say that.”

  “Uncle Magnus,” I asked, the words odd in my mouth, “what is my real name?”

  His face fell serious again.

  “Ah now, there’s a thing,” he said evasively. “What have they called you all these years?”

  “Livvy, short for Olivia.”

  “Well, you might want to stick with that. That’s a pretty name. I don’t reckon you’ll much fancy the name you were given here.”

  “But what was it?”

  “My old dad, he were right against it. ‘You can’t call the little maid that,’ he said, ‘’twill be a millstone round the child’s neck.’ But she would have it; made the old man go and register the birth, not a second would she wait.”

  “Who wouldn’t? My mother?”

  “Lord bless you, no! My mother, that were. Your mother would have given you some dainty name out of her poetry books, but she never got the chance.”

  “You’re driving me mad, you know! What’s my name? Something awful like Bertha or Gladys?”

  Uncle Magnus looked flushed and embarrassed.

  “That wouldn’t be so bad,” he said. I wondered what on earth it could be if that wasn’t so bad. Blodwen? Hagar? My uncle took the plunge.