The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  ‘But, Mr Pritchard, surely this is about what Lucilla wants. She’s growing up. She’s nearly an adult. Soon she will be able to make choices for herself.’

  ‘But not yet, Mr Ire– Ireland, not yet.’ A cautionary flintiness in her father’s tone, which made her flinch, arrives with a spray of spit beyond her sphere of vision. ‘As her parents we must make choices for her.’

  ‘Art for a hobby, maybe, but not a career, surely? You can’t possibly expect us to sanction Lucilla chasing some hare-brained scheme to become a painter,’ her mother twittered.

  ‘Be sensible, Mr Ireland. There’s no money in it, no security,’ her father continued and so did the spit. ‘We want Lucilla to have a stable life, one where she does not have … have anxieties over living expenses.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily true, you know.’ Mr Ireland debated his corner with a terrier’s tenacity. ‘She might have to struggle to begin with. But I believe Lucilla’s art is so unique that recognition would only be a matter of time.’

  ‘But how much time? It could be years of hardship. And in the interim who would have to support her? Mr Ireland, I’m sorry. Our … ans– answer is no.’ Her father was unyielding, a chord of childish perversity humming as the belt widened to hook a last tenuous notch.

  ‘Do please take a few days to discuss this.’ Mr Ireland’s pitch hit a trough of dismay. It made her want to weep. Scamp rounded the bottom of the stairs and limped to her side, nosing her leg in empathy.

  ‘We have considered it, Mr Ireland. And re– rejected it. We’re sorry, but we would be grateful if you did not raise false hopes in our daughter.’ Her father’s breathing was audible in the short interim that the stand-off now afforded the trio. Then he cleared his throat as if signalling the meeting was concluded.

  ‘Besides, Lucilla is bound to get married and have a family. And really, what more could any woman want than a home of her own and children?’ Her mother expounded her ethos for a rewarding life. ‘There’s nothing stopping her doing a bit of painting now and then if she likes it.’

  ‘She needs training! The artist has to hone their skill, develop it. If you don’t let Lucilla sit the scholarship you will be stunting her growth.’ Poor Mr Ireland was getting quite overwrought.

  ‘I think we have had a reasonable exchange of views and that we, my wife and I, Lucilla’s parents, have … have made our position clear. Now if you don’t mind, we have things to do.’

  Things to do? Back to the shed her father would go, surmised Lucilla, with a cynicism well in advance of her years. They were getting to their feet. It was done. The dice had been rolled and she had not won. Lucilla dashed to the understairs cupboard and hid in it, leaving the door ajar an inch or two. She heard their footfalls on the hallway tiles, felt the drop in temperature as the front door was opened.

  ‘There is nothing I can say to make you reconsider?’ A pause in which she guessed her mother’s head was shaking resolutely, her father’s rolling from shoulder to shoulder. ‘Well then,’ her art teacher said, with finality, ‘well then, there is one last caution I must add. If you do this, if you stand between Lucilla and her art, she may react strongly.’

  ‘Please don’t tell us how to bring up our daughter. These are family matters, Mr Ireland, and you … you are interfere … interfering,’ her father declared, biting his lazy lolling tongue so savagely it would bleed until a second dose of antiseptic might be sought from the shed. But he was numb to the sting.

  Behind the cupboard door, Lucilla faintly heard a valiant grumble. ‘But she may –’

  ‘Good evening, Mr Ireland,’ her father cut him off.

  ‘Good evening,’ her mother seconded with a raven’s caw. Mr Ireland, having spent his words, having intervened for the sake of art, Lucilla’s art, was now as mute as if he had merely been a signpost that a driver opted to disregard.

  Lucilla woke the following morning to find blood in her bed, blood soaking the crotch of her pyjama bottoms. She realised what it was. Her periods had started. The girls at school spoke about them like a rite of passage. Her tummy felt swollen and there were dull cramping pains that came and went. She felt rather nauseous too. Overnight she had shucked off the cocoon of girlhood.

  ‘You’re late down.’ Her mother was curt as she mooched into the dining room. ‘I’ve made you porridge and it’s been getting cold. Sit down and I’ll fetch it.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ admitted Lucilla, sniffing scorched oats.

  ‘You need something hot on a cold –’

  ‘My periods have started,’ Lucilla bugled, packing books into her schoolbag.

  ‘Don’t talk such rubbish.’ Lucilla saw the blush rise to her mother’s gaunt cheeks and reaped some small reward. ‘How crude you are and what a liar.’

  ‘They have,’ she reinforced prosaically. ‘Go and look if you don’t believe me. My sheets have blood on them. My pyjamas as well.’ Wagging her head as if some demented weevil was crawling around and around in it, her mother escaped to the kitchen and slammed the door.

  At school, Lucilla made do with wads of toilet paper. Returning home in the afternoon, she found a belt and a packet of bulky sanitary towels on her bed. It was Friday. Unusually her father was home early. As a treat her mother said that she had made roast lamb.

  Lucilla filled the kitchen doorway, fidgeting her thighs together. The bulky sanitary garment wedged between her legs made her waddle like a duck. She had spent five minutes fiddling with the damn contraption in the toilet. The sensation of her blood soaking into it was foreign, weakening. And as it flowed out so her animosity flowed in. She breathed in the smell of burned flesh and the queasiness that had been with her all day hit her with knee-buckling ferocity. I shall puke, she thought, puke my guts up, chuck up the lunch of sandwiches that had sat below her midriff undigested all the afternoon.

  ‘Mint sauce,’ piped up her mother merrily, holding out the jar. ‘Pop it on the table will you.’

  ‘No,’ declined Lucilla. ‘I want to sit the scholarship. I want to go to the Royal Academy. I want to be an artist.’

  Her mother flung wide the oven door and smoke billowed out, making them both cough. ‘Has that awful Mr Ireland been putting crazy ideas in your head?’ Hands wadded in oven gloves, she hefted out the piping-hot metal dish bearing the overdone roast. The fat sizzled and smouldered and spat. She set it down on the sink’s draining board with a bang, and fanned away the bluish-grey haze. ‘I know it’s rather … rather … rather chilly, but I think we’d better open a window,’ she hacked.

  ‘Why won’t you let me go?’ accosted Lucilla. Her mother bobbed her head, making Lucilla want to tear out a handful of her now page-boy styled hair. ‘If I win a scholarship you won’t have to pay any fees.’

  With a patronising laugh her mother released the metal catch on the sash window. ‘If only it were as easy as that, Lucilla.’

  ‘But it is,’ she argued. She felt suddenly woozy, vertiginous. And again the pull of Beachy Head was on her, that ineluctable force sucking her into its vortex. ‘It is that simple. Just let me go!’ She found that her voice had run up a scale, that she was screeching in a shrill falsetto.

  ‘Don’t you raise your voice to me, Miss Mousey,’ her mother castigated, wearing an expression that suggested her daughter had changed overnight into a giant unwelcome rat. She swung her arms about as the cold air blasted in. Her glasses had fogged up, and the misty rings scanned for the insurgent in her midst. ‘Must have, won’t have. Gratitude, that’s what you ought to feel towards us, gratitude. All we’ve done for you, and you’re not even … not even …’ She wheezed to a stop.

  ‘Not even what? Not even what?’ Lucilla yelled. ‘That’s all you ever do, find fault.’

  The mist was clearing. As her mother’s brown eyes came into focus, Lucilla recognised enmity in them. The kitchen had gone from a sauna to a freezer in a trice. Scamp yap-yapped and hobbled after his tail. Lucilla could have sworn she detected a lump on his leg the other day, sli
ght, but nevertheless sufficiently swollen to feel.

  ‘Drain the sprouts, Lucilla.’ Despite ‘or else’ being missing from this injunction, she realised it was an ultimatum.

  ‘Oh stuff the bloody sprouts!’ she threw back, hammering on the door frame with a fist. ‘They stink, all waterlogged and stewed and smelly!’

  ‘Don’t you dare blaspheme. I don’t know what’s got into you these days.’ An instant later the lips in her mother’s puce face winched up into a slow knowing sneer.

  ‘I want to be an artist!’

  Her mother tipped the saucepan of steaming sprouts over the sink, into the metal colander. ‘Tell your father dinner’s ready.’

  She went reluctantly, escorted by crippled Scamp. She relayed the message. ‘Bit of a drama,’ her father commented mildly, tipping out his pipe into the ashtray. She shrugged and he glanced at his watch. ‘Mother’s three minutes late today,’ he observed, pinching his nostrils censoriously.

  ‘Dad, please, I want to sit the scholarship. It’s an honour to win a place at the Royal Academy. And I really think I could.’

  ‘Ears burning, eh? Prying on adult conversations? Tut-tut!’ Her father did not even look up. He ran a forefinger down a column and gave a nod. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ he said. She moved like an automaton to the dining room, where the acrid smells of burned meat mingled with the soggy steam from the overboiled vegetables. Her parents filed in, paused behind their chairs, pulled them out and took their seats. But she remained obstinately upright.

  ‘Sit down, Lucilla,’ her father commanded, taking up his cudgels, the carving knife and steel. He began sharpening the knife. Lucilla gritted her teeth as the blade’s edge ground rhythmically. Her father looked like a toy soldier beating on his drum. ‘Roast lamb, Mother. Looks very tasty.’

  She eyed the blackened leg sceptically, while her mother preened and patted her damaged hair. ‘No it doesn’t,’ disputed Lucilla, with a suddenness that made both her parents start. ‘It’s burned. It’s always burned, whatever she cooks.’

  ‘Don’t be so insolent, girl.’ Her mother gnashed her teeth, a viper rearing up in her seat.

  ‘You’ll go to your room if you can’t behave in a civil manner,’ was the sentence of her father. Grist-grust went the knife and the steel. Grist-grust. Grist-grust. Grist-grust. Scamp began wheeking piteously, whether in pain, or in hunger, tormented by the smoky odours of cremated meat, who could tell. The ants that hatched in her toes that day at the cinema had infested her entire body, and she was alive with the itch of them.

  ‘I want to go art school!’ she bellowed, stamping both feet alternately.

  ‘Well, you can’t and that’s that,’ her mother barked crossly.

  ‘Temper, temper! Lucilla, I will not have –’ But quite what her father would not have remained unuttered. The ants marched up through her ankles, her calves, her thighs. They marched in fury around the menstruating core of her, and up through her aching stomach. They made her nipples stand erect through her cotton starter bra and the fine wool of her blouse. They marched down her arms and caused her hands to lift from her sides, to lift and seize the joint of lamb. By now dried out to the texture of a fibre mat, the skin and toughened meat parched to the charred bone, it was not actually scalding, only hot. Her parents, stunned into immobility, their mouths falling open to reveal rows of teeth ruined by slab toffee, among other sugary sins, stared in appalled fascination at their adopted daughter. She had it in both hands, a firm grip. Raising it above her head like a discus thrower, she circled twice with perfect poise and then let it fly.

  It belted through the air and slammed into the French windows. There came a crump as the teeth of glass made a meal of it. Then it slouched on the floor leaving a stain behind on the broken pane, like a greasy exclamation mark. Seconds ticked by. No one had the gumption to break the impasse. Mongrel eyes swivelled from one human to another. Then Scamp took the initiative. He crept over to the battered joint, deftly took the bone in his mouth, and made as swift an exit as his limp afforded him.

  The turquoise seas of Lucilla’s eyes boiled. Her cheeks stained damson. ‘Say something, Merfyn,’ gasped her mother, falling back to fan herself with her handkerchief.

  Her father made fish mouths.

  ‘I’m not sorry,’ spat out Lucilla, vengefully. ‘Some things are more important than lousy legs of lamb and damn mint sauce.’ Her father jumped in his seat and her mother emitted a squeak. ‘And does it matter if your horrible meals are a minute late? It’s not as if they’ll spoil. You’re a rotten cook anyway, and I hate your food. I wish I lived next door at the Friedmans’ and ate pretzels every day. I wish that I lived anywhere but here!’

  ‘Now, Lucilla,’ began her father heaving himself out of his chair and trying to regain some vestige of control, ‘you –’

  ‘And you needn’t tell me to go to my room because I’m on my way.’ She strode to the door, the uncomfortable pad on the move inside her pants. Yanking the door open, she whirled back. With a jut of her chin and a smirk, she dared her mother to dash over and strike her. If you try it, she thought, I shall empty the dish of soggy sprouts over your head. I shall squash them into your nest of tired hair. But her parents’ condition of semi-paralysis continued, so she strode off and left them to it. The incident was not mentioned again. However, when Lucilla arrived home from school on Monday, her mother ambushed her on the stairs.

  ‘I’d like you to step into the dining room. I want a word with you if you don’t mind,’ she said, untying her apron. Lucilla shrugged listlessly and followed her. Nothing seemed to matter any more. ‘Sit down, Lucilla,’ her mother continued, gesturing towards a dining chair. The table was not yet laid. The polished oak surface looked like a glossy mirror. Lucilla didn’t argue. She was fed up. All she wanted was to get this confrontation over with, so that she could go upstairs and read her library book, Lord of the Flies. She sat herself down, folded her arms and waited. Her mother stayed standing, transferring her weight from foot to foot. And now that Lucilla appraised her, her eyes skittering up and down, she became aware of her dishevelled appearance, her crumpled clothes, her unkempt hair, her bleary glasses. Something was awry, she sensed. Immediately her thoughts hopped to Scamp.

  She sprang up. ‘Is Scamp OK? Has he been ill?’

  ‘No, no, he’s fine.’ Her mother sounded peeved that she had been upstaged by the dog. ‘For goodness’ sake do sit down.’ Lucilla lowered herself once more into her seat, as gingerly as if she were a pilot about to be ejected without a parachute. ‘The dog’s perfectly well. This is about you, Lucilla.’

  Several thoughts chased each other in her head. She was going to be punished for the other night, for being a discus hurler and chucking the joint of lamb against the windowpane. It was taped up now with cardboard, as if a huge sticking plaster had been applied to a cut. She sniffed the air tentatively and a rotten sulphurous odour invaded her nostrils. Eggs again, their whites cauterised to an unappetising slime green. Perhaps they had reconsidered the scholarship and done a U-turn? But this seemed unlikely, her heavy heart told her. Perhaps they had decided to send her to boarding school after all? She was too much trouble at home. Oh, she did hope so. Perhaps she could go to Switzerland and be a Chalet School girl? Or perhaps someone had died? Her mother broke into her reverie.

  ‘Lucilla, I’ve something to tell you, something that really you ought to have known by now.’ Her mother was wringing her hands and she was not clock-watching, counting down to the exact second that tea must be thumped onto the table. ‘Your father promised that he would undertake this, but the years have slid by and … and … well, he just hasn’t.’ She harrumphed out a breath and stalled. Then she spread her hands on the table and braced her arms. She fixed Lucilla, her brown eyes stretched and bulging behind their round lenses. ‘I’m afraid … I’m afraid that you’re not our little girl. The truth is that you are adopted.’

  Adopted. Adopted. Adopted. The word shrill
ed like a police siren. She stared up into the face of the woman she had instinctively known was not her mother. Her spontaneous reaction was immense relief. Exultant thoughts collided. Oh thank God, thank God! You are not my mother. There is no biological connection between us. That I am here in this house in East Finchley was not meant to be. Understanding that her spreading smile was not an appropriate reaction to this devastating announcement, she buried her face in her crooked arms, the smooth wood of the table cushioning her warm cheeks. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, and I turned out to be so … so wicked!’ came her muffled manufactured sobs. After what she estimated was a credible gap, she lifted her head, registering as she did so the reflection of her face in the table’s polished wood grain. ‘So you are not my mother?’ she could not prevent herself from saying, dry-eyed, her tone fizzing like champagne. In reply, her adoptive mother drew out a chair and fell into it. Lucilla waited for an excruciating half-minute. Then, her impatience brimming over, she asked, ‘Who were my real parents?’

  ‘Your birth mother was Welsh,’ her mother revealed tonelessly.

  ‘Welsh?’ Lucilla was gripped. Wasn’t Wales the land of legends, of the myths of Arthur and his true love Guinevere?

  ‘Yes, Welsh. But that’s all I know.’ The tone was churlish. Lucilla felt overwhelmed with disappointment. Surely there was more. She shot her mother, her adoptive mother, an imploring look. ‘I did see her, once, at the Church Adoption Society when she gave you to us. Oh and we caught a brief glimpse of her in court when the adoption was made legal.’ A disapproving chord thrummed in her speech. ‘She seemed a … a pleasant young woman.’ She picked over the adjective as if it was something nasty she had trodden in on the pavement. For her closing coda, she produced her hanky from a pocket and wiped her nose.

  ‘But why did she give me away?’ So soft was Lucilla’s voice that it barely qualified as a whisper. They were shut in by wintry darkness. She threw a glance beyond the reflected light of the dining room windows, beyond the gaping injury in the French doors, beyond the bottom of the garden. There she saw the lights of other lives. She wondered what was occurring in their back rooms, what melodramas were being enacted. The windows of other houses similar to theirs blinked their yellow eyes at her dispassionately. ‘She gave me away. Why would she do that?’ Her mother proffered nothing further. ‘Surely you were told more facts?’ Lucilla persisted. ‘My father – what about him? Was he Welsh?’ Her mother shook her head and gave her a funny look. ‘Well then, what was he? English?’