From the Heart Page 7

  ‘Your health is well looked after. You’ve had all the recommended checks.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I –’

  ‘A word of advice. Sometimes it’s best to meet things when you come to them – not cross your bridges. Not spend weeks imagining the worst.’

  ‘But if –’

  ‘That is also one of the reasons why we don’t allow you to go and see the girls once they have had their babies … silly stories, horror tales … Try to tolerate us, Olive. We do have your best interests at heart, you know – yours and baby’s.’

  17

  HER CHILD WAS born on the day her father married Peggy Drummond, though Olive did not know anything about that until a week later, and by then, they, their marriage, whatever had happened, belonged to another time, almost another life, one to which she could barely relate.

  There was a closed door and she had pushed and pushed against it, but it had not yielded to her, though in the end, after hours of struggling, she found that it opened quite easily, and she half fell through it, to find herself in another, quite unexpected, quite overwhelmingly beautiful place, knowing all things, understanding all things, but, principally, love. Perhaps she thought, as he lay still connected to her by the cord, perhaps this was what dying would be like.

  Apparently her labour had been perfectly straightforward and trouble-free, even on the short side, but as she had no template for it, she could only take their word.

  She was exhausted and she could not sleep.

  He weighed seven pounds four ounces and fed from her at once, greedily, born knowing how and suckling in a closed-in, concentrated place of his own, oblivious to everything else. To her.

  When he was sated and they took him away to his cot among the other cots in the nursery, a corridor and a million miles away, she lay aching and sore and full of longing for him.

  ‘What are you calling him?’

  She had not realised that his name was hers to give, and said nothing.

  ‘It’s true that the adoptive parents can choose a different name of their own, Olive, but you’re his birth mother, you register him. It’s one thing you have.’

  He was brought back to feed again in the early, dark hours, and when he latched on to her breast, she pulled back his flannel swaddling sheet and night dress carefully and examined every inch of him. A very little down of fair hair. Fine fair eyelashes. Mauve blue eyelids. Flat ears. Skin too soft for her finger to feel at all. Blush-pink nails. She cupped her hand round his head, leaned over and inhaled his smell, mingling with her own smell, seemingly still part of her. But separate now. Himself.

  ‘James.’

  ‘Just “James”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mother’s name. Olive May Piper.

  Father’s name. Malcolm Crowley (Did Malcolm have any other names?)

  James. James Piper.

  She knew no one called James. Of course they could change it to the name they preferred.

  Dearest Olive,

  Well, here we are, Mr and Mrs Piper! We’re installed in a luxury suite, sea-facing, in Bournemouth and after a few days here heading for Jersey and Guernsey. Your father has never been to the Channel Isles, so it will be my pleasure to show him round, as I know them well.

  We had a lovely sunny day for our quiet wedding. Half a dozen friends, plus ourselves, for dinner at the Oak Rooms. I don’t know if you know it? We were so sorry you weren’t able to be with us but we look forward to seeing you soon.

  All the best, my dear, from

  Peggy (Piper née Drummond)

  (Livi, and from me of course. Letters can be received here until the 25th, then until the 7th at the Belle Victoire, St Brelade’s, Jersey, CI. Then home, of course. I am sending you something via a separate envelope. I so hope all is well with you. D.

  A £100 cheque came the next day. Was he afraid to tell the new Mrs Piper about it?

  She stood by the window, cradling James. His eyes were briefly open, though unfocused. Grey-blue eyes. He did not look like anyone but himself. No one she knew had those eyes. Then the lids came down.

  ‘That boy – sleeps for his country. He never stirs, you know, even when the rest of them are squeaking and squawking. Whoever gets him will be a lucky mum and dad.

  Olive put her cheek to his head. To the down that was so fine it was like spun air.

  ‘One thing,’ Kay had said, ‘don’t bond. Steel yourself against getting close to him, or it’ll be the worse for you. Don’t let yourself love. I made that mistake.’

  How could that be done?

  She came to know every atom of his long body, every expression on his face as they changed fleetingly, as when a cloud comes over the face of the moon. She knew his contented murmurings when he was milk-sated, knew the second before wind pained him and he drew up his knees, knew his crying from every other in the nursery, knew that he relaxed when she picked him up and he smelled her smell, and tensed as she put him down. She and he were woven together, threads going this way and that to make up a whole.

  The word ‘love’ seemed inadequate to describe her feeling for him and she did not feel it only in her heart but in her gut and in the farthest reaches of her brain.

  He smoothed out, lengthened, put on flesh and strength in his limbs, his eyes began to focus. His hands sometimes moved about in front of his face like fronds of weed under water and she saw how fiercely he concentrated on trying to make them out.

  The pattern of his eating and sleeping fell into place, and the times when he was simply awake, now, awake and looking, were longer. She wanted to hold him to her all day and wrap him up close to her, skin to skin, at night, and when she was told to put him back in his nursery cot, and he cried, the milk came tingling into her breasts and spilled over, at the moment her own tears came with his.

  The days merged. One week became two. Three. They ate in the small annexe dining room, the same food as in the main house, but with extra milk and orange juice, and a vitamin tablet beside every plate at breakfast. She was always hungry. She went twice on the Saturday-afternoon bus into town and was in a panic to leave him, in case she had some stupid accident which would take her from him. She bought biscuits and a boxed cake, chocolate, and at the last minute, before the next bus, a knitted cotton rabbit.

  When she got back, he was asleep, and she put it in the cot, just touching his hand.

  ‘I’m no good at this,’ Noreen said, a girl Olive sometimes talked to when they were side by side changing nappies on the spread pieces of sheeting. ‘I want her to be comfy and I know she isn’t.’

  Noreen’s daughter, who had not been given a name, was tiny, with fists curled in upon themselves and spindles for legs. Olive looked at her son, robust, growing, flailing his arms as she washed him. His genitals seemed huge, out of proportion to the rest of him, but she was told that was usual. ‘They grow into their bits,’ a nurse had said.

  Olive looked at them thinking that they were the only ugly thing about him, the scrotum’s wrinkled, purplish skin, the bulbous testicles. She felt that she should not have been allowed to examine him so closely or touch what was so strange and personal.

  Beside him, Noreen’s baby was perfectly formed, with the delicate cleft tucked into her small body.

  She had thought she would have a girl herself, but the moment he was born, it seemed right and inevitable that he should be he, and no other child would have been possible.

  18

  A TUESDAY AFTERNOON and the windows were open onto the garden. After lunch and clearing up, five of them were sitting on the grass in the sun, Olive next to Noreen.

  ‘She can wear that,’ she said. Noreen held up the daisy chain. ‘Not long enough yet.’

  ‘Anyway, you can bet they’ll take it off her again.’

  ‘You wear it then.’

  ‘I might just.’

  Noreen seemed to think it was a day like any other. Almost seemed not to have registered the fact that sometime on this beautiful, warm afternoon
, the people would arrive to take her baby away.

  Olive picked daisies and split the stalks with her thumbnail neatly, and threaded the next flower through, and her focus was fiercely on this, how long she could make the chain, how carefully she could arrange it so that each daisy was exactly the same distance from the next.

  Time had never speeded up like this before, days had never raced, never merged into one another seamlessly in just this way.

  One baby had left. Noreen’s went today. Wendy’s would probably be next but no one could be sure. No one was told. It was thought to be better this way.

  When her time came Olive did not know how she would bear it. She lay wide awake at night when he was feeding, drawing him even closer to her, as if she could somehow stop it happening. Keeping him back. She had even thought wildly of packing her bag and waiting until late, when no one would be in the nursery, and simply taking him, slipping out of the side door and running, running with him. He was hers, wasn’t he? He belonged to her, not to St Jude’s, not to the people who would come, thinking that he would be theirs. How could anyone stop her?

  The idea came back to her now and seemed even more possible, even more right and the only solution. It was true that she had signed the papers, giving him up, but that had been just the day after his birth, when she had not known what was real and what false, and they had taken advantage of that. She had done it because she had not then understood what love was, or that there could be another way.

  ‘No girl can manage this alone.’

  ‘You want the best for your child, Olive, surely you do?’

  ‘How would you face the world with an illegitimate baby? Ask yourself that. And how would he face it?’

  She had signed the papers.

  ‘They get paid,’ one of the girls had said. ‘People pay a lot of money for them.’

  But surely that could not be true. Surely they would not be allowed to sell babies?

  ‘I can hear them …’

  Noreen turned her head to listen. There was the sound of a car coming slowly over the gravel at the front.

  ‘Oh God, please God …’

  Olive jumped up and took her hand. ‘It might be anyone. But I’ll come upstairs with you in case. You don’t want to see them. I’ll stay with you.’

  They went up to her room because it was further from the nursery. Noreen sat on the bed, the pulse in her neck pounding. She was limp, like a doll someone had propped up against the pillow.

  ‘Have some of this chocolate … and there’s a cake I bought. I don’t know if it’s much of a cake though.’

  ‘Would you go and look? Try if you can see them. Please God they’re nice, that they’re a kind couple for her.’

  ‘Listen, they’ll be a little while. I can go in a bit. You look cold, Noreen.’

  She was hunched up, her arms crossed over her chest, holding herself tightly. Her face was chalk-white. Olive sat down beside her and tried to make her take a small piece of the chocolate but she shook her head.

  ‘I’d be sick.’

  ‘All right. Doesn’t matter.’ She put her arms round the girl and held her and tears ran silently down Noreen’s cheeks and fell onto the back of Olive’s hand and on her arm. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Noreen. It’s the hardest thing. It’s the worst thing of all.’

  ‘I’ll be gone tomorrow, then. I’ll be off from here.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘My sister said I could stay with her, just for a little while. She lives in County Cork. She has three of her own, which might help me. Or might not. And then – I don’t know. I like Ireland. I might stay.’

  ‘I never wanted a sister – or a brother either, I’ve always been happy just as myself. It never seemed to matter, but I can see now what a difference it could make. I’d like a sister now.’

  ‘Do you think they’re in the nursery, do you think they’re looking at her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Try not to think of it.’

  ‘What else can I think about?’

  Olive was silent and just held her hand, gave her a handkerchief to wipe her face, and then they just sat, and it was all that filled her own mind too. She wanted to weep for Noreen. After a while, she realised that she had fallen asleep. She moved her carefully aside, laid her down and pulled the bedcover over her. Noreen stirred and turned half over, and the tears still slid down, but she did not wake.

  The annexe was very quiet. The sun shone through the long, narrow windows, sending golden lances onto the stairs. Olive went slowly, cautiously down, stopping now and then to listen. But there was no one. There were no voices. She went to the window on the half-landing.

  In the sunshine at the front of the house, two people were getting into a car and her heart jumped, as she saw them, and thought of Noreen, sleeping, and of what she had to wake up to, and felt her own tears prickle her eyes. She watched as the car moved slowly off. She caught a glimpse of a woman’s hand, spread on a white shawl. The shape of someone at the wheel. She could not make out any more. The car went a little faster, but then stopped. Waited. Was something wrong? Were they changing their minds, coming back? But as she held her breath, watching and watching, a door opened along the corridor, and she retreated back. When she got to the top, she looked out again. The car had gone.

  How to tell Noreen? What to tell her? How to explain that she had seen very little, but that little had been someone taking away her baby? She felt oddly responsible, as if she could have stopped them.

  There was a burst of laughter from the kitchens. A radio played band music, behind someone’s door. She would have a few minutes, because Noreen would still be asleep, and so she went down, and through the swing doors to the nursery. Mothers were not supposed to visit at random, pop in and out just when they liked, it unsettled the babies, they were told, and babies needed calm and routine. It upset the mothers, as well, getting into the habit of too much close contact when it would not be permanent. It was the quiet time of the afternoon. None of the nurses were about.

  She went to the top of the room on the right, where James’s cot had its place.

  James’s cot.

  The space was vacant. His cot was not there, so who had moved it and why had they moved it? Perhaps something was wrong with him and they had taken him to isolation, or maybe he was just restless and being given a bottle of warm water to soothe him.

  There were seven babies in the annexe at the moment. Seven cots. She counted six.

  Seven. There should be seven. She went to each one and looked down at the swaddled, sleeping baby but none of them was hers.

  The door opened.

  ‘Olive? You should not be here. Who let you come in? I was just about to send for you.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him? Where is he?’

  ‘He’s gone, Olive.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She could not take this in. It made no sense. ‘How has he “gone”?’

  ‘To his new home. They’ve taken him – his new mother and father. Your baby is adopted now, Olive. You have to try and forget him.

  19

  THE FLAT, WHICH was officially Apartment 20, was on the top floor and reached by a slow lift. The entrance hall was silent, and bare, but in an attempt at decoration, two huge fan-shaped displays of orange and red artificial flowers and a pair of giant cactus plants, which might or might not be real, had been placed on ledges.

  Numbers, and the names of occupants, were set into a row of small plates beside the lift. Apartment 20. Piper.

  She had only brought her old duffel bag with a few overnight things.

  ‘Livi!’

  Her father was standing there as the lift doors opened and at once opened his arms to embrace her, a thing he had not done since her childhood.

  ‘You look peaky – as your mother would have said. But well – how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. I never knew what peaky actually meant.’

  He held on to her arm and his face was suffused with pleasu
re at seeing her. And love, she thought. Yes.

  Peggy was in the sitting room, standing in front of the windows, which made up an entire wall. Grey sky beyond. Grey sea. Seagulls swooping and soaring.

  ‘Olive! How nice.’

  They did not know how to greet one another. As to shake hands seemed ridiculous, they did nothing.

  Peggy’s hair was the same blonde puffball. She wore another shiny two-piece, this time printed with flowers.

  ‘Would you like some tea? I’ll show you to your room first.’

  Small, facing a green and an identical block to this. The flat smelled of new paint. New carpet. There were frilled curtains. Small cushions on a small bed.

  Olive looked at herself in the dressing-table mirror – her old dressing table, which had reflected her face back to her over the years during which it had changed into her present, adult self.

  Peaky. Was she? There were shadows beneath her eyes.

  James, she said to herself. He was somewhere unknown and lost to her. By now he would have forgotten the sound of her voice, and her smell. She was lost to him, too.

  James was not mentioned for the whole two days of her stay in the bright, over-cushioned flat. She wondered how her father stood the claustrophobia of its neatness, squareness, its lack of nooks and crannies, high ceilings. A garden. How he could bear to live pent up with Peggy every day, every night. She had never noticed Peggy’s perfume before but in these small rooms it was heavy and cloying, and after a few hours, her own clothes and hair began to smell of it, or so it seemed.

  She said she would like to go for a walk.

  ‘I got used to being near the sea,’ she said. ‘I miss it.’

  But they did not ask her anything about that, and so it went. If she said anything that touched upon where she had been and why, it was as though she had not spoken at all. She began to feel as if she did not exist.

  Peggy would put her feet up, she said, so she went out with her father.

  Blocks of flats were set all the way along the broad sea road with the occasional hotel between, once grand and imposing, now merely depressing. People walked along, people took the air, but without any other apparent purpose.