by Eve Chase
‘If I had some string, I’d tie labels to each item, like you did my leaves,’ she adds teasingly, feeling a beat of pleasure just looking at him. ‘For reference. Lest you forget.’
His smile spreads slowly. He has a self-taught, encyclopaedic brain, and never forgets anything. Slightly annoyingly, he can already identify all the different seaweed that washes up on their little local beach – gut weed, red rag, egg wrack, oyster thief, dead man’s rope … He says he’s well on the way to becoming an arenophile. (‘A what?’ ‘A sand lover.’) She hopes so. His cottage has sold now, and the forest is a place to which they daren’t return.
They moved to Devon from London last month. Although a bit of her misses the city – Robbie does not – she’s glad to be out of their poky rental apartment, and Sylvie can breathe fresh air, not the fumes from the number 30 bus.
Every morning she wakes to the gulls’ cries, and a novel set of feelings: she’s on holiday; she’s come home. Not just the abstract idea of home, like she had before, that confused mash of yearning, and other people’s houses. But home as a simple place of belonging.
They have big plans. Self-sufficiency. Veg. Fruit. Chickens. And a carpentry studio, which he’s started to build in their generous garden, the woodworking equipment under a tarpaulin for now. The house itself is tiny and tongue-and-grooved, like a ship’s cabin – she can stretch out her arms in Sylvie’s nursery and touch the opposing wonky walls – but it’s all they can afford. And it’s about as far from the forest as they could get without falling into the ocean.
Home is wherever they are together, Robbie says. His adaptability amazes Rita. And yet she’s aware of the sacrifice he’s made. Sometimes she’ll find him on the beach, a silvered lump of driftwood in his hands, his fingertips running over it, as if communing, absorbing its long journey from seedling to sea.
‘Urchin.’ She points to each shell in turn. ‘Artemis. Razor. You don’t want to step on that. Common whelk. Periwinkle. You can eat those. Needs a good squirt of lemon, though.’ He nods, listening carefully. But, in typical Robbie fashion, he doesn’t say anything, let’s her jabber on. ‘Oh, and this is actually a seabird bill. Probably an oyster catcher. See the shape? To hammer open molluscs … Don’t you dare ask me for the Latin name!’
He laughs and reaches towards her, holding her face in his hands, rough palms light on her cheeks. They often end up like this, just staring at one another, grinning stupidly. But today is different. Today there is something else hovering. Unresolved. She can see it in his eyes, a cloud, a question mark.
Sylvie, ever attuned to moments of parental intimacy, wakes and strains to pull herself up and totter off. A feisty and inquisitive infant, she’s drawn to the sea, always making a break for it. They have to watch her like hawks.
‘Come here, you.’ Robbie brushes the sand from Sylvie’s pudgy feet, then lies back, wheeling her above his head so she giggles, her delight growing frenzied.
Rita watches them, smiling. But something nags. She tries to identify the feeling, the vague sense of misplacement. But it slips away. She just knows it’s made worse by perfect family moments like this. The wispy beach grass waving in the wind. The dark jewel of the sea. The sheer excess of loveliness.
Robbie shoots her a sidelong glance. Sylvie tugs his nose, wanting his attention, Daddy’s girl. ‘You’re thinking about it again, aren’t you? What we talked about last night.’
Rita nods and lowers her eyes.
Robbie lies down, Sylvie on his chest. She paddles her feet and snatches fistfuls of sand, throws it. ‘It’s a risk, Rita. Even attempting to … I mean, Walter …’ He stops. His face darkens. Walter’s name is never spoken without a hard swallow afterwards.
Rita doesn’t want to push their luck either. They’ve got so much. She didn’t think it was possible to feel this happy. ‘Yes, mad idea.’
Sylvie lurches forward and grabs the periwinkle shell, turning it in her fingers. When she tries to taste it, Rita takes it from her mouth and shakes her head. But she doesn’t remove it. This is Sylvie’s world, hers to explore. Robbie is adamant about that. He even sits Sylvie on an alarmingly high apple-tree branch in the garden, holding her carefully, but letting her enjoy the sensation, her legs kicking free. Rita’s glad the lady at the adoption agency never got to see that.
‘Rita.’ Robbie nudges her bare foot with his own. ‘We can’t rescue everyone.’
‘I know, I know.’ She hinges down beside him, stretching out her long, brown legs, and stares up. The sky is huge, the clouds feathered, like the flesh of a freshly cooked fish. This is enough, she tells herself. Just this.
Then Robbie says quietly, ‘But we could try.’
51
Sylvie
‘Is it really you?’ Helen touches my face, as if I were a dead child come to life. I stiffen. ‘Good Lord,’ she rasps. ‘Baby Forest.’
I stare, fascinated, shocked, as tears slide freely down her cheeks, cutting tramlines through her foundation. Helen is dissolving in front of my eyes. The distance between us is closing.
Outside the window, Jake’s guitar, the sound of a different world. Keep playing, I think. Please keep playing.
‘You had eyes like a blackbird.’ She looks radiant, as if the real Helen has broken through the Botox. It’s the first time I’ve seen her truly smile. ‘Ant bites all over you. Red raw cheeks.’
Mum never told me that. Or that I was called Baby Forest.
‘I mixed your milk powder with water from the stream.’
‘You did?’ It’s like seeing a line drawing emerge on a page. Tears bulb between my lower lashes.
‘Thankfully, you refused to touch it.’
I feel weirdly proud of my baby self.
‘I wanted you all to myself.’ She sniffs, ugly crying, not caring. ‘So did Mother …’
Jeannie. With the flawless skin and dark curls in the newspaper photo. Jeannie pregnant, outside a stucco house, smiling, a little boy tugging her skirt. And I suddenly long to meet her.
‘But you only had eyes for Big Rita,’ Helen continues, her polished demeanour rupturing. She snorts back the tears. She wipes them on her shirt sleeve. ‘Your gaze followed her around the room. If you were crying she’d swoop down and pick you up and soothe you, like a nanny, yes, yes, but also like she was born to do it.’
My heart throbs. It feels like a door to the past is being pushed open, inch by inch. Behind it I see a young Rita, vertical and full of life. A woman born to graze ceilings and stars. A natural mother. The contrast with how she is now, horizontal, on a hospital bed, slays me.
‘You two … Gosh. It was like you recognized something in one another. I … can’t explain.’
I miss Mum so intensely then it hurts.
‘Never in a million years …’ She digs in her pocket for a tissue. ‘You say you have a sister too?’ Her face clouds. ‘All my life I’ve longed for a sister. You were mine for a short while.’ She brightens again. ‘What’s your sister’s name?’
‘Caroline,’ I say, and finally lose it. ‘Can I borrow your tissue?’
‘Let me.’ She dabs my eyes. I can smell mint on her breath. Possibly gin. She pulls back and stares at me intensely, a question forming. ‘What were you told about it all, Sylvie? Growing up.’
Something inside me twists. ‘I didn’t want to know,’ I say.
A gleam in those pale whippet eyes. ‘Well, do you now? Could you stomach it?’
I think of the little girl I was in the apple tree, all the bits of me I’ve suppressed. Steve saying, ‘Don’t go there, Sylvie. Remember, that’s not who you are.’ And I hear Jake’s guitar, louder now, more insistent, beating across the still green canal. One strum. Two. ‘I want to know everything.’
*
The British Museum flashes past the taxi window, a déjà vu stream of columns and stone and amulet-blue sky. A few minutes later, the taxi swerves into Great Portland Street. ‘We’re here.’ Helen can’t hide the anxiety in her voice – like a
plucked untuned violin string – and it makes mine worse.
We’re buzzed into a tall building, grand, frayed at the edges. She still won’t tell me where we’re going or why. All I know is that she made a furtive call before we left. ‘Trust me,’ she says.
I don’t, not quite. But, for the first time in years, I’m beginning to trust myself to be able to deal with the truth, not to be sunk by it.
There’s a lift, small, metal, like a shark cage. Helen won’t set foot in it – ‘I’d rather scale the drainpipes’ – so we pant up five flights of stairs. The apartment door isn’t locked – someone’s expecting us. My heart starts to knock in my chest. I hesitate. My feet weighted like stones. Helen beckons me in, and closes the door behind us with a high-security metallic crunch. It’s dark in here. Stale. The walls are stamped with sad exotic trophies, the head of an antelope, a huge rhino. There’s a moth-eaten tiger skin on the floor. It feels like an old gentlemen’s club, the kind that excludes women, leathery, stuffed with hunted dead things.
‘We’ve got company,’ I say, gauche with nerves, gesturing around at the taxidermy.
‘Ugh. Don’s horrible stuff. Daddy won’t be parted from it,’ she says. It takes a moment for me to connect. The newspaper stories, hidden for so long by Mum, are starting to flesh. I’m about to find out the answers, the bits she scissored away. My heart beats faster.
Glass eyes follow us as we cross the lobby and go into a smaller, darker room, scratchily overheated, furnished with polished antiques and dimly lit with green-shaded lamps. It’s the kind of room children instinctively misbehave in. Again, Helen shuts the door behind us. I feel a prick of claustrophobia. Two eyes – bromide-blue, Helen’s eyes, Elliot’s eyes – stare out of the gloom.
A thin, rather sickly-looking elderly man sits upright in a battered leather chair. He’s wearing a jaunty spotted navy bow-tie at a lopsided angle, as if he’s hurriedly tied it on for the occasion. And he’s still recognizable as the fraught man in the newspaper, dashing out of the court.
On a table beside him is a bowl of walnuts. A silver nutcracker. A wicker basket containing a blown ostrich egg. Everything is clammily still. Loaded with meaning. I immediately want to leave.
As Helen kisses him briskly on each cheek, he squints over his shoulder at me. ‘Daddy, this is Baby Forest.’ Her voice fills with wonder again. ‘The foundling. Found.’
Painfully slowly, her father puts on the spectacles that hang on a chain around his neck and peers at me, frowning, with an expression of dispassionate curiosity.
‘As I explained on the phone, Daddy, she’s Big Rita’s adopted daughter. And … yes, hold on to your hat, Annie’s mother. I’ll explain how that happened later. Teenagers on smartphones basically.’ Her father looks understandably confused. He scratches the folds of his scraggy neck. ‘Sylvie, this is my father, Walter Harrington.’
I struggle to smile. My armpits are wet. I can hardly breathe in here. There’s something toxic, cloying, caught in the dust our feet kick up.
‘Dear girl, I owe you an apology.’ There’s a wheezy rattle in Walter’s voice.
An apology? For what? For a moment, I just stand and stare at him, forgetting my manners. My heart flutters.
‘You’d better sit.’ Helen steers me to a nearby chair, like a fussing aunt, and pushes me into button-back upholstery. ‘There’s no easy way of telling you this, Sylvie.’
I glance at Walter, adjusting his bow-tie, his expression stern. There’s a drop in pressure in the room, headachy. The visit suddenly feels as if it could detonate in any direction. Why did I trust Helen? Why am I here?
‘Daddy and his housekeeper, a psychopath called Marge, they planned it.’ Helen’s voice vibrates with fury. A vein pulses under her eye. ‘You being found in the woods.’
Even the wooden African masks on the wall scream, ‘What?’
‘Marge put you on that tree stump.’ Helen shakes her head, as if she can’t quite believe it herself. ‘She left you there. Your birth-mother couldn’t bear to do it.’
‘Is this some sort of joke?’ She walked away. Only it wasn’t my mother? It was Marge? Marge of the flying fig roll. The room swims in the green lamplight.
‘No, I’m afraid not.’ Helen’s face sags with regret. ‘The rest of us had no idea at the time. None at all. Please believe that. Big Rita never knew, did she, Daddy?’
Walter nudges up his glasses, which leave an indent either side of his nose. ‘Correct. Although I was scared she’d guess.’
My feelings hurl around like angry children. I don’t know how to be in my skin. What to say. What to do. I don’t care about who died now, who killed. I must leave. But when I try to move my legs they’re useless mush.
‘After Don died, Daddy cut Big Rita out of our lives. Brutally.’ Helen’s mouth thins to an angry line. ‘Took out court orders. You like a lawyer, don’t you, Daddy? Threatened her, said if she ever spoke to the press, to anyone about that summer, he’d hammer her life into the ground, drag her name through the mud.’
‘You … you …’ I feel faint with rage ‘… arsehole.’
Walter puts up his hands in surrender. ‘In my defence, I was crazier than my wife by then. I just didn’t know it at the time.’
‘Just say sorry, won’t you?’ says Helen, icily. ‘For once in your life, Daddy.’
Walter bows his head. His pate looks fragile and pale, like the ostrich egg in the bowl. ‘My deepest apologies, Sylvie.’
I cannot look at him, this reserved, entitled man, who thought he was above the rules and treated a baby like a doll.
‘I selfishly thought the baby, you – gosh, how strange life is – would save my marriage. Rescue my beautiful Jeannie.’ Everything starts to feel unreal. Dubbed. ‘I stayed out of the way, even when I got back from overseas, and I hid away here, in this apartment, just to give her a chance to bond with you, the baby she craved, quietly, in the woods.’
Feeling vulnerable, unshelled, I try to stand again but my legs are still not working, and I sink back into the chair.
‘I’d never have thought of such a preposterous thing on my own. Marge presented it, like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a – a stroke of luck.’ He drags at his wizened cheeks with long, thin fingers. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight.’
I grip the sides of the armchair, like Caroline in an aeroplane seat during turbulence. I want Caroline. I should have told her I was coming here. She’d have stopped me.
‘We need a drink.’ Helen starts clinking glasses at a trolley. She presses a gin and tonic into my hand. I take a swig, feeling as though I’m slipping through the protective net I’ve sewn around myself. Trying to grab things to stop my fall.
‘Marge kept everything about you rather vague.’ He nudges his glasses up his nose with his thumb. ‘But I can tell you that your mother was young, nineteen, I believe, and very, very pregnant when she realized. I’m afraid she didn’t know the father’s full name. A sailor of some sort. She gave birth at home, in secret, her own mother as midwife, if I remember rightly. Lived on the other side of the forest, a strict religious family. Dirt poor. Private people. But Marge knew them – she knew everybody, made it her business – and offered a way out.’ He grimaces, and something that might be guilt flashes across his features. ‘I’m not sure she’d have had much choice, your mother. Not like girls do now.’
The ice in my glass cracks. Something inside me does the same. I’m struck by an overwhelming urge to reach back in time and pluck the baby away from all these people – not just the rural family into which I was born, but the Harringtons too. The next moment, as a swig of gin burns down my throat, it occurs to me that this is what my parents did. The ‘truth’ is less about that blood-soaked summer than the legacy of my adopted parents’ daily small acts of love – what was created anew, rather than what was lost. It’s like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time.
‘I’m sure your birth-mother was the anonymous caller who tipped off the police the night Don
was shot.’ Walter is silent for a moment, sifting through the event. ‘Of course, she was meant to have gone by then. On a ship.’
‘A ship?’ I breathe. Jo.
‘A cruise ship,’ Helen confirms. She hands me a tissue. ‘She worked in the kitchens.’
This hurts my heart. There can’t be many workplaces grimmer than a greasy boiling kitchen under the waterline.
‘Wanted to see the world,’ said Helen, her voice choking up. ‘Isn’t that right, Daddy?’
He nods. ‘And she got to Canada in the end. Just not straight away.’ There’s a hint of annoyance in his voice. ‘Not like she was meant to.’
Canada. She couldn’t have got much further from her family. I wonder if she ever forgave them, if she’s got one of her own now, a nice husband, grown-up children. And if she’s ever told them about me, or if I’m a tiny precious secret.
‘But that summer she hung around, checking on you. Marge couldn’t get rid of her, and was terrified she might snatch you back. And the girl might well have if she hadn’t seen how well Rita cared for her … you, I mean. Held you, sang to you, all that mumsy stuff. Marge said that’d made a big difference. It stopped her.’ He raises an eyebrow knowingly, as if aware of a closer call. ‘Just.’
Something in me slides. Starts to thaw. I fight this. It’s dangerous to imagine my birth-mother was anything but heartless. Not young and scared and manipulated. In a different era, Annie. And it’s strange, fissuring, to think that it was Mum, then just a young nanny, Helen’s Big Rita, who might unwittingly have stopped my birth-mother reclaiming me, rerouting Fate, taking my hand and leading me into a whole different life. I can’t take it in.