Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  Connie sat back, staring at the name as it jumped out at her from the grey mass of newsprint.

  Kathleen Merriwether had found her, surely only a matter of minutes or a bare hour after her mother had crept along the hedge like a shadow and left her there. If she could find Kathleen, maybe she could cajole her into remembering some tiny scrap of a fact or impression that had been overlooked until now, a detail that would bring her mother closer. Perhaps even close enough to reach.

  In her desire not to think about losing Bill, the search began to obsess Connie.

  She was having vivid dreams of meeting her mother in strange places – in a laundry, in a flat-bottomed boat in a mangrove swamp – and then having disjointed conversations with her about gardening, or shoes. A sense of urgency grew in her heart, filling some of the space left by Bill’s absence. She wanted a real connection, not these phantoms dredged out of her subconscious. She felt her roots like vestigial fibres, coiled up, waiting to reach down into the ground and anchor her at last.

  How, she wondered, did you go about tracing someone when all you had was their maiden name and their age? She thought of birth records, but that wouldn’t give much of a clue to Kathleen’s present whereabouts, and of electoral rolls, but that might well mean searching the whole country for someone who in all probability would now be known by her husband’s name.

  Connie decided she might as well begin close to home. She took down the London telephone directory and counted the listed Merriwethers. There were only a handful with exactly that spelling, always assuming that the newspapers in 1963 had spelled the name correctly in the first place. With luck, she thought, she might end up speaking to Kathleen’s brother or a cousin.

  It took her a few days to find the right frame of mind. Then one early evening, alone in her flat after a day in a studio, she began making the calls.

  The first four led nowhere. Two were picked up by answering machines and Connie immediately hung up, not wanting or knowing how to leave an appropriate message. Another call was answered by a foreign au pair with small children clamouring in the background, who advised her in a strong Spanish accent to call back when Mrs Merriwether was at home. A very old man in response to the fourth call said that he had no relatives by the name of Kathleen, but told her a very long anecdote anyway about his daughter who was now living in Western Australia. Connie listened, hearing the note of loneliness in his voice.

  A woman answered the fifth call.

  Connie’s speech was well-rehearsed by this time. ‘Good evening, I’m sorry to trouble you, I’m trying to contact a Kathleen Merriwether.’

  ‘This is Kathy Merriwether,’ the brisk, pleasant voice said. ‘How can I help you?’

  Surprise almost took her breath away. It took her a moment before she could say, ‘My name is Constance Thorne.’

  ‘It’s baby Constance, isn’t it?’ the woman replied at once. ‘You know, I’ve always wondered if I’d hear from you.’

  To have found her so easily was such a stroke of good luck that it seemed almost inevitable to learn that Kathy Merriwether lived in Kentish Town, only two miles from Connie’s flat.

  It was a warm spring evening when Connie walked up the street. The plane trees were putting out sprays of tender leaves, and music and voices floated out of open windows. Kathy’s house had stone steps leading up to the front door, net-curtained bay windows, and three doorbells mounted one above the other.

  Connie rang the one marked Merriwether and as she waited she heard the whistling rush and then the buried thud-thud of a fast train in a deep cutting, very close at hand. Echo Street might have been just round the next corner.

  The woman who opened the door was in her late forties. She was broad, with heavy shoulders and pretty plump arms exposed by a pale-blue T-shirt. She was wearing loose trousers and house slippers.

  ‘So you are Constance,’ she smiled. ‘Baby Constance, after all this time.’

  Connie held out the flowers she had brought.

  Everything was as she expected yet she felt awkward, and dull with the sudden certainty that this meeting that she had set up with so much eagerness wasn’t going to deliver any of the clues she longed for.

  Kathy Merriwether’s path had briefly intersected with hers more than thirty years ago, that was all. It was difficult not to feel a sense of anticlimax when confronted with this ordinary, heavy-set stranger.

  Kathy accepted the flowers and sniffed them appreciatively.

  ‘How lovely. You didn’t have to do that.’ She shook Connie’s hand. ‘Come on up. It’s the top floor, I’m afraid.’

  Kathy puffed slightly as they climbed the steep stairs.

  ‘Dear me. Here we are, then. Make yourself at home.’

  The sitting room was over-full with a squashy sofa and a pair of armchairs. China ornaments were lined up on the plain wooden mantelpiece over a gas log fire. The window looked down into a garden that sloped to a high wall, and just as Connie was registering that beyond this was the railway cutting another train whistled through. Vibrations set the window glass rattling in its frame.

  ‘You get so used to them, you don’t even hear them go by,’ Kathy said.

  ‘I know. The house I grew up in was the same.’

  Kathy smiled. ‘Was it? Where was that?’

  Connie accepted the offer of tea rather than a glass of wine. She sat down in one of the armchairs and called out her answers to questions while Kathy clattered in the kitchen, coming back first of all with the flowers arranged in a jug that she placed on the coffee table, then with a tray. She poured tea into cups patterned with rosebuds and handed one to Connie.

  ‘Echo Street? East London, is that? You know, I’ve thought about you so often over the years. I wondered how life had turned out for you.’

  She glanced at Connie’s shoes and the soft leather bag in which she carried her papers. ‘It turned out all right, by the look of it. That’s very good.’

  She offered a plate of foil-wrapped chocolate biscuits. Connie shook her head and Kathy unwrapped one for herself and laid it ready in her saucer.

  ‘Now. What can I tell you?’ she began.

  Connie hesitated. Now that the moment had come the only question that properly formed itself in her mind was, Who am I?

  She put it as neutrally as she could. ‘What happened when you found me?’

  Kathy’s laugh turned into a sigh.

  ‘Well. I was sixteen, and out with my boyfriend. I was supposed to be back home by ten o’clock at the very latest. My dad was quite strict.’

  Connie put down her cup. Every word was important, and she didn’t want to miss a syllable.

  Kathy Merriwether told her about the empty street, the way the arched plane trees made a dark tunnel of the pavement. In her mind’s eye Connie saw Constance Crescent as it had been on the day she went there with Bill.

  ‘We were behind a hedge in one of the gardens. There was a smell of privet, dustbins and cats. Mike was trying it on, and maybe I was leading him on a bit. Then I heard a cry. It was a baby, I knew that straight away.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘It was there, under the hedge. I picked it up. Brown plastic shopping bag, with handles. And you were inside.’

  ‘Was there anyone else there? Could someone have been watching?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Kathy said. ‘There wasn’t so much as a shadow moving anywhere.’

  Another train plunged through the cutting.

  ‘Perhaps…’ Connie said ‘…perhaps she hid nearby, to make sure someone found me?’

  The thought that her mother might have fixed her eyes on the woman she was now looking at seemed to create two spans of a bridge, airy yet almost solid enough to dash across.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Kathy said doubtfully.

  The noise of the train faded and the flat was silent for a moment. Then Kathy went on, and from the way she talked Connie could tell that she was used to retelling the story.

  ‘Mike went to t
he house next door and rang the bell, and the woman who lived there ran out in her dressing gown. We took you inside and the woman’s husband rang for the police and ambulance. While we waited, I held you inside my cardigan. Trying to keep you warm against my skin.’

  Even though the story was so well-rehearsed, Kathy’s voice caught a little. Connie kept her eyes on the patch of sky outside the window.

  ‘And there was the earring.’

  ‘What? What’s that?’

  ‘It was a single earring, I can see it now, fastened to the blanket you were wrapped in. One little glittering droplet. The mother, your mother, must have kept the other one. A keepsake, one for each of you. Maybe it was all she had to leave. I thought it was the saddest thing I had ever seen. It still makes me cry, thinking of it.’

  Kathy reached into the pocket of her loose trousers and extricated a tissue. Connie kept on looking at the sky.

  Kathy blew her nose. ‘What could have happened to that poor girl? What circumstances was she in, that made her abandon you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Connie managed to say. ‘I’d like to find out.’

  ‘Of course you would. That’s only natural,’ Kathy was saying. ‘It’s why you’re here. I’ll tell you what I can, but I’m not sure it will be all that much help.’

  She poured more tea and resettled the cosy on the pot.

  ‘I would have loved to keep in touch with you, you know. I felt so responsible for you, after that night. I went three times to visit you, while you were still in the Royal London. It wasn’t too far, just a bus ride after I came out of school, and the nurses used to let me pick you up and give you a cuddle or a feed. You were the sweetest little baby.’

  Connie risked a glance at her rescuer.

  ‘Did you? Was I?’

  ‘Oh, yes. So pretty and alert. More than any of the other babies on the ward. I didn’t have a camera in those days, not like everyone does now, but I’d have loved a picture of me holding you. Myra, she’s the nurse I made friends with, she’d have taken a photo of the two of us. She used to say that I should have been your mother, I’d have taken better care of you. I’m sorry, that sounds a bit harsh. We don’t know what made your real mother do it, do we?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Connie whispered.

  She was moved to hear the words us and we.

  There was a new story involving Kathy, and a nurse with a name, and a ward with other babies on it who would all now be adults, and it affected her to realise that this was her story and theirs, before Hilda and Tony and Jeanette. Along with the photograph this was her own small fragment of a history, tiny but significant.

  ‘Then they took you off to the LCC children’s home, didn’t they? That was over this side of town so it wasn’t on the cards for me to carry on visiting you. I felt very sad about it. I’d even asked my mum if we could try to adopt you but she said she wasn’t about to start all over again thank you very much now she’d finally got me and Mark to the age we were.’

  Kathy hesitated.

  ‘There was another question too, about you maybe being a bit of a mixture. No one even thinks about that sort of thing nowadays, do they? But it was a lot different back then and my mum and dad were very old-fashioned, Dad especially.’

  Kathy bit into another chocolate biscuit as Connie met her eyes.

  ‘You just look very elegant now. Hard to place, that’s what I’d think if I met you and I didn’t know anything about you.’

  Hard to place. That’s true enough, Connie thought.

  ‘Go on,’ she smiled.

  ‘One day I rang up the home to get news of you, and the clerk there told me that a family had come forward for you, a very nice family, and the adoption procedure was now complete. I asked, but they wouldn’t give me any details. It was confidential. So I never heard any more and it’s been in my mind ever since then. Do you know, at the hospital they gave you my name? Babies have to have names. Constance Merriwether, that’s who you were.’

  Connie looked at her again. Constance Merriwether. There was a bond between her and Kathy after all: she could feel it tightening, pulling at her.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said in surprise. ‘I never saw the adoption papers.’

  ‘The family who adopted you were called Thorne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is like when you’re doing a jigsaw, isn’t it, and two big pieces suddenly fit together. Tell me some more.’

  Connie told her about the Thornes. She realised that Kathy was a good listener.

  ‘So it was a successful adoption,’ the other woman concluded, but with a question in her voice.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ was all Connie would say.

  ‘And now? What do you do now?’

  Connie told her, briefly. Kathy clapped her hands in delight.

  ‘Really? You wrote that? Boom, boom, baboom, ba ba…’

  ‘Yes, and the theme music for…’

  ‘…bababa ba.’

  ‘What do you do, Kathy?’

  ‘Do you want to know about all that?’

  ‘Yes, I do. You found me, and you gave me a name.’ Nowhere near a mother or even a sister, but a significant connection just the same.

  Kathy looked pleased. ‘I’ll need a glass of wine,’ she said.

  She went into the kitchen, came back with a bottle and poured two generous glasses.

  ‘Well now. I went into nursing. Because of you, you could say. That night changed things for me.’ Kathy’s broad face turned solemn.

  ‘Up until then, I was a silly girl. You know…boyfriend, clothes, trying not to let my dad find out the half of what I got up to. Then I saw you, dressed in nothing but a little cardigan and a blanket, and left in a bag under a hedge. Once I’d held you, like this, in my arms, I knew I’d never forget you. I was playing about with Mike, and this was before the pill, remember, and I realised all of a sudden that what all that would inevitably lead to was you – not you, of course, but a baby who was a scrap of humanity, full of the potential to be someone and to love and be loved, not just me getting pregnant and having to leave school. It was a big, serious world. I looked at poor Mike a bit differently after that, I can tell you.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Connie said. She was gazing at Kathy’s plump, pretty arms that had once held her.

  ‘All the boys, they just wanted what they wanted. But when I thought about it, I could just about guess at the mistakes and the bad luck that might have driven your mother to do what she did. She was probably only a girl herself. In the hospital when I visited you, Myra and the other nurses talked to me about their work. I was impressed because it seemed really important and valuable. My mum and dad were quite pleased when I decided to go for nursing training. I finished with Mike and they didn’t mind that, either.’

  ‘Did you marry someone else in the end?’ Connie asked. There were no rings on Kathy’s fingers.

  ‘I did. It lasted ten years. I was a staff nurse on a paediatric ward, and I did quite a lot of night shifts. What happened was just about what you’d expect.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘No. I’ve looked after plenty, though. You were the first, and there must have been hundreds since then.’ Kathy sniffed. ‘I’m a health visitor now. Hospitals are more about management than nursing these days.’

  She drained her glass of wine.

  ‘Are you married, Constance?’

  ‘No,’ Connie said.

  Kathy didn’t miss much. ‘I see,’ she said gently. ‘And are you in love?’

  ‘No. Yes. Or I was.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me any more?’

  Connie lifted her head. She found that she did want to talk to Kathy Merriwether. She liked her for her warmth and matter-of-factness.

  ‘There’s not much to tell. Not now, because it’s over. A married man. It’s painful, but I’ve been lucky in many other ways. That’s what my life feels like. Luck. A lottery.’

  ‘And you’d rather have facts and tidy e
xplanations?’

  Connie thought for a moment. Except with Bill, and the woman she had met on the plane, she wasn’t used to discussing these matters.

  ‘I think if you don’t have a history, the randomness of life strikes you harder. I also feel that if I knew my real mother, if I could find out what has happened to her, even if it was just enough to know that it wasn’t all tragedy, I wouldn’t always have this sense of another parallel existence that’s waiting for me to step into it. It’s partly a sense of foreboding, and partly of something very precious that I lost and need to find again.’

  Connie suddenly leaned forward in the velour armchair, fierce with urgency.

  ‘Can you remember anything else about that night, Kathy? Any small thing that might be a clue?’

  Sadly, Kathy shook her head.

  Connie realised that she hadn’t heard a train go by for quite a long while. The city’s commuters would all be home by now, and it was time she went home herself.

  Kathy offered, ‘You could speak to Myra, my nurse friend. I still write to her. She retired a few years ago and went back up to Aberdeen with her husband. He works on the rigs. Maybe she can think of something else. I’ll jot down the address for you.’

  They both stood up. Connie waited as she searched for her handbag, found a little address book and scribbled on a torn-off scrap of paper. Connie knew that she would contact Myra, who would probably tell her a few more details about a foundling infant who had long ago spent a couple of weeks on her ward. She could try through the Royal London nurses’ association to trace the other nurses who had worked on the same ward, and they might remember more tiny details, but none of them was likely to lead her to her vanished mother.

  Kathy saw her expression.

  ‘Here,’ she said. She held out her arms. For a moment, held in a weighty hug and breathing in another woman’s smell of cosmetics with the faint trace of sweat caught in folds of flesh, a memory of babyhood and the knowledge of a mother passed over Connie like a shadow from a bird’s wing.

  ‘Thank you,’ Connie whispered.

  Kathy came back down the steep stairs with her. She stood in her slippers on the top stone step, looking up and down the street. It was almost dark.