‘No. It wasn’t like that.’ Maggie tried to object.
‘Of course it was: she was the means of you conducting your romance.’ Evelyn’s voice was a vicious whisper. ‘All those times when you were willing to play with her – and she was just making it easier for you to meet.’
The baby was quiet now, his mouth stilled with terror. She could feel his heart bumping, quick and light. His eyes, bright and watchful, never left her face, as if he was trying to read what she would do next. The air filled with the sound of Alice’s barely suppressed sobs. The girl gave a hiccuped gulp and then began whimpering.
‘Oh do be quiet.’ Evelyn was merciless. ‘Take some responsibility – on behalf of your brother. I should have known this would happen,’ she went on, more to herself than anyone in the room. ‘I warned your father it might have been more than a kiss, but he was only ever able to think the best of you – and him.’
She moved back towards the bed, and Maggie bent her arm fast round the baby.
‘It can’t stay here, you know.’ Evelyn’s mouth pinched as if she tasted something acidic. ‘We could take it to the Sisters of Mercy. Joanna?’
‘Yes, Mrs Retallick.’ The maid rallied herself.
‘Has the vet gone?’
‘No … he’s just giving Daisy the calcium injection.’
‘Good.’ Her mother seemed to be thinking. ‘Well, he can take it.’
‘I’ll need to get my stuff together.’ Maggie tried to swing her legs over the side of the bed, clutching the baby to her chest.
‘Oh, you’re not going anywhere, missy.’ Her mother almost spat the words. ‘You have to be booked in there three months before you have the baby. But the nuns should take it. Alice can go and get rid of it.’
‘Me?’ Alice spoke for the first time.
‘We’ll pass it off as yours. A thirteen-year-old evacuee with an illegitimate child? It’s the sort of thing they’re always getting up to, isn’t it Joanna?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’m sure they’re used to it.’
‘You’re not going to take him away from me.’ Maggie was frantic, coldness creeping through her. Her mother had a strange, mad look on her face.
‘Well, I’m afraid I am.’ She reached for her grandchild and snatched him away as Maggie fumbled to pull her nightdress across her exposed breasts.
‘Noooo. Give him back.’ She tried to lunge at her mother, but her knees gave way and she slid to the floor.
‘Maggie!’ Joanna rushed to help her.
‘The baby.’ She tried to reach for him, but her mother was holding him up high and moving away.
‘Alice.’ Maggie turned to her, pleading. ‘Get him, please.’ Tears pooled in Alice’s eyes and spilled from the corners. The impossibility of standing up to an enraged grown-up – especially one who had previously shown her kindness – appeared to be too much for her. Maggie felt a rush of rage.
‘Get me up.’ She tried to push herself off the ground, but Joanna was holding her tightly, and she felt weak and woozy.
‘Get off me,’ she lashed out. But something wasn’t working: flashes of light, and then dark blotches kept pressing down, obscuring her sight.
‘My baby. Get my baby.’ She was slipping in and out of consciousness like a boat half-glimpsed on the horizon. Her voice must be getting weaker, for nobody was doing anything about it. No one seemed to be listening.
‘Alice. Alice.’ She tried one last time.
‘She’s fainting, dear love,’ someone – Joanna? – said.
The baby’s cry – frantic but growing weaker – filled the velvet thickness in her head. If only she could get to him.
Darkness descended.
Thirty-one
Now: 16 August 2014, Cornwall
Changeover day. Saturday, and there are two new guests moving into the cottages. Mid-August: traditionally the busiest time of the year.
Maggie casts her eye over the bookings printout her granddaughter has given her. A couple of months ago she lost interest in who was staying, but that customer’s heart attack has bucked her up; made her realise she has a choice: whether to slip away now, when she has had, it has to be said, a good innings, or to cling on to life for a little while more.
She has chosen life. She will not give up yet, not this summer. Her limbs may be stiff, her body a shrivelled shadow of her once peachy self, but her heart is strong and her mind, her memory, is still good. Life – which has, at times, been tough – could yet surprise her. She does hope so. And while there is hope, she must go on.
There is a man staying this week, you see. Now, perhaps he could be life-changing. There’s a woman, too. A Mrs Coates. But Maggie has no interest in the women who visit, at all.
It depends on his age. Impossible to tell from an Internet printout: better to speak on the phone, to assess their age and their background that way. Of course, few people use the telephone to communicate these days. It’s all texts and emails – even from Richard, who seems to view her as a business proposition, and keeps sending Judith emails with bullet points in them, and even, for goodness sake, spreadsheets attached. As for letters – proper, handwritten letters, missives conveying news and love – well, they’re as rare as hen’s teeth. She can’t remember when she last received a proper letter: not a birthday card or a postcard, something flimsy and trite, but a letter. Sealed up, secretive; conveying something of substance.
But this man. This male guest. Perhaps he could be the one. Her son. Her firstborn. She wonders if she will know him at first sight? She tends to dismiss most of the men of around retirement age who tip up, even before she has managed to slip in a question about where they were born or assess their Cornish heritage. Perhaps it is fanciful, but, seventy years after she last saw his father, she thinks she will recognise their son.
For she has never stopped thinking about her first, precious baby. Not really. Of course, there have been periods in her life when she just gave him a perfunctory prayer each evening, when she didn’t dwell on him. But he has always been there.
She did try to block him out. In the early days with Edward, she told herself she shouldn’t think of him any more: that it was a youthful mistake she could blame on the war and a freakishly hot summer. Her decision to give him up the result of her youth and her mother’s narrow-minded fear of judgement.
It was easier before she returned to the farm. When she was teaching in St Austell and didn’t have daily reminders of where it had all taken place. But then her mother died. And so, in 1956, she and Edward, whom she had finally married once she realised that their history counted for something, agreed to come back and help Joe run the farm.
It had been the right decision, and she was reconciled with her dear father, who, freed by Evelyn’s death, had finally managed to apologise. ‘Your mother was a stronger person than me, and I shouldn’t have let that always be the case,’ he had said. Neither had mentioned the baby, but there, in the milking parlour, cocooned by the smell of the warm beasts and the gentle hiss of the milk hitting the pail, she was grateful. He had given her a quick hug, suddenly sentimental. Until the last hours of his life, he never mentioned it again.
But, though it was the right thing to return, the memories – never that deeply buried – had, at first, almost overwhelmed her. Anything could spark them. Stacking bales in the barn where they had made love; resting against her tamarisk; walking on the beach at low tide and passing their cave, or the second one in which Alice hid. Even the daily renewal of a farm could prompt the deep throb of guilt, for how could she not think of her baby when she lived somewhere that depended on continual birth – of calves and lambs and even chicks – for its business; and especially once she became pregnant and had a baby again?
At times – when Judith was small and the similarities between her and this first child seemed most acute – she thought that grief might fell her. There had been a single moment when, dizzy with a lack of sleep, she had walked to the headland, past the ledge where she and Wil
l had hidden together, and imagined falling onto the granite: toppled, then smashed, by the wind.
She had stood on the very edge, watching the spume buffeting against the rocks, listening to the hiss and slither of the tide dragging back, and she had wondered how much it would hurt. And then she had stepped back. Her breasts, ready to feed her six-week-old baby, were pricking and starting to leak. She had felt the milk soak into her brassiere, and she knew she had other duties. Another child to tend to. She had trudged back to the farm, arms cradling her smarting breasts, tears trickling down her cheeks, with no one, bar the cows, to see them. By the time she had reached the farmhouse, her bloodshot eyes were the only sign of her grief.
She learned to manage it, this raw sadness. When Richard came, two years later, she contained it. The demands of a farm and of two small children meant she hadn’t the energy to mourn another, anyway. Which didn’t mean she forgot him. Over the years, she came to see her grief like a pool of water, fashioned in the sand by her children: for most of the time it was containable – just a deep puddle that, if abandoned, would eventually seep away. But then the tide would race in, or a child would throw in an extra bucket of water, and it would breach its sides, flooding out, anarchic, until she could shore it up again.
The intensity wore off over the years. It had been decades since she had felt that acute pang she had experienced before Judith and Richard were born, whenever she saw a small baby. That pain, as sharp as a paper cut, had – thank goodness – long gone away. But she still prayed for him each night. Keep him safe, she urged a God she wasn’t sure she really believed in, in the slim hope of reassurance. Keep him safe, my sweet William. In her mind’s eye, she always saw him as a tangle of red limbs, with slicked dark hair. A newborn baby. The grown-up version slipped and slithered in and out of her consciousness; part her, part his father; unknowable and never known.
For a long time, she believed that he would come looking for her. She just needed to be patient. And she persisted in thinking this even once she discovered that there was no record of him being handed in to the orphanage.
It was after Judith and Richard had left home. The late seventies. She remembers it now: that moment of despair in the county record office when she queried the missing paperwork and was told that there was none to connect her and him.
‘The war,’ an archivist had explained. ‘Things were more chaotic then; there was a bigger turnover of mothers and babies. And then all the records were cleared out ten years ago, when the orphanage moved.’ But how could they lose something as fundamental as that piece of paper? The archivist, a scrawny young man who looked as if he spent too much time indoors, had shrugged. A bureaucratic mistake. One of those things. He was sorry, but it wasn’t his problem. She had managed not to cry until she left the building. A scrap of paper could all too easily be discarded, it would appear.
Still, she hoped that he had been given the information before the move; that he knew her name, though she had no sense of his. But now that she is nearing the end of her life, that hope, that certainty she had clung to, knowing that it is just possible, is being eaten away.
And even if he knew her name, why on earth would he want to find her: the mother who abandoned him seventy years ago and has made no apparent effort to find him? He might think her entirely heartless. Someone who handed him over like an unwanted puppy with barely another thought for him?
She looks down at her hands and sees that she is twisting her skirt between her fingers. She stops and makes herself smooth it out, deliberately. Her deepest fear – that her abandoned son hates her with a venom she can only imagine – bubbles up and she forces it back down again. Judith mustn’t see her like this, or Lucy. She must pull herself together. A dinghy buffets across the bay, white horses streaking behind it, and she focuses on its speed compared to the fishing trawler ambling in beside it, chased by seagulls. There. That’s better. Breathe this in and focus on this: on your world, your heritage, the life your parents and grandparents built up for you and your children. Your other children. Not the child you let down. Your one, terrible mistake.
For he must know, this unknown son, that that’s what young girls did if they were eighteen, and unmarried? If they faced the wrath of their mother, and the baby’s father, a mere boy himself, had been sent away?
What else could she do? He was wrenched from her and she couldn’t get to him. She just couldn’t reach him. The fatal combination of shock, pain and exhaustion meant her guard was down and she was vulnerable in a way she has never allowed herself to be since. But she still berates herself. How could she have let it happen? Her throat tightens: now almost a reflex whenever she thinks of it.
She has rerun that scene so many times, and also the memory of the next morning when she had inched her way to Alice’s room.
Alice, eyes red-rimmed, face grey, had shrunk away up the bed, clutching her lemon eiderdown as if she thought she would be furious. And yet Maggie was too exhausted – and dimly aware that she needed to keep Alice sweet.
‘Did the nuns seem kind?’ It was hard to get the words out. To speak without her voice breaking.
‘They’ll look after him really well. I know they will,’ Alice had said.
She should have felt relief, for that was what any mother wanted to hear: that her child was being cared for. And yet she was unconvinced. It wasn’t enough. Her baby deserved – her baby needed – to be loved.
She had sat, tracing the stitching on the counterpane with her finger, willing her surging helplessness and anger to subside. And yet it had boiled, hard and furious until she realised, as she looked at fearful, snivelling Alice that she just couldn’t forgive. It was entirely unreasonable, she knows that now, and yet she had hoped that Alice would defy her mother – and would get the baby to her brother. Just for once, she wanted her to show some ingenuity, to act beyond her thirteen years.
Their relationship – so rocky since Will had been sent away – had never recovered after that. Perhaps Evelyn couldn’t bear to see her, either: this girl she saw as collaborating in their love affair, this daily reminder of Will. It only took a little pressure on the billeting officer – and a generous side of bacon – to persuade him that the farm was far more suitable for younger evacuees, and within a month Alice had been rehoused with an older couple down the coast.
She remembers that departure now. Alice’s face pinched white, and closed: no sign of the ruddiness or excitement it had worn the previous summer. Her big, blue eyes had looked unwaveringly at her.
‘Well, goodbye then,’ Maggie had said, and had held out a hand, suddenly abashed and ridiculously formal.
Alice had looked at it as if it were something alien, and then tears had filled those terrible eyes.
She had had to look away first, making an excuse to bend down and fiddle with Alice’s old battered suitcase. Her father, noticing her discomfort, had lifted it as lightly as if it were a basket, and thrown it into the boot of the Austin Sixteen. Her mother had wanted Alice to be driven in the cob and cart to the station, but Joe had insisted she be treated better. ‘She arrived here by car, and she’ll leave that way. It’s common courtesy.’ He had looked intently at his wife, as if trying to impress something upon her, and had leaned forwards, his palms flat on the kitchen table. ‘Evelyn: the child’s done nothing wrong.’
Her mother had refused to watch as the car drew away, and so it was just herself, Joanna and James who had waved as it had set off up the track towards Padstow, stones and hay flying up, mud caking its tyres.
‘It’ll be quieter without her,’ Joanna had said, which was strange, for Alice had known that the way to endear herself was to keep out of everyone’s way. But perhaps it was just Maggie she had shied away from.
James had nodded, his craggy face impenetrable, and turned away, refusing to look at her. Each had trudged back to their jobs, heads down. Maggie had expected to feel relief or even an elation that the person she had blamed for revealing her love affair was out of
sight and had effectively been punished. But she had just felt flat, and then a profound sadness had wormed its way inside her. The evacuees had slipped from the farm as quietly, and as unobtrusively, as they had arrived.
Thirty-two
Alice Coates parks the hire car she picked up from Bodmin Station and leans against the gate to the field in which the pigs once foraged. The sty is overgrown with nettles; the mud covered with ragged grass.
This is nothing like her first glimpse of the farm, for then it had been dark, the house unlit, the fields unseen but sensed, brooding in the distance. Only the sea, seen in the moonlight, had been heard lapping against the shore.
And yet this is the view she remembers, the scene she saw as she cycled home after school or caught a lift in the cob and cart: a seventeenth-century farmhouse with a slate roof and granite walls, neat whitewashed windows, a pillared porch. A house turned in from the sea, facing the fields and the ever-shifting shadows of the moor. Hedgerows running down to it, thick with blackthorn, honeysuckle and rosebay willowherb. A tangle of broom bushes; a clutch of outbuildings; and running down to the ever-changing aquamarine then petrol-blue sea, the fields dotted with bales of straw.
Her heart hammers against her chest, so hard and frenetic she fears a palpitation. She jabs her palm with the dull prong of the car key, pressing metal against bone. Just calm yourself, she thinks, as she touches her handbag containing Will’s letter, double-checking it is safe in there: her passport to a reconciliation should her bold plan not work out – for there is no guarantee it will do so. You do not need to be so anxious, she tells herself. There is no need to be scared, now.
For she has done the hard bit. Not just negotiating the clogged A-roads and twisting lanes from the car hire firm, her heart in her throat as she burned the clutch and tried not to stall on roads far steeper than those she is used to; or enduring the train journey from Paddington; but making the decision to come back, once more. Committing, with that first tentative email, the acknowledgement of acceptance and the cheque, to return to a place where the most formative years of her childhood were spent; where she felt the greatest happiness and the most intense pain: this spot at the edge of the world. Skylark Farm.
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