The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  Her mam had been with her. She had also studied it, puzzling over the unfamiliar vocabulary. Since arriving in London, having the baby, tending to her, actively avoiding physical contact, as if Lucilla had leprosy and was not the most beautiful thing in all creation, Bethan had struggled to think coherently. She sometimes entertained the delusion that she had been in a car crash and was now brain-damaged. Her thoughts lacked logical progression, the snowballing ideas fragmenting or dropping into nothingness long before she could extract any sense from them. Her head wasn’t wired. She had blown a fuse, more like a dozen. It was a bother and a blessing besides, because nothing concluded. She couldn’t stay aboard trains of thought, ride them like bucking broncos till she broke them in. They threw her off in seconds. Oh the train went hurtling on, disappearing in the distance. But where it was going who knew? She was left in the fog, in the humane fog.

  She pounded her brow hoping to hone her concentration. She might be back at school, chomping on a pencil end, hunched over an exercise book working out her sums. And they had been so baffling, she remembered, all those numbers to add, divide, multiply, subtract. She was subtracting that moment. Last year, she’d been adding, adding Thorston into her life, adding the heat of his body to hers. And then she’d been multiplying. Isn’t that what the Bible said, go forth and multiply. Well, she had multiplied. She’d become two, Bethan and a baby. And then she’d been divided from her baby when Lucilla was born. She’d wanted to keep her inside for eternity. But that was obviously idiotic. And now, last sum of all, but inversely the most difficult one, torturous she might say, she was subtracting, subtracting the baby from her.

  ‘It should all work out, dear,’ she recalled her teacher telling her, her distant eyes zipping over the disastrous workings Bethan had scrawled on the page. ‘Have another go and you’ll see, it will all work out.’ But it hadn’t and it wasn’t. The answer was wrong, and no matter how many times she did the complicated sum, she got the same result.

  ‘If you have taken out an insurance policy against funeral expenses for your child, the insurers will be able to advise you whether the policy can be transferred to the adopters.’ That’s what it had said on the form, really! She’d only recently given birth and now they were talking about her baby dying. It had to be a joke, and like all jokes there was a grain of truth embedded in it. Because this birth felt like death. It did. She didn’t care if it was a morbid thing to dwell on. And now they had presented her with their form, as if creepily they were telepathic, asking her to anticipate the costs of her baby’s funeral. But it didn’t feel as if Lucilla was in mortal danger, in spite of being so sick with the gastric upset. Gazing into her turquoise eyes, so like her own, like her grandfather’s honestly, Lucilla exuded life force. It was Bethan who had received a fatal wound, Bethan who was fading with every passing hour. ‘I hereby certify that I received from you a memorandum headed “Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act, 1939”, and that I have read the memorandum and understand it.’ And the dead person she had mutated into, the spectre, took up the pen and signed.

  She had more in common with her brother, Brice, now that she was nearer death. They were both as good as ghosts, shadows of their former selves. Afterwards, after giving her baby away, she wished she hadn’t insisted on seeing them, on physically putting her daughter into that woman’s arms. She could have made them perfect if she hadn’t done that, perfect parents for her perfect baby, and not been witness to their flawed selves. They were old. They appeared more like grandparents than parents. And the woman was sort of stolid and lifeless, like a felled tree. Not fat exactly but broad and wooden as a heavy door. Her hair, shoulder length, was a frizzy lifeless cap. It was no shade at all really, not brown nor grey, but an indiscriminate mix of the two. Most disturbing were her eyes. They were brown, brown as coffee grits, passionless, eyes that the soul, if she had one, did not reach. Both she and her husband wore glasses, the lenses thick as paperbacks, making them seem still more detached and aloof. The man was wearing a suit like her father’s Sunday best, the one he saved for church. And he had his finger stuck in his ear, wiggling, as if he was giving his brains a stir.

  More depressing, there was something used about them, weary, a stifling properness that made her want to fight for air. It would smother her daughter. They would systematically douse the light in those stunning turquoise eyes. She may not, by deliberate design, have known the intimacy of her baby suckling from her breasts. She may have shunned holding her. She may have held her breath when Lucilla came too close, in case she inhaled that unique, intrinsic, indefinable scent that was her daughter’s, but she had locked eyes with her. And in that clasp a whole discourse of love had been spoken, a lifetime of it. She could no more quash her love, no more sever her emotional tie, than she could take a knife and hack off her own legs.

  In her baby’s eyes chapters of faraway tropical oceans were inscribed. And there was a gossamer dreaminess, a whimsical insight that would resist any kind of alphabetical order. She had a fey quality that meant, like her own mother, like herself, Lucilla would forever be spellbound. She would marvel at the way a field of ripe wheat could ripple like an amber sea, would marvel at the way the sky was the changing tide of your emotions. She didn’t have to glimpse a crystal ball to know what was going to happen. Her daughter would not be allowed to run barefoot in the grass, to scramble up trees and swing in their upper branches, to ride horses bareback, feeling their warm flanks heaving against the grip of her thighs. These were the kinds of parents who made rules, who demanded obedience, who made you conform, who forced you into a mould. They would wait for years if that’s what it took, for you to set. They would clock-watch. They would extol absolutism. They would be the dictators. They would yoke Lucilla’s spirit. Her daughter would strive to battle her own nature. In vain she would try to resist gazing up at the unique character of each day, try to withstand the temptation of stringing the stars into necklaces and bracelets, try to still her imagination from pencilling a smile on the mottled silver moon.

  But with full knowledge of all the tomorrows lining up like dominoes, Bethan did it. She let her go. She gave her baby into another’s arms. And then she turned and walked from the room. She did it the way the condemned climb the steps to a gallows, the way they accept the eternal darkness of the hood, the way they raise their head to the collar of the noose. When they got back to Bedwyr Farm it had been rebuilt, her family substituted for another. Her mam no longer chatted comfortably with her. She treated her in the guarded way you might a dog that has bitten you, handling her carefully.

  Her dad would not meet her eye, and in the unconscious curl of his lip was repugnance. He drove her relentlessly, from the second she was shaken from her sleep while it was still pitch black outside, to the second she fell, faint with weariness, back into her bed. He made her work on the land harder than she had ever done before. She did the job of a man twice her age and twice her size. He spied on her every waking minute. By taciturn agreement, she kept mute. It was something like solitary confinement, she thought. And she was never, never ever permitted to be alone with the farm labourers her dad had taken on in their absence: thickset Barris who spat into the mud when she was near, and lanky Jestin who sneered behind her back.

  Towards her dad for his brutal treatment of her she felt nothing but gratitude. He was meting out the punishment she deserved. She bore it with the joy of a martyr. The more he pushed her, the less able she was to unpack the burden of her guilt, the less able to review the prospect of her life sentence. When the summons came for her to go to London in September to witness the adoption, she was overcome with disbelief. It was a second thrust of the knife in a fresh wound. Her dad was adamant that she could not be spared, not even for one day. But the the Church Adoption Society was equally adamant that she must obey, that the adoption would not go ahead without her, that the Justices would not be thwarted. And so he finally consented to the trip, but only if she left on the night train to Paddington on 13
September, returning to Newport by the midday train the following day.

  The station is deserted when she arrives in the early hours of the morning. She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten or drunk. She feels light-headed, dehydrated, giddy as a revolving door. She sits in the waiting room and memorises its drabness. Saucepan-grey walls, varnished wooden benches, a concrete floor. She listens to the echoing announcements. Her stomach rumbles and she is taken by a wave of nausea so powerful that she retches, though all she can bring up is a mouthful of bile, brownish yellow and bitter. Her limbs are starch stiff and her bottom is numb from sitting too long. She has a crick in her neck and she can smell her own sweat. But it is not clean and honest, the way it smells at the end of a day on the farm. The stink is offensive to her, like the rank smell of an infection. In the toilet she undoes her blouse and tries to wash under her arms with a damp paper towel. But it falls apart, and when she finishes the stink is still with her.

  Afterwards, she finds her way to the tube and travels underground with the rush hour. It’s insanity. All the people are racing to their places of work and she races as well, carried along with the flow of them, rushing to her exam, the subtraction of her baby. She has the sudden impulse to interrupt a couple of women who are nattering about their children. She wants to tell them that her daughter has the most extraordinary turquoise eyes you have ever seen. She doesn’t of course, but she dearly wants to.

  Holborn and she stands by the red post box outside the premises of the Church Adoption Society. I hate this city, she thinks. I don’t want to come back. I don’t want to hear its name uttered in my presence ever again. It is September and the leaves are turning red and yellow and orange. Strands of silky white cloud are stretched across the loom of a duck-egg blue sky. Car horns blare and a welter of people jostle and chatter, purpose in their steps. A lady, Mrs Parish, salt-and-pepper hair piled high, comes and claims her. She asks her if she’s had a comfortable trip, and if she has eaten breakfast. Bethan nods to both enquiries. Mrs Parish steers her to the juvenile court, Petty Sessional Division of Highgate, sitting at Avenue House in Finchley.

  And she is here. Her baby Lucilla is here, and so are the adoptive parents, the parents who look like grandparents. She did not expect to see her, her beautiful daughter now eight months old. They are sitting to the rear of the courtroom, the woman clutching her baby. All she dares is a quick glance in their direction while she is being led to her seat. But the image that burns her retina will remain for a lifetime. Lucilla is restless, grizzling, squirming in her arms. And the woman is jigging her up and down, up and down. She doesn’t like it. Her daughter doesn’t like it. Why doesn’t someone tell her to stop it? Why don’t the Justices order her to desist? The impulse to turn and walk slowly towards them, to take her baby back, to hug her close and run from this frightful place is overwhelming. But the formal setting, the intimidating suited men, the Justices staring down at her with their long sober faces, the booming chesty voices speaking legal jargon she does not begin to understand, all these inhibit her. She keeps her eyes down, her body rigid, the scream in her throat gagged. Too fast. It is happening too fast. They race through the proceedings. And then she is summoned to sign her name on a document. And it is done. They hurry her out, leaving her baby, her daughter, her precious child behind her for the second, the final time.

  ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ says Mrs Parish glancing at her gold wristwatch, and then frowning at a snag in her stockings. She has a pug dog’s nose, Bethan observes. ‘Will you be all right finding your way back to Paddington? Only I’ve an appointment.’ Her thin mouth stretches like a rubber band and snaps back. ‘I’m sure the society will keep in touch. Anyway it’s been very nice meeting you … Miss Haverd.’ She shakes hand but only with her fingers, as if she is concerned that she may sully herself. And then abruptly she ditches her outside the court.

  For a minute Bethan just loiters at a loss, as though she has been jilted. She knows she has a train to catch, and that she should get a move on or she will miss it. But she doesn’t care. She isn’t bothered. She may stay here and lie in wait for them, for her baby, and follow them home. She may kidnap her own daughter. Or she may wander the streets like a bag lady. She may beg for a copper or two to buy a cup of tea. She may sleep on the clipped grass in St James’s Park and dream of the green valleys of home. But even as she toys with this inviting inactivity, her feet begin to tramp towards the underground station. On the ride home, she sheds her skin. The woman who loved a German soldier and lay with him, the woman who conceived his baby and carried it to term, the woman who gave birth in New End Hospital in Hampstead, the woman who nursed her baby through gastroenteritis as if both their lives depended on her daughter’s recovery, that woman has gone as surely as if spades of earth are being thrown on her coffin lid.

  Before she chugs into Newport she comes to herself. I am like the cloth doll that has been mauled by a rabid dog. I have holes and through my holes all the stuffing of me has come out. It would be a wasted effort to try to stitch me up. I am undone. I must make do. No one will notice I’m not really here. And she is right, they don’t.

  15th September

  Dear Miss Haverd,

  I do hope you managed to find your way to Paddington, and that you had a leisurely journey home. We were so glad to find such a nice couple to adopt Lucilla. I am sending you some snapshots of the baby. These were, of course, taken earlier in the year but I expect you will be interested to see them.

  With very best wishes.

  Yours sincerely,

  Valeria Mulholland

  Secretary

  Chapter 11

  Harriet, 1950

  SHE HAS BEEN such a good baby up until recently. Merfyn is garrulous in his praise for our golden girl. And let there be no mistake, so was I to start with. I have encountered some minor irritants, but none that compete with the magnitude of her Germanic ancestry. For example, it is a pity that her hair is so straight. My preferment would have been for curls, natural curls. Still this is not without remedy. When she is older I will simply have to perm it, to make it curl. As for her features, she is developing into a plainer child than I had hoped for. But she eats well, and sleeps well. And life, I am pleased to say, more or less is continuing on its accustomed round. What more can we ask for? Yet as things go on, I cannot rid myself of a heightened uneasiness in respect of our adopted daughter.

  ‘I don’t know what you were making such a fuss about, Mother,’ says Merfyn one night as we sit by the fire. ‘She is ideal.’

  I nod and crease my lips in a thin smile. I dislike him calling me Mother. I am not his mother. And in reality I am not Lucilla’s mother either, not genetically anyway. Therefore it seems nonsensical to let this new maternal role define me altogether. But if I argue the point he may take offence. He can be sentimental about such things, so I let it be.

  Merfyn’s job for the Ever Ready Company means that he is employed for lengthy hours, alternate Saturdays included. I’m not saying his adulation is misplaced, but he misses the minutiae of Lucilla’s emerging personality – like hangnails these traits are not necessarily a cause for rejoicing. I pride myself on keeping a sense of proportion. And granted they are only tiny indiscretions. But then if Adam and Eve had been more vigilant we might have avoided original sin. I don’t wish to state the obvious but Merfyn is a man. So he is hardly best qualified to judge the progress Lucilla is making. I, solely, am alone with her all day. I am the one who has to spend tedious mornings and afternoons correcting her misdemeanours.

  I am not dim-witted. I fully comprehend that infants do not arrive house-trained as it were. But the incontrovertible fact is that we have a problem. Frankly, I would talk it over with Merfyn, but it is rather delicate. At twenty months exactly, I started potty training our daughter. One month passed and Lucilla was doing magnificently. Two, then three, and really I was feeling quite smug. She appeared to be clean and dry, except at nights and that was understandable for the
present. Please excuse the crudity of what I am imparting, but in the lieu of a mother you have to deal with these distasteful bodily functions.

  However, as she approached her second birthday I am sorry to say I detected a deviation. Generally, she has a bowel movement after tea, and is accustomed to sitting on the potty while I run her bath or turn back her cot. Then one night she refused to stay seated, hopping up after only a few seconds. I peered inside the bowl. Empty. Meanwhile she was gambolling off down the corridor like a spring lamb.

  ‘Lucilla!’ I called. ‘Lucilla, come here!’ My tone was perhaps more peremptory than I intended, but then it was a situation that warranted it. This kind of thing must not under any circumstances be allowed to escalate. I heard a clatter of footsteps, and she peeped around the bathroom door. She was naked, dragging her toy bear behind her. ‘Lucilla, sit back down right now.’ She stood for a moment, head falling to one side, those odd turquoise eyes of hers unreadable. ‘Lucilla, do you hear me?’ I said imperiously. ‘None of this silliness, miss.’ I pointed at her and directed her to the potty. It is white plastic, and was sitting like a giant eggcup on the linoleum of the bathroom floor. She crossed to it and gingerly lowered her bottom down on the seat. ‘You will sit there, miss, until you perform,’ I said, wagging a finger warningly at her.

  She screwed up her eyes and hung her head as if she was trying to do a complicated sum. We waited and waited and waited, me tapping a foot by now. I glanced at my watch. It was 6 pm. We had a temperance do on that night and I needed to get ready. ‘Push,’ I ordered taking a threatening step towards her. ‘Go on, push! Take a big breath and push.’ She took a breath obligingly, and puffed out her cheeks until they looked rouged. ‘Hurry up, Lucilla.’ My patience was being stretched to its limits. ‘Lucilla!’ I shrilled.