It was to be only a couple of weeks later, whilst Nina was still in Australia, that Romy brought the subject up again, but Nell had forgotten and looked baffled at the mention of the internet site.
‘You know, Nan, the one I mentioned.’ Romy had come in with Patrick, who held the baby and seemed in no hurry to give him up, so Nell must suffice with her granddaughter for now. ‘You said you wanted your name to go down on that list of people wanting to be reunited with their babies.’
‘Oh yes, I remember now,’ said Nell with keenness.
‘Yes, well, whilst I was at it I found another site relating to adoption, an unofficial one set up by people looking for family members, and I didn’t see the harm in posting a few details on there too. Nan, I don’t want to get you too excited, but I’ve had a telephone call.’
Her grandmother looked shocked, confused, but interested at the same time. ‘So quickly …’ After decades of futile search, Nell could not allow herself to believe the push of a few buttons had brought any result.
‘Yes, well, that’s the Internet for you. Anyway, I was contacted by email at first, then I received a follow-up phone call.’ Romy saw that her grandmother had turned pale, and came to put an arm round her. ‘Are you all right – can I get you a glass of water?’
‘No, no … I’m fine.’ She wasn’t, her heart rate had taken a sudden blip. ‘So who was it from? Did they have news of him?’
Romy employed a gentle tone, trying not to dramatise this, but obviously having to rein in her excitement. ‘It was William. At least, the man who called thinks he’s the one you’re looking for. As I said, he first contacted me by email, and then I got him to phone me. He answered all my questions correctly – I believe it’s him. His name’s William Morgan.’
Nell felt as if her heart had come right up into her throat and lodged there, fluttering like a trapped bird. She could not speak, and so, holding her hand, occasionally stroking it, Romy continued.
‘He asked all about you, and I told him how lovely you are, and that you hadn’t wanted to give him up.’ She saw tears in her grandmother’s eyes and immediately they sprang to her own too; but she managed to go on, ‘that you’d been forced to do it, and that you’d kept a ribbon from the little clothes you knitted him tied to his father’s wedding ring – I told him that too, about him being killed before he could marry you, I hope you don’t mind?’ At the stunned shake of head from her grandmother, she paused to blow her nose, then gave a wet laugh. ‘That’s exactly what I heard him do down the phone.’
Nell uttered a laughing sob, nipped her nose with the hankie, and dashed away the brine that threatened to spill. ‘So he doesn’t hate me?’
‘No! How could anyone hate you? Even if he hated the idea of being given up at birth – which he doesn’t, he told me – he was sad, of course, and he’d always wondered why, but he said, “tell her I hold no grudge, or anything like that”. I scribbled it all down, as much as I could, so I could tell you everything – well maybe not every word, but so’s you’d get the message.’
Only now did Nell see that her granddaughter had been referring to a notepad, and asked eagerly, ‘Did he tell you much about himself?’
‘Yes, heaps!’ Romy frowned over the spidery scrawls on her pad. ‘Hang on. I’ve just put key words to jog my memory, because I couldn’t write fast enough, and I wanted to be able to tell you … He’s been happily married for twenty-five years, with three daughters, and one grandson. His wife is called Jean – she was the one who spotted my message on the Internet, apparently she’s been attempting to reunite you for years – and his daughters are Angela, Mandy and Sarah. His grandson is Ryan.’ She looked up into her grandmother’s face and laughed. ‘I’ll bet you never dreamed you’d have a flesh and blood grandson!’
Nell’s eyes were shining again, but with happiness now. She reached out to Romy, to let her know she was regarded as flesh and blood too. ‘He’ll be your cousin.’
Then, with heart aflutter, she was pressing for more about her son. ‘What else – did you ask him to write to me?’
‘I did, yes, though he says he’s no good at letter-writing, and he’d prefer to tell you in person.’
Nell grew more excited. ‘He’s going to phone?’
‘No, I mean in person,’ said Romy.
Her grandmother moaned. ‘I can’t wait that long! It could be weeks before he’s able to organise a flight – oh, your mum’s still over there! I could get her to call on him, take some photos!’
Wasn’t life amazing – just when Australia looked set to claim another of her children, it was about to give the origi nal one back! Yet perhaps that had all been part of God’s great plan, that she must sacrifice one treasure to receive another. ‘Oh, but however will I wait, Rome?’ She clamped both hands to her cheeks in frustration. ‘Haven’t you got anything else to keep me going? Does he have an Australian accent?’
‘Not really …’ Romy had donned an odd expression. ‘He just seemed keen to let you know he’s had a very happy life in general, and he isn’t angry and doesn’t have any feelings of resentment, or any of the things you were afraid of. I made a great point of telling him how much you wanted to keep him, and that you’d been hoping to see him again all your life.’ She glanced at Patrick, who remained with their baby in the background, but Nell was too euphoric to notice.
‘Did you tell him about going all the way to Australia to search for him?’
‘I did. He was mortified to hear we’d been to all that expense and money, especially when we were looking in the wrong place.’
‘Wrong state – I knew it!’ Nell smacked her knee in frustration.
‘No, wrong country.’ Romy stroked the papery skin of her grandmother’s hand with a thumb as she deliberated. ‘He loved Australia, he said, but he only stayed out there for five years. There was always something pulling him back to where he was born … and he couldn’t understand it when he’d had so much tragedy in his early life.’
A look of devastation took over Nell’s face. She stared at Romy and gasped. ‘Are you telling me … he’s been in England all the time?’
A nod. ‘Not just England – in York. He said he couldn’t settle anywhere else.’
Nell gave a little whimper. She could have passed him by in the street any day – he might have been any one of those males she had scrutinised and dismissed because she thought he was in Australia. Oh what absolute fluke! ‘But how come he didn’t see the advert we put in the press?’
‘Yes, I asked him about that,’ said Romy, with an ironic twitch to her smile. ‘He said he can only think it appeared during one of the times he was away on holiday. Normally he’d read it cover to cover …’
Nell was still shaking her head at this kink of fate. Then she sucked in her breath again, as the thought impacted. ‘You said he wanted to see me in person …?’
Another nod, a rapid one this time, and loaded with victory as Romy saw the realisation hit home. ‘I can’t wait to meet him either – I’m almost as excited as you, Nana!’
Nell’s eyes shone with tears of elation. ‘I don’t think you could ever be that, love,’ she opined quietly. ‘Good grief. I don’t think I’ve had such an earth-shattering day since your mother announced she was expecting you!’
Romy turned to share an affectionate laugh with the father of her child, Patrick kissing the baby, before she turned back and said, warmly triumphant, ‘You’ve found him at last, Nana.’
‘Well!’ Her grandmother heaved an exclamation, as if unable to take this all in. But soon she was leaning forward again. ‘Tell me more – what does he do for a living?’
‘I don’t think he told me that – anyway, he’ll be able to tell you all that himself, Nan, and I’m sure you won’t want an audience, so –’
‘What? He’s coming now?’ Nell was thrown into disarray. ‘But I’m not ready!’
‘Sorry, I thought, well, he said he didn’t want to delay the meeting after all these years …’
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‘In case I snuff it,’ guessed Nell – which she felt on the brink of doing. ‘Well, I can’t see him right this minute!’
Romy was quick to take away that look of panic, wrapping her arms about Nell, who seemed to have shrunk all of a sudden. ‘If you want us to stay here then we will. I told William I’d come and pave the way, then give him a ring.’
His name had been spoken countless times throughout their search, but to hear it uttered now from her granddaughter’s lips made it more real, more immediate.
Romy looked wrong-footed. ‘He’s eager, so I thought you would be too …’
‘I am!’ Nell straightened her clothes, as if telling herself, Pull yourself together, woman, isn’t this what you’ve craved since the moment you lost him? ‘It’s just been a shock,’ she stammered to Romy. ‘I think I might collapse with happiness at seeing him.’ With every limb feeling like jelly, she didn’t even know if she’d be able to stand.
Again, her granddaughter gave her an impulsive hug. ‘Do I ring him then, or what?’
Nell took a deep breath, the fluttering bird in her throat making her unable to reply for a second. Then she nodded bravely, and watched her granddaughter go to the phone, somehow managing to ask, ‘Where does he live?’
‘Er, Holgate Road, I think he said, so it’ll only take ten or fifteen minutes in the car – I’m sure he’ll be as excited as you and want to come right away. Do you want to get changed or anything?’ She hesitated over pressing the buttons.
‘No, just tell him to come,’ instructed Nell. ‘He can see me as I am. I’ll go to the loo, though – if I’m not being too indelicate, Patrick, my bowels have turned to water, as they say in the novels.’
A down-to-earth kind of man, Patrick laughed and helped her to rise, before sitting down to wait with Joe on his knee, whilst Romy telephoned William, and an unsteady Nell groped her way to the bathroom.
It had just been an excuse to get away from them – though it had not been a lie, her innards were bubbling with the shock and emotion of it all, every organ working overtime, and her legs so wobbly she did not know how they managed to carry her as far as the lavatory. Lowering herself onto the seat, she flopped sideways to gain the support of a cool wall as she tried to regulate her breathing. Her heart was still going bang, bang, bang against her sternum, causing a terrible dread – what if she were to collapse and die before he got here? With nausea added to the panic, she began to take deep, steady breaths, pretending she was back on the hospital wards and using her expertise to calm some frightened old biddy … except today that frightened old biddy was herself.
She became angry then, and asked what on earth she was so terrified of – was this not her dearest wish come true? The dream she had nurtured for a lifetime? But it did not help, for suddenly that lifetime began to reel backwards. From the tick of Billy’s watch as it had sprung to life in her fist, Nell’s frantic senses were dragged back screaming and protesting, sucked into a dark whirlpool to that ghastly night when their baby had been torn from her arms. The pain of it was so vivid that unconsciously she was to wrap her arms around her own ageing body and grip it for all she was worth, as if to stop them taking him – how could they, how could anyone with an ounce of humanity commit such brutality as to abduct a newborn baby from its mother?
Such fury threatened to engulf her totally … until, become suddenly aware of a more physical pain, Nell loosed the fraught grip on herself, relaxed a little, and began to knead the arthritic joints of her shoulders. Stop, just stop this! She rebuked herself for wasting precious time, for torturing herself in looking backwards, when in a few moments all that suffering would be put to rest.
Alert that she may have been sitting there too long, she pulled herself to order, took another deep breath, washed her hands and then her face. Studying the pale, shocked reflection, she tried to rub some colour into her cheeks, wondering what William would think of his mother. His mother. Her son. Even now, she could not quite believe he was about to walk through her door. Year after year, she had imagined this taking place, though without knowing the venue. Now she could picture an actual door as he came through it, and an actual room in which mother and son would come together, over and over again in her mind. In a moment everything would be real. After more than half a century, she would once again hold her son in her arms.
But what if it wasn’t really William? How would she know? After all, with no idea that he’d been living in York all these years they might have passed each other by every day without a glimmer of recognition. She had imagined him as a cross between Billy and herself, a tall man with lovely black curly hair – but the truth hit her then that she did not really know. What if it was some cruel confidence trick?
And then Joe’s voice entered her head, saying in that droll, affectionate way of his, ‘You silly old bugger – what possible reason would anyone have to make this up? What gain would there be? Your son, who you’ve been dreaming about for years, is going to arrive any second, and you’re up here doing your pisspotical what-ifs!’
And so, with a nervous laugh and a brace of her senses, Nell finally returned to the small gathering downstairs.
Ten minutes later, still finding it hard to concentrate, unable to sit still and twitching nervously by the window, she was to see a vehicle enter the cul-de-sac. ‘I wonder if this is him … yes, I think it’s pulling up.’ Her heart had begun to thud again, and her fingers clung on to the windowsill, though she tried to sound as calm and matter-of-fact as possible. ‘What kind of car is that?’ she turned to enquire of Patrick, sounding completely irrational to her own ears and probably theirs – what sort of an idiot asked about a car when one’s long-lost son might be in it. Yet she wanted to know everything.
Wearing an indulgent smile, Patrick came to lay his hand on her shoulder and looked out. ‘An Audi, I think …’
‘Is that a good make?’ She was also keen to learn if he had done well.
‘Yes, Nan.’ The joint reply was warm, and with a note of total understanding.
Then they saw a man get out and straighten his tie – he had put on a suit for the occasion, saw Nell, still uncertain that it really was William – for at first sight he looked nothing like she had imagined. Then he came towards the wrought-iron gates, tugging nervously at his cuffs as he entered the drive.
Guessing how the man must feel, Patrick withdrew diplomatically from the window, and went to wait on the sidelines with Romy and their baby, leaving Nell standing there alone, her eyes on the approaching figure.
No, he wasn’t at all the way Nell had pictured him. He was as bald as a coot, and looked like Magwitch from that black-and-white film of Great Expectations, a big, gruff, rather threatening type of man, the sort who could take care of himself in a fight …
But then he saw her silhouette, and instinctively put up his arm to wave and to issue a broad smile – and in that moment she saw her darling Billy.
Waving back, she turned to await his entry. Her expression was bright as her granddaughter finally showed him through to the sitting room.
‘Hello, come in,’ Nell said, as if it was the man come to read the gas meter – when inside her heart sang with a greater happiness than she could ever imagined possible, and tears of utter joy burnt her eyes.
Then he came to her, treading carefully over her new rug so that his big feet did not soil it, and at last they stood before each other. There were a million, a trillion things to be said between mother and son. But for now, she just held him.
If you enjoyed An Unsuitable Mother, check out these other great Sheelagh Kelly titles.
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to my late aunt, whose lengthy nursing career provided the background for this novel. Any gaps were filled in courtesy of the archives of the Royal College of Nursing Journal. Though the places mentioned are real, I have taken the liberty of providing a fictional crew for the casualty evacuation train, and for both hospitals. I am also indebted to Leo Kessler for the use of his excellent book The Great York Air Raid, which spared me from trawling through any more old newspapers than was absolutely necessary; and to the staff of York Reference Library for providing me with countless volumes of historical material over the decades.
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