‘There was just our Nancy an’ me at home the years afore you were born, lass. Our mam had had umpteen other bairns, but they’d all died, five in all, I think, or it could’ve been six. Anyway, it was only Nancy an’ me that survived. Our da was away on the boats most of the year, all over he went, months at a time. The sea was in his blood an’ it took him in the end, his ship went down off the coast of Sweden the year after you was born . . .’
The blue eyes were reflective for a moment, and then his voice became brisk as he said, ‘Me mam was a hard woman. No, more than that, she was a cruel so-an’-so if the truth be told. How our Nancy an’ me ever made it beyond bairns I don’t know, ’cos from the minute we was born we looked after ourselves. I reckon one or two of the others would have had a chance if me mam had laid off the drink an’ the carousin’, every night she was at it, ’cept when me da was home. Frightened of me da, she was.’
‘And - and my mother?’
‘She’s a good lass, your mam.’ She watched him close his eyes and bow his head slightly as he breathed out heavily through his nose, before looking her straight in the face and saying, ‘But she made a mistake, like many afore her, an’ a good few after.’
‘Me, you mean.’ It hurt. Stupid after all this time.
‘No, lass, not you, not you as a person. The mistake your mam made was in believin’ a lad when he told her he was goin’ to look after her, marry her an’ the like. She was desperate to get away from me mam you see, an’ she loved the lad too, in her own way. She was just on fifteen when you was born, the swine took her down three months after her fourteenth birthday when she was nowt but a bairn still. I knew Mike Rafferty meself, an’ I’d always liked him afore that. He was all mouth an’ trousers, but a charmer, you know, gift of the gab, an’ easygoin’ with it. Anyway, he cleared off the day after our Nancy told him she was expectin’, an’ within six months he was dead. Seems he got done in by a bunch of miners down South Shields way, he’d bin messin’ about with one of their women from what I heard. It was always the women with Mike Rafferty.’
So her father was dead, Sarah thought numbly. ‘Anyway, me mam kept our Nancy’s trouble from me da, she knew she’d get a good hidin’ along with Nancy if she presented him with a bastard grandchild. Me da hadn’t got much, but he’d got his pride, right enough. As luck would have it - or maybe it was the brew me mam made Nancy drink, she knew people, did me ma - you come a good few weeks early, when me da was still away on the boats, an’ me mam . . .’ He hesitated now, and it was only when Sarah prompted, ‘Yes?’, that he continued, ‘Me mam took you.’
‘Took me?’ Sarah didn’t understand.
‘Aye.’ He had been sitting hunched slightly over the table, his voice low, but now as the docker rose, pulling on his cap as he left with a cursory glance in their direction, he straightened his back and said, ‘She told Nancy you were dead, that you’d died just after you was born. I . . .’ The pause was longer this time, and he swallowed deeply before he continued, ‘I always wondered meself, ’cos I’d seen you when she first brought you down wrapped in the sacking, an’ you was alive then, a perfect little lassie. But she told Nancy you was dead, an’ you didn’t argue with our mam; not if you wanted to see the next day, that was.’
He shook his head, his face troubled. ‘She did it ’cos it meant she was in the clear with me da, you see, an’ our Nancy was too bad at the time to know much. She nearly snuffed it havin’ you, an’ she was bad for months after, but me mam put it about she’d had the fever an’ nearly died. But Nancy remembered holdin’ you for a minute after you was born, afore our mam took you away, an’ I reckon it was that, more than anythin’, that made her bad for so long. She grieved for you, nearly drove herself round the bend ’cos she thought you’d died.’
‘She wanted to keep the baby?’ Sarah’s voice was shaking but she couldn’t break down, not in here, she told herself fiercely. And she needed to hear it all.
‘Oh aye, lass, she wanted to keep you all right.’ And then his voice came soft and sad when he said, ‘She’s never had any more, although she married a right good man the year after me mam died when she was goin’ on twenty. Bill’s a lot older than her, he’d already got two lads from his first wife who died, so she mothers them an’ their bairns.’
It was her mother he was talking about. Sarah looked down at the photograph clenched tightly in her hands. Her mother. She wanted to see her, oh, how she wanted to see her, but would Nancy want to see her? She hadn’t come with her brother today. Did that mean she was ashamed of her? Perhaps she hadn’t even told this Bill she had had an illegitimate daughter who had died.
This thought prompted her to say, her voice very low, ‘This Bill? Does - does he know she had a child?’
‘Oh aye, he knows. Nancy told him when they was first courtin’, gave him the chance to sling his hook if he couldn’t handle it, but like I said, Bill’s a good bloke. He knew me mam, you see; he knew what sort of a life Nancy had had at home.’ He paused a moment before adding, ‘Bill knows I’m here tonight, he’s standin’ by to break the news to Nancy if anythin’ come of it.’
‘Break the news?’ Sarah stared at him. ‘Are you saying . . . Do you mean my mother still doesn’t know I’m alive, that she thinks her baby died when it was born?’
She turned to Rodney as he put in, ‘You didn’t tell her about the advertisement, Jack? She knows nothing of this?’
‘Aye, that’s about it.’ Jack rubbed his nose. ‘I didn’t want to say owt afore I knew for sure you was the bairn I saw me mam take away that day. By, I got the biggest gliff of me life the day I saw that bit in the paper a couple of weeks ago, an’ that was only by chance. I’m not one for readin’ - he rubbed his nose again - ‘but the wife was round at her mam’s one night with the bairns, an’ I got meself fish an’ chips on the way home. Your bit was in the page they wrapped me food in, an’ I saw it was months old. The bairns round these parts earn themselves the odd penny or two by collectin’ all the old newspapers an’ takin’ ’em to the shop, you see. Any road, I was sittin’ at the table eatin’ out of the newspaper - the wife’d kill me if she knew, mind, always insists on plates, does my Abbie - an’ for want of somethin’ better me eyes ran over the adverts. By, I near choked meself, lass. I’d always wondered, you see, at the heart of me.’
He looked at her and she looked back at him.
‘I wouldn’t have put anythin’ past me mam, she was a wicked old devil. I remember when she come back that night, the night you was born. Blind drunk she was, fallin’ about in the street with it, an’ there was our Nancy hangin’ on by a thread in the bedroom upstairs. Oh aye, she was a bad ’un all right. I got a pastin’ that night for askin’ what she’d done with the bairn, I still bear the scars on me back from the buckle of the belt she used.’
‘That was my grandmother.’ The statement was painful, and the two men glanced at each other.
‘Aye.’ She watched the muscles of Jack’s face tighten. ‘Every family has the odd black sheep, lass, an’ me mam was ours, but she’s gone now.’
‘But how could someone do something like that?’
It was Rodney who spoke, and there was a moment’s silence before Jack said, ‘I’m not excusin’ her - I’m not, mind - but she had had a hard life herself. Her da was a master mariner an’ when his ship went down it meant her mam an’ her two sisters an’ her were thrown on the charity of the maritime almshouse in Crowtree Road. She never spoke much of it, an’ we never dared ask her - her rages were somethin’ fierce - but it soured her somethin’ bad. Aye, she were a bitter woman, me mam. Anyway, by the time Nancy was took down me mam was on the drink night an’ day. It was that that killed her in the end.’
Rodney was quite unmoved, and his voice expressed this when he said, ‘I’m a doctor, Jack, and I was working in these parts before the war. I saw poverty like I’d never seen it before, mind-deadening, grinding poverty, but to contemplate the murder - or at the very least the abandonment - of one’s own grandchild is something else.’
‘Please . . .’ The syllable trembled. None of this mattered now, Sarah thought dazedly, none of it. Her mother had cried for her, once she had cried and grieved for her so much it had made her ill. He had said so.
‘I’m sorry, my dear.’ Rodney’s arm tightened round her shoulders, and he looked down into her face before saying, his voice tender, ‘Where do you want to go from here?’ Then, when she couldn’t answer for the lump in her throat, he said to Jack, ‘How do you think your sister will take the news?’
‘Only one way to find out.’
It was said with typical northern bluntness, but the eyes were soft as they looked at Sarah’s white face, and now she leant forward, taking one of his big rough hands in her own as she said, ‘I’ve always wanted to find her, Uncle Jack, always. If . . . if she doesn’t want to see me, tell her that.’
‘Aye, lass, though I don’t think there’s no fear of that. But it’ll be the shock, you see; people react different, don’t they, when they’re in shock, that’s why I thought it’d be best coming from Bill.’
‘Yes.’
‘But don’t you fret, lass.’
‘No.’
Jack glanced rather helplessly at Rodney now, but for once in his life Rodney didn’t know what to say, and after a brief pause Jack said, ‘You’ve got three little cousins by the way, an’ right tearaways they are too. Our Tim is eight, an’ the spittin’ image of his mam, but the other two, our Michael who’s four an’ Billy who’s two, they take after my side - our side.’ It was added with a grin and Sarah smiled back, although the corners of her mouth quivered slightly.
She couldn’t have described the emotions that were surging in her breast, but overriding everything was the fierce, the
consuming
desire to see her mother. She had come so far, further than she had ever dared to hope for, she admitted to herself now; surely the woman Jack had described wouldn’t turn her away?
‘An’ you’ll get on with my Abbie like a house on fire. She’s a real good lass, my Abbie. Look . . .’ Jack hesitated briefly before saying, ‘Do you feel up to comin’ an’ meetin’ my lot tomorrow? I don’t want to push you, with the bairn an’ all, but maybe I could get Bill to have a word with Nancy in the meantime an’ see how she feels about things?’
‘Would you?’
And then, as Rodney said, ‘Don’t you want to take a little time to get used to the idea first?’ she turned to him, her heart in her eyes, and he shook his head slightly as he smiled and said, ‘Obviously not.’ But he wasn’t smiling inside - he was hoping, with every fibre of his being, that this wasn’t going to end badly.
Neither of them slept a wink that night. Rodney brought Sarah a cup of tea and toast in bed before he left for the surgery the next morning, and found her looking at the photograph again, which she had propped against her bedside cabinet all night like a small child with a new pair of shoes.
He stood over her until she had finished the tea and eaten every crumb of the toast, and only left when she promised him she would take it easy that morning and rise late. He was worried about her. This news, coming so soon before the birth of their child, was not how he would have planned it could he have chosen. If it went well, if this Nancy wanted to make contact, then that was one thing, although even that might have complications if the two women found they had nothing in common, he thought agitatedly as he backed the car out of the garage. But what if Sarah’s mother didn’t want the past raking up? What then? She might have told this Bill about her dark secret, but that wasn’t to say she wanted it broadcast to all and sundry in the shape of a twenty-four-year-old woman.
He checked his thoughts sharply as he nearly ran into the three-foot wall surrounding the front garden.
He would face that with Sarah if and when it happened, but his beloved was strong, inside, where it counted; she’d get through this. Of course it didn’t help that Maggie and Florrie, and even Rebecca, hadn’t been able to hide their apprehension as to the wisdom of Sarah’s quest. Margaret and Richard had been encouraging, up to a point, but Richard had told him on the quiet that Margaret had expressed her fears to him privately as to how Sarah would react if the worst happened and her mother, if and when Sarah found her, rejected her daughter for a second time.
But he knew his Sarah. This wasn’t a whim, a light undertaking. She had thought it through and he knew it was something she had to do. It was as simple as that. Funnily enough, the thought comforted him, and he drove the rest of the miles to the surgery with his heart more at peace than it had been all through the long sleepless night.
After Rodney left the house, Sarah snuggled back down under the bedclothes, letting her head drop back against the pillows and looking upwards towards the ceiling, and what she thought was - She hadn’t known.
Her mother hadn’t known
. It was the refrain that had played in her head all night, over and over, in between odd moments of panic and joy and fear and wonder.