The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  Keep! The word was like a rapier stabbing my heart. If I couldn’t come up with a convincing story for this dratted woman, she would scuttle back to her council offices and write a damning report. She would say that I was an unfit mother and that Henry was an unfit father. And soon they would all be buzzing around, petitioning some judge for an order to take Gina into care, to have our daughter adopted. ‘I have money,’ I said, a dreadful serenity stealing over me. ‘We are perfectly comfortable.’ I smiled amicably at her. The life of my child depended on this performance and I did not intend to fail her.

  ‘And how is that?’ There was a residue of vexation in her tone that gave me hope.

  ‘Oh, didn’t I say? My father sends me money,’ I said as matter-of-factly as I could.

  ‘Does he?’ A doubtful upwards inflexion.

  ‘Oh yes. He’s been doing it for ages. He likes to make a contribution to his granddaughter’s upkeep. As you told me yourself he feels compelled to help. Actually we’re very fortunate.’ Gina had hold of the beads that encircled my neck. They were nothing special, clear glass I’d picked up from Oxfam, but she was fascinated by them. ‘I do feel sorry for young couples who don’t have such a supportive family.’ I scarcely breathed. Would she believe me? Would she interrogate me wanting further details, and in doing so uproot my lie? In that second I knew how a gambler feels when everything he holds dear is riding on a single number.

  ‘I see.’ She sounded annoyed. She might have been singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ I felt so uplifted. If she was needled she had believed my excuse.

  On the doorstep she said, ‘Well, what a relief that Gina is being so well cared for. But if circumstances alter please do get in touch. It’s never too late.’ She gave me a card with her number on it, and I assured her that I would. After she had gone, I stood with my head resting against the door. When my daughter yanked my necklace and it broke, crystal beads scattering over the tiled hall, I was sobbing so hard I paid no attention at all.

  We gradually hauled ourselves out of the quagmire. From time to time, I heard from Rachel, bitter phone calls in which she ranted down the line about trying to conceive or her last miscarriage. They had run some test and discovered that, like my mother, she had been suffering from endometriosis and fibroids, and that consequently her doctor doubted she would ever carry to term.

  ‘And yet you, still living in sin, have become pregnant with a second baby just like an alley cat. People with no morals should be banned from bringing up children.’

  I forgave Rachel the nasty things she accused me of, because I felt sorry for her. To be consumed by frustrated maternal longings, an instinct so strong that the human race would perish without it, must be very dreadful. But after our grandmother died I felt as if the only real connection between us was severed. Some months before my twenty-first birthday, I came into my small legacy. And although it was not enough to buy my dream house, well, in honesty, any house at all, it was a stopgap. Then post Mistress Hope, as if the name of the rusting tub had been a charm after all, an advertisement in the newspaper caught my eye: ‘Head Gardener Wanted for Private Estate in Dorking. Cottage provided for successful applicant.’ Just as well, because without Henry working we had soon used up all the money.

  ‘But I don’t know much about gardening,’ Henry prevaricated when I said he should apply.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ I told him undeterred. ‘I’ll go to the library and get lots of books for you to swat up on. We’ll revise together.’

  We crammed as if our lives depended on passing an exam, and perhaps they did. He went alone to the initial interview. We married at the registry office the following week. I travelled with him to the second interview and strolled around the estate. The grass was without railings fencing it in. The trees were without pavements making them line up. The sky was without buildings blocking out the light. It was a homecoming, a mellow spring pageant of youthful greens. I was entranced. But it was the copper beech, pinkish bronze leaves like varnished nails on hundreds of twiggy fingers beckoning me on, that engaged my imagination. Flaunting itself among the other green guards bordering the drive, it proclaimed the message to me that here differences were celebrated. In this haven we would be safe.

  That same day they telephoned to offer Henry the job. He accepted it. We hired a small van and packed up our few possessions. By sundown of that day we had moved into Pear Tree Cottage – the home where we would bring up our children.

  We kept in close touch with Henry’s family though. However, trips to Bowes Park were sadly curtailed when the children were still young, as both his parents died within a year of one another. Aunt Ethel, diagnosed with lung cancer shortly afterwards, soon followed her sister and brother-in-law. As the property was rented and their chattels sparse, their lives were tidied away with the minimum of fuss. As for my adoptive parents, we had one catastrophic rendezvous at the house in East Finchley. We went for tea, blackened fish fingers, burned beans and charcoal chips. Gina was three and Tim was one. Father had been in the shed, all day judging by his condition, and had problems guiding his fork into his mouth. Tim had a temperature and a runny nose, and cried constantly in Henry’s loving patient arms, earning my mother’s censure. Gina, with the honesty of children, refused to eat anything because as she told her grandmother plaintively, ‘It’s horrid and all burnty up!’ When Mother rebuked her, she too burst into tears, climbed down from the table and promptly wet herself. While Mother was frantically scrubbing at the puddle that soaked into the new carpet, Father passed out, his cheek resting on the pillow of midnight black beans on his plate. Mother sprang up, screaming at me to telephone an ambulance.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, he’s had a heart attack! Hurry, hurry, Lucilla, or he’ll die!’

  Able to detect the whisky fumes from the open doorway to the hall, where I was providing solace to Gina, I pointed out the good news, that he was in fact blind drunk and had merely passed out. However, far from being relieved that treating his symptoms would not involve medical intervention, only several hours of sleep, during which glasses of water might wisely be administered, my mother was irate.

  ‘Don’t tell lies! Oh you wicked, wicked girl! You’ll never change!’ She flapped her arms towards her recumbent husband. ‘Your father’s signed the pledge! He never touches a drop! You know we’re both teetotal!’

  We left my father snoring and my mother wielding a bucket. After that we met rarely, and only outdoors, all the better to make a quick getaway should such be necessary. Although rare, these engagements proved so unpopular with the children and adults alike, that they were soon phased out. When Gina was ten and Tim was eight, I told them about my adoption. After this revelation neither of them could be coaxed into any interaction with Granny and Grandpa Pritchard over and above a formal thank you letter for small gifts of money on their birthdays and at Christmas.

  It was a couple of years later that history repeated itself and my cousin Rachel was forced to have a hysterectomy. She was desperate to adopt but Quentin would not have it. A baby that was not his own was completely unacceptable to him. After all, he expounded, who could vouch for the breeding of a cast-off? By slow degrees, Rachel was worn down, giving up the battle for a baby and letting her husband trample her into submission. Her life became a round of trivia: cocktail parties, dinner parties, banking socials, holidays. She had a cleaner and a cook, plenty of money and a life as empty as a blown egg. We had nothing in common any more. I had to tread carefully in conversations with her, avoiding mention of the children and the joy they brought us. It seemed to me yet another dark chapter in the archives of that most complex of genres, the matriarch, the wellspring, the nurturing mother.

  Chapter 25

  Lucilla, 1999

  I SUMMONED EVERY scrap of bravery I had and rang Rosemary Dixon one evening in September. She lives in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, my private sleuth. I felt guilty as if I was contacting a clairvoyant, someone with a hotline to the other side. She did not disappoint
, speaking to me in beguilingly dulcet, sympathetic tones. She understood my rapacious need to locate Bethan Haverd, to establish a relationship with her. I wanted to roll back the years like a carpet, lay bare the floorboards of my life, to start over. I wanted the injustice of it all to be righted, the imbalance corrected. I wanted my suffering in this farce to be acknowledged. It was 1999. Bethan was seventy-one. I wanted her to gather me into her arms a lifetime too late. I was naive. The wheel of time spins inexorably forwards. It cannot go backwards. The past is quite simply that – past. But if I had an inherent understanding of this universal truth, I opted to be myopic. Rosemary Dixon was my fellow gravedigger. Her spade would be her assiduousness, and her assertion that, in step with Sherlock Holmes, the case of my identity was on the verge of being solved.

  Henry stroked his whiskers, smoothed his sideburns and shook his head. But he knew that for good or ill this search must run its course. I wrote to Rosemary Dixon. The desperation I had quelled for so many years now resurfaced with a vengeance. I did not wish this to be a sedate pursuit, with me masquerading at nonchalance. I was in fifth gear and had my foot pressed down hard on life’s accelerator. I intended to compress into weeks the passage of over half a century. I opened by thanking Rosemary for being interested in my personal quest, and confirming that I was enclosing a cheque for £200, together with photocopies of all the documents and letters in my possession.

  Her reply fell on the mat on 7 November. It was dated Guy Fawkes Night. Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I had woken early, had gone a-roaming in the dark with Lola. I like tapping my way with my hiking pole, guided by the owls’ cries and those nocturnal birds, the black flitting shapes of bats overhead. The clocks have gone back, so I’ve gained an hour for my nebulous strolls. I saw what looked like a fire, a raging conflagration on the distant horizon. The tall pines stood out in relief against the lick of blood red flames. The field I was then crossing was soon bathed in streaks of butterscotch and blue grape. The sheep dotted about were backed with golden fleeces. It was dawn, an untamed inferno sweeping up the dregs of night. There was gale blowing as well, and the autumn leaves were being tossed and hurled about in a coppery tempest. The wind whistling through the treetops played the sea’s song, the waves foaming and crashing on grassy knolls.

  I expect Rosemary Dixon was penning her reply to me, while Henry and I, Gina and Nathan and little Lisa, and Tim were warming our hands over a token bonfire, munching on hotdogs, and lighting sparklers. The night jogged a memory. Rachel urging me to sign my name with my sputtering sparkler. But it wasn’t my name. Henry and I read the letter together, upstairs in our bedroom. Lola lay sprawled under the window. We sat down beside her, leaning our backs against the wall. Her nose twitched to our distinctive scents and, without opening her eyes, her tailed thumped in taciturn greeting. In the dim illumination of a low-energy light bulb, my eye ran down the page as I read aloud.

  Dear Lucilla,

  Hello! Thank you for providing your Norcap membership number, the cheque and all your paperwork. I am enclosing a copy of a birth certificate which I believe to be your birth mother’s. Hopefully, there are not too many Bethan Modrun Haverds, who had fathers who were farmers, and mothers called Seren, and who lived on farms in Newport, Pembrokeshire. I am currently checking for possible marriage certificates, also for a death certificate for Seren Haverd. If a death entry is found she may have left a will, which could be a good lead.

  As soon as I know more I’ll be in touch.

  Very best wishes,

  Rosemary

  We scanned the birth certificate together. The registration district was given as Cardigan. The birth itself took place in the sub-district of Newport, Pembroke, the date given 9 August 1928. ‘“Bethan Modrun, girl, born to father Ifan Haul Haverd and Seren Amser Haverd, formerly Kendrick. Occupation of the father – a farmer. Date of register, fourteenth of September, nineteen twenty-eight,”’ Henry read.

  ‘My mother would have been five weeks old,’ I told Henry in disbelief. I saw the line stretching through the hazy annals of Welsh history. My mother, my mother’s mother, my mother’s mother’s mother. Back and back it went through the world wars, the days of Empire, the Tudors, the Normans, the Vikings, to the maternal grunts of Neolithic mothers, their babies carried in fur papooses strapped to their backs. I interrupted that line. From order came the chaos of my birth.

  Henry supplied the even tone of my reply, censoring my heightened emotions. ‘Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui,’ he quoted.

  ‘Queen’s English, Henry, if you please?’ I requested.

  ‘Beware of what you say, when, and to whom,’ Henry filled in prudently. We both knew how high the stakes were, that now was not the time to show our hand. So I signed off, wishing Rosemary a Happy Christmas, telling her to enjoy the festivities and take a rest from her intensive research. However, despite bluffing others, I could not save myself from my inner turmoil. The savour of my own holiday was gone. The mince pies were tasteless, the tinsel gaudy and cheap. I would have bartered my entire present for a solitary day from the past, a day spent with my real mother. My empathetic husband, like a loyal dog, suffered with me. But Rosemary, despite being unacquainted with our agony, did not delay. I next heard on 3 December. And what she sent me for a Christmas present was a copy of my birth mother’s marriage certificate, and a request for further funds. I envisioned her as a Romany wise woman, with clinking bangles and gathered skirts, carrying baskets heaped with sprigs of white heather.

  I took it on a walk with Henry, and we sat on a hillside bench, contemplating it reverently. It was still early, the sun just cresting the distant inky crowns of woods. Lola charged about overdosing on the piquant icy aromas. The frost-rimed slope looked as if barrels of diamonds had been emptied over it. I swung my booted feet and shuttered my eyes.

  ‘What did she look like on her wedding day, Henry? Did my mother, Bethan, wear white or cream?’ I whispered.

  ‘Did her betrothed know that another man had gone before him?’ Henry interjected. My eyes sprang open. ‘Had he been told there was a baby, that a German prisoner-of-war had fathered a child with his young wife?’ My husband looked so forlorn that I hugged him, then we held hands like a teenage couple.

  ‘Was she happy? Was she in love when she said, “I do”? Or was this a marriage of another kind? Was she forced into it to give a semblance of virtue?’

  Henry shook his head. ‘So many questions.’

  ‘So few answers,’ I finished for him. I was temporarily blinded by the scintillating spiked frozen grass. Gradually, as my vision adjusted, I carried on scanning the certificate. ‘After the banns were read, the marriage was solemnised on the thirteenth of May, nineteen fifty, in the parish of Nevern, county of Pembroke. In the Pritchard household in London I would have been two years old, standing in my cot shaking the bars.’ I breathed in the frosty air, a memory tickling my nose, inhaling the astringent odours of cleaning products, polish, disinfectant, vinegar and lemon juice, while my mother clattered about. ‘Did no one speak up for me? The first, the second, the third and final time of asking, did no parishioner climb to their feet, raise an arm, clear their throat and say, but what about baby you had, Bethan? What of Lucilla?’

  Again Henry reminded me that it took two to make a baby. ‘I wonder if the real father was told Bethan was getting married?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. If anyone knew, I expect their lips were gummed together,’ I said, soberly. ‘So it went ahead and Bethan married Leslie David Sterry, an agricultural contractor.’ I tapped the paper with a finger. ‘Look, there’s even an address. Carwyn Farm, Hebron, Cardigan. Though I can’t imagine she’s still there.’ The father of the groom was a farmer too, I saw. ‘It seems that I come from agricultural stock.’ The registration district was recorded as Haverfordwest. I gasped. In the tragedy of Lucilla Pritchard, this impacted on me as forcefully as Oedipus discovering that despite his every effort to escape his fate
he had, after all, married his mother. ‘Haverfordwest. My adoptive mother died in a hospital in Haverfordwest. Henry, do you realise they might have been living a cricket pitch from one another? They might have bumped into each other in the streets? They might have rubbed shoulders at the same market stall.’

  ‘Well, I never, your adoptive mother and your real mother winding up in the same place. And nothing whatsoever in common, bar the baby handed over in nineteen forty-eight. Bar you!’

  When my adoptive father retired, he returned to his childhood home. He and my adoptive mother moved to a pretty cottage in Pembrokeshire. I did not attend his funeral. I elected not to bow to convention and stand in a Welsh graveyard as his coffin was lowered into the earth. And when my adoptive mother rang me and asked if I would like to have his piano, I politely declined. The music died in me long ago.

  I tucked the marriage certificate back in its envelope and into my coat pocket. The sun’s rays could now be felt, and the frosty gems were melting and condensing into low-lying mist. We stood and set off ambling down the hill, listening appreciatively to the crunch of our boots on the still starched grass. Lola, tail wagging, lifted her head and loped after me. The air was delicious enough to eat. But my appetite was marred when Cousin Frank intruded on my reminiscing. I tallied the phone calls that I had taken from him over the years, his patronising visits, his hubris at the power he wielded when it came to his Aunt Harriet, the way in which he ingratiated himself with her. I also bookmarked with some satisfaction, juvenile though it might be, the arrival of Mr Whatmore, Alfred Whatmore. An allegory surely? My widowed mother met Mr Whatmore at her bridge club.