Friendly Fire

by Patrick Gale

  Lucas groaned. ‘Oh, god, yes. Lady Droxford. No, it’ll just be the two of them – although he’d love her there because she’s a Lady and he’s such a snob. Maybe they’ll stay at a hotel because it’ll end so late.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sophie said, ‘it would be nice for Charlie to have all the attention for a change. It’s not always about you, Lou.’ He looked up, stung. At last, she thought, I have his attention. ‘The way you carry on sometimes,’ she added. ‘Anyone would think you were an only child.’

  ‘Yeah, well a fat lot you’d know about that,’ he shot back.

  Kimiko was caught between them, shocked, glancing from one to the other as they glared but then she seemed fractionally to turn to face Sophie more, siding with Lucas, her new best friend.

  Sophie turned and walked back towards Schola, face burning, feeling foolish and wretched. She had almost flounced. She never flounced. It was more Charlie’s style than hers. She never lost her temper because she hated feeling like this. She couldn’t even hint it was her time of the month because Kimiko would know it wasn’t.

  She passed through the Slipe into Flint Quad. The din of lunch was already starting upstairs. Boys were stamping up the boomy wooden steps to Hall. Kitchen staff clanged trays and yelled to one another. She hesitated at the foot of the steps. Lucas and Kimiko would be gaining on her. It had become a practice among them to exploit the studied coolness and lower discipline of the upper school by insinuating Lucas or Charlie into Schola for meals occasionally. The smell of fish pie reached her, and boiled cabbage and the urinous whiff of carrot steam. Far from revolting her, it made her stomach contract with hunger; school food always smelled worse at a distance.

  She started up the steps but was stopped by a familiar voice shouting her name. A rush of first-years, gowns flying as they pounded upstairs on either side of her, confused her senses and it was only when Margaret waved an arm that she spotted her.

  She was out of place there, in a dazzlingly awful hat and scarf set she had knitted herself and the padded, cream raincoat that turned a bulky woman into a tumulus. She dwarfed Itchen, the diminutive, polio-lamed porter, who was hobbling along beside her. Clutching a bunch of daffodils, she managed to appear the model of the embarrassing, inopportunely arriving mother and Sophie had never been so happy to see anyone. Ignoring Lucas and Kimiko, who were just coming through the Slipe, she raced over to her and hugged her.

  ‘Happy birthday, love,’ Margaret laughed and kissed her. It might have been the first kiss she had ever given her. Normally she restricted herself to loving hugs, professionally or maternally wary of how anything warmer might be interpreted. She didn’t smell of cooking or washing for once but of scent, so Sophie realized she was treating this as an occasion, not just another task.

  ‘Found her. Good,’ Itchen said and hobbled back to the lodge, glad to be spared the arduous climb up to Hall.

  ‘I’m kidnapping you,’ Margaret said, handing over the flowers. ‘You don’t turn sixteen every day. These are for you. I invented a dentist’s appointment for you so don’t look too happy. So this is where you live?’

  ‘Yes. My study’s up there.’ Sophie pointed at a dormer window, aware that she had never given Margaret a tour. ‘Do you want to see?’

  ‘Maybe later. Come on. Your presents are in the car. Kieran’s covering for me so we’ve got just two hours before I have to get back and get supper started. You look well.’

  ‘I don’t. I’ve got zits.’

  ‘Just be glad you’re still young enough to get them, my girl.’

  Margaret drove her out of town to a small pub on a riverbank. ‘My refuge,’ she explained. ‘Where I come to get away from you lot.’

  Waiting for their lunch, she gave Sophie her presents. A very grown-up Sheaffer fountain pen from her and a purple bean bag from Kieran. There was a card signed by all the children in the home and Sophie realized she was really having difficulty putting faces to all the names. The last present, a bulky one, was from Wilf. It was an authentic American baseball jacket, red with white sleeves and stripey cuffs. It was worth far more than they usually spent on each other, embarrassingly far more.

  ‘He’s earning now,’ Margaret said, reading her mind as Sophie tried it on, stroking the warm fabric. ‘Will they let you wear that at school? It looks funny over your uniform.’

  ‘On half-days and Sundays we can wear what we like. And he’s got it a bit too big. He knows I like that. Oh, I feel awful!’

  ‘Why? He loves you. Just because he moved out doesn’t change that. I’d take it off now though or you might get gravy on it. It doesn’t look machine-washable.’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s fab,’ Sophie said then took it off, guilty that she had not made nearly as much fuss about the fountain pen and sag bag.

  When they’d reached the coffee stage, Margaret produced another envelope. ‘This came from your social worker,’ she said.

  ‘She remembered my birthday?’ Sophie asked.

  Margaret shook her head. ‘No, love. It’s just been forwarded by her. You’d better read it.’

  The letter was rather sad but also indignant. Enclosing the one Sophie had written them, Mr Pickett explained that he and his wife had indeed tried to adopt her when she was just six months old but then had been told there was an administrative error and that she had been adopted already. Disappointed after a long search, they had given up on parenthood only for a miracle to happen and Mrs Pickett became pregnant, something they had been assured was quite impossible. They were aghast to hear that Sophie had not been adopted after all but possibly more so that she had been given their details to contact them. Surely this was a breach of confidentiality rules?

  The letter was typed, as though to mask whatever sense of Mr Pickett’s personality might have leaked through its careful wording. The signature, in black ink, was illegible but, combined with the typing, suggested a pinched quality, a lack of warmth.

  Sophie could feel Margaret’s eyes on her as she read the letter again. She tried to imagine the child, her supplanter, younger by half a year, and what growing up in an old vicarage, loved by the writer of such a letter would have made of her. She pictured the clothes of conformity: white lacy knee socks, brown, vieille fille shoes, one of those unflatteringly square-hanging tartan skirts with the traditional pin fastening. A life-time completer of holiday diaries and meek wearer of Dr White’s towels.

  At last she could avoid Margaret’s questioning eye no longer.

  ‘Wilf,’ she explained. ‘He’d been on at me for years about how he knew where all the files were kept in your office and did I want to read mine if he took a hairpin to the lock. I’d always said no but he copied my file anyway, without telling me. He left it as a sort of moving-out present. I don’t know why I wrote. Maybe I was a bit angry. I’d given up waiting to hear back.’

  ‘They’d moved, look.’ Margaret tapped the pages, drawing her attention to the difference between the address printed at the top of one and the one in her own writing at the top of the other. Some low, feral part of her could not help taking a mental snapshot of the new address – another old vicarage, this time in a Wiltshire village – in the seconds before Margaret folded the letters away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘Does this get you into trouble?’

  ‘No,’ Margaret told her sadly. ‘Not really. I’ve been onto the council before about the lack of security in the office. Wilf isn’t the first kid we’ve had who could pick locks. It’s a stupid rule anyway.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing. Don’t mind me. I’m being … Oh fuck it.’ Margaret never swore. And now she was getting tearful, Margaret who didn’t even cry at Ring of Bright Water.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Sophie told her. ‘God, I’m sorry, Margaret.’

  ‘It’s not you, love. I … I don’t care. They wouldn’t sack me for it. They wouldn’t have the nerve.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand.’

  But Margaret was all myst
ifying animation suddenly. ‘Come on. Someone for you to meet. Another bit of your birthday present, call it.’

  She drove some distance, back around the city’s outskirts, then stopped at a phone box to make a call. Watching her through the glass, Sophie could see she was agitated.

  ‘Right,’ Margaret said, getting back in the car and driving on. ‘You’ve got half an hour then I’ll have to drop you back at school.’

  ‘Who is it? Where are we going? Margaret?’

  Margaret pulled over, parked and cut the engine. It was a quiet, entirely unremarkable suburban street of redbrick bungalows. ‘Number Twenty-two,’ she said. ‘Just over there by the zebra crossing. She’s expecting you. I’m not here, okay? I never told you anything. But you can’t know so much and no more. It’s not your mother, though, okay? Don’t get your hopes up. She’s called Betty. Betty Kirklow. She’s expecting you. She’s been expecting you a while, I reckon. I’ll wait out here, love. Better that way.’

  Number Twenty-two was a bungalow, like its neighbours. There was a lawn, punctuated by a cherry tree and a circular flower bed stuffed with winter pansies. Beside it, concrete slabs made a hard standing for a car. A fat tabby cat slunk away beneath the hedge as Sophie came up the path. A little metal basket for milk bottles. A device for removing muddy boots. A stirring net curtain. She told her brain to remember, remember anything it could, but nothing here sparked the slightest recognition beyond a faint echo of the house Janet and John lived in. She realized she remembered Janet and John, remembered turning the pages and learning to read and her frustration that the sentences she was reading were so rudimentary and pedestrian. Just as the memory returned to her, the front door opened and a woman was standing there.

  She looked like a piano teacher. Blue blouse, tweed skirt, carefully styled brown hair. A kind, moon-like face. A cameo brooch at her neck. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sophie? I’m Betty.’ Her voice shook slightly with nerves as she held out a hand. It was warm, wet even. She was scared. ‘Please come in,’ she said. ‘Come in and sit down where I can look at you.’

  She closed the door swiftly behind them and led her to the sitting room. The house smelled of lavender air freshener with an undertow of boiled egg. Its atmosphere was not a happy one.

  ‘Look at you. So grown up! How old are you now? Fifteen, is it?’

  ‘Sixteen.’ Sophie held back from telling this stranger it was her birthday. She was too curious to want to deflect her attention.

  ‘Goodness.’ Betty Kirklow smacked her hands together. ‘Do you want tea? Coffee?’

  ‘I’ve just had some, thank you. I know your voice.’

  It was true. Nothing about her struck any chords but the voice, which was far higher than the face and build led one to expect.

  ‘Really? You remember that?’

  Sophie nodded. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Why should I remember?’

  Betty Kirklow glanced nervously at the clock that was ticking on the mantelpiece. ‘Sit down, please,’ she said.

  They both sat.

  ‘I used to run a home,’ she said softly. ‘Not a children’s home, a mother and baby home. They don’t have them any more, thank God. Girls came to us who were pregnant but not married. Actually they didn’t come. They never came. They were delivered. By their parents or sometimes by the people they worked for. The idea was that they stayed with us long enough to have their babies and we found the babies adoptive parents so the babies could go straight to a new home that wanted them and the poor girls could get on with their lives. They didn’t always want to give the babies up.’

  ‘Did my mother come to you like that?’

  ‘No. No, you were bought to us by social services, or whatever they called it then. You were the most beautiful baby. And so quiet. You never seemed to cry. I’d never met a child like you.’ She broke off to retrieve a handkerchief she had tucked up her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. ‘The other nurses thought, with you being so quiet, you weren’t quite right in the head. But I knew better. You were just thoughtful. We found parents for you, no problem at all, but then you got a fever and I moved you into my flat to nurse you. I lived above the home, you see, over the job as it were. And … Well …’

  She twisted the handkerchief into a tight knot between her hands so that it stopped the blood in one of her fingers then another. Her hands were very plump and smooth. But Sophie remembered them too, as she remembered the voice. Murderer’s hands, she thought. The smooth hands of cruelty. She imagined them firmly plucking babies from their mothers’ laps, remembered them turning the pages of a book and the way they smoothed each page as they turned it, with their soft, bed-making fingers.

  ‘I took you into my room to nurse you. It was a Sunday. You were due to go the following week. None of the other staff were around. Then, when they were during the week and someone asked after you, I said your new parents had come to collect you at the weekend. Just like that.’

  She looked up and her lower lip shook like a child’s on the verge of tears.

  ‘It came to me all at once. I hadn’t planned it or anything but as soon as I lied and nobody questioned it, it became quite clear to me. I would keep you by me! In the flat! You’ve no idea what it was like living in that place, surrounded by pregnancy and birth and babies and always handing babies over to happy mothers or taking them from unhappy ones and never having one of my own. I signed the forms and did all the paperwork – not that there was much paperwork back then – to make it look as though you’d gone to your new home and I, oh dear, I rang the couple who wanted you and said I was so sorry but there had been an administrative error and that you weren’t available after all because some other parents had a prior claim. I remember I said that, prior claim, like an official form, and it worked like a charm. They were upset, obviously, but they didn’t want to talk much because they were ashamed. Parents adopting back then often were. A bit hole-in-corner.

  ‘So there you were, living with me. I fed you and changed you and dressed you and you were so good! I’ve got photographs. Here.’

  She rose and went to one of those ugly wooden work boxes that opened out ingeniously into layers. She had a small white album hidden beneath a plastic bag of muddled darning wools. ‘Last place he’d think of looking,’ she said.

  Sophie had not noticed at first but now he had been alluded to she spotted traces of a husband here and there. A set of golf clubs in the hall. A pipe in an ashtray. A library book on the companion armchair to Betty Kirklow’s with a picture of a submarine on the cover. Betty Kirklow came to sit on the sofa beside Sophie.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You were so sweet.’ She turned the pages of the album slowly while Sophie looked. She didn’t offer to let Sophie hold it and read it for herself. It was too precious a secret for that. More probably, she could not connect the baby in the pictures with the inquisitive, discomfiting young woman on the sofa beside her.

  There were no captions, just pictures, first of Sophie as a tiny baby, lying in her cot, or on a rug, then of her crawling and then, quite suddenly, the one Sophie had grown up with, in which her toddler self was learning to walk with the support of a bookcase.

  ‘I’ve got that one.’

  ‘Have you?’ Betty Kirklow sounded surprised. ‘Well perhaps there was a spare. They never got this. I kept it hidden.’

  ‘But they got me?’

  ‘I hadn’t made any plans. I just took you because I wanted you but once I’d got you it was so difficult. You were quiet as a mouse. You played so quietly. You just stared at things with those big eyes of yours and held them and turned them over and over. I left you in a playpen at first, while I slipped down to work, but then you got bigger and I …’ The pictures ran out abruptly with a picture of Sophie aged three or four at a kitchen table with a children’s picture book open before her. She strained to see what the book was but Betty Kirklow shut the album nervously and went to conceal it again in her mending box. She glanced at the clock.

  ‘Were
you arrested?’ Sophie asked her. ‘How did they find out?’

  ‘You followed me out.’ Betty Kirklow shook her head sorrowfully, remembering. ‘I always used to lock you in. I’d read to you so often you’d started reading for yourself and I used to lock you in but with plenty of books to keep you quiet while I did my round. But one day I forgot to lock the door. The psychiatrist said maybe I forgot on purpose and maybe I wanted them to find out. Anyway you came toddling out after me, followed me downstairs. You’d never even been out of doors, poor lamb! And when I heard the other nurses talking and saw one pointing I turned round and there you were, in the middle of the room, holding out a book and you just smiled very sweetly and said, “Finished!” No. No, dear, they didn’t arrest me. Not exactly. There was an enquiry and I lost my job, of course. Couldn’t work in nursing or childcare again, unfit and so on. I never saw you again.’ She blew her nose. ‘You were so bright and good. I never thought you’d be without a family for long. Some mothers prefer to adopt older children. Don’t like nappies.’ She pulled a face. ‘I was quite shocked when Margaret said you hadn’t wanted to move. You like her? Margaret?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She used to work with me. That’s how she knew how to find me. Not that I’ve been very good at keeping in touch or anything but I think she kept tabs. For your sake.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece pinged three times. She jumped up.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear, but you’re going to have to go now. My husband will be back from his life class soon and he doesn’t know about you or anything like that.’

  Sophie suddenly fell a hot pressure behind her eyes as though she might be about to faint and realized she was boiling up with unfamiliar anger.

  ‘So?’ she asked. ‘You messed up my life. Why shouldn’t I mess up yours?’

  ‘Did I?’ Betty Kirklow seemed startled at the abrupt loss of manners, which made the angry feeling worse. ‘You don’t seem very messed up. Are you unhappy?’