‘No, I suppose not, when you put it like that.’
‘And then, some of them have been living here for years. This is all the children know. Sending them back to Nigeria or wherever would be like sending them to the moon; they’d feel just as alien.’
‘Mmm.’
‘So Monica arranges for the families to be able to leave one or two of the babies and younger children behind, with families who’ll love them and care for them, and give them a quality of life they’d never be able to achieve at home. Education, health care, opportunities.’
‘And this is all...’
‘Oh yes, strictly illegal of course. She doctors the paperwork so that they cease to exist.’
‘So you don’t have any paperwork at all? No birth certificate? Nothing?’
Heather shook her head. ‘Not a shred of anything. She was delivered at three o’clock one morning in the clothes she stood up in. Jude and Mitch and I went to an industrial estate near Solihull and Monica met us there with Starlight. We weren’t told her name, her age. To be honest we weren’t totally sure of her sex until we looked, although we’d been told to expect a girl.’
‘Good God!’ Ruth was almost speechless. But then a further question occurred to her. ‘I don’t suppose Monica’s enterprise is purely altruistic?’
‘Oh no. We paid a great deal of money.’
‘I wonder if the poor family got to see a penny of it,’ Ruth couldn’t help musing.
‘I wouldn’t know. But, you know,’ Heather paused, as though listening to an echo, ‘needs must when the devil drives.’
Ruth pushed the food around on her plate. ‘You didn’t consider adopting in the conventional way, Heather?’
‘Actually, yes. But Jude’s too old to be considered as an adoptive father. Which is ridiculous when you consider that he could still father children.’
‘And surrogacy wasn’t an option?’
‘You know, I did think about it. But then I thought, why create a new baby when there are thousands of them already in existence needing love and support?’
Prompted by Miriam’s comment the legal ramifications of what Heather had told her were beginning to muster in Ruth’s mind; they were enormous. Enrolling Starlight in school, getting an NHS number, a passport, a bank account, all of it would depend upon establishing an identity for her. ‘How are you going to..?’
Heather seemed to be following her train of thought. ‘Money,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t care if it takes every penny we have. I’ll never give her up.’
The word was calculated to irritate Ruth. ‘Why does everything,’ she thought to herself crossly, ‘have to boil down to money?’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rachel enter the kitchen. She was wearing her pyjamas and a dressing gown which Ruth didn’t recognise. With a lurch she realised that she hadn’t been up to check on Rachel since she got home, and hadn’t organised any food for her. In the light of Heather’s fervour she suddenly felt wholly inadequate as a mother. She rushed up to Rachel and tried to hug her but Rachel remained strangely stiff and un-responsive. She tried to help Rachel get something to eat but the buffet was sadly depleted. This in itself embarrassed Ruth; she should have thought to save some food for the poor girl.
‘This garlic bread’s cold but I could warm it up for you. Would you like that? What about some of this quiche – mushroom, I think – sorry, it’s a bit bashed around. Would you like it?’
‘Don’t fuss. I’m alright,’ Rachel said. She took a ragged slice of ham, a squashed slice of quiche and a spoonful of salad and left the kitchen without a word.
She almost bumped into June, marching down the corridor. Behind June, Les had Robert on one arm and Granny on the other. June was purple with indignation. She burst into the kitchen. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she gasped, ‘get me a drink this minute or I shall expire!’ She flung herself into the nearest seat.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ Belinda cried.
‘You might well ask! God! What a nightmare! Mother got arrested and while we were dealing with that Robert locked himself in the toilet.’
‘Where is Robert?’ Mary was on her feet in an instant. Robert, when he entered, was trembly and close to tears. ‘His hands are freezing!’ Mary said, taking them in her own and leading him to his seat. Ruth put the kettle on the Aga while James lifted a crocheted throw off the back of the arm chair and tucked it around Robert’s shoulders.
‘Possibly a dram of brandy?’ he said to Simon.
‘Oh! Brandy, certainly,’ June shrilled, ‘and copious quantities of it.’
‘I meant for Robert,’ James said under his breath.
Les settled Granny down next to Elliot, an unhappy arrangement for both parties, and Belinda placed a plate of food down in front of her.
‘An excellent afternoon,’ Granny declared, beaming around her. ‘We got to see the President. Top security of course, lots of uniforms, they gave us a stiff talking to.’
‘That was the manager of the supermarket, Mother, and his security guards, and two police constables.’ June shouted down the table. ‘You were lucky they didn’t take you into custody.’
‘Is there any custard?’ Granny looked hopefully around the table. ‘I can’t eat this. I haven’t got my teeth in. They taste funny.’
‘That’s all she’s gone on about all afternoon,’ June wailed, swigging the large brandy Simon placed before her. ‘That and her damned bottom. So embarrassing. It’s a good job this didn’t happen back at home. I would never have lived it down.’
‘Mary, I’m cold. Where have you been? I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it,’ Robert mumbled. The mug of tea which Ruth placed into his hands shook and quivered and Mary had to hold it steady for him.
‘Here you are, Robert,’ she said, popping two blue tablets into his mouth. ‘These will soothe you. Drink your tea and then you can have something to eat.’
‘We didn’t have lunch, Mary. The man wouldn’t let us eat it.’
‘Yes!’ screeched June, ‘outrageous! Bought and paid for, too. But we were frog-marched off to the manager’s office without a by-your-leave. Not that it was a very nice lunch. Leslie was too mean to take us anywhere nice. If he’d taken us to a pub like I suggested, none of this would have happened.’ June threw a narrow-eyed look across at Les, who was leaning against the dresser next to Muriel.
Granny ignored the tea which Belinda placed before her and took a drink of Elliot’s wine instead. Her mouth made an audible slurping noise against the glass. Some wine dribbled down the outside of the goblet and she licked it up efficiently. ‘Nice!’ she said, smacking her lips.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Elliot fumed.
‘None of what?’ Miriam’s voice cut over the hubbub of voices with surprising volume. ‘Could one of you give us a reasonably cogent account of what’s happened?’
‘Not me, clearly,’ June retorted huffily, ‘although I have been trying.’
‘Les?’ All eyes turned towards him. He was uncomfortable with the scrutiny but launched into an explanation.
‘Robert was feeling a bit restless here, you see, without... well, with you all being out, and so I thought a little drive would settle him. So we set out and I found one of those out-of-town affairs. We went into the supermarket and walked about a bit. I don’t know why.’
‘You do know perfectly well why!’ June interrupted. ‘We were looking for some suspenders for Mother.’
‘Well, anyway, in hindsight, the garden centre might have been safer...’
‘The DIY store would have been more interesting,’ Robert put in with a spark of lucidity.
‘Yes. It would. But anyway, we walked around the store for a while and then we bought a bite to eat in the café.’
‘Horrible place,’ June said acerbically.
‘And then, well, we were approached by a security guard, who thought that Granny might have accidentally put a few things into her handbag without paying for them.’
; ‘I had!’ Granny chuckled. ‘A nice tin of ham and two packets of Johnnies!’
‘And so we had to go and explain to the manager that Granny wasn’t... wasn’t quite...’
‘Sane?’ muttered Elliot. Granny had systematically been transferring all the food from her plate onto his. He had watched this process in horrified disbelief. When her plate was entirely clean she held it up like a child and proclaimed, ‘All gone! What a good girl! Can I have my custard now?’
‘Wasn’t quite well,’ Les corrected. ‘But it seems that it is their invariable policy to call the police in these cases and two constables arrived in due course.’
‘It took an age,’ June complained. ‘It’s a good job I wasn’t being kidnapped.’ Everyone considered the likelihood of this. The chances of such a thing were, they concluded, disappointingly remote.
Granny took another long slurp of Elliot’s wine, then she turned towards him and surveyed him narrowly. ‘You are a very nasty man,’ she commented, ‘and not a gentleman. I thought so as soon as I saw you. I don’t like your nose; it’s too pointy and your chin is weak. I can’t abide a weak-chinned man. I’m surprised they let your sort in here. The Oaks is exclusive. You can be sure I’ll be taking the matter up with Matron.’
‘Belinda! Really! For God’s sake!’ Elliot made a direct appeal but Belinda was busy at the Aga and everyone else ignored him.
Les laboured on with his tale. ‘While we waited, Robert needed the toilet and so I took him to the staff facilities. Unfortunately the lock was a bit awkward and Robert couldn’t open the door.’
‘I never let him lock the door,’ Mary said quietly.
‘No. I’m sorry, I should have thought. I went back to the Manager’s office and he said he’d call the maintenance man, but it would take a while because he was busy in the bakery; something had fused. In the meantime...’
‘I didn’t like it, Mary. It went dark.’
‘Yes,’ Les went on, ‘I was coming to that, Robert. It seems that to discourage the employees from spending too much time in the lavatory the light is on a timer. Once you open the main door you get five minutes of light and then it goes off. Stupid idea, if you ask me, but there it is. So when I got back to the lavatory Robert had been in the dark for about five minutes, poor old lad. And then every subsequent five minutes we were plunged into darkness again. I tried to talk Robert through it, but it really did throw him. He...’
‘He decided to wriggle under the door,’ June took up the story. She couldn’t bear Les to have all the attention.
‘I used to be able to do it,’ Robert shook his head sadly.
‘You did!’ Granny piped up. ‘Your dad locked you in the coal shed once and you got out like that. And I seem to remember you ran away from Sunday school by squeezing out of the toilet window. Little bugger!’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘But you were only a lad then, Robert,’ Mary said quietly. ‘You can’t do that when you’re grown.’
‘Of course he couldn’t. He got stuck,’ June crowed, ‘as though we needed one more inconvenience to top off the day. It was all I needed, I can tell you; mother under close arrest and Robert wedged under a toilet door!’
‘You talk as though he did it on purpose, June,’ Mary snapped. ‘The poor man. He must have been terrified.’
‘He was when the fire alarm went off, we all were! We thought we were going to be burned alive!’
‘The fire alarm? Was there a fire?’ Belinda brought a bowl of soup she had been heating up for Granny to the table.
‘Bring me a fresh wine glass, Belinda,’ Elliot said witheringly.
‘No of course there wasn’t!’ June cried. ‘But Leslie here decided that the thing to do would be to call the fire brigade, as though we hadn’t enough uniformed assistance by that time. Ha ha ha!’
‘He was stuck fast!’ Leslie re-joined, in energetic self-defence. ‘The maintenance man was nowhere to be seen and Robert didn’t want me to leave him on his own again. In the pitch dark. I mean I ask you? What would you have done? I’d seen the alarm; it had an axe in it. I thought I could use the axe to buckle the metal door frame enough to get him through – it was only aluminium. Or to shift the lock. He was so distressed.’ Les looked round the room at them all, his large hands held out in appeal. Muriel took one of them gently and stroked it. June, with her back to the dresser, didn’t see the gesture, although others did.
‘Dear me. What a to-do,’ Mary stroked Robert’s back. The narration of all his unhappy adventures was upsetting Robert again. He had hardly touched his supper.
‘It was hardly an emergency,’ June scoffed, her mouth full of quiche, ‘but of course no one else knew that. They began to evacuate the supermarket.’
‘That was exciting!’’ Granny waved her spoon. A thick gob of soup flicked onto Elliot’s shirt.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he yelled.
‘There were check-out girls rushing around with tills full of money; all the grills came down in front of the bakery and the hot food counter, the staff trapped behind became hysterical. People were piling stuff into their trolleys and there was a jam at the exit. You couldn’t hear yourself think with the all these sirens wailing...’ June said. ‘Sheer mayhem.’
‘Anyway, the axe idea worked,’ Les said bathetically. ‘Got you out no trouble, didn’t it, Robert?’
‘I didn’t like it, Mary,’ Robert said quietly.
‘We made a run for it,’ Granny said, slurping soup, ‘and...’ she reached into her handbag, ‘look! I got my ham and my Johnnies in the end!’
✽✽✽
Rachel took her plate and carried it towards the sound of the television. The room was dark; she could just make out the silhouettes of various people sprawled on the sofas and on the floor. She hovered on the threshold, trying to see if she could sneak in unobserved, find a place to sit and eat her food unnoticed. As her eyes roamed across the bulky outlines of the furniture she recognised Rob’s stiffly gelled hair and her courage failed her. She retreated up the corridor and went into the library. The curtains were open and no fire burned in the grate. It was chill and lonely. She began to eat, miserably.
✽✽✽
Ruth had trouble getting to sleep. It was cold and in spite of the fact that she had dragged the counterpane off James’ bed and laid it on her own she just couldn’t get warm. She had been cold all day, she realised, wondering if she was coming down with ‘flu. The house was cold; the warmth and welcome of the first few hopeful hours had dissipated leaving a chilly, disillusioned disappointment. She wished James himself would come up to bed. She had left him downstairs in the kitchen, chatting, and he had promised that he wouldn’t be long. In fact everyone had been yawning while the final dishes were dried and put away and they had all said how tired they felt. But that was ages ago and there was still no sign of him. The thought of having his warmth in her bed was appealing, for once. Thinking about it, she couldn’t quite recall the last time they had made love; he was a good lover, considerate and patient, but it wasn’t often that she could get past the chain link fence of her irritation to allow him to touch her. He was so slow to act; too apt to think and talk about a thing and too little inclined to actually do anything. By the time he had thought his way around every angle of an issue she could have it done and dealt with and would have moved on to the next thing. His ponderousness, a physical as well as a personal characteristic, infuriated her at times, like an abrasive grit between their skins which rubbed her raw. Once she had loved this rock-like dependability and taken shelter in the lea of his immovableness. He stood like a colossus while the tides of life swirled and eddied around him. But lately she had begun to doubt the value of this quality. A rock was all very well until you wanted it to move.
Lying frozen between the comfortless sheets Ruth fired off angry arrows of indignation. James was her inevitable first target; he had not made any enquiry about her day. She was burning to share the things she had discovered about Starlight but he h
ad made no opportunity for her, making her unique knowledge worthless. A slight shift in aim brought Miriam into her sights. Miriam knew about Starlight of course but from Ruth’s parochial perspective Miriam didn’t count: she was not family. The fact that she was not family and yet was privy to such a family secret was outrageous. She utterly resented Miriam’s inclusion in any family matter, yet still was able to criticise her for remaining resolutely peripheral. Ruth thrashed angrily under the covers at the thought of Miriam’s determined preferences for the organic bread, fruit tea and white burgundy she had brought; everyone else’s groceries were too mundane.
Ruth let fly another arrow: Elliot was another parasite on the McKays. Lording it over them all, behaving as though he owned them all. It made her sick. Given the chance she could have run that business every bit as efficiently as he did and she was a real McKay. She gathered that he had made a real cock-up of something recently and she wondered quite seriously for a while whether she could force a vote of no confidence in the Chair. Naturally Belinda would stand up for Elliot but she might be able to persuade the rest of them to oust him and with the position of Chair vacant she could ask for a chance to try her hand at it. She knew Simon wouldn’t want to and, in any case, he would be back to being a single parent before many months were out.
Ruth reached over and turned on the bedside light to look at the clock. It was gone two. Gathering her courage she slipped out of bed and struggled into James’ enormous dressing gown. Where on earth could he be? She pushed the curtain to one side to look out of the window. The garden was flooded with light; a full moon glowed in a navy sky and swamped the garden with ethereal luminosity. In addition the garden lights were all on. Below her, the terrace was fully illuminated, its old grey slabs marked by an atlas of moss and lichen. Dew, or frost perhaps, sparkled on the grass. She pulled the curtain back around her to block out the light from the lamp. The sky was studded by stars, cloudless. No wonder it was so chilly. She was about to go in search of James when a movement caught her eye. Down on the lawn a naked woman danced and cavorted. Long hair flying and swirling, arms above her head, the whiteness of her skin glowing in the moonlight. She ran down the lawn and described graceful curves in and out of the flower beds, trailing a hand over the shrubs, stopping by the arbour to allow a tendril of honeysuckle to caress her face. She arrived at the bottom of the lawn and entered the ribbon of shadow cast by the trees but the miasmic glow of her skin could still be discerned as she bowed and did obeisance to the woods.
Relative Strangers Page 39