The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  The memory I review next has a bitter flavour to it – my parents’ less than enthusiastic reception of this would-be beau, Henry Ryan.

  ‘He looks foreign,’ Mother says sourly as we wait for him to collect me. ‘German. Two world wars I’ve lived through.’ Her eyes fill with mawkish sentiment. Then pouncing, she asks, ‘Is he German?’

  ‘No!’ I retort emphatically. Then on a quarrelsome whim, I add, ‘And so what if he was? There’s nothing wrong with being German. I should think they’re jolly nice people. Mr Beirmann who runs the café on the corner is anyhow. Besides, the war was years ago, and I rather imagine that the Germans think we British are pigs for what we did to them.’

  My mother gapes, ready to have me tried for treason.

  ‘Don’t you dare speak to your mother like that,’ my father trumpets in a rare show of marital effrontery. ‘You can’t begin to understand what we lived through.’ I raise my eyes rudely to the ceiling, as my astounded father raises his eyebrows in synchronicity. Then his eyes narrow and he licks a speck of spit from the corner of his mouth. ‘If you ask me he took liberties when you danced with him. He was far too close, pushing himself against you. It was nothing short of lewd.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, we were only dancing. Everyone else was doing the same,’ I dispute, with the brand of teenage belligerence that is a flashpoint to adults.

  ‘No they were not!’ my father booms. ‘They certainly were not!’

  Fearing my date may be forbidden, which would be unthinkable, I adjust my attitude quickly. ‘It was only that I kept tripping over my dress. It’s too long. I think the hem needs redoing. He caught me to stop me falling and hurting myself.’ Sewing. My mother grabs the lifeline and her breathing slows, just as well, because she has been hyperventilating. I smile guilelessly. ‘Look,’ I continue, sensing if not a window of opportunity certainly a diamond pane, ‘Henry’s as English as you or I. He’s from Bowes Park.’ Relief brings colour flooding back into my mother’s pale complexion. But my father retains an air of suspicion, as if I am about to date a rapist. Privately, I muse that Henry could come from Timbuktu for all I care.

  ‘I’m only going to the pictures and I’ll be back by ten thirty. Promise. What harm can there be?’

  My father studies his watch, as if it is a stopwatch and he is already counting down the seconds to my return.

  ‘It’s not proper, her wearing trousers to go out with a young man. It’ll give him the wrong impression,’ Mother mutters grim-lipped, but now on terra firma and heading for her sewing box set in a corner of the front room.

  Inside my trousers, my body shivers expectantly, lusting for the adventure of sex, the prospect of going further than I did behind the bike shed at junior school. Henry had been wearing a suit and tie at the temperance summer dance, giving him a semblance of respectability. But, to my delight, he fetches up on our doorstep in a navy, three-quarter-length, double-breasted mackintosh. He looks like a spy, a Russian agent, or a French sailor. Très, très romantic! Mother’s face falls as she appraises his outfit. And my father, drawn up to his full height, with the demeanour of my bodyguard, taps his watch, cautioning Henry proprietarily. As soon as the front door closes behind us, Henry takes my hand. The gesture seems entirely natural, and I like the feel of it in his grip.

  ‘What are we going to see?’ I fish, as we head for the bus stop. It is one of those sunny Sunday evenings when the city glitters as though it is gold-plated. Peaches and pinks and coral reds are unleashed by a sunset that I imagine rivals the tropics for drama. Even the exhaust fumes smell sea-scented.

  ‘Do you like horror films?

  ‘I think they’re divine,’ I admit, relishing the prospect of being terrified in the plush dark confines of a cinema with a man I fancy.

  ‘House of Usher, Vincent Price.’ He gives my hand a squeeze as the bus rolls up. In the seat on the upper deck, his arm curves around my shoulders, and he gives me a swift kiss.

  ‘You’re a bit fresh, aren’t you?’ I say, my lips warm, feeling his fingers caress my upper arm, a spill of liquid fire igniting the wanton in me.

  He grins, unflustered. ‘If you’re scared in the film you can cuddle up to me all you want.’

  I kill the blush that threatens, by looking determinedly out of the window at the London streets. ‘I don’t frighten easily, you know,’ I toss back breezily over my shoulder.

  ‘I can tell,’ I hear him say, humour in his tone. This time, when the lights go down in the cinema, I am not sucking on sweets and readying myself to hurl a lemon sherbet grenade. The chords of haunting music reverberate through me in the concentrated blackness, making my heart quicken and the breath roar through me.

  ‘Are you spooked?’ asks Henry when we are well into the film. A sideways peek gives me his silhouette, the gleam of his eye, and the silver of his hair, the signature of his scar, the line of his mouth.

  ‘Yes, oh yes!’ I whisper explosively.

  ‘For hundreds of years, foul thoughts and foul deeds have been committed within its walls,’ rumbles Vincent Price, larger than life on the vast screen.

  He knows, I recognise guiltily, he knows my dark desires. He has read my mind. Courage! Courage! In my head I speak the word with a French accent. Courage! Somehow it is more powerful than the traditional English pronunciation, and far, far sexier. I turn to face the man I am with. He turns to face me. Then we come together – his lips on mine, light, mine on his, pushing with increasing pressure. I open to him and our tongues meet, explore the sandpaper friction. Cast into delicious depths of spine-tingling horrors, my senses shaved and primed, I feel Henry’s hand on my knee and then on my thigh. When it roosts between my legs, heaven teases me. He strokes my sex, his fingers lingering, torturously erotic. Oh that there was nothing between his hand and my flesh! Now my breaths speed in and out, in and out, my pleasure climbing in rhythmic waves, until the exquisite shudder claims the wet centre of me. At the precise moment when the heroine screams, I reach a climax of pure ecstasy. Every cell, every nerve ending is tantalisingly alive, tender with sensual rapture. I can see Henry’s white teeth flashing as he smiles.

  ‘My girl!’ he says. ‘My girl!’ And his lips are ice on my scalding cheeks.

  Henry accompanies me home on the bus, walks me up to my front door. ‘Give me a kiss,’ he begs, his voice an urgent rasp, drawing me into his arms. I glance back over my shoulder to make sure no one is spying on us. Lights are on in the front room but the curtains are tightly closed. ‘I’ll die if I have to go home without tasting you one last time tonight.’ I study his face in the golden orange lamplight to see if he is mocking me – deadly serious is my interpretation. I decide to risk it and our lips brush, once, twice, then a ravenous return consuming each other with open-mouthed hunger, our tongues laced, our bodies melded together, racing hearts pumping as one. I feel his groin harden against me, and the desire to open myself up and pull him inside me is all consuming. It is Henry who ends our embrace with unpredictable abruptness, so that I am suddenly afraid that I have been too easy, showing him how my body craves his. But comprehension comes when he speaks softly into my hair.

  ‘Your father, I saw him. He was … watching us, through a chink in the curtains. He had a funny look about him. Are you sure you’ll be OK?’

  I nod. ‘But we’d better be more careful next time.’

  ‘Next time?’ He grins, his charm back in the saddle.

  I nod again. ‘Tomorrow, Cherry Tree Wood. Eleven o’clock. I’m walking the dog,’ I say under my breath.

  ‘Are you sure that’s all you’re doing?’ he returns in kind, his tone so low and so sexy it gives me vertigo.

  Not daring another word I spin round and rush into the house.

  Since then Henry has introduced me to jazz clubs, and to a dance hall in Bowes Park. I continue with my two left feet, stepping on his toes while we jive, elbowing him in the ribs when we do the twist. Sometimes we play ping-pong or have a game of darts, and drink half-pints
of cider each at a pub a safe distance from East Finchley. When I tell Henry that Scamp is ill he doesn’t falter.

  ‘I’ll come to the vet with you,’ he says.

  Scamp’s limp is so severe now that he can hardly walk. I know he is dying. The vet is very caring. He examines him thoroughly and confirms this to me. ‘He’s in pain. You can see that, Miss Pritchard, in agony. The kindest thing –’

  ‘The kindest thing. Yes. I want you to do the kindest thing,’ I anticipate. Scamp looks up at me with trusting dewy eyes. I turn to Henry and feel my resolve weaken. ‘Henry, I can’t.’ It is less than a whisper, a pleading fragment.

  He takes my shoulders in his confident hands. ‘You can,’ he reassures. He stays with me at the last. He holds my hand and I hold Scamp’s paw. I have the strangest feeling as we do this, a certainty that in the future we will do this again. The opposite of déjà vu? Vu jàdé would this be? I am being capsized by devotion for my dog, my dog that I have to say goodbye to. And Henry is righting my boat. The loss is acute. I feel it pressing on my heart, the warm-blooded weight of him inside my cardigan as we walk away from the animal stall in the Pentonville marketplace.

  On the way home light-headed with grief, I make a declaration. ‘When I leave school, I want to be a vet.’

  ‘Great idea,’ comes Henry’s resounding endorsement.

  Chapter 24

  Lucilla, 1968

  THE BARGE IS a beaten-up rusty hulk wedged in the mud. It is as distant from what I envisaged as the Ritz is from a hostel. I eye it reproachfully, Gina in my arms, recognising that the sickness I feel is of the morning and not my usual sea variety. Regretfully, I demolish the idyllic river dwelling I have constructed in my head. I throw the tubs of crimson geraniums off the cabin roof into the green murky waters. I look on impotently as the fresh paintwork in reds and blues, yellows and purples, assaulted by decades of stormy weather and devilish currents, bubbles and peels and flakes off. I witness the shine on the brass fittings, polished to a blinding gold, tarnishing. Below my feet the varnished teak floorboards, fodder for woodworm, rot away perilously. Gina fidgets to be put down.

  ‘No darling, it’s not safe,’ I say, depressed.

  ‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Henry jumps in, with the spirit of a Blitz survivor. ‘A bit of sanding, a lick of paint, replace a few planks and she’ll be as good as new.’

  I lift my eyebrows and give him an unbroken sardonic stare. No amount of dedicated elbow grease, and no amount of money, which incidentally we don’t have anyway, can restore this ghost barge to its previous glory. The name alone, Mistress Hope, seems a cruel jibe at us, the prospective purchasers of this bashed about tin can. She is moored at Maldon on the Blackwater estuary in Essex. My plan was to buy her with the small legacy of £200 a distant aunt has left me. My father had handed over the money very reluctantly. He said he didn’t approve of living on the water, that it wasn’t the done thing. By then, what with me having an illegitimate baby and living in sin with Henry’s family, my mother made it transparent she detested everything I had done and was doing. The barge was a blow from which she refused to recover.

  ‘It’s abnormal,’ she griped. ‘Bringing a kiddy up in a floating house.’ Then after a couple of seconds she added, her voice a pessimistic snarl, ‘There’ll be repercussions. You wait and see.’

  Of course, the more they condemned the plan, the more attractive it became, until now, as the damp inhospitable reality swayed drunkenly under me. ‘We can’t live here.’ There was despair in my tone because I knew, what with the second baby on the way, that we could not go on depending on the good nature of Henry’s relatives. We all live together not in a yellow submarine, that, put bluntly, might be more spacious, but in a Victorian end of terrace in Bowes Park. They took me in after I had Gina. It’s a crowded house. His mother and father dwell on the ground floor, and Henry and I are upstairs with his Aunt Ethel. It was she who brought him up, because his mother was so sickly.

  Aunt Ethel is a ruby, a large woman with a massive bosom. She is as generous in build as nature, her only vice a fag that droops all day from her broad, slack mouth. She has a bed-sitting room. We, that is, Henry, our daughter Gina, and myself, share a small bedroom. The Ryan household has been kind to me. When we do move on, I shall miss their easy inclusive love. Aunt Ethel declares that if we go she won’t have to attempt any more healthy eating regimes. ‘I’ll be able to give up dieting for ever, love,’ she says, lighting up another cigarette, while she still has one, lipstick-stained, wagging on her lips. ‘I’ll waste away to nothing. You see if I don’t. Without our Gina to cuddle, I’ll be all bone, never mind the skin.’

  While Henry was out at work as an electrician for a company in Southgate, I spent the afternoons walking in Broomfield Park. It gave his parents a break. It’s a treat, the park, with its flowering borders, the vistas of mowed green grass, the splendid trees and the playground with swings and a slide. There’s a grand old house as well, Broomfield House, set in the grounds. Parts of it are open to the public. Whoever owned it must have had a weakness for taxidermy. Stuffed animals and birds cram the rooms, their glassy eyes eerily tracking you, their pelts looking scruffy and moth-eaten. And the birds, varieties from far overseas, are spectres of their former selves, their feathers dowdy, their calls a distant memory. Gina and I prefer the aviary for the living. We spend hours entertained by hopping budgies and singing canaries. My habit is to order a milky coffee at the picturesque veranda café and while away the hours with my daughter. If it weren’t for the high walls and the din of traffic, it would be perfect. I want to move to the country. The river had seemed a compromise, but it was impractical in the extreme. I realise this now.

  If I had been able to take the job I was offered as a veterinary nurse with a practice in Mill Hill, it might all have been different. But no, my adoptive parents were adamant, refusing to sign the forms. Tending to sick animals was most assuredly not an arena for a young lady to work in.

  ‘It’s not suitable, Lucilla. Risky too,’ my father disparaged.

  ‘Who knows what germs the creatures may be carrying,’ my mother added. And suddenly I was heartily sick of it all.

  ‘Oh hang you both,’ I burst out before dashing off to my room. But there was no way round it. I was a minor and until I was twenty-one had to submit to my adoptive parents’ will. My father’s ambitions for me did not extend beyond a nice office job. My mother’s lay in a smart department store. ‘John Lewis!’ It was a reverential exclamation that made the hairs on my neck stand to attention with dread. ‘You’d like that. You know you would.’

  ‘No, no, I wouldn’t,’ I declared flatly. ‘I don’t want to be a shop girl.’

  But the following day I was made to enlist with a crowd of others, more willing than myself. Near comatose, I listened as we were assigned to our various departments. My eyes flicked over the headings on the board ahead and stuck on haberdashery. If there was any mercy in the universe let me be saved from haberdashery, I prayed.

  ‘Lucilla Pritchard,’ sang out the supervisor with equanimity minutes later. ‘You will be in haberdashery.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but he had moved rapidly on. My fate was bound up in yards and yards of lace. My mother gave me a beatific smile. I weathered day one, training, as I might a winter hailstorm, hunched into the collar of my white uniform shirt, monosyllabic. Day two and it was all I could do to survive an hour on the shop floor. I examined my wristwatch in microscopic detail, as time crawled forwards like an encumbered stag beetle. At 10.05 am precisely, I made up my mind to give in my notice. I told my head of department and she gawked at me. ‘That won’t do, Miss Pritchard. You can’t quit, you’ve hardly started.’

  ‘Oh yes I can,’ I snorted, ignoring the pleas of some dratted customer for darning wool. ‘I cannot work here.’

  I was duly sent to the manager’s office. ‘What’s all this I hear?’ he impeached, elbows splayed on his desk, fisted hands knocking together.

  ‘I’m leaving,�
�� I said.

  ‘You can’t do that. Why … why you’ve only just arrived,’ he blustered. ‘All our trainees complete their probationary period. It is unheard of.’

  ‘Then I’ll be kicking off a new trend,’ I fired back, rudely. And, without waiting for his reaction, I swept out into the sunshine and strutted proudly down the Tottenham Court Road. But the exultant inner cry of ‘I’m free’ was soused after a few reckless minutes with a more sobering thought. What the hell was I going to do, because when my mother learned of my defection she would kill me. Still, head high, I wandered on. Arriving in Leicester Square, I found myself staring in at the window of Foyle’s Bookshop, at the display of tempting novels. And then out of the corner of my eye I saw a notice headed VACANCIES. What had I to lose?

  I went in and wrote my name on the list of applicants, all patiently waiting to see the great Christina Foyle. I was told that she would be interviewing prospective staff personally. Although there was a whole row of people who had more than likely been queuing for hours, before the ink was dry on my application form my name was called. I was ushered to an upstairs office, and invited by the lady herself to take a seat opposite her desk. She was an elegant woman with a wide, heart-shaped face and fine bone structure. She had cropped wavy dark hair, parted at the side and tucked behind her ears. When they rested on me, her greyish blue eyes brimmed with intelligence under their carefully shaped eyebrows. She leaned forwards and shook my hand.

  ‘I am Christina Foyle. This is my bookshop. And you are Lucilla Pritchard?’ I nodded glumly. Hearing my name spoken out loud invariably shattered my confidence. ‘Do you like books, Lucilla?’

  I did not have to consider my reply. ‘Oh I love them,’ I gushed. She gave a smile that began and ended in her perceptive eyes.

  She glanced down at my form, which I now saw somewhat self-consciously was on the top of the pile set in front of her. ‘You’ve only recently left school?’ I nodded and waited.