I never will.
And yet he is mine. My body can feel it. It carried him. He was part of it. All these thoughts bubble in my mind as I stand there, at the cliff edge, the cold dawn air biting at me, the sea spread grey and silver below me, out, out to the horizon. It is beautiful.
A few steps forward, just a few steps, a breath in and out, eyes closed, a drop through darkness like in a dream, and we will be part of it. We will be together, without the world, without the thinking and the guilt, without the memory. The weight of all that is too much. It is too heavy. It will drag us down quickly beneath the waves into the silver and the grey. It won’t take long to fill us up and make us part of it. Yes. That is what I want. It is what I need. To be free of everything. To be rid of this body that was his body too. To be light and free . . .
I am spinning in the park, head thrown back to the sun, the world a blur around me, floating off into the sky . . .
But I’m not. I can never be her again, the girl who threw her head back to the sky and pirouetted on the Common, who said I am not afraid. She has gone. She is lost. I can never find her. Can I?
A few steps forward and I will disappear. A breath in and out and then—
Gone.
And yet—
She stops and stares silently out at the sea and sky, her eyes grey as the rain-heavy clouds.
‘Oh, Gloria,’ I say, my voice choked. ‘God, Gloria, I’m so sorry.’
She doesn’t hear me, though. She is there. In this moment she is the girl, not much older than me, who had wanted to die and take her baby with her. The thought of her desperation, her fear, her despair, and worse, the thought of her reliving it now, is unbearable.
‘Why did you want to come here?’ I ask, and my heart thuds. ‘Gloria, did your baby die here? Did you . . . ?’
I can’t say the words. Could it be that in her traumatized state something terrible had happened, some unthinkable accident or . . . or something that wasn’t an accident? Surely not. And still the questions race through my mind. How did she find her baby? She’d said that a baby with a black father would have been put in a home, but I realize that a baby with a white father would have had families queuing up for him, never mind that his mother had been raped. I feel so angry thinking about it, about the prejudice and ugly injustice of it, about the poor, innocent baby at the centre of it all, and about what Gloria had been through. She’d still been a girl really, suffering in a way no one understood, not even herself. What could it have pushed her to?
I watch Gloria’s face, looking for some clue, something that will tell me that what I’m imagining isn’t what happened. She doesn’t seem to hear me, just stares out to sea. And I remember what she said about her mother, watching the same memories unfold again and again, with no control over which ones they were, some happy, some heartbreaking, some terrifying, replaying in her mind again and again like a film on a loop, but worse because she believed them to be real. Is this what Gloria dreads, being trapped in this place, haunted by the memory she is now reliving as her disease progresses? Wouldn’t anything be better than that? Wouldn’t death be better? I look at her, standing frail but strong against the wind at the edge of the cliff. No. That can’t be why we’re here, can it? Is that what she meant by the end of the story?
‘Gloria, the cliff,’ I say. ‘You didn’t come here to . . .’
She hears me now, and looks round at me but doesn’t speak.
‘You don’t want to do now what you didn’t do then?’
She smiles.
‘Die?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought perhaps I did,’ she says. ‘I still think perhaps I do. But no. Not yet. You don’t need to worry. I’m not going to jump. That’s not why I came.’
‘Why then?’
She pauses.
‘I came to remember why I didn’t,’ she says at last.
The grass is wet with overnight rain and my brown shoes are stained dark with it at the toes. I’m reminded, incongruously, of Louise’s red satin shoes, the ones she wore the night I met Sam. They were ruined in the slush, just as her mum had said they would be, and Louise’s feet were stained bright red for days. Dear Lou. She’s in Canada now, her and Johnny, expecting a baby in March. Mum will write to tell her, I suppose, about me. But she won’t know for weeks. All that time I’ll be at the bottom of the sea and she won’t know. What would she say if she knew that I was thinking of her shoes just before I stepped off a cliff? She’d be delighted, I think. She loved those shoes. The thought of it almost makes me smile. The thought of my own feet, crushed into black patent. The thought of Sam. It is painful to think of him and yet the memory of how I felt when I was with him, the joy of it, the knowledge that I loved him and he loved me – the fact of being capable of love. Isn’t that a reason enough to live?
‘I came here then because I couldn’t face the future,’ Gloria says. ‘I was more scared and lonely than I had ever been in my life. I didn’t know how I could go on. That’s how I felt when you came to visit me, that first time.’
‘And what did stop you, then?’
‘Edie. Mum. Gwen. The fact that there were people who cared about me. The realization that if I didn’t let myself hide, if I allowed myself to feel, if I didn’t disappear, then perhaps I could live my life after all. There was something else I realized too, standing here, all those years ago. I did love my baby. I knew I couldn’t care for him. I knew I couldn’t be a mother to him. But I did love him. I never got to tell him that. And so . . .’ She stops, uncertain for a moment. ‘And so I’m telling you. While I remember. It’s important that you know.’
‘Why me?’
She looks at me, silently, as if working out how to say something important. I wonder if a vital word or fact has escaped her, but it’s not that. She’s nervous.
‘What is it, Gloria?’
‘I came here – with you – because you are the end of the story.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you still got the locket?’ she says at last.
‘Yes.’ They’d found it on me when I crashed the car and Gloria had told me to keep it.
‘Open it,’ she says.
I open the locket.
‘Take the photos out,’ she says. ‘Look at what’s written on the back.’
Carefully I ease out the photo of Gloria and turn it over. On the back is written in faded brown ink:
Gloria, St Monica’s, 1959
I slip it carefully back into the locket and then, my hands shaking a little, I gently slide out the picture of her baby and turn that over.
‘My baby didn’t die here, Hattie,’ Gloria says. ‘He didn’t die until many years after. He lived a full life and had a family of his own.’
On the back, in the same neat handwriting, is written:
Dominic, St Monica’s, 1959
I look up at her, disbelieving.
‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Your baby was Dominic. He was my dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was Nan – Gwen – who adopted him?’
She doesn’t speak. She can’t. She just nods, silent.
In the hospital. Still sore and empty and sick from the exertion of birth. ‘Handsome little fellow, isn’t he?’ Patsy, the nice nurse, says. Gwen holding my pale, blue-eyed baby, staring at him and then at me in confusion.
‘I thought he’d be coloured. I thought – can that happen? If the father is coloured?’ she says.
I say nothing, and Patsy coughs, busying herself with straightening the cotsheets and pretending not to hear.
‘Gloria,’ she says. ‘Look at him. He’s perfect.’
He’d have been perfect if he’d been Sam’s baby, I think.
And now Gwen is looking at me with that urgent look on her face that I haven’t recognized yet. Me, trying not to show anything on my face, picking petals off the roses Gwen brought, pressing my fingertips into the smoothness of them, rolling them against my thumb, and Patsy, the kind nurse, ch
atting cheerfully in the background.
‘I suggested James for a name. After James Dean. I fancy him something rotten,’ she’s saying. Gwen’s not listening. She’s staring at the baby and then back at me.
‘Want to hold him, Mrs Lockwood?’ Patsy says. She’s given up trying to get me to hold him, except to feed him when I can’t very well not.
Gwen nods slowly, her eyes still fixed on me.
‘Don’t let Matron see you, though,’ Patsy laughs. ‘She doesn’t like to see babies being cuddled when it’s supposed to be nap time. Can’t go without saying hello to your handsome nephew, though, can you?’
The baby starts to fuss as she lifts him out of the cot and I think he’s going to start screaming; I brace myself for it because I can’t bear the sound of it. But when she places him gently into Gwen’s arms he is soothed. She rocks him gently and whispers to him and he looks up at her, calm.
‘Oh, you’re a natural, Mrs Lockwood. He’s usually a fretful little chap but look at him now, happy as you like. You’ve babies of your own, no doubt?’
There’s a pause.
‘No,’ Gwen says. ‘I’ve hoped many times, but I just can’t seem to hang on to them, I’m afraid.’ She tries to sound matter-of-fact about it, but her voice is strained. ‘I should have given birth just three months ago. But I lost the baby.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Patsy says, her cheeks turning a blotchy pink. ‘That must be very hard.’
‘Yes,’ Gwen says.
Patsy puts her hand on Gwen’s arm and gives it a squeeze. ‘I’m sure one day you’ll have a baby of your own.’
Gwen bends her head over the baby, looking down at his bright blue eyes and hair the colour of copper and his pale, purple-veined skin.
‘If I’d had a boy I was going to call him Dominic,’ she says, and tears fall from her eyes onto the cheeks of my baby.
‘Dominic,’ Patsy says, smiling at me. ‘There you go, that’s perfect.’
It isn’t until weeks have passed that I understand the look on Gwen’s face as she held my baby. She comes to see me at St Monica’s. She pleads. Surely it is better than giving him to a stranger. She would love him more than anyone else could because he is mine. Her baby died before it could be born. Mine lived. Surely I must see that it is meant to be, it is God’s plan.
‘I don’t believe in God,’ I say.
‘Fate, then. Call it fate. Call it love. Do this for me.’
She squeezes my hands so tight it hurts.
‘But Vinnie . . .’ I say. But I cannot say more. Not to Gwen. Not to anyone. I cannot even think of what happened. Not ever.
‘Vinnie will love him as if he was his own son,’ she says. ‘I know he has it in him to be a good father.’
I turn away from her and look out of the window. There is blossom on the apple trees in the garden. It is spring, I think with a shock. Those trees were bare when I arrived. Time is passing. It will keep passing. It is relentless. And we change with it, I suppose. I’m not the girl I was a year ago, spinning on the Common in the first sunshine of spring.
‘We’ve already spoken to the authorities about it,’ she says at last, softly. ‘They are happy for the adoption to go ahead. But I want to do it with your blessing, Gloria. I want you to see that this is the best thing for all of us.’
I know what she is telling me. She is saying that I have no choice. And I do want to help Gwen, to make her happy. I do.
There is no other way. I will hand the baby over and he will be theirs and I will pretend none of it ever happened.
I will forget.
‘So . . .’ My mind whirls dizzily, and I shiver in the breeze as I try to take it all in. ‘I’m your granddaughter.’
She turns away from the edge of the cliff and the sea that stretches silver-grey away from us, out to places we cannot see. She turns towards me.
‘That is the end of the story,’ she says.
I nod, understanding at last. The journey and what it was about. Not just about remembering. Not just about the past. About the present, too. Our journey together to this place, this moment: the two of us here, together, connected by a son and a father neither of us ever really got to know. And our journey together beyond it, into whatever lies ahead.
I take her hand. It is cold and thin, and it grips mine hard.
‘Perhaps not,’ I say. ‘Perhaps it’s the beginning of the story.’
‘But I still don’t understand,’ I say when we have come down from the abbey and are sitting in a café. ‘Why didn’t you tell them? About Vinnie?’
‘I was ashamed. And no one would have believed me. They’d have believed him. He was a respectable man, wasn’t he? He had money, a nice wife he bought flowers and pretty clothes for, a new house in the suburbs with a fitted kitchen and a lovely big garden. I was a girl. I didn’t do as I was told. What could you expect from someone like me? I’d already proved I had no moral character by going out with Sam. A “coloured man”! I might as well have had “slut” written on my forehead as far as most people were concerned. They’d have said I was lying or that it was my fault. Even I believed it was my fault.’
I shake my head.
‘But after what he did to you . . . He raped you. How could you think that?’
She smiles.
‘I’d been told all my life that eventually I’d get what was coming to me, like all bad girls do. By my father. By Sister Mary Francis. I thought they’d been proved right.’
‘But it was him!’ I say, furious. ‘It was all him and he got away with it and you had to suffer! Why weren’t you angry?’
‘I’d stopped feeling anything,’ Gloria says. ‘I’d learned how to disappear, remember? Just like my mother. If you aren’t really there, you can’t really feel.’
‘Do you think Nan knew?’ I ask. ‘Did Gwen know? About Vinnie?’
I think about the Nan I had known, quiet, tidy, and wonder at the fact that she was hiding this secret, that she had this drama and no one knew.
Gloria doesn’t answer. She folds the paper serviette.
‘Surely she can’t have,’ I say. ‘She couldn’t have known that her husband raped you and just pretended it didn’t happen. She couldn’t have taken that child—’
‘We didn’t talk about it.’
‘Not ever?’
She unfolds and refolds the serviette. ‘It took me a long time to understand how terrified Gwen was of Vinnie. I thought it was love. I think perhaps she did too. But it wasn’t. It was paralysing, abject fear. He detached her from us bit by bit, from her family, her friends, the people who loved her. He detached her from herself, from the person she had been. He told her she was worthless. He was violent. Not like Father. Not in drunken rage. The marks I saw on her arms that day: some of them were fresh and raw, some of them were old, old scars. They had been inflicted methodically where no one would see them. He probably raped her.’
She takes a sip of her tea and I sit staring at her, not knowing what to say.
‘I don’t think she realized at first that Dominic was his son. He looked more like me than anyone when he was born. But as he grew a little and began to look more like Vinnie . . . Who knows? There are secrets we keep, even from ourselves. But I know now that Gwen did what she did out of love and kindness. She did it for herself, because she was desperate for a child, but she did it for Dominic too and for me. She knew I didn’t want a baby and she knew she could give him more care and love than I ever could. I understand this now. I didn’t fully understand it then.’
I shudder. ‘He was my grandfather.’
I think about it, about his blood running in my veins. Have I inherited anything from him? Did Dad? Gloria watches me.
‘Who we are isn’t decided before we’re born. It’s decided in the choices we make, the people we choose to be.’
I remember what she said, about how she wasn’t like her father.
‘If Vinnie hadn’t . . . I mean—’ I stop. I don’t know how to say it. ‘If
it hadn’t been for what he did to you, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t exist.’
It’s a horrible thought, one I don’t really know what to do with.
‘Which just goes to show,’ she says. ‘Sometimes good can come from bad.’
At least he died before Dad could know him, before he could play a part in his life. I’d always thought that was sad before. Now it seems like a blessing.
‘What about after Vinnie died?’ Couldn’t you and Nan – Gwen – couldn’t you have found a way of sorting things out? So that you could have got to know Dad at least?’
‘No.’ She says it quietly but firmly. ‘Things were better as they were. He was gone and it seemed best that all the pain he’d inflicted went with him. We both wanted to forget everything that had happened, put it behind us. Seeing each other made it impossible to do that. Dominic was with a mother who loved him. She was his mother. It was better that way.’
‘So he never knew?’
‘No.’
‘But what about Sam?’ I try to piece it together. ‘Did you tell him you were pregnant?’
She shakes her head. ‘How could I? I couldn’t tell him what had happened to me. I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even have a word for what Vinnie had done to me. After it happened, for a long time I think, I was in shock. I thought it must have been my fault. When I found out I was pregnant I knew the only thing I could do was end things with Sam.’
‘That was what you went to tell Sam that day you met him in the park. Not that you were pregnant. That you were ending it?’
She nods.
‘But you loved him.’ Tears at the unfairness of it spring to my eyes.
‘I did. But it was a long, long time ago.’
I look round and see Alice pulling faces at me through the window. Mum, Carl, Ollie and Kat are making their way through the door of the café.
‘Don’t look now,’ says Gloria. ‘But there’s an extremely attractive man coming towards our table.’
‘It’s Carl,’ I say. ‘Mum’s fiancé. I mean, partner. Boyfriend. I dunno.’
‘Have I met him before?’
‘You’ve been living with him for the last week.’
How Not to Disappear Page 31