One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  I saw the harassed young doctor, who’d delivered Seffy, leaning over me. Then I saw something my mind had blocked for years. Heard it too. Voices shouting, screaming in the corridor about a kindergarten being bombed: the ward door flying open. A man, his face racked with anguish, his little girl in his arms: one leg just a bloody stump, half her head blown off. The man shrieking, forcing the limp, mutilated body into the obstetrician’s arms, there in the maternity ward: a desperate man, desperate for help. They say the mind blocks these sorts of memories to protect us. Does it also protect us from the consequences resultant of such appalling chance and timing? In which a terrible wrong can seem like the only course of action? Or do we have to work out the whys and wherefores for ourselves, years later. I took a breath to steady myself.

  ‘I fled. I left you, Seffy, on that hospital bed.’ Seffy’s eyes widened in shock. ‘I fled in terror and disbelief at all that had happened.’

  There was a silence as my words were absorbed.

  ‘Didn’t anyone try to stop you? Find you?’

  ‘No one had time. Dubrovnik was a city in chaos, remember. Injured were arriving constantly. Bloody children in despairing arms. And no one knew who I was. I got a lift on a lorry and went back to the village, to the empty little house. Very empty. All dead. The whole family. And taciturn as they were, they’d been my family, all those months. And there I was, without my baby. I was… well, I wasn’t well. In my head. Traumatized. All sorts of labels would be stuck on me now, I recognize that.’ I took another deep breath. Let it out slowly. ‘People do extraordinary things in war, Seffy. Not always good, brave ones. Although those are the ones you hear about.’ My shoulders sagged, then I composed myself. ‘I don’t remember much about those few days, except I know I sat in the dark, by an unlit fire, the dogs on my feet. I was in shock, I think.’ I raised my head. ‘Two days later, I took one of the Bedford lorries, and went back to the hospital. I was told the baby had been taken to an orphanage.’ I looked at my son, very calm now. ‘You need to know, Seffy, that I didn’t go to that orphanage to reclaim you. I went to see that you were really there. Safe and well. To place you, in my head. Some kind people might say I was not in my right mind at the time, but I think it’s important you know that.’ I was aware of Seffy watching me intently but I couldn’t read him.

  ‘I went to the orphanage with a friend I drove convoys with. It was run by nuns, in a disused castle in a bombed corner on the outskirts of Dubrovnik. Kindly, gentle nuns. Not an altogether terrible place. They did the best they could. But still… dismal lines of cots. No place for a baby to grow up. The moment I saw you, something kicked in. My heart, I suppose. It started beating again. I told them immediately you were mine, that you’d been born to me in Dubrovnik hospital, that I wanted you back. No one believed me. I told them there were records, birth certificates. Of course there weren’t, there was a bloody civil war on; no one had taken the time to write anything down. I told them to examine me, then they’d know. They wouldn’t. They said a lot of mothers had lost their babies in the war, came in claiming orphans.’ I gave a wry smile. ‘The final irony was, I couldn’t have you. I told them I’d be back. I was. With the help of the UN, friends in the right places, and my humanitarian connections behind me, I adopted you. We came home two weeks later. Me and my Bosnian child. Ibby’s child. That was my story, my raison d’être. I told everyone it was her baby who’d been taken to the orphanage, and that I’d gone and claimed him. And I had papers to prove it, signed by the mother superior. Papers to show to my parents, the world. Which was why, in my head, I was able to believe I’d adopted you.’

  It seemed to me the breath that came out of me as I exhaled went on for ever; had been waiting to come out for so long. It seemed to wrap around us, this air, this silence, enveloping the three of us, suspending us in time. A numb calmness took hold of me and the wound in my chest no longer wept, no longer seeped. It was done. The thing was done.

  28

  It seemed to me we held those positions for a long time. Hal leaning on the dresser, arms folded, Seffy with his back to the sink, looking down at his shoes, me on my stool, gazing at my hands, like three characters in a play oblivious to the curtain coming down at the end of an act, still there when it’s raised for the next.

  Running footsteps in the room above vaguely stirred me. Down the backstairs they came, along the passage, until the door flew open. Laura stood there: face pale, but alight.

  ‘He’s going to be all right. He was knocked unconscious by the blast but he’s come round and he hasn’t got any serious head injuries. Hugh just rang, he’s going to be OK.’ She covered her face and burst into tears.

  It took me a moment. Then, feeling numb and displaced, I got up and crossed the room to hug her. ‘Thank the Lord. Oh, thank God, Laura,’ I managed to whisper.

  Seffy hugged her too and she fought for composure. She gave a mighty sniff, threw her head up to the ceiling and blinked hard. ‘He’s on a drip, and very groggy, obviously, but he’s conscious. Admittedly he’s got this almighty gash across his forehead and his face is completely peppered by the shot, but heads do bleed – ferociously, apparently. Apart from the gash, though, it’s mostly superficial.’ She blew her nose vigorously. ‘Hugh says it looks much, much worse than it is.’ She nodded emphatically; tucked her hanky back up her sleeve.

  ‘I’m so glad, Laura.’ Hal crossed the room to join us and squeezed her shoulder.

  ‘He says obviously he’ll have to stay in for a bit, for observation, but there’s every chance he’ll be out in a few days. He’s not even in intensive care any more. I’m going to the hospital now. Daisy wants to come too. Where are the others? I must tell them.’

  ‘They’re down at the kennels with the dogs. Mum’s gone up for a lie-down.’ My voice, from somewhere.

  ‘I’ll go down and tell them. Will you tell Mum when she wakes up?’

  ‘Of course.’

  And off she flew, down the passage and outside towards the kennels. Luca. I’d quite forgotten. I heard Daisy thunder downstairs and then run down the back passage and on out to the cars.

  ‘Mum!’ she cried as she ran across the gravel. ‘Come on!’

  A door slammed as she leaped in her mother’s four-by-four, glancing about impatiently.

  Well, thank the Lord. One young girl who wouldn’t have to wrestle with her conscience for the rest of her days: one young girl whose life hadn’t been brought to a standstill as she tortured herself with what she may, or may not have unconsciously inflicted on her half-brother. That sort of mental anguish was not something one wanted to lug around for ever, and despite being completely shattered, I felt the gentle easing of my own lead weight, hitherto dragging behind me. Seffy knowing was frightening, but not as frightening as it might have been had he been ten or eleven, surely? All his young trust destroyed? At fifteen he understood a bit, I felt. I straightened up a little. And I like to think I’d have told him at some stage, anyway. Nonsense. I caught my breath, aware that even in the privacy of my own head I couldn’t be completely truthful.

  I heaved up a sigh and let it out shakily. From a selfish point of view, though, at least he’d had a year to grapple with this. At least it wasn’t fresh. Pumping. But a year without me to help him, I thought with a lurch. On his own, except… no, he’d had Hal. As we heard Laura’s car take off at speed, I thanked Hal silently, fervently. Once he’d got over his own shock, that Seffy was his brother’s child, I know he’d have spoken well of me. Wouldn’t have painted me as too black a figure, would have urged Seffy to look at it from my point of view, even if he didn’t entirely understand himself. Because he loved me. I knew that viscerally, and was comforted by it. He would have said: Seffy, she was young, she was frightened. She came home from Dubrovnik with her lie all packed up – at what point could she have unwrapped it, said, stop, this is Dominic’s child, I want to get off the roundabout? Surely once we take that first fatal step into fiction, into that world of imagining, we’re su
cked down until we almost start to believe it ourselves?

  Another lie. I never for one moment felt Seffy was anything other than mine. My own boy. And it had been torture to deny him publicly, too. When, at the age of eight, I’d gone to collect him from school and he’d said excitedly: ‘Miss Taylor did her assembly on adoption today, because of me, because I’m special, because I was chosen,’ I’d almost fainted. The lie had rippled out of my control, beyond my immediate family and friends. It was in Seffy’s hands, not mine. I’d rendered him culpable, and he was spreading the word. That should have been my moment. To grip it. Tell him the truth. Talk to the teacher, squash it dead. But I’d ducked it. His trusting hand in mine as we’d walked home, clutching a wet painting, Seffy chattering away, about how all his friends wanted to know where Croatia was. The lump in my throat had been an immovable blockage.

  His friends. Different ones now, of course, at a different school: Will, Tom, Ben – whom Seffy would have to tell. Would he? How? Put an advert in the school magazine? Seffy Carrington, not adopted after all. I imagined his, friends’ astonished faces. The questions: ‘So why did your mother…?’ ‘Because my father was famous. Married too.’ ‘Oh, I see.’ But not seeing. Thinking: God, you poor bastard. Pity. Which any fifteen-year-old boy wants about as much as a pair of frilly pants. Easier now he was an adolescent, Hattie? Easier than being nine or ten? I don’t think so.

  I thought of Hal trying to placate Seffy, rationally, sensibly. It occurred to me he knew so much about me. Had known, when we’d had dinner in Seillans, at his house in France. He’d been seeing Seffy for a year. If, for a moment I felt that I was the one deceived, manipulated, it passed quickly. Not only did I deserve to be in the dark, but if Seffy’s love was to be delivered back to me, it would be mostly due to Hal. And I mustn’t assume anything. Mustn’t assume deliverance. My son’s face right now was an inscrutable teenage mask, but as Biba burst in through the back door, he rearranged it accordingly.

  ‘Have you heard? He’s going to be all right! There was masses of blood, apparently, but he’s going to be OK!’

  I hugged her as she flew to embrace me. Dad followed her in, beaming and rubbing his hands.

  ‘Thank God,’ he said warmly. ‘What a relief.’

  ‘I’m so glad for Daisy,’ whispered Biba in my ear. ‘I mean – obviously I’m so glad for Luca, that he’s not badly hurt, but, Hattie, can you imagine if…?’

  ‘I know,’ I said quickly as she welled up. ‘I know, Biba, but he’s not.’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. And then she turned and held her arms out to Seffy. So big-hearted, always the demonstrative one.

  I saw Seffy smile into her hair as he held her. I didn’t presume to catch his eye and smile, although I wanted to, but it occurred to me she’d have to be told. Biba. And Daisy, and Laura and Hugh, and Mum and Dad. For a moment the enormity of what I’d done, the scale of my deceit, threatened to overwhelm me. Made me feel faint. Made me think I may not be physically capable of seeing everyone reel in astonishment, these lovely nieces of mine, these elderly kindly parents: my father, coming to hug me now. Felt I’d sink in shame. Disappear into the stinking, bubbling mire that was the real me, as these good people stood about gaping in horror, absorbing the shock.

  ‘Oh, Dad!’ I gasped into his shoulder.

  ‘I know, love, huge relief. Huge. The lad’s going to be fine.’ He patted my shoulder and moved on to clap Seffy on the back, but Hal must have seen my face, my distress. He was meeting my eye, sending me a clear message of support: Don’t panic.

  And now Dad was rounding up the troops, saying he was starving, absolutely ravenous, and was taking everyone out to eat.

  ‘Biba, wash your hands and face. You’ve got mud all over you from the dogs. Seffy, wake your grandmother. Tell her all’s well and that we’re going to the pub.’

  Lunch was originally to have been in the little lodge in the woods where two ladies from the village would have been ready and waiting with shepherd’s pies, a trestle table laid for the jolly shooting party, carafes of wine. But Hugh would have rung ahead and cancelled, so now, here was Dad making alternative arrangements: buoying everyone up, restoring equilibrium.

  ‘What about Maggie, is she still here? Go tell her to come.’

  ‘No, I saw her go,’ Biba was saying, washing her hands at the sink. ‘She asked me to thank Mummy. Said she didn’t want to be in the way. I think she’s gone back to London with Kit.’

  ‘Kit! Our man of God. The one we might have needed in a crisis. Jumping ship.’

  ‘I’m sure he just didn’t want to be in the way, Grandpa.’

  ‘I’m joking, my sweet. Kit would be here if we’d needed him, but he doesn’t like to lurk portentously in his cassock at such moments. And I don’t blame him. Oh, look – here’s your grandmother.’

  More hugging and exclaiming as Mum appeared, looking slightly creased and dishevelled, but the light had returned to her eyes.

  ‘So relieved,’ she kept saying quietly as she was embraced. ‘So relieved.’

  Biba found her handbag for her, and someone else – Seffy – popped back upstairs for her shoes, which she’d left in the bedroom: ‘By the bedside table, I think, darling.’

  I watched him go, marvelling at how normal he looked. But then, he hadn’t just had his life turned upside down. That was my province.

  Mum sat at the table and got her compact out, powdered her nose. Then she popped some lipstick on, listening as everyone chattered around her, as Laura and Dad told her how Luca had said a few words, was conscious, had squeezed Hugh’s hand, was really quite compos mentis. At length she smiled; stood up.

  ‘Right!’ She snapped her handbag decisively and hung it over her arm. ‘Well, I for one need a very large gin and tonic. Are we off?’

  They were. Trooping out to the car, talking excitedly. Dad was saying that Laura had texted him, that she and Daisy were going to come on from the hospital, meet them at the pub. Hugh would stay with Luca, and Laura go back after lunch to relieve him. It was all arranged. All organized through the miracles of modern science, he said waving his mobile incredulously, the technological powers of which never ceased to astound him.

  ‘Coming, Hattie?’ he turned.

  I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. ‘Um would you mind if I didn’t, Dad?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, quick as a flash, catching something in my voice.

  ‘I think I’d just like to be on my own for a bit. Might go for a walk.’

  ‘A splendid idea, very restorative. But we need you, Hal. You’re our driver. I can’t work that damn Land Rover of Hugh’s and my little Datsun hasn’t got belts for all these good people. Would you oblige?’

  Hal hesitated, then: ‘Of course,’ he said politely, for what could he do but agree to transport everyone in his much larger estate car? Only the set of his shoulders betrayed the fact that this hadn’t been in the script.

  Out they went. I watched them go from the window, wondering how it was that my father could do that: know instantly that, for some reason, I needed some space – from Hal too, I realized guiltily – and then achieve it for me, with no questions asked, no enquiring looks, even. And none later either. He’d wait. Bide his time. And then be silent as I told him, as he always was. Never butted in with questions, knew how to listen. But what a story. I’d be changed for ever in his eyes. I shrank from that. Knew I’d be changed in everyone’s eyes, but my dad’s, after Seffy’s, I feared the most. Would it be too much for him, I wondered. Would it – not kill him – but age him, considerably, to know what I’d done?

  The demons were huge again now, that growth bulging to life in my head, popping up with its leaping veins, skin straining. My breathing became shallow, and it occurred to me I shouldn’t be on my own. What might I do? Nothing. Don’t be stupid, Hattie, you’re not that brave. I held on to the sink, temples throbbing. Listened to the quiet of the huge house, which was never really quiet: the distant rumble of the wa
shing machine in the laundry, the peacock, shrieking on the lawn outside like a distressed child, the ticking of the long-case clocks in the hall, the endless creaking – there must be thousands of old floor-boards and panels, all of which realigned occasionally, so that at any one time the house seemed to groan, as if it constantly sighed, folded its arms, rearranged itself. I heaved one up myself. Of self-pity? I hoped not. I deserved none. It occurred to me I should have gone to the pub, was once again ducking the moment, not facing Seffy, but I knew I wouldn’t be capable of polite conversation. Knew we both needed some distance. Another floorboard creaked, but this time it couldn’t just be an ancient floorboard, it had to be perpetrated by a footstep. I turned.

  The door opened and Kit wandered in. Barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt.

  I stared. ‘Oh. We thought you’d gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ He yawned sleepily, ruffling the hair on the back of his head. He crossed the room.

  ‘With Maggie. Biba said you’d gone to London with her.’

  He frowned, padded to the sink and ran the tap, reaching for a glass. ‘No, I just helped her take her bags to the car. She’s been here for ages, had loads. Anyway, I hate London.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I thought you two…’ I trailed off.

  He turned, rolled his eyes. ‘Give over. You’re as bad as Mum, and I thought I could at least count on you and Laura. Have they all gone?’

  ‘Yes, two minutes ago, to the pub. Luca’s going to be all right.’

  ‘I know. I heard Biba telling Mum. I was in the room next door.’

  Right. But didn’t burst in and say, ‘Wow – great news! What a relief !’ Didn’t get involved. Just listened; digested, and was quietly pleased. My little brother, who never invested. Never emoted. I don’t know how I could ever have imagined him with Maggie.